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| Photograph by Robert DeMott |
Thomas McGuane, perhaps Harrison’s oldest living friend, noting Harrison’s passing in the current issue of The New Yorker, writes that Harrison died at his writing desk. It seems to me entirely appropriate; that he would have wanted it that way. He adds that Harrison’s death “leaves an extraordinary vacancy” for family, friends, and admirers who never had the pleasure to meet and know him. I am one of those who feels cast adrift. The thought that no more words will be unleashed from his pen saddens me deeply. I never met Harrison, yet my life and my own writing has orbited his since the early 1970s, when I first became aware of his unique perspective on human foibles and our interaction with the natural world. More on this at another time.
I have been reading Harrison’s latest poems published recently as Dead Man’s Float by Copper Canyon Press, and his newest collection of novellas, The Ancient Minstrel, both of which arrived in my mailbox just days before Harrison died at his writing table in Arizona. The poems especially memorialize his pains and sadness in his twilight days. I take perhaps a small degree of comfort in the fact that he is no longer suffering the various pains and infirmities of recent years, that he is no longer burdened by loneliness since the death of his beloved wife of 55 years last October. After a long and productive life, perhaps the fire in his heart finally went out.
I close my eyes and I try to imagine a young boy casting an alder fly into a quiet pool under a distant cutbank of the Pere Marquette not far from his boyhood Michigan home. A rainbow trout eyes it closely as it drifts past, not realizing, if it strikes out of habit, its quick transit to an awaiting net will be memorialized in the words Jim Harrison quietly, thoughtfully, etched into pages of his own immortality.
