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Here is the Spirit of the Lord
Norman Rockwell's "I Will Do My Best."
I walked the streets of Wagner feeling as if I’d been drawn into a vacuum; as if I had been shunted back in time to when I was a kid in Lookout Valley. Every time I tried to push myself to a better explanation, I always came back to the premise that it felt just like moving through a Norman Rockwell painting. With my past coming up so often, I couldn’t help but draw some parallels, one of which was the fact that southerners shared with Native Americans a penchant for telling tales. Grandpa Joe Packard was a prime example. He was a natural storyteller with an ease of delivery that made his humanitarian lessons he plucked from the mundane events of everyday life and infused with spiritual admonitions refreshing. He often presented the sermons when Father Hobbs was away—pacing in front of the congregation with his hands folded behind his back, his head slightly bowed in concentration.
His baggy, threadbare pants—about a size too large for his frail frame—were cinched to his waist with a disintegrating leather belt. The frayed collar of his shirt, only partially closed under a haphazardly knotted tie, encircled a thin neck the color of cinnamon. He was missing more teeth than he had retained so his smile puckered his swarthy face when he was amused, lending him the appearance of a wizened old coot with a tender core. His habit of removing his badly smudged glasses to wipe his brow with an oversized handkerchief created a series of small silences throughout the service. Though he wasn't doing this for the dramatic effect, a certain tension built as he slicked back the few sprigs of gray hair clinging to the top of his head, replaced the dark rimmed glasses and jammed his hanky back into his pants pocket, leaving the pointed end of one corner trailing down the leg of his trousers.
One of my favorite sermons recounted a man's visit to his home. The fable opened with the visitor saying he'd heard that two of Grandpa Joe's three horses were for sale. They talked briefly about care and feeding; and then the man, whom Grandpa Packard called a fine Christian fellow, left. The next morning when Grandpa Joe awakened, the two horses were missing, leaving his lone saddle horse standing in the enclosure.
"They must have gotten out and gone down to the crick," he said to the attentive congregation, "so I headed in that direction." When he rode past the barn belonging to the man who had paid him a visit the day before, the horse he was riding sounded. In reply, the missing horses whinnied from inside the barn. He swung from his saddle and slung open the barn doors, releasing the horses from their confinement. Once he had returned home and secured the horses inside the corral, the "so called friend," as Grandpa Joe called him, paid him another visit. He told Grandpa Packard he would need to be compensated for keeping his horses safe overnight since they had wandered onto his land. Grandpa Packard told him that he wasn't paying him for stealing his horses.
"You can't expect to come to church and say, 'Here is the spirit of the Lord,' and then live without religion in your everyday life," cautioned Grandpa Joe in conclusion. "God must also be in your home for him to be real." Witnessing the faithfulness of these Native Americans who had fully embraced Christianity seemed to be pushing me into a silent but intense rebellion. Why was it so hard for me to respect that they were willing to trust an institution that had mistreated them in the past? I fumed. The stance of the church had certainly changed for the better over time, and I had no idea what it meant to want to be accepted by an exclusionary culture in almost every other way. These loyal Episcopalians seemed to have no use for the question "Where was God when the Hotchkiss guns were blazing?" so why should I? I knew it wasn’t that simple; knew the ideal of the Christian God they held in their minds wasn’t responsible for the fact the white man had slaughtered so many Native American people. But the wasichu—categorically responsible for the atrocities—had forced the deity down their throats along with everything else white culture had deemed sacred.
Christian scripture proposes that the church was built on the foundation of God. Those who came to spread God's word seemed to have relied solely upon this immovable foundation—like a concrete slab, a crushing weight—forgetting that Christianity's most important building blocks were the humanitarian teachings of Christ. Had we come any closer to treating those who are different from ourselves with respect and equality? I questioned, knowing full well the answer was that we had not. The disadvantaged situations in which so many of the Native Americans still lived proved we had made so little headway as to have essentially gone careening backwards.
I let the arguments filter through my mind as I enjoyed the late autumn sun, which was still strong enough to allow me to sit outside in a lawn chair with only an occasional shiver from the brisk breezes. I was reading Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, fascinated by the author’s descriptive abilities and his natural style of relating history—both painful and playful. His story of bumping into Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux, on the streets of Manhattan was one of my favorites. Little did I know, ten years after reading this, I would make my own move to New York City. The thought of that would have sent me into hysterical fits of laughter at the time, as there was nothing about my life that would have predicted it.
Frazier recounted conversations with Le War Lance, the last of which ended with the Native American singing several songs for him in Sioux. “Then he opened his eyes and looked at the Sixth Avenue masses hurrying past with shopping bags,” Frazier wrote. “’Immigrants!’ he shouted. He shook his head and said, ‘Pasta!’ Did I hear that right? Yes; in tones of exasperation, as if this was really the last straw: ‘Pasta!’”
The only Sioux music I’d heard on the reservations was a wide range of Christian hymns sung in the lilting language—the oddity of hearing the plodding rhythms intoned in the foreign language not quite strange enough to keep the songs from sticking in my mind long after the service had ended. “Rock of Ages” was flowing through my head as I walked into the house for my weekly call to Davelyn, my therapist—one of the only things keeping me glued together during the upheaval I was experiencing.
This hymn, sung in Navajo, proves my point that the tune still carries even though the words are unfamiliar. Today’s installment of this memoir is a participating post in the Let’s Blog Off series. To see what songs drive others to the brink, click here.
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Primal Decorum
As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”
I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.
Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared.
As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.
The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.
The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind.
The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day.
I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.
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This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Lying to Tell the Truth: A #LetsBlogOff Reverie
Jim was racing around with only a week to prepare for his final trip to Costa Rica because he was determined to cram three week’s worth of activities into the seven days he had in town. His meetings with his cronies segued to long lunches at the Mountain City Club; and his determination to taste the best of summer filled our evening and weekend calendar with barbecues, al fresco cocktail parties and boating on Lake Chickamauga.
He would spend a week in Central America before I joined him with six volunteers, and I was up early the morning I took him to the airport, watching as his sunburned head—all that was left of the leisure time he had known—bobbed in and out of view as he heaved the heavy LL Bean duffle bags out the door. I stood at the window admiring the bluff trees, which I knew would envelope me in coolness once I was back from dropping him off because I was determined to park myself on the screened porch for as much of my week of freedom as was possible. I settled myself there the minute I returned, sitting quietly for a few seconds in order to attune myself to the waterfall smattering against the gully of rocks into which it spilled. It seemed that the staccato notes mimicked my lack of output at the typewriter—the tap, tap, tap echoing the stilted rhythm of my creativity gone bone dry, the keys sticking in mid-strike so that the words came out of me in a halting trickle.
I was waiting for an imaginative storm to blow through and leave the ideas cascading from my brain in a torrent but that had not happened in far too long. This made me fear the long summer months ahead, knowing the heat would diminish the waterfall’s voice to a dribble. Would mine be sentenced to the same fate? I wondered. What would it take to get my writing back on track? It was then I realized the sound of that splattering was identical to the noise that falling water made as it splashed into a deep, boxy concrete sink. I closed my eyes and let the sensory memories wash over me as they brought Costa Rica, where I would soon return for the last time, flooding over my senses.
I was still trying to process what I had experienced in South Dakota—a time of controversy, conflicts and extremes. During the convocation, I had felt the need to hang back and remain aloof. I had never met such shy, closed people and I felt there was prejudice against me, though I hardly blamed them because I was just another wasichu. I could only imagine how much deep-seated mistrust had built up in them and I felt sad that there was no unity among tribes because it kept them from moving forward in a way that might have enabled them to assuage some of the despair I had witnessed.
I moved through the days of Jim’s absence with this fretfulness jangling around in me even during the delicious mornings I spent soaking in the beautiful mountain backdrop. The surroundings calmed me as always, but I found that I was so weary it was all I could do to put two sentences together. I kept at it, making false starts as my annoyance at the sound of the heavy equipment cutting the road far below, which sounded downright evil juxtaposed against the soft spraying of the waterfall, edged out the faint momentum that offered itself to me. This must have been the same sound the people who lived near the strip mining operations heard when the ruination of certain parts of the Appalachian Mountains came to pass, I thought. Oh, why do I care? I am a peace here, and I wish I could sit like this for the rest of my days!
I had seen the play “Steel Magnolias” with friends and found myself wishing I could capture the eccentricities of the southern character as brilliantly as Robert Harling had. The only other time I had been as enamored with the authentic rendering of the eccentric southern personality was when I had seen Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” Would I ever get my act together so that I could leave something as forceful to the world?
The Fourth of July dawned and the weather was a deluge. I realized that most people must have been angered by the weather but I was reveling in the fact that I had peace, quiet and every excuse to hole up. The tropical-like downpours had created a snarling waterfall that ravaged slick rocks lit by a queer fog-filtered light—to the point that they glowed, alien-like. Within that odd radiance, hammered silver contrasted shiny green leaves so brilliant they appeared to be made of patent leather.
I’d been reading an article in Harper’s titled “In Deepest Gringolandia.” In it Bob Shacochis declared Mexico was being used as a third-world tourist theme park by North Americans. He wrote, “North Americans, boarding their planes, take North America with them—in varying degrees, yes, ugly or beautiful, but North America nevertheless.” I thought about how uncomfortable some of the places we’d stayed in Costa Rica had been and how I had succumbed to this myself. Being overwhelmed by roaches had certainly thrown me, and living at the mercy of the elements had challenged me to no end. If I was a snob by admitting that being in a clean environment soothed me enormously, then I was guilty as charged.
Since my writing voice was firmly on strike, I found myself reading voraciously while Jim was away—making my way through a stack of books and magazines I had been intending to read for months. I’d thought that focusing on fiction would help me to escape the lack of momentum in my own writing so novels held high priority, but the tactic was having little effect. I awoke on the fourth morning of my solitude, my knee bumping the books tossed haphazardly onto the opposite side of the bed, and looked out into the dull sky. Where the clouds hung thicker, there were puffy lines of deepest gray—a scowl to interrupt the endless monotony of graphite. I felt restless and edgy so I laced up my running shoes to take advantage of the misty umbrella nature had sent before the sun burned it off and brought on the sizzling heat.
It felt good to let the warm moisture move through my hair as the sweat poured from my body. I felt my breath enter and leave my lungs, marveling that flesh and bone had the fortitude to endure when my emotional self felt so beaten down. As I made my way past the familiar vantage points I always saw on my runs, I wondered how my life would look in twenty years; thought about Picasso’s premise that the artist lies in order to reach another kind of truth. What lies could I tell in order to create a life with a truth I could tolerate? I wondered as I turned the corner toward home, accelerating my speed to match they pace of my disconcerting thoughts.
This is a participating post in a bi-monthly exercise known as Let's Blog Off. I don't know what it is about the choices LBO leaders make for topics, but somehow my ramble through the past 20 years seems to always be on point. The material for this post and the photo of me on Lake Chickamauga were created, oddly enough, 20 years ago almost to the day. I can't wait to see how much headway I make as a writer in the next 20 years! To see posts by the other #LetsBlogOff participants du jour, click here.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Tortured Water
Once we crossed to the western rim of the river, the land grew a bit wilder, feeling more isolated and lonelier, especially on the Cheyenne River Reservation where the Convocation was underway. I was trying to nail descriptions of what I had seen in my writers notebook when the hymns that had filled the breaks in the programming ended, leaving only the sound of distant chainsaws to rend the sudden silence. They were being run by heavyset Native American men cutting and stripping the pine poles used for building the bowers, the new ones necessary to accommodate a swelling crowed. The rough-hewn constructs were fastened together with wire and topped with mesh over which dying limbs and branches were tossed to create dappled shade. The spots of light beneath them glinted on folding metal chairs and peppered crude benches made from planks of raw timber that had been nailed onto short sections of tree trunks.
A long line of presenters moved across the dais under the largest bower straddling the podium as the day’s agenda progressed. First up were the varied chapters of the Episcopal Church Women. Beulah Turgeon shared her details of the activity that had taken place on the Rosebud Reservation, noting that they felt a sense of accomplishment given the monies they’d raised from their series of lunches. Mrs. Runs With Enemy asked that grave markers be maintained more vigilantly in her parish because it was a sign of respect for the dead. The pleas of the women to follow were similar, each noting needs beyond their parish’s means. As the women wrapped their agenda, a group of men filtered in, separating into small clusters.
Mr. Little Soldier was the first to step up to the microphone. He asked, “Who is our God?” paused and stared keenly at the audience before adding, “Is he in favor of a separation of church and state?” Every so often he would break into the Sioux dialect, which made his sentences sing as his voice rose and fell, going soft on syllables like "ha" and "cha." English phrases emerged in the midst of the melodic language—“all this time” sandwiched between Woniya Wakan, or holy spirit, and niyelo, “it’s up to you.” He was a member of the camp advocating a vote to approve that both Lakota spiritual activities and Episcopal services be embraced by the Diocese. Some men offered murmurs of acceptance and others dissent, depending upon which side of the issue they supported. A critical argument had to do with whether traditional customs of the Episcopal services could be altered, namely the sips of wine during the Eucharist.
Not everyone wanted the custom to be changed, but the ones who did were adamant that using grape juice or non-alcoholic wine was of grave importance because it took only a tiny bit of alcohol to ignite a setback for the addicted. The sun illuminated the handmade quilts hung behind the podium as the debate wore on—the colorful stars and the war eagle so exquisitely crafted. Set in relief against the artful backdrop created by these beloved symbols, Reginald Bird Horse spoke of how the native religion was a comfort to those who still believed in the old ways. The parade of names of the ardent speakers as they presented their heartfelt positions on a string of issues quickly became a jumble.
Father Makes Good delivered his impassioned plea to preserve the Episcopal services as they had always known them. A lay reader from St. Elizabeth’s named Reginald Bird Horse remarked, “I’ve been to the hill. How long since we’ve been involved with alcoholism? And now it’s bingo. I have found myself by communicating with God; going to the hill to fast and pray.” He was advocating the use of the peace pipe and the drum in church services, and was one of the speakers to address the plight of those who had beat alcoholism only to be faced with the wine at the communion rail.
Nelson Young Hawk came forward and spoke of his tiyospaye, or extended family—his grandmothers and great grandfathers who had adopted the white man’s way by accepting their religion. He was certain that they should not change the services in any way; that these weekly rituals should remain exactly the same as they had been since the church first entered their lives. Simon Speaks approached the microphone and said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, “We don’t come together to think about the almighty dollar from the U.S. treasury—the Indian got along without it for a long time until they took our gold mines and now we can’t get our own money—we should take our religion back, too.”
As clipped, grey clouds drifted through a Wedgwood blue sky, Father Bears Heart took the dais and the men nodded as his voice cascaded through the Sioux language, a dialect that such a small minority within our country’s borders would recognize. His friendly face disappeared as another—thinner and more haggard—took its place, and the back-and-forth continued into the afternoon. I thought of Black Elk’s statement: “They talked and talked for days, but it was just like wind blowing in the end.” As the last man exited the low stage, the sound of crickets and the clink of metal from a small group of men playing horseshoes were suddenly drowned out as the recorded hymns flared from the giant speakers, which had been heaved onto a tall wooden platform.
I learned that day how important the word tiospaye is to Native Americans, and I also came to see that I was intruding on a discussion that wasn’t mine to hear. With a heavy heart, I moved to a bower away from the activities of the church after hearing Bishop Anderson tell those who were asking him to make a decision as to how their church services would be shaped that it was their decision to make, not his. He said decisions had been made for them for far too long and it was in their best interest to talk amongst themselves and come to their own conclusions.
As I noted how sadness seemed to be leaking from each person speaking, I wondered about the jovial demeanor of the people milling around a large pot of buffalo stew—such a contrast to those speaking that day. It took several men to stir it as it bubbled furiously, the intense flames beneath the black vessel holding the soup dancing vibrantly against the pot’s rounded bottom. I stared at the ground a great deal as the hours passed, walking around as I tried to get my bearings. As I did, I saw how the fine, silt-like dirt beneath the grass, which was so dry it crunched with each footstep, eagerly took the imprint of the logos and patterns carved into the bottom of each pair of sneakers that had passed over its surface. I had read that the dirt in this part of the U.S. was the drift left by glaciers of long ago and I wondered whether our version of hieroglyphics would be the motifs on the bottoms of our shoes when the next Ice Age hit.
A priest from Colombia struck up a conversation with me as I sat off to myself scribbling my impressions of things. He told me that he was Lutheran and that he’d had a falling out with his church. He had married an American and found himself on the Pine Ridge Reservation ministering to the Ogalala Sioux. “The American Indian is rich compared to the poor in Latin America,” he remarked. “Their poverty is not in their world, it is in their minds.” His words reverberated as we drove the serpentine road to Mobridge, stopping there for coffee before heading back to Sioux Falls. We laughed as Randy thought to officially welcome us to the land of “tortured water”—the name they’d given their particular brand of joe in South Dakota.
As we flew back to Tennessee, my mind was exploding as I attempted to process everything that I had seen and heard. My confusion as to whether western religions had any relevance for Native Americans had been amplified, and I thought it fitting that one of the first Lakota words I learned was skinciya, or struggle. Stevie Smith once wrote that a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. At that very moment, I was living, breathing proof that this was powerfully true.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Utopian Attitudes
As we left the outskirts of Sioux Falls, our drive to the Yankton Reservation took us through an expanse of checkerboard farmland. It was deemed an open reservation due to the mix of Native Americans and white landowners within its boundaries, and this became clear as we pulled into Wagner, which looked as all-American as any other farming community in the Midwest. We met Father Field and his wife Mary, Rocky, Elmo, Edna, Peter and Annette that day—names of people we would come to know very well as we built a church they had been asking the Diocese to provide for them for many years.
Our second stop was Greenwood, which rests in the nipple extending below the rectangular state at its southeast corner, its meandering outline there defined by the Missouri River. The church we would be replacing with the one we would build was eerily quiet—its interiors musty from being closed up for quite some time because the community that once utilized it had moved to Wagner to be closer to the services a town provides. I’d never been as moved by “The Lord’s Prayer” as when I saw a large framed needlepoint of it, written in the Sioux language, hanging in the vestibule. It was as rag-tag as the little strip of land along the Missouri River we found ourselves walking along that day—the waterway nothing more than a stream indolently moving through a deep ravine the river had made before being dammed upstream. The quiet spot held a collection of abandoned churches and a few run-down houses, and I could feel the sweep of history, though not the bustling one that had long been silenced along the jagged banks.
After the lush vegetation of Greenwood, our next stop—Lower Brule, a closed reservation—felt barren and dry. We met Marilyn, Boots, Gloria and Mr. Small Jumper, all eager to greet us because they welcomed our help. Father James, who was younger than most of the priests we’d met in the mission field, had been assigned to the isolated reservation that held nothing but buttes and flats spanning for miles. When we left the Lower Brule, we traversed the Crow Creek Reservation, moving through undulant gold grasses as we listened to Randy explaining that the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were all arms of the Sioux tribe, and that the first-letter change of their names designates their linguistic differences—certain words used by all the Sioux would begin with “D,” “L,” or “N,” depending upon which segment of the tribe the speaker had been born into.
As we headed farther north and west, we drove a rain-soaked road that rose and fell away, mimicking the undulant profile of the hills. The Missouri River tracked us, slithering out of sight through distant gorges and reappearing when the cliffs gave way to expansive meadows. We glided along the silvered ribbon winding through velvety green for several hours until we came to a field of flattened grass that was littered with beater cars, giant speakers, several pine bowers and an odd assortment of people, both Native American and white.
The four-day, out-of-doors Convocation was in full swing. Christian hymns blared from the speakers as we walked through the trampled prairie grass rousing grasshoppers with every step. I attempted to make eye contact with the Native Americans I passed, but my searching looks were met with stoic distance. I sat alone for most of the afternoon, watching puffy clouds glide effortlessly through an enormous sky as I wondered why my attempts to connect were being met with such resistance.
I realized there was so much to learn. I had always taken my ability to connect with other human beings for granted, and I had already been told once since we’d arrived that I was being very idealistic. What else is new? I thought, admitting that I could see this in most of my dealings, though I wouldn’t have been so quick to put a name on my emotional makeup. It was a bit like being categorized, then stamped with a number to be shelved in the “Idealist” section of the library. How did I come about these “utopian” attitudes? I wondered as I scribbled in the notebook in my lap, the smell of pine infusing the air.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
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This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. The question du jour: “What do you take for granted?” I hope you enjoyed my realization about taking human connections for granted; to see the other posts answering this question, click here for the full roster.
Some Hint of Myself
We were a few days away from taking our first trip to South Dakota and I had no idea what to expect. We would be attending the Niobrara Convocation, a church convention for Sioux Episcopalians, in Promise, South Dakota. The Bishop had mentioned we’d see a bit of the wild wild west as we traversed the Great Plains—prairie dogs, buffalo, antelope and miles upon miles of barbed-wire fences. Though not as “exotic” to me as the animals he listed, I was battling some pretty sneaky Tennessee wildlife as I tried to protect my herb garden on the mountain, and it had me wondering whether the native animal kingdom on the Plains could be any more troublesome.
For three mornings in a row woodchucks had decided it was their duty to dig around in my newly planted pride and joy—a series of mounds of dirt skirted by carefully placed stones from between which plumes of perennials and knots of herbs sprouted. I had planned this perfect garden for months and it had taken me an entire week to physically create it so I was understandably feeling a bit territorial. I had pegged the perpetrators as our regular visitors, the raccoons, until I caught the groundhogs red-handed one night. Just before heading to bed I had heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like terra cotta scraping on wood. I flipped on the deck lights to see the critters pulling my bay tree out of the dirt, placing it carefully on the deck beside the pot they were plundering. I left them alone, knowing the plant would survive the night in the open, and just before drifting off to sleep, I wondered if I should put some dried ears of corn at the bottom of the steps for them the next evening—a peace offering of sorts. Then I quickly realized how silly the idea was, as they didn’t consider their behavior destructive; they were simply foraging for food.
Jim had built me a remarkable potting bench for planting herbs and flowers, and I’d found the perfect place for it in a nook facing the woods. I was making my way to it to repot my bay tree the next morning when I nearly stepped on a large snake sunning on the deck. I thought I was going to drop dead from fear before I could reach the door to the garage, high-stepping more successfully than any drum major I had admired when high school bands were still known for turning out such prancing leaders!
I shuddered all afternoon thinking about how close I had come to stepping on the slithering creature. When I described it to my neighbor’s gardener, he declared it to be a harmless chicken snake but I felt certain it had been of the deadliest sort. I raced down to the bookstore to buy a guidebook so I’d be able to identify snakes from then on. Needless to say, I never nonchalantly walked around any corner on the deck from that day on, and when I would see an elongated reptile sunning on one of the large, flat rocks on the bluff below, I’d pull out my handy book and see if I could tell its type. It was a ridiculous effort, of course, because you had to get pretty close to a snake to make out its details and I certainly wasn’t signing on for that task.
The next day, we took off for South Dakota before the light had come up on the city and I felt inexplicably nervous on the flight to Sioux Falls as I fingered a newspaper clipping with my grainy visage stamped into it—an advertisement I’d used to mark my spot in Black Elk Speaks. I’d agreed to model for this ad at the request of several friends who owned First Impression, a clothing store they’d just opened. I scanned the image for some hint of myself—some sign that it was really me—and I found nothing that told me I was present when the photograph was taken! In fact, it had been an embarrassing endeavor as I tried to figure out how to pose because I’d never done so. Afterwards, I realized I should have practiced before I went to the shoot but that wouldn’t have occurred to me either. The photographer was completely green so he didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, and I had left feeling self-conscious. That’s what I thought about when I saw my wide smile, the discomfort causing me to jam the flimsy piece of paper into the back of the book as I vowed never to do something as out-of-character again.
I had made it about three-quarters of the way through the story of Black Elk’s story and was gaining a Native American’s view of how their lives were changed by the whites they encountered in the days preceding, during and following the “Indian Wars.” Black Elk, who lived in a log house on the Pine Ridge Reservation between Wounded Knee and Grass Creek when he was relating the story to John Neihardt, said,“…the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature…Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here…”
Until reading the book, I’d never heard the word wasichu, which means “white person” in Lakota. It was bizarre to be perceived as different because I’d never been put in a situation of minority before. I suppose something told me I was heading into tricky territory given the anxiety I felt as I finished the book, which I closed as we were beginning the final approach into Sioux Falls. I found myself swallowing tears as the medicine man’s words lamenting the moment when Native Americans were relegated to reservations echoed in my mind.
“And so it was all over…I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…”
Black Elk’s story had been lived one hundred years before my arrival in South Dakota, and it made me sad that there had been even further decline for the freedom-loving people. “O make my people live!” Black Elk had wailed. It occurred to me that I would likely look back on Costa Rica as a piece of cake compared to the emotional territory I found myself entering in South Dakota. The thought was sobering as I stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps into the heat of the Great Plains.
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The Embodiment of Applause
As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!
I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms.
I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.
On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.
Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.”
The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…
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The Bottom of Discontent
I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.
The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms.
One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.
As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.
Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black.
His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.
Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.”
I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!
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In Defiance of the Cold
The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather.
I thought about how most people wouldn’t think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim’s oldest son’s wedding. I lamented to my writer’s notebook, “I can’t wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort.” Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. “I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen,” I wrote. “Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready.”
As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person’s hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.
The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary.
The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet.
It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to “representing the church” with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?
With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:
Plume
It is difficult
to face
someone else’s struggle
when it stokes the fire
of your own
painful burning,
especially when
you’ve labored for years
to swallow the smoke.
-Saxon Henry
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Cold, Clear and Uncaring
It stopped when its backside met the deck railing and stood there, just far enough away to feel safe while being close enough for its pointy nose, which it held high in the air, to identify Sam’s scent. I imagined this must have been as foreign a smell as it had ever encountered in relation to an animal given that Sam, who trembled with desire to get at the raccoon, had been to the groomer that day. Little did my beloved dog know he would have been no match for the teeth in that pointed snout.
Suddenly out of nowhere, a smaller fur ball came rushing in, tumbling under the larger animal as it playfully nipped at its feet. Sam was beside himself with the desire to play, prancing on his hind legs in frustration. The smaller creature, who had no fear whatsoever, stepped right up to the screen and stood nose to nose with Sam. I was guessing by then that the larger raccoon was the mother because the little guy was herded out of harm’s way the minute Sam ran his manicured nails noisily down the woven metal mesh. As the duo skipped out of range of the floodlights flanking the deck, Sam moaned in disappointment that his potential new friends had escaped without a properly sniffed “meet and greet.”
I’d never been able to experience raccoons that closely and I had to admit, even while knowing they were dangerous, I’d loved to have cuddled both of them to my chest. It made me realize why people fooled themselves into thinking that they could domesticate wild animals. I’d always been fascinated with the outlandish behavior of non-domesticated species, and some of my favorite childhood memories were when my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” We’d tune in and find ourselves crying over a dying bear cub during one episode or fighting back hysterical fits of laughter during another that involved a flock of wild birds being startled by an airboat. My dad had a passion for auto racing and had owned his own series of quarter-milers for years so when the leggy birds bolted, wings flapping and feet skimming the shallow waters of some exotic glade, the skinny wakes they made in the surface of the water made them appear as if they were in a dead heat in mother nature’s version of a quarter-mile race.
This was the only program, besides sports, that my mother would allow us to watch together because we were prone to being overly emotional and our tender psyches seemed to feed off each other. “Little House on the Prairie” had long been forbidden as the drama never failed to cause us to sob by the end of each episode. Before she nixed the show all together, she would walk through, roll her eyes and change the channel as we wiped our eyes and blew our noses, laughing a little too self-consciously at our silliness, which she thought was ridiculous! I’d never seen “Wild Kingdom” feature raccoons—maybe they weren’t exotic enough for Jim Fowler, who seemed to prefer eagles, ocelots and monkeys—and I wished I’d known more about them when the duo visited again and again as winter progressed.
Sam never lost his desire to tussle with them—an ever-present frustration in his life as the weather grew colder and we had a second significant snow near Christmas. As the holiday loomed, I was determined not to admit that I was battling a serious case of depression, plagued by nightmares and bouts of sadness that left me feeling spent and wasted. I would make the briefest of entries in my writer’s notebook and then go days without logging anything as I filled my personal journal with dark struggles: “The sky dulls with evening and my mood takes on its color.” I felt like a the protagonist in a movie I’d watched—a dying man who knew his life had been lived in vain—when he said, “All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.” Would I succumb to a life lived in futility? I wondered. As I journaled about it, the red-tailed hawk patrolled the bluff, drawing me away from the page. I watched as it clung to a tree in strong winds, its talons gripping the limb as its body swayed in anticipation of its next move. Suddenly, it flattened itself against the currents and dove through the icy air, disappearing beyond the stony outcroppings at the edge of the yard.
I was trying to write poetry but only snippets emerged. As the new year dawned, I made a resolution that I would put more words on the page, hopeful that I could hold my resolve better than I had in the past. My first entry for 1989 felt like a strong start and as was most often the case when I was at home, nature was my inspiration: “The sunrise burned to expose itself as the knobby heads of mountaintops penetrated wispy clouds. The moon was as thin as a clipped nail last night, bent and useless in its loss. I watch the falls and wait for the water to take on the color of the awakening sky but it refuses to be anything but itself: cold, clear and uncaring—it falls not for orange glory but for its own clarity.”
Life kept reaching out and I couldn’t help but intertwine my fingers with its tentacles, which meant I was being pulled headlong after it and all it had to offer. I was often fooled into thinking I was planning the music of my days when more often than not I would end up dancing to songs I’d never intended to have as my soundtrack—all chosen by others. Why was it that life played its own tunes, forcing us to dance along while knowing the loving stances were the hardest to strike?
My stances had been as far from loving as any could be, and it truly bothered me but I was dancing as fast as I could, the poses I managed to hold not so graceful. Besides Sam, the natural world surrounding the Signal Mountain house continued to be the only bright spot in my life. I studied the raccoons as the baby grew, interacting with Sam beyond the screen in guarded but curious ways. I watched the hawk as it rode the thermals, circling above the falls for hours on end. I wished I could glide as effortlessly through life as it was able to sail on those stiff breezes.
I had been watching for several weeks as a highway was being bulldozed through the landscape below—a connector that would make the morning and evening commutes for thousands of people easier. The machines were busy at work day after day, mowing down trees and cutting into hills. I realized that I had a problem with development in some ways. It took strength for human muscles to brandish an axe against a great tree, but I felt it took minimal effort to bulldoze one flat. As I watched the “progress” day after day, I thought how ironic it was that we were a people professing strength while simultaneously being a culture that plowed across the land without any consideration for the future. Would anyone ever be able to see this? I wondered as I walked away from the windows that looked out onto the long brown ribbon of a scab growing on the land below.
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