Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  If you’re not careful being broke can make you feel broke which as most of the world knows is not a good feeling. I sat there absorbing the sunlight of Provence, a gift of the glass of Domaine Tempier Bandol I was drinking, and noticed that it had begun to rain outside in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The beckoning steps were obvious. Broke people try to get money. I recalled a few years back during three weeks of fly-fishing for brown trout in Montana I received one of those urgent calls from Hollywood demanding my immediate presence to keep a project alive. The fishing was splendid and the phone call gave me an actual heartache, the kind that you think might precede your trip to the incinerator. I flew out in the evening and had my meeting in the morning though the process through which they fired me lasted several hours. During the final portion of the meeting when their silly ax fell I positioned myself in the office so that I could see out the window where my car and driver sat ready for the airport. The frivolously vicious meeting ended and I shook many hands that had never touched a brown trout, or spent cold, rainy autumn days bird hunting. On the way to the car I passed masses of Mercedeses, Jaguar sedans, and BMWs, none of them any good for floating a river or getting out of a mudhole in the backcountry.

  There is the discomforting idea that if I spent all the time I give over to hunting and fishing making money I’d never go broke but then as a writer I’m a very poor portrait of a faucet that can easily be turned on and off. To function at all I have to maintain a state of being concomitant with my vaguely childish idea of what life should be. I begin the day with taking my dog Rose for a walk in the fields, woods, or canyons, depending on which of our three modest properties I’m spending my time. This is no big deal and settles the mind for the day’s work. A dog can escort you away from our current empire and into a more private world where literature is allowed to thrive. Before Rose came Tess, Sand, and Missy, all hunting breeds, also Hud, Jessie, Kate, and Mary, all farm dogs but no less beloved.

  When walking without a rod and gun you are mindful about how deeply fishing and hunting have entered your consciousness and how large the store of perceptions must be in your unconscious. They quite literally have become a way of framing reality. Walking a stretch of river with your dog from far up on the bank’s edge you locate the holes and the flow that concentrate the fish, and you also study the nature of every thicket, the sugar plum, thornapple, chokecherry, and aspen, that may hold grouse and woodcock. It is impossible that there isn’t a holdover in the way you study the details of cities with their human animals. In the French or Mexican countryside you are liable to wonder what kind of birds, game or otherwise, favor what thickets, and what kind of fish favor the riffles or eddies of the Loire, Rhône, or Yaquí rivers. Not to push it too far but there’s certainly an element of stalking in a New York or Los Angeles meeting, and when you enter a saloon you are prone to study which of the couple of dozen human animals there might present a problem.

  There’s no particular virtue in hunting and fishing. The most irksome qualities about them are the sorry bumpkin mythologies surrounding the sports, and especially promoted by the industries that supply the hunters and fishermen with equipment. When asked while giving a lecture in Portland, Oregon why I still hunt I merely joked, “Because I’m less evolved than most.” A more honest answer would be “Because that’s the way I grew up.” The most skilled hunters and fishermen that I’ve known have almost invariably been the most modest and never to my mind identified their sports with our culture’s banal notions of manhood, which is a matter of costumery rather than substance. There is nothing quite so fatuous as a man self-consciously trying to act manly with our media’s cues. (With women there is a direct equivalent in the smirkish pouts of pinups that none of us have actually seen in real life.)

  The fact of the matter is that if you’re going to be any good at fishing and hunting you’re far better off leaving what you think of as your “self” back home or at the office, or if you take a “self” along it should be an earlier version, say back when you could be delighted as a dog looking at a fresh place to hunt. If you wish to feel manly a demolition derby or Big Time Wrestling is more appropriate. Funny how true returning heroes of war more closely resemble Gary Cooper in High Noon than the braying John Wayne, as devout a draft dodger as so many of our political leaders.

  On the other side of the smudgy coin the forces of antihunting seem to be increasing, but then this effort is fueled largely by the idea that there is a sacred monoethic by which we all might live. If I readily admit that fully half of all hunters are swinish and regularly betray all notions of fair chase I haven’t come up with anything that isn’t typical of the norms of human behavior. People can have nearly terrifying limitations in terms of the life actually lived in our wide country. I once spoke with a well-informed antihunter in the questionable atmosphere of Washington, D.C., where everyone likes to forget where they’re from. I described a South Dakota farm-ranch family that works improbably hard eleven months and three weeks a year, taking a single week off in the late fall for pheasant hunting. Why would you want to deny them this? He seemed to try hard to imagine this family but it wasn’t possible. He couldn’t mentally describe their world. Educated circles are shot through with a fungoid self-righteousness about matters with which they haven’t had a filament of experience. At a party recently I was describing the improbable skills of a very large mixed-blood (Ojibway) hunter and fisherman I know who at times will drink a full bottle of whiskey with his dinner which is admittedly a bit much. A bright young woman, a sociologist out of the University of Michigan, said my friend was in “denial.” Without apparent success I tried to point out that the word “denial” didn’t exist in his world so it couldn’t be a problem, and that a great number of people haven’t been exposed to such concepts so why bother painting them with an etiolated academic brush? And why try to stop a UAW assembly line worker at a Buick plant from deer hunting as he’s done for the past thirty Novembers? What would you put in his life rather than his lateautumn hunt?

  Back to the beginning. Sometimes my father would take an iron skillet, a baby-food jar of bacon fat, salt and pepper, and a loaf of my mother’s salt-rising bread along to the river so we could fry some trout for lunch. This was simple enough, far better than a sandwich, and an integral part of what you were doing. Catching fish, then eating them, goes back a long way. Years later while deer hunting we usually ate the liver and the heart right after the first kill. In my trips to Zihuatanejo the past two years we usually kept a few fish from the morning catch, which would be cooked for us on a tiny island shaded with palm fronds at noon.

  In our personal mythologies (“mythology” in the old sense of the stories that are the main fuel of our beliefs) the separate pieces with age can come together and form a not totally familiar whole. Perhaps much of your life is too close to be comprehensible, just as if you wore seventy-seven layers of clothes and had become unsure if your body was beneath them. This can go on and on. A man can wear a corporate “mask” until he’s fifty-five, retire early, then he finds that either he can’t take off the mask or, if he does, there’s no face under it. We can all become suffocated by daily career assumptions so that there’s nothing left to distinguish us but our career assumptions. We leave out of our life the learning of skills that give us pleasure except those tied to our livelihood.

  Our true daylight comes when we take some time off and are doing something else radically different enough to get a clear view backwards. Frankly, this isn’t always pleasant, and when I’m involved in long bouts of fishing and hunting I know in my heart that despite the niceties of having my fiction published in twenty-three languages I’m basically a “working stiff” like anyone else, and that when I’m fishing and hunting with the right attitude I reenter the woods and rivers with a moment-by-moment sense of the glories of creation, of the natural world as living fabric of existence, so that I’m both young again but also seventy thousand years old.

  It is interesting when y
ou think of religion how evidently easy it is to defile our most sacred impulses. You need only read the daily newspaper to see that in our political life, religion is a way that all the money is cleansed, though greed has long since been abolished as one of the seven deadly sins. Over the years I’ve been told a hundred times by a hundred hapless idiots that money is the only way we keep score. It’s fun to tell them that what they say is doubtless the culture’s motif but if universally followed we would be without a single thing to make life worth living, no art or literature or music, or any natural areas left that have not been trashed. You can even reduce the principle of defilement to the sacrament of marriage where you witness the joining of lovely, intelligent young people who are pasted to each other like decals, and a few years later they are in court with lawyers, filing their teeth and trying to spit on each other.

  The most effective way of ruining hunting and fishing is to make them into the rigid forms of routine that doubtless and of necessity pervade the rest of your life. I must have seen dozens of businessmen treating their bird dogs like flunky employees and then becoming angry at the lack of response in the dog. A dog must become your platonic lover, as close as a friend gets. My longtime hunting crony Nick Reens will hunt four big running English setters for two hours and never utter a word except something kind for a good point or retrieve. Dogs are alarmed and confused by shouting. If properly trained they should feel absolutely free to find you birds with their miraculous noses with as little interference as possible. You are basically the “shooter” and the dog is your mentor as hunter. Of course I’ve seen grown men, including myself, break into tears over an irascible dog. My current English setter, Rose, has little concept of time and if she’s thirsty and we’re within a mile of a river she’ll regularly run off for a drink and brief swim. She’s not apologetic when she returns. Since you have no choice you say like a father with a wayward daughter, “It’s okay as long as I know where you are.”

  The routine problem a fisherman can easily enter is the rather comic one of equipment: you simply think you can buy your way out of your ineptitude with the right expensive gear. Given, there’s no question that quality rods, reels, flies, waders, and clothes are better than those of poor quality, but then I keep recalling an old friend, a true yokel, returning to the car with a creel full of plump trout and his battered eight-dollar fly rod and delaminating Japanese flies. Admittedly the fish were feeding well that evening but above all this miserable caster could “read” a river from long experience. If you can’t perceive the nature of the five percent of the river in which the fish actually live, that two-thousand-dollar outfit doesn’t mean anything. Knowledge of habitat, of habits of the prey, the simple fact that both game birds and fish like to hang out in their little natural restaurants mean everything. You have to have acquired the skill to cast or shoot but they both come with time.

  The potential enemies greed and impatience are always there. One day it was lightly raining and getting colder moment by moment so that my pant cuffs were frozen and crackling and my fingers were numb. My dog at the time was a fat Lab named Sand who as she became older also became quite critical of my missed shots, which on that day had amounted to five in the hour I had been hunting. Three of the shots were difficult but two were easy and I knew it was my impatience, my rising anger at the weather and the idea that I had to leave my remote cabin the next morning for the responsibility of home. We were almost back to the car and there was a childish lump in my throat because I had planned on having a roasted grouse for dinner when Sand put up a bird far to my left on my blind side. I whirled and merely shot at the pine grove where the flying bird had disappeared, a thousand-to-one shot but, as they say, why save twenty cents? My critical dog retrieved the bird from the far side of the grove but, though it pleased me, it didn’t quite leaven my shame over my shitty attitude. These were the days when any man can become ten years old, if not a monster killing machine or a game hog, an accurate reflection of our culture. I’m often reminded of what Big Soldier, an Osage chief, said: “I see and admire your manner of living … You can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about you is in chains, and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I, too, should become a slave.”

  Years ago with my old friend Guy de la Valdéne, whose mother was a friend of the crooner, I visited Bing Crosby’s home south of San Francisco. We were showing him a fly-fishing tarpon movie Guy had made starring a scruffy bunch of hippies, including Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and myself, all successfully misbehaving in Key West though we did fish every single day. These were Bing’s last days and he seemed to look askance at us as most of his fishing had been done with the sport’s fashion plates. I was overwhelmed by his collection of fly rods and English shotguns, every single one exceeding my net worth at the time. Oddly, this beautiful equipment over the years begins to appear in a morose light since it tends to be bought as the time available to use it disappears. The equipment becomes mementos for a longed-for life.

  The Wall Street mogul sorts through a thousand dry flies on a wintry evening in New York, glancing at the glass cabinets of fly rods and shotguns. I’m a poet acquaintance of his wife and have escaped her party to talk to this man who is happy to do so, describing his planned fishing in the coming summer that will include four days in Montana and an equal amount of time in Iceland for Atlantic salmon. It was nearly impolite but I admitted I had fished brown trout ninety days in a row the previous summer. I didn’t say I had accumulated fifteen hundred dollars, which was enough at the time to support my wife and daughter for the summer months, offering me the freedom to fish and write poems. Mentioning small sums makes rich men nervous. He was looking out the window at the snow with ineffable melancholy, lost in the struggle between money and the heart’s pleasure. Unfortunately, many years later while on a prolonged screenplay binge fueled by greed I was a similar man looking out a black window and wondering what if I make a bunch of money and die before I can spend it to buy the free time to fish and hunt?

  I’m sitting on a hillock up in the woods listening to Rose’s beeper in the distance. She’s on point about a quarter mile away on the far side of a wild raspberry thicket. We’re near the home farm and this covey of young grouse is doubtless tired of Rose who has been pointing them for months. The grouse often land in the mulberry tree at the far end of the garden and Rose points them from the yard, immobile and drooling behind the fence several hundred feet from the unmindful birds.

  I can’t walk up on Rose and break the point because I twisted my ankle yesterday. Luckily it’s three weeks until the season opener and tomorrow we’re heading for Montana where I’ll fish out of a river drift boat for fourteen days. I like drifting because I never was an expert wader having been swept away a couple of times. The slippery rock bottom of the Yellowstone River doesn’t allow the kind of dreaminess I can fall into while fishing, or hunting for that matter, where the quality has gotten me lost more than once, twice, three times. On the Yellowstone a half-dozen years ago I was thinking about all of the otter I had seen in my life and how much I like their curious voices and the way they can porpoise through the water. At the very moment the images of otter were passing I thought I saw a large one going for my floating dry fly and I jerked it away. Only it wasn’t an otter. It was the largest brown trout I’ve ever seen rising to a fly in nearly fifty years of fishing. My guide and friend Danny Lahren looked at me strangely but said nothing. It was one of those days it didn’t pay to be a poet.

  Sitting there on the hillside waiting for Rose to break her point I remembered two years ago in Arizona when she was up a slope too steep for anyone but a goat or mountaineer to follow and I had to sit under a mesquite and doze while she pointed two quail coveys in succession that finally broke. This was one of the long silences in sport that Tom McGuane has written so eloquently about. In a fi
shing trance at my desk the other day I wrote this:

  I’m sixty-three and can drop dead

  at any moment. Thinking this in August

  I kissed the river’s cold moving lips.

  Last fall we were in Montana for my September trout fishing, a visit repeated nearly every year since 1968, a time when Michigan brown trout fishing began to disintegrate due to canoe traffic. (We have some nice rivers if you like night and dawn fishing, or care to hit the beaver ponds for brook trout, a pleasant if somewhat limited form of angling.)

  On the Yellowstone River the first five days were a mixture of nasty weather, bleak fishing, and the equally nasty business of finding property on which to build a home. The fishing turned good on September 11, a date everyone knows. I was fairly gasping when I fled the house for the river, the brain whirling with tears and shed blood. In the ensuing days I gradually ignored television, opting for National Public Radio where thought is offered to the language. Television presents the questionable presumption that talking is thinking, that unpremeditated logorrhea offers something of value to the public, along with the ceaseless replaying of the visual of planes hitting the buildings, as if the controls of this media were manned by child psychotics. A thousand pundits seemed to rehearse the wisdom they offered us during the Y2K problem.