Homesickness

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e have always been a nation of transients, especially the males. Earlier in our history we were intensely pred­atory transients, but now our movement is based on the need for livelihood or from divorce, irascible restlessness, sheer curios­ity or emotional hunger. I have noted that modern man at the crossroads tries to go in four direc­tions at once. Put simply, if things aren't working out, why not move? Surely there is a perfect place for me, or you, or not.

Perhaps the biggest geographi­cal problem in my life was success. I had no reason to expect it and I certainly wasn't ready for it. The French writer Albert Camus talked about terrible freedom, and tiiat's what I experienced. An animal in a cage on its release is unsure whether it wants to leave the cage. I tliink I was about 40 when I wrote a book of novellas called Legends of the Fall. All three of the novellas were imme­diately optioned by studios and two were made into movies. The sud­den money was a near disaster. Alter almost two decades of aver­aging 10 grand a year I was way up there beyond using U-IIaul trailers to move, living in low-cost rental houses and eating altogether too much macaroni and cheese made with budget cheddar, which I washed down with cheap wine.

Everyone has read about lot-teiy winners and the ubiquitously disastrous results. I came peril­ously close to that arena owing to a festering affection for the mixture of boo/.e and cocaine. It took me a number of years to fully under­stand what gradually saved me. Meanwhile the combinations of booze and coke were not turning out to be a miracle drug.

My salvation was a fairly remote cabin in Michigan's Upper Penin­sula set in a clearing on 50 acres bisected by a small river. When I impulsively bought it with an option from Ray Stark's Columbia Pictures, I didn't even go inside for a look. Outside was good enough. The cabin was to be my retreat from the modern world for more than 20 years. The thousands of square miles of remote country surrounding the cabin were nearly

totally empty of people but chock full of solace. I could fish for trout, an obsession since the age of seven, hunt for grouse and woodcock and take my bird dogs for walks twice a day, early morning and evening. I easily made the thoroughly false assumption that the cabin regen­erated me for my countless trips to Los Angeles and New York as a mediocre screenwriter in addition to work as a poet and novelist. I can be a slow study and it took me some time before I realized that the cabin prepared me for more of the cabin, and if anything my longing for it further crippled an already fatigued soul for the world of film­making, which is a collaborative craft, while I was built to fly solo as a poet and novelist.

Things went fairly well for a decade until the screenplay for Wolf starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer broke my spirit. I put too much of myself into the movie and I didn't care for the resulting production one little bit. I quit the business, and it slowly became apparent to me that it's not easy to give up two thirds of your income. We muddled along on the edge for several years and were finally saved financially by my growing popularity in France. My American publisher Grove/ Atlantic could afford to pay me far more than my value domes­tically because the French rights went high. This brought peace to our private valley until we moved to Montana, where we had been going for vacation and brown trout fishing eveiy year since 1968.

After a few years in Montana, I had to sell the cabin during a time of the usual money problems. Itiis caused a great deal of the pain and melancholy known as homesickness even though the sale was sensible. One summer and fall when I vis­ited the cabin three times for a total of three weeks, I spent a total of 18 days in the car on round-trips. After the cabin was lost, I would lis­ten to Gesaria Kvora sing "Sodade," the meaning of which is the char­acter of longing arrd despair- when a person or' place is forever' lost to us. I'd wander around with a seem­ingly permanent lump in my throat, quite unable to balance the pleasure of seeirrg (concluded, on page 16J)

HOMESICKNESS

(continued from page 131) my daughters and grandchildren with the anguish of the lost cabin.

Unfortunately novelists are more likely to understand the characters they create than they are themselves. My dreams were full of the bears and songbirds, the deer and wolves I had seen in the vicinity of the cabin that often seemed more fellow crea­tures than other people did to me. Oddly it was only when I found an area in Montana that seemed the spiritual equivalent of the Upper Peninsula—that is, remote, under­populated, possessed of a good bar and a wide valley with a good trout river running through it—that the pang of homesickness began to dissipate. On a hike I was watched by seven wild Rocky Mountain sheep. And the other day as I passed downriver in a skiff there was an infant moose and at least 50 yellow-rumped warblers. The only truly irritating part has been the 20 or so rattle­snakes I've had to shoot in our home yard in the past half dozen years, one of which killed my English setter Rose.

Ultimately, of course, our bodies are our only true home and their built-in obsoles­cence urges us on to find a good place to inhabit. As I said I was seven when I became obsessed with trout fishing and the woods with their secretive populations. It seems that to find any serenity we have to accom­modate our childhood, the time when our characters were formed. I fish at least 70 days a summer and in the winter, when we live near the Mexican border, I quail and dove hunt for at least 40 afternoons, but that is another story. In the rest of my time I write like a mother in order to afford to indulge my character, which seems unable to bear up under the burden of home­sickness. From these remote places I can make my uncomfortable forays into what is thought to be the real xontid, knowing that I have a home where I belong. I have often thought that I'm a bit less evolved than oth­ers. I love five days in New York or Chicago or Paris, but after that there is a specific panic, a desperation to sit in a thicket, or float on a river.

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