Magic Hours (36 page)

“Why?” I asked.

“I just made that up.”

We sat down for the last time in Harrison's writing studio. On his desk was a letter he had begun writing to McGuane; he had gotten as far as “Dear Tom.” Harrison usually wrote McGuane on Sunday, and was planning to finish the letter before I arrived, but had fallen asleep. He showed me the most recent letter McGuane had written him. McGuane thanked Harrison for recommending Elif Batuman to him and ended with a postscript that maybe they should start thinking about publishing their forty—five—year—long correspondence.

When he woke up from his nap, he realized he wanted to tell me something, which was his dislike of “nifty gear” outdoormanship, such as the kind he imagined was favored by the readers of
Outside.
He wanted to make sure I got that into the piece. He quickly had second thoughts, though. “Take that out,” he said, waving his hand. A moment later he said, “No, put it in; they need to hear it.”

Sometimes when you are talking to Harrison he gets incredibly still. He looks away and starts breathing wheezily from his chest, and his eyes fade, and you begin to worry that he is in the middle of some kind of cardiac event. Other times, when he is
talking about drinking or writing or his wife or his daughters or grandchildren, he becomes boyish, all the wrinkles ironed out of his face and his eyes slits of joy. Other times, when he is losing his patience, he resembles some kind of Indian werebear with a face wrecked by pit fighting. With Harrison it was impossible to feel something so simple as friendship. He suddenly seemed to me like the closest thing we have to a tribal elder. If writers ever needed permission to raid another tribe and steal its corn, we would need to ask Harrison. He would listen carefully and judge prudently. We would never doubt his judgment, even when we saw him playing in the stream an hour later.

Harrison lives close to his mind. You sense this more and more the longer you stay with him, especially if, like me, you sometimes have to swim across an electro-plastic sea of junk to reach your own mind. You want to know or touch that unmediated part of Harrison, to tell him things. I was not the only one. At one point in Livingston, during our drive-around, we ran into a young friend of his, who immediately launched into a story about how he and his now-ex-girlfriend had recently decided to abort their child. But the younger man danced around mentioning this explicitly, forcing Harrison to say, “You mean you killed it?” His younger friend swallowed with a big-eyed blanch, and so did I. Later still, we met an aspiring screenwriter, who asked Harrison if he would have a look at one of his screenplays. “I couldn't read a screenplay without puking,” Harrison said. Sometimes politeness was just a way to escape what needed to be said.

Before I left him, Harrison wanted to take me for a quick, gorgeous drive down the road, toward the foothills of the Rockies. There was a question I had been wanting to ask but was slightly afraid to. Since we only had an hour or so left together, I let it fly: “What did you think when you heard that one of John Bissell's sons had become a writer?”

He looked on toward the road. “I thought, Boy, isn't this odd? I'd heard rumors, right along. And the main thing that always gets to me is just worry. I'm capable of worrying about anything and anyone. And I thought, Oh God, what will happen to him? Why has he chosen this bloody voyage? That's McGuane's term for being a writer: a bloody voyage. But I was so pleased with your early successes.”

“What are these hills here?” I asked, motioning out the window.

“What do you mean?”

“What are they called?”

“They don't call 'em anything.”

How about those bushes? “Juniper,” he said, and pointed up along the hills' escarpment. “See those rock formations? Full of rodentia. And rattlers.” We circled back to his house and saw, in quick succession, a western tanager and a yellow-rumped warbler, Harrison's first of the season. A deer ran alongside the truck, and I asked Harrison why the deer in Montana looked different from the deer in Michigan. Montana deer are mule deer, he said. Dumber, lower, mangier, grayer than Michigan's whitetails. We passed the big pink tree that grew next to his driveway's entrance. What's that called? “Ornamental crab apple,” he said.

We came back to the house and Harrison wanted to know if I was going to continue teaching, which, I had told him the day before, was increasingly cannibalizing my writing time. Over the years, Harrison said, he had been offered several “really cushy jobs” by various creative writing departments. “And I said, ‘Why me?' And they said, ‘We need some kind of name.' However minimal.” He always said no. “I turned one down for $75,000 in a year that we made $9,000.”

“How were you able to do that?”

Harrison told me what he told them: “‘Somebody's got to
stay outside,”' he said. “And I still think that's true. Somebody's got to stay outside.”

 

 

Before leaving Montana, I decided to drive through Yellowstone Park. Once more I was listening to conservative talk radio, and the voices were shrill and formless in my little rental, beneath the mountain cathedrals. While Sean Hannity spent an hour rhetorically decapitating President Obama, I looked at the landscape, feeling the pressure between Americans and America, between body and being, between reality and aspiration. I wound up at Old Faithful, which Harrison said had been weakened in recent years; it might not even blow, he warned me. I wanted to see it blow. Maybe it would relieve the pressure. After an hour, it had not blown, and I had to catch a plane home. I knew by then I would be quitting my teaching job. It felt too good to be outside.

 

—2011

Different versions of these essays were originally published in the following magazines and journals: “Unflowered Aloes” in the
Boston Review;
“Escanaba's Magic Hour” in
Harper's Magazine
; “Grief and the Outsider” in the
Believer
as “Protesting All Fiction Writers!”; “Writing about Writing about Writing” in the
Believer
as “Sir, Permission to Go AWOL from the Interesting Sir!”; “Rules of Engagement” in the
New York Times Magazine
; “Euphorias of Perrier” in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
; “Still Rising” in the
Believer
; “The Secret Mainstream” in
Harper's Magazine
; “Kapuscinski's Last Journey” in the
New York Times Book Review
as “On the Road with History's Father”; “Great and Terrible Truths” in the
New York Times Book Review
; “Cinema Crudité” in
Harper's Magazine
; “A Simple Medium” in the
New Yorker
; “Invisible Girl” in the
New Yorker
as “Voicebox 360”; “The Theory and Practice of Not Giving a Shit” in
Outside
as “The Last Lion.”

My deep thanks to editors Neil Gordon, Donovan Hohn, Heidi Julavits, Alex Star, Ted Genoways, Roger D. Hodge, Leo Carey, and Abraham Streep. Thanks also to my agent, Heather Schroder, and to Dave Eggers, Chris Ying, Michelle Quint, and Adam Krefman at McSweeney's. Thank you, finally, to Gabriel Reeve, who provided some crucial last-second help in putting this collection together.

Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974, and is the author
Chasing the Sea
and
The Father of all Things
, both travel books;
Speak, Commentary,
a volume of fake DVD commentaries he co-wrote with Jeff Alexander;
God Lives in St. Petersburg,
a story collection;
Extra Lives
, a work of criticism; and
The Art and Design of
Gears of War, a short book about the art and design of
Gears of War.
He is a past winner of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Since 1997 he has lived in New York City, Ho Chi Minh City, Rome, Las Vegas, Tallinn, and Portland. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Subscriptions to the
Believer
are $45 for a year.
That's nine issues of essays and interviews, comics
and poetry, reviews and terrible advice, and
monthly columns by Nick Hornby, Daniel
Handler, and Greil Marcus—including our
three double issues (Art, Music, and Film),
which come with bonus items, such as
original CDs and DVDs.

 

McSWEENEY'S
SAN FRANCISCO

 

Copyright © 2012 Thomas Carlisle Bissell

 

 

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.

 

McSweeney's and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney's,
a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.

 

eISBN : 978-1-938-07310-6