He began to think that if he just got away from people on this boat and had enough time it would come to him, but it hadn’t worked out as well as he’d hoped. You just get other kinds of interruptions. A storm comes up and you worry about the anchor. Or another yacht pulls up and they come over and want to socialize. Or there’s a drunken party down on the dock… on and on…
He got up, went over to the pilot berth, got some more charcoal briquets and put them on the coal stove. It was getting nice and warm now.
He picked up one of the trays and looked at it. The front of it showed rust through the paint. You couldn’t keep anything of steel from rusting on a boat, even stainless, and these boxes were ordinary mild-steel sheet metal. He would have to make some new ones out of marine plywood and glue when he had the time. Maybe when he got South.
This tray was the oldest one. It had slips he hadn’t looked at for more than a year now.
He brought it over to the table with him.
The first topic, at the very front of the tray, was DUSENBERRY. He looked at it nostalgically. At one time he had thought DUSENBERRY was going to be at the center of the whole book.
After a while he took a blank pad from the back of the tray and wrote on the top slip, PROGRAM, and then under it, Hang up everything until Lila gone. Then he tore the slip off the note pad and put the slip in the front of the PROGRAM pile and put the note pad in the back of the tray. It was important, he’d found, to write a PROGRAM slip for what you are currently doing. It seems unnecessary at the time you are writing it but later when interruptions have interrupted interruptions which have interrupted interruptions you’re glad you did it.
The GRIT slips had been saying for months that DUSENBERRY had to go but he never seemed to be able to get rid of it. It just stayed there for what seemed to be sentimental reasons. Now it had been shoved into lesser and lesser importance by incoming slips and was just hanging on, teetering on the edge of the JUNK pile.
He took the whole DUSENBERRY topic section out. The slips were getting brown around the edges and the ink was turning brown too, on the first slip.
It said: Verne Dusenberry, Assoc. Prof., English Dept., Montana State College. Died, brain tumor, 1966, Calgary, Alberta.
He’d made the slip, probably, so he’d remember the year.
3
Nineteen-sixty-six. My God, how the years had sped up.
He wondered what Dusenberry’d be like now if he’d lived. Not much, maybe. There were signs before he died that he was going downhill, that he’d been at the peak of his powers at about the time Phædrus knew him in Bozeman, Montana, where they both were members of the English department.
Dusenberry was born in Bozeman and had graduated from the college there, but after twenty-three years on the faculty his assignment was just three sections of freshman composition; no literature courses, no advanced composition courses of any kind. Academically he had long before been placed on the TOUGH pile of scholars whom the department would just as soon have gotten rid of. Tenure was all that saved him from the JUNK pile. He had little to do with the rest of the department socially. Other members seemed to be in various degrees of alienation from him.
This seemed odd to Phædrus because in his own conversations with him Dusenberry was not at all unsociable. He sometimes looked unsociable with his arched eyebrows and downturned mouth, but when Phædrus had gotten to know him, Dusenberry was actually gabby in a high-spirited, gleeful, maiden-auntish sort of way. It was a slightly gay style; tart, and somewhat backbiting; and at first Phædrus thought this was why they were so down on him. Montanans in those days were supposed to look and act like Marlboro ads, but in time Phædrus saw that wasn’t what caused the alienation. It was just Dusenberry’s general overall eccentricity. Over the years small eccentric differences in a small college department can grow into big differences, and Dusenberry’s differences were not so small. The biggest difference was revealed in a line Phædrus heard a number of times, a disdainfuclass="underline" Oh, yes, Dusenberry… Dusenberry and his Indians.
When Dusenberry spoke of other faculties it was with equal disdain: Oh yes, the English department. But he seldom spoke of them at all. The only subject he spoke about with any sincere enthusiasm was Indians, and particularly the Rocky Boy Indians, the Chippewa-Cree on the Canadian border about whom he was writing his Ph.D. thesis in anthropology. He let it be known that except for the Indians he had befriended for twenty-one of his twenty-three years as a teacher he regarded all these years as a waste of his life.
He was the advisor for all the Indian students at the college and had held this post for as long as anyone could remember. The students were a connecting link. He’d made a point to know their families and visit them and use this as an entry point into their lives. He spent all the weekend and vacation time he could on the reservations, participating in their ceremonies, running errands for them, driving their kids to the hospital when they were sick, speaking to state officials when they got in trouble, and beyond that, completely losing himself into the ways and personalities and secrets and mysteries of these people he loved a hundred times better than his own.
Within a few years when his degree was completed he would be leaving English teaching forever and teaching anthropology instead. One would guess that this would be a happy solution for him, but from what Phædrus heard it was already apparent that it would not be. He was not only an eccentric in the field of English he was an eccentric in anthropology as well.
The main part of his eccentricity seemed to be his refusal to accept objectivity as an anthropological criterion. He didn’t think objectivity had any place in the proper conduct of anthropological study.
This is like saying the Pope has no place in the Catholic Church. In American anthropology that is the worst possible apostasy and Dusenberry was quickly informed of it. Of all the American universities he had applied to for Ph.D. study, every one had turned him down. But rather than change his beliefs he had gone around the whole American university system to Prof. Åke Hultkranz in Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university, and was about to receive his Ph.D. there. Whenever Dusenberry talked about this, a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile would come over his face. An American taking a Ph.D. in Sweden on the Anthropology of American Indians? It was ludicrous!
The trouble with the objective approach, Dusenberry said, is that you don’t learn much that way… The only way to find out about Indians is to care for them and win their love and respect… then they’ll do almost anything for you… But if you don’t do that… He would shake his head and his thoughts would go trailing off.
I’ve seen these "objective" workers come on the reservations, he said, and get absolutely nowhere…
There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re "objective" you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.