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The Voice Which Calls
Elmo and Edna continued to surprise me as I grew to know the brother and sister better. We’d invited them to dinner one evening, and as I spooned a generous helping of the chicken casserole I’d made onto her plate, Edna said, “We were poor when we were growing up; we would go weeks without a dollar in the house. Even so, mother told me to always give something—whether it was something I’d made or as little as a penny. She said it wasn’t the amount you gave, it was how you gave it.”
Like Edna, Betty Zephier, had been telling me her life story. Her ancestry was a mix of Chickasaw and Choctaw she said one afternoon as we visited over cups of coffee. She was making me a morning star quilt and sewing a war eagle quilt for Jim. I’d never seen hand-work as perfect as hers—and that was saying something because both of my grandmothers, who’d quilted their entire adult lives, would have fawned over the remarkable artistry of the tall, beautiful woman with swarthy skin. Her profile was sharp, and her jet-black hair—lightly teased and combed back from her prominent forehead—gave her a regal appearance in spite of a pronounced shyness in her mannerisms.
As I was studying Betty’s features in an effort to remember her well enough to write them down, Faith Spotted Eagle walked into the Spot Café and approached our table. I had been told that Faith was one of the parishioners whose views bordered on activism, a fact that was proven during many of our conversations as she lamented how history had played out. After greeting us in her gentle but determined way she joined us, telling us about a trip she had taken to Greenwood with her husband the week before. They had traveled there to fish from the Missouri River, she explained, and as the sky had darkened to night, hundreds of fireflies set the river aglow. She said there was an eerie quiet and stillness to the evening, and it made her feel as if she had been touched by the spirits of all those who had been there before them. This was an example of how alive a nature-based spirituality remained in the culture of these thoughtful people.
I had watched a National Georgraphic special on PBS the night before she related this story to me, and the program had fascinated me because it explored the different sites of ancient cultures in the Americas. Archaeologists had explained some of their findings, and the narrators of the show were animated with excitement and respect for these ancient peoples. Why is it, I wondered, that there is still scorn for the ways of the plains Indians? Why didn’t they deserve the same respect as the Anasazi and the Navajos? I could certainly understand there was a difference in temperament involved—the plains Indians being warring tribes whereas the desert Indians were peaceful—but the prejudices I’d seen made it clear that our world was permeated with double standards.
As I pondered questions like these, Jim and I moved between the disparate worlds we occupied. In fact, life seemed a logistical nightmare at times. We had arrived in Tennessee to find it rainy and dreary—Bridal Veil Falls was flush with rain as I sat like a purring fat cat on the screened porch. It was almost impossible to believe that anyone in the world could be unhappy at that very moment. Then, I remembered the children and alcoholics of the housing community on the Yankton, those struggling to make sense of life on the Gaza Strip, the massacres of China’s Tiananmen Square and the damage being done by Colombia’s drug cartel. Measured against the drippy grayness I looked out upon, these flashing realizations brought my morning into paradox.
As the thoughts of South Dakota intruded, I wondered, How could you possibly approach the subject of alcoholism with a people who seemed to use it as their only means of escape from oppression but for whom it was said liquor’s deadly grip was physiological? I had picked up the habit of thinking of such things rather than pondering my own plight, which was becoming clearer as I continued the painful process of seeking healing. I was in therapy again—this time in earnest and with a new therapist, Davelyn, whom I sensed was going to help me figure out why I was struggling so, something that had been so long in coming. I felt she would not be one to give lip-service to my pain; rather she seemed determined to help me name it and understand where its sourced resided within my psyche. I longed to become a whole person; felt this process would help me to find a rich writer’s voice, not the thin, puny one I was using just to get by.
Somehow, I think she understood how desperately I wanted to save my own life. I’m not sure she knew how important writing would be to my survival, as I didn’t yet understand that piece of the puzzle myself because my desire to reach great depths with my words—to offer something to humanity—was just budding. I guess this fact did prove I had a mission after all, but mine was one with a selfish purpose at its core—shoring myself up as the world swirled around me and finding a voice that would be strong enough to leave something meaningful to the world. I was growing to despise the title “missionary.” Jim could call himself anything he wanted, but I was not at all comfortable with that albatross around my neck. I was becoming less ashamed of my struggle, but I also wondered if those who might read my work someday would feel as if they were drinking great cups of sadness—like giant mugs of espresso, the bitterness hard to take after the first few sips.
I wondered why I even bothered to write such darkness down. As this forlorn thought popped into my head, the sun emerged, igniting the trees as if they were suddenly wearing jewels—the droplets of water dancing on their leaves turning to prisms as the wind nudged them into the light. In her early diary, Anaïs Nin wrote nearly 70 years before that moment of luminosity, “I long to write. I feel that if I were left alone for a long time, I could do something; I could discover the source of the voice which calls me night and day. I wish for tranquility, for solitude.” I felt a great surge of emotion welling in my throat as I read her words. If she was to be believed, my struggle wasn’t as unnecessary as Jim and our priest contended, the two colluding to “pull me out” of my self-absorbed wallowing. Nin went on to say, “somehow, even as an old maid, an author, an unnoticed individual, I am going to be useful and do something worthwhile during my life.” The word “worthwhile” traveled through the corridors of my mind, and I marveled at how closely I felt her struggle resembled mine when she declared, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Was this time approaching for me? Or would the compressed bloom of my desire to express myself wither and fall from the stem of my life before I had the courage to turn my face toward the light?
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!
This post is a participating entry in today’s #LetsBlogOff, the theme of which is “a favorite flower story.” I was the flower at the point in my life when the above snippet of my story took place. How pretty the bud of my struggling self appeared (or not), I will leave for my biographers to decide. All I knew is that I kept hoping beyond hope that at some point in time, the sun would shine brightly on me so I could bloom in my own way. I have survived and I open my face to the sunlight as often as I can remember to do so in the fast-paced world of my life as it is today. This post is a celebration of talented therapists like Davelyn—the first to show me what it meant to keep my petals intact even when life’s ferocious winds buffeted me from all sides.
God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
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!
It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
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!
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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A Real Place in the World
In the piece, Weber stated, “The stories in Rock Springs…are populated by characters who are mostly down and out, natives of a remote region that simply doesn’t offer them enough. It’s a class of people familiar to readers of current fiction. But unlike those in, say, the early stories of Raymond Carver, whose work set the tone for many of the new writers of the 1980’s, Ford’s characters rarely yield to despair or defeat. They actively seek the high-minded solace that’s available in self-knowledge, in the future, in love.
“The individual’s struggle for transcendence is an old literary theme, of course. But in the narrow mainstream of contemporary American fiction, it’s absence has been well-noted—and by an increasing number of critics missed—particularly in the spreading influence of the so-called ‘minimalists.’ According to many literary observers, short-story writers like Carver, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel, by virtue of their many imitators, have spawned what has become a dominant fashion in American writing.
“The perceived minimalist formula is marked by a technical expertise resonating primarily in the service of characters so burdened by powerlessness, diffidence or anomie that their engagement with the world around them is superficial or oblique. Their often introspective revelations tend to reinforce this sense of isolation…Ford is onto something new…providing American fiction with the theme that life is serious, rather than life is trivial or that life is very grim. That there are issues in this life worth trying to clarify.
“Raymond Carver, who is Ford’s close friend, is unequivocal. ‘Sentence for sentence,’ he says, ‘Richard is the best writer at work in this country today [1988].’ Ford says, ‘I really think that human beings accommodating themselves to a landscape, to a place, is natively dramatic, that that in itself is potentially the stuff of literature.’”
This made me think of the people I’d been meeting in Costa Rica and how dramatic life felt to me just by the sheer fact that the people there were responding to such a fierce environment. Ford went on to say, “The stories didn’t exhaust all the things I care about, the things that move me to write…The other books are novels, and in writing them, I exhausted everything which is, in a way, my own private definition of a novel. I try to exhaust my own interest in a place. Then I’ll just move on, write about someplace else where I kind of notice again how people accommodate themselves to where they live. That accounts for the kinds of things I write.”
The article made me want to read his work so I put Rock Springs at the top of my book-buying list. One of the main reasons I was anxious to see how his writing style unfurled itself on the page was this statement by Weber: “Ford’s sentences are raggedly lyrical, an eclectic music equally capable of the elegant, vaulting language that seeks to encompass an ambiguity and the brisk simplicity of vernacular speech…Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the stories in Rock Springs is a climactic explication. In his most trenchant passages, Ford launches an almost essayistic probe of human yearning and the stories resonate finally with the conviction that his characters have a real place in the world, however strained.”
Ford tells Weber, “What I write is fiction. What I do is imagine a place and call it a name.” Weber asks Ford about his relationship between the place on the map and the place on the page. “Me,” he answered. “It’s just me. There is a place, and there is an impulse to write, and I am the only important meditative there. Which is not to single out my own importance, just my responsibility.”
I sat for a while, staring out at the deepening blue of the water as the day waned, feeling envious of someone who could talk so confidently about writing, the writing life and his responsibility within it. I wanted to rest in that hallowed place so badly I could taste it but the writing I was doing was paltry and stunted. Would that ever change? I wondered.
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Ineffectual Torture
He was ever on the lookout for ways to assuage his loss from letting go of the lion’s share of his power in the business he had worked his entire adult life to build and I cringed when he announced that he wanted to be behind the controls of the plane more often as we traveled the southeast U.S. He renewed his pilot’s license and decided the perfect time to get back in the cockpit was a trip to the beach. I dared not say aloud that the prospect made me want to faint, because he would have seen it as weakness on my part. He banked the plane hard to steer us on course as we left Chattanooga’s airspace and we found ourselves butting heads with a cold front that had screamed through town during the early morning hours. I trusted him in most things, of course, but my veins were coursing with fear as he flipped buttons and pulled knobs, the dropping and rising motion that happened almost simultaneously making me feel oddly giddy and absolutely terrified.
We skirted the weather system until we’d cleared south Alabama, and it looked as though God had been doing some deep spring-cleaning, using foamy carpet cleaner on the sky as far as the eye could see. I was running metaphors through my mind to take the focus off my queasy stomach, which Jim—seeing the panic on my face—assured me was unwarranted nerves. I calmed myself by deciding then and there that I had nothing to lose but my life, and if it came to that it was likely to happen fairly quickly so prolonging the torture by imagining what would come to pass if we were pitched onto the land, broken and burning, was an exercise in stupidity.
We made it to Panama City just fine, and the ocean, as it always had, lulled me into peace. I agreed wholeheartedly with the notion that the sound and the motion was womblike. A gull careened overhead as I lounged on the deck, looking as if it had absolutely no control from its internal cockpit. Trust is a funny thing for a bird in brisk winds! I thought as I sat there wondering how many of them actually crashed—to think that none of them ever did was silly, wasn’t it?
A massive fire was burning miles away down the beach and the winds were turning it into a Hades-sized blowtorch. The smoke was being carried away by the upper-level winds, creating a shelf atop the billowing plume that intercepted the sun during the early afternoon, masking its power. By early evening, the smoke stretched far out to sea as we sat at the water’s edge, our chairs sinking into the sand with each wave that lapped beneath us. I admired the metallic sheen of the ocean, which was mirror-like until a rolling crest foamed and tumbled ashore, washing its own image out to sea.
During my morning journaling sessions, I was working on descriptions of experiences I’d had in Costa Rica. I was trying to describe a scene I saw in Limon in which a harelip and an elderly man sat on a dark porch talking. There were no chairs under their behinds—just bare concrete, the hardness of which did little to dampen their merriment. It was as if they had no clue their accommodations were spare; the old man must have been particularly witty because he continually drew laughter from the gaping mouth of the other man. I wanted to study his deformity but I didn’t dare stare at him because it would have been beyond rude. I made do with a few furtive glances, marveling at the fact that he could so unselfconsciously express glee. I wanted to capture the animated beauty of his face, which completely negated the imperfection of his crimped lip. There was something about his dignity that felt almost holy to me.
Early on in our Limon days, I’d met the sweetest man named Mr. Green at St. Mark’s. I thought about how there were so many people I’d come to know only by their last names, as decorum didn’t permit being on a first-name basis for quite some time. He had tutored me on my diet as we sat in the parish hall in Limon at a dinner held by the local Episcopal Church Women during our last trip to Limon. “It is best to eat only hard foods,” he said, just about the time I took the first bite of my sandwich, “they cause less wind in the belly.” I thanked him and told him I would definitely remember that as he pushed his chair back, already canvassing the long row of tables to see who was nearby.
I watched as he visited with most of the other people in the room, flirting ever-so-slightly with the women who would giggle like they were teenagers when he’d tell a joke or inquire after their well being. The sun was filtering through the window as he leaned over the table to chat with another man I’d seen at church functions, though we’d never been introduced. The light striking his dark skin created a silvery gray glow on the backs of his hands, which looked as tough as tanned leather.
On our way back to San Jose the next day, I had studied the landscape to see if I could push myself to better descriptions than I had been recording. It was the time of year when certain giant trees were blooming orange, their lost petals creating a smattering of confetti on the ground. Some fields that would normally have been a lush grassy green were speckled with resplendent orange light, the sun infusing the fallen blossoms with effervescing color as they lived their last decaying hours so exuberantly. What a paradox of life and death irrevocably intertwined! I thought.fields as And how lucky were the cattle grazing in those fields as they nibbled beauty! Many of the stocky animals had guardian angels on their backs—regal white birds holding vigil to nab the errant insects attempting to light on their burly mobile kitchens.
As we drew closer to the mountains, I noticed a number of trees carrying dense vines on their beefy outstretched arms, which made them appear as if they were draped in cloaks of velvety green. They towered over the other trees as if holding court—telling their charges how to behave with their grand, sweeping gestures that were dripping with finery. One particularly statuesque tree wore vines across its very top in an umbrella shape. It was almost as if it had been crowned the king of the copse it found itself gazing down upon. It brought to mind how the strongest, tallest specimen in any given situation could quickly turn into the most vulnerable when mighty winds blew through.
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Falling Through Space
I drove past the place I’d lived before I met Jim and the door was open. For a second, it seemed as if it were open in exactly the same way I would have left it, an eerie sensation that made me wonder if it had remained ajar during the several years I’d been gone—gaping foolishly as if awaiting my return. I had the rare weekend to work on poetry but I was frustrated and completely stuck. “Can I hold the steering wheel, Daddy?” I wrote just above an entry that noted a group of farmers had gone to St. Louis for a singles convention! The idea of a dating service for farmers seemed such an oddity to me but they were lonely people when they were single, too, right?
Getting nowhere in my feeble attempts to hit upon something interesting to work creatively, I decided to crawl into bed with Ellen Gilchrist’s journal Falling Through Space. I noted the next morning how her descriptions of the people in her life and her reactions to them were so rich. As I flipped through my writer’s notebook, it occurred to me that I avoided writing about people beyond their physical characteristics. I realized then that going further—into the emotional realm—frightened me.
I’d published a Lent/Easter poem in “The Messenger,” our church newsletter, which I’d been writing and editing for a while. I had lunch with my mom the week after it was out and she told me how much she liked it. When she called it scripture, I realized she was holding me in much higher regard than I deserved. She was struggling with her relationship with my sister and she asked if she could talk about it that day. Mama, her mother, who had joined us, chimed in, “It’s like shit, Joyce; the more you stir it, the more it stinks.” I had just told Mama that she looked like an Easter egg in her pale pink and peppermint green blazer and matching earrings. So much for ladylike decorum! I thought, deciding then and there that she would be the perfect character for me to muck around with because she was about as complex a spiteful personality as they come.
I dug into this task as I was flying to Los Angeles to meet with NBC, the only account I had been maintaining from my business days because it was so lucrative. I spent the first several hours of the flight making notes about Anne, as she had been named—though I’d never called her anything but Mama. “How did this young person with her flapper charms turn into such a bitter, crass woman?” I wrote, a question I left open-ended as I ran out of steam about the time we flew over the Grand Canyon. I’d never noticed how the gigantic impression had scooped itself out of the flat plateaus surrounding it, its edges seemingly filled with myriad fingering nerve endings. The adjacent farmland reminded me of a quirky linoleum floor: perfectly cut squares in parts and frayed edges in others. The lakes winked at me like scattered moons, and I wondered if the wayward orb had ever been tempted to unleash itself from its heavenly tether and lie down in one of those verdant squares of what appeared from such a great height to be the softest green. It would have had the sense, of course, to avoid the stubby beards of those rectangles that had gone fallow from lack of nourishment—tan and drab, they had their part in the scheme of things but who’d want to rest within such prickliness?
When I touched down in L.A., I was reminded that it was and ever will be a concrete monster, though the thrill of pulling into Century Plaza in a chauffeured car was something I didn’t take for granted. The first round of meetings went well and with the initial negotiations behind me, I retreated to a plush chair on the balcony of my hotel room in the early evening, the railing so high I had to sit on the arm of the chair to sneak a view of the sprawling city. The next morning, preparing for round two, I lounged on the terrace with breakfast, feeling as if I could languish there all day had I been allowed. It was the first time I’d write that happiness had nothing to do with my surroundings. Instead, contentment had everything to do with having quiet, plenty of paper, a pen and something in mind to explore.
In that moment, I realized what a change this was for me as I had been blaming my misery during my Costa Rican experiences on the place itself. Was I really to come to terms with this in one of the most crowded cities on earth? I wondered. It was not surprising that I had hit upon the fact that I was craving solitude perched above a concrete jungle filled with smog, traffic and a tumult of people. What did surprise me was that such a place inspired me to see so clearly that it wasn’t the lush jungle of Costa Rica that threw me; it was the chaos inherent in how Jim expected me to live while we were there. “I work much better when my mind can stroll into a setting of peaceful non-resistance,” I wrote. “I enjoy aloneness. Does this mean I’m really becoming a writer? Does it mean I’ll have to leave this life I’ve been trying so desperately to accept in order to be myself in the most authentic meaning of the word?”
I felt pensive as I flew back east, the landscape blurring and coming into focus as I struggled with these questions. Far below, the rivulets of water running from the dusty hills through a great gorge had bleached the barren land to a ghostly shade of bisque in a fanned pattern like a bird’s tail when it unfolds. From the higher reaches, the water had cascaded in narrower streams, making markings similar to that of worn, cracked leather that had been scorched by intense heat. I counted nine different shades of earth framed by my airplane window, and one mountain looked as though it had developed a bad case of varicose veins.
I rifled through my writer’s notebook as if I could find clues as to where the trajectory of my desire to write at all costs would lead me. I’d been thinking about the children of Costa Rica a great deal since we’d finished the last project, how they were in the happiest times of their lives as kids and wondering where their adulthood would leave them. Would they look back on the sun-dappled days of running naked across the scrubby lawns with nostalgia when they were left languishing in unquenchable heat as adults who were trying to scrape by on almost nothing? What story could I tell that would shine a light on those who never had an opportunity to actualize the kind of dreams I valued? Wasn’t this arrogant? I asked yet again. Who’s to say my marker of what was valuable would have been of any interest or merit to them?
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And with thy spirit...
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The U.S. has just sent light infantry troops into Honduras.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It seems the Sandinistas crossed the border and fighting broke out between these rebels and the Contras, whose camps are scattered along the border inside Honduras.
“Pray for peace. Pray for the safety of the young service men traveling to Honduras.”
[Jesus takes up his cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Noreaga has yet to resign and there’s no chance for peace in Panama as long as he’s in control. More unrest today as doctors and nurses at the major hospital in Panama City threw rocks at soldiers because they will not be paid this week.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It appears that the President of Honduras has asked President Reagan for a show of muscle. Troops will be based 125 miles from the fighting. No democratic government in the world will be refused military aid against communist aggression.
[Jesus is striped of his garments.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The skirmishes increased on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Men on Nightline argued; called each other liars. Who’s right, Ted?
[Jesus is nailed to the cross.]
Government policy. Amen.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I’m a chaplain in the armed forces; we’ll definitely be in Panama soon. They’re killing our country with drugs. I bet we’ll also have to get to Mexico before the drug traffic stops.”
[Jesus dies on the cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I don’t usually have a homily before the service but I’d like to introduce our program for later. Fifteen years ago, I took my first mission trip abroad…a child died in my arms. He had worms and if you know nothing about worms, they take over the body to the point that they crowd into the esophagus and the child chokes to death.”
[The body of Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Manuel Noreaga squints from the television and asks, “You want a revolution?”
“Save us and keep us, we humbly beseech you, O Lord.”
“The peace of the Lord be always with you.”
“And with thy spirit.”
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[The image at the top of this post is one of the Stations of the Cross created by the incredibly talented artist and architect Alberto Alfonso, who is one of four architects featured in my book Four Florida Moderns, which W.W. Norton & Company published last year.]
If Language Were Liquid
I stood at the window of the house, which was nestled into a copse of fir trees, admiring the statuesque conifers that framed the bowl of the valley like a spiky matte. Their heads shot skyward like shuttlecocks that had blasted off and were then frozen in motion. I’d seen the valley during the summer when it was covered with wild grasses and flowers. Now, it was a vessel filled with sugary powder. The incredible thing about the composition framed by the picture window was that it couldn’t have been plotted better if a master painter had composed the scene: the trees directed the eye beyond the valley to the massive peaks that towered in the distance. The stubble of trees and fingering slopes filled in the composition when the clouds moved away, leaving behind them a downy comforter of shaved ice.
One evening we didn’t leave the slopes until the sun was sinking low in the sky. The light dallied with the clouds and dappled the mountain in patches of ripe rosiness interspersed with matte-finished smudges of shadow in palest gray. At certain points along the lift-lines, the aspen trees—their gnarled and writhing fingers gathering ice—gave the appearance they were fiddling with Victorian lace. The conifers on the highest slopes seemed to gather powder to their chests, forming great paws that seemed to want to bat the frosty air. I was always happy when storms left their backwash on the slopes so I was teased for being the group’s powder hound. As I swished through the fluffy granules, I felt as though I were shooting through a crystalline forest. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d seen Snow White guiding a prancing unicorn along one of the trails, the puffs of air escaping its delicate muzzle forming plumes of steam that drifted above its conical horn.
After several runs in deep powder, I was feeling the strain in my legs and my lungs, which weren’t accustomed to the high altitude, so I took a break from the exertion of skiing, popping Suzanne Vega’s cassette Solitude Standing into my Walkman. As I listened to "In the Eye," an idea for a short story started to form, inspired by her lyrics:
“If you were to kill me now
Right here I would still
Look you in the eye
And I would burn myself
Into your memory
As long as you were still alive
I would not run
I would not turn
I would not hi-i-ide…
I would live inside of you
I’d make you wear me
Like a scar
And I would burn myself
into your memory
And run through everything you are…”
The story had as its protagonist a woman named Karrman, who opened her tale with the declaration, “My mother’s maiden name was Karr and she couldn’t bear to give it up but she wasn’t strong enough to keep it herself. I guess that means I’ll be her identity until I die.”
Her newfound love interest, named Martin, asks, “You mean until she dies?”
“No,” Karrman corrects him; “that kind of brainwashing doesn’t die with her, it can only die with me—that is unless I have kids and then it’s a guaranteed right of succession.”
She let out a brash cackle and he knew then and there that if she laughed that way too many times, he’d have to kill her. She did, of course; it was simply who she was, and he snapped one evening—her crassness sending him over the edge. Lost in a blood-pulsing fog, he bludgeoned Karrman to death as Vega’s “Night Vision” wafted into the room from the speakers flanking the record player in her apartment:
When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don’t give in too quickly
Find the thing she’s erased…
He taped her legs at the ankles as he salivated over the idea of burying her in a snowy field. He decided he couldn’t let her go without a souvenir so he cut a piece of the tape that he’d plastered over her mouth—a symbolic gesture that he had shut her up for all eternity—and placed the scrap in his pocket. He looked out the window of her apartment toward the high-rise next door, the lights from which were casting strong shadows into the dim interiors. No one was watching so he took his time savoring his deed, turning up the volume as "Solitude Standing" pulsed out into the room, while sipping slowly on the glass of wine Karrman had poured him. He rocked back and forth to Vega’s soulful guitar chords and tentatively beautiful voice:
Solitude stands in the doorway
And I’m struck once again by her black silhouette
By her long cool stare and her silence
I suddenly remember each time we’ve met
And she says “I’ve come to set a twisted thing straight.”
And she says “I’ve come to lighten this dark heart.”
And she takes my wrist; I feel her imprint of fear
And I say, “I’ve never thought of finding you here…”
As the word trailed off, he raised the glass, toasting himself, and unleashed a creepy laugh. THWACK! I was startled from my narrative by the sound of skis meeting the ground as a guy dropped his on the snow next to me and sat down to eat an apple. I hadn’t realized I’d been sitting on the bench long enough that my ski suit had nearly frozen to the slats of the wood bench. I took off a mitten to check my watch and it hit me that Jim was likely having a heart attack; I just hoped he hadn’t already called the ski patrol. What a mess that would be! As I pried myself from the frosty bench and jammed my boots into my skis to head down the mountain, I had a picture of him pacing in front of the dressing rooms down below. I flipped the volume higher on my Walkman and let Vega’s “Language” carry me along the power-laden trails:
If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be…
I’d like to meet you
In a timeless, placeless place
Somewhere out of context
And beyond all consequences…
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