Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

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  So off you go, avoiding the interstates as much as possible because they are mostly efficient traffic funnels following the geographic path of least resistance for carrying a maximal flow. On interstates you understand our grotesque error in favoring trucking over our once grand railroad system. As our population continues to increase this error has an overwhelming presence. Once I had to wave a shotgun (empty) out the window at a trucker a few feet from my back bumper. This method worked though I don’t recommend it. I also don’t recommend driving through Chicago on Route 80 on a weekday as you can easily get encapsulated by four trucks and never be seen again. There’s been a definite slippage in truck-driver training that merges with the growing fascism of our time, sort of “If I’m big I have an inalienable right to mistreat you.” Truckers, however, don’t present the dangers of the twin felons of the road, the very young and the very old drivers.

  The inherent insecurity of simply taking off gives you the specific advantage of being more attentive than usual. A disproportionate number of accidents happen around home when as a somnolent squatter you are lulled into carelessness. In East Africa I watched where I sat down because I had an aversion to green mambas and suchlike. At home I sat down where there was usually a chair and knocked myself silly. There’s a delicious freedom in being called upon to be attentive. Moment by moment you are extending time rather than diminishing it through your housebroken narcissism. You have abandoned the support system that mostly allows you to work rather than play. The insecurity allows more oxygen and you recall for the seventy-fifth time D. H. Lawrence’s fabled notion that the only aristocracy is consciousness.

  Back to my peculiar sampling of places. They mean a great deal to me because of their peculiarities, and in part because I came to certain decisions in these places that added greatly to the vitality of my life as a writer. There were dozens of possibilities but I chose impulsively, discounting trips with specific destinations like New York City where I once drove when irked at airlines and the parking garage at the Carlyle Hotel cost more per day than many of the trips into the hinterlands.

  Valentine, Nebraska: set in the northern portion of the Sandhills along the magnificent Niobrara River Valley. Approach it from the east on Route 12 where you may not see another car for an hour. Dozens of pretty girls and women live hereabouts. Eat beef at the Peppermill where the steak is the best you’ll get west of Peter Luger’s or Manny Wolf’s in New York City, or Gibson’s in Chicago. Continue west on Route 20 toward Chadron in this fabled, mythological landscape after swimming in the Niobrara. Detour north to see Wounded Knee. Kneel on the ground of the massacre and do penance for the bloodthirsty greedy creeps that were your ancestors.

  Duluth, Minnesota: approach from the west on Route 2 after crossing the country from Montana. You’ll come over a very high hill and see Lake Superior and Duluth’s harbor far below. Ocean freighters line up for midwestern grain, and thousand-foot ore boats pass on the horizon loaded with taconite pellets headed far south through the Great Lakes to make steel. Duluth is an improbable city built on a steep hillside. If you catch it right in spring or fall you can see thousands of migrating hawks.

  LaCrosse, Wisconsin: the Mississippi makes a deep cut through here where it is still a mighty river rather than a polluted sluice captured by levees, as it becomes farther south. In LaCrosse you get a firm sense of the river it used to be. High on a hill in the east of town in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, young missionaries would gaze to the west and pray before making their ill-advised trips to save the souls of Native Americans, the reverse of what it should have been. LaCrosse is an amenable city for food and drink and historical interest, also athletic young women from the local state university.

  Rodeo, New Mexico: not much here except a bar, post office, gas station, but a stunning valley about eighty miles, and along up the road to the east a couple of miles is Portal, Arizona, where Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita fame used to chase actual butterflies and where several dozen times a year I travel to look for the eared trogon, which has been seen a couple of times since the seventies. This hopeless search on foot is wonderfully healthy. I stay in the only motel and eat in a little restaurant attached to the grocery store, a tonic for my gourmand obsessions. The landscape was a suitable hideout for Cochise and Geronimo and continues to be for us ordinary mortals. There are superb thickets up Cave Creek.

  Ajo, Arizona: an ex-mining town that is a fine stepping-off place for Organ Pipe National Monument, but more so for the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, a vast desert area where I’ve wandered as much as three days without seeing a single other human. The Cabeza is a claustrophobe’s dream and you must pay attention to preserve your own life. Take in plenty of water, and don’t step on rattlesnakes or make love to a nest of scorpions, as they are natural feminists.

  The Seri Coast of Mexico: make your way slowly from El Desemboque to Bahia Kino, both on the Sea of Cortez, otherwise known as the Gulf of California. There are only a few hundred Seri left when there used to be thousands, accounted for by the usual murderous reasons. Camp on empty beaches or in the desert. Climb a mountain and stare at the Isla Tiburon. Before going read about the ethnobotany of the area, also John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez. The Seri Coast will give you a dose of “otherness” that will make your own hometown seem strange by contrast on your return.

  Jordan and Ekalaka in Montana: Jordan is in the center of an area that is referred to as “The Big Empty,” which serves as an adequate description. Jordan makes me realize I would have failed as a westward pioneer. If you, like me, occasionally get oppressed by population pressures make your way to Jordan and find solace. After a few days head south into the Powder River country to Ekalaka where until recently the town was the sole county seat left in America approachable only by gravel road. Spend a day in the dinosaur museum examining the bones picked up by locals. You, after all, have some related genes.

  Oxford, Mississippi: this place is the pleasantest university town in America and it is not drowned in the usual student frivolities. There is a high density of actual readers, rather than people gossiping about books that they’ve almost read. Oxford was the home of William Faulkner who is right up there with Herman Melville. It’s a good walking and eating and music town. Mississippi appears to have the richest literary heritage of any state when to Faulkner you add Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Willie Morris, and currently Shelby Foote, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, and others. You can spend a whole week in Oxford without growing tired of it. Buy a book at Square Books, then walk across the square to the Ajax Diner and eat too much soul food while you read.

  Florida Panhandle: I like to drive here for the melancholy reason that this is virtually the only area of Florida that holds remnants of what Florida once was. When I pass through Destin I stop and eat a whole bunch of fresh fish at Charles Morgan’s Harbor Docks in order to get me through until morning or whatever. It’s fun to see a little wild piglet eat a big rattlesnake, then waddle off into a swamp for a nap.

  Bluff, Utah: there is a splendid, dramatic emptiness in this area. Read about Navajo and Hopi cultures, also read the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman. Get out of your car and walk in one direction until you are afraid, then try to make your way back to your car before dark. Drive from Bluff to Kayenta and visit Canyon de Chelly at dawn.

  Dalhart, Texas: I’ve never quite figured out why I like this place except that it is surrounded by a vast emptiness that has been grazed more prudently than public cattle country farther west. The history of Dalhart has a mythic touch. A couple of easterners rebuilt the burned state capital in Austin in exchange for over a million deeded acres near Dalhart. The easterners went broke trying to fence all that land. There’s a metaphor of something grand here.

  Finally to drive without destination is to accept your own fragility, the passage of time, with the miles ticking off the pace of your own mortality. Moving through the country you are moment by moment capable of topographically mapping
your past, and more capable of a clear view of your future. This is as close as you’re ever going to get to the life of a freewheeling migratory bird.

  NATURE AND NATIVES

  Occasionally as a writer you come up against a back wall that is far too sturdy for you to follow Dostoyevsky’s dictum that you must dash your head against it over and over. Certain walls seem infinitely thick. Why should I spend what’s left of my heart and mind, not to speak of my time, writing about environmental depredations when any person of average intelligence can look out the window except in very rare locations and see how we have maniacally fouled our nest? This perception is occasionally a great burden to some of us, as if we were doomed to carry a heavy and sodden knapsack of this knowledge throughout our lives. It can quite easily distort our happiness, our sleep and marriages, our daily walks, the possible grace of moment-by-moment reality. The knowledge is always encapsuled in the thrust of “what is” overlayed upon “what might have been.” You have to squint in order to find love among the ruins.

  In the past few years I have spent more time than I wished wondering how I evolved my notions of a land ethic that so troubles my sleep. Up above my desk I keep a small piece of paper that states, “You’re just a writer,” which is what a studio head in Hollywood barked at me years ago. This is an essential idea, though meant as an insult, in that it promotes the humility needed to function as a human being rather than as an ideologue, an altruistic ranter and raver, a religious lunatic who believes that God gave us the earth and we have metaphorically and actually chewed off the fingers and hands of the gift giver. Unfortunately with my overfed imagination I can see this vision in the manner of a William Blake or Goya painting. To return myself to earth I walk daily with my dog in empty areas that are naked, gutted, and blasted of their essential nature by our behavior. They are still beautiful, these mountains and valleys in the Southwest, or the rivers and forests of my Native northern Michigan. They would be much more beautiful if I didn’t know what they could have looked like but then they will have to do because they’re all that we have.

  Naturally it’s my parents’ fault. When I was young and my father was the county agricultural agent in Osceola County in northern Michigan, I’d accompany him on his rounds of giving advice to farmers. This was early in my career as a bad boy, a mode of behavior partly caused by the evident trauma of losing my eye. He was easy for the farmers to accept in that he had grown up on a farm in the neighboring county and spoke their peculiar language of hard work and privation.

  Now over fifty years later what I recall about those country drives is my father trying to teach me the names of weeds, bushes, trees, and wildflowers that we smelled or saw through the open car windows, or on walks when we’d take soil samples with an augur, collecting the specimens in small glass jars. I was a poor student and accumulated a smattering of knowledge that mildly increased itself by exposure to forest hikes, daily fishing excursions from our cabin, or longer ones to nearby trout streams and rivers. It was many years before I understood that the great amount of time given to me was due to my blinding that made me a berserk waif.

  Added to these outdoor trips were books that he passed on from his own boyhood, by Ernest Thompson Seton, James Oliver Curwood, Fenimore Cooper, the redoubtable fibbers Horatio Alger and Zane Grey, Owen Wister, to which were later added the wilderness novels of Hervey Allen and Walter Edmonds, who wrote Drums Along the Mohawk. For the obvious reason of my disfigurement, I tended to be designated an “Indian” in childhood games of cowboys and Indians. This was further emphasized by my beloved Seton book Two Little Savages, which dealt with two white boys learning woodcraft while spending an entire month living as Indians in the virtual wilderness. The transition isn’t entirely clear but I gradually came to identify with the Indians who stole the heroine, away in romantic frontier novels, rather than with the courageous men who retrieved her. What a fine thing to have a pretty girl in my teepee, I’d think.

  Perhaps everyone has seemingly smallish events in their childhoods that have disproportionate effects on the later lives they lead. I mean aside from obvious traumas of injury, sexual abuse, divorces, or deaths of either parent. I remember my stack of Audubon cards used for bird identification more clearly than the teacher who gave them to me. A neighbor boy is repeatedly patted on the head for his facility with numbers and later becomes an accountant. The most trifling event can become large. There is a deeply accidental and comedic aspect to how people become what they are that always reminds me of Aristophanes’ idea that “whirl is king.” I even met a man in San Francisco in the late fifties who told me that when he grew up on a farm in South Dakota his ambition was to become a big-city gigolo and pimp, a double occupation at which he was obviously successful.

  Wordsworth said that the “child is father of the man” and it’s probably a very good thing we didn’t know this as children. Nowadays the concept is used to truncate the nature of childhood with excessive scrutiny and wild ambition in parents on behalf of their children. You often note the curious deadness in these miniature adults at their organized play. There are even lessons in stocks and bonds available to urban children.

  I have to admit that my own lacunae in terms of good behavior may have come from my search and reverence for natural wildness. As a child I had read how the Natives of our Southwest favored beans, so soon after daylight I’d head into the woods with a canteen of water and a can of beans, and sometimes a bow and arrow. I’d build a fire to heat the beans but more often I’d eat them cold. So powerful were the sensuous impressions of these early hikes that it is effortless to re-create them over fifty years later. You were utterly without the opinions, attitudes, conclusions that so easily blind you to the nature of experience, virtually the nature of nature. “With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward,” said Rilke. When we are young in a natural setting our eyes aren’t yet turned inward. It’s extremely difficult but you can recapture this state as an adult.

  Of course it’s altogether predictable that the weight of the contents of your life would determine your later concerns, and you are quite helpless in the face of this accretion of memories and ideals. You know very well that only the stars are safe from our destructiveness on our own shortsighted behalf. We are but one of an estimated 100,000,000 species. It has given many of us pleasure to dwell upon our dominance over these species. In fact we have created aspects of religion to reassure us that it’s fine to defile these other species as we wish. We have organized a virtual theocracy of land rape wherein all the steps of our iron feet are acceptable if not sacred. I am mindful moment by moment that this is the world I live in. I know the details. Nothing has changed since Mark Twain reminded us that Congress is our only truly criminal class of citizens. They have constructed their own game of canasta in which earth herself is scarcely a dominant factor.

  It occurred to me that what I have studied about Native Americans throughout my lifetime has aggregated itself into an anecdotal mass, an unorthodox accumulation that wouldn’t pass an elementary college course but nonetheless exceeds that of 99.999 percent of my fellow citizens who resolutely hide their faces from the sins of their ancestors against these people. We must accept the fact that most of us wish only to know what is convenient for us and educators have made only temporary inroads on this condition. I recently asked a Native American friend to what degree it distressed him that we apparently have never learned a simple fucking thing about his people. He said he wasn’t distressed because accepting responsibility for wrongs is a religious idea and he hadn’t noticed much religion “in motion” in modern culture. He added that without the element of goodwill all problems had to be approached legalistically because that was the only effective language for social change. How sad. No justice is possible without lawyers.

  Days later I said to myself, “Get off your high horse,” in itself an archaism. I’m a putative “white person” with all the inherent privileges that come with tha
t, and the additional privileges of being a financially successful white person which puts one high in the first percentile worldwide. This does not in the least add a tinge of guilt because I did it myself by writing, an independent operator in a non-extractive industry. I drilled and mined my head, as it were. My problem is my sense of parity, which I acquired so witlessly and is not directed simply at the human race but at the other hundred million species. I actually believe that reality is the aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures.

  I ruminated cowlike for a couple of days by the river running next to my cabin trying to figure out how to deflate this ruminative cow in myself that was driving me quite batty. There was a lot that was deeply comedic about the self-image of a man brooding thusly while drinking a thirty-dollar bottle of wine and pondering his own history and that of our first citizens, which is what Natives are called in Canada. Now we are back in the territory of noodling Hamlet but further down the food chain with “just a writer” falling deeply into the sump of all that makes a writer parodic. The father taught the child that we must be fair with the land, the Natives, and other species. The writer forgets that his or her calling is to write, and this doesn’t include trying to identify with and imitate the often preposterously heroic characters that the writer has created.

  Way back when, I envisioned that one could spread a thin cotton sheet over our country and its living history, then stand back and watch the locations where the blood soaked through. It’s even easier to do with Europe’s more recent history. We must consciously remind ourselves what happened at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, to name two. Such events have never fully entered the history of the conquerors for the same reason that My Lai hasn’t. You’re scarcely going to see a Wounded Knee or a My Lai float in the Fourth of July parade. Come to think of it our so-called Indian Wars were, strictly speaking, mere real estate operations and conquests. This property is condemned for better use. Much later, it was Bertolt Brecht who said that whom we would destroy we first call savage.