A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand

by Jim Harrison

  Returning to earth, my favorite place after all, at least for the time being. This evening we’re having our first pesto of the summer, what with the basil having matured. I love this dish. It is the taste of early summer eventually overtaken by garden ripe tomatoes. The garden is huge, the vegetables mixed with dozens of species of flowers. It is visual splendor. I stare at it for hours in an effort to forget myself. When the Lakota used to ride into battle they would say, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.” I am notably not a Lakota though I have visited Wounded Knee several times to kneel and pay my respects, also the site of the death of Crazy Horse, which reminds you of the utter shabbiness of Washington now. When his three-year-old daughter died he climbed the tree to her burial platform and stayed there for three days, playing with her toys.

  I am not a Lakota warrior in the nineteenth century. I tease my mind knowing if I didn’t have a wife and two daughters and grandchildren, I would have offed myself during this period when life offered so little except pain, occasionally a courageous act. Also in these dire times I am a partial support of eleven. You ultimately don’t want to disappoint others or make them feel they failed you. Nothing failed you except your body. I once wrote long ago in a prophetic poem, “Our bodies are women who were never / meant to be faithful to us.”

  San Rafael

  Just recently, last fall in fact, I had extensive spinal surgery for a condition called “spondylolisthesis.” If you can pronounce this you likely have it. To give the surgeon a better view of my interior carcass I was slashed from neck to tailbone. Recovery was slow and I had to go to the famed Mayo in Minnesota to help it. I loathed the Mayo, the vast Pentagon of medicine. I wouldn’t feed their food to a starving migrant. It was very hard on my tender empathy to see so many hopeless cases. There was a truly beautiful girl who was paralyzed for life. This meant that I could never take her camping, which girls really deserve.

  My real desire for surgery was so I could resume walking my dog Zilpha every morning. When I was immovable she would stare at me with melancholy, never to know what was wrong. I have to take a little walk every morning to compose my mind for writing. This is a bit odd but necessary. Montana was not good for recovery because there was way too much snow so I made my way to our small casita down on the border. The chief neurologist at the Mayo had told me, “You can walk your way out of this.” So that’s what I work on. I went through dove and quail season on my friend’s San Rafael ranch without firing a shot. The doves were in the thousands last year but almost none this year. We speculated that they had been killed by Muslim terrorists farther north. There were plenty of quail but I only shuffled along and couldn’t keep up with the dogs. My mood was always corrected by spotting an oak log to sit on and staring hard at the landscape. If you do this it will enter your dream life, which is better than your mom beating you or running from the grizzlies in Montana.

  I made some notes on log sitting. There are Emory oaks felled by forest fires or weakened until they eventually fall. I worked so hard on this because I had lots of time stuck there in the near wilderness. Naturally I thought of franchising my concepts and touring the nation and Canada and making a retirement income. The problem is the oak trunks weigh tons and right away I’d have to use the very American method of faking it, creating a lightweight version to follow me in my travels. There were dreams of fame and fortune before I put on the brakes. Why not give my modest Brick audience the sacred technique for free? Besides I can no longer bear public appearances. Here goes perhaps nothing:

  Approach the log cautiously with proper reverence as if you were entering a French cathedral or the bedroom of a nude girl or a nude man if you’re a girl. If it’s warmish, over sixty, inspect the lower sides of the log for a Mojave rattlesnake. They can kill people, horses, and cows. You don’t want that, or do you? Just recently I have been reading a natural history memoir of my friend Harry Greene, a herpetologist. An appalling number of herpetologists have been killed toying with these creatures. Vipers don’t want to be our friends. Now examine the log closely for the most comfortable place to sit, usually away from the sun. Sit down and stay for forty-five minutes to an hour. Empty your mind of everything except what is in front of you, the natural landscape or the canyon. Dismiss or allow to slide away any aspect of your grand or pathetic life. Breathe softly. Avoid a doze. Internalize what you see in the canyon, the oaks and the desert willows, the rumpled and grassy earth, hawks flying by, a few songbirds. When you get up bow nine times to the log.

  Easy does it. Three logs a day is generally my maximum. When you get in your car it will seem as wretched as it is. A horse would be far better. For hours your mind will still be absorbed in the glory of what you saw rather than mail, e-mails, cell phones, TV, etc. Hopefully log sitting will allow you to change the contents of your life. You will introduce yourself as a “log sitter” rather than a poet, novelist, or mortician. You will walk more slowly and perhaps your feet will shuffle like mine.

  There. If all Brick readers send me a nickel a month I’ll buy some life-giving red wine. Maybe they don’t have nickels in Canada? In that case if you see a poet stumbling down the street offer him some red wine. We are all brothers though I wouldn’t throw myself on a grenade to save any of them.

  I have traveled widely and intensely in the west and the San Rafael is the most beautiful ranchland I’ve ever seen. It is five by seven miles, more than twenty-two thousand acres of good grass in an area without much good grazing, but then the previous owners, the Greene family, took care of it. Ross runs only about six hundred cows when the land could easily handle three times that. I was on the Gray Ranch, 321,000 acres, when they shipped out nine thousand cows. A previous owner had run nineteen thousand but that was too hard on the land.

  Despite being from an agricultural family—my father was an agronomist and county agent—I have never been much interested in land, whether farm or ranch, in terms of productivity. Instead of following in my father’s footsteps I became a poet and novelist, so consequently it is altogether natural that my primary impulse toward land is aesthetic. I do make careless estimates on productivity. Up near Jordan, Montana, I thought on the vast Binion Ranch that it would take more than three hundred acres to graze a single cow and at dinner in a local diner found out this was true. Ten acres of my farm back in Michigan would equal a thousand acres in many places in Montana in terms of available grazing. I had plenty of rain and rich soil. When I could get only twenty bucks a ton for my alfalfa I bought forty Scottish Highlanders and fed them at my neighbors’, who had good pasture cut by a creek. They were worrisome cattle. I built a storm shed for them so they could get out of the fierce Michigan winter but they wouldn’t enter it. They stood around shaggily in belly-deep snow trying to reach the ground for grass. They were tasty beef which I had never eaten before except in the British Isles. Some of the most beautiful farms in America are to be seen on the way west in mid-Minnesota, or out near Fergus Falls. There are both beef and dairy operations, the houses look comfortable in the rolling green land. There are often immense ponds, really lakes, with rowboats parked in the reeds, evidence that you have fishing to go with the fat cattle.

  I can readily imagine buying a small ranch I’d call “The Log Ranch.” I’d truck in thirty-three logs and arrange them on the property like the stations of the cross. This could soothe me in my perhaps limited time in the twenty-first century which has been coarse indeed. I’ve been lately fixed on Syria which is like getting scalped every day. I also can’t bear that we’re in Afghanistan when next door Mexico so desperately needs help. We’d save a lot of gas money and wouldn’t have all of those suicides of men returning from Afghanistan.

  It was quite interesting not to hunt. There was the thought that I’d killed enough game birds in my life. I missed eating them because properly cooked they are as good to eat as anything on this earth. I remember my mock hunting in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an unknown part of Canad
a, toward the end of the season when I knew I should slow down my shooting. I’d let my English setter go on point. I’d flush the bird and yell, “Bang” and off it went to continue to live. The dog didn’t mind. It was all fun and after a long afternoon of mock hunting you felt good.

  On my little log ranch there will be no livestock except dogs and one Jersey cow. I will have made a pet out of the cow and allow her to follow me in the house. Don’t worry, she’ll be toilet trained. As a child I made pets out of certain cows and they’d take walks with you hither and yon, including the dense woodlot. Cows don’t have a lot of fun before they’re shipped off to die so it was nice to give them some human companionship. Come to think of it I prefer the company of a cow to any literary festival or reading I’ve ever endured. They have such pretty eyes and think of you as a leader, a gross mistake. In my limited time in Washington, D.C., or the United Nations I made little sense out of these piles of ninnies. The U.S. Congress had only a 10 percent approval rating because they are largely malicious dolts and feebs. I’m all for making politics a “women only” profession to see if they can’t improve on our enfeebled condition. Back to cows. It is largely known that Jerseys give the best milk and the heavy cream I need for my French recipes, and which is not available except in a pasteurized form which ruins it. So there I am on Log Ranch sitting before the fireplace with my sleeping cow and dogs. Not surprisingly she moos loudly when she needs to go outside to the toilet, a little startling in the middle of the night or to drunk girls stopping in for the usual love who did not notice the cow. “Holy shit!” they scream to the shatteringly loud moo. They calm down with more drugs and alcohol like they do in any country.

  I’ve begun yet another novel and I find myself in a mood similar to my post-op trauma from spinal surgery. The sky has descended and darkness prevails. You feel like you’re driving an old used car trying to get out of China. You finally hit the coast and the Pacific only to discover there are no bridges to America. You turn around with difficulty on the beach, running over several swimmers but they are strong and can withstand the tires. You head west across China and Asia including Mongolia’s dreaded Gobi Desert. You earn gas money working in the fields and selling your body to the usual eager priests. You finally hit Cornwall in the British Isles but there is no bridge there. The English have lied about bridges again. You fall asleep in the filthy car with priests knocking at the windows. You wake up in Montana after the toughest trip of your life and you’re still only on page 145, about a third done.

  With or without spinal surgery writing novels is brutal yet I don’t want an ounce of empathy or sympathy. After all I’m writing at our little winter casita in Patagonia, Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. Wonderful food is available in my home and at the Wagon Wheel bar cooked by Susi. Her enchiladas are the best I’ve ever had and she makes her red chile sauce from scratch out of big ristras of peppers.

  Also my logs on the San Rafael are a half hour away for my delectation. Also the birds are ten feet away. One April my mother counted one hundred nineteen species in two days. This is a prime spot on the migration route.

  We end with a serene still life with no names: a man sprawled on the rug before the fireplace with his beloved cow and dog. The dog is nestled against her tummy down near her teats, the warmest place, nestled the same way they are out in the yard where the dog imitates her, a friend, eating grass. The cow has unfortunately pooped on the porch. This is a cognitive problem in addition to being a clean-up problem. She thinks the porch is outside where she has freedom to defecate. But the porch is really half inside, half outside. How to teach the cow this nicety? The man is diverted from this animal complexity by his stirring appetite. The surgeon had told him to eat a lot to restore his strength and weight. Lately he had favored Moroccan food including a recent lamb tagine though the harissa his wife made was too hot, causing him to weep sweet tears as he continued to eat it. One can’t chicken out on food. The day before at a Japanese restaurant he had eaten a spoon of wasabi through lack of concentration. That will get your attention as you sputter desperately, “We won the war why are they doing this to me?” There is a world of food out there but some of it is dangerous. If you eat a square yard of roasted pig skin or the skin of an entire goose you’re going to pay for your crimes. The dog will also eat saltines but what’s in a saltine for a dog? She eats them because she sees me eat two every night to comfort my tummy. My friend’s dog eats live fish.

  Eat Where You Live

  Moving to Patagonia for the winters twenty-five years ago was a considerable revelation. I had visited Tucson a number of times but didn’t catch on to the cuisine. I had been to Mexico City on the way home from Cozumel but had settled for French food in a hotel that was pointlessly expensive.

  When I was at Michigan State University, our late night college hangout was a Mexican place with what I later recognized as Tex-Mex food. I had eaten the wonderful roast cabrito at Mi Tierra in San Antonio. It took a while to recognize my limitations. A flash point was eating grilled baby octopus in Zihuatanejo on a fishing trip. This is Mexican food? Of course. We northerners are perversely misinformed. Without question, Mexicans cook seafood much better than we do in the States. I don’t mean border food, far from it. I have been in the Veracruz area several times where you can get wonderful whole roasted robalo (common snook). The same is true on the west coast in terms of roasted fish. We ate a nine-pounder one evening in Tulum with many bottles of good Mexican white wine.

  Closer to home, we’re within twenty miles of Nogales. I’ve eaten at Las Vigas perhaps a hundred times, most for the superlative machaca sonorense. I had them organize a banquet when I paid off the mortgage, and it included a wild pig shipped from Florida, and also a large snapper, some enormous wild shrimp, and a mariachi band, of course. I’m hoping in the future to travel around Mexico and hire housewives to cook me their favorite bean dishes.

  The other half of the year we live in Montana where food choices are distinctly limited. You can’t even buy an edible tortilla in Montana and my past experiences trying to make them were a disaster. You can’t buy a calf’s foot in Montana to make menudo, an obsession of my taste. Millions of calves and no feet for sale. This was also true in northern Michigan where I began making my own menudo. It’s clearly against the law to wander into a pasture and cut your own.

  So here we are happily for half the year. I’ve been given both javelina and mountain lion sausage but didn’t care for either. We eat lots of doves and quail roasted over wood fire and my ace urologist, Dr. Alfredo Guevara, cooked a wonderful cabrito last year. Down here much of my taste for American food wanes. Eat where you live is a far better practice.

  Gramps Le Fou

  There had been certain slippages of late that he chose not to dwell upon. He had mistakenly used the cortisone cream his wife applied on her ankle rash as toothpaste and had wondered at the blandness of the flavor. Perhaps he was losing his taste buds? This was not as serious as squirting Neo-Synephrine in his eye instead of Visine, which had temporarily disturbed his already limited vision. He filed these simple-minded mistakes under monkey brain, the Zen question of whether one part of the brain can accurately assess slippages in another part of the brain.

  He offered an easy pardon to himself for these errors because when he had recently passed his seventieth birthday he had decided that life was a liquid rather than a solid. People created grievous errors when they treated their lives as a solid, and this was his own downfall when several months before a neurologist had diagnosed him as having “acute mental exhaustion.” His wife had driven him to the doctor knowing that left to his own devices he would only pretend to have gone to the doctor. He was a talented fibber and fully capable of recounting a visit to a neurologist having read Edelman’s Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection and Robert Martensen’s lunar The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History.

  Some few days our lives have their own
intact stories and he was about to live an utterly bruised tale of love and loss that would lead him to radically imperfect conclusions.

  The day had started poorly, Thursday to be meaninglessly exact, with a five-mile drive to the village’s corner grocery to pick up the Tucson paper and a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise. He enjoyed hearing the Spanish frequently spoken in the store. Their winter casita on a creek in the mountains was a scant fifteen miles from Mexico and thus border life offered the pleasant air of living in a foreign country without the wretched experience of a long plane trip and the inevitable delays spent in terminals that had become crosses of dog pounds and enormous toilets.

  Unfortunately he had returned home with a jar of Kraft Miracle Whip salad dressing and his wife had immediately noticed. In his defense he said that the mayonnaise and salad dressing were next to each other on the shelf and had the same off-white color. “Darling, wear your glasses. Each product in the store has a different name. It’s sort of like books. Books can look similar, but the titles are all different.”

  He watched the dogs leave the room, which they always did when he and his wife spoke sharply to each other.

  Back in the car he was diverted by a dream he’d had about exactly where his Scottish Labrador, Zilpha, had lost her collar. He could “see” the collar in a particular side ravine off Paloma Canyon. He murmured, “Eureka” to himself and drove right past the grocery store, turning right to follow the winding road to San Rafael Valley a half-hour distant. Dreams had always offered vital information to him in contrast to the thorough junkiness of his mind, which included all the names of the basilicas in Florence, the lyrics of “Tell Laura I Love Her” and an improbable number of Protestant hymns from his childhood, the alphabetical names of the kids in his second grade, and the complete menu of his seventh birthday dinner (pickled herring and baked beans and a German chocolate cake). He had told the neurologist that it would be nice if he could get up in the morning, start the coffee, and slice a mango without saying, “Dawn found him carving a mango.” The neurologist seemed slightly alarmed and wanted to make an appointment for him with a psychiatrist. He tried to stomp out of the office, but he had hurt his knee while bird hunting and couldn’t stomp.