by Jim Harrison
This put me in a huff, which in turn doubtless caused me to make my first wrong turn, the tip-off on one being that the road abruptly ended at the river. I pretended that this was on purpose though I could see Ann had her doubts. The river was in a gorge far below us and Ann stood close to the edge, which made me nervous what with being a victim of vertigo. On my countless trips up from Chicago I have to drive through Wisconsin rather than Michigan in order to avoid the vast Mackinac Bridge. Until the mid-fifties you could take a ferry across the Straits. Why war against my limitations? Those extraordinary individuals that appear to break through human limits frequently have unendurable lives. Or so it seems. Of course in Joe’s case it didn’t appear to be his choice but maybe part of it was. He had logged over a year in various hospitals. What better motive was needed to spend a life as a free-roaming primate? Why give up your life for doctors to toy with your head at vast profit when, according to his mother, Joe never had the slightest chance to return to what we wanly call a normal life. He had lost his functional intelligence or that part of it most valued in society, the ability to make a living.
After about fifteen minutes of pondering my next verbal move, and having my vehicle coming to yet another riverine dead end, I reached for my compass in the glove compartment, brushing against my companion which made me forget that you can’t take an accurate compass reading in a vehicle because of all the metal. I decided to taunt her with piths and gists, fragments of excoriating wisdom from world literature. She asked for it, I thought. It became quite fun because I concealed authorship and pretended the ideas were my own and was intrigued when she caught me on two of the first three, even though I translated the thoughts into common, slangy language.
“I think that if you’re really too conscious it’s the same as being diseased,” I said at which she replied, “Clumsy Dostoyevsky.”
“Stare into a big hole in the ground long enough and it stares back into you.” She paused at this one, then said, “Big hole is a bullshit version of ‘abyss,’ Nietzsche. Try harder.” She also added that literary folks like us couldn’t put together a whole picture because they were frightened at settling for less than the ultimate. She was amused when I butchered D. H. Lawrence’s “The only aristocracy is consciousness” into “Oddly, the only unique possession we can have is the level of consciousness.” I defended myself by saying that the reason I went into commercial real estate and book dealing was because at an early age, say nineteen, I admitted my mind was far too ordinary to become a writer, and that from an early age I had veiled my essential corniness by becoming prematurely querulous.
“Your parents must have stomped the shit out of you,” she laughed. This was a bit too much for me to handle so I stared out my side window fearing that tears would form. Why hadn’t I brought a thermos of martinis?
“There’s a point at which the exposed heart never recovers.” This was tit for tat and the Rilke nailed her through the heart. I could almost feel her throat swell and her tears begin to emerge. We were back smack-dab in Joe’s territory, and consequently her own. She loved a man who had run into a beech tree on his motorcycle and she would likely think of it on her deathbed. One couldn’t really presume that he loved her equally but that was now beside the point. I handed her a fine linen handkerchief, one of a dozen I had bought in London. She looked at it closely, handed it back, and took tissues from her purse.
“Goddamn the world,” she screamed and I slammed on the brakes with sweat fairly bursting from my forehead. There’s a lot of screaming in the media in general but you rarely hear a scream in actual life.
After about three hours when it was seven in the evening we emerged on a highway. This was puzzling because the highway number told us we were a full twenty miles off course. I was all for throwing in the towel and heading for a mediocre restaurant in the next town at the suggestion of which Ann became disgusted. I had a small Xeroxed county map that they sell in local stores to tourists for a quarter. However, the map was poor and blurred and besides I hadn’t packed along my reading glasses. I was able to show Ann our present location and she assumed the role of navigator with my heart sinking when I realized it would be a full hour on slow two-tracks before we could even reach the general area where we presumed Joe to be. Meanwhile Ann was driving me batty by rambling on about medical details she had researched, all of which seemed to ignore the severity of Joe’s injuries proven by dozens of tests that did not exclude the visual treats of the MRI and the CAT scan. Ann admitted she had read the three-inch-thick scrapbook of medical reports Joe’s mother had collected, but then she had been through the scrapbook in late March and simple hope was beginning to overcome her rationality. She even mentioned a charismatic healer she had heard of who lived down on the Mexican border of Texas. Now she was close to touching my true “bete noire,” the loathsome arena of the occult. All Joe needed least was to be hauled off to face some geek charlatan. The occult is always the excrescence of our fear of death which is also the fear of the realities that surrounded us. I had dabbled a bit in the subject in a literary sense until in the late fifties when I began to read Loren Eiseley (sad that few, if any, scientists can write as well as this man) and also an article by the great Yale professor G. E. Hutchinson called “Homage to Santa Rosalia, or Why Are There So Many Kinds of Animals?” The mystery is in the products of earth herself not in the workings of vaporous goblins. Of course I went on and on until she demanded I stop.
It was at this point, about nine in the waning evening but still with plenty of light, that we thought we saw a partially nude figure cross the narrow road perhaps fifty yards ahead of us. The figure seemed to be in the act of leaping. I had just turned on NPR out of Marquette for music to soothe our abraded nerves, in this case Brahms whom I don’t care for. Even at this important juncture I must render my opinions! Anyway, I sped up until we reached the point we agreed on. She began yelling “Joe” and I closely examined the damp, sandy road for tracks, at first finding nothing but then on the far edge there was a deeply embedded heel print of the figure landing. I turned to see Ann running into the woods continuing to yell “Joe.” I followed at a slower pace, tracking her by her voice. I wasn’t very far into the woods before I sensed it was all a bad idea. I turned around, hopefully to determine the way I had come. The contemptible Reagan had said, “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.” I immediately recognized eleven kinds of trees and shrubs but the predominant reality was the din of mosquitoes. Ann’s voice faded in the distance and my insides quavered at the thought that we would both become hopelessly lost. Above the creepy whine of the mosquitoes I seemed to hear something else, almost like music. Of course. It was the despised Brahms on the vehicle’s radio. I was saved but not so Ann. I walked back, the music becoming more fulsome and melodious, thinking I would pay ten thousand dollars for a Sapphire martini. It’s all “dead money” anyway; money destined to nieces and nephews as my manner of living hasn’t made the slightest inroads in the principal of my portfolio, an ugly word except where it pertains to the work of an artist. Why in God’s name shouldn’t I fork over an even ten grand for a martini, not that one was available in at least fifteen miles?
I honked the horn until I became tearful at this very bleak sound. The “beep, beep, beep” of children’s stories doesn’t do it justice. Beep a horn deep in the woods if you want to redefine your notion of the “forlorn”; the sound quickly baffles and muffles itself in the greenery. Lonesome Norm beeping the horn.
After about a half-hour Ann emerged from the woods asking why I had kept beeping the horn? When asked, she said she came out of the woods the same way she went in. Unfortunately I made a miscue when I turned the vehicle around. It was now getting dark and I backed into a ditch containing water. Four-wheel drive doesn’t work when the car frame is on the ground and the hood is slanted upward as if it were a plane taking off. Luckily there was mosquito repellent in the glove compartment and Ann was kind enough not to call me a stupid shit. There
was a full hour of Mozart on NPR before Dick Rathbone showed up and towed us out of the ditch which I knew he would. Show up, that is. While he hooked up the chain I was sure I saw a face in the woods where his truck lights were shining but said nothing.
Back at the cabin I made the dreamed-of martinis, also sandwiches because it was midnight and too late to cook dinner. When Dick had dropped us off he said he was going to return to Joe’s area at first light and hang a little bag with his pills from a tree limb close to the old shelter. Joe had ditched his telemetric devices as he often did.
Ann was nearly asleep sitting up and I insisted she take my sleeping loft while I was content with a sofa before the fireplace because even the smallest wood fire on a warm summer night can soothe my brain. I recalled reading in William Calvin, a theoretical neurophysiologist, that most of the mass or volume of the brain is insulation for the countless billions of electrical impulses. Well, staring into a wood fire can slow these down to a manageable level. While waiting for Dick Rathbone to tow us out Ann said she had been awarded a partial travel grant from the university to go to St. Petersburg in Russia for a month in the coming winter. She had always wanted to go there in the winter and needed to visit some Turgenev scholars. She said idly while spraying on more mosquito dope that she might not be able to go because she was short of money. I had been to this splendid city back in the seventies before communism thawed into whatever and I insisted to Ann that I had a hotshot travel agent in Chicago who I’d get to put her up for the month in the Hotel Europa. I didn’t want her to freeze her lovely butt off in some wretched student quarters. She teased that if I was after her “lovely butt” that was a very expensive way to go about it. We let the subject go over mutual discomfort. Staring into my beech fire I thought that if at my age you could buy a memory of this quality for ten grand or so it would be the ultimate bargain. What a bold thought, for me anyway. Is not Ann worth a portion of my dead money? If a martini was worth ten grand what improbable amount was Ann worth?
II
It was the hottest first week of August that anyone could remember, and these local folks are experts at remembering weather. Maybe all writers telling a story are in fact doing a coroner’s inquest? For instance, this morning my left hand had an irritating tremble when I read the newspaper. I attributed it at first to the usual information that makes one livid, but then decided to admit the tremble might very well be another downward step in the aging process. As an experiment I concocted a glandular fantasy about tupping Ann on the picnic table and the trembling stopped. This is my kind of science. What magic potion could my brain have delivered?
Joe reappeared after five days in the woods, rather shameless over the worries he had caused us. He said he was sorry and then went swimming off the pier. He was pulled aboard exhausted by a cabin cruiser at least five miles out in Lake Superior on a warm but blustery day. The cabin cruiser folks were appalled and called the Coast Guard which dispatched a boat owned by the local Coast Guard auxiliary now that the local station is defunct.
Joe was gone five days because he was digging a cave near the site of his torn-down shelter. “They won’t find my cave,” he said to me in Dick Rathbone’s backyard, then turned to Ann a few feet from me but evidently in a parallel universe in his mind and said, “They won’t find my cave.” Is he a sick dog who wishes to hide, a mammal who finds safety in secrecy, a wounded young man trying valiantly to sort out his confused mind? I must say I observed him closely for signs of unhappiness and self-pity but found none. Something in his bruised skull had accepted his condition in perhaps the same manner that his dog, Marcia, accepted his errant behavior. As a nickel-plated gourmand I asked him what he and Marcia had found to eat during their five days of absence. He said, “Animal meat” and left it at that. Dick later told me that when he checked out my cabin in April Marcia had managed to catch a large snowshoe rabbit. When the rabbit zigged and zagged at top speed, which it does to escape an ordinary predator, Marcia had run straight through the zigs and zags and was able to intercept the animal.
So he probably ate rabbits, presumably roasted, and God knows what else as he ignored further inquiries. When he returned, Edna remarked that both he and his clothes were relatively clean which could be explained by a creek nearby the site. This proved he remembered childhood lessons of hygiene though it should be noted that many species of mammals tend to bathe regularly.
Naturally Ann rejoined Joe at the tiny cabin behind the Rathbone’s. The first evening without her I seethed with jealousy so Roberto’s inept remarks were not totally off base. The tombstones of aging were coming up out of the earth like mushrooms or, better yet, toadstools. The old toad sits in his cabin with moist eyes, the first time he’s been alone in five nights, though he’s in training after having spent much of his life flying solo. His wife used to say, “I’m not really here, am I?” Joe was doubtless pounding away at poor Ann. Poor Ann indeed. Women are much more feral in their lovemaking than men, and despite a fire in the fireplace my brain kept raising images of their coupling and his evidently improbable potency, or so implied Sonia on her last trip.
When I awoke and made coffee I was startled to see Joe and Ann sitting out on the picnic table waiting for me to get up. At first I was irritated because I like to start the day with an hour of reading and I had reached a chapter in William Calvin’s How Brains Think called “Syntax as a Foundation of Intelligence.” There was also the problem that when my eyes first opened in that hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking my mind had concocted a dreamlike plan that was both generous and selfish. I own a small winter adobe in southern New Mexico left to me by my father from when he resigned from Cleveland Cliffs to go with Phelps Dodge whose questionable labor practices are maddening. I was thinking I could put Joe up in the nearby village, mostly Latino, and hire someone local to keep track of him. Latinos are traditionally more tolerant of people like Joe than we are. Of course this would mean that Ann would come for visits. In the lago part of my impulse that was part of the plan. But then Joe wouldn’t freeze to death or have to be locked up in the coming winter.
Now they were sitting on the picnic table at seven in the morning and I waved them in for coffee. I ended up frying Joe and Marcia a dozen eggs while Ann and I had dry toast. Ann drives one of those minuscule subcompacts, useless in this area, and she wondered if I was willing to drop them off as near as possible to the site of Joe’s cave, still several miles from the nearest two-track. Joe needed to retrieve a present for me and Ann said she had to leave early the next morning. I’ve always loved even the smallest presents. Of course I would chauffeur them. We glanced over at Joe who was munching dog kibble from a sack I kept for Marcia’s visits. Ann was horrified and slapped the dog food out of his hand. He burst into tears for the first time, or the first time I had seen him do so. She jumped up so fast she knocked over her chair and leaned over and embraced him. I could feel my face sadden because her lovely butt in her tight hiking trousers was inches from my nose and, at the same time, I was grieving over the embarrassing incident. He simply didn’t recognize dog food. Marcia was having some with her fried eggs, why shouldn’t he?
Off we went and I was proud that I drove directly to the place which was close to where I had backed into the ditch. At the last moment I decided to walk along with them, not for the childish motive of seeing my present without an undue wait, but from the ticklish idea that how can I understand the inside without going outside and taking a look from that vantage point. Besides, if I don’t discover the earth in this life when am I going to understand it? This is admittedly a daffy notion but my brain was quite abuzz. Up and down I go, round and round I go, that is the human condition, but there must be a limited number of knots that can be tied in a single rope. Calvin quotes Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin saying, “All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next?”
I can’t say my walk on the wild side went espe
cially well. I fell down several times which in itself wasn’t bad because I couldn’t recall seeing the earth so closely. The third time it happened I began to wonder if it was partly why the Muslims do prostrations. I seemed to remember that the act of prostration also occurred in many cultures. Maybe bankers, politicians, and suchlike should begin the day out in their yards touching their noses to the Great Mother. Of course, I haven’t done so myself so my sudden reverence might be tainted. It simply doesn’t exist in any viable form though often when I’m in the woods, say picking blueberries for pancakes near my cabin, I can sense the reverence creeping up my legs like standing in tropical waters.
I was falling down because during much of our arduous hike the ferns were as high as our waists or higher. Joe, without saying anything, demonstrated a more shuffling gait where you push your feet out close to the ground, insuring a certain balance when you run into an invisible dead tree limb or smallish stump.
I was quite impressed with the cave itself. I recognized Dick Rathbone’s green-handled garden spade near the entrance, which Joe had concealed by transplanting viburnum and other shrubs. The cave itself was quite small with the floor covered with ferns and pine boughs which in turn were covered by untanned deer hides. People salt them down but tanning hides is laborious and to have them done professionally is expensive. There was a Coleman lantern, a cheapish plastic poncho, several bird and flora guidebooks, and a laminated map. I could imagine Joe reading the guidebooks even though his memory might recapture the information for only seconds in regard to the photos and drawings. He was, however, unable to imagine remembering the meaning of words but not the visual aspects they represented. None of us, not so afflicted, could cross this peculiar gap. I moved back quickly when a large, fat garter snake oozed out from under a deer hide. Joe croaked with laughter and Ann faked an untroubled posture.
