Returning to Earth

Praise for
Returning to Earth
:

“A force of nature in American letters . . . Harrison's trademark prose, lyric and fluid, seamlessly melds perceptions, memories, and dreams to capture his characters' inner lives. The narratives in turn pull readers into the underlying depths and currents of this tale with the quiet force of a river.
Returning to Earth
is a watershed work for Harrison.. . . [A] view of death that is as earthbound and humble as it is spiritual and profound.”

—
The Seattle Times

“Harrison has always written with muscular force and startling compassion.. . . We watch as Donald's family members enter the essence of grief and as they take the first small steps towards acceptance of loss. When the book ends, many readers will, I suspect, hold it quietly and wonder how to let these people go.”

—
The Oregonian

“Each voice has its Joycean digressions and obsessions.. . . Although these characters share a common heritage and interests, they remain so distinct, so memorable, that you would recognize their voices in a crowded bar, even if you had your back to them. As for the places they love and inhabit, the chokecherry and dogwood and porcupine-quill baskets and feathers and stones—well, let's just say that all five senses were used to re-create them.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Harrison's newest novel,
Returning to Earth
, contains some of the most poignant moments he has ever imagined.. . . [He] has crafted something remarkable, a set of interlocking stories set in a complex, evolving geography. Any reader who emerges dry-eyed from this powerful but beautifully underwritten scene isn't paying attention.. . . an important work by a major writer.”

—
The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland)

“Jim Harrison is a writer with bear in him. Fearless, a top predator, omnivorous, he consumes all manner of literature and history and philosophy.. . . one of the great writers of our age. . . I never miss a book by Harrison, and am glad I did not miss this one.”

—
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis-St. Paul)

“Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison's remarkable new novel.. . . A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison's finest works.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

“A quilt of family intimacy narrated by disparate voices. . . Harrison deftly shows the intimate details of a family facing the death of a loved one.. . .
Returning to Earth
is a beautifully written account of one man's passing and the effect on his multifaceted and multicultural family.”

—
Rocky Mountain News

“Vintage Harrison. . . The themes are as stark and inevitable as life itself: love, loss, death, guilt, redemption.. . . More like Faulkner than Hemingway in the telling. . . It is told in a prose so pure and scraped of excess that a paragraph can seem like a novel, a sentence a poem.. . . Breathtaking.”

—
The Grand Rapids Press

“[Harrison's] books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau's in the particulars of American place—its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns. Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison's forty years of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet. . .. A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“[Jim Harrison] has become a major figure in American literature, and nowhere are the reasons for that more clear than in his newest novel,
Returning to Earth
.. . . A prodigious achievement. It is both familiar and strange, rooted and rootless, endlessly dark and occasionally hilarious. It is above all human: raucous, literary, bawdy, goofy, and wise. It is heartbreakingly sad. And it registers the redemption of love, the power of the word to speak the truth, the peace that comes to those who live even when it is time to die.”

—
The San Diego Union Tribune

“Harrison's meticulous attention to the sensualities of life are still present in the beautifully lucid writing.. . .
Returning to Earth
is a poignant and powerful reflection of how all stories become one in the end, and it is a story told with bare-bone honesty and simple eloquence.”

—
Livingston Weekly

“Poses the big, searching questions about life and death that we've come to expect from this robust, vibrant author. . . He posits an intriguingly receptive attitude toward mortality in a society that largely finds death aberrant and unfathomable.. . . Harrison is one of few American writers equally at home writing about backwoods, mixed-race construction workers, and wealthy university intellectuals. . . [the] saga bears strong traces of Southern classics by William Faulkner and Walker Percy.”

—
The Boston Globe

“[Harrison is] one of America's most life-affirming writers. . . with a vision of life as a stormy and hardscrabble affair.. . . Recalls Williams Faulkner and Louise Erdrich—two writers who stand behind Harrison's writing, not to say his vision of reality.. . . What drives these knotted stories forward is Jim Harrison's acute sense of abundance: the abundance of talk—these folks are such talkers—of food, of spirit, of drink, and of life itself.”

—
The Buffalo News

“Harrison is one of the most remarkable writers on the planet. He is one of the few who can write a book about death and dying that is at once dignified, uplifting, and hilarious.. . . Redemption and courage flow from Harrison's heart to ours. We're lucky to have him. He's a genuine treasure.”

—
The Wichita Eagle

“For more than four decades his sinewy prose and poetry have been exhorting us—without timidity—to embrace life in all its sensuality. Now, with his splendid new novel, [Harrison] delivers a treatise on love, loss, and longing.”

—
Santa Fe New Mexican

“[Jim Harrison's] fiction is rooted in primitive feelings of earthy connectedness and the mystical bonds shared by human beings and nature, or that could be shared were not our innocence corrupted by greed and unholy aspiration.”

—
The Commercial Appeal

“At the center of the novel, the irreducible conundrum: what matters after life is stripped away? That is the question. It is not an easy question and it is the question we most often look away from, in a culture swept up in the distractions of the everyday. Be kind, Harrison might say by way of a sideways answer. Be true and be kind.”

—
Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

JIM HARRISON

Copyright © 2007 by Jim Harrison

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, Jim, 1937–
Returning to Earth / Jim Harrison,
p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-8021-4331-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4331-0

1. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Patients—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction.
3. Indians—Mixed descent—Fiction. 4. Upper Peninsula (Mich.)—Fiction.
5. Family—Fiction. 6. Memory—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A67R4 2007
813'.54—dc22           2006050802

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

07 08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

to Peter Lewis

Also by Jim Harrison

FICTION

Wolf
A Good Day to Die

Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva

The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn't Die

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin and Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & Other Poems

After Ikky
Å«
& Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek
(with Ted Kooser)
Saving Daylight

ESSAYS
Just Before Dark
The Raw and the Cooked

MEMOIR
Off to the Side

I'm laying here talking to Cynthia because that's about all I can do with my infirmity. We're living in Cynthia's old house in Marquette in order to be close to the doctors. Her brother David usually lives here but he's off taking a look at different parts of the world but mostly Mexico. Cynthia and I ran away in our teens and got married and now she's back where she started. My dad, Clarence, did the yard work for her family for about thirty years. My bed is in her father's den because it's too hard for me to get upstairs. One wall of the den is full of books with a moving ladder to get to the top shelves. Cynthia says her brother lives inside these books and never really got out. I'm forty-five and it seems I'm to leave the earth early but these things happen to people.

I don't have the right language to keep up with my thinking or my memory or all of my emotions over being sick so I'm speaking this to Cynthia [I'm interfering as little
as possible. Cynthia] because she wants our two children to know something about the history of their father's family.

Starting a long time ago there have been three Clarences but when they got to me my father thought there hadn't been all that much luck in the name so they called me Donald in honor of a young friend of his who died in a mining accident over near Ishpeming. The first Clarence, named after a Jesuit priest who was a missionary to Indians out in Minnesota, waited until he was fifty to father children because he wasn't too sure about the world. He had tried to come east in 1871 because his mother had told him about the great forests of the Upper Peninsula. Some of her family had moved west to Minnesota from the U.P. because the white men were moving in for the copper up in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Her people were Chippewa (Anishinabe) but she slept with an immigrant who had come over to the Pipestone area of southwest Minnesota. This man was from the country of Iceland and a bunch of them had come over to farm that real good soil down that way. It was hard on Indians then because the Sioux had killed a bunch of farmers near New Ulm and the settlers were leery of any kind of Indian. So the first Clarence's mother died when he was about twelve and he had never met his father in person. He was real big for his age and he ran off and worked for a farmer near Morris for a year but they made him sleep in the root cellar beneath their pump shed. He was a good worker and they didn't want him to get away. They kept him locked down there a whole winter week for stealing a pie. Who is to say how angry a young man would get trapped in a root cellar for a week? By and by he got loose and walked down
to Taunton near Minneota and found his father, whose name he had memorized, a farmer named Lagerquist. It was a Saturday morning when farmers come to town but the man was with a wife and two kids so that young Clarence wasn't sure what to do. The story goes that the man came up to him and said, “What do you want, son?” Clarence was real glad the man recognized him. So Clarence said, “I'd like a horse to ride to Michigan if you can spare one?” The man got him a horse but it was a draft horse so it was slow going. That's how the first Clarence started out for Michigan. It's hard to think of a thirteen-year-old doing such a thing nowadays.