The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  Nearly all of his swimming was done in near-wilderness conditions and he liked the idea of swimming past immense buildings and millions of people. As a student of the natural world he did not ignore the works of man who in his view was nature too, so said Shakespeare who also seemed a mystery to Thad along with his mother’s Mozart addiction.

  He worked hard and quickly in the heat of the morning, streaming sweat, and occasionally his mother would spray him down with insect repellent. Mosquitoes loved still, humid mornings, and their steady whine was obnoxious. He mostly held the stakes as he drove them in. The rest of the crew showed up sleepily at 8 a.m. and they were off and running. How beautiful he thought to think of red ripe tomatoes as the future of their work. They’d sell a hundred bushels to the town women who still liked to can their own tomatoes in rows of Ball jars.

  By 11 a.m. they were half done and decided to surge on, skipping lunch in favor of a midafternoon picnic though they broke for a quick refreshing swim. Rather than looking at Emily and Laurie he consoled himself with thinking about stories his mother had told him about the great cities she had visited, London, Paris, and New York, with him chiming in questions about the swimming possibilities of the Thames, Seine, and Hudson. When told these rivers were filthy he wasn’t troubled because mothers were always cautionary and he had swum in many muddy rivers. He decided swimming these three rivers would put order in his life, adding the great rivers of the American West. He might have to wait as his life savings was less than three thousand dollars. Of course he was aware that if he captured and sold a water baby everything would be possible but this would be akin to Judas and the crucifixion. This notion brought immediate despondency similar to the slump of March and April. It was bad enough not to be able to swim but to also be unable to have the substitute exertion of cross-country skiing brought on a particular despondency as the snows melted and he could no longer glide through the hills and forest. Some people have to burn up or become smudge. Hate can become a trigger and when he looked at Laurie his burgeoning hate for her father brought on an exhaustion. Surely part of the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them.

  Right now in the early afternoon he was concocting murder plots. Late in the summer he would often see Friendly Frank brown trout fishing with a guide. There were open areas on the river and the fields produced thousands of grasshoppers, which brown trout fed on with gusto when the hoppers landed in the river. Many took advantage of this phenomenon and Thad concocted an idea where he would hide behind a larger boulder above a rapid and when the guide came through with Friendly Frank he would swim underwater after them, and when they reached the right place he would set his feet on the bottom and tip over his boat. By fish and game law the guide always wore a life preserver, but not Friendly Frank who was above all law. The guide would be fine but within a day Friendly Frank would have a severe case of the bloat.

  He felt heartsick and queasy from his murder fantasy. What right did he have to kill anyone? He was nearly done with the stakes and Mother was off to pick up Dad in the hospital in Grand Rapids and would be back in an hour. Laurie would manage the tomato crew. Thad scooped up Pudge and Bone who were being pains in the ass. Bone had decided to repeatedly scream, “I want my daddy.” He headed upriver toward the water baby pond. Emily followed, relieving him of the burden of Bone after a few hundred yards. Pudge immediately captured a small garter snake with which she tormented her brother who was phobic about snakes. He wept piteously. Thad pitched the snake in the nearby river at which Pudge screamed having lost her pet.

  “This is the downside of child rearing,” Emily said. “I’ll still want a baby if you want one.”

  “We’ll wait until I have a livelihood.”

  “You’re such a prick. It’s not my fault if I have some money. I was born that way.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want your money, I want your ass.”

  “How about now?”

  The kids were well in front of them on the trail and Emily detoured behind a huge maple for a stand-up quickie.

  This was not the most satisfying form of lovemaking and he stumbled backward into the wide growth with Emily glancing with amusement at him on the ground.

  At the pond Thad quickly stepped out of his clothes and entered the pond fearing the water babies may have escaped into the river but there they were, perhaps a dozen in all in the deepest part of the pond drifting in a shaft of sunlight and watching his slow approach. Emily followed him but turned in sudden alarm and thrashed away in seeing them. He held out his hands and one curled up in his palms. He held it up for Pudge and Bone to see. Bone bellowed in horror, but Pudge shrieked with delight petting it. Thad replaced the water baby with the others and got out of the pond. Emily was pale and looked at him questioningly.

  “It’s my secret,” he said. “They’re water babies like in the old story. Tooth said they develop from the souls of dead infants.”

  “I’m not sure I can take it,” Emily said.

  Pudge threw herself into the water and Thad went after her. He knew she could swim but he had never seen her deep underwater. There she was in the circle of water babies who petted this miniature human as if she were a puppy. At this point he decided that at picnic time he wouldn’t show anyone else but perhaps bring Laurie out in the next few days. She certainly deserved this splendid diversion. Rather than further murderous thoughts he had to depend on Friendly Frank being ruined legally. Emily’s cell rang and they were beckoned back to the farmhouse for the picnic because his mother had returned with his dad who was still unable to walk this far downriver.

  PART II

  Thad and Emily stayed another ten days then rented a car for Chicago, not wanting to ride in John Scott’s plane but preferring a slow trip. Thad would be obligated to return in August. The X-rays to be used for evidence had revealed a dozen small fractures in his cheekbone. The doctor had said, “The pain must have been awful,” to which Thad replied simply, “It was.” At the picnic table Thad’s father had been overwhelmed to see Laurie’s black eyes. Tooth patted his hand and announced loudly, “I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch with my 30.06 this coming deer season. Enough is enough,” to which no one responded. “I’ll pop his head off. This is called damage control.”

  Thad had been chewing on his wonderful fried chicken thinking that humans are ill-prepared for the miraculous. It’s too much of a jolt and the human soul is not spacious enough to deal with it. What happens when we sense and see the eternal in the ordinary present? What should he do about the water babies? Absolutely nothing. The idea that wild creatures always need our help was repugnant to him. He would look at them again at the time of the court case in August. Meanwhile he had to resume some sort of equilibrium connected to day-to-day life. Oddly they were passing Ludington, a lovely city by the sea on Lake Michigan which always temporarily knocked him off his pins. A dear friend had lived here whom he knew because they were both half-milers at different high schools. They usually finished in a virtual dead heat including the state finals when his friend won by a footfall. A week later he had been swept from the Ludington Pier and drawn to his death by an undertow. Throughout the Great Lakes boys and young men race huge waves sometimes successfully.

  He told Emily the story and she was upset by the freakish nature of challenging waves. Was it to show your courage? Not having grown up on the coast Thad wasn’t sure. There were dozens of examples of foolhardy behavior. He recalled a mountaineering guide calling his children from the top of Everest by cell phone to say that Dad wasn’t going to make it home. The least comprehensible to Thad was race car driving that killed so many. Swimming was fast enough to him, though the drowning rate was not negligible.

  Emily brought up religion and they tried to keep it light. Her grandmother had been a radical Evangelical which had somewhat traumatized her father who viewed monotheism as one of the world’s great ills in terms of war and sh
eer murder. Thad said that his parents allowed Tooth to take him to Sunday school. She had grown up on an Ontario reservation run by an Episcopalian missionary and thought the Resurrection was a great idea, while his mother was agnostic but a strict ethicist.

  He himself was quite spiritual in an eccentric way based on all of his reading in the life sciences and astronomy wherein everything seemed to be too monstrously intricate to be accidental whether it was avian vision and migration or the sheer fact of ninety billion galaxies. One could scarcely be cynical about this despite the absurd behavior of Evangelicals and Mormons or the history of the Catholic Church, the minimalization of a moral life. A history teacher he mourned who had been fired for too many DUIs said that a common thread of genius ran through Mozart, Caravaggio, and Gauguin that was divine whatever that in itself meant. He felt that our culture’s general instruction manual was enough to puke a maggot. He had learned early not to try to formalize his interesting perceptions or they would stagnate. All of this certainly was not enough to pass for religion but he didn’t care partly because he was still young. His first love, swimming, was certainly not eternal but then so was earth and any creature, human or otherwise.

  While they talked Emily’s face was knotted in puzzlement. She had talked several times in their quiet moments about the six months she had worked at an orphanage managed by a cousin in the unfashionable southern border of Kenya. She loved taking care of the children and teaching them to read. It was a wonderful time several years back before she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence when she was taking a year off from learning. She felt fulfilled by her work.

  Disaster hit when both Emily’s cousin and her black boyfriend had died of AIDS this spring and any faint idea that Emily might want to return to Africa drove her father to the edge of berserk. Emily could clearly see that her father’s enthusiasm for Thad as her love interest came clearly from this fear of Africa. This all became twisted in Thad’s mind with the death of his Ludington friend and the eerie feeling he had as one of the six pallbearers carrying the casket from the Methodist church. Not oddly it filled him with the urgency to get on with his own life. This desperation of mortality is always present when someone close dies, even Dove’s husband. His brain seemed a little bruised by too much happening in recent months. He had the opposite of a soldier’s mentality in that anything akin to violence repelled him, even talking about it. To the disgust of his high school’s football coach he had refused to take part but the coach wanted his track speed and strength. He held the school record time for the hand-over-hand rope climb, going up the large rope that hung from the gym ceiling. You didn’t use your legs just arms and shoulders. But then he recognized that coaches are interested in coaches and careers that are enhanced by the strong and fast. He told Emily about the most important event of his life which occurred when he was eight. He had driven to Texas, flying was too expensive, with his parents for a family reunion of his father’s people. One day in East Texas they wandered around Larry McMurtry’s famed used bookstore and he spotted a huge book published in England called The Rivers of Earth. He was dumbfounded with curiosity and his parents after a quarrel bought it for him. Thad was forever grateful to his mother to insist on his having the book. His mother insisted that it was hard enough to be a boy on a remote farm but he shouldn’t have to go without good books. She visited the library once a week and Thad usually went with her. Once the very homely librarian came out for Sunday lunch and announced that she had fatal pancreatic cancer. She didn’t mind dying she said although a male had never kissed her. Thad’s father at the table grabbed her and kissed her violently then wept. For inexplicable reasons they all laughed. His mother pushed him into reading Emily Brontë, Sherwood Anderson, and Dostoyevsky, certainly a mixed bag with a sheer tonnage of emotions that drove Thad frequently to the river. After lunch that day in which the adults drank too much cheap California wine Thad went out to the porch and the librarian followed. He shed his clothes down to his skivvies for a swim. He heard her say, “You have a nice physique” and his throat closed up. How could he be embarrassed underwater but he was. He held his breath as long as possible until well downstream. He recalled his father warning him not to become too soft but then felt he wouldn’t become too soft if everyone else was too hard. The general cruelty of life was too often overwhelming. Why wasn’t the librarian a trace more attractive? What was the evolutionary purpose of homeliness in this otherwise delightful person? How can one give up these relentless questions? Two years in a row he had taken a girl to the prom because no one else would.

  Back to his dad saying you can’t accept anything as it is presented to you. You have to question the nature of everything. Though young both Emily and Laurie seemed bent on permanent coupling but he was mindful of how often both male and females in his high school class seemed to change their minds. Even his mother had seemed a bit sweet on the Finnish bachelor farmer a few miles downriver. For himself it made more sense to take up with Dove because her children needed a father. It was his understanding that it was how it was done in groups in the old days. The group was more important than free choice in love. Tooth wanted her daughter to take up with an older Indian farmer who owned a lot of property in the northern part of the county about thirty miles away. Tooth was interested in the financial survival of Dove’s children more than the happiness of her niece whom she viewed as not born to be happy. This wasn’t a judgment of Dove but just the nature of her character. Thad had always been puzzled about the sides of his own character. One half wanted to simply stay home and grow from a farm boy to a farm man, but the other half was a water obsessive who had been wearing out the book The Rivers of Earth for a decade, and had studied maps of all the great cities of Earth that he could likely navigate: Hong Kong, Calcutta, New York City, and Los Angeles as well as his hometown. He thought it was wonderful that John Scott wanted to help him with college but ultimately he was afraid that with help would come control. People wanted to help you do what they wanted you to do and both Laurie and Emily wanted to pin him down to be their very own. It reminded him of his refusal to pin butterflies for biology class. He only wanted to see butterflies flying not collect dead ones. Why kill a butterfly to name it when you already know its name? Why pin yourself down before you’ve gotten started flying?

  He felt more than a trace of panic when he went into the kitchen where Dove was making a veal stew and she turned to him and said, “Let’s have a baby” and he replied, “Let’s not.” Luckily his father came in from his bedroom. He looked a little better. “In the hospital I felt like a nail driven into cement,” he said, drinking a beer with a sandwich Dove had made for him. Dove drew Thad out onto the porch.

  “I just worry you’ll go off to Chicago and marry Emily because she’s rich and you won’t have to work.”

  “No, I’m thinking of not going to my last year of high school but moving right into college. The principal said I could do it.”

  As usual when tormented and the weather was right he had gone swimming in a big deep pool in this river not far down from the farm. He had written a paper for biology class about this hole and its large brown trout population. The teacher in turn gave the paper to the editors of a Michigan trout fishing magazine without his permission which irked him. As he expected he was pestered by anglers right from the beginning of the season but steadfastly refused to divulge its whereabouts saying that it would be like giving away his girlfriend. The fish census Thad made was surprising in that this large pool in the river, about thirty yards by twenty yards, held over a hundred brown trout with over half being mature and fairly sizable and a half dozen very large, three over ten pounds taking up residence as far as possible from each other. They were not alarmed by him so he could study them at close quarters. The anglers pestered him because every trout fisherman wishes to catch a brown on fly over five pounds and one of ten pounds would be a lifetime trophy. Being born and raised in the middle of the river made Thad since childhood
a rather more bookish angler in that he would fish a short time for as many as ninety days in a row.

  Entering the outskirts of Chicago with Emily he was revisited by some of the same feelings he had experienced sprawled out on the tarmac at Meigs Field Airport after his long swim down. It was the recurrent image from a dream of the grandest river of all, the Gulf Stream, the ocean river, so immense it couldn’t be seen across, moving from the Florida Gulf through the Atlantic Northeast up past Great Britain, the current profoundly affecting the European climate. He had imagined that if he were ever fatally ill he would like to slip into the ocean river far to the south and swim with the current until he disappeared. His present moody distress however was singularly down-to-earth. When he was in the ninth grade a few years back his parents had become quite worried about his swimming obsession and had arranged a meeting with the school counselor since there was no professional mind doctor in the area where mental difficulties no matter how prevalent were not viewed as worth spending money on. Thad viewed the counselor as a stiff, preposterous snot from Ann Arbor who in the American poetry class he taught loathed Walt Whitman, whom Thad loved. The session went poorly and was in fact traumatic to Thad. The counselor ridiculed his love of water and swimming. Did he expect to earn a livelihood from water? Thad was close to losing his temper but caught them all off guard by saying yes, he intended to become a hydrologist, a scientist of water. They backpedaled a bit but some damage was done. Out of resentment he kept himself distant from his parents for a couple of weeks. How could they have put him through this humiliation? Of all the jobs in the world why was his love of swimming in question? Of course parents worry about children but he was confident he could make a fine living out of his love of water. He certainly wouldn’t permit any more ridicule. When the counselor tried to greet him in the high school hallway he looked away. When the man shouted “be polite” he bellowed back “fuck you.” He was promptly reported to the principal but he and Thad were trout fishing friends and the principal was allowed to fish anywhere in the prime locations on the farm. The principal patiently explained that a student couldn’t be allowed to yell “fuck you” at a teacher-counselor and Thad was remorseful, promising to write an apology. However the whole experience made him swim longer and harder and with additional reading he added swimming the length of France’s Rhône River to his ambitions. He would certainly become a hero to French girls. On a trip to Ann Arbor he had seen the movie Jules and Jim and the wonderful actress Jeanne Moreau apparently had none of the chirrupy chipmunk aspects of American girls. At present as they fully entered Chicago all he wanted to do was be alone in his little room-and-a-half quarters and not hear any more of Emily’s normally excusable prattle about the future, an obsession of students that deterred them from exercising any level of attention on the present. Thad tended to be a bit anal. If the weather was passable he would work on the farm four hours each morning, swim four hours in the afternoon, and read four hours in the evening on the science of water. The local librarian was helpful describing all local young males as “dolts and louts.” They unloaded and unpacked his bags and he was disappointed that he was to continue on to Winnetka with Emily and have dinner with her parents. He simply wanted to be alone which had been the habit of most of his lifetime on the farm where the loudest of noises were birds and occasionally farm machinery though the rumble of a tractor lacked irritation. This rural background made him ill prepared for the sheer noisiness of modern culture, say a Chicago traffic jam. When they finally entered Emily’s neighborhood he felt a bit of dread at the grandeur of the homes. When they pulled into Emily’s circular drive she had phoned ahead and her parents were on the porch of a very large home he recognized as English Tudor style. He wondered why in God’s name a family of three needed a home and manicured grounds of this grand size. Something similar was happening near his home in northern Michigan in select locations where wealthy people from Detroit, Chicago, and Indiana built oversized and expensive summer homes far beyond any space possibly needed. This was what an economic text from Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption”: the urge of rich people to show off their wealth. In the vast living room John Scott told him that the fireplace had been moved over from Sussex where it had been built in the fourteenth century for an ancestor of his wife. Thad thought it should be left where it belonged but then chided himself for being snarky.