Having Everything Right

by Stafford, Kim; Pyle, Robert Michael;

  “Dad,” she said, coming out of a dream, “I always think boys are stronger, but girls remember better. Boys are tough, but girls remember. That’s fair. We each have one thing to do.” Cedar and hemlock shadows flickered across her face as we traveled.

  At Warm Springs, inside the longhouse, things started slowly by not really starting at all. It seems we awaited the seventh drummer. The long dancing floor at the center was open, and people sat in knots of two and three around the perimeter. Somewhere, just out of sight, there was a bustle of people very busy preparing the feast. The old women had been at work for days, digging, and even the inmates at the jail had pitched in to help peel the roots for us. But in the big room, we looked at each other and smiled. On my lap, Rosemary pulled down my head to whisper.

  “Dad, why did the men with guns come and take this world from the Indians? I guess they wanted to have the whole world to theirselves!” She thought for a time. “But there has to be a place for everyone to live—with peace, and harmony, and care, and love. Those four things for everyone.”

  Then the drums started and five dancers, a men’s line of two and a women’s line of three, facing each other, began to spring-step around the hall, twirling their bodies into the line like ouzels entering a sacred river, and passing before us, their eyes inward, cast down. The heartbeat drums shaped the hall inward. We slid together into that older rhythm than history.

  The drumming stopped. An old man stood at the microphone, held it two-handed like a staff for support, then raised his right hand and spoke.

  “Our children, where are our children? They have gone from us into the wilderness.” His hand swept away toward the west. “Into the wilderness, and we don’t know where they are. We don’t know how to help them there. If they would come back here”—his arm curled inward to embrace the circle we made—“we could feed them, and take care of them. Back to us here.”

  My mind followed his hand outward, and back. When he said “the wilderness,” I knew he meant the city of Portland, my city, the hard streets where the tribe’s children wandered and faltered. When he said “back here,” I knew he meant the desert, the dry, open land my country allowed to his people. Within this circle, the children could be raised.

  Then hours of dancing, and prayers, speeches in English and in Sahaptian. I wondered what all this would mean to my daughter. What would she understand, or remember? After four hours of drumming, dancing, and prayers, Rosemary looked up at me.

  “Dad,” she said, “I’ve gotta have a Pepsi.” So we got her a Pepsi. And then she sat still for another hour and watched the dance.

  The drums stopped in unison. The dance floor cleared. There was a great bustle as the long mats were unrolled across the floor, and a clatter as plates were put down, cups, napkins along the length of the mat. It was another kind of dance, as women came in a file to set our places, serving the places. It was time, and the women came dancing in a row, all in beads and otter fur, each who had helped, from young to old, each with their platters of camas roots, bitterroot, wapato, huckleberries, chokecherries, and other wild foods I did not know. Behind them, the men came dancing with their platters of salmon and venison. All the bounty of the wilderness—the generous wilderness of the reservation land—was spread on long mats across the floor. My daughter knelt beside me, and everyone settled in double rows, facing each other across the feast. Then an old man was saying a blessing, and a mother beside me began quietly translating for me: “Blessing fish, blessing berries, and roots. . .God in the roots we walk on, as we dig them up. . .children will know. . .blessing. . .dancing. . . .” Then a woman at the microphone was giving a prayer in words I could not understand, and everyone was busy. The mother saw my trouble.

  “This is the ritual tasting,” she said. “Taste the bitterroot, and give your daughter some. Taste the huckleberry, and give your daughter some. Now taste the salmon, and give her some. Now taste the venison, and give her some. Now. . .now pig out!”

  I looked around. Everyone was feasting. I learned by watching how to join salmon and camas in a single bite with my fingers, to dip bread in fat. I had never seen such feasting, and as we ate, women behind us kept advancing, placing more food over our shoulders to the mat, spilling candy, bread, and oranges to fill any empty space. And finally, there was a distribution of gallon-size ziplock bags. Everyone was gathering what was left.

  “We had a death,” the woman said to me, “coming back from California. We got a funeral now, upriver. Grandpa’s left. Our old man everyone knows. We are all going.”

  Everyone rose, and we filed out in a circle around the longhouse for a final prayer. The sun beat down. Wind riffled through the ribbons on the shirts of young boys, and jingled the bells on the dresses of the girls. And then it was done. Together, we cleared the floor. As I turned to go, a boy caught my eye and threw me a chocolate kiss wrapped in silver foil.

  I went around asking, “Is there a place I can pay? Can I make donation?” No one would look at me. Everyone was busy, with a clang of pans, and a dance of brooms.

  Finally, an old woman stopped beside me, turned her head to hear me.

  “Is there a place I can contribute?” I asked her. She looked at me.

  “You will find a way,” she said. And she turned away and went into the kitchen.

  My child wandered among the people on her own, and I found myself walking down behind the longhouse, to the fire-pit where the salmon had been prepared. I looked over the blanket that had been set up between poles as a wind-break, and saw Verbena, old friend, sitting in a folding aluminum chair with her eyes closed as the wind blew ashes sifting down on her face, her gray braids. She opened her eyes, and squinted through the smoke in my direction.

  “Oh, Kim,” she said slowly, “I wrote you a letter, but never sent it. But you’re here, so I guess I didn’t need to.” She looked around for another chair, but I crouched down by the fire. We were quiet for a time.

  “Yeah,” she said, “twenty five pounds of roots is a lot of work, you know. Each one is so little. I’m glad our prisoners could help us peel them. We never would have been ready without everyone helping. It’s always like that.” And soon she is telling me of recent sorrows, and their blessings.

  “When diabetes took my husband’s sight, and then both his legs, it brought the children home—now he has everything in reach.”

  I tell her I had asked how to contribute in some way, and what the woman had told me. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Kim, you will find a way. You will find a way. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week. But you will.” She had bent to lift a fish from the grill over the coals, a whole salmon, wrapping it in foil. She handed it to me, hot.

  “This was left over,” she said. “Take it. The head is a delicacy.” I stared down at the bundle in my hands. “Go,” she said, “and tell me sometime about the way you find.” She was laughing as she turned to stir the coals. Then she looked over her shoulder at me with a grin. She waved me away. I turned back, stumbling, to the longhouse.

  There was my daughter, tugging on my sleeve. “Dad, do you have some paper? I want to give my phone number to those Indian boys.” She gestured toward a cluster of boys five years older, standing together. I gave her papers. She barely knew how to write, but leaned on her knee and scrawled something on each piece, and gravely handed them around. The boys looked at her, and at each other, then at the papers. Then they looked at me. I shrugged back at them.

  We got in the car and started west, up the long slope out of the canyon toward the wilderness of Portland. I was hoping Rosemary would fall asleep again. The evening was warm, and the sun shone down through the windshield.

  “Dad,” she said, “stop the car.”

  I said what any parent would say: “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “No, dad. Stop the car. We gotta climb that mountain.” She was pointing toward the bluff. I looked up the slope. I was tired. I said what any tired parent might say, a guess and a lie: “I think that land is
private property.”

  “Dad, stop the car.” She had her hand on my sleeve. For a moment, I kept my foot on the gas pedal. The car had just settled into its long-distance lope, climbing the grade. But then I took my foot away, and eased off the road onto the shoulder. We climbed out. Deflected from her first choice of climbing, she pointed to the ditch beside the road, the little ravine filled with styrofoam and tumbleweeds.

  “Let’s follow that road,” she said, “and maybe we’ll find gold, or pretty rocks, or Jesus!” She held up her hands to the sky, the way she had seen the elders of the tribe stand tall to pray. “There was one big rock,” she said, “that filled all the world, and out of that rock, Jesus was born! And here God rained all of Jesus’ bones, one for every land.” Her hands sifted slowly down. “This is where they had his wedding feast. And look!” She bent to take up a handful of dust. “Here are his brains.” She held out the dust to me, then bent to take up a rock. “And a piece of his heart!” She took up gravel. “And all his bones!”

  She looked at me. “Dad! We gotta take this stuff home!”

  “What shall we put it in?” I said.

  “Take off one of your shoes, dad.”

  I took off one of my shoes. She filled it with the bones of Jesus. We got in the car and drove. She was still. I began the long river of thought that is such a road home. How did my daughter learn to see the sacred in a gully of debris? Where would this seeing lead her? How would I find a way?

  But in a few miles, she said again, “Dad, stop the car.” This time I didn’t hesitate. We climbed over a barbwire fence, just east of the Mill Creek gorge, and she led me to a pile of rocks. She wanted to play house among them, showed me which hollow was my room, which was hers, and which was the kitchen. Then for a long time, we sat there, as the wind twitched a little pine tree nearby, and the sun began to slant low toward the west. I could hear the rush of Mill Creek, in the canyon. I remembered how my brother and I had once written to the Tribal Council, asking permission to hike up that creek, across Reservation land, toward the mountain.

  “We believe that is a wilderness,” they wrote back. “No one should go there.”

  “Dad,” my daughter said, “when you get really old, I won’t move away. I’ll stay with you.”

  And we drove west toward the city.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND THE BOOK

  You are holding the thirtieth-anniversary edition of this book, which first came out from Confluence Press in 1986, then in paperback from Penguin in 1987, as a Japanese translation from Editions Papyrus in the early 1990s, and from Sasquatch Books in 1997. The original edition won a Special Citation for Excellence from the Western States Book Award in 1986. The book was submitted as creative nonfiction, but the judges found it so filled with stories they chose to create a separate category to honor it.

  Readers wishing to pursue some of the names and stories in this book may find the following sources helpful:

  In the “Introduction,” the Kwakiutl names are from Franz Boas, Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, No. 20 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). Thomas Jefferson’s word list is from volume seven of the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (1905; rpt. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959). The list of Iroquois lacrosse players is from Archives: Mirror of Canada Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

  The literary passages in “Out of This World” are from the standard editions of the authors mentioned.

  The Nez Perce Coyote tale in “The Story That Saved Life” is after “Coyote and the Shadow People,” in Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country, ed. Jarold Ramsey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977). The poem “I Was Old” was written by Vicki Lynne Smith.

  References to Ishi in “The Separate Hearth” are from Theodora Kroeber, Ishi: In Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

  The full story of Grizzly Bear’s death in “Dancing Bear of the Siuslaw” is in Leo Frachtenberg, “Siuslawan (Lower Umpqua),” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40, Part 2, which forms a part of the Handbook of American Indian Languages, ed. Franz Boas (Washington: GPO, 1922).

  Some of the stories by old-timers of the Siuslaw Valley in “Dancing Bear of the Siuslaw,” “River & Road,” and other essays are in the oral history collection of the Siuslaw Pioneer Museum, Florence, Oregon. Thanks to Eileen Huntington, Mary Johnston, Wyma Rogers, and others in Florence for their support of my work as an oral historian collecting these stories, and to the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Oregon for supporting the oral history project in 1976.

  How did this book originally come about? In the summer of 1984 I was driving from Portland, Oregon, to Billings, Montana, to speak at a gathering of librarians, and stopped in Lewiston, Idaho, to sip Wild Turkey on the back porch with my friend Jim Hepworth, publisher of Confluence Press. We got to telling stories about our beloved places in the territory, and as the sun slanted toward the western horizon, Jim announced out of nowhere, “Stafford, you’re going to write essays!” Essays? I thought of essays as the dithering of scholars, and I’d had enough of that in grad school. “You’re going to write me an essay about the poetry of Jim Welch,” Jim said, “for an anthology I’m editing. Then you’re going to write essays of your own, and if they’re any good, I’ll think about publishing them as a book.”

  As I drove east up the Clearwater, dusk settling over the river, I thought about Jim’s challenge. Was there something there that could be native to my way in the world? Well, I thought, if I’m going to write essays, I’ll do them like poems, or long letters to a friend—rambling, festive, capricious, in my own way.

  By midnight I had made it to Dixon, Montana, and was sitting at the bar where Welch had written his famous poem, “The Only Bar in Dixon,” the one that ended:

  Take the redhead—yours for just a word. . .

  And by God there she was, still working the till. A bit older, perhaps, but salty. And I knew in that moment I could write essays.

  For an hour, I sipped my beer and savored details seen and overheard for my essay on Welch’s poetry. Then I got in the car and drove south through the little town of Lolo, and along the Blackfoot River to roll out my bag in the wee hours and sleep at Chief Joseph Pass, before heading down the road to the Big Hole battlefield the next morning, as described in this book.

  Given this history, I would like to thank Jim Hepworth, publisher at Confluence Press, for believing in this book before it existed; to my agent Lizzie Grossman for her early enthusiasm and assistance; and to Jonathan Gallasi at Penguin for taking on the paperback edition. Thanks to Robin Gill at Papyrus Editions, who managed the translation and publication of the Japanese edition. I would like to thank Gary Luke and Joan Gregory for helping to keep this bundle of stories alive in the Sasquatch edition, 1997. And thanks to my kind readers for telling me, now and then, how the book has reminded them of their own places and stories.

  Finally, I would like to thank Bob Pyle for his generous introduction to this edition, and for bringing the project to Pharos. My thanks to Harry Kirchner at Pharos, and to Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press, for bringing forth this thirtieth anniversary edition. They have gone the distance in helping me to sustain the original legacy of the book, and to enhance this edition for readers now.

  Much has changed in the three decades since I first drove up the Clearwater River in Idaho to begin these essays, but something wild and original remains—the importance of listening to places, the resonant place called The Pacific Northwest, and the old idea called h′lad, “having everything right.”

  Kim Stafford has taught since 1979 at Lewis and Clark College, where he is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute. He also serves as the literary executor for the estate of his father, William Stafford. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Orego
n and has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer in communities and colleges across the country, and in Italy, Scotland, and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft; Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford; and most recently 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, an account of his brother’s death by suicide, and the struggle of a family to understand, and to live beyond that event. . He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

  Robert Michael Pyle is the author of eighteen books, including Chasing Monarchs, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, the recent poetry collection Evolution of the Genus Iris and the Pharos Editions’ Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, 30th Anniversary Edition. . A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim fellow, he is a full-time writer and naturalist living in the Willapa Hills of southwestern Washington.

  MORE TITLES FROM PHAROS EDITIONS

  The Unsettling by Peter Rock

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY BRIAN EVENSON

  The Diamond Hitch by Frank O’Rourke

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY MOLLY GLOSS

  Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales by William Maxwell

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY AIMEE BENDER

  Bubble Gum and Kipling by Tom Mayer

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY ANDREW DUBUS

  Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer by Bernard Wolfe

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY JOHNATHAN LETHEM

  The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY T.C. BOYLE

  Wintergreen by Robert Michael Pyle