Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I heated a can of beans of questionable age, a bit wary because in the cold June last year a garter snake had made its way through the logs and established a home coiled around the pilot light. Garter snakes are harmless but startling when they ooze out of the stove when you’re putting on your morning coffee. I woke David before I put on the steaks.

  “Why do I ever leave this place?” A question to which the answer could be obvious to most though I loved it myself.

  We didn’t realize how hungry we were until we began eating. It was the fastest job I had ever done on a big steak and the beans were made passable drenched in hot sauce. David was waving a steak bone and talking about local native history and how in the eighteenth century east of here the Ojibway had repelled the Iroquois invasion. I was only half listening reflecting on how a tribe that had lived on Grand Island off present-day Munising had been pressured into going to war against the Sioux. The island tribe was totally inexperienced in warfare and all of the men were wiped out, thus ending a small culture that had existed for hundreds of years. David, now thoroughly boozed, read a passage from Charles Cleland that I already knew: “Michigan Indians, like other native people of the Great Lakes region, have withstood and survived a biological and cultural assault that has now lasted for eight generations. The scourge of smallpox, generations of intense warfare, the total disruption of communities, alcohol and drunkenness, poverty, and the loss of their land and many cultural traditions have come upon them without their choosing. It is almost beyond belief that they have endured at all . . .” and then more words about the miracle of survival.

  “Remember when Donald carried me?” He dropped the book to the floor and his chin was now on his chest. He was referring to an evening when we had brook trout caught in a beaver pond to the south, near the empty wolf den. David was wading in his boots and had stepped into a beaver path under the surface and went in over his head, twisting his bad ankle on tree roots when he scrambled to shore. Donald had carried him piggyback through the woods a mile back to the car.

  “Yes. We caught some nice fish,” I said. He was now fully asleep and I dragged him to his spartan single bed in the corner. On an end table were small framed photos of his poet girlfriend Vernice, and a youngish photo of the Mexican girl Vera. I mixed myself a nightcap not looking at the glass while I drank because the water turned the whiskey into a fecal brown. I went out and turned off the Yamaha generator letting my eyes adjust to the total dark so as not to stumble on my way to the cabin. The sky was nearly creamy with stars this far from ambient light. I thought I heard a wolf far in the distance but maybe not. I had heard them there before.

  I was awakened just before dawn by the first birds and David’s resonant snoring, also a dream that verged on nightmare. My grandpa Ted used to like to tell woeful stories about his family while we looked through a pile of scrap-books. In the dream an old photo talked in a language I couldn’t understand. It was Ted’s great-uncle Alberto, who drowned in a mine when the Michigamme River poured into the Mansfield shaft over near Crystal Falls way back when. It happened in late September and Alberto, who hated the cold, had intended to return with his savings to his home ground in Emilia-Romagna in Italy to start a trattoria. Ted liked to end his stories with often inappropriate morals. “Alberto’s story shows a man that if you want to do something you better get your ass in gear.” The dream made me wonder what language the dead speak. A local politician rejecting foreign languages in a school budget had said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it’s good enough for our kids.”

  I trotted the two miles or so down a log trail to fetch the car, pausing only for a baby skunk who came out of the ferns ahead of me. He stopped. I stopped. He sat down. I sat down. I was likely his first human. I described my recent life and he seemed to doze, then walked off under the mantle of the ferns.

  When I reached David’s car I realized I had forgotten to search his pockets for the keys but luckily they were in the ignition. I chewed on a crust of bread and for a still moment I understood clearly what was happening to everyone I loved.

  We had a morose breakfast in Grand Marais and David decided to take the back way to Munising, a matter of fifty miles of lumpy road. When we passed Au Sable Lake he pointed out a distant sandbar across the lake where he had “lost” his virginity to Laurie, a friend of Cynthia’s who had died of breast cancer at what he described as “the unacceptable age of twenty-five.” I joined David on his obligatory midmorning nap, this one on a dock near Munising where boats departed for Grand Island, the scene of the disappeared tribe that had failed at war.

  When we reached the house at midafternoon Cynthia and Clare were opening a big Fed Ex carton on the front porch. It was a Styrofoam cooler from Mississippi full of sweet corn, peas, and tomatoes. Both Cynthia and Clare are provident about money but there are certain indulgences.

  “You guys look like shit,” Clare said with a broad smile. “You could shuck the corn. We’ll do the peas inside.”

  “We misplaced the car.” David picked up an ear of corn and studied its inherent mystery. “There are always an odd number of corn rows on the cob, never even.”

  Cynthia stood up and looked down the steps at us. It was plain to see that she was struggling for the right words and looking up into the oak tree bordering the sidewalk for help.

  “This morning Donald said that it’s real good that you love me but it’s time to let me go.” She turned to go into the house and then paused to look in the dining room window where Donald was propped up in a chair staring blankly out at us. Herald stood there with a hand on Donald’s shoulder to steady him. And that was that.

  Polly came over for dinner after which she was driving to Iron Mountain to see her parents. We had a mid-August meal in June with a pot roast, corn, peas, and sliced tomatoes. Herald had moved Donald’s electric hospital bed into the end of the dining room so he could be with us. Cynthia told me that this expensive bed had precipitated their last little quarrel two months before. She’d reassured him that the bed could be given to one of the hundreds of infirm locals who had no health insurance. Donald was always interested in value rather than mere cost. In the summer he wouldn’t drink soda pop, which he said had gone up five hundred percent in his lifetime, packing along iced coffee in a thermos instead. When hamburgers went up a quarter at a local Soo diner he inquired and the owner, who was a friend, showed Donald his books and explained the price rise, but economics were a lacuna for him. I once tried to explain the nature of inflation but he thought it as pathetic as daylight savings time.

  Far in the back of the cupboard Cynthia had found her baby dish with her name on the border. The dish had compartments and Cynthia fed Donald a few spoonfuls of corn, peas, and tomatoes she had pureed. He closed his eyes and smiled at these memories of earth. Clare put on Donald’s favorite piece of music of Jim Pepper, which is a chant of the names of dozens of Indian tribes, and then a number of marvelous jazz compositions.

  Herald and I stayed up late at the kitchen table making lists and plans. The mathematician in Herald rose to the surface and I was startled at the completeness of his lists, with everything from pickaxes, shovels, camping gear, water, bug dope, and fishing equipment. Canadian customs was usually easy but to make a plan fail-safe it had to appear that both cars contained people off on an Ontario fishing expedition up near Hawk Junction, north of Wawa. We weren’t going that far but the idea was to have no problems at customs. My Toyota pickup didn’t have four-wheel drive so we were using David’s old Subaru. Herald would take it in early the next morning for a tune-up and new tires. I had watched from the kitchen window when David had cleaned out his junk and covered it with a tarp. It had taken him over an hour because he had to stop and examine passages in the dozens of books in bags in the back.

  I had to go out to the workshop in the garage to get the two hypodermics I had hidden there. Just before I left Ann Arbor Cynthia had called to say that it was questionable whether Donald could swallow a handf
ul of pills and she had rejected his not joking idea that we shoot him in the head like a sick dog. I was in a panic and explained the situation to the crippled big-shot stockbroker I drove to sporting contests at the University of Michigan. He was far to the right but was also an absolute right-to-die advocate. He got the two hypodermics full of Nembutal and God knows what else from a horse farm over near Metamora. This mixture was used to “put down” sick or badly injured horses. He said that was what he’d use for himself. Anyway, Herald said that we would hide one in each car. He examined his father’s death potions with the bleak look of a man intent on suicide. We were planning on leaving before dawn on Friday. Cynthia, Donald, Clare, and David would follow at noon, which would give us time to dig an appropriate grave. I had dug well pits in a day’s time and with Herald’s help I figured we could dig a grave in four or five hours.

  We had a whiskey nightcap, which loosened up Herald ever so slightly. He retrieved a Detroit Tigers ball cap from his room and put it on my head to cover up my “silly” Mohawk haircut, which he was sure would attract negative attention at Canadian customs. I tend to avoid mirrors and remembered my haircut only when it drew the attention of older people in Marquette. Younger ones would say “cool” if anything. Herald said that his dad liked the idea of dying on the day of the summer solstice. When she and Donald had eloped Cynthia had swiped her father’s expensive telescope, a Questar, from his big closet of unused equipment. Cynthia loved the night sky and Donald quickly adopted her obsession. Sometimes at work in the daytime I’d see him squint up at the sky as if he thought he might be missing something. When Herald went off to Caltech he sent back large blowups of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope and Donald tacked them up on the walls of his workshop.

  It was nearly midnight when I had a small, second nightcap figuring I’d quit this nonsense when the current time passed. Normally I don’t like my mind to feel blurred or muted. A large part of my life is to check out reality and make sure it is what I think it is and normally I enjoy the extremist reaches my mind wishes to take me to.

  Herald was sleepily explaining chaos theory in modern physics when we heard Donald moaning and thrashing in the severest body cramps. Cynthia slept on a single bed next to his and began softly singing nursery rhymes, which seemed to best calm him. Herald burst into tears when we heard the strains of “Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea.” I gave Herald a hug and fled the house.

  It was a hard night. I woke at four a.m. and thought, “Twenty-four hours until zero hour.” I had dreamt about my father fixing his motorcycle in our tiny yard in Chicago. This had awakened me and I began thinking about fathers and how Donald had helped straighten out my wild kinks in high school when David, who acted as my stepfather (though Polly wouldn’t remarry him), was lost in his own desolate space after finishing his twenty-five-year project. I recalled one evening when Herald, Clare, and I had gone over to the Canadian Soo to visit some French-Canadian friends who were mixed-breed Ojibway. We went to a dance out on the edge of the city and most people spoke pidgin English at best. We danced all night to a French-Indian band that had come down from Montreal. It was the most fun I’ve ever had dancing before or since. During intermission I talked to an old man who used to cut pulp over near Iron Mountain who said he had met my grandfather Ted and his family back in the forties. He said that the French-Canadians wouldn’t go down in the mines because they were death traps. I asked him if he had read Émile Zola, whose Germinal we were reading in high school. He laughed and said he couldn’t read or write. He was in his late seventies and still worked in the woods. He said he had fathered nine children who were all doing pretty well.

  At first light I went for a walk and a mile down the beach I ran into Clare. Oddly enough she was writing an immense version of her name on the smooth sand left by the storm two days before. The beach doesn’t get much traffic in June, when Lake Superior is still too cold for swimming. Clare was a little embarrassed to be caught writing her own name. It had been a real hard night and Herald was now sitting with Donald so Cynthia could get some sleep. I asked if she needed to again go over the road and topographical maps north of the Canadian Soo. She said no, and that she remembered the gas station near the turnoff from our fishing trip years before where we had bought some fine smoked whitefish.

  “I’m not saying you should marry me if I’m pregnant.” She sat down on the sand in the middle of the first letter of her name.

  “I will if you want to.”

  “I mean I don’t need two kids at once.”

  “You sound like your mother. People say I’m the most mature young man in the U.S.” I sat beside her and kissed her knee.

  She laughed and then said that they were doing a trial run with Donald by driving him over near Au Train so he could say good-bye to his aunt Flower. I reminded her to take along several jars of a particular Jewish pickled herring Cynthia had ordered from Chicago. Flower had glaucoma and her license had been lifted after she tailgated a squad car in Munising. She didn’t want more than two jars of this herring at once for fear of ruining the pleasure. Cynthia had supported Flower for quite some time though an anthropologist from Kalamazoo College would also stop by now and then with sacks of groceries and blackberry brandy of which she drank a single ounce a day. I had stopped to see her on my way up from Ann Arbor and she was sad that her “little boy Donald” was sick and that she had told Donald that they would take many walks in the far corners of the earth when they entered the spirit world. She was particularly interested in the Yakut and Sami natives of far northern Scandinavia and Russia. The anthropologist told her about these people and she trusted that they would like each other. Strangely enough, I had no doubt that Flower would accomplish this. I didn’t know all that much about Anishinabe religion but in contemporary terms you couldn’t have more mojo than Flower. If anyone was a true Night Flying Woman it was Flower.

  “Where are you?” Clare pinched my stomach.

  “I was thinking about Flower. Remember when we were there and she talked to that bear when we were out picking berries?” The bear had rubbed against Flower before going away, ignoring the rest of us.

  “That’s not the kind of thing you forget.” Clare gave me a chaste kiss, got up, and walked back toward home.

  It was a day of the comforting mindlessness of errands, lists, sporting goods and hardware stores, selecting new tires for David’s car, eating a fried whitefish sandwich with Herald at the Verling, where we talked about David’s obsession with Mexico. Herald made the point that Mexico was more vivid. Life was more reduced to its essentials and both the good and bad were more clearly visible than in the U.S. I reflected aloud that David had spent his life nearly suffocated by ambiguities and Mexico likely offered the tonic he needed. It was that and the fact that he felt useful down there. Herald and I were both a little smitten by our large Finnish waitress, who refused to flirt. You never get away from this sort of thing. Nelmi said that despite Grandpa Ted’s dementia he still flirts with the nurses.

  I barbecued pork ribs for dinner to go with the rest of the Mississippi vegetables. Donald wanted the smell so I moved the Weber over under the den window. A family joke is how inept Donald is at grilling outdoors. He is always in a rush to eat the food. Once while we were camping I saw him eat a raw pork chop doused with hot sauce but then he said there hadn’t been a case of trichinosis in Michigan since World War II. Cynthia tried to feed him some pork she had chopped fine with a little sauce but he couldn’t swallow it. He smiled when she wiped his chin with a kitchen towel. You could see the visit to Flower had put him in a fine mood despite his discomfort. Flower had given him her grandfather’s bear-claw necklace, which he wore around his neck and touched now and then.

  After dinner we sat out in the backyard with Donald on the sofa I had moved out in the yard. David told some stories about getting lost in the woods over the years, including once in a blizzard over near Sagola when he had walked into his pickup on a gravel road. Herald and Clare s
ang an absurd ditty they had performed as a duet at the talent show early in grade school. Cynthia sang the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” I couldn’t sing a song or tell a story because I had begun crying and couldn’t quite stop enough to use my voice. I had begun thinking that it would be good knowing that it was your last night on earth rather than simply being hit by a car or something like that.

  I spent the night in a sleeping bag in the backyard to make sure I was ready for my departure with Herald at four a.m. Clare joined me for a while but we didn’t make love. We looked up at the stars and didn’t talk.

  I was hollow-stomached and damp from a light rain when Herald woke me in the predawn dark. We drank from a thermos of coffee and there was a strong light in the east by the time we passed through Shingleton heading east. The clouds had broken up and the sun looked too large when it rose as it often does. We ate the pot roast sandwiches Herald had made and listened to some of David’s Mexican tapes. Herald translated some lines of a border corrido the content of which was all love, death, and the drug trade. I changed the tape to mariachi music to escape further sinking myself in my seat. Beginning when Clare left me in the night I was seeing reality as a goofy seventeen-year-old in extremis, my brain making and remaking and editing life as a movie. It was disturbing because I thought I had purged myself of this impulse. When we whizzed through Canadian customs with the agent saying, “Good luck fishing” my mind altered his line and began to view the world in black and white despite the bluish-green water of eastern Lake Superior to the left and the high, green forested hills on the right with the conifers a dense green and the hardwoods not totally leafed out this far north, their pale green normally my favorite color.

  We were digging hard by seven-thirty below a granite escarpment about three miles from the lake, which was visible over the treetops. We were in a small clearing where the drainage had gathered soil over the millennia after the glaciers had passed. It was hard digging at first with many large rocks over a hundred pounds dislodged by our pickaxes but then we were lucky when a little deeper our shovels hit manageable soil. By ten in the morning we were deep enough so when I looked out at ground level I saw the lid of grass, ferns, and wildflowers covering the ground. We certainly were appropriately deep but we tacitly agreed to keep digging because we had two hours before they would arrive, and now the ground was anyway soft, and we didn’t want to stand around and think so continued on until the hole was truly enormous, about eight feet by six. We had no gloves and Herald’s hands were becoming blistered and smeared with little blood splotches. I told him I could square off the hole, which he ignored, but then he cussed saying he had forgotten to buy a collapsible ladder. I told him he could easily find a dead hemlock sapling we could shimmy up. A moment after I helped Herald out of the hole I was frightened to hear another voice and I scrambled upward. I heard Herald say in a quaking voice, “Don’t bother us. I’m digging my dad’s grave.”