The English Major

by Jim Harrison

The world is a wobbly place and so is my mind. I had turned on Wisconsin NPR and then turned it off again because I was up to my ass in Iraq. I was trying to remember from history books if the Blackhawk Indians had come up this far from what is now Iowa? As the landscape unfolds it’s all we have to offer and it’s not even ours. We were always an army of occupation. You know that if you read history.

We spent a fine day driving south from Lemmon all the way to Nebraska with a specific kind of grandeur to the landscape, truly the Great Plains, a subtlety to rolling hills and rocky escarpments that doesn’t suit people like Marybelle who want snow capped postcard mountains.

This was a wonderful world without the eyesores of ski resorts or golf courses.

I thought, “She does her thinking out loud,” about Marybelle, maybe a new development in our culture just as twenty-five years ago when I quit teaching I could see the onslaught of the new culture where everything including education had to be fun or amusing.

Robert always said that he had the soul of an artist and the mind of a scientist and that’s why he ended up in the movie business. I must say that I wasn’t able to follow the logic of the statement.

It had occurred to me that elections tended to illustrate the abject failure of our sodden, fun educational system. Civics as a course offered high ideals that never seemed to present themselves.

made camping impossible for Marybelle and I thought about my tiring wallet when I packed the gear for the trip back to the motel. Lucky for me she had a sunburn which meant I’d get to sleep an entire

What can dad give me now? Maybe that I should loosen up as much as I am able.

We don’t quite get started except on our livelihood which is probably the story of mankind.

Staring at the river I began to wonder what we are when we are alone. Maybe we don’t count for much unless we are rubbing against others.

Ever present was the cultural fantasy that you could separate the fuck from the fuckers.

I felt too good in the aftermath of my first rate burger to want to deal with big issues. I nodded to a herd of Angus out in a pasture in silent thanks that they taste so good.

Time tricks us into thinking we’re part of her and then leaves us behind.

I’m sort of neutral in terms of religion but ever since I was a kid I’ve thought moving water to be the best thing God made.

Daily in grade school when I started trout fishing with my dad he told me that gods and spirits lived in creeks and rivers, information he got from his own father’s Chippewa buddy. I never doubted this one bit. Where else would they live?

What bothered me on the sleeping bag listening to Marybelle and the river was the idea that with my clumsy consent my own script and most of the human race’s had been written for them.

There was a question if television made my lust artificial? My friend Ad said that sex in a non-traditional society was always up for grabs. It was like tennis with no net played in a gravel pit. The wisdom of this was moderated by what I had learned on the phone south of Minneapolis vis-à-vis Ad asking a woman to pee in his hat. Where did this come from?

I’m too ordinary and slow in her speedy world. When I said about her favorite novels that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy, they own it all anyway, she said, what do you know of the world? Maybe she was right, but then on the evening news they talk faster and faster hoping that they’ll find something to say while I’m trapped back there inside Emerson’s “Essays.”

Maybe we were just another couple who faded late in the game. I didn’t offer her a lot in my back to nature binge after I quit teaching. We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals.

This idea brought me back to Martin’s contention that Americans are somewhat unique in that a smaller percentage of them are mere victims of historical chance and circumstances. For most of us anyway there was no overwhelming ground control that pushed us this way and that. Back during the Civil Rights nightmare dad had startled me by saying that if he was a black man getting pushed around he’d likely go to war against the whites. I was all for Martin Luther King and dad sounded like Malcolm X.

Here I was in very empty North Central Oregon where my own unforced errors played big from my brain’s movie projector against the immense screen of landscape.

There was a sudden troubling thought that nobody seems to know much of anything. Everything in our culture seems to be marinating in the same plastic sac and the ingredients are deeply suspect.

The experience was a world away from the American idea of God as someone who drove around in a dump truck full of figurative candy to toss to deserving people if you beckoned him properly.

The ocean was a god unknown, galactic, and in her own quiet way maybe enjoyed the moon as much as we did, what with the way the ocean gets pushed around by the moon and her tidal energies.

As people used to say, she was full of vim and vigor and offered a good balance to my melancholy and brooding that seemed to be passed on by my mother.

He was jolly but scary back then and when I questioned dad he said that this man was in close touch with all of the gods and spirits on earth who hide from us to survive. “We’re a nation of spirit killers,” dad said.

successful people never had much time for important things like hunting, fishing, drinking, and wandering around in the woods.

Every night he’d go out carousing quoting a line of Rilke saying, “Only in the rat-race of the arena can the heart learn to beat.” I presumed this man Rilke to be a pretty racy poet but when I looked at one of his books I found out otherwise.

“I have no more time for self-doubt which is a profession in itself for English majors. I must follow my star even if it turns out to be one of those squiggly motes floating through my eyeball.”

I thought how preposterous it was that anyone would try to paste a decal of sanity on our time.

I had abandoned my purest impulses for a lifetime of toil and now they were arising again.

and discovered again that a stiff single drink on the porch on a summer evening can be like going to the church of your “self.”

This won’t be a bad life I thought happily. What there is left of it is undetermined but I’ll do fine.