The Farmer's Daughter (25 page)

Looking back I see that at the time I felt envious of those who could afford to follow their curiosity outside an institution. Of course part of my modest repulsion came from the struggles of my father which had set me to brooding early on with my childish antennae wavering to pick up life's perverse signals that find expression in parents.

Part of my entertainment came from my half-English, half-Chinese physics-major roommate. He was brilliant in his subject and had an enormous sense of humor, and could answer any question I had in the sciences. He left at the end of his freshman year for Caltech but his gift to me was eventually enormous. What happened was that my mother's maiden sister, a librarian in Boston who had visited us only once because she loathed my father, had set up an education fund for me of a thousand dollars. In the spring of my freshman year I had bought a junky old Chevrolet and a good bicycle. I loaned my roommate five hundred dollars to move to California which in his mind constituted an investment in the inventions he was always diddling with on paper. One of them dealt with measuring solar winds (steady at a million miles per hour, but gusting to two million). This small investment eventually supported me for my entire life as my roommate was to become a pioneer in the computer field.

I had to have a car because I was exhausted with taking the Greyhound bus north to upper Wisconsin or Minnesota during my monthly difficulties. I couldn't very well endanger my university career with my inevitable energetic behavior. During December's big moon before Christmas I had fucked my Spanish instructor nearly to death and I was fearful for both of us. She was in her early fifties and had carelessly seduced me after cooking dinner for us. Luckily it was during the mutual loneliness of Christmas vacation so she didn't miss any of her teaching duties. The staff at Emergency at the hospital were sure she had been gang-raped. I brought flowers and read to her during her three days in the hospital. She had taken her PhD at Columbia writing her dissertation on Antonio Machado. After our unforgettable experience she quoted a Machado passage to me from her hospital bed:

Look in your mirror for the other one,

the one who accompanies you.

We remained friends but naturally not lovers and this fearsome experience taught me to seek out the big tavern tarts of the North in Duluth, Minnesota, or Superior, Wisconsin, and occasionally vigorous black women in Chicago, one of whose pimps I had to throttle perhaps fatally though I found nothing in the Tribune about it.

The Great North brought me back to hunting with open arms but more so as a retreat from areas where I might do damage. My life began to take firm shape around the principle of finding a relatively safe place for my seizures, and then I would have to move on for the next month's two-day period because my memory of what I'd done during the seizures was somewhat short-circuited so that I only remembered in visual jolts. For instance I was camped near Cayuga in northern Wisconsin in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest and on a late-afternoon hike on a bitterly cold and snowy late November day I came upon a vacant deer-hunting camp of three floor tents. There was a hindquarter of venison hanging from a cache pole. I maneuvered the meat to the ground and was making off with it when a burly man emerged from one of the tents and began shouting at me. I ran with the hindquarter under an arm and he gave chase on a snowmobile. Rather than backtracking toward my own camp I entered a swampy delta near a small river thinking that the thick brush would prevent him from following. Unfortunately he knew the landscape better than I did and was waiting on a tract downstream. When he rushed at me I swung the frozen venison quarter which likely weighed thirty pounds striking him on the head. I lifted his body onto his snowmobile and ran it into the river hoping to make it look like an accident.

Frankly I doubted if he survived. The hunter was hunted. The next morning I remembered this in the briefest visual images and recalled the feelings especially in my hands when the meat slammed into his head. I moved camp a half dozen miles and spent the night thawing, cooking, and eating the meat, a grand feast indeed. I heard wolves howl in the distance and responded.

And so life went. I graduated from Northwestern on an accelerated program in a little more than two years and moved to Minneapolis where I took courses on property management. I was able to set myself up overseeing remote properties for wealthy men in Minneapolis and Chicago. I rarely ever met the men themselves but dealt with their money managers who at first were suspicious of my peerless academic credentials. I explained that I was the son of a naturalist and had always suffered from acute claustrophobia. I further offered that man had spent a couple of million years out of doors and had only recently moved indoors. I was likely less evolved except intellectually and preferred the outside. A couple of them said, “Oh, the lone wolf type” and I jokingly responded, “More like a lone dog.”

In successive years I took care of properties in the western Dakotas, Wyoming, northern Minnesota, and several places in Montana. I thrived especially in winter when for weeks, sometimes a month, I'd never see another soul except when traveling out for supplies. It's a comfort for wealthy men to own such properties even though they rarely visit them except for a short time in the summer. I stayed away from keeping an eye on working ranches for the obvious reason of my monthly infirmity. To counter the emotional starvation of keeping my personal lid on so tight I read poetry, the best of world fiction, and listened to classical music and also rhythm and blues the passion of which intrigued me. I also began a lifelong project of studying the languages of the nonhuman creatures, quite amazed to find myself fallen into my father's obsession with birds. With most mammalian species the language is in the nose which was equally fascinating. I did a great deal of hunting for meat, and to avoid the curiosity of game wardens I rarely used a rifle. I followed the path of the great anthropologist Louis Leakey by hunting in trees. Elk were too large but deer were manageable. You baited an area beneath a tree with fruit or grain and waited up there on a branch, falling on the creature with a knife in hand. Your weight usually broke the animal's back, especially the young females who were the tastiest eating.

Sadly I spent a great deal of time in a state of sexual deprivation in these years. My best outlet was in the company of large Indian women who abound in the many reservation areas of the American West. I was making decent money and could afford to be generous in terms of food, alcohol, and outright cash. In our long occasionally grotesque history we have treated these people with a hygienic savagery they could never imagine. It seems that the most civilized and mechanized countries are the best at meting out slow torture and prolonged and sophisticated punishment. In the wake of World War II we treated the Japanese and Germans far better than our resident natives.

My body had begun to bring me down to my very sore knees after a half dozen years in the West. I had continued eating mountainous amounts of meat and because of that along with the extreme physical exertion my joints had become occasionally cripplingly painful. At the time I was looking after a large property near the Washakie Wilderness Area in Wyoming and one spring morning no longer able to bear the pain I drove fifty miles over to Meeteetse to visit a very old doctor who, after elementary lab work, determined that I had enough purines in my blood to kill any human who wasn't part dog. I liked his humor. He said ranch hands who lived in remote line shacks and ate only meat and beans had modest versions of my blood problem. While looking at my body he said it resembled that of a bulldogger (a rodeo cowboy who leaps on a steer from a horse and wrestles it to the ground). I joked that I only wrestled deer for dinner. He advised that I go the tropics and eat fruit, rice, and fish for a decade or my goutish blood would permanently cripple me.

A few days later by sheer luck I was liberated. I occasionally corresponded with my Chinese-English roommate from Northwestern and I heard from him that he had sold his small company in Palo Alto and wanted to know what to do with my share. I called and was somewhat stunned at the amount. I asked him to wire it to the bank in Chicago that had held my original college fund and my small savings over the years. Since it was necessary for me to be mobile I had to live simply which anyway was my preference. Any money more than the minimum for my needs would blind me to the actual world I had come to love. My continuing motto was that nothing is what it appears to be. I had the advantage of being a permanent stranger on earth which gave me quite a different point of view. True, my character was occasionally violent but it seemed to me that most men have an itchy trigger finger in the womb. My own life would always be a barely containable arc but it now needed an adjustment in direction.

I packed up and drove east with vague intentions of going to Madrid which could be settled at an airport. I thought of my mother and Laurel both of whom I corresponded with every month or two. My mother was amused when I told her that when I read certain passages in Ovid's Metamorphoses or in Virgil's Georgics I would recall the visual ambience where I first read the passages near Bozeman, or in Alpine, or Cincinnati. Location is everything when we are young animals and our survival depends on our attentiveness to where we are. The young are always walking on thin ice. I was jolted when Mother wrote that she thought my friendship with Emelia was wonderful because every boy should have a sister. When I wrote back teasingly that my friendship with Emelia was rather more physically intense than a sister could offer she answered that by far the best sex of her life had been at fourteen when she and the neighbor boy had spent a long summer necking and “petting” out in the far corner of the orchard. This news curiously made me wonder about the nature of language I had been observing in the creature world. An emotion arises and you express it with a noise. Or you smell something and recite the nature of the smell to yourself in a wordless language. If on a rare occasion I wrote to Mother and Laurel the same evening I was amazed by the difference in language I used on the two. To a certain extent my language was a defense, an apologia for my nature, but then I was duplicitous because I couldn't very well express my true nature could I? As a boy I had been fascinated with “secret codes” so I devised a simple alphabetical code to at least express my nature to myself. This helped alleviate the essential loneliness of being a true stranger and the disadvantage of a single child not born among a human litter. Were I to die and someone find my journal the contents would look like gibberish except to a cryptographer to whom my code would be simpleminded. Here is a decoded sample:

Aug. 4

Encamped along the Bois de Sioux River between Wahpeton and Sisseton in far eastern Dakotas. Would have preferred a motel for my aching bones but my monthly fit is upon me. Awoke after dawn and noted with despair the severed head and feet of a piglet near me and the still warm coals of a fire on which I made coffee. Obviously I had feasted on a piglet and some night images returned in my brain's light show. A moonlit barnyard. Grabbing a piglet from a pen while the sow cowered at my scent. Crushed piglet's neck to still its squeal. Very large farm dog jumped at me. Plunged thumb and forefinger into dog's eye sockets and drowned it in water trough. Ran as yard light came on.

Took early walk to ease full stomach and cramped body. Heard chattering on small gravel road. Two girls bird-watching on their old bikes. They looked Indian or at least half-breed, from local Chippewa reserve. Said their names were Lise and Louise. I said I heard a larkspur and they said more likely a horned lark. I was sideways to them and when I turned they screamed, “Rougarou rougarou rougarou” and raced off on their bikes. I looked down and my shirt was covered with piglet blood. I felt my face which was caked with grease and blood. I hastily washed up in river, changed clothes, and fled in my pickup.

A few hours south I stopped at the public library in Sioux Falls and determined in a section devoted to local Native Americans that rougarou was a métis term for a lycanthrope, French-sounding as Natives intermarried with French trappers.

I passed the inevitable second night of my fit camped north of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Still full of pig meat I spent the night swimming in the Mississippi. Dawn found me well downriver and some kindly fishermen gave me a ride in their motorboat back to my campsite about a dozen miles north. They seemed uncomfortable in my naked and overmuscled presence and were glad to get rid of me.

Other than for the infernal traffic it was grand to revisit Chicago. Oddly, traffic jams remind me of overflowing public toilets, in short, our condensed excrescences, and those religious stampedes that kill so many in the Middle East and India. After buying some nice clothes I checked into the Drake what with my newfound financial luck. I had been without a television for seven years in the West and turned it on seeing something that was also strangely reminiscent of a traffic jam. It was a minute or so of the audience at a rock concert. They were howling and jumping up and down, their faces contorted in pleasure that resembled subdued rage.

I had time for a brief visit to Northern Trust to straighten out my financial matters. The bank officer was surprised that I planned on living on so little per year. I explained that I had been working for very wealthy men the past seven years and disapproved of the way their money sterilized their lives. I preferred a simpler life on the edge to continue my studies in nonhuman language. Perhaps down the road I would draw out more funds to build myself a cabin someplace remote or to take a fishing trip to some foreign place. The officer was a little melancholy and said, “I suppose my life is a bit sterile.”

On the way back to the hotel in the late afternoon I questioned my unrest. It was the third night of a big moon by which time I was normally okay but I felt fearful of having even a modest spell in the city. The steak restaurant where I had eaten a decade ago with Laurel and her father was just opening. They were fully booked but I begged and they allowed me to eat a porterhouse and three dozen oysters at the bar while drinking a bottle of French wine. The bartender was a little troubled with my speed eating and I explained I had been in the mountains for a long time without a first-rate meal.