Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  The horses were how Clarence got to see his father again. The farmer was impressed by Sally and wrote off to Clarence’s father to see if he might have any other horses of Sally’s breeding. By and by his father showed up by railroad in Grand Forks with two fine teams, which the farmer bought. Clarence was right there in Grand Forks with the farmer and they had a steak dinner together so it was a real good experience to be acknowledged by your dad. Cynthia tells me that the Icelandic on their remote island don’t grow up with much in the way of prejudice. I’ve always had an urge to go to this island but I’ve had this problem of not wanting to get on a plane. I’ve never been on one and now it’s not likely I will. I’ve always loved winter and ice and snow. I’ve been on a helicopter twice a year ago when K took me up to western Canada to see a glacier. After I got diagnosed with this disease Cynthia said to me that if I had any special wishes for travel I better jump on them. I had always wanted to see a glacier and K figured out the whole trip with his computer. K told me that a helicopter was more like a huge metal hummingbird than a plane. I’ll tell about this trip at some point because it got me over wanting to murder a man.

  It’s hard to understand your fears. For instance I don’t fear death. As far as I know every living creature dies but as a boy after they took my mother off to the asylum in Newberry I had to stay with my dad’s cousin back in the woods over near Au Train. I cried about a month over my mother. [She was diagnosed with schizophrenia I learned from the records. Cynthia.] I also cried because I was scared of my dad’s cousin. I couldn’t stop crying so they sent me home from the third grade. The principal tried to tease me out of it by saying here I was a foot taller than any other boy in the class and crying like a baby. The principal was a nice man from down in Ann Arbor and took me for a walk way out to Presque Isle but that didn’t stop me from crying. Anyway I lived for about two months with my dad’s cousin that early summer when I wanted to be back in Marquette playing football with other kids. Such is the nature of athletes that I was already being watched when I was ten. It was the accident of me being big and fast, which is what coaches look for.

  My dad’s cousin was named Flower, her white name anyway, but she was a pure-blood and traditional. For all practical purposes my dad and I weren’t the least bit Indian but were just among the ordinary tens of thousands of mixed bloods in the Upper Peninsula. Of course we had a bunch of relatives, especially on my mother’s side, who were more like real Indians but we thought of ourselves as city people with Marquette being the biggest city in the Upper Peninsula with a population of 20,000 in the mid-1950s. All our relatives were such a mixture of Finn, some Cornish, a few Italian, and Chippewa. A lot of these nationalities turned up to get work as miners and loggers. Take my Great-Uncle Bertie for instance. He worked on the ore boats out of Duluth and could be gone for years at a time. Both Bertie and his wife were half Chippewa and had three of their own children but three more came along fathered by a Finn miner when Bertie was gone so much. Once when he was in the merchant marines sailing out of Los Angeles and he was gone for seven years, he wrote a card that said, “I am in the country of Chile. Say hello to the kids.” The upshot of this is that of my dad’s six cousins in Bertie’s family three look like Chippewa and three look more like Finns.

  So I didn’t know anything to speak of about Indian life when I went to live with Flower for those two months, but then what can a ten-year-old know? Quite a lot, says Cynthia, though they don’t have the language to express what they know. That’s like me. Anyway, Flower shook my brain like one of her many rattles hanging from the rafters of her tarpaper shack. To make a living she cleaned cabins and did laundry for cottagers, sold her wild berry pies, collected herbs with some like wild ginseng bringing good money. In winter she trapped and was pretty good at it my dad said. She wouldn’t take any money from the state, county, or federal government because she wouldn’t sign papers. Her grandpa had lost a lot of land by signing timber leases for white lumbermen. Her grandpa couldn’t read and they slipped land-sale papers past him and then had him kicked off his land down toward Trenary. These things happened in those days with evil men for whom everything is money.

  So I tagged along with Flower in the woods while she was finding herbs, or picking berries for pies, or cleaning cottages when I would sit out in the car though twice I got invited to go swimming with the kids of the cottage owners. I mostly swam with Flower in the Au Train River or in Lake Superior when it was warm enough. Flower had an old rickety ’47 Plymouth that wouldn’t go very fast and this is how I started getting scared. We drove over to Grand Marais to see a friend of hers and to catch some pike in early June. We were out in the rowboat on Au Sable Lake and this old woman friend of Flower’s pointed toward the huge sand dunes to the north along Lake Superior and said that long ago there was a bad tribe that lived up in the dunes. They could become beasts and fly down in the night and cannibalize the peace-loving Indians that lived near the Grand Marais harbor though there was no town back in those days. Up to the point of this story I was happy because I had caught two nice pike, which pleased Flower because pike were her favorite dish. Well, after the story I could imagine these bad Indians becoming bears with huge wings and flying down to the harbor in the moonlight and eating Indian children like myself. I almost peed my pants right there in the boat.

  During our two months together Flower told me dozens of old stories, most of which scared me especially the ones about the Windigo, but then the story of lona, the Night Flying Woman, calmed me down. Cynthia said that I was already frightened because my mother had to be hospitalized forever. That’s what my dad told me anyway. I think at ten I already sensed this because we were always looking for her whether in our old house on the edge of town where the city was going to tear down the house to build a road. It had been a farmhouse before the city moved outward and was cold as a barn in winter. We pretty much lived in the kitchen during the coldest parts of winter. That’s when my dad worried the most because Mother would wander off into the coldest part of the house, or worse yet into the frozen swamp behind the house. Her cousin from Negaunee would babysit her but she liked our phone too much because she didn’t have a phone in Negaunee. The last straw was during a cold snap in March and mother lost the tips of two toes when she walked out barefoot in the swamp. Our best help during this hard time was a Mexican I called Uncle Jesse who also worked for my dad’s boss, Mr. Burkett, who was Cynthia’s father. Mr. Burkett often didn’t have both oars in the water as they say, which means he wasn’t a stable man. Some of the drugs my mother had to take tended to eat up the paycheck but Jesse was there to help. Sometimes he would come over with one of his many girlfriends and a six-pack and my dad would fry up some fish or venison, which Jesse loved to eat. Jesse would tease me because at ten I was already as big as he was and every time he would come over he would give me four quarters because on the side he owned a Laundromat.

  So the city took our house and by the time Dad found one and got it ready I had been two months at cousin Flower’s. Strange to say, at first I missed Flower’s place when I got back to Marquette but then it faded away except at night when her stories would come back to my imagination in full Technicolor, especially the flying beasts which I took to mean bears with huge wings. When that happened I might come down from my room and sleep on the front porch where there were always street noises nearby our bungalow, which was fairly close to the college. A car passing would send the flying bears away and then I could think of the good things about living with Flower like looking for a buck for the deer season months away. Flower guided this rich man from Grand Rapids who came up alone every November. Dad said this man liked bringing home a huge buck every year though it was Flower who had the deer completely scouted. Dad told me later that he thought the two of them were “sweet” on each other. Once when a drunk hit her when she was walking a two-track this hunter paid her doctor and hospital expenses in Munising.

  I feel like I’m running on at the mouth but Cynt
hia says no. I should get back to the beginning of the story but I’m still in an odd mood from waking up at first light on this warm morning and smelling the lilacs in bloom. It seemed like when I woke up I couldn’t understand anything and my heart ached. I looked down and took the sheet off and my muscles are nearly gone. Cynthia says not but I know otherwise. Even a pencil or a glass of water weighs something now. For twenty-five years I made a fair living laying blocks, pouring and finishing cement, and sometimes roughing in houses. Now I have too much spit and I don’t want to eat. On Sugar Island I used to carry the rowboat down to the river for the kids and it weighed three hundred pounds. I would hold an arm out and my little daughter would swing on it like a monkey. I could hold a ninety-pound corner block out straight and now I can scarcely hold my arm out. These things happen to people but some days it can be hard to handle. So this morning my reality broke down and I wasn’t sure of anything. Just before I got sick I finally made a three-day fast, which I’d failed at four times before I succeeded. What you do is go up into Ontario to a certain mountainside and spend three days without food, shelter, or water. I’m not going to talk about my religion because it’s too private. Maybe a little. There’s another hillside from which you can see Lake Superior where I’m going to be buried. You can’t think of a thing that lives that’s not going to die. I had hoped in these three days to find out how I was going to get rid of my fears and how to grow older with grace. I found out in a hurry! Here I am on my way. [Donald is now laughing. It takes courage to laugh until you cry at death. Cynthia.] Anyway, while I was up there after about a day and a half reality fell apart, which I’ll explain to you later without any religious conclusions.

  My last long walk alone was only a few months after I got sick last year. My doctors told me I had been sick for a while but I didn’t want to let on. Cynthia noticed because it’s an old joke in our marriage that when I really want to make love I charge upstairs in the evening while she reads in bed. Cynthia has always just read and not watched television where like to watch sports. Only suddenly one day I couldn’t charge upstairs. That was that. She waited a long time to question me but it scared me too much to talk about it until we finally went to the doctors.

  Well, on my last long walk K drove me over to Grand Marais so we could fish for early pike just like I had done thirty-five years before with Flower. The fishing was so good that K drove into town to get some ice so we could keep the fish in good shape. I told K I was going to take a stroll up into the dunes and he wondered if this was a good idea because Cynthia had told him not to let me out of his sight. I said I was feeling fine, which wasn’t quite true. It was hot and sunny and I knew if I got up into the dunes I could get away from the deerflies. I’m not so fast at swatting them away anymore. What I was hoping to find was this beautiful, cool grove of birches that my brother-in-law David had shown me years ago. My kids used to refer to their uncle David as “the loon.” He heard about his secret nickname and just laughed. David has spent so many years around here at this cabin that he knows some fine places that seem to carry a weight of their own. Flower knew such places. Actually there’s a tinge of resemblance between them. If you spend that many years in the woods it’s bound to be a share of your body and soul.

  So I half crawled up the dunes because I already wasn’t very strong but I made it up and over a ridge and descended into a bowl of sand about a mile wide. Out in the middle of the bowl was the grove of birches and poplars. It occurred to me that this place was the same as it was back in the time of the first Clarence. Maybe I’m him, I thought, which is an odd thought. I had a handkerchief and wiped the sweat out of my eyes feeling lucky because there weren’t any deerflies up in the dunes. Way off to the northwest I could see a single bear grazing on beach pea and wild strawberries on a grassy hillside. I wasn’t worried though he was close to the birch grove because there were no cubs. It’s the female who is ornery when she has cubs. Well, it took me about a half hour to reach the grove because my muscles were seizing up and sometimes I crawled because it was easier, also faster. I made my way into the grove and crawled up on this huge low-slung birch limb where David showed me how you could lay back on it and the slightest breeze off Lake Superior would rock you gently. That’s what I wanted. It was a miracle of sorts but there was no breeze until I laid out on the limb and my body calmed down. Within minutes there was no inside or outside to the world if you get what I mean. My sick body disappeared plain and simple, at least for a while, and then it slept. There was a spirit in the place that gave my body some peace. Maybe it was only because the wind came up and the huge branch rocked me as my mother once had in the rocking chair. My eyes were closed but I started to see things just as I had up in Canada in my three days on the hill. My mind brought up the vision of the bears with big wings the old woman told me about when I was in the boat with Flower. One had a face that looked a little like my own. I wondered how you could see things with your eyes closed? [Donald wants an immediate answer to this but I’ll have to ask the neurologist. Cynthia.] Of course when I die sooner rather than later and my eyes don’t work I wonder how long my mind will keep seeing things and what I’ll see? This seems to me a natural question. If we have a spirit how and what does it see? All around the bears were ravens, which always follow bears to share the food. They follow the wolves up here too. I was there a fair amount of time and when I finally opened my eyes there was K sitting against the tree smoking a cigarette.

  “How did you find me?” I said.

  “There was a little rain last night and you leave a real big track, especially when you’re crawling.”

  K helped me up and it wasn’t too hard to get back to the lake though I knew I’d never again be able-bodied.

  Enough of me. Back to the first Clarence. He worked for that farmer about five years the story goes but then the farmer died of heart problems and his wife and son, who were spoiled, put the farm up for sale. They wanted to move to Minneapolis and live a higher sort of life. Their lawyer wouldn’t pay Clarence the five months of wages still due to him but these things happen so Clarence headed toward Duluth, where he heard there was plenty of work to be had. Here he was back on Sally and still only seventeen. Now he was at the age when he needed the company of women and they weren’t hard to find in those days because this was 1876 and there were so many Civil War widows in the towns and countryside. These women also needed affection. Up near Crookston he stayed with a widow and her three children on a farm for a year but then she got a chance to marry a pure white man who owned a hardware store so that was that. In his sorrow he got drunk and when he woke up at this campsite an Indian was trying to make off with Sally, so he hit the man a bit too hard and then had to take care of him for a week until he was up and around. Though it was early May one night it snowed a foot and then the next day a rain began that lasted seven days so that Clarence and the injured man were stuck between flooded creeks. Lucky for them Clarence snared a young deer so they had plenty to eat and wood to maintain a big fire. I mean it was still a hard life but if you’re warm and got enough to eat and a tarp over a lean-to to keep dry, you’re about covered for your needs. The horse thief turned out to be a pretty good person and when they parted ways after the man’s ribs felt better from the punch they agreed they’d probably meet up again, which they did in Marquette thirty years later.

  Clarence had a stroke of luck when he reached Bemidji and met a logger who admired the size of both Sally and Clarence and gave him a job skidding out big logs, which were used to build ore docks over in Superior and Duluth. He had bad luck in love, though. He was struck down with love for this Indian girl but her father said no because he wasn’t pure-blood. First he lost the widow because he wasn’t pure white and then he lost this girl because he wasn’t pure Anishinabe and her father was a Mede-wi-win. Clarence couldn’t believe it and stuck around Bemidji for two years but then the girl married someone else so Clarence moved on east to Duluth. He hadn’t yet seen the “big waters” that are
Lake Superior. Well, he was thrilled with Lake Superior and camped out over east near Odanah for a month just looking at the endless sea. For some reason Sally loved big waves and swimming and he’d ride way out in the lake on her broad back even if the waves were high. Of course this was June and swimming would take her away from the blackflies, which drive both man and beast crazy. My dad said when he was young and cutting pulp down near Seney he just went crazy one day and dropped his chain saw and started running and jumped into this lake scaring the deer, who were already there submerged with just their noses peeking out.

  Before Clarence went to work in Superior he rode even farther east to see some remnants of the big forests and didn’t know until later that he didn’t go far enough. He avoided settlements and loggers because people were always trying to get his horse, so he didn’t have much information. He found a river gorge that was over near Nisula or Pelkie I think and on a flat there was a group of the largest white pines in creation. It was Eden he told his son, who told his son, who was my dad killed years ago when a boat slipped off a hoist. Anyway he got starved out of Eden because you can’t just eat wild meat you also need flour for bread or potatoes. As I’ve said Clarence was real big but he measured one white pine as the spread of his arms four times around the tree. I wish I could have seen a tree like that. My brother-in-law David has found some great big stumps southeast of Grand Marais, which is not the same thing. He and I sat beneath one during an August thunderstorm once and you could almost imagine the tree that lived on that spot. Even one of the roots was bigger than about any tree you see nowadays. I went back there several times including once alone when I spent a moonlit night under there and a small bear looked in between the roots and I said, “Hello, mugwa,” which means bear in Anishinabe, but there’s a lot more to it than just saying “bear.” Suddenly laying here talking to Cynthia I’m falling apart in many directions.