Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I had started out walking five minutes a day in mid-January and by the first of March I was up to two hours of walking or cross-country skiing. I had also gained back twelve pounds. Benedetta even put good olive oil on steak after she broiled it. The only startling news I received from out of town was that Herald and Sylvia had caused a problem for everyone but themselves by running off to San Francisco and getting married. This was one of the few distinct times Herald reminded me of his father, who would have loathed the idea of a huge June wedding in Hermosillo. Sylvia told me on the phone that she was on her mother’s shit List again but I said she’d get over it.

  I found my father’s Bronze Star from his service in the Philippines behind some books on the upper shelves of the den. I carried it around the house in its small leather case wondering what to do with it then put it back behind the same books. I also found a photo of him and Jesse wearing leis in Hawaii between the pages of a copy of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. They looked thin and drunk. In a small cookbook called Canapé I found a photo of Mother in her moonbeam costume for a Club party that had so terrified David. Our nanny Gretel tried to cover her whiskey breath by chewing entire packs of Dentyne gum.

  In early March Polly and I drove out to Flower’s bringing her a fifth of her favorite peppermint schnapps (Dr. McGillicuddy’s). Polly said that Rachel had written from Burbank to say that her boyfriend had left her and returned to New York but she was staying in L.A. and looking after an unsuccessful rock band. We stopped on the beach and listened to drift ice pushed by an east wind pile up against a granite island with huge crunching sounds. Polly said that it was curious but that despite the obvious horrors her husband thought that his two years in Vietnam had been the best of his life. “Where did that leave me?” Polly had wondered at the time. I told her that once when David and I were little my father had taken us for a walk in the woods at the Club because Mother had a hangover. We had seen a big black snake sunning on a log and my father said that during the war in the Philippines he and his men would eat snakes. David and I caught a snake and took it into the kitchen to cook but then David suggested that we eat tuna fish and pretend it was snake. I had discovered that my father had been with General Jonathan Wainwright on Corregidor. My father, Jesse, and several hundred other men had headed for the hills rather than surrender, which was lucky for them because the mortality rate for those who surrendered was very high. It takes a long time for a father to drive the love out of a child.

  We went for a walk at Flower’s on the hard-crusted snow but Polly turned around because she didn’t want to see Clare’s hut, which Flower had finally decided to show me. The hut was mostly buried in snow but I cleared the entrance and peered in. The day was bright and the hut’s interior, really a cave, was black so I could see nothing. I reached my hand in and Flower, who was behind me, growled. I jumped up screeching and Flower laughed. We continued walking into the swamp for half an hour or so to where under the roots of a huge deadfall tree Flower showed me a blowhole, the breathing hole of a hibernating bear. I lay down and smelled the rank odor of breath and putting my ear to the hole heard what seemed like a single breath a minute. “It’s not Donald, it’s an old female bear,” Flower said, and then did an eerie little dance and chant while I walked away. Back at the house Flower cooked us a beaver tail, which Polly didn’t eat but I thought was rather good.

  That evening I hastily looked through the bear material Coughlin had brought up at Thanksgiving. It made me feel uncomfortable, not in a spooky sense but with the feeling, semireligious, that it was not my business. There was a footnote that said in the ninth century the men who guarded the Swedish Viking king were thought to be half bear. In many native tribes the bear was thought to be redemptive because it rose from near death in the spring. One May Donald said that bears were lucky and fat after a severe winter had killed so many deer for them to eat.

  I had an insomniac night over the matter marveling how certain beliefs managed to hold on. I finally got up at three a.m. and tried unsuccessfully to read Harper’s magazine, poured a drink, and watched a movie about World War II set in France around the time of the Normandy invasion. Young men jumped out of landing craft at the beachhead and were mowed down by machine-gun fire. They floated facedown in the surf. The world seemed unacceptably temporary including love. I turned off the television and listened to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which though I loved this music failed to purge bears and war.

  In mid-April when Lake Superior’s ice had begun to break up I flew out to Billings, in Montana, and then drove down to Lame Deer for my job interview. The landscape was bleak and horribly windy but I was happy. The reservation school had a familiar feel and the superintendent was pleased with my résumé, saying that “ordinary do-gooders” often didn’t make it through the first year. While we talked we were both looking out in the school yard where under a set of swings two little girls were punching a little boy. We laughed. When I left I was confident that I needed this new landscape, which was so unclaustrophobic compared to the Upper Peninsula’s dense forests. I would have to live in a mobile home the first year but if I liked the place well enough I’d build a cabin similar to the one I’d seen in my dream.

  I had thought about stopping in Chicago for a few days on my way home but then suddenly I didn’t want to see Coughlin and talk about myself. I made a few phone calls from my Billings motel, ate a wretched dinner, and then flew the next morning to New York City via Denver. I stayed in the same fancy hotel on the Upper East Side that my parents had favored. On one trip David and I had stayed in the same bedroom and I had thrown his shoes out the window but Mother had had a bellhop retrieve them. I visited museums and bookstores and went to the Bronx Zoo, where I did not pause overlong at the bear cages. I went to an Italian delicatessen and had a big carton of food shipped home to Benedetta, who still lived with me but had enrolled at the college. I had called her to remind her to feed a little female terrier that arrived on our back porch every morning for a snack. She didn’t have a collar and wouldn’t come in the house, eyeing me as if I were trying to trap her. She liked cheddar cheese and I had seen her crawling under the garage. I hoped she would stay. She was as footloose as me. On a cool morning walk I stopped at a construction site where the workers were dressed like Donald. A Mexicanlooking worker yelled at me, “Hey, foxy lady” and I felt pleasant.

  In June around the summer solstice and the anniversary of Donald’s departure I went with Clare over to David’s cabin. K had been there for a month and the place was more shipshape than I had ever seen it. K had been surveying the roots of creeks and wanted to take us to a big hill where the watersheds of three rivers began but the insects were too thick so I preferred the idea of a hike in the dunes, where the sand supports less insect life. David wouldn’t be able to come up from Veracruz until early July when he finished the first part of his water project. Vera had had second thoughts about having a child with him and they had begun the paperwork for adopting a baby girl. David had said something vaguely inappropriate about how it was better to adopt a homeless puppy from a dog pound.

  Clare and I walked up the first tall edge of the dunes and watched K rowing on Au Sable Lake far below us. She then guided me a mile or so to a grove of poplar and birch, which K had showed her as a place he had taken Donald. We were sitting there on a huge low-slung branch of a birch tree moving in the breeze when Clare saw a large flock of ravens near another ridge of dunes out toward Lake Superior. Clare said that the ravens were probably following a bear and slid off the branch and started walking in that direction. I wasn’t excited about seeing the bear but decided to trust Clare’s judgment. When we got close to the ridge and could hear the ravens on the other side Clare saw the bear tracks, which had emerged from a neck of forest to the west of us. She said she had been out there with K a few days before tracking bears that came to the dunes to eat the vines of beach pea and wild strawberries. In the shade of the dune we found a patch of wild strawberries and ate so
me despite the sand granules that clung to them. We crept up the steep dune with difficulty in the sliding sand and peeked over the edge. About a hundred yards away and below us a large bear swagged his head between a patch of beach pea and strawberries nibbling quickly as if frantic to eat. And then the ravens above him must have warned him because he stood up and made a woofing sound. I know that Clare and I were thinking the same thing. Is that him? Is that him? Is that Donald who is greeting us, saying a final good-bye? The bear stared at us and Clare clenched at my hand. And then he trotted over a hill as we all must.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank Professor Richard Eathorne of Northern Michigan University and Professor Kurt S. Pregitzer of Michigan Tech for their help, also Ray Nurmi of Snowbound Books in Marquette, Michigan. I also wish to acknowledge Professor Charles Cleland, whose seminal book Rites of Conquest gave me bitter encouragement.

  —JH