Jim Harrison, Untrammeled Renegade Genius

(That description from a poster announcing a reading of his work by Terry Tempest Williams, Colum McCann, Chris Dombrowski, and Chris La Tray)

Below, a poem I found on a wonderful Facebook page of reminiscences of fellow authors, friends, drinking buddies, gourmet cooks and other notables. I knew Jim a little through a mutual friend, Doug Peacock.

The River
By Jim Harrison

Yes, we'll gather by the river,
the beautiful, the beautiful river.
They say it runs by the throne of God.
This is where God invented fish.
Wherever, but then God's throne is as wide
as the universe. If you're attentive you'll
see the throne's borders in the stars. We're on this side
and when you get to the other side we don't know
what will happen if anything. If nothing happens
we won't know it, I said once. Is that cynical?
No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just
nothing. Then again maybe we'll be cast
at the speed of light through the universe
to God's throne. His hair is bounteous.
All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there.
The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back
so as not to frighten the little ones.
Even now they remember this divine habitat.
Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river?
We'll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.
- Jim Harrison, "The River" from Dead Man’s Float. Copper Canyon Press.

”You can’t be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.” ~Jim Harrison

Verlen Kruger, river runner, canoe adventurer extraordinaire.

A river is life.  A river attracts life.  Rivers are always changing -- the water is changing, the wildlife is changing.  It may be the same trees, but they will have grown.  Its movement, its life, its growth.  The rivers are the arteries of the earth.  They are what transfers life.  Wildlife is attracted.  People are attracted.  Civilizations settle on the waterways. 
        The river has many branches, many forks.  Life is like that.  There are many choices to be made travelling a river.  And man who travels the length of a river learns something about himself.  It is an experience everyone should have, at least once.  Go the full length--starting from where it is nothing but a trickle, or several trickles that get together and form a creek.  The creeks get together and become a river.  The river comes from somewhere and it goes somewhere.  Where does it go?  Can I go along?  I cannot look at a river without wondering where the water is going.  Ultimately it goes where all good waters go--to the great sea beyond.

       - Excerpted from a Heron Dance interview. Verlen paddled the entire west coast of Canada and the United States, after setting off from his backyard in East Lansing Michigan and paddling up to the Arctic Ocean. He then paddled up the Grand Canyon, with his paddling partner, the only two people known to have accomplished that. He also paddled down the Mississippi, across to Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico to the Amazon, and up the entire Amazon River. Among many other adventures, totalling over 100,000 miles.