Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  When I finally got a ride in the midafternoon heat the next day my throat was too dry to talk. The car was a junker driven by a couple in their seventies. They looked at me, shook their heads, handed me the best cold beer of my life before or since. I had spent the clear night drowned in stars but was glad to see day come, a delight that didn’t last long.

  Four months later in October I was married, a rather hurried affair as Linda was pregnant. I was nearly twenty-one and she was two days short of nineteen. Neither set of parents was particularly happy about the pregnancy but the worst of it was over by the time Linda had returned from Stephens College down in Missouri. When I told my parents my mother actually said, “James, we’ve always catered to your aberrations. Now it’s time for responsibility.” After that rather literary little speech my father asked if Linda’s parents knew, and I said no, that she didn’t have the craw to tell them over the phone. “It’s up to you to go over and talk to them,” he said, “but remember you didn’t do it by yourself.”

  I was ignorant of it all at the time but not many years later I realized what an antique, old-world gesture it was for a young man to visit parents to tell them that their only child was pregnant out of wedlock. I had met them a number of times and it was accurate to say they didn’t seem overfond of me, a euphemism in itself. If I had been her parents I wouldn’t have been fond of me either.

  My news didn’t go over well. Linda’s mother started wailing but William King, essentially a kind man whom I always thought of as “the last gentleman,” said, “Frankly James, I think you’re a bastard,” then went immediately to the phone to call Linda at college and set her mind at rest.

  When Linda returned home in two days I wasn’t allowed to see her until a decision was made as to whether or not she might prefer to go visit an aunt for a year, but she wanted to marry me. We had first met when she was fourteen and I was sixteen and after she graduated from high school and we began seeing each other it became apparent, despite my problematical character, that we seemed destined for each other. “Destiny” is a cheeky word but an intimate part of the fretwork of romantic love. Luckily for all, including myself, at the time of our shotgun wedding I was immersed in the work of Rene Char and William Butler Yeats, rather benign influences compared to many of my other enthusiasms.

  With marriage my world of freedom disappeared but at the time I was more than happy to give it up. It is said of Yeats that he never quite got off his stilts. How admirable. However, when a young poet like myself walks on one stilt, it is awkward and possible for only moments at a time. I was fifty years old before I realized that I got married in part because I doubted I would survive alone. I would guess there is something in us that unconsciously tries to ensure we will continue to live. I was simply unable to hold off the darkness offered by my perceptions by myself. Even then I was aware of the Jungian admonition of living “too high in the mind” but I could not help myself for any prolonged periods. Maybe I still can’t. The idea has also arisen that growing up in a very close and loving family doesn’t adequately prepare you for life outside that family. This is mildly heretical but strikes me as true. You grow accustomed to a densely warm creaturely love that you do not find when you step off your front porch. Admittedly I haven’t probed too far in this direction but I have watched how very cold people seem to thrive in this cold world in the arenas of corporations and politics. In both you see the unconscionable and frivolous use of language that has suffered dissolution to the point you believe no human being could speak this way.

  In marriage I found something to tie me to earth. I was too naked to survive and I discovered clothing in this day-to-day etiquette of love. In weak periods I could at least imitate my parents’ steadfastness when they sat on the porch, my father with his arm over my mother’s shoulder with five children wandering around in stages of obsession and disarray.

  Forty years later my wife, Linda, went to England and Ireland with our two adult daughters, Jamie and Anna. I faxed a letter every day even though it might not have been desired. Because of my professional life I’m often away weeks at a time but when away I often remember our courtship when we wrote to each other every day. For reasons emerging from her own family I believe Linda needs this closeness as much as I. I do know that darkness more easily overcomes me when I’m not in her presence.

  A few years ago in late April I crossed the dunes abutting Lake Superior near Grand Marais in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When I reached the edge after an hour’s walk I looked down the shoreline three hundred feet or so below me and there, partly shrouded by fog and icy mist, was a large iceberg maybe five stories high and a hundred feet in diameter. The iceberg was covered by several dozen ravens who were waddling around pecking at the ice with their strong beaks for anything to eat that might be in the frozen ice. I watched them with my monocular (being blind in one eye I don’t have to carry cumbersome binoculars) as they shared a particularly large lake trout that had probably died of old age.

  I came back on five successive days to watch the ravens, twice reaching the area before the birds and trying clumsily to hide from them in the scant shubbery at the dune’s lip. After a few scolding squawks they ignored me except for a full-bearded old one who flew silently close to my hiding place so I could see an eyeball aimed at me. He seemed to be the raven who often hung out near my cabin and I was judged a safe observer. A warm spell had arrived after a particularly hard winter and by the fourth day the iceberg rocked a bit in the waves, having shed much weight into the water. At a certain depth of the iceberg the ravens had found a mother lode of frozen fish and were jabbering like people at a large, very good dinner party.

  On the sixth day the iceberg was gone and so were the ravens. Shape-changing again, I thought, always ready to draw a metaphor through the reluctant teeth of reality. The week that had passed had been full of natural oddities, from walking through swirling, low-flying clouds to reach my ravens, to stupidly tracking a sow bear and two infant cubs across the sand dunes. It is best to leave this kind of mother to her own preoccupations. Most of all, though, I had been obsessed by the passage of time, and during one frightening half hour I had lain in a pocket, a bowl of sand, while a thunderstorm tormented the sky a few feet above my head. I had the feeling that I was seeing the actual face of lightning and its strokes, which must have passed in a split second, elongated themselves in time, which had stretched and distorted itself.

  Soon after the storm sunlight appeared and I continued on toward my ravens, noting that the lightning had hit a promontory of dune turning a patch into a glassy substance. My ears were still ringing when I thought I saw my father, perhaps fifty yards away, leading a group of girls who were dancing along the edge facing Lake Superior. My sister was close behind and there were six other girls I had known, three of whom had committed suicide, and three who had died in accidents or from cancer. My body felt hollow and I attributed this vision to the effect of the close lightning strikes, the electricity in the air prodding an unused part of my brain. The group headed down the face of the dunes and disappeared into the water. At that moment I realized how often I was a vulnerable, fragile, and frightened man who wondered so deeply how he got from there to here, the questionable nature of the arc or trajectory that accumulates its energy when we are so young and then we are carried with it despite the presumed control over the character we have constructed moment by moment.

  This was all quite exhausting and I flopped down in the sand in the manner of a very large baby thinking of the fleeting thrust of time through marriage, the creation of children and books, the ways I had made my living, the nature of the three places I lived. First came the farm in Leelanau County which started with just a few acres and a fine barn, and a granary that I turned into a studio, bought in 1968 for eighteen thousand dollars. The land expanded to a hundred acres, the house growing with remodeling, and Leelanau County itself, a peninsula jutting up into Lake Michigan changing radically in the thirty years from basically
an agrarian culture toward one directed to tourism and wealthy summer residents, but always the “family home,” still a consoling place however adumbrated by the many wealthy people (people who arrived in the past decade with their sure compass for lovely places), a kind of bourgeois paradise with the bottom half economically coming up missing.

  What happened is that freshly married I managed to finish a B.A. in a year, then attempted graduate school. It was in this period that I had the first inkling of the primary dichotomy of my life, a nearly schizoid pulling at the soul. Simply put, it is inside and outside. In the late fall and winters I worked at the university library and covered the waterfront of Western literature. We lived in a modern though squalid compound called “married-student housing” with our infant daughter Jamie. In early spring, though, I’d be liberated back to the Horticulture Farm and my spirits would lift and our young marriage would improve. Perhaps it was only outside that I could digest my winter’s reading: Rilke and Eliade are still synchronous with setting up irrigation fields, Valéry and Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” with digging a root-cellar extension. The memory of the very long hours I worked, forty a week at minimum in addition to classes, are jumbled permanently with what I was reading. Rabelais is a well pit while my first immersion in Lorca is picking McIntosh apples from a championship tree that yielded sixty bushels before it died. Nabokov is digging fence-post holes.

  This is all germane now, the driving force of claustrophobia, because other than the home farm there is a cabin in the far north where the room I work in is windowed on three sides with the sound of the river on my left. In the scruffy yard I see birds, rabbits, a sow bear and her two cubs, a Cooper’s hawk snatching a red squirrel, three young ravens trying to figure out the bird feeder and giving up in boredom, and in the evening I hear owls, whippoorwills, bullbats, coyotes yipping, and on stormy nights Lake Superior roaring in the distance. And the ne plus ultra, on two occasions a wolf howling along the river to the west.

  Our small winter casita borders a creek in the mountains outside of Patagonia, Arizona, a scant fifteen miles from Mexico. The spring before she died my mother counted seventy species of birds from our patio. There are also javelina, deer, bobcats, and the occasional mountain lion. At my studio at our friends the Bergiers’ Hard Luck Ranch up the road I have Mexican ravens, roadrunners, quail, and seven cow dogs to keep me company. To some extent all dogs offer you the comfort of your first dog.

  So by luck, accident, and design I have been able to make a compromise between outside and inside. On the morning I finished my novel The Road Home a female trogon appeared in the pyrocanthus tree only a few feet away from where I sat writing “The End.” Such a rare bird returns you spontaneously to the first time you saw a certain bird as a child and you are overwhelmed by your good fortune in living in such places. Rilke wrote, “What is fate but the density of childhood?”

  II

  SEVEN OBSESSIONS

  ALCOHOL

  It all began early with stolen sips. More often than not we had no whiskey in our home because my family couldn’t afford it except for the holiday season when a few bottles would arrive as gifts. Even beer was an occasional weekend matter but certainly not often, maybe once a month, though in the summer my uncles Walt and Arty, recently home from World War II and bent on sedation, would bring out to our cabin a bottle of Four Roses and a case of A&P beer, the latter costing about three dollars. The beer was usually drunk while catching enough fish for supper and the whiskey rationed out through a long evening of poker and a gambling board game called Tripoley.

  My two ounces of beer in a juice glass tasted harsh and wheaty followed by an unpleasant burp. The untouchable whiskey had a hollow stink similar to sticking your head into a big pipe at an oil-equipment storage yard near our home. All the adults drank and smoked, talking randily, terribly glad to have come home from the war alive though scarcely in one piece. Spending the entirety of the war in the navy in the South Pacific is not fairly represented by books, even less so by movies. It shows itself best in the faces I remember from fifty years ago, stricken faces that were laboriously trying to resume life.

  I suppose the point is that if you spend a day behind a shovel or in an office grinding your mental teeth, alcohol is the rite of passage to your time off, the rest of your life that takes place when not getting your living, the evenings and weekends spent in the constitutionally entitled pursuit of happiness.

  “Happy” is the word though its dimensions are muddy indeed. The boy notes immediately that the sips make him feel a little dumb, though not unpleasantly so. The beer clearly doesn’t taste as good as a Heath bar or fried meat so alcohol becomes a mysterious medicine that adults willingly take to become dumb and happy, a pleasure certainly not equal to playing with your weenie in the outhouse behind the cabin at the edge of the woods. Years later you think of this privy when you read the Yeats line “Love has pitched her palace in the place of excrement.” Ironies abound though they are only slowly learned. If the adults drink too much and laugh too loudly late into the night they are quite miserable in the morning. Peeking down from the cabin loft you see your lovely bare-breasted aunt Barbara holding her head in her hands and saying, “Goddammit, I’ve got a hangover.” The breasts divert you from the idea that beer and whiskey can cause pain.

  On your mother’s side of the family, the Swedes, there is no visible sign of the effects of alcohol except in Great-uncle Nelse, a wonderful smelly old bachelor who lives in the woods and curls up on the ground of the lilac grove after drinking too much. To say that Swedes are nondemonstrative is a euphemism. Salt and pepper are adequate condiments for a lifetime. The only discernible glitch in the drinking of Guckenheimer whiskey, the very cheapest brand, is that Grandpa has the tendency to cheat on the pinochle score if he drinks too much of it, and also might miss the spittoon with his chaw, though only by critical inches. Years later in a state of truly melancholy homesickness I tried to order a shooter of Guckenheimer at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel and the bartender thought it was the funniest thing possible.

  My boyhood friend David Kilmer had ready access to whiskey because his father was prosperous in our little town and also owned a cabin down the shore of the lake from our own. We stole some for our camp in the woods but the scotch tasted like laundry day though it seemed to work as a mosquito repellent. It was also good for starting a campfire.

  The first time I got drunk was at seven in the evening on a New Year’s Eve. My mother made me get in a hot bathtub where I vomited out my thirteen-year-old heart. This experience drove me to religion and athleticism. As a high school sophomore I was second in the countywide half mile. I could chin myself a hundred times with one arm. I was profoundly mediocre at softball, baseball, basketball, and football. Losing an eye to a childhood injury does not help in these sports. I developed a size-nineteen neck by the relentless swiveling of my head to see what object or person was going to hit me next. I turned to art and literature, which everyone knows are paths conveniently lubricated by alcohol. As a senior in high school, buried in the glories of James Joyce, a friend of mine and I stole two cases of Haig & Haig Pinch scotch whiskey out of a rich man’s garage. Over forty years later I still can’t touch scotch unless nothing else is available. As William Faulkner, a noble boozer, said, “Between scotch and nothing, I’ll take scotch.” I hopefully sneaked some of this Haig & Haig into a girlfriend’s pop at a party. “A dog pissed in my drink,” she screeched. Her undies stayed on. A friend got drunk with a woman and split his dick. There was a lot of blood in the backseat of the car. He was a star and we lost the big game he missed. There was a lot of gossip but no one teased him because he was the toughest guy in school and could drink a six-pack in fifteen minutes, a habit that makes one careless in taking aim in sex.

  This is all the etiology of something that apparently didn’t quite become a disease in my case. The disease model for alcoholism is frequently in dispute. It is simply enough true for some and not for others. Pe
ople lie mightily about sex, money, and drinking. It takes a real pro to see the fibs clearly. There is also the question of why shouldn’t they lie? Despite the economic and social interests of the dominant culture it is possible to look at life as more than a self-improvement plan.

  With money you say you make either more or less than you do depending on the situation. If you are in the company of less fortunate friends who might want yet another loan you infer you are not doing all that well. In conversations in which sex is featured there is the helpless incursion of everyone’s fantasy life. Rarely, if ever, does anyone say, “I was sleeping with this famous model but I only had a half-master, the head of which turned back and said ‘nope.’” Talking about alcohol is shot through with a rich lore of queasiness. Five martinis become three, and three bottles of wine become two in contrast to everyone’s earlier years where our essential loutishness caused us to bray, “I drank a case of Schlitz,” when midway through the third six-pack we fell asleep with a half piece of pizza sticking out of our mouths. By dawn eager flies had gathered.

  The other day at a local bar while I was having a single Absolut on the rocks with a twist (some days I have two) a friend told me about his annual physical. This is a moderately expensive procedure for a man of sixty so he thought, “Why not be honest?” When the doctor pro forma asked about how many drinks he had a week my friend said, “About one hundred.” This is not an acceptable answer, needless to say. “You know, some days just a few pops, but then a couple of days a week I do thirty or so, then taper off to fifteen.” This is a remarkably sturdy fellow, aged sixty, of middle-European descent and a biggish body, no liver or kidney damage. I don’t know about his brain though I did considerable study in brain physiology for a novel. In conversation he functions mentally at least as well as, maybe better than, our current president. He is the rarity who can drink an amount that would be slowly lethal to 99 percent of us. Many try, many die, as it were.