The Summer He Didn't Die by Jim Harrison
The last few days in the north he spent most of the time in the woods after packing was done. The water was warmish in August and he was able to wade a small channel in the Manistee River out to a minuscule island and sit in the middle of a cedar thicket, fending off an aggressive blue racer snake who didn’t want him to be there. Life seemed no more shaped by logic than the flowing water around him. There was a mystery to locations and this little island seemed to own the emotional equivalent of a thicket along the Platte River in Nebraska where he had spent the night when hitchhiking home from Colorado at age sixteen. The level of perceptions seem to move and increase with the volume of the river. The Boston of a book salesman was radically different from the Boston of a nineteen-year-old busboy. The New York City of a member of an English department would have a different resonance than it had for a young itinerant. You couldn’t step in the same river even once.
Off they went towing the usual U-Haul trailer with a cat and a dog, an English pointer that would find no hunting on Long Island but would instead point mice the cat stalked or birds in the trees of the Stony Brook yard. He was appalled by the hundred-and-fifty-dollar rent of the house forgetting his sufficient salary.
A new location absorbs us, he thought, making us part of whatever it is. First was the matter of getting the lay of the land, your bearings, the directions in regard to the moon and stars which were much less relevant than in the country but a matter of habit. There were interesting streets of old houses, a fascinating grocery store compared to the Midwest, an expensive restaurant, and a pleasant workingmen’s bar where he immediately felt at home among plumbers, carpenters, handymen all speaking with a peculiar accent. The true boon of their rental home was that at the end of a small street and not fifty yards from their home was an inlet of the Long Island Sound. His daughter and dog stared at a cluster of horseshoe crabs, several of which moved at their approach. A boat sailed by on the evening waters. Another dog joined them waiting to be petted. They were surrounded by alien flora, thick-leaved bushes and unrecognizable trees.
The university was, well, a university, a newish institution that attracted famous scholars. All the people were people never met before. There were many abrasive and hyperintelligent Jews, a refreshing tonic to the soporific Midwest. There were lovely girls in the miniskirts of the early sixties, flopping down in the chair of his office, their panties clearly visible. He was supposedly administering the English department which he naively assumed would be similar to his job as straw boss to fifty laborers on the college farm. When they didn’t know how to sharpen their hoes you showed them. He wasn’t all that dumb and quickly figured out that a big English department was similar to the emotional and intellectual play he imagined in the State Department. Important people like Philip Roth and Alfred Kazin must have Tuesday-Thursday schedules because they lived in New York City, an unreliable two hours away by train. Why not? They were distinguished though their schedules irked the faculty that lived locally. It was a lovely place with a large budget for visiting writers like Kenneth Burke, Joseph Campbell, Loren Eiseley all of whom knew Weisinger. Dozens of poets came in a program of which he was in charge, from Robert Lowell and James Wright to Robert Duncan, with whom he became friends, and Louis Simpson who joined the faculty.
It was still an institution in which only a certain kind of personality felt comfortable. He wasn’t one. His neckties were strangling. Frequent trips to New York City saved his hide. So weary was he of academics that he would drive to Port Jefferson to hang out with Italians and eat smoked eel.
There were literary things to do in New York City, the meaning of which quickly blurred but then life in the East had enabled him to meet writers with whom he felt kinship like Gary Snyder, and Peter Matthiessen, and the austere presence, except when drunk, of William Styron.
Ultimately they couldn’t wait to get out of there as the congestion even distressed their sleep. Long Island itself was a bottleneck, not a good configuration for a claustrophobe. He had received a grant which would nearly get them through the first year in the country, or so he thought with the raw immensity of his Kingsley mistake still fresh in his mind. He had also begun to brood about what he was going to do without the company of intelligent people. He wouldn’t again be seated next to W. H. Auden at Drue Heinz’s apartment, or eat German roast goose in Yorktown with Louis Simpson and Derek Walcott, go to a party at Bobby White’s and talk to William Styron, Robert Lowell, Peter Matthiessen, and Jack Ludwig and watch them quarrel about events neither could quite remember. He was told that Ludwig had stolen Saul Bellow’s wife but there was the question of how a wife could be stolen unless she was willing. Lowell seemed more profoundly short circuited than James Wright, intermittently kind and pleasant, verbally cruel, or completely remote. Marching on the State Department in Washington he suddenly began talking about Alexander Pope while Robert Bly and Norman Mailer were at least manically concentrated on the event at hand.
His conclusion, not totally right, was that none of this activity much mattered, that all of the social activity surrounding the practice of literature was amusingly meaningless. Perhaps it was the vice of intelligent literary people to talk their lives away but then he neglected the idea that they also comprised a mutual-aid society, and it was easy to ignore or forget someone on his own off-brand solo act. His errors of thinking were those of a young man who wishes to be right when it was a matter beyond right and wrong. Within the limitations of a livelihood people seek out a habitat for habits of their souls, and likely this process begins in childhood, and the chances of finding the right place to live out your life are, for economic reasons, small indeed. Places change, people change, divorce, running away, are swept to and fro by jobs or searching for jobs, always looking for a perfect place, even in a crowded city an apartment window that looks down at an imperfect tree.
His wife and daughter flew west, and he followed in their old brown Ford towing the U-Haul at dawn over the Verrazano Bridge even less sure of himself looking out in clear light at the questionable wonders of the city, possibly the only writer awake who hadn’t stayed up all night. Thousands of people can and do write books, but where am I going now and why? After jumping off the edge he wondered, Why again is he jumping off the edge? He would continue publishing books but shouldn’t more attention be paid to the life that went with it? When he arrived in northern Michigan after a twenty-seven-hour drive with a rambunctious dog and quarrelsome cat in the back seat his daughter, now six, asked, “Dad, I like this place, do we have to move again?” and he said, “No.”
It was a rental farm on a high hill with Lake Michigan and the green Manitou Islands glistening in the distance. The three of them stood in the yard letting their dog, Missy, enter her new unfenced life. She ran in tentative circles then headed off toward a distant orchard, down through the corner of a big woodlot that traversed a mile down to the lake, and back up the hill through an alfalfa field, and into the yard where she jumped over the hood of their car, and then took a nap under an elm tree. The cat merely disappeared for several hours as cats do in their long and laborious examination of new terrain.
He saw what couldn’t be in his books, partly because there was too much, but mostly because there is an evanescence in our visual moods that is only available to fine painters and occasionally the best photographers. In a paned window there are sixteen versions of the outside. In his interior journeys he could be blind for days, returning abruptly to the creature mode when he became lost in the woods or a swamp at which point nothing escaped his notice. He understood water when through carelessness he stumbled while wading, or fished in a small boat in heavy seas on Lake Michigan when the water was too cold except for brief survival. Water then became alien in its overwhelming presence. One evening in the tavern everyone was glum because three Chippewa (Anishinabe) fishermen they all knew well had drowned on a cold windy day.
He had been amazed when walking with a friend in New York who was a native of the city how much he h
In the fall his wife and daughter loved the grouse and woodcock he brought home from the field and there were many gifts of venison. In the spring the larger fish came close to the shore chasing smelt and one night he and a friend caught ten lake trout, totaling more than a hundred pounds, delicious to eat. Spring itself was electrifying after their first severe winter with over two hundred inches of snow though unlike Kingsley they could afford fuel. Winter was a time when you discovered if you had anything to say when you wrote though if you didn’t it was easy to convince yourself that you did.
The grant year was coming to an end and in April with the first hint of not-yet-jubilant green on the south-facing hillsides they decided to use the last of their money to visit his friend Tom McGuane and his wife, Becky, in the Florida Keys. This is typical of a young couple with limited funds. Why not spend it all at once, but then it was a wonderful trip to a new wilderness of water of stunning beauty with turquoise channels and beige flats, dense green mangrove islets, with a fresh world of water each morning when they set off in McGuane’s skiff for the area on the Gulf side of the Keys.
A mistake in their tickets cost the very last of their money on the trip back and they arrived in a late-April snowstorm. From Miami to Detroit he had brooded about the grand landscape of his delusions, perceiving clearly for the first time that the world bore little resemblance to the life he wished for, that being a poet would certainly have to be a part-time obsession. This was not the less poignant for being so foolish. Despite being an academic atmosphere Stony Brook had brought the world into your face day by day with the relentless anti-Vietnam War efforts and a returning veteran at the docks at Big Pine Key had told him how much war literally stank day by day. The man said that the people who start and maintain the wars whether it was Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon had never known the stench of rotting bodies which was so overwhelming that months later in the Florida Keys while fishing he could recall the smell to the point of retching despite the sweetness of the salt air all around him.
The largest question mark for him was that he had grown up in such idyllic circumstances despite being blinded that perhaps his mind was simply incapable of comprehending the day-to-day actualities of the human world. The twelve volumes of My Book House, the dearest volumes of his childhood, had created his own world which still formed a retreat for him under duress. It was a little like coming into an unknown area and your cognitive abilities figured out the directions only to find later that the directions were all wrong. It was very difficult for the brain to correct the delusion. Frankly, characters from Greek and Norse mythology were more specifically real to him than the United Nations. Walking past their impressive building on New York’s East Side he found it difficult to extrapolate anything meaningful even though he knew it to be true from reading Dag Hammarskjöld.
So on the flight home he was in the middle of the mind ground of being as it is though it was a landscape of question marks. The missing world was only the one he wished it to be. From Detroit to Traverse City he was answering his daughter Jamie’s questions about how planes can fly but mostly his mind was sunk in the William James he had read so studiously at age sixteen to understand his own mind. “How great is the darkness in which we grope,” James had said. Also, “Consciousness is an event that cannot be fully shared.”
In Lake Leelanau they sat in the old car going over three weeks of mail while the windshield wipers dealt with the dense wet snow. Halfway through the stack they found the letter from the Guggenheim Foundation saying he had received a fellowship that could start immediately. Saved for another year. They laughed and bought steak and wine on credit at the grocery. Home to a cool farmhouse and turning the heat up high because they could afford it.
A grant year is a soporific fool’s paradise. Days drift with good intentions. He had worked regularly since age twelve wanting his own money but writing had none of the faucet characteristics of a regular job. He began to feel the constraints of poetry though three books had produced a pleasant amount of extra income through readings which also allowed the relief of habit through travel. He read in the schools in Minneapolis for two weeks on a government arts program, also on Arizona Indian reservations, and in black high schools in Detroit, the latter two because no one else wanted to do it. He drank too much and occasionally fell in love, another habit of travelers. There were certainly no more grants to be had after this one and he thought of fiction, which simultaneous with poetry at age fourteen had been inseparable loves. Bad luck helped. He fell off a cliff while hunting and during a long convalescence wrote a novel, the only copy temporarily lost during a month- long mail strike when he sent it to his brother. The novel was immediately accepted so now he was a novelist though the ego was restrained remembering his father’s admonition that the arts weren’t an entitlement that separated one from the social contract.
Toward the end of the year they lost their rental, but found a small farm to buy for eighteen thousand dollars, borrowing a down payment from his poet friend Dan Gerber. The move was only three miles which kept him within the bounds of his promise to his daughter since the school district was the same. His own questionable desires were for the Upper Peninsula which he had taken to visiting for its large areas of wild country where wolves and bears roamed, and the fishing was uncrowded, mostly solitary. On a short trip to San Francisco to judge a literary contest, his first and only foray into this questionable process, he stayed with Robert Duncan and his housemate the artist Jess. There was a bit of the gay father figure in Duncan though the word “gay” had not yet arrived. Duncan was full of non-Protestant enthusiasm for life and advised him that since his mortgage payment was only ninety-nine dollars he would somehow manage. If you wished to live in a remote area you’d simply have to travel to get a livelihood. He was bothered by the often perceived nastiness of the literary profession but it was Duncan’s comic belief that it was the old folkloric eighty-twenty situation where eighty percent of humanity is basically goodwilled but the other twenty percent is far less so, the second time he had heard this defined. In the interim between homes their second daughter, Anna, was conceived in a friend’s garage where they lived rather happily for two months.
But now the raw meat was on the floor which meant hustling and airports. Having read countless biographies of writers he could see that it was an unusually unhappy profession but wondered if it was more so than ordinary people about whom no biographies were written. The true question was the life that accompanied the profession. In his granary studio he broke for lunch and drove over to the beach to see his wife, eight-year-old daughter, and baby daughter where they were having a picnic and looked left and right and there were only a half dozen others in miles on the vast golden beach with the blue waters of Lake Michigan in front of them and the green Manitou Islands beyond. This was a grand place to live no matter how trim their budget and back in the studio in the late afternoon he heard noises in the barn and his wife and daughter with their passion for horses were trying to teach a young Belgian filly, an immense girl, how to back up in a stall. He took a few turns pushing and pulling with his arms around her huge docile neck. They boarded as many as seven horses mostly to be surrounded by their beauty.
Off he went, now and then, in order to write an essay or do a reading, but fewer and fewer of the latter as appearing in the costume of a public figure was exhausting, but more important put you in a false state of rehearsal before you left, caused you to invent a comfortable persona while you were there, and the inevitable
Travel, despite it being for work, could create for-getfulness like the dream world of sleep doesn’t recognize the existence of the waking man. Travel brings out the mammalian instincts for attentiveness to place where death is unlikely but it’s better to be sure. It can be as simple as stepping off a curb in London forgetting that the traffic flow is opposite, or leaving a bar in Ecuador and suddenly shots are fired in the darkness down the street. He wrote about fishing in Key West and one evening when guns were drawn he slid over the bar and out the kitchen door like a snake, thinking, “I’m a father.”
The Pacific Ocean fifty miles off the coast of Ecuador was as anti-claustrophobic as could be imagined but still fearsome in its limitlessness. The engine of the boat kept breaking down and near the confluence of the La Niña and Humboldt Currents the current was visible or so thought his fear. Even the rickety boat’s compass was awry though you need only follow the seabirds in their homeward flight in the afternoon or so the captain said. The sky was sometimes crowded with frigate birds and when they would see them far off they would follow these birds in pursuit of schools of bait. Sometimes around the bait schools the striped marlin would whirl in fast circles until the bait was confined and then the marlin would slash through with their bills and devour the fish. There were also schools of big dolphinfish with each fish larger than he had seen of this species in the Florida Keys. Sometimes groups of sea snakes, a type of cobra, would swim around the boat, deadly poisonous but sweet-tempered. Whales sounded, one so close to the boat he could look into a bowling-ball-sized eye. Every day they caught marlin, too many in fact for the hundred-degree equatorial heat. And motoring home in the afternoon the stomach clenched a bit at the upcoming huge swells and combers near the tiny harbor. One day he was sick from bad food and they came in early. He took a walk like any sick dog, sat near a promontory, and petted a tiny black goat while a long row of vultures watched from a cliff behind them.