CHAPTER VIII
TAPE 4 : Back to my own cabin with an extraordinary sense of relief. My god! Confrontations and anxiety are the given in the big city, but they seem especially raw in a sylvan setting. Imagine a prolonged and vicious argument between lovers in a beautiful part of the forest. I will create one because that's my business, as it were. Strang caught me on the way out of the yard. He was plainly exhausted.
“Beating a retreat, hey?”
“You don't look so hot yourself. A poet named Lorca once said, ‘I want to sleep the dream of apples, far from the tumult of cemeteries.’”
“That's a fine thing to say. Love and death tire a man out. You just can't answer any of these big questions, but you got to keep a weather eye out for them.”
“Oh, god, no. I thought we had some work to do.”
There is a uniqueness to those who work very hard. Thoreau only pretended to loaf—every step of a walk was part of an idea. I remember reading about Rilke's pilgrimage to see Tolstoy. He told the great count that he wanted to be a writer. “Then write, for God's sake,” replied Tolstoy. It is built into the arts that her participants, except for a few, are waffling neurotics. The distorted prism is the source of the energy. What did Shakespeare feel like after a good lunch and a stroll along the Avon? I doubt he regretted the extra chop or he wouldn't have eaten it. The other evening I bought a local Indian a few drinks to see if he would reveal any secret lore. Nothing doing. We can be reasonably sure that not all of these people are mysterious. He did give me three illegally small lake trout. As opposed to the lake trout of the warmer waters of Lake Michigan, the permanently cold waters of Lake Superior yield up a pink-fleshed, fatless fish. I poached the first, serving it to myself at room temperature with a fresh cucumber mayonnaise and a Sancerre. The second I broiled over wood and grapevine cuttings swiped from a grape arbor near the cabin. I basted it with lemon, butter and vermouth. By the dint of inordinate self-control I will save the third for tomorrow. Or not. Strang with his children: Real emotion can seize one with terror. As children we are guided around like little bears. We are taught essentials: not to piss our pants or bed, how to tie our shoes, to eat with our mouths closed, the reversal of which we practiced before the mirror to see what was so terrible about it. Mashed potatoes were interesting. But then many of us are released on the world as permanent orphans, or those who are only casually and insincerely, we feel, adopted. I have a few rich friends who were sent off to boarding school at age six. Mothers and fathers, listen! They never got over it, never. I was a hopeless bed wetter, then one morning I jumped out of bed at dawn and ran downstairs in dry pajamas. Mom and Dad, I shouted, I didn't pee the bed! They woke slowly but treated this accomplishment as a triumph. My life changed for the better that day. In New York, it makes everyone glad to see those nursery school tykes marching down the street connected by a long string. Some of them pause to watch a bum gurgling down a bottle of Tokay, and the string grows taut.
Last evening I drove around the countryside—it doesn't get dark up here until after ten this time of year-with a set of topographical maps Strang loaned me. When we take breaks from his story, he is trying to teach me about geology, weather, natural history, physics and suchlike, including the basic shapes used in structural engineering. He confesses kind amazement at what little I know. We discuss humanism and my considerable knowledge of history, arts and letters, music. He is no slouch in this area, either. The textbook on dam engineering is the best tonic for insomnia I've ever possessed. He is an unselfconscious visionary of technology. He thinks the “nuke” boys haven't perfected their lessons, hence there will continue to be a need for the hydroelectric power. I was pleased when he said the Glen Canyon shouldn't have been built any more than we would allow NASA to dye half the moon pink for research.
Stopped at the tavern for a nightcap. The bar owner whipped out that morning's Free Press for our discussion of current events over my bedtime toddy. We never got past an account of government research announcing that Michigan leads the country in alcoholism, obesity and hypertension. It is second in smoking to North Carolina. I light a cigarette and drop my lighter. My temples pound when I bend over to pick it up. I take a gulp of my drink and suppress a belch. Did I need that platter of roesti potatoes with my fish? Did the salad require two hard-boiled eggs, a tin of anchovies, and a half-cup of Parmesan? The bar owner is a tad burly like myself. He drinks coffee brandy with milk because of an ulcer. Oh, well. We promise to discuss this further.
A cold dawn with the wind shifting to the north in the night. I tried to scrape frost from my windshield with my fingernails. No wonder vegetable gardening isn't a big item up here, while the making of gravy is a science. I began to mull over my sexual deprivation when my eyes caught a movement ahead. It looked like a beige, medium-sized dog, and I recognized it as a coyote. I made a note to send my mother a postcard to announce my nature sighting.
All was not well at the Strang cabin, and it took a while to get started. He was in great pain and had allowed himself a pill, which made him drowsy. Eulia was doing some stretching exercises in a flannel nightgown that revealed nothing. I fetched some wood for the fire and filled the tank of the ancient Kohler generator they used for power. The dog cornered a chipmunk but lay down as if puzzled by what to do with the prize. Back in the cabin, Eulia was heating something up at the stove that smelled delicious. One tends to approach the cookstove of another with hands behind the back like a tentative professor. It was a Spanish bean soup with sausage and fat pork and redolent with garlic. Despite a diet I had devised during a 3 A.M. spate of indigestion, I craved a bowl.
“We had a difficult time.” Beneath her tan there were shadows. “After they finally left—I don't blame them, really—he was so exhausted he fell asleep on his river chair. I sat on the chair and brushed the mosquitoes away. Then I covered him with a mosquito net and came into the cabin and started this soup. Then later, out the screen door, I heard him crying, and I ran out there. Because of the net, he thought he was in Venezuela when his friend Jorge had his hand cut off. I heard the story. So when I made him realize he was at the cabin, he said we must send Jorge some money immediately. One day on a riverbank a peasant had come up behind Jorge and chopped off his hand because Jorge had made love to his daughter. It was almost dark, but there was a big moon and Robert wouldn't eat. He wants to get better because his company will start a dam in New Guinea this winter. So we drove up the road so he could crawl in the meadow in the dark and he becomes lost for several hours until midnight.”
“I wasn't lost. I knew where the moon was and where it was going. I just forgot where I started out. I could always have followed the dog home.” He pulled himself up into his walker and made his way to the kitchen table where Eulia was serving the soup. “I went too far down in the swamp and lost one of my knee pads. Then the dog ran off for a while when she heard coyotes. But here I am, all alive and sparkling. Right? And Eulia has made my favorite soup.”
“Did you see anything extraordinary?” I couldn't begin to imagine crawling around in the forest and swamp at night.
“I just felt and heard things. I got my bearings when I found the river by the sound, and the spring a quarter a mile upstream. Then I was thrown off by the hairpin bend in the river where you hear it on both sides. This phenomenon can screw anyone up. Then there were northern lights, which by their intensity helped me determine the direction. When Dad got really crazy on his deathbed, we helped him out to the porch to see the northern lights. He said the northern lights were the blood of Jesus streaming in the firmament, which even scared the hell out of me. It went Karl's inventions one better. So I was down in the mire of the horseshoe bend, and the northern lights seemed to set off that bad herb I took. I sensed I was on a swampy island with a big river rushing all the way around it in a circle, which isn't possible. Finally I was able to listen to where the river sound was weakest and find the neck to higher ground. You flush a grouse before your nose, and it's thunderous.”
This little rendition gave me vertigo. Eulia brewed some delicious but muddy Cuban coffee, and we made our way to the chairs before the fireplace. I could hear Eulia dressing in the loft but was too slow and preoccupied to invent a reason to glance around. Shakespeare himself would have twisted owl-like, knowing one had to seize the day, rather than creating reasons to seize the day. That came later. I began to feel a little dread at Strang's manic appearance.
When that grouse flushed up in my face, I was reminded of a hunting story that got me some pills from a doctor to subdue my seizures. You see, because of my illness I wasn't allowed to have a shotgun. I was a fisherman, which was what helped draw me to the water. Dad swore we didn't have enough money to feed a bird dog. Karl said he would pay for the food, but Dad put his foot down, saying there were no bird dogs in the Bible.
This may sound a little bizarre, but I became Karl's bird dog, and it was the finest time of my life up to that point. I had a purpose to my life, other than my studies, for more than a month. I wanted to get Edith involved, but Karl said that one make-believe dog was enough. Dad was with Ted down in Manistique, building a school, or we might not have gotten away with it. Mom and the girls were all for it because they wanted me to get some pleasure from life. After my first few days running through the brush and getting my clothes all torn up, Mother fashioned me a canvas suit out of an army surplus puptent. Mind you, Karl wasn't taking advantage; we were partners in an operation that mixed the pleasure of hunting with profit. As with the berries, it was the lawyer's wife who bought most of our kill, and our family ate the rest. She gave the birds as presents to her husband's associates in the Soo and Marquette, earning him a reputation in the U.P. as a great hunter. She cooked us some woodcock one rainy afternoon in what she called a French sauce. It was fine, but we liked them best the way Karl called Indian-style: He built a spit over wood coals in the backyard and roasted the woodcock and grouse basted with butter and pepper. Ted had bought this book for us by Ernest Thomas Seton called Two Little Savages, and it was filled with information about such things. When Dad came home, he did some theological hairsplitting and decided that, since the birds came from God's bounty, the project was blessed.
Here was our routine: We'd find some good cover, usually strips of popple, which is what we call aspen, alder, dogwood, with lush groundcover of berries and wintergreen. Often this cover was around farms deserted during the Depression. We didn't waste our time if the area wasn't first-rate. We'd ride out in the morning on Karl's bike with me on the back and the shotgun and gunnysack strapped across his shoulders. I'd enter the thicket upwind of Karl so the birds would fly toward him. Game birds prefer not to fly into the wind. I'd give out a screech when a bird would flush and then hit the deck so I wouldn't get hit by the pellets. I would crisscross, casting back and forth across any patch of cover like a good English setter does. I carried a pair of gloves for when I'd have to crawl through a thorn-apple thicket, which grouse favor, because the thorns can go right through a hand. Once in a while I'd bark for the hell of it and to let Karl know where I was. I was thin and wiry but strong, and I can see and smell those thickets right now as surely as I can see you and Eulia.
And then there was a beautiful day that helped change my life. It was late in October, during a respite from the winter to come called Indian summer. It was a glorious day, around fifty degrees with a clear sky and a dull, soft light in the late afternoon. We were late in our best hunting ever—we had thirteen woodcock and nine grouse, and I had mentally picked out a pair of lace-up, high-top boots I was going to order from the Montgomery Ward catalog with my earnings. We were a good way from town, and I knew we would have to ride back on Karl's bike in the dark, but I didn't care. Then I heard bells and was a little frightened, because I knew Karl was a long ways off and I couldn't figure out why there were bells way out in the woods.
So I just sat there behind a downed tree looking up a culvert where the sound was coming from. The culvert was brilliant yellow from fallen maple leaves, and there was a large group of blackbirds, gathered to migrate south, feeding among the leaves. It was such a strange sight that I looked away, as I began to have that diffuse, dreamy feeling that often signaled a seizure. Then I would black out for a moment. I slouched down to further hide myself from the bells. It turned out to be two English setters with bells around their necks. The female pointed me in my hiding place because I had handled so many dead birds that day I smelled like one. The male honored her point, that is, he pointed on trust in her rather than scent. I'd be goddamned if I knew what to do. Then two men entered the clearing and readied themselves to shoot.
“It's me,” I croaked.
They both yelled in alarm, so I stood with my hands up like they did in pictures from the war. Then they laughed with surprise, only stopping when Karl swaggered into the clearing. Even at fourteen Karl was a showstopper. He had seen a movie about Jesse James with Tyrone Power and liked to affect the rakish manner of that outlaw.
“Hello, gents. Those are nice dogs. What do you think of mine?” Karl said, pointing at me. “If you're short on birds, we got some to sell. A quarter per grouse, ten cents a woodcock.” Karl dumped our twenty-two birds out of the burlap sack for inspection.
“You must have shot those out of the trees or on the ground,” one of the men said petulantly.
“Got a few of the grouse that way, but I've never seen a woodcock, not in the air, have you? How many you guys get?”
I picked that moment to have a fit, though not a bad one. I was petting the dogs, and one shook its head vigorously, and the flash of the shiny bell set me off. When I came to, moments later, the taller of the two men knelt over me. It turned out he was a doctor. The upshot was they gave us a ride home, and the doctor talked to Mother. Dad and Ted had returned to Manistique.
Early the next morning I was driven, along with Karl, by a family friend who owned the hardware store, Brother Fred, over to the Soo to the doctor's office. Mother tried to pack us a lunch, but Karl insisted he wanted to spot me my first restaurant meal. In all my trips with Dad, testifying to the grace of God for not killing me with lightning, we had never eaten in a restaurant. As a youth in Chicago, he had suffered food poisoning, and God had not spared his life to repeat the mistake. Now Brother Fred was a sincere Christian but was a goofy sort, and he enjoyed the prospect of getting out of town. We weren't a tenth of the way down the road when Karl had him talked into going to a movie while I was at the doctor's for tests. We were sworn to secrecy, because Fred was an important force in our church, part of his power coming from his elaborate stories of his sinful past, including a trip to a burlesque show in Detroit, where shameless women “bared their parts for the world to see,” the latter being a favorite of the male members of the church.
Sault Ste. Marie was a bit frightening to a boy during wartime. The Soo Locks handle more tonnage than Panama or the Suez Canal, and they were intensely guarded against sabotage by the Germans and Japs. This wasn't the usual paranoia, where even the smallest villages went through air-raid practice; a great percentage of the country's iron ore is from Michigan and the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and it all went through the locks, and it was an armed camp.
We had reached the Soo in time for our lunch before the appointment. We sat in the Ojibway Hotel dining room, watching an ore freighter pass, with my stomach hollow and jumping with the thrill of this giant ship so near to us. I offered a silent prayer that I might be allowed on a ship one day. So then Karl knocks our hats off by ordering a beer for himself and Fred, who looked off weakly as an innocent victim, though he was fifty to Karl's fourteen.
“Sure you're old enough, cutie?” asked the waitress.
“Old enough to handle the likes of you any day of the week.” Karl flashed a smile and patted her butt. Fred buried his face in his hands. I watched intently, not wanting to miss the ways of the world. We had big steaks, and they had several beers. Karl gave me a teaspoon of his, and it was made delicious by the fact that it was so evil. Then they dropped me off at the doctor's office with instructions to meet them at a neighboring park.
Well, I went through a number of simple tests. The doctor and his nurses were kind, and I was given an enormous canister of pills to take, one a day. The doctor said I'd eventually be able to function as well as anyone, but the cure would be gradual. Even now, he said, there was no reason I shouldn't be in school the same as anyone else, because I only had blackouts rather than true seizures. Then the doctor tried to throw a curve by hauling out a county map, and trying to get me to mark Karl's best bird-hunting areas. Now this is something one never gives away and shouldn't be asked, so I just marked places that were down the road from the good ones. Brook-trout spots are the same way: Breathe a word, and they'll be wiped out by those too lazy to hike for their own. I thanked the doctor, and he said he'd check me out next October when he was out our way.
Luckily, I was dressed warm, because I waited in the park until dinnertime for them to show up, and then it was only a weeping Brother Fred, who, so he told me, had fallen asleep only to find Karl gone. There was a note, however: “Dear loved ones. I have gone to serve my country whether at land or sea or air. Duty called me and my courage answers with a forthright yes. May the eagle ever fly above the flagpole. Your son and brother, Karl H. Strang.” I was sent into a diner to get a sack of hamburgers for the beery, fat, tearful Fred. On our slow way home I had to reassure him a hundred times that it wasn't his fault. I had known, anyway, that something was afoot, because Karl had taken along his secret kit that held his hunting knife, arrowheads and dirty pictures.
It was probably good for me, because that winter I began reading and studying in earnest. Not that I didn't miss Karl terribly. In fact, I wrote him letters in wait for such a time that we'd hear from him. There is also the thought that occurred to me later in my life: Karl, as noble as he seemed to me as a boy, always ran so stridently counter to all authority, to the way we structure society, that he was doomed from the beginning. I don't just mean the cliché of the Midwest preacher's son sowing wild oats; I mean a hard-core, violent man, at odds with the world. I've wangled him out of prison twice, but I'm afraid this third time might be beyond anything I can do. Much has been made of Viet Nam returning us a lot of psychotics and uncontrollable young men. So did World War II, though not much was made of it because the currently popular cry from the heart was not in fashion then. Some of the crews I've worked on have their share of these men, now in their late fifties, and they're still a rough bunch, though most of these unregenerate types don't live all that long.
By this time, the middle of World War II, my sisters Laurel and Ivy were downstate with their husbands, working at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal. When the husbands were drafted, the girls kept on working in the factories. Laurel sent me a new book every week, a thrill not to be underrated during a U.P. winter. Ted was bitter about being rejected for the service, because his building abilities were such that he was put to work building primitive radar facilities all across the northern Midwest. Dad was with Ted most of the time, preaching wherever he could find a welcome and making more money than he had in a lifetime. If it weren't for Ted's efforts, Dad would have given it all away, a propensity I seem to have inherited.
That left Mother, Violet, Lily and me at home for the winter. Then Lily, who was only seventeen, ran off with a commercial fisherman from Naubinway. I was thankful that Violet stayed home, because she paid the most attention to me and was by far the best and most faithful teacher of the lot. Something just occurred to me: brushing hair. I always brushed the girls’ hair for them in the evening from the time I was small. I remember a potbellied stove, a table with an oilcloth, and a radio which Dad wouldn't listen to except for, later, the war news as broadcast by Gabriel Heatter. I would brush all of their hair except Mother's They all had long hair, but Violet's was the longest. What wonderful sisters they were! I must be boring you. Just because we have invented clocks and calendars doesn't mean that's the way people keep track of their lives, do you think? One winter might be the winter you see through ice. You go out on a lake, and if it hasn't sleeted and blurred in freezing, you can wipe away the snow and look down through the ice as if it were a horizontal window. I saw muskrat and beaver swimming this way, also large pike, which was what we were looking for. It was Dad's favorite food, a mess of fried pike, and it was the single, truly pleasant thing Karl would do for Dad. Once I read a story about a farm kid whose pig broke through the ice of the farm pond and the kid could see the pig swimming under the ice, looking for a way to get out.
That winter damn near killed Mother, Violet and me and is the reason, I suppose, that I've spent my life working in the tropics. What happened is that we had a rare January thaw, then an ice storm that knocked out the power, not all that rare an occurrence. Violet had a bad case of the flu, and then Mother caught it. They could barely get around, so I took care of them as best I could, bringing them water and aspirin and emptying the chamber pots, because we had just got electricity out in the country and didn't yet have inside plumbing. I'd warm up chicken soup for them, but they couldn't hold food down. My main job was to feed the woodstove and keep a lantern lit. It was lonely with no radio and no one to talk to. Without thinking, I stupidly used all the dry wood from the woodshed. After the ice storm, the wind shifted north and we had the great blizzard of ‘44, which was a three-day blow with mountainous snows and subzero temperatures. I could barely see the drifts through the heavily frosted windows. Violet would stumble out, pat my head, and tell me to get at my lessons. I sat there with a world map and H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, looking at a dead radio and listing to the wind howl, the house shudder.
Well, when I got around to replenishing the wood supply, I could barely get the door open, and the woodpile was under a big drift. I wasn't too concerned until I dug down and discovered the wood was all stuck hard toge1ther by the ice storm that came before the blizzard. I could barely knock off a single piece with continual swings of a sledgehammer. Now, to be frank, the shit was scared out of me. I had no one to turn to, what with two sick ladies on my hands, whom I loved and felt responsible for. I sat there in the pumpshed, looking at the three lonely pieces of maple I had left, crying and praying, neither of which did any good. It was midafternoon and early dark. It was obvious to me we would be frozen dead by morning even if I burned the furniture. The drafty old house required about a half-cord a day during a winter storm when you're talking fifty knots and up off Superior.
What saved us was the sudden memory of one of Karl's pranks. We loved to watch Ted blow stumps or dislodge boulders with dynamite—everyone in the construction business up here uses it because the U.P. is mostly rock. Karl wanted to blow up a beaver dam and lodge that was no longer in use; he had this elaborate notion, unless he was pulling my leg, that beavers lived in quarters that included a death room (where we would find bones and skulls), a kitchen for eating saplings, and a sleeping room. We stole a half a dozen sticks of Ted's dynamite and rigged it to a fuse, stuffing it a few feet into the dam. We used about four sticks too many—the whole setup became airborne, as it were, and a search of the area revealed no bones, or at least none that were intact.
I wiped away my tears and got the flashlight. I wallowed through the drifts out to a locked shed where Ted kept his gear, broke a window, and got two sticks of dynamite and a section of fuse. I dug well down beside the woodpile, chipped away the ice, stuffed the sticks into an opening, and rigged the fuse. I felt I should go in and warn the ladies. Mother was asleep, but dear Violet lay there bathed in sweat.
“There's going to be some noise, Violet.”
“You go ahead and play. The noise won't bother me. You get some venison from the crock, and maybe I'll have some, too.” We kept venison buried in rendered beef fat to preserve it. I heard the French still do this with geese and duck.
Here goes, I thought, going back outside and lighting the fuse. I hoped the charge was deep enough not to break the windows, and I prayed not to have a fit and get my ass blown off. I scrambled for cover, and there was an immense, satisfying WHUMP as the woodpile rose up a few feet above the snow and settled, all broken apart. Then I spent an hour or so, until I couldn't move from cold and exhaustion, filling the pumpshed with wood. I couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds at the time. Violet had a plate of venison and potatoes ready for me.
“I see you got us all the wood we need,” she said. I never much liked winter after that nightmarish incident.