The Solace of Open Spaces

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Crow Fair is a five-day country fair—Indian style. It’s different from ours because their roots are nomadic, not agricultural. Instead of the horse pulls, steer judging, and cake stands, they have all-night sessions of Indian dancing, a traditional dress parade, and a lengthy rodeo augmented by horse racing and betting. Looking down from the hill where I pitched our borrowed tent, the encampment of well over five hundred tipis could have been a summer council at the turn of the nineteenth century except for the pickups, loudspeakers, and the ubiquitous aluminum folding chairs. Inside the sprawl of tipis, tents, and arbors was a circle of concession stands, at the center of which stood the big open-air dance arbor.

  My young friend Ursula, who was visiting from Cambridge, asked if these Indians lived here all the time. Indians don’t, of course, still live in tipis, but the encampment looked so well-worn and amiable she wasn’t wrong in thinking so. Part of the “wholeness” of traditional Indian life that the tipi and circular dance arbor signify is the togetherness at these powwows. Indians don’t go home at night; they camp out where the action is, en masse, whole extended families and clans spanning several generations. It’s a tradition with them the way sending our kids to summer camp is with us.

  Two days before the fair started, the pickups began to roll in with tipi poles slung over the tailgates. Brush was cut, canvas unrolled, and in twelve hours a village had been made. Tipis and tents, reserved mainly for sleeping, were often as plush as an Arab’s. Inside were wall-to-wall rugs, hanging lanterns, and ceremonial drums. Outdoor kitchens were arranged under canvas flies or inside a shady brush arbor with packing crates turned on end for shelves, and long picnic tables were loaded with food. With barely any elbow room between camps, even feuding tribes took on a congenial air, their children banding together and roving freely.

  At the morning parade you could see the splendors of traditional beadwork, elk tooth shirts, buckskin dresses, and beaded moccasins, but what interested me more were the contradictions: the Sioux boy in warrior dress riding the hood of a Corvette; vans with smokey windows covered with star quilts and baskets; the roar of new wave music coming from the cars. John Whiteman, the last surviving Custer scout, rode on the back of a big ton truck with his tiny wife, who had hoisted up a brown-and-white-striped umbrella to shade herself from the sun. They were both, someone said, well past 110 years old.

  Ursula and I were the first ones at the rodeo because everyone else seemed to know it would start late. The young, cigar-smoking man who sold us our tickets turned out to be an Eskimo from Barrow, Alaska. He’d come south to live with what he called “these mean Plains Indians.”

  The Crow crossed into this valley in the late 1700s and fought off the Shoshone to claim territory that spread between the Big Horns, the Badlands, and the Wind River Mountains. Trappers, like Osborne Russell, who hunted right along with them, described the Crow as tall, insolent, and haughty, but submissive when cornered. Russell met one chief who had hair eleven feet long, and said their beadwork was “excessively gaudy.” The Crows were so pinched geographically by raiding Sioux and Blackfeet they adopted a militaristic style, still evident in the way they zipped around camp in police cars with “Executive Security Force” emblazoned on the doors. Endowed with a natural horse-handling ability, they became famous horse thieves.

  The rodeo got under way after an off-key rendition of “God Bless America” (instead of the national anthem). A local band, aptly named “The Warriors,” warmed up on the stand in front of us. While the rough stock was run into the bucking chutes they played “He’s Just a Coca-Cola Cowboy.” As testimony to their enthusiasm for horses, the rodeo, usually a two- or three-hour affair, lasted seven hours.

  Before the all-night session of dancing began we made the circuit of concession stands. Between the corn dogs and Indian tacos—fry bread topped with beans and hot sauce—was an aisle of video games. Between the menudo and the caramel apples were two gambling tents—one for bingo, the other for poker. You could eat corn barbecued in the husk Navajo style and a hunk of Taos bread, or gulp down a buffalo burger and a Coke, the one cooked by a Navajo from Shiprock, the other by an Ogalalla Sioux. Ursula had her ears pierced and bought a pair of opalescent earrings; I bought a T-shirt with the words “Crow Fair” across the front, and around and around we went until the dancing began.

  Dark. Instead of the tamping, rigid, narcotic bounce of Sun Dance that seemed to set into motion a chronic tremor, one that radiated out of the Lodge to knock against our legbones and temples, the dances at Crow Fair were show-offish and glittering. These Society, War, Animal, and Contest Dances served no direct purpose these days, the way some religious dances do. “What you’re seeing out there is a lot of dyed turkey feathers and plastic elk teeth, and kids doing the Indian disco,” a friend commented. He’s an Italian from Saint Louis who married a Kiowa woman when he was sixteen and together they moved to Wyoming to live with the Shoshone. Incongruity delights him as much as tradition. “We assimilate a little this way, and a little that way. Life is only mutation.”

  The dance arbor was lit by mercury vapor lamps hung from one forty-foot power pole at the center—no bonfires or Coleman lanterns here. The ceremonies started with a long prayer in English during which a Crow child in front of me shot off a toy gun, aiming first at the preacher, then at himself, then at me. Six separate drum groups set up around the periphery with names like Night Hawks, Whistling Elk, Plenty Coups, Magpie, and Salt Lake Crows. Although participants had come from a great number of tribes—Assiniboine, Apache and Shoshone, Sioux, Kiowa, and Arapaho—what we saw was only Plains-Indian dancing. Performed in a clockwise motion, as if following the sun, the dancers moved in long lines like spokes on a wheel. Anyone could dance, and it seemed at times as if everyone did. Families crowded in around the dance space with their folding chairs and Pendleton blankets—babies and grandmothers, boys and fathers, mothers and daughters, all dressed fit to kill. The long succession of dances began: Girls’ Fancy Shawl, Boys’ Traditional, Fast and Slow War Dance, a Hoop Dance, a Hot Dance, and a Grass Dance. Intertribal dances—open to anyone—alternated with contest dances that were judged. Participants wore Coors numbers pinned to their backs the way bronc riders do. The costumes were elaborate. There were feathers dyed magenta and lime green, then fluffed at the tips; great feather bustles attached to every backside; and long straps of sleighbells running from ankles to hips. The Hot Dancers wore porcupine-hair roaches on their heads, the War Dancers carried straight and crooked lances, the Society Dancers wore wolf heads with little pointed ears, and the women in fringed buckskin dresses carried elegant eagle fans. One young man, who seemed to be a loner, had painted black stripes across his face and chest so thickly the paint ran together into a blackface. Later, we discovered he was white. A good many white people danced every night. One couple had flown in from Germany; they were Hot Dance aficionados, and when I tried to talk to them I found out they spoke only German and Crow. A blond boy of ten said he had driven north from Arizona with his adopted Apache parents. After eating a cheesy, dripping box of nachos, he went out to win his contest.

  I squeezed through the delicious congestion of bodies, feathers brushing my cheeks, and circled under the eaves of the arbor. One boy, who couldn’t have been older than three, in war bonnet and bells, shuffled out into the dance circle. The Mylar balloon tied to his hand was shaped like a fish. Four boys dancing near the power pole crouched low, jerking their heads and shoulders in the Prairie Chicken Dance. The Fast Dancers spun by, like wheels of fireworks, orbiting at twice the speed of the others.

  Outside the arbor was a residual flux: crowds of Indian teenagers ambled past the bright concession stands, behind which a ribbon of headlights streamed, and behind them glowed rows of tents and tipis.

  The arbor closed at 3 A.M., and we walked up our hill and went to bed. A couple of drunks stumbled by. “Hey. What’s this? A tombstone?” one of them said as he kicked the tent. When no one answered, he disappeared in the brush.
Later, the 49ers, a roving group of singers, began their encampment serenade. They sang until dawn every night of the fair so that even sleep, accompanied by their drumbeats, felt like a kind of dancing.

  Crow Fair days are hot; Crow Fair nights are cold. A rumbling truck woke me. It was the septic tank man (he was white) pumping the outhouses. Some Livingston, Montana, friends who had arrived late were scattered around on the ground in sleeping bags. I brushed my teeth with water I’d brought for the radiator. The dance arbor, abandoned and dreary at midday, was getting a facelift from a cleanup crew. All the action was elsewhere: when I walked toward the bluffs behind the camp, I discovered two hundred children splashing in the Little Big Horn River.

  That afternoon I visited Gary Johnson’s camp. He’s a bright, sly Crow drummer. Over some beadwork repairs he was swatting flies. “You killed our buffalo, I’ll kill your flies,” he said with a sardonic grin as I pulled up a chair. A small boy had taken Gary’s drumstick and had beaten the metal top of a beer cooler until it was covered with dents. “Let him play, let him play,” Gary admonished the boy’s mother. “That’s how we learn to make music.” To be a drummer is to be a singer too, the voice used as percussively as the drum is musically. “I’d like to steal this boy. He and I would sing every night.”

  Every turn of the nomadic Crow life was once marked by movement and music. There were dances to celebrate birth, puberty, marriage, or death. There were healing dances and hunters’ dances and contrary dances, in which all movement was done in reverse. There were dances to count coup, welcome strangers, honor guests, to cement alliances and feuds. Songs weren’t composed but received whole from animals, plants, or storms. Antelope gave mothers lullabies, thunder and wind gave medicine songs, bears taught hunting songs.

  Carlos Castaneda gave us talking bushes, but few of us realized how common these transmissions had become in aboriginal America. When I asked Gary about his pink-and-red-striped tip—the only one of its kind in camp—he explained: “That’s a medicine tipi. Somehow I inherited it. The creek water rose up and told the guy living in it to dress and live like a woman. That was to be his medicine. So he became a berdache [a transvestite].” He gave me a serious look. “I’ll do anything in that tipi, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sleep in it.”

  D. H. Lawrence described the Apache ceremonies he saw as “the feet of birds treading a dance” and claimed the music awakened in him “new root-griefs, old root-richnesses.” In the next three nights I saw the quick, addled movements of blue grouse, feet that worked the ground like hooves, or else massaged it erotically with moccasins. One of the nights, when almost everyone had gone, I thought I heard women singing. It turned out to be teenage boys whose strange, hoarse voices convulsed and ululated in a falsetto. Gary was there and he drummed and danced and his son and wife danced, all the repetitions redoubled by multiple generations. How affectionately the shimmering beadwork traced the shapes of their dreams and threaded them back to the bodies that dreamed them.

  It had been raining on and off all evening. The spectators and all but a few dancers had left. Shoals of garbage—pop cans, hot-dog wrappers, corn husks, and pieces of fry bread—drifted up against the wooden benches. I knew I had been riding an ebb tide here at Crow Fair. I’d seen bead workers’ beadwork, dancers’ dance steps, Indianness for the sake of being Indian—a shell of a culture whose spontaneous force had been revived against great odds and was transmitting weak signals. But transmitting nonetheless. The last intertribal dance was announced. Already, three of the drum groups had packed up and were leaving the arbor when five or six Crow men, dressed like cowboys, walked onto the grass. In boots, not moccasins, and still smoking cigarettes, they formed a long line and shuffled around and around. The shrill, trembling song that accompanied them could empower anyone listening to turn away from distraction and slide their hands across the buttocks of the world—above and beyond the ceremonial decor that was, after all, the point of all this. At the last minute, a young boy jumped up and burst into a boiling, hot-stepping Fast Dance, his feathered headdress shaking down his back like lightning. I wondered how much of this culture-straddling he could take and what in it would finally be instructive to him. Almost under his bounding feet a row of young children were sleeping on blankets laid out for them. Their feather bustles were bent and askew and a couple of moccasins were missing. A very tall Crow man with long braids but skin so light he might actually have been white began picking up the children. One by one, and so gently none of them woke, he carried them away.

  A STORM, THE CORNFIELD, AND ELK

  Last week a bank of clouds lowered itself down summer’s green ladder and let loose with a storm. A heavy snow can act like fists: trees are pummeled, hay- and grainfields are flattened, splayed out like deer beds; field corn, jackknifed and bleached blond by the freeze, is bedraggled by the brawl. All night we heard groans and crashes of cottonwood trunks snapping. “I slept under the damned kitchen table,” one rancher told me. “I’ve already had one of them trees come through my roof.” Along the highway electric lines were looped to the ground like dropped reins.

  As the storm blows east toward the Dakotas, the blue of the sky intensifies. It inks dry washes and broad grasslands with quiet. In their most complete gesture of restraint, cottonwoods, willows, and wild rose engorge themselves with every hue of ruddiness—russet, puce, umber, gold, musteline—whose spectral repletion we know also to be an agony, riding oncoming waves of cold.

  The French call the autumn leaf feuille morte. When the leaves are finally corrupted by frost they rain down into themselves until the tree, disowning itself, goes bald.

  All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware”—an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.” Some days we have to shoulder against a marauding melancholy. Dreams have a hallucinatory effect: in one, a man who is dying watches from inside a huge cocoon while stud colts run through deep mud, their balls bursting open, their seed spilling onto the black ground. My reading brings me this thought from the mad Zen priest Ikkyu: “Remember that under the skin you fondle lie the bones, waiting to reveal themselves.” But another day, I ride in the mountains. Against rimrock, tall aspens have the graceful bearing of giraffes, and another small grove, not yet turned, gives off a virginal limelight that transpierces everything heavy.

  Fall is the end of a rancher’s year. Third and fourth cuttings of hay are stacked; cattle and sheep are gathered, weaned, and shipped; yearling bulls and horse colts are sold. “We always like this time of year, but it’s a lot more fun when the cattle prices are up!” a third-generation rancher tells me.

  This week I help round up their cows and calves on the Big Horns. The storm system that brought three feet of snow at the beginning of the month now brings intense and continual rain. Riding for cows resembles a wild game of touch football played on skis: cows and cowboys bang into each other, or else, as the calves run back, the horse just slides. Twice today my buckskin falls with me, crushing my leg against a steep sidehill, but the mud and snow, now trampled into a gruel, is so deep it’s almost impossible to get bruised.

  When the cattle are finally gathered, we wean the calves from the cows in portable corrals by the road. Here, black mud reaches our shins. The stock dogs have to swim in order to move. Once, while trying to dodge a cow, my feet stuck, and losing both boots in the effort to get out of the way, I had to climb the fence barefooted. Weaning is noisy; cows don’t hide their grief. As calves are loaded into semis and stock trucks, their mothers—five or six hundred of them at a time—crowd around the sorting alleys with outstretched necks, their squared-off faces all opened in a collective bellowing.

  On the way home a neighboring rancher who trails his steers down the mountain highway loses one as they ride through town. There’s a high-speed chase across lawns and flower beds, around the general s
tore and the fire station. Going at a full lope, the steer ducks behind the fire truck just as Mike tries to rope him. “Missing something?” a friend yells out her window as the second loop sails like a burning hoop to the ground.

  “That’s nothing,” one onlooker remarks. “When we brought our cattle through Kaycee one year, the minister opened the church door to see what all the noise was about and one old cow just ran in past him. He had a hell of a time getting her out.”

  In the valley, harvest is on but it’s soggy. The pinto bean crops are sprouting, and the sugar beets are balled up with mud so that one is indistinguishable from the other. Now I can only think of mud as being sweet. At night the moon makes a brief appearance between storms and laces mud with a confectionary light. Farmers whose last cutting of hay is still on the ground turn windrows to dry as if they were limp, bedridden bodies. The hay that has already been baled is damp, and after four inches of rain (in a county where there’s never more than eight inches a year) mold eats its way to the top again.

  The morning sky looks like cheese. Its cobalt wheel has been cut down and all the richness of the season is at our feet. The quick-blanch of frost stings autumn’s rouge into a skin that is tawny. At dawn, mowed hay meadows are the color of pumpkins, and the willows, leafless now, are pink and silver batons conducting inaudible river music. When I dress for the day, my body, white and suddenly numb, looks like dead coral.

  After breakfast there are autumn chores to finish. We grease head gates on irrigation ditches, roll up tarp dams, pull horseshoes, and truck horses to their winter pasture. The harvest moon gives way to the hunter’s moon. Elk, deer, and moose hunters repopulate the mountains now that the livestock is gone. One young hunting guide has already been hurt. While he was alone at camp, his horse kicked him in the spleen. Immobilized, he scratched an SOS with the sharp point of a bullet on a piece of leather he cut from his chaps. “Hurt bad. In pain. Bring doctor with painkiller,” it read. Then he tied the note to the horse’s halter and threw rocks at the horse until it trotted out of camp. When the horse wandered into a ranch yard down the mountain, the note was quickly discovered and a doctor was helicoptered to camp. Amid orgiastic gunfire, sometimes lives are saved.