The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  He made a number of visits a few miles down the road to a ten-acre woodlot where he used to hunt rabbits with his dad. It was pleasant to sit on a stump in a glade with his sketch pad and find something that caught his interest, often the osier, what most called dogwood, with the sweet smell of its tiny blooms, also the chokecherry tree with its overwhelming odor. He ended up kneeling and doing a series of close-up sketches of the white pine stumps on which he usually sat with their burn marks of a century-old fire that had hit the area. When he made the small painting it occurred to him that only students of stumps could have any idea what it was. On a rare warmhearted whim he did a small portrait of a bluebird for his mother then was embarrassed when she was overwhelmed.

  “I’ll cherish it forever, which probably won’t be long,” she said intensely.

  Mother had been in a dither after talking on the phone several times. Sabrina would come for a few days of birding, then she would take her father camping in the Upper Peninsula when Margaret returned. Sabrina wanted to see the area where Louis Agassiz, one of her naturalist heroes, had traveled in the 1850s from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like most people in Michigan Clive had never been to the U.P., then recalled there was that quick pass-through from St. Ignace to Sault Ste. Marie with his father on their Canadian fishing trip. The very idea put him on a short end. The last thing he wanted to do on earth was to camp. Maybe it would rain and they could stay in a motel. Why make yourself uncomfortable for no good reason? He calmed down when it occurred to him that Sabrina had organized the trip as a “rapprochement.” One cause of his mother’s excitement was that all of her bird-watching companions were dead and she considered her granddaughter her best friend on earth. Unfortunately, Sabrina’s upcoming visit put his mother in a mental dither and she began talking about Dostoyevsky. She had taken a course in Russian literature and Margaret and Clive had learned to dread her Dostoyevsky monologues. Mother had written her term paper on The Brothers Karamazov, a book that some never recover from any more than certain painters don’t get over Caravaggio. Her disquisitions on the Karamazov family always ended up with her own husband, “When the love of my life died . . .” and then she would break down. If she had concentrated on Turgenev it would have been easier on all of them. Once she had even called Clive Kolya, her favorite character in the book, after an ample glass of wine.

  Clive’s workday went from 6 a.m. to dinner at 6 p.m. He enjoyed the mental and physical exhaustion that owned none of the enervation of what he thought of as his real life. One day while sketching in the woodlot he was spooked by a female voice calling out his name several times. He had been sketching a small square of leaf litter with the tiny buds on fiddlehead ferns and was so deep within it that he had trouble emerging from it, but finally yelled “What?” with irritation. It was Lydia coming through a grove of young maples, wearing blue shorts and slapping at mosquitoes on her legs.

  “I saw your parked car. I thought I’d stop to say hello.” Now she was a little nervous at the slowness of response on his part.

  “I was just sketching,” he finally said, realizing that she was so far out of context in the woodlot that he was puzzled.

  “You could stop by when you like.” She was vaguely embarrassed which was so unlike her. “Laurette said I should offer you a little affection when you need it.” She turned and walked quickly back toward the road.

  “Thank you,” he called out.

  Now he had a bad case of the jitters and sat down on a stump. Where was he anyway? Actually and literally buried in his work and without any sense of sexuality. In fancy terms he had abandoned his calling and now was resuming it. Soon he would be getting older, a daffy concept. He was a man of no importance so why not paint? He struggled to locate himself. There was Mother, Margaret, and Sabrina, with whom the upcoming reunion was the most important thing in his life along with simply painting. He thought momentarily of Tessa. Why had they beaten themselves up so badly after those years of towering ambition, a tree so tall it had to tip over? It was clearly his fault, the doom of ambition and marriage. Should he try to see her? Probably not. He should just paint and then the doors of the world are surprisingly open if you don’t lock them.

  Late in the afternoon he drove Mother over to a tavern on Chippewa Lake where she was going to meet an old friend to have hamburgers for supper. “I have one a year,” she announced. When they got there he was relieved that she didn’t mention that this was his father’s favorite tavern.

  The friend was a very old stooped man with a vigorous handshake named Orville.

  “I was sweet on your mother. Good thing she didn’t choose me or you wouldn’t exist.” Orville laughed.

  “Of course,” Clive said. He was amused by the fragility of the idea.

  While they chattered about the old days Clive’s mind drifted to the lake out the front window. The season wasn’t open yet, or so he thought, while envisioning a plate of bluegills and perch fried in butter. He and his father used to catch them on live crickets. There was no reason not to return in August and catch some fish, maybe paint one.

  Chapter 17

  Margaret arrived two days early because her traveling friend had had an illness in the family. She drove up from Grand Rapids with Sabrina, who had flown in from San Francisco the night before and had rented a ghastly-looking vehicle called a Hummer. When they came in the driveway before noon Clive was just emerging from the thicket where he had burned the remains of an old chicken coop on the west side and had vainly tried to make a series of sketches of the fire. Margaret joked that when Clive came out of the thicket she was frightened because he looked like Dad. In the next two days before Clive and Sabrina left for the north Margaret would let slip little phrases in Italian and French like people do who have just returned from Europe.

  Sabrina startled Clive and he looked at her thinking she must be wearing high-heeled boots. She said she was six foot and when they embraced she was slender but athletic. Hadn’t he been paying attention or had the world grown smaller in the three years since he had seen her? Possibly.

  There were two days of family nonsense with Mother insisting that they play card games, canasta and hearts, since there were four of them. Clive was pleased that he didn’t have to pack up all of his belongings because they were coming back to the farm. With this two-day interruption he was trying to keep art at a distance but was unsuccessful. Sabrina brought the past back freshly and he was slightly frightened at what had been happening to him in the few weeks on the farm. Was he ready to give up everything, but then it occurred to him he was giving up nothing that he cared about. He had called the rich woman in Atlanta. She was thrilled at the idea of subletting his apartment for half the year and the generous price she offered that took care of the whole year’s rent. He called the accountant in New York and it was determined his retirement would be forty-six thousand a year, not much but not bad. Associates in Portland, Oregon, and Athens, Ohio, had offered short but well-paid teaching stints, and there was a full-time offer at Stanford but he couldn’t bear to think of anything full-time. He would be a wandering painter half the year. In a college course on medieval Europe he had liked the idea of being a troubadour.

  They played cards and drank wine late the last evening and he entertained them with comic stories of the lecture circuit and European travels. Once in a Paris hotel he had called the desk with his imperfect French and requested a foam pillow because feathered pillows made him sneeze. They brought him up an omelet. Once in St. Louis after giving his patented lecture on Art and Economics and during the Q & A, a persistent but well-dressed oaf who had his MBA written all over him tried to corner Clive into putting a price tag on the Mona Lisa. Clive refused by saying that the painting (which he didn’t like) could be considered either worthless or priceless. It simply didn’t matter since it would never be sold and price assumes a transaction. The young man who had obviously had a few drinks before the lecture had
kept yelling “You’re copping out” until he was asked to leave. At the door he had turned and bellowed “fuck you” and the audience had laughed.

  “I hate that word,” Mother said, cocking an ear toward the patio door and listening to a whip-poor-will, but Sabrina and Margaret laughed.

  Mother had monopolized Sabrina’s time with local bird-watching expeditions and stayed up for longer in the evening than was her habit so that Clive had had almost no opportunity to talk to Sabrina alone. Early on the morning that they left for the north he was standing in the driveway with her and they were circling around their three-year absence from one another but then the dog whistle blew back in the thicket. Sabrina grinned and took off at what Clive thought was an alarming speed to retrieve her grandmother.

  In the silly Hummer heading north with Sabrina at the wheel Clive joked that the odor of the tuna fish sandwiches Mother had packed for them was “haunting.”

  “You seem happier than I ever remember,” Sabrina said.

  “I do?” Clive was startled by this. He imagined that he was tormented though in truth nearly all of his thoughts were directed to whatever he was painting rather than to his life problems.

  “Grandma said that all you did was paint, though when I was a little girl painting never seemed to make you happy. You were always worried about your gallery.”

  He couldn’t think of what to say about the horrors of galleries so he changed the subject to her mother and after a short time Sabrina became tearful about her mother’s mood pills. He had had his own experiences with Prozac but had given it up when his long city walks seemed to work without any additional help. Sabrina also talked about the responsibility of unearned income and he figured that it was the most singular reason she was working toward a PhD in earth sciences. Partly out of her reaction to her mother she simply enough wanted to lead a useful life.

  The mordant conversation was broken at the Straits of Mackinac and the immensely high bridge gave Clive an attack of acrophobia. She laughed when he slumped low in his seat like a little boy. On the other side of the bridge they pulled into a rest stop and shared the tuna fish sandwiches with a cloud of seagulls. During lunch a strong wind rose from the northwest and Sabrina said she had checked and the weather looked very bad for camping the next two days but fine on the third and last day of their trip. She pulled over and fiddled with her BlackBerry making hotel reservations in Marquette and Clive felt rosy with relief after being spared from spending two nights in his mother’s cheap sleeping bag and tiny tent.

  They parked a few minutes in Munising and laughed at the sight of snow and sleet blowing in strongly off Lake Superior. Snow in late May seemed unreasonable but there it was. Sabrina had been giving him an intriguing lecture on the structure of the cosmos, which was largely beyond him with his diffident glance every Tuesday at the science section of the New York Times.

  “The miracle is that the world exists,” he intoned.

  “My God, who said that?”

  “Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s an exact quote.”

  “How wonderful. Was he religious?”

  “Not in the least,” Clive said. “He also said ‘I am my world.’”

  “That’s not so good,” she said with a twisted frown.

  It was almost eerie to see her at close range after three years’ absence. How could he have been that buried in himself in what he now saw as his declining life? He couldn’t very well say that he was on his way back up because that would be presumptuous but he definitely had changed directions. How could it have started with yellow paint on his prized possession, his English tailored suit? It was daffy as life itself. On the last trips to Mother’s farm before the divorce, he and Sabrina would take long early morning walks on the property. She was maybe six at the time and wanted to hear stories about his boyhood. She would catch snakes, toads, frogs and examine them while he talked. Her curiosity about the natural world was insatiable.

  When they reached Marquette late in the afternoon the city was loud with the roar of the storm on Lake Superior. The hotel, the Landmark Inn, was fairly sophisticated even by New York standards. He’d rather expected fishermen and loggers running amok. Sabrina had secured the Teddy Roosevelt suite plus an extra room in case someone needed to be alone. He was reminded again that his daughter was wealthy but it quickly occurred to him she didn’t act like it. All of her clothing seemed aimed at her outdoor life and obsessions and her conversation when not geared to her mother was about the sciences.

  He was staring at a series of photos of Teddy Roosevelt with a room service vodka in hand. He recalled reading a biography of Roosevelt and his fantastic hardiness in college, and how Roosevelt took his own Airedale dogs to Africa on a safari.

  “Grandma said that you painted all day every day and you seemed quite happy doing so. You didn’t really respond before,” Sabrina said a little timidly behind him. “She said that it was quite a shock.”

  “I’m thinking of retiring and becoming a Sunday painter every day.” He smiled blankly as if knowing it sounded a tad daffy.

  When she headed off in foul weather gear for a beach walk he arranged his watercolors and sketchbook on a table near the window faced toward the northeast from which he could see the harbor ten stories below down a steep hill, and a break wall and tormented Lake Superior which reminded him of the painting of Winslow Homer. He stared down long and hard at the harbor, picked up his sketchbook, and then saw his daughter striding along far below and thought briefly of the distances at which we keep each other.

  Two days later when the weather changed with the wind coming from the south he awoke in the tent thinking he had survived a night in the wilds. Sabrina sat by the campfire reading the Agassiz book, said good morning, and started making him breakfast. What would become of him? But then the task of thinking about himself was tiring like trying to comprehend the chaos theory in Science Times. Behind Sabrina there was a shade of green on a moss-colored log he had never seen before. And on that first afternoon in Marquette there had been a splotch of sunlight far out on the dark stormy lake, golden light and furling white wave crests. Time was passing as his daughter read and scrambled eggs. He had had his dream of the world’s idea of success but it was surprisingly easy to give up for his first love.

  The River Swimmer

  PART I

  Theirs was a small farm in the middle of an island in a large river started during the Great Depression when county and state land regulations loosened in the name of need. The Chippewa Indians vainly claimed it but then they perhaps justly claimed everything in the area. There was a lone old maiden Indian woman living there called Tooth because rather than having two prominent front teeth she had one very large one. She took care of the progenitor of the family and farm through the Depression when it was a survival property with a few cows and pigs fenced in by rushing water. The soil was magnificently fertile, alluvial, with a couple feet of topsoil. Simply everything grew and grew fast and irrigation water was easily diverted from the river during drought periods. Old Thaddeus married an English girl in the First World War but their second generation was a bit of a bust in terms of vigor. Thaddeus was an ex-logger and believed in twelve-hour workdays, six days a week, and on Sunday he fished the river. The second generation were a bit effete in his terms, three sons who were star high school athletes and a daughter named Marie Love who bore another Marie Love, both star workers with Grandpa. The girls, daughter and granddaughter, were the hard workers, the apples of his eye, so the three star athletes were left out of the will. The sole owner of the farm was the first Marie Love and then the second who was Thad’s mother. He never knew the great-grandfather he was named for, a loud and mean and burly man with a false last name, Sockrider, from his youth of hauling supplies on mules to logging camps. Tooth, in fact, hung in there on the island because she was born there and felt she had a claim to the property. Her father had though
t he owned it because he signed what he thought was a timber lease which was really a bill of sale, a common way that whites swindled Indians out of land, even beautiful lakes set in the middle of thousands of acres of forest and good farmlands. We could be uncomfortably awful people. Tooth even showed old Thaddeus her family graveyard in a remote part of the island next to a vast virgin oak which he immediately intended to cut down and sell. He looked at the Anishinabe graves without comment and said he would take care of her in her old age. The reverse came true as she took care of him in his final bedridden years and the family too. Because of the rare honored treaty rights local Indians could shoot deer out of season and old Tooth was a good hunter shooting deer, grouse, ducks, and the occasional feral pig, necessary as they were destructive to the garden and crops.

  Thad the boy grew up hyperactive and obnoxious as his father, an oil roustabout and oil fire fighter from Texas who appeared in the area during a big fire at the best well and seemed daring and romantic to young Marie Love to the disgust of her father who only cared for logs and crops. Marie and the southerner, Thetis by name, eloped and their son was improbably difficult as his mother was hardworking and his father was lazy in between trips to put out oil fires throughout the world. The Indian woman Tooth was the only one with any control of boy Thad. She created a play yard with an impenetrable electric fence to keep him out of the river. Such was his love of water he was always wet even in winter. Once when his father spanked him he stuffed his expensive cowboy boots with pig shit which stopped the spanking thing. In the summer of his third year when boy Thad taught himself to swim in the spring pond behind the farmhouse, Tooth devised a leather harness that allowed her to tether him to a stake while he swam and dove in the spring pool. If she thought he was holding his breath too long she could haul him screaming to the surface. His biggest special thrill was when his father fished the river in a rowboat with a small motor and let Thad swim at the end of a long rope to keep the current from sweeping him away. For a slender swimmer’s body his chest grew very large as often happens. Luckily his school didn’t have a swim team or he would have become a worthless star athlete though he drew the attention of the university when he swam to shore from the Manitou Islands and Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. To be frank he could not stop himself and that was his downfall.