Night Walking

It is an oddly Protestant notion that life is a form of punishment to be endured to reach a greater end. Even when this idea isn't allowed to be overwhelming, it's still hiding behind the curtains like a headless leper ready to reach out and grab you in case you're feeling a little too good.

Life is a vale of woe, they used to say, during my childhood in Michigan. The illustrated Bible was full of pictures of bleeding folks, vipers biting kids, sorrowful ladies, old guys sleeping on beds of rags, rocks and ashes. If we survived the Nazis and Japs, that wouldn't prevent God, in all his justified anger, from snuffing out the sun, moon and stars. At the end of the road was probably the Lake of Fire, but before that could be reached, there was a lot of hard work and grinding poverty to go through. My own distinct case history reached its theological nadir when I was blinded in one eye at age seven by a little girl wielding a broken bottle. We had our clothes off in a heavily wooded vacant lot on an exploratory venture.

A severe childhood injury is not a bad preparation for life in this portion of the twentieth century. It makes you empathetic and wary, and you lack the built-in compass your friends seem to have: fence posts and trees contort into question marks, and at any moment you might fall through the earth where the crust is thin. Much later, certain news photos would have a natural resonance: the girl's mouth torn open in a simian howl at Kent State, and the Oriental tyke trotting nudely down the road after a napalm bath. Happier images are arrayed above my desk: a crow wing and a heron wing, an antisuicide button, a dried grizzly turd, a small toy pig, a Haitian baby shoe found on the beach in Florida after the boatload of blacks had been carted off to jail, having missed the Statue of Liberty by a thousand miles.

The northern Midwest night I grew up in was the only immediately available mystery, other than the bombazine Saturday matinees featuring the likes of Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers. There was a whole theater full of village and farm kids trying to figure out what tumbleweed was, only to be released back out into a black sky and immense snowbanks. Years later, while hitchhiking to California, I was in a car accident and finally saw tumbleweed an inch from my nose and heard again the warbling of the Pioneers.

But summer nights, winter nights and walking. My father, who owned the unlikely name of Winfield Sprague Harrison, built a cabin on a lake with the help of his brothers for the grand sum of a thousand dollars in 1946. My uncles had just returned from full-term service in World War II and were particularly kind to me as one of the fellow injured. I took walks with them and was referred to as Little Beaver, after the Red Ryder comic strip. Then, while my uncles busied themselves fishing or getting drunk, I began to walk during the day and evening alone. I discovered that twilight was a fine time to walk, and night herself was even more wonderful. I walked along creeks and a river and around the lake, with the voices of bass fishermen carrying to the shore. Once, through a cabin window, I saw a nude girl dancing with a Dalmatian dog in the light of an oil lamp; another time I saw a very old couple in utter hysterics listening to “Fibber McGee and Molly” on a battery-operated radio. The old man slid off his chair, kicking his feet with laughter. The old woman helped him back up on the couch, and they began pelting each other with popcorn. There was no electric power in the area, so night was truly dark.

I envied Jesus’ ability to walk on water, imagining how I would look down through the surface of the lake as if it were glass, observing the secret lives of fishes and turtles and the fabled and elusive water bird, the loon, which could swim faster underwater, it was said, than the penguin or dolphin, a Jap torpedo or a German submarine.

I had a particular spot favored for a big moon—a grove of white birches where deer wandered and where, if you stupidly missed the point, you could read a newspaper in the shimmering light. Blue herons lived near the grove, and they often fished in the shallows on bright nights. There was a Chippewa Indian burial mound, and a girl I knew said if you put your ear to the ground, you could hear dead warriors talking with their wives and children. Frankly, I never dared put my ear to the ground. Terror at night, though, was a splendid antidote to the lassitude of hot August afternoons for a boy freelancing with a hoe and earning a dime an hour.

Often I spent weeks on the farm of my Swedish-immigrant grandparents, especially when my mother was having yet another baby. I walked down long rows of corn twice my height, through wheat fields, often ending up near a pond where the white bones of slaughtered cattle and pigs were dumped and mammoth water snakes glided across the sheen of algae on the water. If there was rain or a thunderstorm, I sat in the Model A or under an upended pig-scalding pot on sawhorses, listening to what my brother said was Chinese music. In the barn I sat on a milk stool and listened to the cattle and draft horses eating in the dark, or up in the mow I could lie back in the hay with all the barn cats, uncatchable in the daylight, surrounding me at night like true friends.

It is amusing to think that the God I thought had ruptured my eyeball and propelled me into the dark is now, evidently, a mascot of the Republican party. Times change.

I remember slipping out of the farmhouse and walking three miles across the fields to a small village by a lake, where there was a roller-skating rink, roofed but with sides open to the night air. Girls in dresses as brief as bathing suits would float around and around to improbably beautiful organ music. When the girls stopped for a rest, they would chatter and brush back their damp hair. Standing by the railing, I thought they all looked and smelled very good. I would move as close as courage allowed, exposing the uninjured side of my face and hoping to be noticed. I was always bumping into things, what with missing the whole left side of the world.

My father, as the county agricultural agent, helped run the annual fair. It was basically an exposition and competition of farm animals and produce, with the highlights being a horse pulling contest and a 4-H amateur talent show. Along with the last day of school, after which my failings would no longer be noticed for three months, the fair was the main event of the year. I never managed my behavior very well, then or now. One evening I ate cotton candy, hot dogs, french fries, drank a half dozen pops at a nickel a bottle and smoked a filched cigar. For some reason I became ill and walked off into the dark beyond the parked cars and stock trucks, up a long slope and through a field of oats to an elm tree, where I lay down and puked my heart out. When I recovered and looked back down the hill at the fair, it was a wildly colored and beautiful jewel: the gold, vertical bracelet of the ferris wheel, the smell of the cattle and horse barns, the merry-go-round music, the racked machinery of the tilt-a-whirl, and from a stage in front of the bleachers, a blond girl I favored sang “Candy Kisses,” followed by a man playing “The Old Rugged Cross” on a musical handsaw.

We are more equal at night. At nineteen, in New York City and San Francisco, I admired Ginsberg's “Howl” and wanted to be among the “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” I wasn't quite sure how to go about it, but I tried, crisscrossing both cities, discovering garlic and Benzedrine, playing the music I loved in my head—Charlie Parker, Stravinsky, Thelonious Monk, George Shearing, Telemann, Sonny Rollins. Later there were night walks in Paris and London, Costa Rica and Ecuador, where I flushed a tree full of vultures on a cliff far above the Pacific swells; Moscow and Leningrad, where I walked the Neva embankment, thinking about my distant cousin, the poet Sergei Yesenin; the beach north of Mombasa, where tiny, finger-size poisonous snakes tried to get in my pant cuffs; Rio, where you can store minuscule bikinis in your cheeks like a Buddha squirrel. Foreign oceans have the aura of countries that cartographers have forgotten to put on maps.

At present I have tried to stop everything, pure and simple, stuffing time and memory into a custom-blown fishbowl from Belgium, but without success. At my cabin, miles from the nearest neighbor in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I walk at night when the moon isn't shrouded by the fog or the cold rain that dominates the area—weather that seems to suit my temperament. I hear coyotes, whippoorwills and loons, bears wallowing off through swamps, and once I heard and saw a timber wolf. If you are bored, strained, lacerated, enervated by the way we live now, I suggest a night walk as far as you can get from a trace of civilization. This form of walking is a dance, and the ghost that follows you, your moon-cast shadow, is your true, androgynous parent, bearing within its distinct outline the child who has always directed your every move.

1987