by Jim Harrison
1985
Log of the Earthtoy Drifthumper
A few summers ago in Michigan's Upper Peninsula I walked out of my cabin well after midnight, took off my clothes, and dove buck-naked into the river, swimming and drifting downstream in the darkness, clambering over several logjams. It was pleasant, if eerie, until it was time to make my way back through the unpeopled forest and swamp. Then it became clear why shoes and clothing had been devised.
This is not generally recommended behavior, but then we like to think that life is usually lived between the lines, when we surprise ourselves, or lived while others are making plans and appointments. Mostly, though, I had to take the swim because I needed to know what it was like in order to conclude the novel Sundog.
This January I was having trouble with another book, because I am just another alpha manic-depressive who spends too much time in the air, with a dozen or so not very meaningful trips a year to either of America's dream coasts: to New York which is really Europe, and to Los Angeles which is an enticing, sunburned void. I needed to know what the Great Plains were like in the winter, and the kind of information I wanted could not be extrapolated from the vantage point of 37,000 feet or from trips to the library.
At the outset you should know that I am not a car freak or maven. This disinterest can be attributed to a childhood trauma. At sixteen I bought a 1929 Model A, covered with birdshit, out of a barn and received a ghastly electric shock from something under the hood that my father described as a “magneto.” Other young folks have been bitten by horses and turned to cars, but I was bitten by both, as it were. That summer I rode a balloon-tire Schwinn 128 miles in one day in reaction to horses and cars.
As a consequence I have gone through life at forty-nine miles an hour—if I were a boat, I'd be a tug. I have never run out of gas (for fear that the car won't start again), and I haven't washed a car since my teens, when I washed too many of them for quarters. Not that I am a totally slow-track guy—through the kindness and misapprehension of friends I have driven Porsches, a Ferrari, a Maserati, a 600 Mercedes, even my wife's Saab. Also a Daimler limousine in London when the chauffeur was drunker than I was. Curiously, I have never met anyone who thinks I drive well.
Late on the eve of my departure from Lake Leelanau, Michigan, I am having a heavy nightcap to steady my nerves, and listening to the wind howl. The snowdrifts have collected against the lower tiers of the window-panes. Dimly under the yard light I can see the fully packed 1986 Subaru four-wheel drive Turbo station wagon with manufacturer's plates. Parked next to it is my own 1981 Subaru four-wheel drive station wagon, only mine has a skidplate, a cowcatcher, and a winch. There is a temptation to take “old reliable” and leave the new one at home. All I want in a car is reliability, just as in boats I prefer one that floats. The tempting factor is the turbo, though my wife quipped earlier in the evening that I don't know what “turbo” means. If it sounds good, you don't need to know what it means, I replied, remembering Paris, where I invariably order unknown items from the menu. Much of life seems to be a blind date.
Soon after daylight—actually, a few hours—I was on my way, double-checking for the shovel, the sleeping bag, and the big, white candles that were to save me if I became stranded—I'd read that if you light a few candles in your car, they give enough heat to keep you from freezing to death. I headed northward to the Straits of Mackinac with the snow coming down so hard I only averaged 38.5 miles per hour in the first four hours, or so said the elaborate trip computer. The trip computer was to be virtually my only sore point about the car. I was reminded of what Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon's celebrity, had said: “People in the Midwest don't take trips, they compute mileage and distance.” I wanted my land voyage to be taken on house-cat time, with no attention paid to anything but the essentials of what I was seeing. Do you want to remember that you climbed a 10,000-foot mountain or what happened to you on the way up or down? But then I couldn't use my heel or Magnum on the trip computer because it wasn't my car. I've always felt those nitwits on the annual coast-to-coast race should be beaten across the gums.
I began to cool off approaching the Mackinac Bridge. There's no real point in getting angry while driving solo, when you can only yell into your dictaphone. There are racers, and there are those who tour. Meanwhile, the bridge was swaying visibly in the gale-force winds. I began to have thoughts about mechanical mortality; just as a car grows old and dies, with gray hairs hanging from its mud flaps, so also must a bridge die. I just don't want to be there when it happens, when it finally gives up its bridge ghost and plummets into the bottomless straits. A few years ago, I missed by a mere seven months plunging off the bridge that collapsed between Tampa and Sarasota.
My spirits picked up when the weather cleared enough for me to see that there was barely any traffic. This was a signal thrill that was to follow me for the next twenty-eight days. By summertime standards, the progress was unimpeded by other cars. To be sure, there were trucks, but then they are somewhat predictable and reliable. There must be folks heading south to Florida, I thought, drawn there for the vermin-ridden night flowers, and for the clothing and pharmaceuticals on display in Miami Vice. I punched on cruise control and opened the sunroof, standing on the seat and steering with my fingertips.
I was headed west on Route 2, and now the sun glistened off the storm-tormented northern Lake Michigan. It was like driving a two-ton motorcycle without a wind visor. An oncoming car beeped, suggesting perhaps that my method was reprehensible. I forced myself into a more serious, mechanical mood. My 1981 Subaru, with four forward gears, required 3300 rpm to go fifty-eight miles per hour, while the 1986 Subaru in fifth gear required only 2400 rpm to maintain the same speed. Any fool could figure out that if you were a skater or a dancer, 900 fewer twirls per minute would make a big difference.
I had planned my first night's stop for the House of Ludington in Escanaba, my favorite Midwestern hostelry. When I got out, I gave the car a friendly pat for a good day's work. Despite some harrowing moments, I felt much better than I would have arriving at La Guardia, or on a jam-packed flight at Los Angeles International with a dead woman and bizarre but friendly Siamese twins connected at the head, as had happened in December. Besides, no terrorist or member of the criminal element was likely to stick a bomb in the car. And I didn't have to pull up at this wonderful hotel and restaurant at 170 miles per hour, which has always been an enervating way to retouch earth.
Not knowing where the next good meal might come from in the hinterlands, I treated myself to fresh oysters and soup and a bottle of Graves. I was torn between the roast duck and the roast smoked pork loin, so I ordered them both, accompanied by a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. This normally might have put me to sleep, but I walked a mile up the street to see the kindly dancing girls at Orphan Annie's, somewhat as a soldier might do on the eve of battle, or a sailor before a voyage that might very well take him off the edge of the earth. The Great Plains were not known for nude dancing girls, and it would be best to take a look now. There were to be no flesh colors in future landscapes, or so I thought.
At daylight, or soon after, I adopted a slightly higher sense of purpose. At the current rate, what could I discover through red eyes and 10,000 lost dollars, a bilious stomach in a land without rest stops? I had worked the bugs out to the point where I comprehended the entire, intricate instrument panel of the car—except, of course, the trip computer. There were a few bugs left in my head, but they would presumably pass with the miles.
The trip through Wisconsin and Minnesota (the weather was nasty, but it was a garden-variety nasty) illustrated the central weather fraud current in America: Everyone brags about his bad weather. I've even had Texans tell me that I had “never lived through a Texas winter,” a winter so severe that most northern Michiganders wouldn't bother putting on their winter coats. The fact is, the Leelanau peninsula had 108 inches of snow by New Year's, and much of the Upper Peninsula had half again as much. In Michigan I had humped through drifts a
bout the size of a low-slung ranch house. Naturally you pause to check for oncoming traffic before you crank up toward the redline.
Route 64 through northern Wisconsin was a good choice, an improbably beautiful landscape with frozen forests and clearings, Scandinavian barns with frozen white, shimmering haystacks, an immense field with thousands of bright, frozen thorn apples catching the morning sun, the breath of Holsteins rising in steamy wisps in the still air. Hooking to the left on 73 and 95, you descend into the upper Mississippi River basin, moving down toward La Crosse through a rural landscape pretty much unequaled, somewhat like the hills of Kentucky. A well-tended hill farm owns a pure but functional beauty. Nearing a town or city of any size, you are reminded again of the implausible junkiness of mankind—I don't mean, in the anal-compulsive sense, that everything should be beautiful, but that ninety-nine percent of our artifacts are ugly, and strewn around so haphazardly that we are forever pausing to figure out why we feel so badly about what we are seeing.
At a service station near Sioux Valley, Minnesota, I flipped out my dictaphone, determined to get at some troublesome questions concerning the average weight of heartland ladies, also whether any of the assembled had ever named their vehicles. The consensus was 150 for the ladies (the respondents were truly big ole boys, upward of 200 apiece). All of the men admitted to having named cars and trucks anything from Bullet to Bob to Fireball to Myrna (after a girlfriend). They liked the idea that I was going no place in particular for as long as cash and credit cards lasted.
“How long would that be?”
“About thirty days west of here,” I answered.
“Too bad you can't drive to Hawaii. You should go to Vegas.” (Everyone in the Midwest wants to go to Vegas or Hawaii.)
“I'm going to end up in Arizona to track mountain lions and track a Mexican wolf known as a white lobo. I might shoot some quail to eat, too.”
There were long faces at the station when I pulled out. Everyone wants to go someplace and the comparatively rare idea of a trip without a plan was even more attractive. As the days passed, I came to think that the finest thing about a long solo car trip is that you get to forget who you are, if anything celebrated or negotiable beyond the normal bounds of ego. Every place you stay is a place you never stayed before. Everyone you talk to is new, and no one can get you on the phone unless you call home. The bottom line is that you are free, however temporarily, and you return to the exhilaration of those childhood myths of Robin Hood or the lone cowpoke.
I'm heading through a hellish Minnesota storm toward a corner of Iowa, and the closest thing I have to a destination, Nebraska. The radio announces that all local schools will close because of the storm. I come upon the aftermath of a truly nasty truck–snowplow collision. I feel like I'm driving in a dentist's chair during an unsuccessful root canal. This weather is why I've had two Subarus for a total of seven years—there was only one trip to the garage, and that was caused by a caroming trip down a steep hill through the woods. Suddenly there's a bit of ugliness caused by a jackknifing semi that overshot an exit. I'm forced over a bank onto a cloverleaf in a split second. In another split second I think, “I'm not getting stuck here this close to lunch,” punch the four-wheel-drive button, downshift to second, and fishtail in big circles to gain speed, throwing a rooster tail of snow that I pass through before leaping a bank back onto the shoulder.
I am rewarded by a grotesque pork fritter and canned gravy at a truck stop where the assembled Knights of the Road all look like they need a resident nutritionist. On the road, breakfast is the most reliable meal. When I'm settled into my motel in the early evening, I invariably call the local radio station for a hot dinner tip. I figure disc jockeys are layabouts like writers and they would likely know the best place to eat. This works pretty well if you're willing to settle for a little less and can develop the uncritical state of mind that is required if you're ever going to get out of bed in the first place. In Alliance, Nebraska, I had a fabulous two-pound rib steak, watched a soft-core porn film on TV, and went to an American Legion country dance, where I jumped around like a plump kangaroo to work off the protein rush, or whatever.
I suppose if the country I had been driving through held anything in common from state to state it was that it had changed less as time had slipped by than it would have anywhere else in the United States. I mean outside the cities of Sioux City or Omaha or Lincoln. Iowa owns a charming lack of differentiation. If you lived there, you would seek out the extraordinary tuft of grass or mudhole, the most beautiful pig. Only one bird nests in all of Iowa, and it is called, simply enough, “brown bird.” Iowa has a fifty-by-fifty-foot national park called Wild Thicket. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop visits this place every year to write an annual nature poem—"how thick the thicket / where Brer Rabbit lies.” There are no Sierra Club–type articles called “Hiking Across Iowa.”
I spent a number of days wandering around Nebraska. At one point, the January head wind was so strong my car seemed to hold in one place, a land Cessna passed by crows. Not incidentally, the sunroof is a splendid vantage for the roadside bird watcher, just as in Kenya and Tanzania; birds, especially hawks, and coyotes are less disturbed if you stay in the car. Near the Wyoming border I was able to study at close range a golden eagle on a fence post and, one morning just after dawn, a big coyote with a blood-wet muzzle settling down for a stint of car watching. We exchanged deeply meaningless glances, the same as one does with a porpoise at sea. Much of the Great Plains will return to being a sea of grass when we stop overproducing beef, and when the Bureau of Land Management decides to stop disastrous overgrazing. The Sandhills themselves, an area of some 150 by 100 miles between Broken Bow and Alliance, Merriman and Lemoyne, will be largely abandoned by agriculture because they share the same diminishing Ogallala aquifer as Houston, Texas, far to the south.
Without question the best place to begin exploring Nebraska is the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, in Grand Island. I spent a full day there and will return this summer to finish my research. It isn't a place readily admired by yuppie nitwits, but it will deeply satisfy anyone with an interest in how we used to live and, consequently, why we live the way we do now. I was mostly studying the lay of the land, the windbreaks and shelterbelts, the possible soul history of the Dismal, the Middle Loup, and the Niobrara rivers. I am reminded that these concerns are not everyone's and shouldn't be. I'd like New York better if I could see it with the spirit of George and Ira Gershwin. I imagine if I lived out here, I would have to take R and R in Omaha every few months. For inscrutable reasons, there are some very good Chinese restaurants in Omaha.
One evening up near Whitman I had an urge to frighten myself. The moon was nearly full, and I had stopped along the creek bed after a large bird had swooped across the road. I was sure it was a great horned owl, so I walked up the creek bed in the direction the owl had taken. I circled up and over a hill with the air icy and metallic and the moon visibly moving as I walked. Far off I could see a small herd of ghost buffalo, though they were probably cattle. Now I could hear the owl from the creek bed, and he showed his lack of curiosity about me by staying there. I felt fine and undramatic, chough a little lightheaded. Unlike the train I heard in the middle distance, I could make a right turn and do something different.
And I continued doing so. I woke up in the morning in Alliance after the kangaroo country hop and watched the news on CNN, which was dismal, unlike the Dismal River. I had finished my research in Nebraska and felt it was an even bet that I'd end up living there, because I like to live at the end of the road. Despite the fact that it was zero outside—the car gives the handy exterior temperature—I spread the map against the steering wheel while listening to Aretha Franklin sing “Spanish Harlem.” I would hook a left outside of Alliance and reach Colorado Springs in time to watch the Super Bowl. Then on south through Taos, where my Zen master, Kobun Chino Sensei, owned a blue 1984 Subaru four-wheel drive. He liked my turbo but was no help on the unruly trip computer
, which he gazed at serenely. Then south to Tucson and Patagonia for a week, turning left to drive three days to Point Clear, Alabama, for sailing on Mobile Bay and quail hunting in Baldwin County with my friend Tom McGuane. Another left turn and it was north toward home with a day's stop in Oxford, Mississippi, to visit Rowan Oak, the home of my dead mentor, William Faulkner.
I liked being home for the first forty-eight hours; then the urge to drive returned. May seemed like a good possibility. A little green would be a nice alternative to black trees, white snow, the brown frozen prairie grass. I would call Lincoln, Nebraska, and get a set of county maps and log a couple of thousand miles on gravel roads. Maybe rig some foot pedals so that I could steer while standing through the sunroof of my motorized prairie schooner.
Suddenly I have decided to admit that I came within a few inches of losing the car on a two-track in Arivaca Canyon in Arizona. As the car slid toward the precipice on the frost-slick dirt, I undid the seat belt and opened the door, under the assumption that a car is easier to replace than a novelist. Perhaps I'll order another Subaru this summer, if only because the car is foolproof.
1986
Going Places
Everyone remembers those kindergarten or first-grade jigsaw puzzles of the forty-eight states, not including Hawaii or Alaska, which weren't states when I was a child and perhaps for that reason are permanently beyond my sphere of interest. I'm not at all sure at what age a child begins to comprehend the abstractions of maps—Arthur Rimbaud's line about the “child crazed with maps” strikes home. Contiguous states in the puzzle were of different colors, establishing the notion that states are more different from one another than they really are. The world grows larger with the child's mind, but each new step doesn't abolish the previous steps, so it's not much more than a big child who finally gets a driver's license, certainly equivalent to losing your virginity in the list of life's prime events.
