by Jim Harrison
One of my most critical woman friends unfortunately turned up during Nelse’s visit last fall. She’s certainly too young for me, about thirty, and must have had an unpleasant father for which I am an ambiguous substitute. Nelse managed to conceal his amusement about my discomfort over her arrival, though not his polite cynicism about her character. She’s openly scathing about my profession of geology and its relation to mining, and Nelse pointedly asked her if her Porsche was made out of plastic. She then tried to charm him though she would have had better luck with a fence post. She came up with an odd theory that amused me for a short time to the effect that women in the Southwest are more interested than those in the East in astrology because the stars are far more visible in the Southwest. With all the ambient light along the eastern seaboard it is difficult to see the stars with any clarity. Nelse momentarily thought she said “astronomy” for “astrology” and there was a minor rupture with his “Oh bullshit!” I suppose it takes age to be more interested in absurdities than being right.
There was a further dissembling when she said that as an aspiring writer she hoped to spend her life defending nature, a noble enough ambition, but then Nelse quipped that the natural world was something you had to know and study in particular. It wasn’t simply a static art museum, or a beautiful collection of photographs that you guarded against the hordes of which you are a part. She was miffed and asked him for his qualifications, to which he replied, “None,” that you didn’t need credentials to see that most of our virgin forests had been razed, the prairies and Great Plains almost totally scalped and denuded by overgrazing and bad farming practices, not to speak of the oceans which were coming closer to irretrievable depletion, or the out-of-check population surge which in itself clearly spelled out doom. Nelse himself charmlessly spelled out “doom” in a newscaster’s faux baritone. She poured herself a gigantic glass of tequila and looked to me for defense. I tried to joke that as mammals we quite naturally bore some resemblance to other mammals, say the widely spread Rodentia.
She went to the sliding doors of the patio and looked out as if she could see southward into the high desert night. When your eyes became accustomed to the dark you could always make out the Sierra San Antonio mountains of Mexico with the border, a simple fence, only a few miles away. Carlos got up from his cushion and put himself between her and the door to prevent her from doing something stupid like going outside without his master. The other dogs were kenneled to keep them from chasing javelinas or abusing the poor souls who were trying to migrate across the border.
I glanced at Nelse who seemed to be trying to ignore her trim figure. He then asked her what her religion was and she said, “Nature” in the spirit of baiting him. Sometimes your company will give you a headache but people as sheer phenomena usually outweigh my simply opting out and going to bed alone. Nelse rattled on rather listlessly about how the theology of land rape seemed to be a cornerstone of the Christian religion and she answered rather sharply that you couldn’t blame that on Jesus. Nelse had the dining table spread with the paperwork involved with disposing of the Native artifacts and at least pretended to go back to work. She sat down rather dreamily beside me on the sofa after having refilled her tequila. I wondered, as always, if such quarrels were anything more than little dances of our general unrest.
I got up before daylight and turned off in Sonoita for the Canello Hills when it was still early morning. I felt an untoward amount of unrest because invariably when the blacktop turns to gravel with thirty miles yet to go I experience a great welling of homesickness, a kind of free-floating desperation to reach my place which since 1949 has been my retreat from all I did not like about the world. Only today the homesickness didn’t arrive and I had to blame the way Naomi had again pushed other considerations aside in my mind. On balance I’d have preferred to be back in her farmhouse on this Saturday morning. The ghost of my brother was benign, and the other ghosts in the area had had their energies that produced ill feelings almost completely dissipated. Sometimes a “summa cum laude” won’t help a jot or tittle in understanding yourself, and might even mitigate against it. I have never even accepted how inevitably we are our fathers’ sons, for better or worse but mostly in the middle. On some of my long adolescent inward journeys which now would be called “depression” my father would chide me, saying, “Why don’t you crawl out of your butt and take a look at the world?” If you’re in a precious, somewhat Keatsian mood this will strike you as repellently vulgar. During one of these periods he knew very well I had a disabling crush on a girl a half dozen miles away who it would be generous to say was as dumb as an armadillo. John Wesley would say, Why don’t you just fall for one of the brood hens? I’d ride a horse way down the road to see her but horses didn’t turn this ranch girl’s head, even my splendid buckskin Felix. I was fourteen at the time, it was June and my mother was off in Rhode Island, a trip I wouldn’t take for fear of losing this girl I didn’t have. I stayed in my room for days playing the Victrola to feed my aching heart. My dad knocked one morning and said in a level voice that he understood what I was going through, and all I thought was, How could this old bastard understand anything but horses, cows and making money? Of course I said nothing because my throat was choked with melancholy. He then said that if I’d take a day-long walk around the property he’d go into town and get me a Ford Roadster, not a new one but good enough to turn a girl’s head away from cowboys. He did and it worked all too well. Within a few days she was a decal you couldn’t peel off and I realized for the first time in my young life that getting what you want and not getting what you want were somewhat similar in emotional effect.
When I came over a certain rise, almost a mountain pass with red-stalked manzanita everywhere and alligator juniper and Mexican pinyon pine, I could see my place nearly twenty miles away. I was sure that most of my nagging lack of homesickness came from a long-term squabble involving a settlement of about a dozen Mexican families seven miles to the west of my place. Both of my housekeepers, Emilia and Luisa, lived there as did my occasional handyman, Jorge, who was a bit of a professional bad guy. I’d judged him to be nearly as strong as my father after first meeting him when he threw a good-sized fence post most of the way across a corral at a rank mule who had killed his goat. The trouble at the settlement was that the Mexican gentleman who owned the land in the area intended to bulldoze the small adobe houses, perhaps making it more attractive real estate, I don’t know. I had tried to buy him out but he intended to hold on after the occupants were gone. After all of my years down in Mexico there was still something impenetrable to Latino businessmen as if they owned more emotional ties to their businesses than their gringo cousins in greed. I had assured Emilia and Luisa that we could build them a house on my property but that did not lessen their grief. All of their aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews and friends would be gone over the mountains to the north to the small village of Patagonia, to me a wonderful place, but thirty long miles away to Emilia and Luisa.
There was simply no way out of this quandary. I didn’t have much sympathy for myself though I had a good deal of emotional dependence on this little community. There’s not enough sympathy in our systems to include people with sizable bank accounts and portfolios barring, of course, their illnesses or those of their loved ones. When I first heard the news and tried to intervene the year before, I was forced into an admission that though I love my solitude and privacy it is changed into something distasteful if it is enforced by outside powers. Then it becomes solitude without freedom. I’d far rather live smack dab in the middle of New York City than in enforced solitude without Christmas tamales, guitar music, children giving me nickels to buy them candy when I drive up to the small store in Washington Camp, sitting under a cottonwood on a warm summer evening cooking and eating carne asada and drinking cold beer with anyone that comes along, riding arroyos in the high country helping someone look for lost cattle, or having someone’s plump citified cousin from Hermosillo dance with me an
d perhaps take me to bed, or driving five old ladies down to Magdalena for the Virgin of Guadalupe celebration. These women all made the hundred-mile walk across the border and mountains until they became too old to do so. Emilia’s mother made the walk for the last time at seventy-nine. I was ill equipped to comprehend the power of this motivation, the visual image of a very old lady in a flowered housedress carrying a plastic milk carton of water, scrambling over the scree and shoulders of high country arroyos on a hike that would devastate physical fitness buffs.
The question, of course, is how you make your soul clap its hands and sing. My bones seemed built out of incomprehension. The road was rutted enough by winter rains so that the car drove itself. I was ringed by four mountain ranges in this valley but then natural beauty seems to offer no more than you can bring to it. There was scarcely a patch in a thousand square miles I hadn’t covered on foot. Looking down you see blue and black gama, side oats gama, curly mesquite, sprangle-top, and the grassy skin of the local earth. Straight up is invariably sky. Beneath the earth’s skin are the minerals I’ve professionally taken advantage of as surely as preachers and priests try to mechanize our souls. I was camped last spring on the east slope of Baboquivari and had the curious sensation that the moon was shining all the way through me and when I mentally stepped back I saw that it was so. When I tried to help both the T’ohono Odom and the Hopi with mineral leases I noted that they had a cultural hesitancy to take advantage of anything whereas it is the bedrock of our culture. Up in my own country it was apparently our nature to kill seventy million buffalo just as it was our nature to destroy the Native cultures. History will not help your soul clap its hands and sing but it is unconscionable to proceed without knowing it. In college I was obsessed with the beauty of studying the morphology of rivers but then all of the jobs in this area were with the enemies of rivers. I was in Glen Canyon and when they drowned it the similarity to the crucifixion was inescapable. There is also a great beauty in the study of geology but not in its use. I suppose I could have taught it in its purest form but good colleges and universities are invariably in locations I don’t care to live. I noted that when Nelse visited and scanned the library in my den he passed over any titles of literary merit. When I questioned why he didn’t take “advantage” of such fine work he said it usually made his brain feel too raw. This reminded me of my father giving up his ambition to be an artist which I later saw as a resistance to the utter vulnerability of that calling.
I detoured for an hour out onto Jones Mesa, skirting the fingers of several arroyos and arriving at the one I wanted. One of these days, probably not all that far in the future, I’ll no longer be able to make my way down into it and climb back out. There is a spring down there, a very small one, beneath a granitic outcropping that during the driest times before the summer rains attracts an uncommon number of birds and animals. I have no urge to find the names to all the birds as Naomi does but then I have done so, after all, with rocks. A scant ten feet from the spring, a survivor of floods from previous times, is a boulder with a large indentation that serves as a curved seat. This stone chair is not very hospitable during cold weather but on most mornings by noon it is ravishingly comfortable. When you doze off in this chair your sleep seems dense, far deeper than normal, and when you are awake you seem hyperconscious. Of course the most well-trained parts of my brain tell me this is likely nonsense but I’m under no obligation to listen to them all of the time. In fact in my mid-sixties a small part of the time is more than enough. I was certainly amused when Einstein said that he had no admiration for scientists who only drilled countless holes in thin pieces of board. Phenomena are far more interesting than my reductive conclusions.
I dozed for a few minutes, then awoke after a dream vision of Naomi sitting on her porch swing in a winter coat, her obnoxious crow beside her. I wondered if that was what she was doing at that very moment, not a profitable direction of inquiry. After I had showed him the way Nelse camped here for three days instead of his announced two, saying that he had lost track of time and had forgotten to come back. I was a little irked but still didn’t want to disturb him so glassed the canyon with my binoculars from the far end until I caught him on a high ridge glassing back at me.
When the wind is from the southeast you can occasionally catch a faint, feline odor from a mountain lion lair far up the canyon wall. There are often pugmarks and scat near the spring and several times I’ve found a dissected deer carcass in the immediate area, barely more than a hide and the larger bones. A couple of times I’ve noted smaller tracks which means its a female’s dwelling and she lives within striking distance of her restaurant. Nelse had said jokingly that he loved sitting there by the hour because his father’s last name was Stone Horse.
The dogs, who can hear my vehicle miles away, met me at the gate except for Carlos who always stood at least thirty yards back, baying and howling. There were six in all, including three Airedales, two English setters, and a Labrador retriever. The last three were from my quail-hunting habit, a sport that has waned for me in recent years. So much of my youth was spent shifting back and forth with my mother between home, Arizona and Rhode Island that I couldn’t fairly keep the dogs that John Wesley did. We bird hunted since we were twelve but the day after Christmas I would bid the dogs goodbye and entrain with my mother for the Tucson area, nearly a dozen times more populated now then it was in the thirties. And in the summer I was with her often enough at Wickford so that our dogs would make it pointedly clear to me that their true master was John Wesley though they bore the most affection for Lundquist. All of our animals were drawn to him to an uncanny degree so that even our rankest horses and bulls were practically his lapdogs. I think it must have been the muttering, singsong, nonsense language he used with them, also the slow, graceful nonhostile gestures he used in their presence. I’ve never known a man who had less self-importance with creatures. Whatever his self-invented language it was closer to their own.
Anyway, certain resentments built in my youth and I swore that when I had my own home quarters there would be as many dogs as I wished and there always have been. In my frequent trips, some of them quite long throughout my life, my homesickness has centered on the dogs and spread out from there. The dog graveyard is fenced off from the few well-bred steers I keep for our beef meals, including one apiece for Emilia and Luisa. Long ago Emilia and I were lovers, but then she married and made sure she put her young friend Luisa in my direction. Luisa also married ten years back and now I’m godfather to a half dozen of their children. As opposed to the cliché of poorly educated women Emilia is a student of the stock market, and also handles any legal and accounting matters I have, making the trip to Tucson once a month. Lawyers and accountants prefer her company to my own because I have what psychologists call an “attention deficit disorder” in this area.
My homecoming dinner was one of my favorites though quite simple, a posole made from the neck and shanks of a mule deer Luisa’s brother had recently shot. The cartilaginous nature of the neck naps this hominy stew so that it glistens. In Luisa’s kitchen garden there are many varieties of herbs and chiles, including epazote, needed for the posole, and a number of rows of garlic which is wonderful when so fresh the peeled cloves stick to your fingers. Emilia is a poor cook compared to the younger Luisa, and often carps about the lengthy grocery list she is expected to take to Tucson. I will frequently act as Luisa’s “sous chef,” sitting at the counter on a stool and grinding away in her ancient metate, and fetching what she wishes from the garden.
That evening after dinner we tried to force a gaiety that was improbable given the settlement problems down the road. It was easy enough during dinner because of the preoccupation with the good food. There’s nothing like a sensual delight to banish enervation, but when we were finished full reality struck us quite hard. We tried to watch Marathon Man on the VCR and it was at least mildly diverting until Emilia quipped that their present situation with their landlord was like “living in a
dentist’s chair.” We had a somewhat quaky three-way hug, then went to our separate bedrooms.
I can’t say that I was morose because I saw this change in the way I lived my life coming for nearly a year, while Emilia and Luisa had visceral responses to the change every day. Naomi and I had spoken humorously about a “half-year” living arrangement, or trial marriage, but then I had been brought up rather sharply when she’d asked why ever would I wish to finally get married at my age? But I’ve loved you for nearly forty-five years I said, to which she answered that marriage might ruin it. I’ve never had any particular interest in Orientalia but a friend in San Francisco pointed out an old Ch’an saying, “Ashes don’t return to wood.” I took this to mean “What are we waiting for?” though there are a number of other subtler ramifications. Perhaps “Why are you holding back?” is more accurate to the feeling. I don’t know if I’ve ever believed in anything more strongly than the existence of Naomi and that must be partly what love is. Our hearts yawn when we try to pretend we care for someone more than we do. Love itself seems quite involuntary. I no longer put much stock in any strict ideas of rationality. Geology itself can turn the head toward eternal questions and when a young woman brought me a bowling-ball-size rock containing the broken femur bone of a Jurassic lizard I could tell her all about the “what” but not the “why.” I know nearly as much about astronomy as Nelse as there’s no better place to look at stars because of the absence of ambient light than the San Rafael Valley, but I’m not as intemperate as he is about the general human ignorance of the stars. It is simply too large a question mark for most to bear continuous preoccupation. One night a few years back while camped on a mountain saddle I awoke and some sort of visual distortion led me to believe that the moon and Venus were but a few feet away, and the stars that surrounded them only a few feet further. I was instantly covered with sweat, and jumped from my sleeping bag to stoke my juniper fire out of trepidation. But maybe they aren’t really that far away if you think of the relative meaninglessness of distance. I think it was Heraclitus who said that the moon is the width of a woman’s thigh.
