Off to the Side Read online

  Praise for Off to the Side:

  “A story of art’s triumph over human fallibility and perversity … Readers will find [in Off to the Side] lovely prose, an original mind and a plainspoken man.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

  “Part memoir and part menu from a sixty-four-year-old writer who is part man and part beast … [and] a deeply spiritual, reverent, and grateful man.”

  —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

  “As fine a portrait of the species American writer as we’re ever likely to have … A wholly winning book.”

  —James Sallis, The Boston Globe

  “Celebrating the body’s coarse demands and the mind’s highest aspirations, Jim Harrison’s bighearted memoir is a tell-all about the ‘delicious freedom’ of attentiveness…. The literary equivalent of a bear hug, enveloped by a whiff of garlic, booze and the brimstone that accompanies unfettered thought.”

  —Chris Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “A grand treat … Crotchety, hyperliterate, ribald, wine-stained, a lingual barnstormer, the crazy rogue uncle of American writing—this is Jim Harrison, folks, and Off to the Side is proof yet again of his cockeyed genius.”

  —Jonathan Miles, Men’s Journal

  “This is a big book, the book of a life, and it treats all aspects of Harrison’s life with honesty and craft in the telling … This book captured my mind, remained with me for days after reading it; and for those for whom it is but an introduction to Harrison’s work, rather than one of the elegant capstones, I am deeply happy for their good fortune.”

  —Rick Bass, Shambhala Sun

  “Reading Jim Harrison’s memoir, Off to the Side, is a lot like sitting down with a garrulous and wise uncle to hear story after story late into the night. He’s been around the block, for sure, but he’s neither bragging nor complaining. The pleasure comes from total immersion in a life lived to the hilt.”

  —Dan Cryer, Newsday

  ALSO BY JIM HARRISON

  FICTION

  Wolf

  A Good Day to Die

  Farmer

  Legends of the Fall

  Warlock

  Sundog

  Dalva

  The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  Julip

  The Road Home

  The Beast God Forgot to Invent

  POETRY

  Plain Song

  Locations

  Outlyer

  Letters to Yesenin

  Returning to Earth

  Selected & New Poems

  The Theory and Practice of Rivers and Other Poems

  After Ikkū and Other Poems

  The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

  ESSAYS

  Just Before Dark

  The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

  OFF TO THE SIDE

  A Memoir

  Jim Harrison

  In memory of Winfield Sprague Harrison and Norma Olivia Walgren

  Copyright © 2002 by Jim Harrison

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Some of the pieces included in II: Seven Obsessions have been previously published in slightly different form in Men’s Journal. “Alcohol” appeared under the title “A Man’s Guide to Drinking” in the October 2001 issue. “Stripping” appeared under the title “Naked Women Dancing” in the December 2001 issue. “Private Religion” appeared under the title “How Men Pray” in the February 2002 issue. “The Road” appeared under the title “The Road: A Love Story” in the May 2002 issue. “Nature and Natives” appeared under the title “The End of Nature” in the August 2002 issue.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harrison, Jim, 1937–

  Off to the side : a memoir / Jim Harrison.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4647-3

  1. Harrison, Jim, 1937– 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3558.A67 Z.465 2002

  813‘.54—dc21 2002026051

  Grove Fress

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  “Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too.”

  —Rilke

  INTRODUCTION

  When mentally fragile I like to drive to a far city, say at least a few hundred miles from any of the three modest places my family lives, check in to a somewhat pathetic brand-name motel with the pleasant feeling that I wouldn’t know a single soul in the local phone book. And that my own phone won’t ring except in the case of a dire event because my wife is well aware of my motives for staying in the anonymous room. Here I have shorn myself of my support systems and there is a fairly good chance that in a day or two I’ll discover the etiology of what ails me, keeping in mind that the overexamined life is also not worth living.

  Most often nothing in particular ails me, or nothing that is immediately correctable, other than a need to step aside from my life for a day or two and walk in unknown country. Close after dawn and armed with a local map I take a stroll in empty fields, canyons, woods, but preferably near a creek or river because since childhood I’ve loved the sound they make. Moving water is forever in the present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid. I’ve always favored undistinguished places for reasons of privacy. And the fact that you’re in new country, however modest, raises the level of attention for perhaps genetic reasons. Who goes here? Not many.

  It is in this manner that I’ve always come up with the ideas and images that engender my poetry, novellas, and novels. I would add road trips that aren’t particularly directional and have lasted for weeks. On solo road trips you see with clarity pieces of your life unroll against the unconditioned and nonhabitual backdrop. You refuse to think about anything you’ve thought about before, a tactic that seems to freshen the neurons and synapses because new images arise from the past, also new images from the unlived life before you. It is a somewhat mortal game.

  Of course your own life is your truest story and it blinds you unless it’s heavily edited. You can immediately dismiss all the routines which, though comforting, own the banality of a greeting card. This shrinkage alone will get rid of nine-tenths of your life. I recall that in his book The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder notes the relative sameness of our biographies but that our dreams and visions can be quite unique. The dream that I could write a good poem, a good novel, or even a good movie for that matter, has devoured my life.

  I’m not sure I’m particularly well equipped to tell the truth. What our parents and teachers taught us as truth usually dealt with moral abstractions or the illusory notion of coming to grips with what they loosely termed as reality. Certain things happened and certain things didn’t happen, and then the not very agile jump to certain things are true and others false. The wild humor of ten-year-olds comes from the first reading between the lines of this paralyzing bullshit that is destined to suffocate most of them.

  I have noticed that everyone speaks a slightly different language. I suspect this is one way a writer
can draw us together in that there is an effortless reverence among the intelligent for language mastery. I have also become aware that people’s speech is less vivid than earlier in my life in terms of rural life—plants, animals both farm and wild, trees, weather, land and water shapes, the sun, moon, and stars. But then this is altogether natural in that during my own lifetime the thirty percent urban and semi-urban and seventy percent rural population has been reversed, thus the drift away from earthbound metaphor and images.

  Maybe the idea of our unique dreams and visions is a little antique, if not pretentious. “Obsession” is more contemporary, though the young man who felt his brain transfigured by Keats and Whitman at sixteen felt called to these professions as surely as he would have felt if a voice had boomed out on a spring night from the marsh behind the house. We are drenched in cynicism, psychologisms, explanations, but life is still there, its essence quite beyond spin, its cycle as surely set as it always has been. And just recently there is the delightful reminder that in our trillion or so cells, within each one, in fact, are thirty thousand indicators of what we are genetically. That’s just the beginning of the story which despite a lifetime of reading and hearing answers remains a mystery.

  There is the additional corrective that on any given day for any number of reasons you are bound to look at your past a little differently. There is a very old Zen saying that is especially poignant on this matter: “If you wish to balance your past you are painting it with a turtle hair paintbrush.” I can imagine a mortally wounded caveman sitting on a rock precipice and admitting to himself with puzzlement, “The life I’ve already lived is my life,” not the less true being so naked.

  I

  EARLY LIFE

  FAMILY

  Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Michigan, on the banks of the Muskegon River. When young we children were somewhat embarrassed to hear the story of our parents’ probably feverish collision on a summer evening early in the Great Depression. The river has to slide past until we ourselves are in love and bent on mating with the scant ability to lift our eyelids high enough to see that it happens to nearly everyone. Norma was a very strong and somewhat irascible character and remained that way until her death at eighty-five. Winfield was obsessively hardworking, playful but melancholy. He must have been troubled at the time because he had worked his way through Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1932, but the convulsed economy only allowed him a job driving a beer truck and he was lucky to get that. I think I was twelve and we were trout fishing when he told me that I had nearly missed existing. One hot summer day on a hangover he had taken an after-lunch nap in the shade underneath the beer truck. His employer had driven by with a friend, seen his abandoned truck with its valuable cargo, and driven the truck off, a back tire slightly grazing my father’s head.

  A close call with nonexistence, a vaguely stimulating idea until I think of the nonexistence of my brothers and sisters and my children. At the time, though, of first hearing the story while driving home from the Pine River, it seemed part of the carelessness of adults similar to my uncles drinking a case of beer while fishing and falling off the dock into the lake at the cabin in a semi-stupor. My father’s younger brothers, Walter and Arthur, had had a long and tough time in the South Pacific during World War II and their general behavior was never up to my mother’s high standards. My father’s side of the family was verbally witty and Walt and Artie’s talk was full of sexual badinage, some of which puzzled me at the time. Of course their wives, Audrey and Barbara, were young and you could imagine how much passion got saved up during four years in the armed services on ships with thousands of other men all mooning for home.

  For a boy forced to attend church and Sunday school every week there is the fuzzy paradox of Bible lessons not jibing with what he hears and sees. One part of him feels slightly priggish about the behavior of adults. Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. And the other part of the boy is sunk in his growing knowledge of the natural world and farm life where the sexual lives of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows is an open book, not to speak of the tingly warmth he feels when there’s a glance up a girl’s skirt at school or when he sees by happenstance a lovely aunt’s breast while she’s squeezing in or out of a bathing suit at the cabin. I’ve always been a bit cynical about the existence of the Oedipus complex but having a number of attractive aunts can be tough and dreamy at the same time. Your sense of wrong and right is tenuous and you drift around in a goofy haze of instinctual curiosity with your hard little weenie an almost acceptable embarrassment. At the time I was amazed at my childhood friend David Kilmer, who would heroically pursue the quest. David was a doctor’s son with an ample allowance and would bribe certain girls with a quarter for an inspection, or their somewhat retarded housemaid a couple of bucks for a peek. I recall he wasn’t the least bit fixated, spending most of the time fishing, killing frogs and turtles, repairing an Evinrude outboard, riding his bike off a gangplank at the end of their long dock under the erroneous assumption that he would truly fly through the air. It was, however, my decision to quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books. A woman is included in the book only if something has gone “haywire,” we agreed, and the photos weren’t pretty.

  There is a specific melancholy to hardship that accrues later as a collection of gestures, glances, and dire events. I don’t remember anyone ever saying life is hard but it was hard to a child in other puzzling ways, say at Great-uncle Nelse’s shack when we joined him in eating possum, beaver, and raccoon, and I asked my dad why Nelse ate such strange things and he said, “He came up short on beef.” I do remember Nelse embracing the keg of herring we bought him for Christmas, the salt brine soaking through the slats enough so that the wood was grainy with crystals to the touch. Nelse had been unhappily in love, rejected in his twenties, and retreated to the woods forever.

  It’s not a matter of romanticizing farm life or distorting it for effect. It was merely the given, the donnée as the French would have it. Anyone’s earliest memories tend to be sensuous so that when we lived with my grandparents in the Depression I was a child and what is left is remarkably vivid but spotty and nonlinear. When my dad finally got work he was more than happy to leave because my mother’s father was a true Swede autocrat whose opinions on farming were at extreme odds with what my dad had learned in agricultural college.

  Strange to say my sister Judith knew the most about my grandfather John but then she died at nineteen and took her knowledge with her. John had come from a fishing family in northern Sweden (my grandmother’s people were from the Stockholm archipelago), emigrating at sixteen to the United States where he soon took the train west hoping to be a cowboy in Wyoming or South Dakota. This was 1890, the year of Wounded Knee, certainly a signal event of American history. Grandma Hulda had been raised in the Swedish colony of Davenport, Iowa. They were said to have met in Chicago. They married and with modest savings made a down payment on a small farm in northern Michigan. He went back south to buy a team of draft horses, riding with them on a freight train north to Big Rapids, then reining them home the twelve miles to the farm.

  That’s not much but as my mother said, “We were never hungry during the Great Depression,” a pretty big item. When shortly before her death at ninety-seven Hulda said to me, “Don’t ever go to Milwaukee. The streets are full of mud in Milwaukee,” it was because the streets weren’t paved when she was there. I do know that Hulda and John raised five daughters—Inez, Grace, Norma, Evelyn, and Marjorie—on a cash income that never reached a thousand dollars a year.

  Maybe I had been ill, or maybe it was shortly after my left eye was blinded, but I can return at will to a summer dawn in an upstairs room where I was confined: in a corner were three old trunks from Sweden with stickers in that foreign language, and lined with pasted newspape
r I think from Goteborg (Göthenburg). I hear the screen door of the pump shed slam and in the dim light I can see my grandfather heading to the barn with two pails of milk skimmed for the calves. The rooster won’t stop crowing. There had been a little rain in the night and I can smell the damp garden, the strong winey smell of the grape arbor, the bacon grease from the kitchen below. My older brother, also named John, runs out the pump-shed door followed by my maiden great-aunt Anna carrying a pail of slop for the hogs. Both John and I loved to watch the pigs feeding at their trough. John swiped them a few pieces of ham once and proclaimed them “goddamned cannibals.” Pigs eat with marvelously vivid energy. Anna turns now to the gathering chickens and John has retrieved ground-shell corn from the granary and he and Anna broadcast it out to the frantic chickens with Anna pausing to scratch her arms which are covered with psoriasis. Grandpa has finished milking and turned the cows and the two big draft horses out to pasture. He had never owned a tractor and pretends he doesn’t want one. He carries the milk to the house and soon I hear the cream separator whirring. Sometimes I’m allowed to turn the crank and this whirling machine divides the cream and the skim milk fed to the calves and pigs. We eat the heavy thick cream on our cereal. In bad weather I’m allowed to fork down hay from the mow to the horses and cows. Across from the granary is an outside toilet called a privy. Later, when I’m in high school, I help my father install an indoor toilet for my grandparents. The family also collected money and bought them a television but old John put the television out in the pump shed saying it was too late to start something new. In the front yard there is a tire swing hanging from a maple branch near a grove of lilacs. If you swing high enough you look down at the flowers as if you were a bird. Sweet mint grows in the ditch near the section road.

  What have I forgotten? Waking to the animal sounds that seem to comfort one, easing the soul into consciousness. There were no alarm clocks in the house. This ancient cycle was so embedded that no reminders were needed. The body’s clock sufficed and through the screen window and the skein of a mosquito or fly’s whine and buzz there was a sow’s untroubled grunt, the muffled squeal of a piglet, the neighbor’s dog, the milk truck two miles away, a cow lowing, a horse stomping a sleepy foot, and the long-awaited rooster’s crow which, though it might still be dark, dispelled the inevitable night demons.