The Road; Stripping; Nature and Natives; Hunting, Fishing (and Dogs)

Some Obsessions of the Poet, Jim Harrison

I took a lovely long (well, long by my standards) hike last week with Michèle in Sky Meadows State Park, which was possibly a degree and a half cooler than DC and during those muggy last few days of August, I’m open to any relief on offer. 

We saw some gorgeous butterflies, all of which steadfastly refused to pose for me, and then just as we were within sight of the car — not even on the hike any more really, we were on paved ground — I got so distracted by an extremely bold deer who watched us from under a shade tree but seemed as relaxed as a dairy cow about the entire affair, that I put a step wrong, fell off the edge of the pavement, and wiped out right into the gravel. 

Fortunately, Michèle, Boy Scout Troop Leader Extraordinaire that she is, had a first aid kit with her, and she patched me up in no time. (Before one big, week-long scouting trip, if I remember correctly, all the troop leaders had to take some grizzly training course with — I don’t know if I remember this exactly correctly, but it was something like this — realistic severed limbs and people pretending to be corpses. It all sounded pretty extreme to me but the point is, Michèle, if you’re reading this, I’m fully expecting you to reattach my arm one day if it comes to that.)

All of this is to say that, despite Michèle’s miracles, I was little banged up last week and spent it more-or-less recovering and not feeling like I had much for you.

Well, except, eternally, the poems of Jim Harrison. After the conversation with Chris LaTray in the notes of this WanderFinder, I went ahead and bought the doorstopper of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems. Can I just say that the the list of Harrison’s obsessions in the editor’s note (the editor was Joseph Bednarik) is almost worth the price of the book alone? As a person who is trying more and more to follow my nose, my gut, my north star, my animal instincts, whatever it is that tells a person “this! this! this!” I love reading what obsessions do for other people.

I guess what I love the most about obsessions is that it matters less what the obsessions are and more that you have them.

In the case of Jim Harrison, his list of seven obsessions includes the following:

• The Road

• Hunting, Fishing (and Dogs)

• Private Religion

• Nature and Natives

• Alchohol

• Stripping

• France

As the editor notes, this is ten obsessions, not seven, and given Harrison’s reputation as a gourmand and nearly 40 books published, you could safely add “good food” and “writing” to the list. So — twelve obsessions? Or so?

I’d like to note that almost all of these obsessions can be described as “earthy,” though in very different ways. Having spent time with many of them myself, it’s a list I gotta love.  

Here’s a poem of his that’s stuck with me lately.

(I’ll type out the poem in the comments for those who can’t see the image.)

My dad collected memento mori as a younger man. When he married my mom, and certainly by the time I came along, he had mostly stopped with the skulls and so on. But the afternoon we found ourselves at a French chateau where the hunting dogs fight for meat — he watched me watching them.

Photo by Nathanaël Desmeules on Unsplash

This website describes the tradition. A chateau’s dog trainer wheels out a mix of raw meat, pasta, and kibble, and lays carefully in a straight line across the kennel floor. The pack of dogs — about 50 hounds — are released and race forward, only to stop a few feet from the food. They will not advance until the trainer gives them the go-ahead.

They squirm, though, some of them. They jostle for position. I worried for the ones at the back. Did the trainers notice? What if one dog kept getting stuck at the back and then got too weak to fight, would they notice? I still worry now, truth be told, though the dogs I saw are certainly long dead and the pictures online show a throughly healthy pack. 

“They’re quite something, aren’t they?” my dad asked later, over the dinner table.

I nodded, not knowing exactly what he wanted from me. Some toughness, perhaps? Or just assent? 

But he had gotten what he wanted. He knew some combination of fear and trepidation and adrenaline held my attention as surely as it held the dogs, so that I could not look away when pleasure and death showed up on my table, splayed like a pomegranate or like a poem.

Photo by Paula Morin on Unsplash

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Hi WanderFinders — I’m thinking about maybe trying to make these posts (just a bit) shorter & less on a schedule — more free flowing, is the idea. I hope it’ll encourage conversations. :) (I’m following Tom Pluck’s lead on this.)

Thanks, and have a wanderful week.