Dalva Book

Embedded in this brilliant novel is this single poignant sentence:

Back on the front porch, I saw her in the far corner of the yard, pushing an empty tire swing as if it held an imaginary child.

Jim Harrison can raise a lump in your throat. By this point in the book we are already in love with Dalva. She is 45, beyond intelligent, fetching, equal parts sentimental and pragmatic. She is as self-sufficient as it is possible to be. She can, as they say, ride a horse. When she was a young girl, she fell hard for Duane Stone Horse - quite the young man but not necessarily the kind you wanted in your living room. The resultant child was taken from her, an adoption arranged. In this book, Dalva is searching for her son and searching for her history as well. It is America's history, not all parades and ruffles and flourishes. But it's so much more.

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I woke yesterday, not hungover, but I hadn't slept well. I opened Dalva. Uncharacteristically, I had left my bookmark in the middle of a section, apparently worn out the night before right there. What followed was three pages that I think show why Harrison has such a purchase on my reading soul.

Ruth arrived at the last minute before dinner, running late because she had been reading a book called Arctic Dreams and had been carried away...

That stopped me. First, because Arctic Dreams (by Barry Lopez) is one of my favorite books. That will always get my attention. But I also loved the casual way Harrison brought it up. Never even mentioned the author's name. Just a little tip of the cap. (He makes a more cryptic reference to Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard later, naming neither the author nor title.) But I also loved how it served its literary purpose. So many things could have made Ruth late: a flat tire, a phone call, an unexpected visitor. This reference wasn't for everyone. But for me, yes, I understood exactly why Ruth could be carried away and thus late.

Ruth, Dalva's sister, was late for an impromptu dinner hosted by Uncle Paul. (Their father, Paul's brother, was killed in the Korean War). Paul has conspired to invite Fred, a neighbor, as a possible match for either Dalva or Ruth. This is Dalva's take on Fred:

It turned out she (Ruth) rather liked Paul's neighbor, Fred, the divorced rancher. I felt noncommittal about him after a half-hour's chat; he wore slightly too much cologne, his informal ranch clothes were too precisely tailored and didn't seem quite comfortable, the sort of clothes a CEO would wear at a chuck-wagon outing at a Phoenix convention. He was terribly bright and knowledgeable, but lacked the "indentations," the unique character traits I look for in men. I imagined he ate donuts with a fork and folded his underpants. This trace of bitchiness in me reminded me of what my Santa Monica gynecologist friend had told me--that I was too "autolelic," i.e., I only did things for and of themselves and lacked an overall "game plan." At least with Fred there were no edges against which one could bruise--he had taken care of himself so well he'd likely grow old and die in a single minute when the time was appropriate.

Irritated by Fred, Uncle Paul offers his own thoughts:

"You can't make the desert represent a freedom you should have organized for yourself in your bedroom or living room. That's what is so otiose about nearly all nature writing. People naturally shed their petty and inordinate grievances in the natural world, then resume them when the sheer novelty dissipates. We always destroy wilderness when we make it represent something else, because that something else can always fall out of fashion. Freedom to the all-terrain-vehicle addict, the mining and oil and timber companies, has always meant the absolute license to do as they wish, while "heritage" is a word brought up by politicians to recall a virtue they can't quite remember. The only traceable heritage related to our use of the land is to exhaust it....

Of course, on a metaphoric level the desert is an unfathomably intricate prison, and you may understandably wish to play with this fact, comparing it to your own life. By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant or unwilling to carry the load."

Embarrassed by his speech, Paul asks Ruth to "play something morose and sentimental" on the piano. Dalva watches:

She began with a harpsichord imitation, lapsed into a polka, then slid into the Debussy she knew Paul favored. In turn he laughed, closed his eyes, then smiled. When I looked at him I couldn't help wondering what sort of man my father would have become.

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I stopped and looked outside. The first frost was painting the grass. It would kill the basil but not the flowers. Not yet.

I thought of love. I thought of history. I thought of my father. I thought of the magic of just three pages.

This is supposed to be the Year of Reading Proust. I found Jim Harrison two months ago. It's late in the year, but I've compulsively made this my Year of Reading Harrison. Next year too.