Nehaveigur

Wolf by Jim Harrison is a novel about being outdoors and about traveling. It’s Harrison’s first novel, published in 1971.

There is a lot in this book, and in all of Harrison’s writing, that I recognize. For example, it has been some time since I’ve been truly lost in the woods, but this is a familiar description:

There is a brief time when first lost that you are sure you will be lost forever. Your heart flutters and you become winded with little walking and everything you know or think you know about the woods is forgotten, or you aren’t sure you ever knew enough in the beginning … It is first of all embarrassment mixed with a little terror

Thers’s also the observation that even though we’re drawn to being outdoors, once we are, there are moments we wish we weren’t:

I wanted suddenly to be in a hotel in New York or Boston, to be warm after sleeping off lunch and to take the cellophane off a glass in a yellow bathroom and pour whiskey in the glass then add a half inch or so of chlorinated water and plan the evening.

There’s also this:

I suffered now from a pussy trance. They come without warning in everyone’s technicolor memory – in the woods, the taiga, the Arctic, to fighter pilots and perhaps senators and presidents. Homosexuals no doubt are struck by cock trances. No relief in trees.

Here is another familiar sentiment:

Nothing more tiresome than the idyll of someone’s youth. The world three of four feet high with all things in unique wonderment, pored over in late years, confessed, hugged, wrung of their residue in disgust with the present.

Your experience may differ. Here is Shilo Brooks talking about Wolf with Steven Rinella. It’s a good conversation, even though their interpretation of the fictional author being an example of toxic masculinity is different from my perception.