by Jim Harrison
I packed up and drove east with vague intentions of going to Madrid which could be settled at an airport. I thought of my mother and Laurel both of whom I corresponded with every month or two. My mother was amused when I told her that when I read certain passages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses or in Virgil’s Georgics I would recall the visual ambience where I first read the passages near Bozeman, or in Alpine, or Cincinnati. Location is everything when we are young animals and our survival depends on our attentiveness to where we are. The young are always walking on thin ice. I was jolted when Mother wrote that she thought my friendship with Emelia was wonderful because every boy should have a sister. When I wrote back teasingly that my friendship with Emelia was rather more physically intense than a sister could offer she answered that by far the best sex of her life had been at fourteen when she and the neighbor boy had spent a long summer necking and “petting” out in the far corner of the orchard. This news curiously made me wonder about the nature of language I had been observing in the creature world. An emotion arises and you express it with a noise. Or you smell something and recite the nature of the smell to yourself in a wordless language. If on a rare occasion I wrote to Mother and Laurel the same evening I was amazed by the difference in language I used on the two. To a certain extent my language was a defense, an apologia for my nature, but then I was duplicitous because I couldn’t very well express my true nature could I? As a boy I had been fascinated with “secret codes” so I devised a simple alphabetical code to at least express my nature to myself. This helped alleviate the essential loneliness of being a true stranger and the disadvantage of a single child not born among a human litter. Were I to die and someone find my journal the contents would look like gibberish except to a cryptographer to whom my code would be simpleminded. Here is a decoded sample:
Aug. 4
Encamped along the Bois de Sioux River between Wahpeton and Sisseton in far eastern Dakotas. Would have preferred a motel for my aching bones but my monthly fit is upon me. Awoke after dawn and noted with despair the severed head and feet of a piglet near me and the still warm coals of a fire on which I made coffee. Obviously I had feasted on a piglet and some night images returned in my brain’s light show. A moonlit barnyard. Grabbing a piglet from a pen while the sow cowered at my scent. Crushed piglet’s neck to still its squeal. Very large farm dog jumped at me. Plunged thumb and forefinger into dog’s eye sockets and drowned it in water trough. Ran as yard light came on.
Took early walk to ease full stomach and cramped body. Heard chattering on small gravel road. Two girls bird-watching on their old bikes. They looked Indian or at least half-breed, from local Chippewa reserve. Said their names were Lise and Louise. I said I heard a larkspur and they said more likely a horned lark. I was sideways to them and when I turned they screamed, “Rougarou rougarou rougarou” and raced off on their bikes. I looked down and my shirt was covered with piglet blood. I felt my face which was caked with grease and blood. I hastily washed up in river, changed clothes, and fled in my pickup.
A few hours south I stopped at the public library in Sioux Falls and determined in a section devoted to local Native Americans that rougarou was a métis term for a lycanthrope, French-sounding as Natives intermarried with French trappers.
I passed the inevitable second night of my fit camped north of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Still full of pig meat I spent the night swimming in the Mississippi. Dawn found me well downriver and some kindly fishermen gave me a ride in their motorboat back to my campsite about a dozen miles north. They seemed uncomfortable in my naked and overmuscled presence and were glad to get rid of me.
Other than for the infernal traffic it was grand to revisit Chicago. Oddly, traffic jams remind me of overflowing public toilets, in short, our condensed excrescences, and those religious stampedes that kill so many in the Middle East and India. After buying some nice clothes I checked into the Drake what with my newfound financial luck. I had been without a television for seven years in the West and turned it on seeing something that was also strangely reminiscent of a traffic jam. It was a minute or so of the audience at a rock concert. They were howling and jumping up and down, their faces contorted in pleasure that resembled subdued rage.
I had time for a brief visit to Northern Trust to straighten out my financial matters. The bank officer was surprised that I planned on living on so little per year. I explained that I had been working for very wealthy men the past seven years and disapproved of the way their money sterilized their lives. I preferred a simpler life on the edge to continue my studies in nonhuman language. Perhaps down the road I would draw out more funds to build myself a cabin someplace remote or to take a fishing trip to some foreign place. The officer was a little melancholy and said, “I suppose my life is a bit sterile.”
On the way back to the hotel in the late afternoon I questioned my unrest. It was the third night of a big moon by which time I was normally okay but I felt fearful of having even a modest spell in the city. The steak restaurant where I had eaten a decade ago with Laurel and her father was just opening. They were fully booked but I begged and they allowed me to eat a porterhouse and three dozen oysters at the bar while drinking a bottle of French wine. The bartender was a little troubled with my speed eating and I explained I had been in the mountains for a long time without a first-rate meal.
I returned to my room tentatively happy that the wine had calmed me down. I sat at the window for an hour looking out at Lake Michigan and thinking I might need a swim but then rejected the idea remembering my swim of the night before. It occurred to me that if one bottle of wine had helped my disposition two bottles might be a good idea. I recalled seeing a sign in the foyer for the hotel’s Cape Cod Room, a seafood restaurant. I went down and ate the first lobster of my life and three dozen oysters, accompanying the meal with a bottle of white wine. Back in my room my joints were shrieking at my wolfish behavior with me knowing how quickly a canine can process protein compared to a human. I had a shower thinking I might take a stroll and find a prostitute but when I got out of the shower I was appalled at my semicrouched, hypermuscular figure in the mirror. My brain flooded with depression and I impulsively called the geeky doctor I had visited with Laurel so many years before. Naturally I only reached his message machine but he called back within a restless hour in which I drank a couple of shooters from the minibar. Normally I drink rarely but alcohol seemed to help. I told the doctor all of my problems and symptoms in a mad rush and he offered to meet me in Emergency at his local hospital which wasn’t that far away. He said he had often thought of me in the transpired years and had come up with some possible remedies.
I walked swiftly the dozen blocks to the hospital and he was waiting. In one of those small rooms with the walls plastered with grotesque posters of cross sections of bodies I let down my guard and poured out all the worst of my behavior leaving out the few possible deaths at my hands. I admitted my wild meat eating and my two-day-a-month seizures which occasionally lapsed into three.
He listened to my forlorn babbling while closely inspecting my body which he without humor pronounced perfectly suited for prehistoric life. When I fell silent I began to study him closely and sensed a mildly deranged aspect to his character as if he were a doctor in one of those “creature features,” horror movies I used to watch with Emelia, Lawrence, and Dicky with all of us huddled in fear close together on the sofa. He drew a number of vials of blood and admitted that my first visit eight years before had deeply troubled him, especially his pride as he had graduated at the top of his class at both his university and medical school. Now he was involved in the first studies of HIV which was slowly making its appearance in 1979. He said he would have to meet me the following evening in his small private laboratory because the treatment he expected to make was “extralegal.” He trusted me only because of my desperation for a cure. He called me a cab and gave me a strong sedative telling me with a crazy grin to “behave” myself. I was struck by the feeling in his demeanor that he had
lost the hubris I first sensed so many years before. He walked me out to a street corner talking in little more than a whisper about how much in the human body wasn’t correctable but that it could be temporarily steered. As I was getting into the cab I stared at two passing young women who were obviously prostitutes. He took my arm in his weak grip and said, “No,” adding that I was in grave danger of dying within a few years unless my seizures could be contained. I was properly terrified and eager for the safety of my room though on the elevator I exchanged looks with a rather dumpy middle-aged woman who appeared to be up for anything.
I had been exchanging calls with my mother in Italy and early in the morning I was awakened by her with a request that I see her first rather than flying to Madrid to spend time with Laurel. Mother’s elderly husband was ill and she needed help for a few days guiding an older Cincinnati couple around northern Italy. My mother had always been a phenomenally bad driver mostly because, or so she said, driving was boring and she couldn’t concentrate on little things like staying within the lines. I told her I was waiting for a diagnosis and she suggested that I call my father in Dowagiac which was only a couple of hours from Chicago. This was already on my mind more out of curiosity than affection. I hadn’t seen him in ten years so I called and we made plans, it being Saturday morning and he wouldn’t be teaching. I ate a boringly meatless breakfast to help my joints and their overload of purines and then called the travel agent in the hotel and changed my flight from Madrid to Milan. I was chafing with claustrophobia because for years my mornings had included at least a two-hour walk and run in a peopleless landscape. A change in routine as we all know can come bearing more than a hint of vertigo. At my room service breakfast I had watched a TV documentary dealing with the enormous anacondas in the swamps of Venezuela and I had an urge to wrestle with one of these beasts to see if I could subdue it, admittedly a strange idea. I had a stroke of luck downstairs when a bellhop retrieved my pickup truck. I had chatted with him before about his plan to drive to Alaska with a friend and now I made a generous offer to sell him the pickup. Looking at the truck my routineless vertigo gave me a glimmer of nausea because the truck seemed to represent my life as a stranger enduring all of those seizures in the remotest landscapes. I had to try something else for a while though I felt doomed to end my life in the Centennial Valley, a nearly empty place of 350,000 acres down on the border between southwest Montana and Idaho. Absolutely no one is there in the winter which would suit me fine. When your body is slowly immolating itself extreme cold is attractive.
To my surprise my father was happy, absurdly so. He was looking after his infirm mother with the help of a black practical nurse and teaching science at a middle school, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, over west of Dowagiac in Benton Harbor. My father said giddily that it gave him such pleasure to teach science to those so eager to learn unlike the usual whining college students. Even now in the summer he was teaching gratis to students who had fallen behind out of poverty. He said his first two years after we had “abandoned” him were difficult but now he was thriving. I detected that he and the practical nurse were sleeping together and was mildly jealous of this domesticity. We had a nice roast chicken for lunch then pushed my father’s infirm mother around Dowagiac in her wheelchair. The small town was full of the kind of well-built old homes rarely seen in the sparser areas west of the Mississippi. I enjoyed my daffy grandmother who was confident that her eccentric perceptions represented the real world. For instance, she greeted certain trees she had known since her childhood. I regretted leaving in the late afternoon to ensure that I’d make my doctor’s appointment.
In the doctor’s minimalist laboratory he poured us a vodka saying that he had been quite distressed of late because he and his colleagues in the field expected that HIV would kill tens of millions. This was difficult to believe in 1979 but of course proved to be true. He repeated that in my present state my uncontrollable diet and seizures would certainly kill me. He had prepared a drug mixture of a unique nature and I’d have to return every year for a refill. Chemistry is certainly my weakest point but he said the bottle of spansules he gave me included ketamine, an animal tranquilizer, plus Xylazine and atropine to calm the effects of the ketamine, plus a small amount of Thorazine which is normally used for schizophrenics. He could think of no other way to preserve my life. I was to find the safest possible place for taking the drugs for seventy-two hours. I thanked him and left. I spent a long evening reading tourist guidebooks, eating a piece of fish, and drinking a bottle of pallid white wine in my room rather than going out for the longed for porterhouse and oysters.
Part III
I Look for a Home
By age thirty most of us have found, and are perhaps confined by, the arc of our lives. We wander in the sphere of our idiosyncrasies usually unmindful of what a poet said: “Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”
I gave up on my obsession with the language of living creatures other than human while staying the usual twenty-seven days in Reggio, in Italy. I had rented a bicycle and taken a long ride north to see the ruins of the eleventh-century castle of Matilda (I think it is called the Castle of Canossa and was owned by Matilda of Tuscany) who once owned northern Italy and saved the Catholic Church from the powerful Germans, a matter of minimal interest to me. I was intrigued by Matilda because she wrote poetry, practiced falconry, and hunted with hounds, in short, an ideal woman.
It was a cold day, wet and nasty, with the last mile up the mountain, which was enveloped in a cloud, quite arduous. As I’ve said I need to know the history, among other things, of any area I inhabit and in Europe it was quite a job compared to America where in many areas west of the Mississippi the history is of nominal content if it exists at all beyond the history of Native tribes and the unheroic efforts of those who stole their land to raise a limitless number of cows.
Anyway, in the cold foggy rain I was remarking to myself what discomfort my curiosity brought upon me, in short, what the fuck was I doing? The caretaker of the property was so obviously appalled by the weather that he didn’t come out of his attractive, tiny house. I made my way upward on a slippery, stone trail and hadn’t gone that far when I turned to discover that five of the gatekeeper’s chickens were closely following me. I stopped. They stopped, looking up at my face, the apparent seat of my being. Why follow me in the hideous weather up into a nonconclusive immense pile of rocks? In an almost flashing moment I perceived the vanity of my study of nonhuman communication. I wasn’t a scientist satisfied with drilling holes in a thin piece of board. Only that morning two ants had crossed the decrepit table in my little room in Reggio and had met in the middle, conversed, turned, and gone off in random directions. I decided looking down at my wet but friendly chickens that I’d never have a meaningful clue what they were clucking to each other, or what two tiny brown birds were saying to each other in the tree above me.
Riding back south toward Reggio in the intense rain I reflected on my first clue to a change the full nature of which I hadn’t yet comprehended. The day before on a pleasant, sunny October morning I had been sitting against a tree reading a book (Alberto Moravia) when a minuscule lizard crept down the tree trunk close to my head and I thought the contents of the novel were within my reach but the lizard wasn’t from its forked tongue testing the air to the tail that diminished itself into nothing. I thought it would be easy enough to identify the lizard but I would never understand its lizardness. After a few moments studying me the lizard followed its path back up the tree. What about my own path, I thought. It was only informed by chaotic unrest.
Three months before, I had landed in Milano but its large size unnerved me. I mean that while I had learned Chicago, Milano was a last-minute change of plans and I hadn’t studied its skeletal map. I was there a day and a half before I met my mother back at the airport when we picked up her clients, an elderly couple from Cincinnati I’ll call Robert and Sylvia. Robert was morbidly obese and only interested in eating, drinking,
and sleeping. Sylvia was interested in Etruscan culture and medieval art though she was distressingly simpleminded about both. In the four days of driving them around they were never ready to go before eleven in the morning when the July weather was already overwarm. Robert barely looked out the car window so intently was he studying his briefcase full of food guidebooks.
Mother was pleasant but not overly warm, feeling bad as she was over the ill health of her elderly husband who was left behind in Milano when we drove south to Parma. Robert smelled poor despite his wealth which came from a well-known Cincinnati company that makes soap and toothpaste.
In Parma we had a few free hours after dropping Robert and Sylvia off at a grand hotel and checking into a simple pensione. While we were sharing a bottle of prosecco Mother said, “What horrid miserable fuckers,” referring to her clients. We laughed and she dug into her purse coming up with a letter from my first love Emelia which had been forwarded but which she had misplaced for several months.
“There’s something terribly wrong with you,” she shyly observed.
“Of course,” I said, adding a few details about complicated viruses.
“Do you have AIDS, dear?” she asked taking my hand.
