Returning to Earth (8 page)

[A week later Donald was still quite distressed about this trip to murder Floyd. Donald also had his most severe seizure to date. He said his whole body felt like his foot did when he
dropped a cement block on it, which he did a couple of times in his working life. He became so low that I was frantic and suggested that if he still intended to see a glacier he better get started. It was mid-August and K would leave to go back to Ann Arbor in a month. Right now what I remember most is my tears when they left. I was not totally confident that I'd see Donald again. When you've been married a long time you simply know the nature of your lover's thoughts and I knew he was thinking about suicide. Luckily there was a remission and he made it through the winter, which is a somewhat dormant period in the Great North, where people are mostly eager to discuss the latest blizzard and how far out Lake Superior would freeze, if not all the way across to Canada. C.]

I got down in the dumps after our Floyd visit mostly because I wondered what kind of piece of shit a man could become before he cracked. Floyd was no more than a character in one of those zombie movies I used to watch on television with Herald and Clare. At the doctor's office that week when I asked Cynthia to go out in the waiting room I tried to talk the doctor into giving me some pills for when I figured I might want to cash out. The doctor said no, that it was illegal. I said I didn't want to make a mess using a pistol or deer rifle. The doctor said, “Let me think it over.” I have no intention of becoming too much of a burden to my family. Also, it's my life to end if I wish to end it.

It seemed to be time to see a glacier if I was ever going to see one. The trip turned out to be quite a joke because I never told K my true intentions and we spent damn near two weeks and a lot of driving and went to the wrong kind of glacier. Back in the seventh grade a man came to our
school assembly with a film about the farthest north and Arctic country. Maybe it's the best thing I've ever seen on film. The man was in a boat in this area where there were more than a million birds—I think they were named puffins—that lived in cliffs and flew down to the ocean to eat fish. Down the shore there was a glacier as high as a mountain it seemed and this glacier was moving so slow you couldn't see it move and finally huge pieces of it would drop off into the sea with a crash like thunder. Well, when I got sick I developed this dream that a good way to die would be to be camped up on top of this glacier and ride a piece of ice as big as a house a thousand feet down to the sea. Well, I never told K this fantasy but then he wanted to head northwest to British Columbia because he had read a book about some Indians up there called the Koyukon. It turned out K was off a few hundred miles about where these Indians were. I had an old camper top and we put a mattress in the back so I could ride laying down when need be. We took a cooler, sleeping bags, a tent in case it rained, and fishing gear though K has never been much of an angler. He took a university course dealing with rivers and he mostly hikes and studies how rivers are shaped. He loves the Peshekee over in the Huron Mountains because it has quite a drop. I had also carved a hole inside a book in David's library. The book was called
The Indians of Lake Superior
and the hole contained mostly veterinary pills for pain from when our last dog, a part-malamute mongrel named Sally, got old and died. There were about thirty of these pills and I figured they might do the job for me. I only asked the doctor because I knew he'd have something more guaranteed to get me on the ghost road.

Off we went on our joke trip after Cynthia fried us up a pan of eggs and side pork. In my condition you don't worry anymore about cholesterol. You have to know that K is not a normal person. He has built himself into a different kind of person. For instance he might stay awake a few days and nights and then sleep and read for a day and night. I used to think he must take pep pills but Clare said no, he won't even take an aspirin. Anyway, we headed over into Minnesota, then north toward Winnipeg, where we caught the main western artery, Route 16. I wanted to detour up to Hollow Water in Manitoba to see where the first Clarence's wife, Sally, hailed from but it was too far out of the way. Many people don't know that Canadian cities are mostly like our own but the big empty places between cities are larger than ours. K has a heavy foot and we drove forty-eight hours in a row until we camped beside a fine river near Hinton, Alberta. While K slept I caught a nice mess of trout to cook for dinner. A game warden stopped to see if I had a fishing license but then he looked at me closely and said it didn't matter because even though I was American I was a First Citizen. I started to fall down but he was a big fellow and caught me. I was embarrassed and told him I had Lou Gehrig's disease. He said he had a second cousin down in Calgary with the problem.
First Citizen
is the official term for what they call Indians in Canada.

Well, we finally made Smithers up in British Columbia and I wasn't feeling too good. K had called ahead and when we got to the airport a helicopter was ready to take us out to this glacier. He was to drop us off and pick us up the next afternoon. K had given me a pill to calm my nerves
and I felt a little like the first time I smoked pot back in junior high school. The helicopter ride was quite a thrill. I kept thinking of a passage Cynthia read me once from a book where there was a Cheyenne Indian character named One Who Sees as a Bird who was an actual person in history. I don't have any faith in what they call reincarnation but if I was to return to earth in the form of another creature it would be nice if it was a bird, a raven to be exact. Once when I was night fishing in the fall with my dad on the Escanaba River down near Arnold he pointed up into the darkness at the big moon to where you could see birds like little pieces of black confetti flying south.

Well, when we were dropped off at the glacier I started laughing and rolling on the ground. These laughing or crying fits can be a symptom of my disease but this one was different. There was no ocean near this glacier. K was puzzled so I explained to him my suicide dream and he said, “Cool,” which he says when he really likes something. We had a wonderful time camped there on that glacier with the light of a quarter moon glistening off the ice. I've always loved snow and ice and for a while I lay on it stark naked thinking that life can be quite glorious. When we were young Cynthia and I made love outdoors a lot mostly because we had no other place to go but then we came to like it. This included in a rowboat out on a lake where she had me rowing into the shine of the moon on the water. You can't beat these times in life.

I wasn't in too good shape when we got back in September but they had just brought out this new drug that helped some, called Rilutek. Talking with Cynthia I found
out I had a raw memory that had kept itself hidden. About a year after they took my mom away and I lived with Flower I got to missing my mom and I couldn't believe my dad when he said we couldn't see her. One summer morning when my dad went off to work at dawn, about five a.m. I got on my bicycle and headed toward that Newberry mental hospital, which was one hundred and thirty miles away. I figured I could reach it by nightfall and then sleep out in the yard and I could see my mom in the morning. My bicycle chain broke twice and I didn't reach Newberry until midnight, nineteen hours after I started. A night watchman caught me out in the yard of the hospital and called the police. Meanwhile a doctor who was on night duty had them fix me something to eat. The doctor explained to me that my mother was in a bad way and they had sent her downstate to Ypsilanti, which he said was four hundred miles to the south. He said she wouldn't recognize anyone except people she knew as a child down near Bark River. I fell asleep in the office and my dad picked me up after three a.m. and on the way home we stopped near Seney and fished the Fox River. I caught my biggest brook trout ever, about two pounds, and that helped in this hard time. We stopped to see Flower in Au Train and I ate fried chicken and two pieces of blackberry pie with cream. Flower told me that she was now my mother and when I needed her she was free to help me.

Despite my bad intentions I was sort of proud I didn't kill Floyd. Or relieved. We were both in the prisons of our bodies and the trip to the glacier wiped out a lot of my low feelings. All winter long I watched these VCR tapes Cynthia got me. As I've said my dyslexia is bad so I read too slow
but these tapes were a real education of sorts. The subjects were the types of Indian societies all over the world, including Indonesia, South America, Siberia, and Africa. I still have that book Cynthia's uncle Fred loaned me over in Grand Marais so many years ago. It's about black Indians down in the southern parts of the United States. Throughout the world none of these people got a fair shake. Some of those tribes died out completely. During the winter liked to sit by the window and watch it snow. If I felt good enough Cynthia would help me get bundled up and I'd sit on a chair in the backyard and let it snow on me.

Herald and Clare arrived this evening from Los Angeles via Chicago. Polly picked them up at the airport. She said David would get here tomorrow from Mexico, where he's been helping poor folks move north. It's strange how he and Polly are divorced and live in different houses but still see each other a lot when he's here. Cynthia says her brother can only be taken in small doses but K says his mother, Polly, is just as difficult. Herald burst into tears when he saw me, I suppose because I've shrunk so much. Clare sat up all night with me and we had a good time talking about the old days, which are not so long ago. At dawn she said, “Dad, I know what you are going to do and I can't say I blame you,” and then she fell asleep in her chair.

For about a half hour I was seeing things in the corners and at the tops of my eyes under the lids. I began to wonder where dreams were stored because the things I was seeing were blurred but they were sure enough combinations of
animals. The female bear that had hung around the hill near me had sprouted great big raven wings, and there was also an otter with Clare's face.

I called out and Cynthia came down the stairs and sent Clare off to bed. I said I was sorry to disturb her but my mind was playing tricks. She teased me by saying what I had said years ago, “Whoever we are isn't for certain.” We had been out on the porch of our darkened house near Bay Mills looking at stars all bundled up on a cold late fall night and that's what I'd said.

I now decided to say a little about my three days and nights on the hillside. I shouldn't be keeping all of my religious feelings from my family. I have to hold some things to myself, where they belong. They are too strange for me to understand and might be a burden to my family when they read this. I told my teacher up there but then such things are his calling. He told me that a few nights a year he “flies” out to Sisseton in South Dakota for a few minutes to poke fun at this woman who turned him down years ago. He admitted he shouldn't be doing this but nobody's perfect.

It's an ordinary thing to sit in a thicket on a hillside for three days. Everything is ordinary but more so, as if the thicket was a thousand times a thicket. Your life comes to a stop and some of the moments became hours by the third night.

The nights close to the summer solstice are pretty short, only truly dark from about eleven in the evening to before five in the morning. Of course I didn't take my watch. My dad, Clarence, used to joke that you don't tell time anything because it never wanted to hear from us, it just rushes past
leaving us high and dry. The nights were pretty clear except for a brief thunderstorm the second night and I was lucky my children had taught me the stars. During and after the thunderstorm it helped me to be large. I noticed how shivering warms you up. I admit I was scared when the lightning struck the granite outcrop a hundred yards up the hill behind me. You could smell the lightning. I had seen the storm coming from the southwest across Lake Superior but nothing about seeing it prepared me for its violence.

A female bear, not real large but about my weight, came around on the second evening. I was dozing but smelled her nearness and opened my eyes. Bears can smell pretty strong depending on what they've been eating. She made some threatening noises and I wondered if she intended to kill me. This is rare but you're a fool if you don't think it happens. She went away but then came back at dawn and I got the idea that she was courting me. She flounced around outside the thicket about thirty feet away. Maybe she had lost a cub and wanted to start over. After a few minutes she gave up and wandered off, probably looking for a fawn to eat, likely her favorite meal.

Around noon the second day a flock of ravens began checking me out. I got this idea that the ravens hung around because they have spare time and were wondering what I was doing sitting still in their general home, which was where I was. Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do too they lose their logical mistrust of us. At midmorning on the third day these three big ravens stood right outside of the thicket looking in at me. Ravens don't stand on the ground unless they're sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one
dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven't figured out cars but ravens have. Anyway, it was plain to me that these three ravens wanted to know why I was sitting there. I wasn't so sure myself but I told them that the first day I had had a real short vision that I was going to get sick and die. This was more than two years before I got diagnosed. I told them I wasn't too much bothered by my coming death because it's what happens to all living things sooner or later. Later would be better but it's not for me to decide. I also told these ravens about a funeral of their kind I had seen a few miles inland from Whitefish Point a few years back. A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground. I got the feeling that one of the three ravens had been there as it was less than a hundred miles away. They showed no signs of leaving so I also told them of my vision of my mother and father sitting beside a creek with a sleeping bear beside them as if it were a pet dog. My mother and father looked wonderful and they said, “Don't be afraid to come home, son.”