by Jim Harrison
I parked near the office which was adjacent to the university, standing in the parking lot in the rain with a case of admitted tremors over the phone call. I remembered thinking on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica that I could simply walk up to her and say, “Pardon me but I’m your son,” but then I imagined that she might say, “Oh for Christ’s sake I live way out here to get away from my family and past.” But now all of those doubts were slipping away and I spent a half hour in the nearby Nebraska Historical Association to check out something among the vast collection of old photos. I had been there a number of times in the past few years to compare the photos of the grasslands in the western part of the state, including the Sandhills, in the 1880s and 1890s with what they looked like now. Since I am habitually sunken in the justifiable pessimism of my generation I was startled to discover that the rangeland looked marvelous now compared to the supposed good old days (except for the Natives) when the area was miserably overgrazed and overpopulated with cattle. Of course this is all private ranching and not within the apparent misery of Bureau of Land Management control visible throughout the “great” West.
The curator of photographs, a burly crank of great knowledge and curiosity, dug up a number of photos of old Northridge, the man who had doled me out to my Omaha parents. There was a pic of him standing next to the governor and John J. Pershing at the groundbreaking of the new State Capitol building in 1924, another at the State Fair holding the reins of a team of champion draft horses, another in 1920 standing outside of a mansion in Omaha, dressed in a homburg and a topcoat with a fur collar, holding leashes with two obvious coyotes. This was a bit puzzling in that he looked more feral than the coyotes, as if he wished to bite the world in the neck and shake it, a mood similar to that in the portrait in Naomi’s dining room. His head looked too large but then so were his shoulders.
There was a niftily dressed young hotshot talking to my bird boss when I entered the office. He represented a private environmental group, I think it was the Nature Conservancy, but my heart was elsewhere and I wasn’t listening carefully. My bird boss offered me a few days of work checking out fledgling Swainson’s hawks in nests in the Sandhills, also a possible rare breeder, a ferruginous hawk in Sheridan County, if I would make a list of areas, from my hundreds of camping spots, I felt needed preservation. We ended up talking a couple of hours and it seemed odd that I might know something of value to these professionals, but then it is easy to forget that few could equal the way I had covered the map. Obsessions don’t seem extraordinary if it’s just the way you are. I ignored my slight sense of invasion of privacy as I rattled off a dozen or more of my favorite locales, feeling a growing irritation that a man younger than myself had an actual job that J.M. would find acceptable, though he was also probably suffocating in paperwork.
I was back in my motel, still very agitated, and trying to write a letter to J.M., when it occurred to me that the room wasn’t making me feel claustrophobic. I had read enough on the subject to know that phobias can become intermittent. The college roommate who had conned me into reading Henry Miller was frightened by heights. Three steps up a ladder and he was lost, or anything higher than the third floor of a building and he felt he might be sucked out the windows, doubtless a genetic remnant of our primate brain. In exchange for my reading his main enthusiasm, Henry Miller, I insisted he had to read volumes by Mary Douglas and Loren Eiseley, also Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. Oddly, after the initial discomfort of having our brains expanded, possibly the real value of college, we felt it had been a good deal though Miller had sent me off on a sexual rampage.
Dear J.M.,
Good news for a change. Dalva was in Omaha looking for me! She talked to my mother. As you have noted I’ve been timid about this. I never thought of myself as fragile but I guess we all are somewhat. I hope that your trip to the lawyer wasn’t too bad. I have a terrible urge to call you but think it might not be a good idea for a few more days. I don’t want to suffocate you. I mean I probably want to but you have that divorce problem. There doesn’t seem to be much good advice floating around on the subject of falling in love with someone but I don’t want my obvious shortcomings to scare you away. Perhaps you could let your father know I’d actually enjoy putting up that fence on your place. Love, Nelse.
It was now ten in the evening and I had forgotten to call Naomi. There’s always a touch of the moron in this kind of mental agitation. Luckily she was awake and reading and, after a long pause that made me nervous, she said she was up for a raptor trip but would have to be back in three days for a family picnic. Then her voice dropped in volume and she said that I might enjoy meeting her family. There was a stroke of suspicion here that she might be onto my deceit but I dismissed the idea as unlikely.
As I tried to sleep a few tears formed from Ralph’s direction but they quickly absorbed themselves when I thought of his adoptive parents which was ludicrously coincidental as many things are. If I hadn’t been at the campground in New Mexico I never would have found him whimpering under some balls of tumbleweed near the back fence. If I hadn’t gone to that particular truck stop on the outskirts of Tucson near the air force base my truck wouldn’t have been stolen and, with it, Ralph and my journals, a life’s work but only for my life and eyes and heart. If a rancher’s fifteen-year-old daughter and a mixed-breed Lakota hadn’t made love I wouldn’t exist. The bottom line was manifestly simple like the billions of galaxies which, no matter how inconceivably vast, had an existence with origins as mysterious as our own. If it all was based so resolutely on chance it seemed by far the best course to seize what chances were offered. Come to think of it, I hadn’t been in a strip club for several years until the night I saw J.M.
I left the motel at four A.M. and reached Naomi’s a little after eight. She was on her porch swing waiting and received me like an old friend. I sat on a stool in the kitchen while she made breakfast and I babbled on about the beauty of the morning and the birds I’d noted after I got past Broken Bow and could see more clearly in the diffuse light that occurs after a long rain lets up. I spread out my topographical maps and pinpointed the Swainson’s hawk sites, also the supposed ferruginous site over between Gordon and Walgren Lake. She didn’t seem to be looking at the topos carefully but instead gazed directly at me. I looked down at my nearly empty breakfast plate, then back at my topos, and then out the kitchen window at her semi-pet crow looking back in the window at me.
“Don’t you have something to say to me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, standing up so abruptly that I tipped over my chair. I rolled up my topos and carried her bag out to the truck, standing there sweating in the coolish morning air as she came down the steps of the front porch and walked toward me. “How did you know?” I asked.
She laughed and stood there shaking her head. “How could I not know? I knew from the instant you got out of your truck the first time. You simply look like the product of my daughter and her godforsaken boyfriend.” She got in the truck and I stood on my side looking in on her and wondering if there was something further to say. My temples and heart were drumming to my own foolishness, but then my stupidity no longer seemed to matter so I simply got in the truck and started it. She patted my shoulder and rubbed my neck, then laughed again. “I don’t know who you look like more but you act like both of them at once. Maybe that seems unlikely but it’s true. Of course you’re truly the son of those who raised you. I understand that but I’m very happy you showed up. No one is more welcome.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say for the first half hour down the road. My dreary self-consciousness was choking me, and I felt like a dog who has been caught at a terrible deed and is convulsed with embarrassment. Finally I slowed the truck to a stop and asked if we shouldn’t turn around and go see her but Naomi said she thought Dalva was off near Buffalo Gap in South Dakota for a few days, and then she stopped me cold.
“What do you want fro
m her?” she asked, staring straight ahead.
“I don’t need any money.” I didn’t quite know what she meant.
“I don’t mean that. I know she’s been looking for you but I told her that I suspected that was wrong. If there was any looking to be done it was up to you. I didn’t want you to expect too much, or her to expect something impossible if she found you.”
“I want to know what her life has been like and who exactly my father was and what he was like,” I finally said, stuttering.
“She’ll have to tell you that. She’d want to. I’m just relieved. I prayed for this moment because it’s only fair. She made herself a very hard life just like her father and grandfather.” She smiled and added, “She even told me she wished she had taken after me.”
I started driving again to cover the anguish of what I had to ask, “Why did you folks give me away?” I glanced at her and her eyes had teared up and she looked away. It was miles before she answered and I kept wondering if I had had the right to ask that question. I felt I did despite her evident sorrow. The answer came in a jumble as she said she was mostly overcome because her younger daughter, Ruth, had behaved so horribly when she didn’t get to see me, the baby, who had been born in Tucson. The grandfather had wanted to keep me but Naomi said he was the most difficult man she had ever known though he certainly hadn’t seen himself that way. In her long career as a teacher a number of her students had gotten pregnant and a number of them had kept their babies, but Dalva hadn’t shown the barest thread of the maternal. Naomi had disliked my father but years later realized that Dalva was equally at fault, probably more so. There wasn’t a remote prospect of immediate marriage because of the nature of the two and this was a difficult area to bring up an illegitimate child. The grandfather had died the year I was born and she felt ashamed to be relieved that the quarrels had ended. Countless times she had wondered if she shouldn’t have raised me and perhaps it was selfish but after her husband’s death in the Korean War her sanity had depended on her teaching at the country school down the road.
“I’m not blaming anyone anymore,” I said, and that was that for the time being.
We did fairly well at our Swainson’s hawk chore mostly because of Naomi who had an antique sense of responsibility. By the afternoon of our first day out it had become hot and humid and I was having a relapse in my interest in birds. My curiosity about my original family was incessant, and maybe a little clinical in the anthropological sense, but then I felt I had a right to know. Naomi refused to talk about my mother and father, saying that it would be improper, and that since I had hesitated this long two more days wouldn’t matter. She mostly spoke, at my insistence, of the background of the family which was eccentric enough for me to tirelessly want more.
On the second morning we were over at the Fort Niobrara refuge near Valentine and found two nests before noon and also saw three fine plump western diamondbacks. I came intentionally close enough to the third for it to coil up in anger. “Why bother it?” said Naomi, and I said in defense, “You could at least tell me his name.”
“Duane Stone Horse,” she said. “He was half Lakota the same as Dalva’s grandfather. I met his mother who was a fine woman.”
I didn’t dare go further beyond our implicit agreement, but she then asked if anyone had mentioned my own small share of Native blood, and I said mostly when I was younger. Children are quick to recognize differences, however slight. Later on it seemed to depend on how much time I spent in the sun, often a lot, or in college when my hair was very long. Once after an anthro class a Wahpeton Chippewa, who was a leader in the Native activist group, asked me why I was playing lily white and I said I was playing nothing. To show him I attended a meeting but my own privileged background made me feel like a hoax. Naomi listened to this carefully and we walked another hundred yards before she stopped abruptly and took my arm.
“Sometimes it must be terribly hard work to be a loner,” she said.
This was rather close to home and I wasn’t able to say anything. She sensed my discomfort and told me a wonderfully bawdy and sad story about their houseguest Michael, the historian, who had gotten himself involved with an underage local waitress. There were photos and angry parents, the father slugged him, and now his jaw was wired. He was staying at Naomi’s where he worked all night and slept most of the day. She was amused that I could identify the girl as the obvious knockout at Lena’s Cafe in town. She then asked me how my girlfriend was and on and off all afternoon I talked about J.M. and what I should do. We were eating dinner at the Peppermill in Valentine, where I was intent on proving to the owner that I could actually eat the two-pound porterhouse I had insisted on, when Naomi looked at me blankly and said, “God knows why she’d marry you at this point. She doesn’t want to be your anchor. That’s an improper job for a woman because she’ll soon be resented.”
This was a little disappointing but I wasn’t able to respond because an old rancher and his wife stopped by to say hello to Naomi. I was introduced as her grandson which gave me a tingle. This woman said, “Why yes, Ruth’s son,” and Naomi said, “No, Dalva’s son,” which blanched the woman somewhat though she seemed pleased to the point of beaming at me. When they left Naomi said that this wasn’t an area where anyone could hide unlike a city. You were welcome to have all the privacy you wished but people knew your family history from day one. She suddenly looked as tired as I was but said she hoped she hadn’t sounded cruel about J.M. Marriage was impossible enough without going into it with an unclear mind. I wasn’t sure I agreed but I had asked for advice not a quarrel.
Back at our motel we were saying good night and about to enter our separate rooms when she added that if I truly loved this woman I better give it all my energy because for both Dalva and herself it had only happened once. This was a cold thought that made my room seem very small indeed. In fact the ceiling was descending until I called J.M. who deftly reassured me. How could I think anything was wrong? Let’s stick to the plan. We’ll see each other every day if we wish. Surely with my apparent brains I could find a livable area where she could eventually teach. This all reminded me of my sisters who, when they hit the bottoms of their private hells, could still see a continuity in life that escaped me during all but my best equilibrium.
There was the vacant thought of how totally ordinary my “problem” was. A young man looks for the mother he’s never met other than within the confines of her womb, blood-warm and wet, discovering life in absolute but comforting darkness. She doubtless rode a horse while she was pregnant so I felt that! Newspapers, television, magazines and books have covered the situation. My Omaha mother was always sliding them my way, thinking it was my main torment rather than the daily view that the natural world was disintegrating. The comic aspect was that the distance between mother and son in the common mind could go away because the reports had been sequentially digested. That was that. Except for those who lived it every day. Like everyone else we were only supposed to behave and follow the national, interior manifest destiny of profit that was evidently the reason for the country and its inhabitants existing. The millions of rules were rather localized, my first poignant lesson being the dogs I saw in restaurants in France, and later, the countless miserably poor in ghettos, barrios and Native reservations, not to speak of my beloved nature which was everywhere scalped and diminished so that the lords of progress could make more bucks. Why would I wish to fit in this schema? All I had to do was find a more stationary niche because I loved J.M.
We left by dawn driving all the way over past Gordon to Walgren Lake only to discover our ferruginous hawk was a fiction. Birdwatchers can be both wistful and hopeful and send in inventive reports. My bird boss had a relentless informant who kept insisting he’d seen any number of gyrfalcons near Hastings, a notion much more remote than world peace.
Naomi started laughing over the matter while I was quite pissed off. We’d only seen two harriers and by midmorning it was almost ninety degrees during our long walk b
ack to the truck. She laughed until there were tears in her eyes and finally it was infective enough for me to join in. We left our valuables and binoculars on shore and walked into a reedy lake up to our necks which was even more funny. We sat in the shade of the truck for an hour half-dozing and chatting, then decided to bag it and head home.
This was a bit of a fuss when we reached Naomi’s at midafternoon. Frieda, the housekeeper at the old place, was testing the strength of Naomi’s porch swing with her big body and swollen face. She gestured at a screened window from which Michael’s snores emerged, and said that at his insistence they had drunk a full quart of butterscotch schnapps, the mere idea of which made my belly tremble. I had regretted not seeing him the other morning after Naomi had told me the nature of his work dealing with land conquest and Sioux extermination. She had said there was no point in trying to talk to a man with wired jaws.
I had already asked Naomi if I could camp back at the pond and she had joked that the idea was appropriate as she thought I was probably conceived there because Dalva and her “boyfriend” had used it as a hideout. She then blushed and threw up her hands, believing it an indiscretion. She made me a large ham sandwich and I was off until picnic morning, though not before Frieda told me that it was beyond her why any “asshole” would want to sleep outdoors, adding that she had done so dozens of times in the army in Nevada where she had met a Basque rapist that kept her captive. I stood there boggled by the information until she waved me away saying, “Go to it, kiddo.”
