An Extraordinary Vacancy - Jim Harrison, 1937-2016

Photo: Robert DeMott

Jim Harrison, one of my favorite writers, passed away on March 26, 2016 at his modest casita near Patagonia, Arizona where he had spent his winters in more recent years. The rest of the time he resided in Paradise Valley, in the shadows of the grand Absaroka Mountains, near Livingston, Montana. I just want to take a few minutes this morning to mark this sad fourth anniversary of his passing at age 78.

Thomas McGuane, perhaps Harrison’s oldest living friend at the time of his death, remarked on his passing in The New Yorker, noting that Harrison died at his writing desk. It seems to me entirely appropriate; that he would have wanted it that way. McGuane added that Harrison’s death "leaves an extraordinary vacancy" for family, friends, and admirers who never had the pleasure to meet and know him. I was one of those who felt cast adrift. I still do. 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 interaction with the natural world.

I have been rereading Harrison’s last poems published by Copper Canyon Press in Dead Man’s Float shortly before his death, as well as his last collection of novellas, The Ancient Minstrel. Both of these volumes 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 earthly twilight. I took perhaps a small degree of comfort at the time in the fact that he was no longer suffering the various pains and infirmities that plagued him late in life. Nor would he be burdened by the loneliness he endured after the death of Linda, his beloved wife of 55 years the previous October. After a long and productive life, perhaps the fire in his heart just flickered and finally went out.

Once again I close my eyes and I try to imagine a young boy casting an alder fly into a quiet pool under a distant cutbank on the Pere Marquette River 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 would one day be quietly and thoughtfully memorialized in the words Jim Harrison as if etched into pages of his own immortality.