Sitting Still Long Enough
A conversation of memories with Joyce Harrington Bahle about the writer Jim Harrison. Compiled by Joseph Beyer for The Boardman Review — the creative culture and outdoor lifestyle journal of Northern Michigan.
It was always one or the other.
So this year it was dogs.
It was the eve of the fourth anniversary of Jim’s death, and it continued a tradition of feeling his presence right around this time. “After I lost my last lab, I was hesitant to get another. My kids were gone, I was divorced, and travel was in my heart. I could hear Jim talking to me. He was always wanting to buy me a puppy, and I had his insistence again in my head. No Jim, please no!”
Her tone is always energized, zippy and happy, sometimes a sharp laugh and an “Aye-Know” if you say something true. Sometimes too just a quiet beat to think. And of course she mentions Jim often. No surprise there, Joyce was a lifelong friend and colleague of the writer Jim Harrison, and now trustee of his works and legacy.
She first met Harrison in the mid 1970’s while waitressing at The Bluebird Tavern in downtown Leland, where she says “artists, locals, and partiers bonded.” After a teaching job ended, she was footloose again in ’79 when she met Harrison in his granary writing studio on the author’s Leelanau County farm. Here they made a handshake deal. He would write, and Joyce would take care of the life that allowed him to do so. She went on to be his literary and business manager for the next 37 years, and one of he and his wife Linda’s closest friends and confidantes.
“Another year passes and this pandemic hits, my mind and fingers begin to wander about: shelter dog, purebred, puppy. Lots of pros and cons swirling, but one night in vivid memory mode I thought — maybe Jim was right. I laid in bed restless on March 25th, and then finally got up, looked up lab kennels in northern Michigan and Sutton Labrador Retrievers popped up in East Jordan almost two hours away,” she remembered.
“I emailed them a detailed description about my past dogs, Jim and Linda’s dogs (that I loved like my own), explained I was retiring and had 40 acres of land available right out my front door. I was sure Jim was pulling strings from where part of his essence resided in the dark night sky of dog stars.”
Sirius the Dog Star hangs prominently low in the Southwest sky, the brightest of all in the Canis Major constellation. Joyce could see it shining the night before she woke on Mothers Day 2020, the day she drove to pick up her new three-year-old fox-red Labrador, whom she’d never met. The dog’s given name was Byrd.
Beloved by her previous owners, even though they were never able to successfully breed her as planned, Sutton Labradors entrusted Joyce with the “best dog they’ve ever had” and hoped she would find, what they called, her second life.
She shared these emails with me, starting with the late night initiation and ending with the brokerage of picking up Byrd. In them Joyce keeps insisting she’d be better with a grown dog, not puppy raising. She relays memories of her beloved previous lab, about her abundance of space she says “come see!” and then offers to foster or to help with food donations. Joyce ends one note with the sentence, “Dog love heals most things.”
When I asked Joyce if she’d be willing to talk for The Boardman Review, she graciously said yes. But as we tried to connect for an interview, things had become complicated quickly in her life — Byrd was pregnant.
Nothing could have been more unexpected. Not only because the previous breeders, despite all knowledge and resources, were never successful — but also because Byrd mated just days away from being spayed, an act only delayed by an emergency surgery at the animal hospital. Joyce has done the math carefully and still can’t believe it.
She was preoccupied. Doing her best to explain this surreal turn of events to me, driving back and forth from the vet, holding vigil for Byrd, anxiously and obviously trying to keep up with the unknowns and communicating with a posse of concerned folks. We had rescheduled several times and I had almost given up hope of connecting, but then her update on March 25th arrived. One year exactly from that night hearing Harrison’s voice:
“Pups born today. Still waiting on last one.
Will come up for air tomorrow.”
Joyce and her friend Emmy were vigilant doulas but Byrd’s labor had been long and complicated: one born at the clinic, one in the backseat of Joyce’s Subaru Crosstrek on the way home, and one in the whelping box. They had expected another.
After five hours waiting and a final emergency trip to the vet, there was a last twist to process — earlier ultrasounds and a follow-up x-ray had been mistaken. There were just three. All healthy, all here in this world. Everyone happy tired.
Then March 27th, as I’m filing this story, another reply to my questions arrives along with a post-script: “sorry so messy, pups adorable!” And she was gone again.
Other times, it was birds.
I asked when it started — this sensation of birds communicating with a part of her soul, our souls, that we ourselves don’t even seem to understand? “I guess I always loved them. My father’s favorite was the red male cardinal. He passed before my kids were born. One of our long running childhood games was when we saw the regal red bird, I’d say ‘there’s your Grandpa watching over us.’ To this day, whenever we see the cardinal, we all point out he’s there. It’s a thread from me to him and them.”
As the second youngest in a family of seven siblings, Joyce was the designated bird bath scrubber — a strong enough memory to pop up when I asked her about the beginnings.
Now at age 67, her home sits on a beautiful hilltop and one of the highest points in Leelanau County. And over these years, she’s been able to hone her bird watching, adding more and more sophisticated feeders on the porch and the dedication to keeping them full. “The birds love this area — it’s like a safe skyway — trees just right for them to fly in and out to my feeders and the surrounding canopies.” She says simply, nature surrounds her.
McGough’s Farm and Feed still sits in the center of downtown Traverse City where it’s been operating continuously since 1890 and changed very little. It’s a birder’s favorite stop. During one call, Joyce was on her way there again. She’s a regular. Suet, no mess mix, sunflower chips, oranges, thistle seed, millet and peanuts. All du jour of the seasons. In her words, she was getting serious.
Chickadees, juncos, Rose-breasted grosbeaks, Gold and House finches, Mourning doves. Tufted titmouse, Ruby-throated hummingbirds, Nuthatches, Baltimore orioles, and Snowy, Barred and Eastern Screech owls.
And then the bald eagles soaring up above, the hawks catching air currents from Lake Michigan in the distance. When she built in 1990, she told me her friend Cris Telgard declared “You’re overlooking the ‘county-nental’ divide from up here!”
And every kind of woodpecker: Red bellied, Downy, Hairy, Northern Flicker, and the king of them all — the Pileated.
She shared another photo by email of the feeder outside her window, “I have a mating pair of Pileated and they gifted me a fledgling, so lots of viewing and a connection to their family. The male literally talks to me, reminding me if the suet is low. When my daughter came to visit, she gave me the ‘really-mom?’ eye roll, and then one day admitted simply: I think they talk to you too.”
Joyce applied for Certified Bird Habitat status and got it from Omena’s “Saving Birds Through Habitat” organization. Her homestead became an official haven. She’s deservedly proud and sends photos of the signs and guides she’s put up.
In 2019, another new project — she remodeled her basement into an Airbnb rental and named it The Birdhouse of Suttons Bay. Possibly from her habit of collecting them, but mainly as a tribute to a very special one made together with her two young children.
Andrew was 9, and Anna 5 at the time, and they had collected stones off Leland beach. She remembered, “It was a crisp November day but the sun was beaming on the shallow shore and made these rocks just jump out at us. The bucket filled and then back home to dry. The kids and I made a stone birdhouse to give their grandparents for Christmas. When Leila and Owen passed, it came back to me.”
Later I ask where she thinks Harrison’s love of birds came from and she declares it a fact, “Jim’s mother Norma had her life-list of bird sightings, and she traveled near and far across the country to seek them out. His brother David — and wife Cindy — carry out the tradition by searching for elusives in remote places. It was natural that Jim and Linda were birders too.”
He once wrote, “Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.”
Joyce confirmed that every home the Harrison’s lived in was a haven for feeders and birds, “but let’s just say that Linda did the work, while Jim was an avid watcher of the yards, and on his frequent long walks.”
Splitting time between writing holes and lives he created on a farm in Leelanau County, and a cabin in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, another house in Livingston, Montana and a tiny poco rancho in Southern Arizona — everywhere they went, the seasons and migrations and birds were different. Joyce often traveled to them, when and where she was needed.
One of Harrison’s getaways was a modest casita outside Patagonia, an eccentric little village just miles from the Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert where he spent time writing, escaping and sometimes frequenting the Wagon Wheel Saloon. He had a special spot outside where he could smoke, and where I myself tried and failed multiple times to meet him years ago.
Along AZ Route 82, a few short miles from his place and down a bumpy dirt road, you’ll find one of the strangest and most famous spots in the world to watch hummingbirds. Wally and Marion Paton had been inviting birders into their small backyard since 1973, finally setting out tents, chairs, bird books, and a chalkboard for guests to record sightings. Now, the Tucson Audubon Society runs the Paton Sanctuary as a nature preserve in the middle of this dusty border town.
Harrison would have had the same 213 species buzzing around his own mesquite and palo verde trees, dipping in and out of his view from the desk where he was sitting when he died in 2016.
Joyce’s most recent birding book, the newly expanded Sibley, had been a gift from him before he left.
Having worked for so long and so diligently alongside each other, it was only after he was gone that Joyce found the pockets of real time in her life that allowed her new passions, and the gift to reflect and remember windy things — those feelings and voices from the past that appear unexpectedly but inevitably back in our lives, something we’re never in control of, but we must sometimes be forced to allow.
She revealed to the Glen Arbor Sun that on her last visit to Arizona, sitting around the fire, Jim had said to her “I don’t worry one bit about you when I’m gone.” She told him that was unfair, and that she would carry the loss of him with her forever. She also predicted she’d likely have no time to mourn, since it would be her job to keep it all together, what he would leave behind.
She sends photos today attached with no description.
They are from her home, and they show metal nichos on the wall — tiny Mexican shrines to patron saints or loved ones, a tradition dating back to Spanish Colonialism.
I learned the one on top was for Linda, who died first. The one on the bottom is for Jim who left just five months and a few days after her. They had been married over 50 years. Each holds small trinkets of memories from places Joyce hand-collected for them: stones, snakeskin, seed pods, dried sage from Linda’s garden, a key to the casita, twigs, and in both — feathers.
In our last exchange, she shares that one of Jim’s favorite spots to ruminate in Leelanau was to walk to a swale on his property where there was a large boulder he climbed onto. He told her that sometimes a trusting bird would land and sit on his head or shoulder … if he sat still long enough.
I finish by asking if she has a favorite poem in mind at the end of our conversations. She quickly offered Birds Again, which Harrison wrote in 2006; an excerpt now stands out as I read it once more:
“… I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures, I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting in me …”
ABOUT THE STORY
I first met Joyce in 2020 during the start of the pandemic when I cold-called on her to be a part of a strange project combining live online birdwatching, readings of literature and ornithology, and musical interludes. We called it “Birds & Words” and I produced it as director of Michigan Legacy Art Park, an outdoor sculpture experience located in Benzie County and part of the Sleeping Bear Birding Trail. Collaborating again with Here:Say Storytelling, Rare Bird Brewpub, National Writers Series, and our friends at The Boardman Review, Joyce will be returning to read more of Jim’s work for our second edition of “Birds & Words” when the gang gets back together.
Back in January, with this event on my mind, I asked The Boardman Review if I could interview her about birds (a growing mutual interest), and over the course of many weeks, Joyce and I just talked.
Looking back at the fragments and bits I had collected, and thinking about the genuine emotional connection I felt listening to her talk about her friend, I suddenly realized we had been having an ongoing dialogue about grief. What happened to us together in discovering and processing this was collecting new memories, as she reminded me Jim would have called it. Our interaction was meaningful.
This piece was made up of responses and thoughts she sent me, along with texts and email excerpts, photos, and my notes from our calls. Some of them were direct answers to my questions, but many of her stories were unprompted. It represents a collaboration of trust, and I’m very grateful to her for sharing her experiences with me.
In our “final-final!” emails as we tried to finish the process, she attached a picture of an owl perched on the fence overlooking Harrison’s writing studio in Livingston, Montana. There had been a pair of them Jim and Linda knew well, but when Joyce returned to close down the estate after their deaths, she spent time there by herself and discovered four chicks, recently hatched, had joined them on the railing. Presumably and only to carry on into the future, composing poems about us.
Joyce Harrington Bahle plans to retire this year as the trustee of Harrison’s giant literary legacy, completing over four decades of service and continuing her dedication forward in new ways alongside Jim and Linda’s family, publishers, and friends. She lives and works in Suttons Bay and welcomes guests to her Airbnb, when available, to share in her private bird sanctuary.
Joseph Beyer is an idea agitator who relocated to Traverse City, Michigan after two decades in Los Angeles where he worked for Sundance Institute, The Redford Center and Warner Bros. Television among others, in a career of supporting storytellers and Arts and Culture organizations.
