by Jim Harrison
A forty-seven-mile walk offers plenty of time to think things over but it is the walking rather than the thinking that calms the spirit. Brown Dog had none of the raw melancholy that the well educated often feel when first encountering Los Angeles. His frame of mind was a great deal more functional with the single purpose being to retrieve his bearskin and head back to the country, wherever that might be, though he had pondered Canada as a haven that might be safe from the arm of the law, and not the lovely strip club in the Canadian Soo where the girls got down to no clothing at all, but perhaps way up on the Nipigon River on the north shore of Lake Superior. Sizable brook trout were said to be plentiful there and he could always go back to the obnoxious job of cutting pulp.
B.D.’s last walk of this length had taken place a few years before when two Grand Marais girls he had driven over to Munising had ditched him there when he had drunk too much at the Corktown Bar and walked down a grassy knoll near the harbor for a snooze. He thought himself deeply in love with one of the girls, innocently named Mary, who originally hailed from Detroit and it was she with her own dark past who had hot-wired his van and taken off for a weekend in Iron Mountain. So deep was his grief and anger over this betrayal that he walked back to Grand Marais, taking a leisurely full two days, over forty miles and sadly, or so he thought in the present, about the same distance as Cucamonga to Westwood. But much of his Munising—to—Grand Marais hike had been cross country and except for a stop at the small store in Melstrand to pick up a few cans of pork and beans he had not viewed another human being. It was mid-May and warmish with a big moon and by the time of his first campfire he had largely gotten over Mary. Frank, his true friend and the owner of a local tavern, had warned him that Mary was “fast,” the evidence being the morning that B.D. had sunk himself in Frank’s bathtub, the water to which had been added a potent anti-crab medicine. There weren’t any fleas that far north and Brown Dog had been puzzled by a buggy feeling all over his body, even in his eyebrows. Frank had worked construction way down in Florida and made the expert analysis from experience.
A few hours out of Cucamonga he suddenly remembered where he had heard the name before. His grandfather had listened to the Jack Benny program on Sunday evenings on their battery-operated Zenith and Jack Benny himself had often traveled through Cucamonga on the train to Hollywood. Jack Benny’s buddy Rochester would sometimes yell “Cucamonga” for no apparent reason and one summer evening when there was a very small bear rummaging in their garbage pit at the far end of the garden the bear had suddenly looked up on hearing Rochester’s voice. He and his friend David Four Feet, who died in Jackson Prison, were full of envy at Rochester’s voice though they were incapable of imitating it and when they tried Grandfather would yell, “Batten your gob.”
The memory of Jack Benny lifted his spirits and B.D.’s vision expanded from the cement beneath his feet and the narrow tunnel in front of him that his emotions up to this point had allowed. Before Jack Benny he had been trying to remember the gist of the biblical story about Ruth among the “alien corn.” During his brief period at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago the pastor from the church back home had sent a letter about Ruth among the alien corn to assuage Brown Dog’s possible homesickness. Unfortunately the church had mistakenly sent B.D. the entire tuition check rather than directing it to the institute and he had squandered the money on a black waitress. The expression “head over heels in love” had always puzzled him because, though love could be physically rigorous, it didn’t seem quite that acrobatic.
As his vision widened somewhat his native curiosity, surely the most valuable thing one can own, took over and he began to observe this foreign country of Los Angeles more closely and certain things became clear. For instance, millions of new cars were supposedly sold every year but you saw few of them in the Upper Peninsula except on Routes 2 and 28 during tourist season where they were collectively parked in front of the more expensive motels in the evening. Here in Los Angeles there were countless thousands of new cars which meant the locals must be making money hand over fist. But standing on an overpass stretched above the San Gabriel River Freeway and staring down at six lanes of jam-packed traffic going bumper to bumper in both directions, he wondered why the drivers on each side of the highway just didn’t trade jobs and avoid the mess. B.D. also read the sign twice but couldn’t find the San Gabriel River and there were no other pedestrians to ask the river’s whereabouts.
Hours before he had stopped in a small park and had been rather amazed at the flora, none of which he recognized, though he knew the names of hundreds of trees and bushes in the Upper Peninsula. The birds were also a mystery and he wondered idly at God’s messiness in inventing so many species, then decided it was the messiness of nature that gave it such beauty.
He tried to extend his pursuit by the law into a gentler region of his mind to avoid the sensation that he should be looking over his shoulder even though the scene of the crime was two thousand miles to the east. He had burned the tent of two evil young anthropologists to protect his Indian graveyard, also with Lone Marten had lobbed cherry bombs and M-80 firecrackers into a protected archeological site, the graveyard, in an attempt to drive away the despoilers. This was scarcely a high crime but his probation had dictated he could not enter Alger County though the attack engineered by Lone Marten had strayed only a few hundred yards from Luce County into Alger. The point in Brown Dog’s mind was that if only the law imitated the gorgeously messy aspects of nature the judge might say “Let bygones be bygones” or something on that order. And then he could go back home, assuming that he recovered his bearskin. Delmore had mentioned that a bearskin should never be taken away from the region in which the animal had been killed because the skin sometimes still contained the spirit of the beast though B.D. suspected that Delmore often made up Indian lore when it suited his purpose.
The biggest problem on the long walk had been water. They weren’t exactly giving it away in this area. He had been charged fifty cents at a fast-food place for a large Styrofoam cup of water and hadn’t been able to drink it because it seemed to contain some weird chemicals. The girl behind the counter had been sympathetic to B.D.’s startled look when he tasted the water and pointed out a cooler that contained quarts of the stuff at over a dollar apiece. It was a warm day and he had no choice. He wasn’t quite prepared for this experience but recalled a quarrel in Frank’s Tavern over the matter of bottled water that had recently entered the Upper Peninsula. At the time he had been struggling to hear his all-time favorites, Patsy Cline and Janis Joplin, on the jukebox and Ed Mikula, the chief of the local Finns, was hollering that God’s own precious water was now being sold in bottles for more than beer or gasoline per ounce. Who was behind this crime was the question at hand? When asked his opinion B.D. said that water, gasoline, and beer were equally important but not interchangeable, and he was up to walking to any number of springs he knew of to get first-rate water even in the dead of winter, a fine notion though springs in Los Angeles were unlikely so he paid the full price for a quart of water that the label said had been shipped all the way from France, a boggling idea. He imagined some secret enormous burbling spring in far-off France and wanted to question the store clerk but she was now busy. There was the immediate notion that when he got back home he need only bottle twenty quarts of water from one of his springs to make a living wage. He had stuffed a fifteen-foot pole down in one of them and it had shot back up in the air from the force of the water. If you had a hangover you could just lie there on the soft green moss, drink plenty of the cold water, and after you were still for a while the brook trout would begin swimming around again.
After the first twenty-four hours of walking the map he had bought for yet another dollar at a service station had turned soft from his sweaty hands. He had passed the confusing place where César E. Chávez Avenue became Sunset Boulevard and had bought a black lunch bucket and a green janitor’s uniform at a secondhand store, the lunch bucket to carry his water and
any leftovers from his snacks. He was down to forty-nine dollars but then forty-nine was also his age so this collusion somehow appeared fortuitous at least for the time being. The problem was that he was beginning to stink and needed a place to suds off before putting on the clean clothes. The janitor’s shirt had the name “Ted” stamped on a pocket but then he felt it was unlikely that he find a shirt with his own name on it. He made his way up to Silver Lake Reservoir, clambered over the fence, and had a short swim. A number of hikers and dog walkers had hollered at him because swimming was forbidden in the city’s water supply but he ignored them. The objectors had withdrawn for the same reason that two unfriendly Mexican fellows had withdrawn back near Monterery Park when Brown Dog had asked for directions. First, to all he looked rather goofy, and second in modern terms he was quite a physical specimen from his lifelong work in the woods. He didn’t have the big breasts of the many bodybuilders he had seen on the streets in their tight T-shirts, but he could unload a four-hundred-pound iron wood-stove from a pick-up all by himself and other men tend to notice those capable of such feats. But more important, B.D. lacked a single filament of hostility in his system. Even way back in his teens when he was a champion bare-knuckle fighter in the western U.P. he was not prone to anger unless an opponent poked him in the eye. Even his anger over the soon-to-be-desecrated Indian (Anishinabe) graveyard was directed more at himself for betraying the location. In addition, he had what used to be called a “winning smile,” though that wouldn’t be true as he drew near the Pacific and the more prosperous areas because two teeth were prominently missing.
Under his poi or taro leaf in the botanical gardens there were a number of things to take pleasure in. He had had enough sense not to discard the neatly folded garbage bag in his back pocket. “Just when you think you won’t need it anymore you will,” old Claude liked to say. Claude would get in his garbage bag when he was out in the backcountry and it began to rain, or if the wind was cold he would step into his, hunch down, and pull the drawstring and have a nice curled-up snooze. Claude insisted the garbage bag was one of the great inventions of modern man along with toilet paper and galvanized buckets. Brown Dog tended to agree but mostly when he needed one. The Westwood night was tolerably warm for a northerner but the laid-out garbage bag made a nice ground cloth to protect him from moisture. His pleasure was not diminished by the fact that Westwood didn’t seem to have much in the way of woods, and just before dark he noted that the small pond with a feeder rivulet contained only a dozen or so lethargic orange carp. It might have been nice to cook one on a bed of coals but a fire would doubtless draw attention and the botanical park was officially closed for the night.
A good share of his pleasure under his leafy blanket came from his grandfather’s notion that you had to make the best of it wherever you were, and throughout the long hike from Cucamonga he had been pleasantly boggled by all the colors of the people he had seen who must come from many lands. Way back in school he had never been quite taken with the idea of America as a boiling pot, partly because his grandpa had used a boiling pot to scald pigs at butchering in order to scrape off the hair. Despite his hard knocks he felt a specific pleasure in all he had seen, especially along the busy part of Sunset Strip as he had continued heading west late in the afternoon. There had been literally hundreds of beautiful women though they tended to be uniformly quite thin in his terms. Delmore liked to say that you should avoid women who don’t enjoy their food because that means they have real problems, but even old Delmore would have had his head turned by this plenitude. To be sure, not one of them gave him a glance but he suspected this was because of the green janitor’s suit and the black lunch bucket which had the good quality he noted of making him invisible to the many police he had seen.
In fact he had become quite invisible to everyone except for a few other menial workers who nodded in greeting. When he had made his way farther west into the swank residential area of Beverly Hills he fairly had to wave in the face of a girl selling star maps which he quickly perceived had nothing to do with the constellations. He repeated his question about the whereabouts of Westwood three times before she deigned to take notice. Her eyes focused past his neck as she said that a few miles farther on he should take a left on Hilgard. There was something distinctly familiar about her and he remembered that last winter when a tree he was cutting had kicked back and injured his knee, during his convalescence Delmore had rented him a video called Butts Galore and this girl sure looked like one of the “butts” in the film. He couldn’t help but ask her and she replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no,” but a slight tinge of blush entered her cheeks. He would have tried to continue the conversation but a carload of older tourists pulled over wanting to know where Fred MacMurray lived so Brown Dog moved on. You couldn’t say Butts Galore was a top-drawer movie but it was certainly amazing to just get into town and meet an actress you recognized. The fact of the matter was that Brown Dog hadn’t seen many movies. The closest theater in one direction was in Newberry and that was over fifty miles distant, and in the other direction Marquette’s theaters were over a hundred miles to the west. Delmore played old westerns on his VCR because they were cheap to rent and he hated them which gave rise to a much needed emotional life. There was also the additional shortcoming to Brown Dog who lived on a subsistence level that a price of a movie was a price of five beers at Frank’s Tavern. Once as an early teen he and David Four Feet had hot-wired a Plymouth and gone to a drive-in theater to see what was advertised as a daring sex movie. Part of it was a cartoon showing a phalanx of sperm traveling up into the womb and David had hollered out the car window, “That’s me in the lead,” to much general laughter and horn beeping. The movie ended with a rather skinny woman giving birth in a rather frightening close-up that could not readily be distinguished from any of the farm animals they had seen giving birth. They both agreed they could have used the fifty cents apiece to see the genitals of a classmate, Debbie Schwartz, which is what she charged, a buck a look.
After finding his botanical-garden nest Brown Dog drifted through the greenery in the last of the twilight. There was a slight evening breeze from the west, clearing the air which had all day long resembled a sheen of yellow snot with the heat close enough to body temperature to emphasize the exudate nature of the air. B.D. found a patch of bamboo and lit a match to see it more closely, noting with pleasure that the bamboo was a giant version of the cane poles he had used as a child to fish inland lakes. This bamboo was a half foot in diameter and he supposed that it was capable of landing a fish the size of a Budweiser Clydesdale. The breeze picked up further and rattled the bamboo. He thought the breeze must surely come from the Pacific Ocean and his body fairly shimmered with delight at the prospect of seeing this body of water. He had spent enough time with maps, his favorite school book being the world atlas in the library, and he remembered clearly what this ocean looked like on paper. While he arranged his Hefty garbage bag on the ground his thoughts of the Pacific wavered into the image of a girl getting out of a Mercedes convertible on Sunset, and as luck would have it he had been blessed with a clear view way up her legs to her pale blue undies and slightly visible fur pieces. She had trotted down the sidewalk and into a store and he had marveled at her grace of movement, the fluid lubricant that fills such a body and makes it move so beautifully. He whispered a very old song, “I’d love to get you on a slow boat to China,” something on that order, before he slept, quite unmindful in his ordinariness that his straits were dire indeed, or that some in this immediate area of a great university, not to speak of the film business, would mistake this ordinariness as extraordinary.
Those who sleep outside a great deal know that this sleep can’t aspire to the comatose aspects of hibernation that so many seem to crave from night. You might wake up a hundred times for a moment or two, allowing your senses of hearing or smell or sight in the dimmish light to test your surroundings. This is unconscious enough not to deter from rest. Brown Dog was visited by a single cur
ious cat for a short time, and also the stars which finally made an appearance as the ambient light of the city diminished. The few times he became conscious enough his thought processes settled on simple things such as he would not be able to continue spending seven dollars a day on water. The air was quite sweet in the garden, a wonderful contrast to the fungoid odors of the motel rooms he had stayed in with Lone Marten who was armed with a dozen phony credit cards. Brown Dog had suggested that a couple of cheap sleeping bags would cost less than a night in a motel and Lone Marten had called him a fool and a “blanket ass,” a pejorative term for traditional Natives. Lone Marten insisted he needed a desk at night to work on the “colloquium” he would perform at U.C.L.A. Lone Marten called him a fool so often that in Laramie B.D. had to run him up the wall by his belt so that he flopped there while B.D. asked him to stop using the word “fool,” that in biblical terms it was a terrible thing to call your brother a fool. Of course from his uncomfortable position Lone Marten agreed, thinking at the time that if he weren’t David Four Feet’s brother he might actually be in danger with this simpleminded fool who hadn’t the sense to do anything to his own advantage.
