Excerpts from Jim Harrison’s third-person autobiography Tracking, which appeared in his collection The Summer He Didn’t Die.
About rivers:
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 race snake who didn’t want him to be there. Life seemed no more shaped by logic than the flowing water around him… You couldn’t step in in the same river even once.
And later:
He came to the conclusion that it was less the fishing than the day-to-day presence of water, the nature of which to him was still as indefinably mysterious as it had been in his childhood when the passion had begun with the cool pellucid lakes or gently moving rivers of the northern Michigan forests.
About screenwriting, something that Harrison did successfully for several years:
You had to be able to see like a movie camera and then make the camera see like you.
On traveling:
He vaguely recalled in his reading and from college anthropology that nomads were freer in their religious impulses, more broadly based in civility and generosity, more connected to the nature of the earth they passed through their journeys, while the religion of the long-settled areas leaned toward the prescriptive, very strict property rights, and a priestly class that was authoritarian. Accumulation and greed were transformed into virtues.
On science:
His habitual pride made him sweat through books on DNA and the genome or, even harder, Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism, but his retention was minimal compared to his wonder.
Nehaveigur 