The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand by Harrison Jim

Author:Harrison, Jim [Harrison, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

COMING TO OUR SENSES

I took a very long fall that had apparently been waiting for me way up Hog Canyon. The ridgeline looked good for Mearns quail, and I scrambled up in defiance of gravity and good sense, forgetting that the backcountry is always trying to get you to self-destruct. A loose rock perched on another rock, no doubt for eons, was my downfall; I slipped, whirled, spun, slid, then plummeted, ending up on a pile of sharp rocks, deep within which the dread Mojave rattlers hibernated, perking up their little snake ears to the commotion, perhaps thinking that a stray ungulate wired on locoweed had met its doom.

My peerless guide, John Haviland, came at a dead run as if to a funeral offering free lunch and booze. He stuttered in his shock, “Baba-what?-hurt-rammed-rocks,” a glyph for what was to become my new name—Baba Ram Rimrock.

So I lay there waiting for the wet spots, the warm emergent blood smelling of sheared copper. My bird dog leaped over my body without particular interest on her way to new cover. Quite suddenly I did a kip-up, a gymnastic procedure, landing on my feet. Strange to say, there was not the slightest of bruises beneath my torn clothes, a fact I attribute to my finishing the fourth draft of a screenplay about how a man became a wolf.

When John and I reached the nearest bar, I called my employer, Columbia, and they agreed to spot me to a DNA test in hopes of pinpointing the cause of recent disturbing body phenomena. Haviland, an old dog hand, aptly pointed out that he had had an English setter (male) survive a leap off a seventy-five-foot cliff, so my experience, though troubling, was scarcely unique.

Of course, everyone knows that old Goethe saw “such a price the gods exact for song, to become what we sing,” a rather sad note for the man writing an exhaustive study of fireplugs or rock singers. Just this morning, loping up a border canyon, I was disturbed by a peculiar odor that grew stronger with the miles. Near a seep trickling from beneath a mass of boulders I saw the large, feline tracks, and nearby, beneath a manzanita thicket, there was the spore of a mountain lion, the scent a mixture of pee and scorched fur, which brought me, finally, to my senses.

I’ve spoken of this to no one yet, and because of the lead date, by the time you read this column it will have gone one way or the other. I may be lost to the ages, but an aspect of this transmogrification is not to care about such trifles. My cohorts at PEN are welcome to split up the shreds of my immortality. The obvious downside of this condition—say, public toilets and that sort of thing—isn’t what it might seem as you have become more curious than judgmental. There was an embarrassing moment in a supermarket yesterday, the fabled Reay’s of Tucson, where with Peacock I was buying thirty pounds of protein for a barbecue.

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