- Posts tagged #TravelTuesday
- Explore #TravelTuesday on posterous
A Slight Detour on The Road to Promise
Today marks the end of an era in several ways: it's the final flourish for #LetsBlogOff and the final post (for a while, at least) for The Road to Promise. You can read why Paul and Gerard have decided to cease the bi-monthly blogging phenomenon here. I've decided it's time to try to publish The Road to Promise in book-form so I'll be putting my energies into a book proposal for the foreseeable future. I would like to express gratitude to everyone who has visited this blog for the past several years, and to thank Paul and Gerard for giving us an exciting forum on which to exchange writing and ideas. Wish me luck, would you? I'll let everyone know if I manage to snag a book deal; until then, best of luck to everyone in their life/work endeavors...
No Power In a Square
The snazziest party spot in Wagner on any given Saturday night was the local VFW, where you could chow down on juicy prime rib and dance the polka until you were ready to drop. Elmo was as patriotic as any of his fellow Wagnerites, hanging out at the VFW with that sheepish look on his face, which told anyone who knew him that a joke was on the tip of his tongue. Despite this easy-going demeanor, he also made it clear that he believed the government had ruined his people by handing out money instead of making them work. He remarked that each administration seemed to grow worse, as if each President was trying to outdo the one before him in what Elmo considered to be unwise practices.
I had come across a quote in Ian Frazier’s Great Plains stating that William T. Sherman, then General-in-Chief of the Army, maintained the government’s plan was to remove all Native Americans, who were being divided and forced onto reservations at the time, to a safe place and reduce them to a helpless condition. Maybe the dole did continue to encourage dependency, but the condition was forced upon them by what Mary Crow Dog called an "alien, more powerful culture."
With late autumn, our spate of trips bringing volunteers to South Dakota had ended so we had moved from our little house to the Sleepy Pine Motel because it would be just the two of us during the dreary winter months. I immediately felt the stricture of having only one small, high window after having had greater access to the prairie sky and its abundance of light through the ample windows in the house. I had been reading about the transitional period from the camp circle days to “acculturation” and had learned that Spotted Tail had disliked the mansion the government had built for him so he had moved back to a nearby camp and installed each of his wives in their own tipis. The conical tents were cooler in the summer than houses without air conditioning had been. This was one of the reasons Native Americans gave when explaining why they’d had a difficult time transitioning from the round structure to the square one. Black Elk had remarked that residing in the first log houses built on the reservations was "a bad way to live.” He declared, “There can be no power in a square."
Elmo's sister Edna had become quite affronted by my regurgitations of the long ago, displaying a frustration which ran counter to her normally serene personality when I repeated some anecdote I'd gleaned from a book. She seemed to be growing weary of my ramblings about the larger-than-life “Indians” who had roamed the surrounding prairie before the coming of wasichu. These personae often seemed more alive to me than the people I saw going through the motions of life on the reservation. When I asked her if she had ever slept in a tipi, she adopted an unusually sarcastic tone, telling me in no uncertain terms that she thought the people who claimed they wanted to return to the old ways were ridiculous. "I'd like to see how long they would last without their carpeting, their heating and their air conditioning," she retorted; “much less how they’d feel about giving up their televisions.”
Edna was one of the Native Americans who held no grief over the passing of their former ways of life. She credited her mother for her advocacy of the Episcopal Church, saying it was easy for her to be faithful to her religion—to try to protect it as it was—because she could remember the devotion her mother had displayed when she walked to church every Sunday, even trudging through deep snow to get there. "I think about always following those footsteps," she remarked, her pensive look illustrating how much she missed her mom.
But there were those who said they'd grown tired of what they saw as empty promises made by Christianity, which they believed had only given lip-service to equality. I felt as torn as the culture I was interacting with as I straddled the past and the present. A powwow at the middle school brought a great surge of emotions when I heard the wailing and the drumbeats of the native music for the first time. Watching the sun glinting from the thimbles on the jingle dancers' costumes, I longed for a flash of emotional clarity; one that would show me whether I had a right to the grief I felt, as this was not my history to mourn.
It was then I came to realize it was my own internal pain being reflected back to me, not theirs, causing me grief. The history of oppression that had deposited trauma in these people echoed a milder incidence of oppression in my own life. But I had been choosing to focus on the external chaos around me—fixating on them rather than on my own feelings of despair. It was true that for the luck of the draw, I could have been the Native American woman slumped over on the curb a few feet away, clutching the empty bottle of booze and her tattered dignity. But this was not my path, as much as I wrongly identified with her pain.
These realizations were confusing ones, and I struggled to keep fear from overriding my admiration for how they held their lives together. After all, it must have required a great deal of strength and courage to face each new day knowing what was ahead in the way of poverty, racism and turmoil.
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!
The Heavens Cannot Contain You
Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty.
In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May Have Life, Sneve states the little chapel was first built in August 1870 from logs gathered by the Native Americans who wanted a church on their reservation. In 1873, W. Hobart Hare, then Bishop of the newly created Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara, arrived at Yankton Mission and chose the church for his cathedral, making his home in a small room built onto its side.
The frame structure as we found it in 1989 was not the original; it wasn’t concecrated until 1886, a little over one hundred and three years prior to my setting foot within its interior. One of the things I enjoyed about the history of the Native Americans I was reading was their embracing of their own brand of mythology, something they seemed to do as naturally as any culture since the ancient Greeks. In fact, they were steeped in their version of it before the wasichu, white perople, came along and tried to snuff it out of them. In Yankton, one of the earliest bits of folklore relating to the Episcopal Church and its entrée into Sioux society was the story of the conversion of Tipi Sapa, then the chief of the Yanktonai whose name in Dakota meant Black Lodge. Once “Christianized,” Tipi Sapa had been given the name Philip Deloria, and was lauded as “the best known of all the native priests.”
Sneve tells the story of the day his interest in the church was first recorded. Tipi Sapa rode by the chapel in full war regalia when he heard the congregation singing “Guide Me Thou Great Jehovah” in Dakota, stopping for a brief time to listen to the words. He didn’t enter the chapel at that time but returned another day to hear the same hymn being sung. It is said the words of the hymn made a great impression on the young chief, a response that eventually led him to approach Bishop Hare about becoming a Christian. When the bishop told him he must give up his chief’s position, cut his hair and become a simple man, he balked, stating he was a powerful chief. He did eventually agree to be baptized, and was sent to Shattuck Military School for the beginning of the inculturation process. After completing the educational and service requirements to enter the priesthood, he was ordained a deacon at St. Stephen’s chapel on the Cheyenne River reservation, then spent forty years on the Standing Rock reservation as a priest, returning to the Yankton reservation in 1925. His story expanded beyond Native American culture when his visage was placed in the reredos of the high altar in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—one of only three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages.”
My stewing about the abandoned chapel in Greenwood was the counter opposite to how the parishioners were feeling. I could have taken a cue from my grandmother, who loved to say the more you stirred shit, the worse it smelled but I couldn’t let go of my disgust over how the church had treated Native Americans in the past. My viewpoint was not shared by the Wagner congregation whose excitement had reached a fever pitch by the day Bishop Anderson was visiting for the groundbreaking. Just before his closing comments for the ceremony that day, the Bishop read a prayer: “Oh Lord God of Israel, the heavens cannot contain you, yet you are pleased to dwell in the midst of your people, and have moved us to set apart a space on which to build a house of prayer: accept and bless the work which we have now begun, that it may be brought to completion, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
He then remarked how the great spirit had waffled through the framed shell of a building we had been standing within, the studded walls surrounding a rough concrete slab foundation still fully open to the elements. “The heavens cannot contain you,” he said, raising his hands to let the wind stir the papers he held. I thought this was a fitting statement considering how the strong breezes had fluttered our clothing and programs throughout the entire service. The pages of the Bibles the lay readers had been holding danced as if in a ceremony of their own as the men tried to keep their places. Finally, the Bishop ended his closing statements by declaring the wind was indeed the spirit, or breath, of the “word,” because it had joined in the celebration of a new beginning for the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Father Hobbs, who led the congregation, had spoken of miracles during the service, his list including the $55,000 grant from the United Thank Offering, the construction knowledge Jim brought to the project, and the free labor given by all the volunteers who traveled with us from Chattanooga. “The miracle of this spirit of volunteerism will allow the church to be debt free,” he said: “a luxury, yet a necessity in the life of this small parish.”
A feeling of pride that we had brought something of value to a group of people who’d rarely caught breaks in our country was battling it out with my feelings of regret. Would our hymns sung in English have drawn Tipi Sapa in if he’d rode by on horseback today? I questioned. The only answer was the breeze stirring the skirt I’d worn, the fabric whipping into a frenzy as the Bishop walked over to shake Jim’s hand. The silence of the undulant air provided no answer as I smiled and tried to appear gracious while my emotions buffeted my heaving mind. Where would this turmoil lead me? I wondered as the Bishop embraced me in a gentle hug.
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 is a participating post in Let's Blog Off. To see how my blogging compatriots chose to answer how the preceding generations had made an impact on their lives, click here.
The Depository of Arrogance
We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money.
The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?
With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.
Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.
I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good."
I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church.
The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.
The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week.
And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself.
Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?
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 is a participating post in Let’s Blog Off, the subject today being “If I could turn back time…” To see the full roster of bloggers who are riffing on the subject, click here.
Land of the Free
Once we had exited the Rockies, driving from Steamboat Springs to Wagner, South Dakota, was a lesson in monotony, the Plains stretching into oblivion as we struck a straight coarse on the shaft of asphault that ran right up to the horizon. We passed over so many dried creek beds, I wondered how anything could survive on the sun-scoured expanse of brittle grasses. Old Woman Creek had packed up and gone, leaving behind a scattering of brittle bones and the splintered scaps of cottonwood limbs begging for rain while the sky refrained.
The first elevation relief came as we neared the border between Wyoming and South Dakota in the form of the Black Hills. They were being pounded by a scowling storm, visible from as far away as Newcastle—its cloud-choked head feathering heavenward and its dark heart bearing down on the outer edge of the hills. The closer we drew, the angrier it seemed, I thought, and I was right: once we reached its proximity, we were pounded with hail so thick we could hardly see to drive. At one point, we were barely advancing as quarter-inch-sized balls of ice blanketed the ground an inch and a half deep.
I was thankful we were in such a macho vehicle—the old Bronco had seen much worse having been through four college-age boys in succession as Jim passed it from one son to another and had weathered a decade of being kicked around by the partying set that took over Steamboat each winter. Though it never shrugged, the sound of ice striking the thin metal of its hood and roof was deafening at times. I’d had kinder welcomes but in spite of the weather’s tantrum, I decided I wanted to return to the Black Hills someday because it was where the Native Americans believed nature had the most amplified spiritual voice. She had certainly been exercising it that day as we drove past tourist traps and tacky intrusions on a gorgeous backdrop of jagged peaks covered in the verdant thickness of pines reaching high into the sky.
Once past the Hills, the flatness of the land returned until we reached the Badlands, an incredibly bleak and frightening landscape if there ever was one. It was as if the earth was eating itself, and the bleached-out, bone-dry colors were the counter opposites to the Black Hills’ lush infusion of blue-greens and deep grays. I wondered how quickly it took the Badlands to change as plateaus and buttes melted away, then formed again as the edge of the grasslands caved in on itself. Is anything ever constant here or is this a treacherous world of continual dissolving? I wondered.
We skirted the Buffalo Gap Grasslands to see its buxom namesakes grazing—some in pairs and others wandering the expanses in small groups. The first prairie dogs came into view as we dipped a bit further into the park, their “Prairie Dog Town” a field of dirt mounds, some of which had the straight-backed homeowners themselves popping up from within as they haughtily surveyed us from their tunneled residences.
It felt as if it had taken weeks for us to make our way to Wagner, though it had been only a day and a half. When we arrived, we were greeted by the stalwart parishioners of the tiny town, and it wasn’t long before one stood out. We parked the Bronco at the house Jim had rented and made our way to the community center where we were being honored with a dinner, and I knew immediately who was going to be Jim’s favorite among our new friends. The minute we entered the open room, Elmo’s booming voice and thin cackling laugh, which shook his large girth, welcomed us, not once letting up during the entire evening.
He reminded me of an overstuffed teddy bear with its ears torn off because his head was shaved and his jowls were so pronounced, his tiny ears seemed tucked away behind the protruding cheeks. He wore baggy pants that had never been “in fashion,” the thick suspenders holding them up smudged where he would fiddle with them as he pontificated about one subject or another. His smile was so endearing to me because it reminded me of my grandmother’s when she was soaking her false teeth at night—the indented oblong of his big grin hiding his lips as if for safekeeping.
His eyes were perpetually twinkling because he was always thinking of his next joke or a riff he could interject into any conversation, whether it was actually fitting or not. That night, he pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. It was darkened and worn smooth from being handled innumerable times. He held it in front of him and paused for effect, finally saying with a drawl, “Well, lookie here!” As he said it, he slowly pulled a fly from its interior, which prompted Jim to ask, “Do you fish?”
Elmo answered, “Not anymore; but if I got stranded on the river somewhere I could catch my dinner!” He broke into a hearty laugh at his own joke, the only thing making it funny besides the fact he’d not likely been on a river in decades. As evidenced by his portliness, he did like to eat. “My Grandpa told me to always get a look at the cook before I eat at a restaurant,” he said that night. “He told me, ‘If the cook is skinny, don’t eat there; fat, jolly cooks mean a good meal because they constantly sample their own cooking!’” He referred to himself as a Siouxwegian because his ancestry was a mix of Sioux and Norwegian. When he explained this to me, he slapped his knee and shook his head as he sniggered, seeming so particularly amused he must have been hearing the fact for the first time, though that was not the case.
I couldn’t help but giggle myself as I scribbled my impressions of Elmo into my writer’s notebook on the flight home—a 12-hour journey that left me feeling exhausted but happy to see Sam after nine days away from him. I had picked up a number of books in South Dakota, among them Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr. It was a scathing book aimed at white culture but the chapter about the Native American sense of humor gave me extra insight into Elmo’s personality. I was working my way through the tough material during mornings on the screened porch—feeling my skin burn with shame that a people’s civil rights were still being breached in our country, especially since we were so fond of proclaiming we were the land of the free. I was receiving a painful education as to the ways of the world, the ways of our government and the ways of ugly racism.
I found myself wondering time and again why these weren’t the stories we were taught in school: why did our lessons stop after the Pilgrims and the Indians shared that supposed meal on that first Thanksgiving? Should it still be looked upon as such a thankful day? I questioned, closing Deloria’s book and wondering what other inconsistencies were about to come to the fore. According to the history books, the Native Americans gave their best to the Pilgrims who’d made their entrée into their world during that lauded celebratory meal, and I had just experienced the same level of generosity during a dinner in Wagner when a group of Native Americans who had so little to give provided us with a delicious and heartfelt experience.
I had been told that many Sioux took the rations they received from the government—cheese, sugar, flour and butter, for instance—to the dump and tossed them into the trash to make a point. Peter Cook was not one of those. He brought several of the most magnificent apple pies I’d ever seen or tasted to that dinner. As I watched his face gleam with pride when Jim relished his first bite, I thought about how very different history could have been. If only I could rewrite it, I’d include a great deal more true “thanks giving” and a lot less fanfare.
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 is a Let’s Blog Off post; to see the other bloggers’ plats du jour, click here.
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.
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.
# # #
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!
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!
* * *
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.
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!
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!
Today's post is a #LetsBlogOff post. For a full list of participants telling everyone how they relax, click here.
Mountain Song
* * *
We sprinted through the Miami airport to make our connection because the customs queue through which we had been processed from Costa Rica was a bogged-down mess. Once we were finally on the plane to Atlanta, my excitement was making it difficult for me to write—the fragmented thoughts, scattered words and jumbled feelings exploding onto the page in an incoherent mish-mash of joy and impatience. A friend of ours, Jerry, had made the trip with us, as had our priest from Chattanooga. It was the first time I’d been around either of them for as long as a week and I’d grown fond of Jerry’s voice, the inflections that made his southern drawl so friendly had a lyrical charm that only a down-home boy could convey. He and I had laughed for days about the fact that when Jim sent the Padre to the hardware store to buy rope, he’d asked for ropa, which garnered him nothing. The clerk obviously couldn’t understand why he was intent on purchasing clothing when they didn’t sell garments there!
Once home, I managed to capture a few days to myself because Jim was off on a business trip. Sam slept beside me as I journaled the first morning—all fours up in the air, a snoring mass of golden-hued hair. As I stroked his belly, it occurred to me that the value of home was truly priceless. Storms had roared through the night before, trailing in their wake a shooting star. In another mood, I might have taken that as a sign of promise but I was weary and bereft. My goal for the day was to let go of my gaunt frame of mind so I could enjoy the atmosphere in which I was luxuriating as Bridal Veil Falls sang over my shoulder in an earthly percussive arrangement of smattering water against unyielding boulders. A dove’s contented coo reproached me for having any feelings other than gratitude given that I was finally tranquilly at home. I’d been pouring words into my personal journal, which had helped to clear my head somewhat—there was something about spilling the quandary of my life onto its pages that always made room for a modicum of ease. The sun, which had made a personal call as it rose above the fog-choked valley, was casting long shadows on my writer’s notebook and causing the point of my pen where it met the page to gleam.
I was made for this quiet, this solitude, this calm, and I reveled in the fact that Jim’s trip had given me the time to myself, which I believed would help me sort through the mess we’d made of things. As I sat there wondering what changes we could undertake that would help us right our wrongs, the wind rode up the mountain, whistling like the engine of a speeding train. It was then that I noticed it was happily marking time on the porch, its rhythm moving the rocking chair as it took a breather. I loved the idea that the undulant currents wanted to take a respite, and the fact that they had chosen my deck as a hangout delighted me to no end.
Questions as to the quality of my writing were surfacing—the realization dawning that when it was rushed my work lacked the vivacity of the material created during times of complete absorption. Had my work reached the level at which I should be so concerned with publishability? I wondered. I longed for more time for revision, but I had also seen that the process was not always my friend; that the flesh of my poetry was too tender to be ripped apart and expected to heal without exhibiting scars. Was I a skilled enough practitioner to prescribe the proper ointment for the treatment of these lesions?
This question was a quirky one because I wasn’t inclined to write what would be considered “publishable” work anyway. I simply didn’t see myself creating the type of poetic constructs I saw in most of the magazines I read because I felt the work I came across in the mainstream press lacked a certain narrative beauty I wanted to achieve. And yet, I had to admit that I wrote for the approval of others because. “It’s impossible for me to give myself the very thing that I need to feel accomplished: an appreciation from a source other than myself,” I wrote that morning. How vulgar this looked in black and white! I thought; yet, vulgar as it was, wasn’t this the truth for every writer? Even if a writer was unaware of the fact that he or she needed this give-and-take, I bet there were none among us who didn’t crave attention for what he or she produced.
I finished my coffee as these thoughts reached an unresolved end, stilling my mind to focus on the sun as it broke through the cloudbank. The scene was hyper illuminated as she infused the towering billows that fanned out like a long ball-gown with her verve. How glorious would it feel for the upper reaches of your hair to burn—a filmy, shimmering cotton, torn, singed and arranged in a glittery display? I wondered. As I stared into the blazing harshness, a hawk skirted past, dipping just below our rock outcropping as silent as night. I picked up the book I’d chosen to read, watching as the attentive raptor made several circles above the falls. As I caressed the tattered cover of Strains from a Dulcimore, a book of poems by Emma Bell Miles, the hawk keened twice and then dove earthward.
I thought the moment was remarkably serendipitous, as Miles had once ambled along this very bluff gathering inspiration for her writing, her watercolors and her sketches. Had she also marveled at the quality of the light, the hawks, the waterfall as she traipsed through the woods so long ago? Her world—in the 1890s—was one of a densely forested mountaintop sprinkled only with the occasional cabin, a far cry from present-day Walden’s Ridge with its pricey real estate and busy streets.
Her other published works included The Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, but it was her poems that moved me, and I felt grateful to have had the time to sit with them as the sun climbed ever higher in the sky, setting the yellowed surface of the worn pages I flipped through aglow:
Mountain Song
Sing me another song tonight—
Tell me a story, Love—
A queer old dear old dreamy tale
Of gulch and cliff and cove;
A song of wimpling waters where
The trout’s white bellies gleam;
A story scrolled against dark pines
In wood-smoke blue as dream.
Sing me a song, low, elfin-sad,
That mountain-folk know well;
Tell me a tale of candle-light
In cabins where they dwell.
For O my heart has ached to these
Ere love began to be,
And you, Dear, are but part of this,
The life you lent to me.
-Emma Bell Miles
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!
The Puzzle of My Life
It’s remarkable how quickly #LetsBlogOff comes around and the topic today is “Where do you get your ideas for creating what you do…Do you have a favorite writing table or a quiet corner in your house or apartment?” My ideas have varied birthing points but rest in only one repository—my writer’s notebook—which carries them forward, keeping them safe and alive until I’m ready to use them in projects such as this memoir. I’ve been in the hospital for a week—heading home today I hope—and I’ve filled page after page with sensory perceptions about my time here that I know I will use somehow somewhere. My Lucille Ball-esque run-in with the ice/filtered water machine is likely the only thing you won’t be seeing recorded anywhere amongst my copious notes (a girl’s gotta reserve some dignity!). To see how other #LetsBlogOff participants glean their creative ideas, click here for a full list.
The Puzzle of My Life
We were back in Siquirres. The morning had dawned rainy, the tip-tap of large drops drumming the tin roof making me so drowsy I slept longer than I should have. When the other noises of life finally penetrated my consciousness, it was the birdsong that capped all the other sounds. It was, in fact, always difficult to ignore in surround sound but I had to admit on that particular morning there was a difference—suddenly, the twittering of the birds seemed positive, quite a turnabout for me given how negative I had been of late.
I was far from proud of that and I wished I could learn to be different but I was having a tough time making an altered attitude stick. “Maybe it is time for me to grow up,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook, which was normally sturdy but was so damp it had become pliable—flexible to the point of disintegration. Was it possible that the environment here would help me to become strong if I could learn how to be more flexible or would I fall apart as quickly as this pressed cardboard book I’d grown so dependent upon?
Kimberly and Gertrude were taking the bus to Siquirres so they could have lunch with me, a break from the grind that I celebrated. I would give Kimberly the Barbie Coloring Book and Crayons I brought her. Little did I know as I placed them on the table in the kitchen they were bringing me gifts that would mean much more to me than the silly nothings I had brought from the states. Mrs. Green had sent me a wooden calendar. I was moved and humbled by its exquisite craftsmanship and the beauty of its presentation. She had made it, which meant all the more, and this level of generosity was so in keeping with the deep respect the people continued to show me.
Having news of her made me remember how close Gus and Mr. Green seemed. They would sit for hours on the porch talking about the most inane things, and every chance I had, I would light like a fly on the wall to listen in on their musings as I crouched in the corner of the porch. I learned that Mr. Green gleaned most of his medical inclinations, for which he was touted, from his wife. She was always recommending this treatment or that one, such as a “prescription” for Marcie, who had a sore throat. Mrs. Green insisted that she mix banana vinegar with black pepper, heat the mixture, and gargle it.
One day one of our volunteers had asked Mr. Green if he could think of anything he didn’t have that he might want. He thought for a long time, his ample lips pulsing as he rubbed the knob of his chin, then finally answered, “It would be money. I have everything else.” I was sitting with him one afternoon when a harmless crazy man, well known around town for his antics, passed by. He had a yellow ball cap socked on his head sideways, the bill pointing to the right making him look far younger than he was. Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” was blaring from the house across the street and he began dancing to it—quite well actually. When the song trailed off, he opened his mouth wide, looking side to side to see if anyone was admiring him, then held his hands up in the air, fingers splayed, as if to say, “Hold your applause!” Mr. Green and I laughed until we were doubled over in pain.
The rain had finally stopped and the sun was shining brightly. This was the tropics I remembered: sultry to the point of suffocating. The mosquitoes had multiplied greatly from the abundant moisture and I was battling a swarm of them when I bumped into Philip Wheaton on the way back from breakfast. A jack-of-all-trades who prided himself in the breadth of his skills, he had visited the job site several times, and was now helping with some of the new church’s paperwork. He typed with one hand flying and the other resting on the edge of the typewriter—his shoulders moving back and forth with the rhythm of his characters as they indented the paper in fuzzy black blobs.
He was tall and loosely jointed. Not too well groomed, yet not dirty. It was as if he’d been haphazardly put together and I marveled at his thin sideburns extending almost to his mouth. They angled off to a point as they reached for his lips, little more than skinny triangles of graying hair. His eyebrows were barely there, but the hair that did remain was wiry and unruly. He had a great deal of personality in his eyes, especially when he smiled. His great receding hairline was combed back, lending his sideburns more prominence and giving him the appearance of a scrooge or some other Dickensian character. I pegged him as rangy as he ambled along on spidery legs. He was almost hyper about his work, or extremely intent at the very least. As he talked about this project or that project, his brown eyes danced in his wide, creased face.
I was terribly homesick, was missing Sam so much I ached with it. I had brought a jigsaw puzzle to work and it had helped me to pass the time, but as I worked it, I thought of how simple it seemed to put together piece-by-piece compared to the puzzle of my life. I looked around the large front room with its alternating dark and light wood floorboards, walls made from the same, strong dark wood plentiful in Costa Rica—some of which had been painted yellow. In that moment of observation, I felt more isolated than I could bear but I couldn’t let the longing hold: the feeling was far too melancholy. I stood so quickly the chair crashed to the floor behind me, then headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. I felt ever more alien in the sparsely equipped room with its tiny refrigerator and petite stove, which were dwarfed by a huge porcelain sink spouting only cold running water.
I gulped down the water as I sunk into a chair covered in faded Naugahyde—the once bright pink, caramel and pert green flowers on the upholstery long faded to pastels. There was a tan mat woven from rushes under a tiny coffee table draped with a bright, though very dirty, linen shawl, which had been stitched with a decorative motive in silk threads. The furniture was straight and hard, and I sat on the clammy unforgiving upholstery thinking how relieved I was that I’d be heading home to greater comfort the day before my 31st birthday. I’d been trying to think of a way to sum things up as far as life in Siquirres was concerned and I’d hit upon the theme that life vibrated: music, birdsong, weather, the vivacity with which everyone spoke—everything vibrated. I might have given the idea “life vibrates” more power if my thoughts hadn’t been as dry and cracked as the dustbowl. There was no spark for the jungle, only the excitement of going home.
As I approached 31, I made the commitment to myself to try and rebuild whatever it was that was broken in me—not remake it as it had been but to refashion it into something stronger and real. God help me do it right this time, I thought as I packed and let the thrill of the fact that the next day I would be “home, sweet home,” fill me with hope.
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!
