The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  I found myself teary when I passed through Yakima. Martin was a specialist on everything awful that happened in human history and could pinpoint the locations on the world map. My American Literature class came right after Martin’s American History and the few brighter kids would come into my class quite disturbed, especially when Martin was teaching from the “Atlas of the North American Indian.” Martin was a map nut and believed you couldn’t understand events unless you located them geographically.

  When I reached Umatilla and tossed the Washington jigsaw piece into the Columbia River it occurred to me that in being upset about Martin I was also being upset about myself and my own age of sixty. My brain felt jiggly when I looked down at the river. Again, it was the sense of being without ground control. Viv was a bit paranoid and thought it was “others” who were in control but looking down at the broad powerful river I was on my own and my own trajectory certainly lacked the definition of river banks. A girl in a green skirt was leaning over a railing showing a lot of her brown legs and I felt uncomfortable because she was too young, maybe fourteen, for me to be looking at. I turned back to my car and felt further blurred by simple reality. Jesus Christ, toughen up. That’s what dad would say, “Toughen up.” He would make up awful stories to prove a point insisting that they were true. An example: there was little ranch boy with a crippled foot. He left his muddy boots outside and one morning when he slipped his crippled foot into the boot a baby rattlesnake that crawled into the boot during the night lay in wait. The boy’s crippled foot had to be amputated.” This kind of tale was told to me when I was upset over having broken the tip of my fly rod, or sprained my ankle sliding into second base on the rocky field we called a baseball diamond. The message was, bad things can get worse and dad thought this was very funny. Sure, our little brother Teddy was a mongoloid but a few miles down the road a farm family had a seven year old daughter who was encephalitic and her head was so huge, bigger than the biggest watermelon that it had to be propped up by a metal contraption at the county home. To my dad who was a young man during the Great Depression the only truly hopeless grievance was not to have a job, or not to have “work” as he called it. This idea brought me back to Martin’s contention that Americans are somewhat unique in that a smaller percentage of them are mere victims of historical chance and circumstances. For most of us anyway there was no overwhelming ground control that pushed us this way and that. Back during the Civil Rights nightmare dad had startled me by saying that if he was a black man getting pushed around he’d likely go to war against the whites. I was all for Martin Luther King and dad sounded like Malcolm X.

  I got a little confused by my reverie. Here I was in North Central Oregon and I couldn’t remember what Martin had had to say about the local Umatilla Indians. Something about them joining up with the Yakimas to go to war against the invading gold miners. Last night I had watched a few minutes of re-played Wimbledon from England before I slept and the babbling announcers kept talking about “unforced errors” and I was drawn to the idea. Here I was in very empty North Central Oregon where my own unforced errors played big from my brain’s movie projector against the immense screen of landscape. I had been too damned wishy-washy. I had let my disgust with teaching ruin my love of literature. In college I had had a fine lit teacher, a Jewish fellow from Brooklyn but then in college there were more proportionately intelligent students than I had had in high school. After class in college a group of us would follow this professor to his car in a remote parking lot hanging on his every word about Theodore Dreiser or John Dos Passos or Hart Crane or William Faulkner. I had lost my edge in my sentimentality about “the land” and I had finally lost Viv most probably because I had become a country bumpkin. Along came dashing Fred in his red sports car. So long, farmer.

  I had become inattentive and missed a couple of preplanned turns in my route, then stopped at a gas station to ask about a scenic route. An old man, older than me, traced out roads that were remote enough to not be susceptible to cell phone calls. Mine had rung three times when I was still near Interstate 84 but I wasn’t up to answering. Two of the calls were from Marybelle and the third was from my son Robert. Let them drift in the electronic void with their unspoken thoughts. I wanted to think through the idea that my college teacher had never for a moment lost enthusiasm for literature though he seemed to be the least popular man in the English department. On our last day of class he told us that no matter what we did for a living we should never absolve ourselves from being bipeds with brains. I had managed to do so, or at least tried pretty hard. Thoreau hadn’t sauntered around like an eco-ninnie (Ad’s term) but had dwelt on profound thoughts. Over a year ago I had sat out in the calving shed next to a space heater because it was a cold March night and I was waiting for a cow I named “Nancy” to give birth. She usually needed some help and I sat there reading a little book called From Burnt House to Paw Paw Robert had sent me. When Robert was a young boy we used to sit in a thicket next to the pond behind the barn and watch birds. Anyway, in this book the author is wandering around the Appalachians looking at birds and doing some solid thinking about life and art. I had snuffed out the dim bulb in the life of my mind pretending I was exclusively a Son of the Soil. For a change Nancy had a relatively easy birth. I only had to give a tug or two. Lola as usual went for the afterbirth and I had to limit her because it’s too rich and I didn’t want her to puke on her bed under the kitchen table. Believe it or not but Robert said he belonged to a group of gay bird watchers in San Francisco. He said that once a month they get up as early as four a.m. and drive up to a place called Pt. Reyes. He’s going to take me there for a picnic when I get to S.F.

  I had thought Oregon would be as green as photos of Ireland but down near Kimberly it was dry and brown and what they call high desert. I figured the green must be a couple hundred miles to the East toward the Pacific Ocean. What cattle I saw were a bit shy on weight unlike the plump cows of Nebraska.

  I pulled off the road and took a stroll up a hill in the Ochoco National Forest. I didn’t recognize the type of pine I was walking through which were more sparsely needled than the pines of Michigan. Looking upward at their boughs I tripped and fell painfully forward on my chest, my head narrowly missing a large rock. For unclear reasons I began laughing though it was an uncomfortable laughter. I slowly rolled over feeling a sharp ache in my left side ribs. When I was a kid out in the woods I’d wave my walking stick and say, “I’m the king of all I survey,” doubtless got from a children’s story. It was not exactly original to have exhausted one form of life and to try to turn to another. I had a sudden stroke of pure luck when a yellow and black headed Scott’s oriole landed in a branch of a pine directly above my head. We didn’t have this oriole back in Michigan but I was familiar with it from my third grade Audubon cards. I stared up at this bird and it stared back down at me. Parts of life are truly beautiful I thought. Here I was flat on my back in an alien forest with an intermittent throb in my ribs and along comes a bird yellow as liquid sun to keep me company. Better yet, the bird found me here and stopped to take a look. My friend Ad told me that in some primitive culture, I forget which, the souls of still born or aborted babies are thought to reside in birds. I wondered where Lola’s departed soul resided. She knew enough not to bother porcupines because when she was young she had gotten a few quills in her nose. However, she remained fascinated with them and would sit there under a tree and stare up at porcupines for hours. I discarded the porcupine as a home for Lola’s soul and then decided the subject was beyond my ken. Life is clueless in such matters.

  I hadn’t moved except to breathe and now the oriole descended to a lower branch less than ten feet from my head. My heart had fluttered with its wings. I knew that they liked grapes and wondered if the buttons on my shirt resembled grapes to the bird. If I said hello the bird would flee. I decided I would hang in there as long as the bird and that the pleasant chore of waiting on the bird was as much as I could handle at the present time. Maybe
our world had out devised itself and only a few superior people could keep up with the world’s speed. I was clearly not one of them. Now the oriole with its nearly garish color reminded me of when I was an agonized college sophomore thinking thoughts too heavy for my fragile head. For a brief month or so I came to know a poet-student my own age. He indulged my company at the coffee house because I was a good listener. He felt he was beyond hippieness as a lonely “space voyager through the history of world poetry.” He was utterly threadbare and sometimes would draw a can of Franco American spaghetti from his pack sack and open it with his Swiss Army knife. He was reasonably good looking and was often followed around by sorority girls. He mostly wore t-shirts and on all of them was printed in Spanish a line from a South American poet which translated meant, “On the day I was born God was sick.”

  Three ravens came over, spotted me, and gave their unusual noisy alarm. My oriole fled. I made my way down the hill to the car holding my tender chest. The “Fun Facts” that came with the puzzle said that Oregon was the Beaver State, the bird the Western Meadowlark, and the flower the Oregon Grape. The motto fascinated me: “Alis Volat Propiis” which means, “She flies with her own wings.” That would be nice if it included men.

  CALIFORNIA

  Early in the evening I drove over the California border south of Klamath Falls but then turned around and drove back into Oregon thinking it wasn’t fair to not have a night’s sleep in Oregon. That’s an even-minded liberal for you! It’s hard with five weaned piglets because every single one except the inevitable runt will try to get more than their share of the food. It is apparently part of their non-democratic nature. My friend Ad says we should run a big pig trough through the main hall of the U.S. Congress. He even wrote a letter to the newspaper to say so and lost two out of three of his remaining Republican patients. The last of the faithful was a lumberman mogul’s granddaughter who had come to despise all politicians. She had liked the older Bush but thought Junior to be “craven.” She said this at the post office and a nearby school teacher had wondered what the word “craven” meant.

  I was giddy after fifteen hours in the car and stumbled in a ditch when I stopped to take a photo of a group of late spring Angus calves. There was still an ache in my chest from my previous fall and I thought here and there throughout the land older people are falling down. The calves only took nominal interest in me except for a single bull calf who snorted in playful anger. I had a sudden burst of memory of several springs ago when a dozen of my calves came down with common scours, luckily not bloody scours which is so often fatal. (Scours is a form of acute diarrhea). I was up several nights with the calves and their concerned mothers. I had a cot with a sleeping bag in the barn so I wouldn’t be disturbing Viv who could be a real bear when I inadvertently woke her. I lost one little girl and it was a sad late April dawn when I buried the poor soul out behind the corncrib. The burial mystified Lola.

  I checked into a cheap motel just south of Klamath Falls to balance out my extravagance the night before in Moses Lake. I poured a small whiskey and pondered the meaning of the art reproduction of the sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers above the bed. Was this donkey print following me? I checked my cell phone. The ringer had been off all day long, a few bars of the “William Tell Overture” which I found irritating but had been selected by Marybelle back in Valentine, Nebraska. To show that life has balance the tiny window told me that there had been three calls each from Marybelle, Robert, and Viv of all people, the idea of the latter making my heart flutter despite my full swallow of whiskey. The calls were mixed in order of arrival. Robert was concerned about my “well being.” Marybelle was concerned that I wouldn’t “communicate” with her. Twice Vivian called to say to call her back “immediately.” Marybelle’s second call was to say that she was thinking of cutting off her hair because that was what her friend had done immediately before being hospitalized in a mental facility. Robert called for the date and approximate time of my arrival, then called again to say that he had spoken to Marybelle about their mutual fears and concerns about my mental well being. Marybelle’s third call was demanding my estimated time of arrival in San Francisco. She also gave me the number of a Minneapolis travel agent so I could call in a credit card number in order to prepay a ticket for San Francisco.

  I was tempted to pour myself a second whiskey but decided self-denial was in order. Somewhere in my weak heart I hoped that Viv’s third call would hold an ounce of pleasant human sentiment. No such luck. Her voice was brittle and instructed me to drive to Robert’s with all possible speed and Fed Ex her power of attorney to clean up some legal details remaining from our divorce. This seemed a suspicious deal.

  The phone thing was much worse than stepping on a dog turd or fresh cow plot in the dark. On my way across the parking lot of the motel to a diner for supper I envied the first miners who were in the area a hundred fifty years ago without the convenience of a cell phone. Dad always inferred to me that he had a secret life in addition to the one over which mother stood as a domestic autocrat. Dad certainly wouldn’t own a cell phone which only made the wandering man a target with the number providing a guaranteed bull’s-eye.

  At the diner the meat loaf special was densely mediocre what with its ladle of generic gravy and instant mashed potatoes and canned green beans. It was a supper that Lola would have enjoyed. I was clearly losing weight far from my own kitchen. I am an average cook but I work at it. Years ago Viv said, “No more sex until you stop using oregano in everything.” Up until she got her real estate job Viv was a real tiger in the sack. She bought some mail-order nighties that were real show stoppers.

  I had ordered a piece of apple pie with scarcely any apple slices in it, mostly glutinous filler. They have a lot of apples out here in the northwest and I pondered why they would cheapen up on the apple content? Searching for apple bits in the filler that resembled cow snot I traced the origins of some of my unrest. I hummed a strain of the song, “California, Here I Come.” It was always a common assumption among us English majors that California was a bad place and its effects on the life of the United State malodorous. The entertainment industry was trashing the soul life of our great nation. That sort of thing. Here I was on the verge of entering the belly of this vast western beast.

  More troubling was one of Robert’s three phone messages where he had said Marybelle seemed to have “a good head on her shoulders” and her multiple concerns for my character were credible. Robert was always a language buff and is doubtless a sucker for Marybelle who talks in paragraphs on the phone. There was a sudden troubling thought that nobody seems to know much of anything. Everything in our culture seems to be marinating in the same plastic sac and the ingredients are deeply suspect.

  Before I slept under the stare of the flowery donkey I watched the big, fast girls in the Wimbledon tournament. Their Amazonian beauty gave me a nut tingle for Marybelle. Mother used to remind me to count my blessings and maybe it should have been “mixed blessings.” I was nodding off when I thought with absolute delight that I wasn’t worrying about my cherry crop. If it’s not frost, or the rare possibility of hail which only hit me slightly in 1988 there are a bunch of things that can hurt you right now about two weeks before the crop is ready. High wind off Lake Michigan can bruise the fruit, say one of those black line squalls with wind around 70 m.p.h. The worst thing, though, is wet weather which is always possible up in our area which is well known among meteorologist for its major thunder storms. Wet weather can bring on cherry leaf spot which has developed a resistance to the fungicides we spray. We had 40 acres of tarts, and 10 of sweets. If it’s over warm and wet your sweets can crack open just before harvest. I thought of going into apples for a while but too many farmers got into apples and there’s an oversupply. That’s true of cherries too where we’ve been overgrowing demand by about ten percent.

  Shorn of the demanding farm, and heart warmed by a Wimbledon Amazon howling in victory I clicked off the television and fell into
a deep sleep waking at 4 a.m. after a lurid sex dream of Viv at the height of her sexuality which was in her thirties and early forties before her real estate career kicked in. We were energetic lovers to say the least. I had an urge to call her but then it was only 7 a.m. in Michigan and she might be with her lover Fred. I felt a pang of jealousy, the all time hopeless emotion. I fell into a doze for fifteen minutes but then recalled a silly dream I had back in college where I was told that I would become a jubilant man if I read page five hundred of a certain novel, but when I got to the library in a hurried half hour later I discovered that the book only had three hundred pages.

  I was back across the border into California at dawn with only the smallest trace of English major foreboding. Northern California is an extraordinarily beautiful and varied landscape and is totally disassociated from the criminal mayhem on the L.A. based television programs Viv favored wherein everyone is tough and full of smart talk and cars chase each other at incomprehensible speeds on crowded freeways. Of course the countryside way up north around our deer camp in the Upper Peninsula has no resemblance to Flint and Detroit. In these remote areas you lose the notion that America has worn itself out much in the manner that I have. How well I remember my Whitmanesque intoxication with spring on the beautifully landscaped university campus, with so many flowers that wouldn’t grow in the colder regions of my northern homeland.