Book: The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

The River Swimmer is the second novella in this book. 

So, though I usually love Jim Harrison, The River Swimmer was weird. Thad is a young man who loves to swim, like for instance from mid western Michigan around the bottom of the lake to Chicago. Thad and his family live on an island near the towns of Big Rapids, Ludington, Reed City and Grand Rapids...all in western Michigan, and having lived in most of these towns, the territory was familiar. My country, off and on throughout my life. 

Thad arrives in Chicago, "slipped on trousers and a shirt from his fanny pack" and heads off to meet a rich girl whose Daddy (John Scott) takes over his life for a few months. Very soon they all fly in John Scott's private plane to rural Michigan (first stopping at Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids to see Thad's father who is in the ICU there). Thad and the rich girl go to France. Thad has an accident and almost dies. When he swims, he communes with water babies and "his little friends clung to him as if they were glue" as he swims out into cold Lake Michigan one night. 

Many, many sentences and paragraphs are beautifully written even though the story is often not credible. The characters are fine enough as individuals but what they do seems made up without much thought to the denouement. Mr. Harrison rambles on, easily, with humor and sweetness and fantastical events because he can, because he has the gift of writing lovely prose while making his observations.

"At the pond, Thad quickly stepped out of his clothes and entered the pond fearing the water babies may  have escaped into the river but there they were, perhaps a dozen in all in the deepest part of the pond drifting in a shaft of sunlight and watching his slow approach." 

"He had grown up with the habit of thinking about the cost of everything, typical of people who have to turn the soil into dollars and cents, people who are free of the abstractions money can twirl in our sorry head. How many bushels of tomatoes or sweet corn will it take to get the house painted? We're better off doing it ourselves in spare time that doesn't actually exit. So you paint after dinner until summer dark." 

"Writers seem drawn to the grace and peace of fly-fishing. He liked one in particular, a poet and graduate student from Michigan State working in despair on his PhD because he needed money for a burgeoning family of three children...He drank too much from a flask and occasionally tumbled in the water but had a wading staff and was strong enough to right himself. "

And the water babies are always with him...

But, the first novella The Land of Unlikeness was fine. Of course, I am always rooted in reality as this writing is. (No water babies or swimming to Chicago.) 

Clive "art professor, an emissary, appraiser, and culture handyman" living in New York City comes to northern Michigan to spend a month with his aging Mother while his sister (her usual caretaker) is off to Europe. He is gentled and calmed by the change in the pace of his life. He reminesces; he begins painting again; he renews an acquaintance with his lady neighbor; he drinks coffee on the porch early every morning, while waiting on his mother who is birding a nearby thicket, until she whistles for him to retrieve her. How shall we live our later years? What eases the mind? How important is the instant availability of nearly everything? A barrage of artificial stimuli versus those of nature....

"Clive woke at dawn having lost his self-importance..."

"Now that he was on a roll he also made a big order from Zingerman's deli in Ann Arbor. He had nearly three weeks to go on his mother-sitting and couldn't envision enduring the purgatory of her bland cooking."

"He recalled cutting wood with his father. A neighbor a mile away had timbered his woodlot but there were many huge branches of beech, oak and maple, all marvelous firewood. They had worked through an afternoon that featured high winds and an ice storm in late October. Passage through the woods and fallen branches was tight so they had brought Jerry dragging the stone boat rather than the tractor and wagon...By the time that they had cut three cords their coats were crunchy with ice...They reached home just before dark, fed Jerry and rubbed him down, and finally in the house shedding their wet clothes before the hot bellied stove, his father had poured them each a couple of ounces of cheap whiskey to the disapproval of his mother. They ate pot roast and gravy with a mixture of whipped potatoes and rutabaga and boiled cabbage..."

"In order to maintain equilibrium in New York City and to be taken seriously you had to maintain appearances whether you were teaching, giving a lecture, or evaluating a collection."

Again, having lived in northern Michigan, I loved reading about the woods and lakes and rivers, and I also liked the story.

One small correction: Jim Harrison writes that Clive saw a "yellow bird" which his birdwatching mother tells him is a yellow-rumped warbler. But yellow-rumps are mostly black and white with only small yellow patches on their shoulders, rump and sometimes a tiny yellow spot on the top of the head.