I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Harrison lately. It’s an infatuation with his work that began a few years ago but has now reached new heights. I have purchased all of his prose and some of his books of poems. Four of the last five books I’ve read are by him.
It’s the freedom his characters enjoy. They are outdoors. They travel. They are only loosely bound by their work or families. They sleep around. It’s also the perspective on what’s important: Birds, travel, emotions, love, food, fishing, hiking, women, dogs.
What I want to do is follow Jim and take a month or a year, living in a cabin in the woods, or failing that, live out of my truck exploring the empty parts of Northern California. A fishing rod in the back of my truck and some cans of beans and a sleeping bag.
As I write this, I’m returning to California from a business trip to London. I’m looking out of the little airplane window and I see the Western Sierras, with Mt Shasta on the horizon. This beauty, apparent even from a few thousand feet above, contrasts with the blandness of Heathrow airport with its underground walkways, chrome and glass, walls full of HSBC ads.
In the excellent movie Ad Astra, Brad Pitt’s astronaut character travels to the moon. The moon base turns out to be yet another airport, complete with Applebee’s and tourist photo opportunities. It’s a vision of a commercial and boring future, and one that resonates with me – but not in a good way. I get the same feeling of dread in shopping malls, in downtown Las Vegas and hotels. What’s missing is irregularity, unpredictability, texture.
And it was the rock-bottom puzzlement of life and time: There is an ideal woman who will return you the kind of sexual life you could have had at nineteen but didn’t. That this was not meant to be for man on Earth did not stop millions of fools from looking. It was puzzlement, pure and simple. A thousand dollars in the wallet wasn’t proportionally more pleasurable than a ten-spot. Honors were dreary, the mail and phone calls were to be avoided. The horizon was as invisible as it was when they were nineteen, but now its nature was deeply sensed. An actual surprise would have astounded them now that their time was sliced so precise and thin. They were unquestionably kind and generous men, polite in mixed company, loaning money in bulk to less fortunate friends, still flipping books of poems open at random, hoping for secrets. And they all knew that in a traditional culture they would be busy by now learning to be Elders. But this was America and you weren’t supposed to stop the generalized churning until you announced retirement or, more simply, the lights were turned out.
Jim Harrison: Julip
Nehaveigur 