Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  Walking

  Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake

  into the first broad gully, down its trough

  and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into

  a larger gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth

  of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank

  at a small spring remembered from ten years back;

  walking northwest two miles where another gully

  opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father

  stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold

  burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange

  on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened

  by the ‘81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood

  swale – I sat within it on a November morning

  watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun

  and slug, chest beating hard for killing –

  into the edge of a swale waist-high with ferns,

  seeing the quick movement of a blue racer,

  and thick curl of the snake against a birch log,

  a pale blue with nothing of the sky in it,

  a fleshy blue, blue of knotted veins in an arm;

  walking to Savage’s Lake where I ate my bread

  and cheese, drank cool lake water, and slept for a while,

  dreaming of fire, snake and fish and women in white

  linen walking, pinkish warm limbs beneath white linen;

  then waking, walking homeward toward Well’s Lake,

  brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening

  in yellow heat, dead dun-brown grass, windless,

  with all distant things shimmering, grasshoppers, birds

  dulled to quietness; walking a log road near a cedar swamp

  looking cool with green darkness and whine of mosquitoes,

  crow’s caw overhead, Cooper’s hawk floating singly

  in mateless haze; walking dumbly, footsore, cutting

  into evening through sumac and blackberry brambles,

  onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel,

  whippoorwills, night birds wakening, stumbling to lake

  shore, shedding clothes on sweet moss; walking

  into syrupy August moonless dark, water cold, pushing

  lily pads aside, walking out into the lake with feet

  springing on mucky bottom until the water flows overhead;

  sinking again to walk on the bottom then buoyed up,

  walking on the surface, moving through beds of reeds,

  snakes and frogs moving, to the far edge of the lake

  then walking upward over the basswood and alders, and field

  of sharp stubble and hay bales, toward the woods,

  floating over the bushy crests of hardwoods and tips

  of pine, barely touching in miles of rolling heavy dark,

  coming to the larger water, there walking along the troughs

  of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island,

  small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle

  of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring

  which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool

  dark endless weight of water.

  As pleasant and innocent as this life seemed at the time it created enormous problems beginning at the age of twelve and these not unique problems still very much confuse my life. You live in a small town without claustrophobia because the town ends so suddenly, its borders clearly defined. Most people in the town have known one another for generations and there is no particular reason for anyone there to move away, or anyone to move in for that matter. Most often you walk home from school for lunch, or walk to your father’s office in the county courthouse and ride home a few blocks with him. Your mother is ironing, tending baby Judith, and singing along with whoever is singing on Arthur Godfrey on the radio. On Saturday she listens to the opera broadcast directly from New York City far to the east. You are a bit out of hand ever since your accident a year or two before. You’re in the third grade and just learning to read. All you really want to do is ride around with your dad and visit farmers. Once he left in the evening to help a family when the farmer hanged himself in the barn. Another time you got to help pull a difficult calf from a mother cow who was making an improbable amount of noise. Second grade was horrible and for some reason you were punished for pissing on the cloakroom floor. Third grade was better with Audubon cards to identify birds and the insufferable nonsense of words like “when where what why who and whom” finally resolved themselves. School had gotten better but you still didn’t want to be there. You simply wanted to be at the cabin safe from the confusions of who you were, what you looked like, and the inevitable report cards that came in every societal form and still do over fifty years later. You dammed a creek with friends without knowing it would flood the neighborhood. The deputy said you’d end up in reform school. You boarded a boxcar while the train was moving and an adult reported you. You rode your bike fifty miles and it got dark and you had to be retrieved. Three months at the cabin seemed to solve everything with days of fishing, swimming, and wandering. You were in love with this life as deeply as is possible and it imprinted itself in your brain and heart just as deeply, bone- and marrow-deep, permanently altering brain chemistry.

  The trouble is that over fifty years later this life still lives within me and has presented unpleasant difficulties, including claustrophobia that is occasionally acute. It isn’t the hokum Daniel Boone-Robert Frost, city-country, civilization-wilderness thing, which is far too simple for actual humans, though it occurs regularly in our mythology, especially the aspects of the “mythos” that arise in television and movies. And low-rent fiction. You know, the guy has a pooch, a pet bear, says “darn it” a lot and can’t “abide womenfolk.” I mean something closer to the Portuguese notion of saudade, a person or place or sense of life irretrievably lost; a shadow of your own making that follows you, and though often forgotten can at any moment give rise to heartache, an obtuse sentimentality, a sharp anger that you are not located where you wish to be, an irrational and childish melancholy that you have cheated yourself of being married to a life essence that you have never been able to quite gather to yourself.

  On the simplest, most ordinary level I’ve seen this in the small village near my cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a location I found and moved to because it reminded me of the ambience of my childhood cabin. People who used to live in the village, were children there, come up for holidays, usually Memorial Day weekend, or the Fourth of July, from what is called “down below,” the cities far to the south of the Mackinaw Bridge that connects Michigan’s two sections and where they make their livelihoods. When they first arrive back home there is often jubilant drinking, then the next day fishing or hunting, and by the second evening a vague unrest often settles in. Things, of course, are not what they were in the old days and though these feelings are bearable the disappointment is always there.

  GROWING UP

  In the middle of my sophomore year in high school when my fundamentalist religion had begun to wane I began to think about getting out of town. I yearned for the places I had read about in Richard Halliburton but they were too unlikely and it hadn’t occurred to me that they had changed since Halliburton’s travels just after the turn of the century: Timbuktu, Kathmandu, the Pampas, the Forbidden City, the latter doubtless possessing everything the Midwest lacked, a thousand nude Susan Haywards demanding the head of John the Baptist she had earned by acrobatic dancing, or Cyd Charisse kicking up her long legs in the torchlit tent of a sultan. These were places I clearly belonged and the lovely limbs of my cheerleader friends fell short of the top.

  So I wrote letters to the West that held mountains I’d never seen. Start with mountains, I thought, then move on to oceans, and cities where I could act Byronic what with Byron having recently replaced the New Testament. All the western resorts I wr
ote to replied that at sixteen I was too young and had to wait until eighteen. The solution was a non-Protestant fib about my age and I was finally accepted by the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, as a future busboy. I had been president of my class and student council and these dubious positions won the day though the age fib was probably significant.

  My father thought it was a fine idea to “get out and around” and my mother wondered why I couldn’t stay home like “everybody else.” I took the Greyhound and while I was waiting to transfer in Chicago a burly homosexual tracked me here and there. I didn’t know what he was at the time but memory told me a couple of years later. I arrived at the Stanley a full week early to the manager’s momentary dismay but he put me to work helping cooks and porters get the kitchen ready, a lucky stroke as I got to eat their wondrous foreign food, a pleasant shock that made me feel truly away from home. The cooks all spoke French, and though they were probably from Montreal, I was quite overwhelmed by their gruff sophistication. The maître d’s wife liked to tickle me and brush my hair after she finished her dessert and stinky cheese, an odor to which I quickly adapted after solving the mystery. The employee’s concrete bunkhouse wasn’t heated yet so I slept under many blankets, getting up at dawn to wander in the nearby mountains, the air warm but the snow not yet melted. I also helped and met some of the maintenance crew, three of whom were tough, older Jewish guys from the East. At the time I hadn’t met a Jewish person except for seeing the fabulously beautiful Joanne Nedelman, an East Lansing high school girl, in a drugstore. My reading told me that Jews tended to become scientists and classical musicians but these boiler-room workers at the Stanley were muscular, used wonderfully foul language, and drank a lot, reminding me of my uncles.

  It was a picaresque summer. I climbed a disused, rickety fire tower with a waitress from Ohio State who shed all her clothes save her panties. This was an age of heavy petting well before the sexual revolution. Eisenhower was the nearly invisible president, and the dining room staff, all college students, were decidedly nonpolitical. Many of the hotel’s patrons were Jewish, from Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City, and were touchingly generous with our clumsy service. I soon had hundreds of dollars in change in my trunk, more money than I had ever seen. The patrons seemed to be truly enjoying their wealth (unlike the present) and were both kind and curious which stretched my fibbing capacity as I suddenly became a self-invented sophomore at Michigan State. Though I was the youngest of the dozen or so busboys, I became the “captain,” which gave me the duty of collecting our share of the tips from the waiters and waitresses. This took a sharp tongue and some spying as they were always bent on cheating. My newly inflated sense of importance became generally troublesome as I threatened management with strikes over bad employee food, usually leftovers that gave us diarrhea. We won the right to have a cook for employees who prepared us fresh food.

  I had become a general pain in the ass and was fired for throwing an egg in the kitchen which hit the cashier, and for ordering prime rib which I ate in the laundry room. I despondently packed my gear and hitchhiked to a cheap lodge where they needed a breakfast cook. I spent a sleepless night wondering how I was going to figure out how to cook and when dozens of folks entered the dining room I fled out the back door and down the mountain with my gear. I’ve often wondered what they all did about breakfast that morning, whether the manager said “the sensitive cook has fled.”

  Luckily for me the Stanley was hosting a convention of federal judges in a few days and I was able with humility and apologies to get my job back. With pride I was able to pour coffee for Supreme Court judges Earl Warren and Tom Clark. My unrest, however, returned, and as an admirer of Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis I “fomented,” as they say, more labor unrest and was made uncomfortable enough to quit in mid-August. I was pretty flush, partly because on my days off and some midafternoons a bellhop friend, Ronnie, and I organized horse races with stable nags. Older patrons would watch and bet while Ronnie and I jockeyed these horses as fast as possible across a wide field. The tips got pretty large from happy bettors and I continued to money-order my earnings home.

  On a whim I decided to hitchhike as I felt I was missing too much country by taking a bus that continued through the night. This decision also fueled my romantic notion of myself as a vagabond. I spent a couple of days getting through Nebraska which struck my fancy then and has continued to do so. I was awakened one dawn by a group of Hereford calves as I slept in a pasture on the banks of the Platte River. I felt at home and still do when I visit Nebraska.

  When I reached Duluth, Minnesota, I made the mistake of buying a blackjack for a school friend, Roger Wilson, back home. A Duluth detective saw me put the blackjack in my boot outside the pawnshop on the street. I was taken to jail and interrogated about a robbery. I was pleased when the cops wouldn’t believe I was sixteen. They finally took me down to the bus station and made me buy a ticket for home which was somewhat humiliating for a vagabond.

  After all this it was more than a little banal to go back to high school as a junior. My unrest had become permanent, and the only consolation was the hormonal violence of football, the reading of fiction and poetry, doing poorly in my schoolwork. Byron was supplanted by Keats and Walt Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, and hopeless romantic biographies of artists like Romaine Rolland’s Jean-Christophe.

  Strangely, I’ve rarely been claustrophobic in New York City except on the plane getting there, and during occasional dinner parties when I’ve had to slip away. I think this is because early on New York City represented the figure of complete “openness” to me, and still can when I see an appealing photo of the city’s skyline. This feeling started late in my junior year in high school when with a friend, Randy Scott, an escape to New York City was planned. Randy had been sharing my interest in romanticized novels such as Irving Stone’s book on van Gogh who we were convinced suffered too much. We were more immediately taken with Pierre La Mure’s Moulin Rouge about Toulouse-Lautrec who drank a lot but frequently bedded “sensual” whores. At the time we were very taken by the word “sensual” and used it whenever possible, a word far from the pallid and drudgery-ridden confines of our lives in the Midwest. Under the ruse of visiting Randy’s cousins up north of Albany (we eventually did) we headed for New York City and its much dreamed-about bohemian quarter, which we pronounced “Green Witch Village.” We carried along a couple of extra second gears for Randy’s ‘49 Ford, a fragile part when you continually wound it up to sixty a second, but rather easy to install.

  We drove straight through in twenty hours with a few flat tires and one new second gear on the Penn Turnpike. We checked into Hotel Marlton on Eighth Street and immediately asked an old bellhop if there was any “sex” available. He asked us, “What kind?” and we were swept away by the sophistication of the place. To guarantee our Toulouse-Lautrec motif we bought an expensive bottle of cognac, sipping the harsh liquid as we waited for love to arrive in our rather dismal room which we decided was quite artistic. She came in the form of a tall bulky redhead who thought we were a “hoot” but was kind enough to cooperate in our Lautrec charade, pouring herself a water glass of cognac before saying, “Let’s get down to business.” Randy went first and she was certainly a short-order cook. After my own turn was speedily finished I caught myself thinking I had spent two full days’ pay working at digging footings for cement foundations at construction sites, but we were too exhilarated by accomplishing our mission for a letdown. Our virginities had been tossed away for a life of art.

  The cognac, whore, and long drive put us to sleep until evening when we went out on the streets. Typically, my memory keys on food and I recall we bought Italian-sausage sandwiches with fried onions and peppers from a street vendor for thirty-five cents apiece. The sandwiches were indescribably delicious so we had a second each. Our luck continued with a chamber-music concert in Washington Square, a tearful pleasure on a summer evening in that we both loved classical music but had never heard i
t “live.” I recall it was Telemann, Buxtehude, and Monteverdi.

  This was the kind of grand trip to New York City that predicated the future. Sadly enough it seemed to also pave the way for certain mental problems, or at least accelerate them. It’s hard to happily finish high school in the heart of the Midwest when in the East, in the true bohemia, people are painting paintings, writing poetry, drinking red wine, and eating meals with lots of garlic cooked by beautiful women wearing black turtlenecks and mascaraed eyes who were doubtless free with their sexual favors to deserving young men like myself.

  In my junior and senior years of high school, in the years 1954-1956 and deep in the Eisenhower senescence, I had also begun reading a great deal of French novels and poetry which energized my unrest. Now there was Paris added to New York as a golden city. I had pretty much given up painting as I could use more in paints a day than I earned, an easy economic lesson, the kind I haven’t learned well but one simplified by my perception that I wouldn’t be another Modigliani, and the only thing I possibly shared with van Gogh was a propensity to depression. It was many years before I realized that a writer-artist can’t go it alone and during my teens I had no one really to share my obsession with art and literature except my younger sister, Judith. I talked with my dad and my brother John about books but not from the viewpoint that I was ever going to end up making books. Judith and I would light a red candle upstairs and play Berlioz and Stravinsky on a small record player I had bought for twenty bucks all the while examining our small collections of Skira paperback art books. This isolation was to become a habit and possibly not a good one.