Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  As I neared the campsite I could instantly see something was wrong. Someone had stolen my cookstove, also my medicine kit, which contained the mosquito repellent. Nothing else was missing except a bag of peanuts and a couple of candy bars. The mosquitoes came at us in horrendous clouds so I quickly built a smudge fire close to the tent flaps, adding green leaves, ferns, and also cedar branches for their delicious burning odor. Clare got in the sleeping bag with only her head sticking out. From under a tree I dug up my hidden cache, which contained bottled water, also a bottle of Calvados, a taste acquired on my graduation trip to France. I scarcely ever touch hard liquor but Calvados smells like an apple orchard in October. I got in the sleeping bag with both of us coughing from the smoke and sipping the liquor. We began to make love hearing violent thunderstorms approach from the south and the roar of the wind accompanying the storm. When the storm hit, the rain came down in bellowing sheets and soon there were a number of rivulets of water entering the tent from several directions and beginning to soak the sleeping bag. This didn’t much matter as it was still warm and we were making love strenuously as if Clare expected my body to absorb her grief. Before we fell asleep we stared at a chickadee who had entered the tent mouth to get out of the still-raging squall. The tiny bird was only a foot away from our faces and regarded us with curiosity. I had one of those nearly imperceptible flashes, realizing I had never fully comprehended birds. Maybe one evening far back in prehistory all nine thousand or so types of birds had arrived on a cloud from the heavens.

  When I awoke an hour or so later Clare was smiling in her sleep but shivering against me. The strong wind had clocked around to the north and I could hear the distant roar of Lake Superior, which had sunk the temperature to the mid-forties from the warmth of dawn. Not much more than a month before the lake had had a lid of ice. Now the air was clear and glittery with mother birds shrieking over their young blown fatally from their nests. Clare got up abruptly, dressed herself in wet clothes, and ran down the trail for the warmth of the truck heater. I broke camp dragging the wet tent behind me.

  At the house the doctor’s forbidding car was parked in front. I dropped Clare off and drove over to my mother’s and hung the tent and sleeping bag over the clothesline. Mom came out the back door and we walked down the street to the old Coast Guard station to watch the huge white-capped waves slamming against the breakwall. We’ve always loved storms and made this walk even in the dead of winter to watch a norther, but then on a still night of twenty below zero Superior will begin to freeze and you have to wait until spring to see the grand waves again. The wind, perhaps fifty knots, was too loud for talk and I began to shiver in my wet clothes.

  Polly made breakfast and while I was in the steamy shower I prepared for what might be coming. She tends to limit her lectures of disapproval to a couple of times a year. On our cold, windy walk I could see by her stiff lips something was coming. She and Clare were friendly and I hoped Clare hadn’t mentioned her intentions of getting pregnant, which might precipitate a major inquisition. I always got straight A’s in high school and at the University of Michigan, kept my room clean and orderly, earned scholarships and my own money except for what David slid my way. Once on a cool morning in Arizona when we were hiking David found four one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. He looked at the money in puzzlement as if the parka had created the cash. Not knowing what else to do he gave me two of the bills.

  At breakfast with a forkful of egg and fried potatoes halfway to my mouth the hammer dropped.

  “What you intend to do is illegal,” she said.

  “I know it.” I wanted to say something smart like “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “You could get in serious trouble. All of you.”

  “I think of death as beyond paltry legalities. Donald should die in the way he chooses. I simply don’t care what happens afterward.” The idea of civil authorities interfering knotted my stomach and I pushed my plate away. I could understand where Polly was coming from. Her family was relatively poor, the kind of people you see standing in lines everywhere at Social Security offices, emergency rooms at hospitals, and suchlike. She’d told me that if her father’s disability check was a day late her parents would become desperate with worry. Such people have an extreme fear of laws, rules, regulations, which at any time might destroy the meager life they’ve cobbled together. Her mother, Nelmi, worked at everything, with jobs as a grocery store clerk, cleaning woman, and a nurse’s aide, and when we would come up at Christmas she would be out shoveling the snow off the walk before daylight.

  “I just don’t want you to go to jail.” Now she was rising to anger at the world in general. “They can always find a reason to arrest a person. Maybe the Canadian authorities will catch you in the act. Remember you can’t take a pistol into Canada.”

  “For Christ’s sake no one even owns a pistol. We’re going to the place Donald wishes to die. When he dies we’ll bury him. That’s all. Of course it’s illegal but fuck everyone.”

  “Don’t use that word in front of your mother.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, David has talked to their family lawyer, who naturally advises against it. You have to register a death both here and in Canada and you can’t just bury anyone where you might wish but since Donald’s an enrolled member of the tribe here he’s called a First Citizen in Canada and the civil law thus becomes mushy. First Citizens have different rights.”

  “But the rest of you aren’t Indians. You have to be half.” Polly’s voice had become quavery.

  “Who gives a shit!” I barked.

  “Ssh. David’s asleep on the sofa.” But then David appeared at the kitchen door and poured himself a cup of coffee, his eyes more widely open than usual. David is that rare type who on waking from a night’s sleep or his multiple daily naps has to reconstitute the world. Last year he told me that he has cognitive problems wherein on waking he’s not sure the world actually exists. He’s unsure until he consciously rehearses his senses. Once while the three of us were fishing out on the Deadstream Donald said he was jealous of David’s dreaming, which includes bears, wolves, the beginning or the end of the world, a landscape of female butts, whatever. When David saw the wildly colored Hubble galactic photos he said, “I knew it. I saw them in my dreams.”

  Now he sat down next to Polly, hugged her, and began to eat my plate of tepid eggs and potatoes first sprinkling Tabasco liberally. “I heard part of your conversation. Don’t worry. It can be skewed so I can take full responsibility. Civil authorities never want to charge five people when they can charge one. Polly hates the word but this is that rare case where you can say fuck the government.” She pinched his stomach. He winced and laughed. It was clear they were still lovers. After my dad died and some of his friends would stop over when we were packing to leave Chicago I was upset at the way these men would look at Polly. She had a way of actually listening to men’s complaints that they construed as affection. Some of his motorcycle group were tough guys who made much of their toughness in the manner of ex-servicemen. However, when we moved north I didn’t much mind David looking at Polly with desire. Of course I knew they had once been married but most of all it was David’s kindness. We didn’t have the money and he convinced her to accept a down payment for a house. At age eleven I couldn’t figure it out because David looked ratty and people in Chicago who had money looked like they had money.

  There was a rap at the back door and Cynthia came in looking haggard, her hair blown into a bird’s nest and her eyes reddish. She had been up all night with Donald, who had developed pleurisy, his lungs filling with fluid. The doctor had come twice and then she had finally persuaded Donald to be hooked up to a portable inhaler. He agreed but on the condition that Friday be his last day on earth. Herald would accept this but not Clare, who became hysterical when she came home from her night with me. Now Cynthia wanted a day or so with just the four of them together. This was Tuesday so there would be time to get ready for the trip on Thursday. She wanted to see the co
llapsible stretcher I had bought in Detroit to make sure it was strong enough. I retrieved it from my room and put one end on a chair and David laid on it. I sprung it up and down and it seemed plenty strong. David weighs about one-ninety and Donald about thirty pounds more but well down from his pre-illness two-eighty. It was understandable that Cynthia would fix on details when the complete picture was unbearable. When she stood up to leave she and David embraced and I thought of brothers and sisters and wished mightily that my own sister didn’t keep herself so remote. I suddenly intended when Donald passed on to visit Rachel in New York City. She recently consented to speak to Polly once a week on the phone, which Polly viewed as a major breakthrough.

  When Cynthia left there was a nearly interminable silence as if we three were willingly lost in our universe.

  “God damn life,” David finally whispered.

  “Don’t say that,” Polly hissed, covering her face with her hands. In the past year she had started going to Catholic mass again having dropped the habit late in her teens.

  David and I walked down to the breakwall and then decided to drive over to Grand Marais to see a wolf den he had discovered late last October before going to Mexico. He said it might still be occupied and we could spend the night at his cabin, which a friend had recently opened up for him. We went back to the house and quickly packed. David invited Polly but she said she wished to be alone. On the way out of town we dropped her off at church. I was curious on what terms she had begun to talk to God. She was an odd mixture. Her Finnish mother had become Catholic when she married Ted at his Italian and Irish parents’ insistence. It took years for my grandma Nelmi’s Lutheran family to forgive her. Consequently Nelmi never missed mass while Ted wouldn’t go at gunpoint saying that the Catholic Church had always sided with the “powers that be” rather than the workingman. People used to take religious denominations very seriously. Maybe they still do. It’s not something you’d notice at the University of Michigan.

  On the way out of town David stopped at a butcher shop and bought two extra-large porterhouses and some bacon saying two things he’d missed in Mexico were fatty steaks and fatty bacon.

  “Anything else?” I teased.

  “No. I mean I think I love my country but I don’t miss white people, white food, white cars, that sort of thing. And I’m of no particular use here except maybe teaching in inner cities and I find big cities too disorienting. Down there I’m in demand and I feel of at least minimal value to others.”

  David had written a pamphlet, in Spanish of course, about thirty-three things you need to know if you make it to the United States. Since many of the potential migrants were very poor and totally illiterate he traveled around a lot for a charity organization speaking in churches and town squares.

  “How do you feel about your essay seven years later?” David had self-published a long essay on his family connection to economic predation in the history of the Upper Peninsula in a dozen newspapers up here.

  “I don’t think about it anymore. Donald’s criticism was best. I connected my family’s logging and mining to the land but gave short shrift to the people. It was unbalanced. I have to ask you this because no one really explained it to me but why does Donald have to be buried in this exact spot in Canada?”

  “It’s near where he spent three days without food, shelter, or water. It’s an Anishinabe thing and I didn’t pry into it very far. He had some sort of vision about the true nature of life there and it’s the location from which he wishes to leave the earth.”

  “It would be good to know everything he saw. He wasn’t clear!”

  “That’s not likely. You’re supposed to have your own vision, which is more likely if you’re in the right spot. Donald tried this several times before he made the whole three days. He told me he got scared out.”

  We dropped the groceries off at the cabin and drove on a two-track to within a mile or so of the wolf den before we began walking. It was seven hours before we got back to the cabin and without the car. There’s a local euphemism in the U.P. that you’re not lost, you just can’t find your vehicle. Throughout this improbably arduous and uncomfortable hike my brain delivered little snippets from a course I had taken in the history of theater, everything from the Lord of Misrule, comic relief, berserk Puck, the fortunate fall, to the surprise ending. Both David and I are very experienced in the woods but we broke all the rules because our minds were elsewhere. David figured the walk to the wolf den and back would require about an hour and a half at most so we didn’t think about taking a compass, matches, collapsible tin cups, water, halazone tablets, insect repellent, all of which are de rigueur in this area, where the nearest people are at least a dozen miles away.

  Our first mistake was not figuring out a relatively new log road that wiped out a familiar old trail. The new log road was shaped like a horseshoe and only led to an eighty-acre pulped area and returned us near to where we began. The wind was still cool and strong from the north so we had to make a big half circle in order to approach the wolf den from downwind so if the animals were there they wouldn’t scent us. Rather than making the half circle through an easy open area of dogwood and chokecherry we opted for the deep woods. Since the clouds were dense enough to thoroughly conceal the sun we ended up too far east, on the shore of one of the Barfield Lakes. This meant that we were nearly two miles off course. While David was resting his bad ankle, injured in his teens, I could hear above the wind a faint staccato roaring. I pointed to the west and David turned his head the better to hear out of the wind. He said the noise had to be two male bears in a quarrel about territory, or a female defending her cubs from a rogue male. Since the bears were in the direction of our intended shortcut to be back on course we decided it was prudent to backtrack and virtually start over. When we reached the open area we were three hours into our hike and upset when we saw that the sky was clearing to both the west and north. This meant the cool wind that drove the insects away would stop and the air become warm. We would become more thirsty than we already were. We thought of bagging the project as we sat under a dog-wood on a bed of desiccated flower petals. When you’re in this area in late May there’s at least a thousand acres of blooming trees. David rubbed his ankle and said we shouldn’t quit now because we would just go back to the cabin and talk and think about Donald or go to the Dunes Saloon and get drunk to avoid thinking about Donald.

  We set out again in a half circle to the south with the sun warming us and swarms of noxious blackflies following us when we neared a creek to the west. I followed David to avoid walking too fast for his pace. He shambled rather than walked, tilting this way and that to angle his direction on the easiest route for his ankle across the lumpy ground. Every now and then he’d examine an enormous white pine stump as if it were a religious site. Finally from a half mile away we could see the lightning tree on a knoll from which David said we could see the wolf den in a clump of trees at the end of a long valley. Native peoples tend to think that lightning trees signal the approach of the gods, a place where their power directly touched earth. When I examined this charred and blasted white pine I was pleased I hadn’t been there when the lightning had struck. Sitting on the knoll we couldn’t see much because the binoculars had been left on the dashboard of the car. We stared at the end of the gulley until our eyes blurred, then walked slowly toward the den. It had been abandoned though there were a few deer bones in the grass and a slight sweet smell of decay in the now windless air. We sat down and laughed that our quest had ended this way. We examined the trackless dirt at the mouth of the den and David speculated that the den had probably been abandoned the previous November when deer hunters had come too close.

  Now we were a good five hours into a stroll though with the sun slightly visible it was possible to use David’s pocket watch as a vaguely accurate compass. We reached a long-unused log road and David said the car wasn’t where it was supposed to be. This seemed funny as there weren’t any car thieves in this spavined wilderness. He
said we’d pick up the car in the morning and set out on a cross-country route toward the river and the cabin, pleased to reach the east end of the gulley that held his mother-of-all-stumps, which he’d shown me back in my early teens. I peeked through the roots at the roomy interior and when I looked up David was giving the stump a kiss.

  In another half hour we stumbled into the cabin clearing and I ran toward the pump. We drank water until we were bilious. We slumped on the porch swing in the twilight. It was just after ten in the evening but still warmish and I took off my clothes, which were crusty with drying sweat, and took a dip in the cold river, floating south and swimming back in an eddy. David started a grill fire for the steaks out of oak kindling, which is best for meat because of the intense heat its coals generate. David mumbled that the lettuce for salad and the bread were still in the car. He retrieved a bottle of cloudy whiskey that his friend Mike, the saloon owner, had left behind. We had brought along two bottles of wine but they were also in the car as was a bag of ice in a cooler. In the cabin I put a dishpan of water on the propane stove so David could soak his wretched ankle and then mixed drinks with the whiskey and well water, which was full of tannin from an upstream swamp and iron from the ground. David drank his in three gulps and I made him another. I went out and got some wood and cedar branches, which sweeten the odor of a musty cabin, and built a fire in the fireplace for the cold night that was surely coming. David dozed in an easy chair surrounded by stacks of books. He had given his research collection to Northern Michigan University but then got lonely for the books and built another collection of Upper Peninsula history out of a local store aptly called Snowbound Books. David was a bona fide book neurotic even shipping cartons of duplicates to Mexico.