Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“Doc, I don’t feel so good myself.”

“You’ve eaten too much.”

“I’m low-spirited.”

“You’ll have to work on that.”

This didn’t satisfy Dale, and it was time to check on Gladys, who was awake again, but barely. I leaned very close to her face so that she could see me. I thought she looked quite serene; she muttered something unintelligible about going to White Bird and closed her eyes. Something told me that they wouldn’t open again and she wouldn’t again speak. Dale slept in the bunkhouse and I slept on the sofa in the front room. I got up, washed my face at the kitchen sink with cold water, went into Gladys’s room and confirmed her death. She hadn’t moved since I’d seen her last, but whatever it was, was gone.

She left Dale the ranch, and in time Dale saw to converting it into real estate.

I READ A COMIC BOOK VERSION of Don Quixote when I was a boy, and then an abridged one as a young man, and finally I read it entirely in later years, and more than once. It was now part of my general memory, and some of its ideas emerged unexpectedly, especially when I was oppressed by the feeling that I was living my life under an evil star and that everything in life was circular — the seasons and so on — except human life, which hastened in a straight line to the end and, moreover, without hope of renewal. The death of Gladys, which I had attended with such sangfroid, had produced a delayed reaction that, as best I can tell, had to do with my final severance from the world of my childhood. I thought I had dealt with this long ago, but I must not have because I was very downcast and regarded my life, or anyone else’s, as an adventure dubious in the extreme. The part of Cervantes’s disquisition which had once given me hope I had memorized: “Many who have lacked the light of faith, being guided solely by the illumination that nature affords them, have yet attained to a comprehension of the swiftness and instability of this present existence and the eternal duration of the one we hope for.” As to this, Sancho Panza, who his master said feared lizards more than God, had the last word. To Sancho, death was a lady with no flesh on her bones; she was powerful but not squeamish and devoured every single thing that came her way. She on no account took a siesta and was “as hungry as a dog that never has its fill.” I did feel a truth in the idea that just beneath our follies and day-to-day distractions a terrible grinding mechanism was at work and had a full tank of gas. This was not necessarily a bad thing and gave gravity to our madness and ignorance, our persiflage, our deviousness and clamor for renown. In the news today, placentas were being found in urban sewage. I don’t know if the Trade Center bombing just pushed this sort of thing to the surface, but since then we seemed to have lost a layer of skin. And such things as fate, which I had long since viewed as discredited, seemed to have come to life all over again.

Also, I’d say things lacked a certain sparkle. It was Lewis and Clark this and Lewis and Clark that; traveling dinosaur shows and children’s theater staged by aging potheads; ranchers scheming for a buyout and watching the inbound flights from either coast; and the political races for the state legislature in Helena: one notch above a greased-pig contest. Furthermore, I was losing my capacity to go along and get along with my more obstreperous patients. One fellow, a tousle-headed middle-aged wheat farmer from a small valley to the north, suffered, it seemed to me, from unreasonable pride in his origins, which he viewed with outlandish romanticism. While I took his blood pressure and felt his thyroid, which seemed a bit enlarged, he proudly went on about how suspicious the people in his valley were of anyone they hadn’t known for three generations. I agreed that people were very backward in his parts. With much animation, he explained that they had accustomed themselves to subsisting on what little the land and weather yielded. I explained that ignorance and shiftlessness seldom provided reasonable comforts. When he disclosed that his great-grandparents were all born in that same valley, I offered my most heartfelt sympathy. Of course, he went away mad and I doubt I’ll see him again. A doctor who views his patients as clay pigeons has seen better days. I’d by now had many come to me needing a kick in the ass more than any other treatment. You can’t urge them to change their habits or exercise; they just want to take something. Well, anyone could see where that was headed.

Some of my sickest patients have been those indifferent to mortal health issues. One woman thought she would go to outer space when she died and rarely followed my advice, and that reluctantly, because she feared landing on some strange planet only to be called “earthling” by the locals and never really being accepted. One old fellow told me, “It’s been a wonderful life. I wish I understood it.” Another had all sorts of intestinal problems from drinking rainwater out of a barrel. At my urging he drilled a well but complained he “didn’t get enough water to run a washing machine.” I lost a twenty-five-year-old girl to suicide when all my pharmaceutical remedies had failed; her husband had “moved to Nashville to write cheatin’ songs.” Some of the problems in a region where energy development and resource extraction are king came from the battered values of small towns sitting in country desecrated in the search for platinum or gas or coal, whatever you can dig out, dam up, chop down, or sell: the wild world of philistine commercialism had its price even in places like mine. I didn’t always think in these terms, but stretched out on my office couch, listening to NPR and languidly guessing at a piano puzzler, I was inclined to be gloomy. If I bothered changing stations, it was On-Air Bliss for the Demented. It beat flailing. I put on a Pablo Casals suite for unaccompanied cello and felt way better. I promised myself to leave well enough alone with the single nurses, even acknowledging that one’s reputation as an accomplished wencher was at stake. Success in these matters resulted in the circulation of pheromones, which took the guesswork out of venery. I was just trying to give a sense of my daydreams, all of which were unrealistic, fanciful, or ironic.

I’ve said all I can stand about the rug-shampoo years. The lesson I came away with was both to strive and to rebel against the grim and meager standards that had made my home a pleasant place for average people. First, I became a philandering doctor on an Indian reservation — the latter serving a thin social conscience obviated by my many flutters with Indian women: I skipped the sweat lodge but ate the peyote and wandered around the sagebrush having visions. An enduring effect of those days is that women still don’t look quite right to me if they’re not Indians. I’m trying to get over that, as every town contains a few pleasant whites.

The Indian Health Service proved to be accelerated training in emergency medical care. We dealt with the results of so many car wrecks that we began to think of ourselves as a branch of the automotive industry. At any rate, we rebuilt numerous motorists, returning them to the road, and some we lost. I tried to advise the tribal council on the prospects for a safer life on the reservation, but in reality I was just one more witness to the desolation of Indian existence. Years later, when shopping for a laptop computer in Portland, Oregon, I met an Argentine trauma surgeon who told me that the torturers in the basement of his hospital in Buenos Aires would send their victims up the elevator to the surgery interns on the fourth floor. I guess he’d had more practice than I and he was pretty aggressive about his deluxe training. He lived in Portland, supported azaleas in city planning, drove a Porsche, and was passionate about his Mac. Portland is a real outdoors town, and since he focused on sports medicine, it had all worked out for him. I wonder if he felt better about those dark hours in Buenos Aires each time he got another skier back on the hill.