Vigor.

You begin with simple truths in food: for instance, peeling sweetbreads is not really exercise. When you're trimming a two-pound porterhouse, don't make those false, hyperkinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens. Either trim it or skip trimming. Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor. Chances are you will come up with something Latin—I mean food that is quite different from our own in areas of fruit growth, food from a place where garlic and flowers abound, where there are blue water and hot sun. At the bottom of dampish arroyos are giant butterflies and moths, extravagantly plumed birds that feed on the remains of lightning and sunbeams, the unique maggots that feed only on the spleens of road kill. Farther up the cliffs, where the cacti are sparser, rattlers sun themselves. At first you are uncomfortable, then disarmed by the way the snakes contract over hot coals. 

Last March I was hiking out of the Seri Indian country, south of Caborca along the Sea of Cortés, with Douglas Peacock, the fabled grizzly-bear expert. We were both out of sorts: he, because he can't seem to make a living; I, because my sinus pain was so extreme that I had to bash my head against the car door and specific boulders we passed. Luckily, we were able to dig a full bushel of clams at a secret estuary and make a hearty chowder with a pound of chilies and garlic, which started me on the road to recovery. Broiled tripe from an unborn calf helped, as did giant Guaymas shrimp. After this infusion of health I was able to dance five hours with a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball. She was, in fact, shaped rather like me. In the morning my clothes were crisp from exertion; my head, bell clear. The world seemed new again—like a warm rain after a movie.

One late-November night, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, I was camping out with two old men who I was reasonably sure were witches, although kind witches. I was researching a film on the life of Edward Curtis and that morning had received word that the studio had fired me again. But that night there was a big moon through the intermittent snow, and above the fire a posole was cooking, with its dark freight of several different chiles, a head of garlic, sun-dried hominy, and the neck, ribs, and shanks of a young goat. After eating the posole, we hiked in the moonlight, and one of the old men showed me his raven and coyote imitations, jumping in bounds the length of which would have shamed Carl Lewis.

Jim Harrison, from "Meals of Peace and Restoration"