Experience.

I like to think that I was a member of the French

Resistance though I was only three years old and lived on

a farm in Northern Michigan when Germany invaded

France, and unforgivable act but then the seams of

history burst with the unforgivable.  The mind itself is a

hoax that feeds on its own fanciful stories.  In Marseille

the Germans cut off my feet at the ankle and left me for

dead as they say, I cauterized my stumps on the coals of

a bonfire near the Vieux Port and took several weeks to

crawl over the hills past Cassis to Bandol.  The German

soldiers ignored me crawling along with my knees

wrapped in burlap.  In Bandol I was recognized as the

Mapman by a vintner and I was smuggled back to

Marseille under the straw of a cartload of pigs.  Pig shit

repels prying noses.  I was hidden behind a false wall in

the basement of a bakery from which I helped direct the

routes of passage through the countryside of the

Resistance from my candlelit table spread with the maps

of war.  Intensely detailed maps of southern France were

my wall paper and improbably intimate to me.  We lost

thousands of brave men but saved thousands or so they

said.  Sandrine who worked at the bakery sent down

nude photos of herself and I thought of these photos

as maps of the mysteries of women.  I grew too fat on all the

bread sent down to me with summer vegetables.  I began

to grow thin in November when a Nazi colonel set up a

desk in the bakery to avoid the bitterness of the Mistral

and the employees had to be careful about the use of the

dumbwaiter.  Once in the middle of the night someone

courageous sent down a case of simple red wine which I

drank in two days to experience the glories and ample

delusions of drunkenness.  I even tried to dance to

silence on my healed stumps, an unsuccessful venture.  

The logical question anyone might ask is how an
American could be of any use to the Resistance?

Jim Harrison