SUNDOG
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
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
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
CHILDREN’S LITURATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems
After Ikkyū & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
SUNDOG
Copyright © 1984 by Jim Harrison
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to Russell Chatham
* * *
* * *
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
WILLIAM BLAKE,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
For three years this project has offered the gravest doubts, not the least of which is whether or not the subject of this book is still alive. But that is only the most recent consideration in a long list of questions, none of which will ever be adequately resolved. Frankly, I have nowhere to stand, but then I have come to realize through the unwitting efforts of my subject that I shouldn't have been caught standing in the first place. It is an unnatural act. Fluidity and grace are all. The contemporary mage James Hillman has told us that the notion that there is a light at the end of the tunnel has mostly been a boon to pharmaceutical companies.
Of course, all disclaimers bear a strong odor. Why should I care if I was duped? Novelists are renowned fools in this respect—they listen to what a person is saying with little or no attention given to why he or she is saying it; thus my effort to write a book that is “true” might be the falsest of my inventions. Perhaps the true story of Robert Corvus Strang is not to be found in the thousand or so pages of transcribed tape I have winnowed down into a book. I decided only recently to alternate his story with my own observations of what went on during our five months of taping—purportedly the last five months of his life.
I felt compelled for reasons of readability to edit out information of a highly technical nature on the building of hydroelectric dams and large Third World irrigation projects. I have also banished certain speech idiosyncrasies Strang got from talking over the radio in all the godforsaken parts of our world, which is not shrinking as fast as I previously had thought. “That's a negative,” or if I asked how to spell Azula, I would receive “Alfred Zebra Ursula Lock Alfred,” or something daffy like that.
It all started in a locker room at a club in Palm Beach, both locales being highly unlikely. I was in Florida for the winter trying to get over the effects of a divorce and declining health, and working on a book about game cookery with a friend who lives there. I suffered deeply from gout at age forty-five. A rather fancy clinic would feed me fruit juices, elixirs of herbs and animal glands, then sink me in a whirlpool tub for the incautious sum of a thousand dollars a day, plus extras. After several hours of this, I would toddle off to plan the next test recipe for our book, say a slab of foie gras, or oysters Bienville, some grilled doves and roasted pintail ducks, assorted fruits and cheeses to add a health note. In Palm Beach you notice that wealth, like poverty, seems to blur the peripheries, and the spectrum is delimited to the torpor of the middle range. Even imaginary ailments demand unique treatments. Only later, when I neared bankruptcy due to this project, did I regain my health.
On to the locker room, the sort of locker room that would pass for a parlor in Grosse Pointe. A half-dozen men between forty and sixty were drinking after tennis games truncated by rain. I watched the quarrel develop as a polite, observant outsider. A young scion announced that he was bored with life, to which a wise old tycoon responded, “That's because you retired before you did anything. When's the last time you got out of town?” The younger man said that in the past year he had been in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Aspen, Deauville, plus a month at the Carlyle in New York City. “Those are all the same places,” quipped the older man. “Maybe so, but then the television doesn't present the outside world as an attractive place.” The old man stood up and nodded his assent, and everyone seemed relieved. Anger, after all, represents bad manners. Then he said, “Television never gets off the Interstate unless there's an explosion. The world wasn't designed to be an attractive place. You should meet the man that used to be my son-in-law. Compared to him you're all asshole fops. That includes you.” He was pointing his finger at me, and my temples ached with panic. I'm so weak-stomached about criticism that I only read reviews after someone has assured me that they're laudatory. “I read your books. They're nice enough, but you might try writing about someone who actually does something.” Then he left, whistling a show tune, and somebody asked me what the word fop meant. Naturally, an hour didn't pass before I began checking up on this ex-son-in-law to whom I compared so unfavorably.
There was a casual stupidity to this little argument, especially in that the reading public likes to feel superior to rich people and their ostensibly artificial problems. That doesn't concern me here. That afternoon was the rather nagging and painful beginning for me of a long voyage back toward Earth, however simpleminded might be my arrival. Rather than jump at the challenge immediately, I wrote a few letters to this son-in-law, Robert Strang, none of which brought a response. I checked the map and discovered the nearest airport to his place in the upper peninsula of Michigan was some hundred miles away in Sault Ste. Marie.
I put the idea on hold and went off to Key West for my annual tarpon fishing trip, which was severely marred by gluttony, alcohol, painkillers for the gout
, and other such things that keep me awake for long, sleepless, tropical nights and have done so for over a decade. Only it didn't work anymore, and I sat in a dark room for three days with palm fronds rattling against the eaves. Then a postcard of a snowbank from Strang was forwarded from Palm Beach. In response to my rambling notes he only said, “I don't get what you're talking about. Robert C. Strang.” I was so desperate at the moment that his terse sentence was all I needed to get started.
In bringing to a close this small introduction, I should thank numerous doctors, civil engineers, and certain companies involved in international construction projects, but they weren't, finally, germane in understanding our man. I am, however, thankful to Doctor Bryce Douglas for pointing me to a Harvard University Botanical Museum leaflet by Richard Evans Schultes with the imposing title “De Plantis Toxicarüs E Mundo Novo Tropicale Commentationes I.” This leaflet identifies the plant Aristolochia medicinalis, which is a native Venezuelan remedy for epilepsy and other seizures, and which helped give me insight into the core of Strang's unique personality. Whether he is still alive or not is obviously beyond our control, but not beyond our interest. I must somehow content myself with having known a man totally free of the bondage of the appropriate.
CHAPTER I
* * *
So I moved slowly north, passing through dozens of springs, virtually traveling north with greening spring herself overhead and below, pausing here and there to wait for her and for my own courage to gather. You see, I was on the verge of doing something truly different in my life, something totally unexampled. Usually I drove north along the Eastern Seaboard to New York City and, later in June, to our cottage near Sag Harbor. My wife would fly ahead, lacking my affection for long drives. But now I had lost both the modest New York co-op and the Sag Harbor property to her in the divorce—not so much lost, but gave them up in an attack of kindness, much to the disgust of my lawyers and accountant. She was shocked but happy, what with a boy and a girl in their early teens from a previous marriage. My motive, oddly, was the memory of an unhappy move from Marquette to East Lansing, Michigan, at age twelve. The experience marked me deeply, and since I loved these children and had recently reread the great Dostoevsky, I had become at the same time serene and captious. But then this is not my story, and I will keep my intrusions to a minimum.
On impulse I had bought one of those large, involved, four-wheel-drive sporting vehicles and felt a little silly on the seven-hour drive from Key West to Palm Beach. Later, I decided, I might add some sensible plaid shirts to my wardrobe, a pair of boots, perhaps a hat with a feather in it. The vehicle had delayed me three extra days in Key West while I waited for the addition of cruise control; my gout-ridden right toes could barely handle a gas pedal.
I had been corresponding a bit with the older tycoon mentioned previously—I have promised not to mention his name because of his prominent political and financial affiliations. This seemed unnecessarily cautionary at the time, but later, when the situation became explosive, even grotesque, the stipulation appeared sensible. In any event, our tycoon had invited me to stop by for dinner, an event I had anticipated because of the reputation of his cook. The real reason for the invitation was that his daughter, the ex-wife of our unmet hero, was home for a week and he thought I might speak to her. I was ill-disposed to her because she hadn't answered a letter, but also curious when I heard she was a doctor specializing in tropical medicine for the World Health Organization.
“The deepest feeling of all is that there should be more,” he said, from behind a small but billowing cloud of Havana smoke.
“There is a lot more. You just can't see it from anywhere you bother looking,” she said. She was a mean woman, though she clearly loved her father. She had managed to ignore me in a way that couldn't be ignored. I was flushed, almost uncomfortably past enjoying my food and wine. There was an urge to present some fresh, invented credentials to supplant the ones she had apparently dismissed. I kept trying.
“But isn't it inherent in the idea of personality to wear blinders of some sort? You maintain that your father and myself are ignorant of a world that is the target of your intensest curiosity. Perhaps we are. Unfortunately, in the gunnysack holding all the possible attitudes on earth, the most offensive one that can be drawn out is that of moral superiority.”
“Right!” she laughed. “I hate it. This town forces me into it.”
“That's why it puzzles me that you won't talk about your former husband. I told your father that when I've been fishing or hunting in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Africa, wherever, I've met such people and their energy fascinates me. It rarely occurs to people like myself just who actually goes into a jungle and builds an immense dam or who engineers the irrigation of thousands of acres of desert. All I simply proposed is that I write about this man, say for Vanity Fair or The New Yorker or Atlantic, because it would be good for us to see this aspect. . . .”
“Maybe you could bring some Giorgio Armani models along, and they could sweep across the top of a dam and Scavullo could shoot them with a leg up against a turbine, or with a group of dark, smoky Brazilian workers.”
“You're not being fair.” Now I was more than reasonably pissed off.
“I'm being quite fair. It's such silly, scheming bullshit. We've become like the French. Everything must be incroyable or bizarre. If the information is sufficiently novel, it's a twenty-minute buzz while the bath is being drawn, sort of a three-dollar round-trip ticket before bedtime. Your type is drunk on novelty, not reality.”
“You're the most unbelievable bitch I've ever met.” I gulped my Calvados and choked. The father roared with laughter and pounded the table, then I somehow began to strangle and hyperventilate at the same time. The room began to dim as if by a rheostat, and I was facedown in my pear sorbet and chèvre cheese. I barely felt their hands on my shoulders as they helped me, with the aid of a black butler, to a sofa. As my vision cleared, I became drenched with cold sweat. She ran out of the room with a certain alarm in her eyes.
“I'm very sorry,” I said, trying to get up, but my arms felt numb like rubber ganglia.
“Don't say a thing. Evelyn is hard on people, to put it mildly.”
“I'm so sorry.” She had returned with a medical bag and the trace of a smile. I was too frightened to be angry, and she had softened to the point of becoming attractive. She intently checked my heart rate and blood pressure, during which I could see most of her breasts. Somehow they looked like serious breasts, the sort that an effete writer would never get to tinker with.
“Not to panic you, but you're in terrible shape. Very high pulse rate, blood pressure 165 over 112, at least thirty pounds overweight.” She slapped my tummy. “You could support an African village on what you spend on your gut.” Then she gave me a sedative and denied me a nightcap. I was sent up to bed with two kindly handshakes.
In the morning I was alone in the house, except for the servants. To my delight, the butler delivered an ample breakfast along with The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the Miami Herald for spice. There was also an envelope from Evelyn which I opened immediately.
Father chided me for bitchiness which was the reason, he reminded me, that mother was exiled to Rancho Mirage for a death tan. Not quite sure what to say about dear Strang. I had met him several times, then got to know him when I treated him for schistosomiasis. Haven't seen him since the accident, but reading the company's report the prognosis isn't good. Also the herbal remedy he tried for his petit mal epilepsy, otherwise totally controlled, has further cast him askew. He's had a dozen or so tropical diseases in the past twenty-five years and is pretty much physically burned out.
This isn't very helpful. You might key on what he calls the theory and practice of rivers. If you want to get into gossip, Strang understands women better than any man I have ever met.
Meanwhile, I looked in on you early this morning and you were grasping your penis like a seven-year-old waif. Follow the enclosed diet o
r you'll never see fifty.
Con amore,
Evelyn
The diet turned out to be suitable for someone with the disposition of a Gandhi, a Sister Theresa, a Gautama Buddha —some tiny, brown, selfless person. I, however, resolved to follow it and skipped lunch, supplanting the meal with a hundred-mile-long sexual fantasy about the good doctor Evelyn. If I weren't a gentleman, I might let you in on the details. I was heated up to the point that I reached for a bottle of La Begorce in my snack container. The wine broke down my food resolve, and consequently I swerved off the Interstate south of Macon and followed the red dirt road to Home Folks Barbeque, indisputably the best barbeque shack in the United States. Of course, I had been planning this move subconsciously for an entire day. Despite our well-advertised standard of living, a certain heartiness was gone out of American life. I've always insisted that cuisine minceur was the moral equivalent of the foxtrot. On my way south in January, I had stopped at Home Folks for an enormous take-out order. Some of the sauce had spilled indelibly on the marble tile floor of my Palm Beach rental, costing me several thousand of my damage deposit. A pungent sauce, to say the least, slathered over racks of pork and beef ribs. A sauce not to be confused with those hokum béchamels served over gaily decorated baby hamsters in New York City, home of the most otiose food faddism. Strangely, Doctor Evelyn seemed to peer up from the glistening pool of sauce, and I called for a doggy bag.
Crossing the Ohio-Michigan border, I again lost the sense of my quarry and the good sense behind the pursuit. The otherwise fair May afternoon turned dark and blustery with the arrival of a northern front, well advertised on the radio but somehow unexpected. I imagined Michigan as some huge, bruised mitten, floating in the hostile frigid waters of the Great Lakes. Above the Straits of Mackinac, the Upper Peninsula sat alone, perhaps the least-known land mass in the United States. In this age where every niche on earth has been discovered and rediscovered countless times, there is an open secret why the upper Midwest is generally ignored: it is relatively charmless, and it competes with Siberia for the least hospitable climate on earth. Perhaps I'd stop and see my mother, then head for Montana. Or Paris.