Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  THE ROAD

  Valentine, Nebraska; Duluth, Minnesota; LaCrosse, Wisconsin; Rodeo, New Mexico; Ajo, Arizona; the Seri Coast of Mexico; Jordan and Ekalaka in Montana; Bluff in Utah; Oxford, Mississippi; and the Florida Panhandle, not forgetting Dalhart, Texas: all exercise a strong pull on me so that before sleep, or within the enervation of insomnia, I can re-create what I have noted in the nature of their human populations, also the flora and fauna of the area, the geology, the geography of their landscapes. These places are in the top ten, but I often have to hold back the flood of Grove Street or MacDougal Street in New York City in 1957; North Beach in San Francisco in 1958; or even Estes Park in Colorado in 1954 and Key West in 1970.

  In nowhere but favored locations are the peculiarities of human taste more captious and evident. There’s a fairly recent word in the academic discipline of human geography, “geopiety,” to help account for our profound xenophobia, or my often remarked fact that I’ve been in a hundred places in the United States the locals call “God’s country.” These people jump up and down, dance, organize parades in annual celebrations of their beloved locales, calling the fetes names like “Daze of Yore,” “Frontier Days” (or Daze), “Old-Fashioned Days,” or “Mountain Dreams,” but then these celebrations appear to the outsider as brief respites in the torpor of daily lives, the ordinariness of survival preoccupations that afflict even New Yorkers.

  When you stay at home years at a time the ceilings definitely lower themselves. If you’re a young man, say eighteen or whatever, jumping from job to job, from changing and mounting tires to being a shovel man on construction sites to rudimentary farm labor, the workdays are full of daydreaming of elsewhere, some based on fact from hitchhiking home from Colorado at sixteen, the impulse for going there to see your first mountains, to driving to New York City to be a bohemian for two days and taking the subway after inquiries to Far Rockaway to see an ocean for the first time. Your own ‘47 Plymouth bought for fifty bucks barely takes you to work on time. On hot days of manual labor the fantasies of escape intensify: perhaps on a warm night in a bar parking lot in Joplin, Missouri, you may meet a barefoot ballerina. She recognizes your intrinsic worth. You splurge on a motel so she can shower. (In fantasies errant details must be dealt with.) She has a car and you drive to San Francisco where you swim under the Golden Gate Bridge holding hands after a hard day writing immortal poetry.

  Soon enough you save nearly a hundred dollars and hitchhike to California on Route 66, ending up in Bakersfield because that’s where the last ride took you. It’s the middle of a hot night and there are no evident parking-lot ballerinas. After a few hours of empty thumbing you board a bus for San Francisco where you get to heavypet with a young woman in transparent high-heeled shoes who has a flask of whiskey and chain-smokes. You mutually and noisily conclude and a nearby geezer wakes and hisses, “Animals.”

  A year later you’re married and there’s not much freedom for two decades except the driving that’s related to the miserable road between the married housing apartments and the university, the holiday drives homeward to visit parents and in-laws, the pathetically short vacation fishing trips, and a few longer drives to Key West and Montana to fish. A poet technically is supposed to be a “thief of fire” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons. You begin to overcherish the memories of the freedom of earlier trips. You settle for bar pool and spectator sports. You begin to remind yourself of all of the men you know who speak of their golden days in the armed services, the singular exciting time of their lives. Clinical depressions become more frequent. I made far less money than it took to support my family, which required about twelve grand a year. I did seemingly countless poetry readings in public schools at a hundred bucks a crack for the National Endowment for the Arts, an experience that made me permanently loathe public appearances. I tried journalism which got me to Russia, Africa, South America, and France but the assignments paid for only the time it took to write the articles, leaving me little freedom to write what I wished, and the most obvious economic lesson of all became obvious: survival work requires your entire life. I tried university teaching for two years but the closest metaphor was life in a zoo. I had two years of grants, a release from the zoo but a little problematic. When you first release wild animals from cages they are unwilling to leave a known environment for a speculative future outside the cage. A man quite easily suppresses his longing for freedom until this supposed longing becomes a cliché without energy. It appears that man is the only creature: capable of tying and lying himself into interminable knots. I had met Jack Kerouac a couple of times and it mystified me that his recent success with On the Road meant only that he had freedom to become hopelessly drunk. Of course I was just nineteen at the time and there’s no one as abrasively judgmental as a nineteen-year-old.

  With the immodest success that came after the publication of Legends of the Fall in 1978 my life quickly evolved a kind of hysteria that I attempted to pacify with alcohol and cocaine. Success wasn’t “indigenous” to my family with generations of what southern writers call “dirt farmers” behind me and what we in the North merely called “farmers.” I was utterly unprepared because I had been told by my agent that no one ever heard of novellas and my publisher had said it was an “archaic form.” The book wasn’t an overwhelming publishing success but suddenly David Lean wanted to film the title story and John Huston the novella called Revenge. Even more heady in terms of experience was the flood of money. If you have averaged twelve grand a year for a decade and then have a year when you make well over a million bucks in contemporary terms you are utterly unseated from your slow-moving horse. Maybe it was actually a donkey I had been riding.

  My singular wise choice at the time was to buy a Subaru 4WD, at age forty the only brand-new car I had ever bought. Those around me ridiculed the humility of this purchase for a new millionaire but I had something else in mind other than Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption.” Escape, pure and simple. Since childhood when my left eye had been blinded my favorite locations had been thickets and now I intended to search for new and better and bigger thickets. Gradually my definition of thickets came to include distant, anonymous motels in remote towns and cities. In actual thickets there is ideally a stump to sit on and enough brambles so that you may frame the surrounding landscape in the apertures formed by branches. If you sit there long enough the natural world that surrounds you resumes its activities, either forgetting that you are there or accepting the idea that you are harmless because you are behaving harmlessly. Best of all you can see out and no one else can see in.

  When you use up your thickets it occurs to you that the country is full of thickets and you can air out the claustrophobia that success has brought into your life by searching for them, the set of impulses that brought me to road trips. When I bought a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the first wave of money, the five-hour drive from our farm seemed an immediate and repeatable act of liberation. In fact when I bought the cabin itself, settled as it was on a riverbank in the middle of fifty acres and a couple of miles from the nearest neighbors, I signed the purchase agreement without going inside of it.

  Of course any harried dog or cat knows how to take a powder. A not often discussed problem with sudden success is that it immediately overfills the life. Where there were one or two outside calls a week, suddenly there were a dozen or so a day. And if there is an influx of money you quickly learn it takes time to spend money. A child given one or two fine gifts for Christmas becomes happily preoccupied with playing with the toys, but dump a carload on him and he becomes petulant. An unstable man of forty feels guilty because his friends are still broke. He flushes his money away as if it were used toilet paper.

  This is not whining but a record of fear and confusion. Any fool knows that success is better than failure and when it’s preceded by two decades of struggle and near poverty there is a specific exhilaration in a big check
. You might eat steak three days in a row and the half gallons of Gallo are pushed aside for French wine. At bars you move from the bottom shelf, where you dwelt so long to save fifty cents a shot, to the top shelf where you order doubles. The fear settled in when you perceived that the serenity of privacy, of isolation, that had left your life had taken with it the ability to write well. I also knew enough of literary history to mentally rehearse the way so many writers had allowed the costume of public approbation to freeze to their bodies and when they finally tried to take the costume off there was little identifiable body left underneath. It had become bruised and splotched, depleted of life.

  But there sat the Subaru in the yard on a winter morning, not exactly gleaming because I never wash cars. The abuse of scrubbing them for quarters as a boy taught me to invent reasons not to wash cars. It hurts their skin by rubbing off protective oils. They feel more comfortable in dirty old clothes. The dirt contains many pleasant memories that I don’t want to deny the car. That sort of thing. Maybe I should drive in a circle around much of the U.S., I thought. And so I did.

  Many of us remember the pleasure of getting our driver’s license when we were sixteen, or even the learner’s permit at fourteen. At forty you reabsorb and relive the electricity of that thrill when it occurs to you that all along you have been treating your vehicles as mere utilitarian conveniences to get from here to there for specific purposes instead of understanding that the vehicle can be an instrument of freedom, of liberation from whatever might ail you. Our main problem, and one that we share with all other earthly creatures, is what to do next. Drive with no particular destination. Go on roads you’ve never gone on before. See different landscapes and villages and cities. Talk to people you’ve never met, especially those who are totally unaware of your motives and identity. Pretend you’re a spy for the country of your own mind Over twenty years later I’m still doing it when I feel oppressed by the life I’ve so methodically constructed and which occasionally begins to suffocate me as if I had crawled under thirty-three wet blankets. It’s even amazingly cheap when you avoid our major cities. Fifty bucks is about tops for a motel, and another fifty covers your meals given the stunning mediocrity of road food. Add two tanks of gas a day and I can live on the road a week for what a single day habitually costs me in New York or Paris.

  A few months ago we were driving through the Texas Panhandle, the only route through that state I can bear. We were on our way from our farm in northern Michigan to our little winter casita near the Mexican border. This was not a trip, therefore, that lacked a destination, but we vary this twice-yearly sojourn by changing the route once we escape the heartland. This time we had spent a pleasant five hours zigzagging through Oklahoma where there are relatively unknown areas of astounding beauty, especially the country surrounding Bartlesville and Ponca City with great vistas and hills densely wooded with blackjack oak.

  Here we reach an important point. Before I visited this part of Oklahoma I had read the work of Joseph Mitchell, a Native American who had built a house in this area and had withdrawn from the world for a stretch of nine years. I had also read the considerable novels of Native American authors Linda Hogan and Louis Owens. The beauty of a landscape needs help to endure in your mind. You must mentally people the landscape with human history and, more important, the sense of the quality of human life you can get only from firstrate literature. For instance, when I drive around and camp in the Southwest with my friend the grizzly-bear expert Doug Peacock, we have it covered because he intimately knows the geology, the flora and fauna, and the Native history of the area. A mere landscape can wear out for you like the photos of beautiful women you collected as a young man. Their power wore thin because you didn’t know them, their voices, the smell and touch, the qualities of their minds.

  I have often examined the unpleasant feelings I have about Texas when I drive through the state. These are on the surface level and exclude the splendors to be found in such writers as J. Frank Dobie, John Graves, Larry McMurtry, Jim Crumley, or Max Crawford, to name a few. I don’t mean that my ire is defined by the predatory nonsense in the movie Giant, the notion of the Alamo, or the obvious phoniness of the Gadsen Purchase, though these might form a part of it.

  Last week I had the perception near Amarillo of the laminated mythologies of Texas resembling a vastly compressed stack of waffles. Or maybe a cowplot in a moist halo of oil. Or Texas as the Johnny Wadd (John Holmes) of our States, the word “big” repeated until it was a nonsense syllable. As an example, on Route 40, the interstate through the Panhandle, there’s not a single rest stop though they are currently building one, albeit tardily. When you pass the construction site it occurs to you that the Texans are building the largest rest stop in the world. Presumably the toilet bowls will be as big as hot tubs, imperiling children and the very old.

  In the past a quick pass through Midland, Texas, and you immediately comprehended why the current George Bush yawns and snoozes when the environment is brought up. Midland doesn’t have an environment other than the stifling sense of big money contrasting with the squalor at the bottom. Midland is simply a sun-blasted junk heap, the living dump of the oil culture. No one living there for any extended time would have a concept that there might be land worth preserving, land that exists outside the immediate purpose of making money. Unlike George Bush, though, I’d rather live in Midland than in Washington, D.C. In Midland you can always drive over west to the marvelous Guadeloupe Mountains and hide in a thicket.

  By contrast there is splendid landscape in the Hill Country near Austin, the vast grazing areas around Dalhart, the mountainous country south of Marfa. It’s easy to go into a semi-convulsive fit about western cities on aesthetic grounds. They’re nearly all “outskirts” in a curious way, and the remnants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the cores of the downtowns remind us how our garden-variety greed has aesthetically stunted us.

  * * *

  Nothing refreshes quite like a tinge of insecurity if it has a viable purpose. The idea of dying on a business plane trip to L.A. where money is the carrot at the end of a stick is a flawless example of questionable purpose. By contrast, the insecurity of a blizzard on a smallish state highway in North Dakota, say between Arnegard and Rawson, purges the soul because it was altruistic curiosity that got you in the mess in the first place. When I was able to follow a snowplow into Williston I had a number of what they euphemistically call “beverages” back home. The fact is I had seen this grand landscape in the summer and I needed to see it in the winter for the same reason I need to see an elegant trogon, a snowy owl, a permanently pissed-off goshawk every once in a while. I need to eat a mediocre chicken-fried steak out of pure hunger and drink the usual rotgut far from my own overloaded refrigerator and wine cellar. I need to hear a waitress tell me about her problems with her 1985 Plymouth. I need to see a girl in a green dress pumping her own gas on a hot afternoon in Nebraska. I need to visit remote strip clubs where the women are nearly as homely as I am. I need the insecurity of the snowstorm or an overheated car when it’s a hundred and three in the shade in Kansas, the insecurity of stretching heart and mind far from the familiar. It is too easy to be sure of yourself, too easy to know what you are doing moment by moment, too easy to walk the same path until it is a rut that finally becomes a trench and you can’t see over the edge.

  You might begin as a “child crazed with maps,” as Rimbaud early described what predestined his own life as an inconsolable wanderer. A period of restless hitchhiking is a tip-off, and the ready notion that the grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. The easily perceivable motive is more life rather than less, and the simple historical fact that we lost a certain exuberance when we began to squat rather than wander. We arm ourselves early with quasi-wisdom to support our heart’s urgings. I remember my dad’s consternation when I quoted William Blake, “Still water breeds pestilence,” though he was indeed sympathetic to my “seeing the world” before I got married and
settled down. It pained him that what with five children he couldn’t help support my wanderings. This eventually proved good as the notion that if the lack of money couldn’t stop me from hitchhiking to New York and California, the future lack of money couldn’t stop me from writing. Heating a can of soup in the sink of your five-buck-a-week rented room could be seen as heroic because the motives came from John Keats and Walt Whitman and a dozen other great ones.

  But then is then and now is now, in case you’ve failed to notice. You can build a conceivably perfect life and then one day notice that it’s suffocating you and your marriage. As they say in Nebraska, you’ve “screwed the lid on too tight.” You’ve no intention of abandoning your love for your wife but you wish to get rid of the remnants of this love that have died from overexposure. Locked in a house small differences gracelessly grow larger. Marriages can witlessly evolve into daily psychodramas that feed on tainted fuel, the often wretched effects of no longer present in-laws and parents, the traumas of childhood that can burst back to life in the practice of gruesome habit. In my own life I have occasionally been pushed toward the door. A writer around the house can be as satisfactory as a realtor, teacher, editor, or butcher, but a writer can easily turn into a rabid wombat, somewhat in the manner of an actor or director with three flops in a row. A writer can be as emotionally captious as a prom queen wired on meth.

  When you leave, you can leave a lot behind. Simple as that. And when you return the bad stuff has all disappeared in your absence because you were keeping it alive. You’ve brooded and moped until your unnatural mental weight might very well plummet you through the floor, or the crust of earth on your walk from the granary studio back to the farmhouse. Your emotional theme song has become turgid “Volga Boatmen” rather than playful Mozart. You look at your snow- or dust-covered car in the driveway and think tardily that it might be time to drive away and collect some fresh memories. You’re a predator of your own memories and you’ve eaten up all of those you managed to summon into consciousness.