Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  The next morning I very slowly coaxed my dog back to friendship with chunks of Wisconsin sharp cheddar cheese. I reflected that when my bird dogs have heard coyotes up at the cabin they barked out the window, but on the two occasions that they have heard wolves they have crawled quietly up the stairs to the loft and hid under the bed. In the aftermath, I as a writer of course had to research the matter and my conclusion was that I had had a simple attack of lycanthropy, fairly innocent in that I had hurt nothing except my head and my dog’s feelings. I tried a little howl a day later and she wasn’t amused. Years later I still occasionally look at my bed and then the chandelier, mentally measuring the distance, and wondering how a burly fellow could make the jump which would be demanding for a good athlete.

  Curiously enough I have never had any interest in occult matters and have often thought it sad that someone with deep interest in such things could have appreciated the experience. In a fairly long lifetime I can recall having only two accurate intuitions, both of them a little comic. On my way back home from the West I had gotten up before dawn to minimize Chicago traffic problems, and passed in the early-morning light a munitions plant between Joliet and Chicago. I stepped on the gas when I had an odd feeling that there was going to be an explosion. I quickly found out on the radio that it was true and I had been lucky enough to get through before they closed the expressway. I don’t think there were any serious injuries.

  My second successful intuition was very specific. I was in New York City for the usual screenplay meeting and after work one day called my wife at home which was a daily habit. She was upset because there had been a blizzard back in northern Michigan and three of my neighbor’s English-setter bird dogs were lost. They weren’t accustomed to spending the night outdoors in subzero weather and my friend Nick, the owner, was worried because the dogs had never run off for more than an hour or so and now they had been gone all day. That night in New York City I had an especially vivid dream of the path the three dogs took, including crossing the grave of a friend of ours and Nick’s, and then heading through a marsh and over a frozen creek down to a thick woods bordering Lake Michigan. The next morning when I left La Guardia I dismissed the dream as nonsense, the mind merely wishing it knew where the dogs had gone. I knew from an early-morning call that they hadn’t reappeared which made my trip home dismal as I had hunted with these glorious creatures. Sometimes we would release my two setters plus four of Nick’s into the field together and it was wonderful indeed to watch them work coverts each in its own way. Anyway, I got home in midafternoon, rechecked, and dressed warmly, then headed out to the cemetery about eight miles south of our farm. I was a little amazed to see three sets of tracks crossing the grave of our friend, Larry Price. I then drove directly for the dogs’ destination in my dream, about two miles farther away on the lake road. There was nothing there and I beeped at which point the dogs popped up from behind a big snowbank where they had evidently buried themselves for warmth. They were pleased to see me but got in the car without comment.

  These kinds of experiences are what scientists call “anecdotal,” hence unreliable, perhaps specious, but then I have a leg up because I don’t care if they are. I’m more inclined to believe the wonderful Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz, who said, “There are no truths, only stories.” Far more interesting to me are perceptions that considerably enlarge my notions of natural and human behavior, thus I spend a great deal of time clumsily reading books related to brain structure, botany, anthropology. I am so poorly trained in the sciences that my comprehension of these books is minimal. I like to know that bacteria survive in deep undersea molten fissures that reach twelve hundred degrees but I can’t really tell you why such information thrills me except that it enlarges my perception of reality. This could be true also of experiences termed “occult” but then this easily becomes an ornate succubus devouring otherwise sensible lives. Two accurate intuitions makes for one every thirty years, a truly unimpressive average.

  I think that it was Wittgenstein who said that the real mystery is that the earth exists. This is easy to dismiss on a conscious level as being unreachable, but the puzzlement evidently reaches deep into our unconsciousness. One winter I was having a particularly severe slump due to exhaustion over a number of items in my life and at my lowest point I had a dream of God standing in space before time “was.” He was hurling countless trillions of nearly invisible specks of material into the void. When I awoke instantly—this was the kind of dream that wakes you—I was fearful because I remembered from childhood the biblical admonition that if you see God you die. I got myself off the hook by thinking that the God in the dream was sort of a comic-book version: vastly globey, but with definite humanoid features.

  A few days later I was sitting in the backyard of our casita, which borders a creek in the mountains down near the Mexican border, our winter residence the past twelve years after a half century of snow. There were uncommon rains in the area in late October and early November that continued on sporadically through the winter and spring where the year before we had gone through one hundred and fifty days without water. Now I walked through a normally barren mesquite thicket and found an evening primrose big as a bushel basket with thirty-three purple-and-cream-colored flowers. Even my bird dog took a curious sniff.

  Anyway, I was sitting in the backyard thinking of the nature of this wild efflorescence in front of me, listening to the burble of the creek over rock and sand, counting the nineteen bird species around the feeder, and vainly trying to remember the details of an article on the human genome in the New York Times science pages. But sitting there I escaped my body and saw the genetic nature of all the plants, trees, shrubs, the birds, the two dogs, and the cat, the moving water itself, even the earth beneath my feet, which E. O. Wilson said has a billion bacteria in each spoonful. It was clearly impossible but this cellular life of the natural world was making itself visible so that the landscape shimmered and seethed with its infinitesimal life. I was plainly in a trance in which my rational consciousness had no governance, though near the top of my skull there was a cold point of animal fear that I was being sucked into a world I didn’t want to visit. Afterwards, while eating a sensible Hebrew National hot dog (with sauerkraut and hot mustard), I poked fun at my poetic vision of what any natural scientist finds available every day. But then I’m only a writer and this engaging view of the minuscule building blocks of existence lifted my sodden spirits. After all, we have carbon and iron in our bodies because we are made in part out of the dust of stars.

  Every few years I come across a particular quote from a Rilke letter, the last time in Richard Flanagan’s startling Death of a River Guide: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”

  It is apparent to me now that the nature of the Rilke quote is what fueled my curiosity and investigation of so many third-world cultures from Africa to Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, and a lifelong obsession with our own Native American cultures. It is simply the fear of missing out. To really learn much about another culture is a very long and slow process and you’re not liable to receive anything in a spiritual sense unless it’s already in yourself waiting to be discovered. In the past two decades there’s been a great deal of spiritual shopping which, though understandable, carries with it and is disastrously married to our culture’s collapsed sense of time, where speed is, finally, of the essence. There is a fatal impatience to quickly count spiritual “coup” and get on with it. This includes a great deal of the eco- and ethno-travel “opportunities,” and the comic aspects of faux shamans selling thre
e-hour “power visions” for a few hundred bucks. That’s just us, whether it’s the Zen of tennis, or fishing, or shooting, the Zen to make you a better businessman or help you write “spontaneously,” or the “Apache” and “Redskin” football teams that abound, the warriors, the mightily white Mohawks, the secrets of Black Elk learned in an afternoon seminar after which Indian fry bread is served and then a buffalo ghost is ridden back to the suburbs. Of course there is no kind of absurdity we’ll refuse to perform if the economics are tangible. If anyone is truly sick of “the fucking white culture,” as I frequently hear, they better get ready for a long haul. An hour staring at a fifty-ton Olmec head will offer you a preposterous emptiness that all the sugar in the world can’t sweeten.

  Back to school. We failed each other. My love of books didn’t include chemistry, biology, geometry, and algebra, and barely history, certainly not civics. The chemistry and biology classroom naturally stank and that was enough. I gazed at the chart of the elements in firm disbelief that they could be the components for the contents of the world. How could I study chemistry when I was enthralled by John Keats, and earlier, how could I get interested in our governmental structure when the book open on my desk was by Richard Halliburton, a record of his travels in India and Africa. At the time the school was called Haslett Rural Agricultural though the area was quickly becoming a suburb of Lansing and East Lansing. Many of the students were country people, some of the boys of loutish nature so that when Mr. Birdsall would say, “We have a reasonable idea of what the moon is made of,” our all-star quarterback Ken Schaibly bellowed, “Bullshit.” This is hard on a teacher.

  But I had a couple of wonderful teachers. One, Berenice Smith, somewhat thwarted in her own life, would pass on to me her subscriptions to The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and so on, plus her enthusiasms for Willa Cather and Trollope, the English Romantics. Another, James McClure, a POW in Germany for years during World War II, gave me Thorstein Veblen, Vance Packard, Beard’s histories, Crèvecoeur. McClure was obsessed with Thomas Jefferson and told us his own tales of eating bowls of fish heads in prison camps. An other of his idols who became mine was the great labor leader Walter Reuther, also Eugene Debs and John L. Lewis.

  In a somewhat predictable nature my religious obsessions converted their energies toward literature. There was no middle ground and the public ecstasy of fundamentalism and being a young preacher transferred themselves into the private obsession with literature. This borders on psychobabble, an addiction of our culture, but is probably true. It is easier to see at a distance in Ireland where becoming lapsed Catholics fueled the early careers of so many writers.

  What is the nature of beloved objects that are wrapped so tightly with our emotions they can’t be separated in our brains until death? I see a gray and black teddy bear, frayed and singed (having been tested by me in the oven); a new oilcloth from Montgomery Ward, its roseate pattern becoming the first grand painting for the child, the wonderful smooth surface and oily, sweet odor; the packet of Audubon cards given out to third-graders with each card a glorious bird that you yourself might find locally, a scarlet tanager in a blooming peach tree that still doesn’t seem quite possible; the leather-bound King James Bible (with complete concordance) earned with a 4-H project where you grew a large plot of staked tomatoes and sold them for seventy-five cents a bushel, the Old Testament poured into the mind over and over until forty years later verses still pop unbidden into the mouth. Doubtless people have felt religious ecstasy since the Pleistocene though now it is largely ridiculed, mostly because of the charlatan behavior of the leaders. I certainly don’t view fundamentalists as more threatening than the somewhat fascist monoethic of our surging, prosperous young middle class who were educated with the usual politically correct fodder to the point that they seem to keep totally to their own kind. Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are well out of their purview. They live in a consensus world of day care, Little League, stock portfolios, healing, closure, ergonomics, with pablum concerns about air pollution and smoking (in their immediate areas). It is a version of life much closer to Huxley’s prophecies than those of George Orwell. Imagine a serious discussion of whether thirty-five hours a week is too much television for the little nitwits they are breeding.

  Oh well. I’ve spent a lifetime with the accusatory question “What if everyone were like you?” I’d respond, “Poets are mostly the pulse of the wound that probes to the opposite side,” as Lorca would have it. He was, of course, executed by the Falangistas, of which we have many in sheep’s clothing in our own culture. But then there’s the not so amusing idea that our writing adheres so closely to our culture’s money ethic that only a small minority takes it seriously, and none regard it as dangerous. The PEN and Amnesty International statistics on murders of writers and journalists in other countries are startling. I suppose the idea that we thrive here is a testimony to both our democracy and our indifference.

  Curiously and perhaps due to my religious youth, I have never felt that being an artist was in itself any excuse for wretched behavior. Toward another pole it is also quite obvious that we as Victorian Romans in a Silver Age frenzy are producing whatever is profitable in enormous quantity. Publishers as well as literary presses are as market-directed as our corporations. The real reason we have a profligate number of MFA programs is that, as with cocaine, Pampers, and Budweiser, the demand’s there. When it was only the highly competitive programs at Stanford and Iowa it seemed sensible enough, a boon to some and harmless to others, but now the proliferation seems to be drowning the literary novel by force of numbers and peculiarly arch uniformity. In recent years I’ve received several hundred galleys and manuscripts a year and most would have benefited if the writer’s experience were of a less concentrated academic variety. Seventeen years in a row in institutions presents a narrow spectrum. Gone are those cornball days when book jackets proclaimed the writer had worked as a truck driver, a proctologist, a stripper, a dishwasher, a furrier, a cowboy, an unlicensed plumber, a Peace Corps worker in five different countries. But then in the middle of the night it occurred to me that I didn’t really know why it gets light when you turn on the light, and when you turn it off it gets dark again. What do I know?

  What is going on in the air with light and dark is accessible information though I’ll probably never give it enough time to truly understand it. What we don’t understand is inevitably more interesting. Maybe all the MFA programs are training a super-race of readers who will understand all of the processes of the printed word. And this, after all, is the age of the triumph of the process, say a computer, over what actually might be stored within it, the contents.

  I’m drawn again to Wittgenstein and the mystery being, simply enough, that the world exists, but within this world you have a five-year-old piss-pants heading on foot to kindergarten on a winter morning, a path to school that will be repeated in different forms for the next seventeen years. The memories of wet wool and cold feet are more pungent than anything learned, the cherry smell of flour glue, the way that the tops of the teacher’s stockings cut into her plump thighs, a student vomiting breakfast on a radiator. Drifting back from his brother and friends he turns off before the school yard, cuts down the alleys behind houses until he reaches the lumberyard where he climbs to the top of the coal pile and watches the morning train pass by. Circling down by a creek he reaches the factory where they make railroad ties, then treat them with creosote, the heavy scent thick in the cold air. He’s a little sad because his dog Penny has been punished for biting the creamy tops off milk bottles delivered to porches by the horse-drawn wagon. On zero-degree mornings the milk begins to freeze pushing several inches of yellow cream through the top and the dog bites off these frozen cylindrical chunks, eating them with pleasure.

  It was very hard to go to school and easy to be dissuaded by impulse. Many years later in college your Italian-language professor walks by just as you are entering the movie theater and cutting his class. You accidental
ly punch a teacher who has shaken you awake, get kicked out for a term, hitchhike to New York City, which has become your threadbare nirvana. Seventeen years passing in a state of torpor except for classes that dealt with the beauty and meaning of language, the path to school always difficult, missing the morning classes to talk to a lovely diner waitress named Willie who was from Paducah, Kentucky, and her left leg was a few inches shorter than her right but she walked with a sexy wobble, her voice raspy with tales of marital woe. She’d play Faron Young and Hank Williams on the jukebox, we’d drink coffee and smoke cigarettes looking out the window at the mounds of dirty snow in the parking lot. I kissed her only once, back near the walk-in cooler when she was retrieving a box of hamburger patties. Willie prepared me better for my beloved course in the French Symbolist poets than anything else could. I loaned her a couple of Henry Miller books but she thought he had a “dirty mouth,” then accused me with “certain men favor a woman with a bum leg.” She blew smoke in my face and hobbled off to feed the jukebox. She was perfectly beautiful except for that bad leg which I could no doubt heal by rubbing it with my blind left eye.