Jim Harrison’s The Road Home, first published in 1998, is one of those books you want everyone to read. I first encountered Harrison, who died in 2016, in a story entitled The Woman Lit by Fireflies, an amazing piece of feminist literature by an author who really doesn’t fit the profile.
In The Road Home the narrator, a half-Lakota, half-white ranch kid, is accepted at an art school in Chicago. I think it was 1903 and the noise of Chicago was quite maddening for one used to the silence of the prairie where you could hear the heart of your horse over its breathing, a far-off meadowlark, a cow lowing in the creekbed a mile away, even a delicate breeze approaching across the sea of grass.
How I wish I could write like that. My friend Marge has family in the southern Arizona town of Patagonia, where Harrison lived out the last years of his life. I thought of visiting the town just hoping for a chance to talk to him for maybe 15 minutes. I wish I had.
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