Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Well, when we were dropped off at the glacier I started laughing and rolling on the ground. These laughing or crying fits can be a symptom of my disease but this one was different. There was no ocean near this glacier. K was puzzled so I explained to him my suicide dream and he said, “Cool,” which he says when he really likes something. We had a wonderful time camped there on that glacier with the light of a quarter moon glistening off the ice. I’ve always loved snow and ice and for a while I lay on it stark naked thinking that life can be quite glorious. When we were young Cynthia and I made love outdoors a lot mostly because we had no other place to go but then we came to like it. This included in a rowboat out on a lake where she had me rowing into the shine of the moon on the water. You can’t beat these times in life.

  I wasn’t in too good shape when we got back in September but they had just brought out this new drug that helped some, called Rilutek. Talking with Cynthia I found out I had a raw memory that had kept itself hidden. About a year after they took my mom away and I lived with Flower I got to missing my mom and I couldn’t believe my dad when he said we couldn’t see her. One summer morning when my dad went off to work at dawn, about five a.m. I got on my bicycle and headed toward that Newberry mental hospital, which was one hundred and thirty miles away. I figured I could reach it by nightfall and then sleep out in the yard and I could see my mom in the morning. My bicycle chain broke twice and I didn’t reach Newberry until midnight, nineteen hours after I started. A night watchman caught me out in the yard of the hospital and called the police. Meanwhile a doctor who was on night duty had them fix me something to eat. The doctor explained to me that my mother was in a bad way and they had sent her downstate to Ypsilanti, which he said was four hundred miles to the south. He said she wouldn’t recognize anyone except people she knew as a child down near Bark River. I fell asleep in the office and my dad picked me up after three a.m. and on the way home we stopped near Seney and fished the Fox River. I caught my biggest brook trout ever, about two pounds, and that helped in this hard time. We stopped to see Flower in Au Train and I ate fried chicken and two pieces of blackberry pie with cream. Flower told me that she was now my mother and when I needed her she was free to help me.

  Despite my bad intentions I was sort of proud I didn’t kill Floyd. Or relieved. We were both in the prisons of our bodies and the trip to the glacier wiped out a lot of my low feelings. All winter long I watched these VCR tapes Cynthia got me. As I’ve said my dyslexia is bad so I read too slow but these tapes were a real education of sorts. The subjects were the types of Indian societies all over the world, including Indonesia, South America, Siberia, and Africa. I still have that book Cynthia’s uncle Fred loaned me over in Grand Marais so many years ago. It’s about black Indians down in the southern parts of the United States. Throughout the world none of these people got a fair shake. Some of those tribes died out completely. During the winter liked to sit by the window and watch it snow. If I felt good enough Cynthia would help me get bundled up and I’d sit on a chair in the backyard and let it snow on me.

  Herald and Clare arrived this evening from Los Angeles via Chicago. Polly picked them up at the airport. She said David would get here tomorrow from Mexico, where he’s been helping poor folks move north. It’s strange how he and Polly are divorced and live in different houses but still see each other a lot when he’s here. Cynthia says her brother can only be taken in small doses but K says his mother, Polly, is just as difficult. Herald burst into tears when he saw me, I suppose because I’ve shrunk so much. Clare sat up all night with me and we had a good time talking about the old days, which are not so long ago. At dawn she said, “Dad, I know what you are going to do and I can’t say I blame you,” and then she fell asleep in her chair.

  For about a half hour I was seeing things in the corners and at the tops of my eyes under the lids. I began to wonder where dreams were stored because the things I was seeing were blurred but they were sure enough combinations of animals. The female bear that had hung around the hill near me had sprouted great big raven wings, and there was also an otter with Clare’s face.

  I called out and Cynthia came down the stairs and sent Clare off to bed. I said I was sorry to disturb her but my mind was playing tricks. She teased me by saying what I had said years ago, “Whoever we are isn’t for certain.” We had been out on the porch of our darkened house near Bay Mills looking at stars all bundled up on a cold late fall night and that’s what I’d said.

  I now decided to say a little about my three days and nights on the hillside. I shouldn’t be keeping all of my religious feelings from my family. I have to hold some things to myself, where they belong. They are too strange for me to understand and might be a burden to my family when they read this. I told my teacher up there but then such things are his calling. He told me that a few nights a year he “flies” out to Sisseton in South Dakota for a few minutes to poke fun at this woman who turned him down years ago. He admitted he shouldn’t be doing this but nobody’s perfect.

  It’s an ordinary thing to sit in a thicket on a hillside for three days. Everything is ordinary but more so, as if the thicket was a thousand times a thicket. Your life comes to a stop and some of the moments became hours by the third night.

  The nights close to the summer solstice are pretty short, only truly dark from about eleven in the evening to before five in the morning. Of course I didn’t take my watch. My dad, Clarence, used to joke that you don’t tell time anything because it never wanted to hear from us, it just rushes past leaving us high and dry. The nights were pretty clear except for a brief thunderstorm the second night and I was lucky my children had taught me the stars. During and after the thunderstorm it helped me to be large. I noticed how shivering warms you up. I admit I was scared when the lightning struck the granite outcrop a hundred yards up the hill behind me. You could smell the lightning. I had seen the storm coming from the southwest across Lake Superior but nothing about seeing it prepared me for its violence.

  A female bear, not real large but about my weight, came around on the second evening. I was dozing but smelled her nearness and opened my eyes. Bears can smell pretty strong depending on what they’ve been eating. She made some threatening noises and I wondered if she intended to kill me. This is rare but you’re a fool if you don’t think it happens. She went away but then came back at dawn and I got the idea that she was courting me. She flounced around outside the thicket about thirty feet away. Maybe she had lost a cub and wanted to start over. After a few minutes she gave up and wandered off, probably looking for a fawn to eat, likely her favorite meal.

  Around noon the second day a flock of ravens began checking me out. I got this idea that the ravens hung around because they have spare time and were wondering what I was doing sitting still in their general home, which was where I was. Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do too they lose their logical mistrust of us. At midmorning on the third day these three big ravens stood right outside of the thicket looking in at me. Ravens don’t stand on the ground unless they’re sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven’t figured out cars but ravens have. Anyway, it was plain to me that these three ravens wanted to know why I was sitting there. I wasn’t so sure myself but I told them that the first day I had had a real short vision that I was going to get sick and die. This was more than two years before I got diagnosed. I told them I wasn’t too much bothered by my coming death because it’s what happens to all living things sooner or later. Later would be better but it’s not for me to decide. I also told these ravens about a funeral of their kind I had seen a few miles inland from Whitefish Point a few years back. A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground. I got the feeling that
one of the three ravens had been there as it was less than a hundred miles away. They showed no signs of leaving so I also told them of my vision of my mother and father sitting beside a creek with a sleeping bear beside them as if it were a pet dog. My mother and father looked wonderful and they said, “Don’t be afraid to come home, son.”

  In my three days I was able to see how creatures including insects looked at me rather than just how I saw them. I became the garter snake that tested the air beside my left knee and the two chickadees that landed on my head. I was lucky enough to have my body fly over the countries of earth and also to walk the bottom of the oceans, which I’d always been curious about. I was scared at one point when I descended into the earth and when I came up I was no longer there.

  When I came down the hill and drove to the Soo with my teacher I saw one of the same ravens just north of the city. I doubt if my experience was much different than anyone else who spent three days up there. It was good to finally know that the spirit is everywhere rather than a separate thing. I’ve been lucky to spend a life pretty close to the earth up here in the north. I learned in those three days that the earth is so much more than I ever thought it was. It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once. This makes it real hard to say good-bye. My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree.

  Part II

  K

  JUNE 14, 1995

  Jesus Christ. Mosquitoes. I’m camped on a semisecret pond about a dozen miles northwest of town. I’d say it’s about midnight though I’ve misplaced my pocket watch and I’ve just finished reading Donald’s story by the light of my Coleman lantern. Cynthia gave it to me this morning. I think the story would be better without Cynthia’s glosses but then if you’re going to say something critical to Cynthia you better have your ammunition stockpiled. She doesn’t get angry but she always has a dozen reasons why she’s right compared to the one or two contentions you might have that she’s wrong. It doesn’t really matter because Donald’s story is limited to family use.

  I usually stay in a back bedroom at my mom Polly’s house but I picked up a girl I vaguely knew at the Verling the other night and she puked on the back sidewalk. I forgot to hose off the sidewalk in the morning and Polly became a witch. Her voice pattern changes when she’s pissed. It becomes terse and clipped. I remember this voice pattern very clearly from before my father died and they argued about his motorcycles. He claimed he needed motorcycles to “let off steam.” I was about ten at the time and didn’t understand the term and when I did it occurred to me that my father didn’t have any particular steam. His was a case of a man who had kept the lid screwed on tight for so long that there was nothing left in the jar. He never took me for a ride on a motorcycle, saying it was too dangerous, which it eventually was for him. Every Saturday morning when weather was permissible he would roar off with four or five friends. Like my mother he was an elementary school teacher on the South Side of Chicago. He and his motorcycle friends were all Vietnam veterans and all singularly marked by that conflict.

  Yesterday I was reading to Donald in the backyard from Schoolcraft’s Narrative Journal. Schoolcraft was in this area in the 1820s and Donald likes what he calls the “old-timey” feel of the book. After about fifteen minutes Donald fell asleep on the old sofa that I’d hauled up through the cellar door into the yard. The little pound mongrel Clare brought in from Los Angeles lay curled up near Donald’s neck. The dog is named Betty and is not very likable. When she arrived with Clare a few days ago she examined all of us and seemed to decide we were a bad lot except Donald. We don’t know her background but Betty is an irritable creature. She caught a fledgling robin under a bush the other day and ate it before Clare could get it away from her. I told Clare that she looked attractive in her blue shorts, crawling around under the bushes trying to catch her dog with half a robin sticking out of its mouth. Clare screeched, “Fuck you,” which Donald thought was funny.

  I’ve come to think of Donald as a tugboat. Last year during semester break in the winter I house-sat an apartment in New York City owned by the old aunt of an ex-girlfriend. This woman, who was in her seventies, was paranoid about her art collection. We had stayed with her during a brief trip to New York and she had developed an affection for me that survived my breakup with her niece. Though this woman was Jewish she reminded me of Marlene Dietrich in the old movies I used to be addicted to. I still think Dietrich’s left thigh in The Blue Angel is sexier than any photo I’ve ever seen in Penthouse or Playboy. Of course, the film had the advantage of her voice. Anyway this wonderful old lady has a voice like Jeanne Moreau’s (the French actress). I spent a confining ten days in her apartment while she was off attending a trial in Frankfurt attempting to recover some of her family paintings that had been “misplaced” by the Nazis in World War II. Most of the paintings were now in the possession of an Alsatian sausage king who was unwilling to relinquish them. I got five grand for two weeks sitting in this spacious apartment guarding some Kandinskys, Tchelitchews, and Bakst stage drawings, etc., also a stimulating Mary Cassatt. I had full use of an improbable collection of take-out menus, on which she had made notations, and each day I was spelled at five for three hours by the doorman’s thuggish brother, during which I walked because my sanity depends on that and my bicycle (an old balloon-tired Schwinn), which I hadn’t brought to New York for fear it might be stolen. So sitting in this huge apartment leafing through the thousands of art books and ignoring a semester paper on Wittgenstein as a possible source of the deconstructionists I also spent hours with an antique telescope looking out the parlor’s bay window at the East River and the passing craft, big ships, little ships, sailboats, and suchlike. Which reminds me of a tugboat, their dense weight and immense power, slow to achieve speed but with an irresistible surge of power. To care for Donald in his present state is to finally understand that there are no miracles except that we exist. Like his ancestor the first Clarence, we ride a big horse to the east and then it’s over.

  Waking at dawn to the drone of mosquitoes. In June the U.P. is a semitropical bug farm. I juice my skin with mosquito dope for a hike, trying to figure out a sentence from a dream, “Before I was born I was water.” I decided it was mostly a neural image evolving from a book I was reading, Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. I’m sort of a professional student and am allowed to take many different courses usually limited to majors because I’m also a handyman for a big-deal dean’s household. This freedom comes from my expertise at fixing faucets, among other things.

  I make it to the haunted house by breakfast time. When we moved to Marquette when I was eleven my new friends always referred to Cynthia’s family home as the “haunted house” and I can’t shake this early perception. When I arrive Clare has picked up her uncle David from the early plane from Chicago. David and I eat breakfast in the den with Donald, who can only manage his coffee and then eggnog through a straw. Donald is amused by David’s story about a crush he developed on a waitress in the Red Garter Club at the O’Hare Hilton. Cynthia says that with women David is a benign version of their father. Each new woman is an undiscovered country, but then he has learned nothing from the other countries he has visited. She added that he is always loaning them money to start a new life. Of course I already knew this. At breakfast David says that teaching in Mexico for several years has taught him “the banality of Eros.” What can you say about a man that says such things? Donald wants a clear explanation. David hems and haws, saying that the problems of the poor are so overwhelming that one’s sexuality drifts away. Donald says, “Bullshit” and that all of his working crew were involved in love and sex to such a crazy degree that it reminded him of the worst country music. David said that he meant that he had become less sexually motivated while teaching the poor. “You don’t fall in love down there?” Donald asked and David said, “Well, occasionally” and we laughed. When Clare comes into the den and picks up our dishes she points out that though David’s shoes are
the same make and model, one is dirty gray and one is beige. “How could this happen?” he asks, a little irritated by her laughter. She says, “Finish your eggs,” which he does with a frown, clearly not wanting to finish his eggs. She kisses his forehead and he blushes. She told me that when he comes home a couple of times a year he’ll go down to Getz’s clothing store and buy a half dozen of the same shirt so he won’t have to decide what to wear. She thinks her uncle is “goofy” but she likes him very much. Her dog Betty comes into the den, jumps up on the bed with Donald, and growls at David. “Nice dog,” he says. In David you see the inevitable melancholy of the mix of high intelligence and unearned income. It can’t be much fun to always feel vaguely unworthy. Clare has observed that there is always a tinge of the homeless to her uncle, almost unbelievable but true. She says that he never seems quite comfortable except when he’s sitting on the rickety porch of his remote cabin over near Grand Marais. I once offered to repair this porch and he delaminated as if I were intent on modernizing a cathedral.

  Clare and I take Donald out to Presque Isle but he falls asleep in the easy chair I’ve hauled along. Donald likes to sit under a tree near the graves of Chief Kawbawgam and his daughter. This man’s life spanned three centuries, from 1798 to 1901. Donald sits there and stares at Lake Superior as if it is an enormous puzzle and his puzzlement puts him to sleep. It’s a windy day and the crashing of the surf against the rock promontory is repetitively loud. Clare is upset as we’re having a little picnic and the milk shake she bought her father is turning to soup. Donald can manage only liquids. He wanted me to make some pork barbecue the other day just so he could smell it. Clare said that it’s strange to think that his body is at war with itself. After breakfast this morning she sat out near a grove of lilacs near the garage and read Donald’s story. I was at the workbench in the garage and saw her out the window. She would lift her eyes and look at the lilacs, then go back to reading. Now she wipes her father’s drooling mouth with a handkerchief and he smiles in his sleep.