by Jim Harrison
An hour into our ride my horse drew up lame from a stone bruise on the “frog” of its hoof. Paul whistled in the English setters to adjust their range to our new slow pace as we headed toward home on foot. We were in the foothills between Mowry Wash and Cherry Creek, on the edge of Meadow Valley Flat. Paul knew two young naturalists from the University of Arizona who had been in the area for quite some time checking out reports and looking for the Mexican gray wolf, or lobo. Paul had been searching for three months himself and had one sighting at twilight down near Lochiel on the border. South of there in Sonora the country was enormous and capable of nurturing a resurgence of the mammal. To the southwest we could see the sun coming up over the Huachucas, the vision of which was spoiled a little by the immense Defense installation there, including a cave that held God knows what. At least the Huachucas were diminished for me, that is: Paul’s impenetrable private religion didn’t allow ordinary fixtures like the Defense Department to disturb him. Even his inability to sleep more than a few hours a day had long been beyond his concern. As far as I had ever been able to determine the central aspects of his ethic were rather stern notions of generosity and accountability. You were accountable in the strictest sense for every moment you were alive, though it was never clear to me who you were accountable to; I had certainly never seen his records but knew he supported and educated young people, mostly orphans, in Loreto, Agua Prieta, Tucson, Mulege, and other places I didn’t know about. If you were rich you were to give of your money and yourself—if poor, your “self” would do fine. He was the most deeply idiosyncratic and solitary man I had ever known. Part of his beliefs included not taking credit for anything or drawing conclusions. I asked him once about the largish number of books of a religious nature in his library, most of which were dated in the flyleafs from the late forties. He said that that was when he discovered he was sterile and needed a bit of what he called “consolation.” He felt his grandfather had been “nearly” a great man until he became murderous. He was rather pleased that the Northridge name would die out because they had done quite enough “for and against” the world, and a name was anyway a patrilineal artificiality. He spent a great deal of time alone—or “standing by the fire” as he called it—or otherwise he would be of no use to anyone. He wished to offer his clarity, not his confusion. These were mostly my own conclusions for he was far too modest to be doctrinal. Years before when I was an ardent graduate student I had accused him of being, in turn, a Sufi, a Taoist, a Zen Buddhist, a Christian, and possibly a sexual compulsive-obsessive. He had only complimented me on my reading, and asked about Charlene whom I had once brought down on vacation, though he later said that he didn’t think anyone was anything except to the extent they thought they were. I had suspected Charlene of sneaking off to his bedroom but never asked her. Paul had given her what he called a “scholarship” to go to Paris after she graduated from the University of Minnesota.
The walk home took nearly three hours, well into the heat of the morning. We detoured up an arroyo to reach a rock pool that still held water in May. The rock pool was fed by a mere trickle of a spring, really just a seep, but enough to make the area densely green. There were javelina tracks everywhere and a covey of Cambers quail flushed out not fifty feet away, their crisp wingbeats echoing up the canyon walls. We both were very hungry and made a pact not to talk about food as we watched the horses drink, then the dogs drink and take turns wallowing in a small patch of mud.
Paul had been trying to find Ruth a suitable man—they had had dinner twice in the past week, and Ruth was coming down in the evening. He had met the grocer and thought it an impossible match because they were too similar—quiet, rather melancholy twins. Paul’s neighbor was an intelligent though bumbling and unsuccessful rancher and Paul had high hopes for the intended introduction. His reasoning was that Ruth had plenty of money, and in his divorce from a wealthy woman the man had been given a ranch he couldn’t afford to maintain. The man was a first-rate amateur archaeologist, among a number of other wild enthusiasms. He and Paul had made several trips down into the Barranca del Cobre and everywhere in Tarahumara country together.
“What about me?” I said. “He sounds pretty good.”
“I’ll get him in the house and you ladies can work it out. He has two rather awful teenagers the mother ignores, though they’re away at school.”
The rest of the way home from the spring we talked about a penchant toward manic-depressive tendencies, however subdued, that ran in the family and which he viewed as distinctly genetic. He felt that an insistence on an intense level of consciousness carried with it a susceptibility to odd forms of mental disease. Paul thought that Ted and Ruth’s son, Bradley, who was at the Air Force Academy, was due some day for a serious crack-up. Paul was the only member of the family that Bradley cared for—even gracious Naomi was viewed as just another “weak sister.”
After lunch and a short siesta I went out to Paul’s study to look at the diary we had kept together during the month in Baja after Duane’s suicide. I had never read it before and for some reason this was the first time I felt fully capable of looking at it. I was addled by the idea of asking either Paul or Ruth to check out Tucson birth records for me but dismissed it. Perhaps mistakenly I felt confident that Michael would know how to proceed.
The diaries turned out to be a surprise and a delight, though a few portions were a little frightening. The only therapeutic aspects were implicit rather than explicit: long walks at daylight before the fullness of heat arrived, and in the evening when it subsided; comments on the progress of the free English lessons I gave (Paul volunteered my services) to a couple of dozen locals every afternoon at three; my efforts to become a really good cook under the tutelage of Paul’s cook, a fragile, tiny woman named Epiphania who couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds; and, finally, the comments of the grief-stricken insomniac. All of the passages except the latter were written during the hour before dinner while we were having drinks, which were fruit-and-rum or -tequila concoctions.
PAUL
On the third day she can see all the way across the room. This morning she lifted her eyes from her feet more frequently while we walked. I gave an ambulatory lecture on Cortez—his namesake sea beside us as we walked—which would have been futile yesterday. History allows but few men to figuratively rape and kill a million virgins, revive and rape them again and again, all in the name of God and Spain.
DALVA
Somewhere my son is fifteen. I began teaching English today to a motley group whose actual ages run from seven, a street urchin, to a retired fishing-boat captain of seventy-three, with the unlikely name of Felipe Sullivan. This has long been an unsuccessful project of Paul’s and I have a weathered stack of paperback texts put out by the University of Michigan for the teaching of English as a foreign language. Their plan involves the repetition teaching of specific phrases under the supposition that the language, given the comprehension of enough phrases, will all fall together, though perhaps not in this lifetime.
Late at night: I think I hear Duane breathing outside the window. The music from the cantina down the beach stopped an hour ago. An old man kept singing a ranchero song in a raspy voice with a refrain that went “two friends, two horses, two guns.” The song does not end happily. Someone, perhaps a sentimental murderer, must have been paying the man to repeat the song. I thought the breathing I heard was a prowler, though I can’t imagine anyone getting past Paul’s mongrels. I whisper, “Duane, is that you?” The sound of the breathing increases. I repeat the question in Sioux and the breathing grows louder. I began to cry, and then go out to the front porch which is bright with moonlight. Paul is sitting there watching an enormous pod of dolphin not fifty yards off the beach, swimming slowly on the surface and breathing deeply. It is all so grand I begin to shiver. After a half-hour or so they swim out to sea, crisscrossing in the sheen of moonlight on the water. We go back to bed without speaking.
PAUL
C. S. Sherri
ngton said, “The brain is an enchanted loom, weaving a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one, a shifting harmony of subpatterns.” This seems written by someone who lived in the water! On her sixth day here Dalva states that her beloved could not have done otherwise and that she couldn’t imagine him connected to life-support systems in a VA hospital. She is writing a letter to a woman in Los Angeles for Captain Felipe Sullivan. I haven’t told her that I have written a dozen or so of these letters for Felipe since he met the woman with her husband on his charter boat in 1956. She has never answered and he had finally told me that my words lack the necessary romantic touch though I quote him directly. “Oh, return to me, beloved flower of the north,” etc. Dalva and Felipe are sitting at a card table on the porch struggling with his feelings as the sun sets behind the Sierra de la Gigante. She is still in her brief bathing suit and his old goat’s eyes flicker to her legs, then back into the hacienda, fearful that I am watching him. Now she is laughing, and loudly repeats an approprioate line: “We men of the sea are whales of love who dive deeply, roosterfish who caress the shore in the spring, beautiful sharks who never tire of the struggles of love,” etc. She now sees the locals as individuals and is learning their names. She no longer stops in mid-sentence and has begun to ask what particular mountains are called, also what kind of fish she is eating, what kind of mixes the mongrel are, and who is my current girlfriend.
DALVA
I found a snorkel and fins in a closet but discovered I could not use them, thinking as I did that the bottom of the sea was a repository of bodies. I never had him for my own, and when I did it was only the afternoon and part of an evening, plus that short time so long ago. I have read enough about suicide to know that in certain cases the conditions of life have become untenable. If he had come back to Nebraska or South Dakota he would have called me and we would have married at his insistence for his benefits; then he would have ridden far out on the prairie at night on his old buckskin and have done the same thing. I find myself hoping that Capt. Sullivan will get an answer. He admitted to me today he has not received one in sixteen years. This love of his was based on a single kiss in the galley while the husband was fighting a grouper, which makes me reflect on the depth of the irrationality involved in love. Because I am an outsider and speak Spanish I have been sought out for advice by several young girls of thirteen years or so. Their problems are love problems. I spoke to the boyfriend of one-a cowboy from the interior who was so nasty, preening, feral, also filthy, that I wondered at the craziness that would make her want to give herself to him. Curious about the medical details of the actual “heartache” that diminishes a little in its intensity each day.
PAUL
Dalva said something on our hike this morning that reminded me of the character of longing. The mist was thickish and we could hear sea lions bellowing and she supposed they were calling out to absent partners, a hollowish roar sweeping out over the water, a noise so grand you wanted to bow to it. I remembered the only truly wonderful trip Father took us on. John Wesley and I were in our early teens, and mother was still pretty healthy but showing the first signs of disintegration by drugs and alcohol—a combination that has nothing new about it. Dad had decided we should have an outing in order to see the Konza, the last remaining tall-grass prairie down in Kansas. It was June and I remember the dense, sweeping purple of the pasqueflower mixed with the yellow of the goldenrod. It was the middle of the Great Depression and I was somewhat embarrassed by our Packard, though Dad and John Wesley didn’t seem to mind. I saw Dad give some money to a man and his big family with a broken-down truck at a gas station. Wesley asked him why he did it, and he gruffly said “Only an asshole won’t give away money.” It is often forgotten that some of us went through the Depression untouched. We didn’t camp very well without Lundquist to pick up the ample slack. Dad got drunk with some horse people in Great Bend and John Wesley and I talked to an actual prostitute outside the hotel. The next day was hot and Dad slept in the backseat, letting us do the driving, though we barely knew how and were heavy on the gas. When we reached the virgin, tall-grass prairie with its shorter blue grama, and the bluestem, which grew up to fourteen feet high, Dad plunged right in with us in tow. In short order we were lost, and remained lost for a couple of hours. Dad and Wesley finally lifted me up to Dad’s shoulders and I saw a distant farm truck. When we finally made it out we drank and took a swim in a cold clear stock tank, and Dad began to laugh. We joined in, rolling and kicking on the ground in our wet underpants. He later said that he had wondered how settlers got lost on the prairie and now he knew. When things began to go bad I thought of this day with great longing. I would read Dickens to my very sick mother on hot summer afternoons in Omaha while Dad and John Wesley were hundreds of miles to the northwest on the farm. It was as if we had chosen up sides and there was nothing to be done about it.
I had barely finished this passage when Paul came out to his study. It was five in the afternoon and he was bringing me a cold margarita in a big brandy snifter. We talked about the last few days in Loreto and the school picnic for my students that Paul had hosted, an all-afternoon-and-evening-and-half-the-night affair with a ragtag band, beer, tequila, shrimp and spiny lobster, piglets and cabrito, a barrel of menudo for the end of it all. Paul said that when he’s in Loreto the locals speak to him of the party fourteen years later.
Paul looked through a file cabinet, found an envelope, and handed it to me, saying that it wasn’t too important but he had meant to send it to me while I was in Brazil in the mid-seventies. He and his friend Douglas had written it so I would remember the Loreto area as it was during my recovery, not what had become of the the area in recent years. Douglas had introduced me to the Cabeza Prieta and I asked how he was doing. Paul said that he was busy shocking normal folks and had just headed north with his family to spend the summer with grizzly bears. Douglas was another living fatality of our last war but, unlike Duane, had the sort of functional and literate intelligence that gave him the perspective to stay alive.
Ruth arrived at the last minute before dinner, running late because she had been reading a book called Arctic Dreams and had been carried away—the book must have been fascinating because Ruth was one of those overly punctual souls who arrived everywhere quite early. When we were girls she’d suggest we go riding at eight-fifteen in the morning and she meant eight-fifteen on the dot. I suppose I’m the opposite—dates and numbers have always been an abstraction to me.
It turned out she rather liked Paul’s neighbor, Fred, the divorced rancher. I felt noncommittal about him after a half-hour’s chat; he wore slightly too much cologne, his informal ranch clothes were too precisely tailored and didn’t seem quite comfortable, the sort of clothes a CEO would wear at a chuck-wagon outing at a Phoenix convention. He was terribly bright and knowledgeable, but lacked the “indentations,” the unique character traits I look for in men. I imagined that he ate donuts with a fork and folded his underpants. This trace of bitchiness in me reminded me of what my Santa Monica gynecologist friend had told me—that I was too “autolelic,” i.e., I only did things for and of themselves and lacked an overall “game plan.” At least with Fred there were no edges against which one could bruise—he had taken care of himself so well he’d likely grow old and die in a single minute when the time was appropriate. In contrast to these observations, which mostly meant I was overdue in getting out of southern California, Paul and Fred were having an engrossing discussion about the Apache wars wherein it finally took five thousand U. S. Army troops to capture the last seven Apaches. Then Fred began a semi-speech, I guessed for Ruth’s benefit, about “the freedom and the heraldic mysteries of the desert,” and how “the heritage of freedom represented by this wild country must be preserved.” Paul became a little irritable, perhaps not noticeably to anyone else, but I could tell by the peculiar way his eyes began to shine. His voice remained soft which always served to make people more attentive.
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�You can’t make the desert represent a freedom you should have organized for yourself in your bedroom or living room. That’s what is so otiose about nearly all nature writing. People naturally shed their petty and inordinate grievances in the natural world, then resume them when the sheer novelty dissipates. We always destroy wilderness when we make it represent something else, because that something else can always fall out of fashion. Freedom to the all-terrain-vehicle addict, the mining and oil and timber companies, has always meant the absolute license to do as they wish, while ‘heritage’ is a word brought up by politicians to recall a virtue they can’t quite remember. The only traceable heritage related to our use of the land is to exhaust it.”
“You’re trying to tell me you feel as free on the crapper as we did down in the Baranca del Cobre?” There was a trace of pink in Fred’s earlobes that he hoped to diminish by a witticism.
“I feel as free—which is your word, not mine—though naturally not as exhilarated. When you first come to the desert, and I suspect it’s true of any wild area, it’s just a desert, an accretion of all the bits and pieces of information and opinion you’ve picked up along the way about deserts. Then you study and walk and camp in the desert for years, as we both have, and it becomes, as you say, heraldic, mysterious, stupefying, full of auras and ghosts, with the voices of those who lived there speaking from every petroglyph and pottery shard. At this point you must let the desert go back to being the desert or you’ll gradually become quite blind to it. Of course, on a metaphoric level the desert is an unfathomably intricate prison, and you may understandably wish to play with this fact, comparing it to your own life. By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.” He paused, slightly embarrassed, then bustled out into the kitchen to get another bottle of wine. I felt a specific admiration for Fred because he acted as though he had just heard something fascinating, which I thought we all had. Paul was genuinely apologetic about his speech.
