DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  Picking a spot near the clear, fast river that flowed down the canyon, Serle kicked the rocks to dislodge any resident rattlesnakes, and then continued his stories of the Ancient Time. Although I thought he was getting accustomed to us and seemed to be enjoying our company, he nonetheless warned us that he was not telling everything and was introducing deliberate inaccuracies to avoid the story being stolen. I appreciated his candor, and rather liked the sound of that as a literary device. At first Serle elaborated on Maheo, the Great Spirit, and the four realms of the sky. At the highest was the spirit, which was masculine. At the other extreme was matter, the tangible substance of the earth, which was feminine. In the space between were one realm for masculine with female spirit and one for female with masculine spirit. (These intermediate realms had been largely forgotten on the reservations—which, we were told, explained the present-day intolerance of homosexuality, which would not have been there in former times.)

  The past, Serle explained, was divided into four periods: Ancient Time, the Time of the Dog, the Time of the Buffalo, and now the Time of the Horse. Where had his people been in the Ancient Time? I inquired. Where had they come from? They had come from the earth, he replied—from the hissing, steaming vents that break through to the surface in Yellowstone. That was when Ancient Time began. Before that there were no humans. Just like Bear Lodge and Devils Tower, here again was a dual truth: For Serle and the Cheyenne there is no memory of an ancestral journey across the Bering Strait or the Atlantic or from anywhere else.

  Other tribes have similar stories. The Navajo myth, for example, sees today’s world as the fifth in a sequence, their ancestors having escaped from hostile earlier worlds through rents in the sky. Viewed from this fifth world, these are the very same fissures in the earth from which the ancestors of the Cheyenne once emerged. The ancestors of the Iroquois were the sky people, inhabiting Karionake, or “sky world”, which floated among the stars. There lived Sky Woman, the ancestor of all humans. She fell from Karionake to Earth, which at the time was covered in water. She only survived thanks to a snapping turtle who offered her his shell as a refuge. Thus began the myth of Turtle Island, common to many Indian tribes. In time Sky Woman had a daughter, Lynx, whose children with earthly males eventually populated the whole world. These are all my ludicrously abbreviated summaries of a very rich creation mythology, doubtless including the subtle inaccuracies that honor the propriety of Serle’s world. They all have their mystical qualities, but none is intrinsically any more strange than the Old Testament account of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. But while many Christians are content to regard that as a parable rather than a literal truth, the same is not the case for many Native Americans, as we shall explore a little later.

  After we left the river canyon, we headed farther into the Bighorn Mountains toward one of the most sacred Cheyenne sites, the Medicine Wheel. Up and up the hairpin highway, higher and higher as Sheridan shrank from view into the haze of the prairie. Then the gradient receded, and we were driving through dense pine forest. On and on, past occasional clearings where white-tailed deer looked up cautiously as we drove by. After several miles the woods thinned, and we passed the tree line. Scrub willows grew alongside hidden streams, but as we climbed higher still even they disappeared, and we were on open grassland. A large flock of sheep appeared by the side of the road, and two of them broke away and headed toward us. Except they were not sheep but large white dogs, guarding the flock from bears and coyotes. There was not a shepherd in sight.

  A few miles farther we turned off the road and drove along a rough track, then parked and got out of the car. We were very high up by now. The sun was going down over Yellowstone a hundred miles to the west, taking with it the last warming rays. It was getting rapidly colder, a consequence of the high altitude. As soon as we began the shallow climb toward the Medicine Wheel, I could feel the thin air. My lungs expanded, but I wasn’t inhaling anything. The track led up through spare trees and rock-strewn meadows onto a wide ridge that, like the approach to some ancient Mayan temple, led up to a high point on the horizon. Thousands of feet below to the north, the Bighorn River sparkled in the low sunlight. The gaunt shadows of the few remaining trees grew longer. I was beginning to feel the strain of the climb in the thin air and stopped many times to catch my breath. And then, quite suddenly, we had arrived.

  On every side the mountains sloped gently away, and there, on the plateau in front of us, was the Medicine Wheel, an assemblage of flat rocks arranged like spokes around a central hub. The perimeter was defined by stout wooden posts, and on the connecting wires hung hundreds of objects. What they were I did not know. Serle was silent. He stood well back. He did not speak, but he had already explained on the way up that, viewed from the center, particular stones on the circumference marked the rising points of the principal stars: Sirius, the brightest, the old woman, spirit of the earth. Rigel, the blue star in Orion, the blond girl. Red Aldebaran, in the constellation of Taurus, the old man, the red wolf. The twenty-eight spokes were the ribs of a buffalo, and the days of the lunar cycle, and of menstruation. Below the central hub was a cave, a sanctuary of deep earth, its opening where the divine breath reached the sky. Richard and I walked slowly round the perimeter. Among the tokens tied to the fence wires were pouches that, we learned later, were filled with tobacco as offerings to the Great Spirit. We did not think we should take photographs, such was the effect of the place, along with Serle’s silent waiting. We rejoined him, then he approached the wheel without us, and left his own pouch. We walked back to the car in silence. By then it was getting dark, and the brightest stars were showing against the deep blue of the sky. We returned the way we had come. Serle headed west to Yellowstone to look for grizzlies. We never saw him again.

  Because of our time with Serle and the appreciation, if only rudimentary, of the spiritual life of the Cheyenne, of the Ancient Time, of Maheo, the Great Spirit, of Bear Lodge, I began to feel uneasy about our scheduled visit to the reservation, where, our other prospective guide had warned us, we would see how the Indians lived now in poverty and squalor. This may or may not have been true, but I wanted my last memory of the Cheyenne to be on the high-mountain plateau under the stars and imagining the ancient ceremony of Massom.

  We left Sheridan and headed north up the I 90 toward Billings, Montana, which was to be our overnight stop before Yellowstone. After a while we entered the Crow reservation and immediately the fields, which had up to then been well fenced and with good grass, got considerably less good. The farm buildings disappeared and were replaced by shabby townships of mobile homes and precarious shacks. We had been promised a day on the nearby Cheyenne reservation and a meeting with Serle’s uncle, the keeper of the sacred arrows. However, the prospect of witnessing the modern-day poverty our current guide promised, and the depths to which the once-proud nation had fallen, threatened to divert our experience, and the book, away from its original intention. We rendezvoused at the Cheyenne Trading Lodge, just off the freeway, and very close to the Little Bighorn battle site. The lodge was a pastiche of faux-Indian artifacts run by a white guy. The casino nearby was seedy, run down, and under threat of closure. After lunch I took Richard aside and told him how I felt. Not for the first time, he felt exactly the same. We explained to our guide, who was fine about it, paid her for the day, and said good-bye.

  The nearby government-run site of Little Bighorn was, we discovered, very well laid out and informative. It marks the place where an alliance of Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Arapaho led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse defeated the Seventh Cavalry under General Custer. Little Bighorn, in late June 1876, was the only significant battle victory for Indian resistance among a long catalog of defeats. We saw, as every visitor does, the rows and rows of memorials of those who fell in the Indian Wars, and the memorials to Custer’s men of the Seventh Cavalry, who were buried where they fell on the side of a low mound. As so often at sites like this, I felt I had learned something, but I could not fully appr
eciate its significance. I could not feel the noise and the fear as Custer’s men, hopelessly outnumbered, sheltered behind the bodies of their fallen horses and emptied their rifles into the advancing Indians until the ammunition ran out. Their deaths after that were inevitable, swift, and merciless. News of the defeat reached Washington on July 4, Independence Day, in its centennial year. It was received with general consternation by a public accustomed only to news of victories. The battle is widely thought to mark the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars. The U.S. Army redoubled its efforts to defeat the few remaining tribes that had resisted expansion from the East. Realizing that there would be retaliation, the victors of Little Bighorn dispersed. Sitting Bull crossed the border into Canada, while Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877 and was fatally injured by a military guard in Fort Robinson, Nebraska. The final encounter in the Indian Wars was the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Lakota Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in late December 1890, when the U.S. Seventh Cavalry killed 150 mostly unarmed Indians.

  It had been a hot day at Little Bighorn, and as we headed into Montana toward Yellowstone, the car thermometer registered ninety-two degrees. (The temperature swings around here at this time of year are remarkable: The following week the whole area was covered by the first snow of winter.) We entered Yellowstone through the arch built to commemorate its establishment as the first national park by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, and headed for Mammoth Springs. We had booked into the Yellowstone Lake Hotel, but a forest fire was threatening to put it out of bounds to guests. Mammoth Springs is one of dozens of thermal vents in Yellowstone and had that smell of rotten eggs that signals the presence of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere. Steam and boiling water hissed from dark fissures lined with yellow crystals of sulfur. Rather like the Bear Lodge/Devils Tower dichotomy, we were at the exit of the womb of the earth mother, the very birthplace of humanity for the Cheyenne, and at the same time at a geological location where the earth’s crust is both thin and perforated. In Yellowstone we saw what most people come there to see, chocolate brown bison warming themselves by the steam from thermal springs, places where bears had torn bark from the trees, distant views of elk and a solitary coyote, but no actual bears or wolves.

  We did not get to the geysers as the forest fire was spreading fast, and the roads had been closed. As guests with reservations we were, however, allowed access to the Yellowstone Lake Hotel, an elegant wooden structure built in 1891 and recently renovated in the style of the 1920s. From the lakeside jetty we watched dense plumes of smoke drifting across the water, colored pink and orange by the setting sun in an otherwise azure sky. Helicopters ran shuttles from the lake to the seat of the fire in a desperate attempt to confine it. Forest fires are part of the natural sequence of life and death in Yellowstone, and the pine seeds need a good roasting in the flames before they will germinate. This fire, code-named Arnica, was receiving so much attention because it threatened the hotel. It did not feel dangerous, but sprinklers were set up to dampen the vegetation beside the access roads with water, which froze at night as the temperature plummeted. Each evening the progress of the fire was mapped on a board, new arrivals canceled, and the hotel gradually emptied. The Arnica fire had been started by a lightning strike on September 13. Sixteen days later, when we arrived, it had spread to more than eight thousand acres. The following day another thousand acres had gone. During the day we could see only the smoke as it drifted across the lake, but at night flames leaped high into the sky. The next day the fire had crossed and closed the road to the south, which was our planned route out of Yellowstone to Salt Lake City. The hotel became emptier and emptier, but there was a good spirit and the lobby pianist kept on playing.

  At four in the morning the fire alarm went off, and we all assembled outside ready to evacuate. There was no panic, but by now we really could smell the smoke as a change in the wind set the fire on a collision course with the hotel. Due to leave that morning anyway, Richard and I hastily packed our bags and headed off early. The route change meant we had to leave the park by the only exit still open and retrace our steps into Montana, then loop around to Butte, and get to Salt Lake City by driving through the whole of Idaho from top to bottom. The road took us over the continental watershed, where rain falling now headed west to the Snake River and the Pacific, rather than back along the Yellowstone River to join the Missouri on its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Are there any raindrops, I wondered, whose destiny is shared, some water molecules traveling in one direction and some the other? I think there must be.

  We eventually covered 636 miles, the longest distance I have ever driven in a single day. We knew we had to get to Salt Lake City to pick up the Zephyr for the final leg of our westward journey. The Utah capital was full of preteens going to a Hannah Montana concert. Merely a low shed near the bus station, the Amtrak station in Salt Lake City couldn’t hold a candle to Chicago or Denver, and had a very temporary feel to it. The long diversion caused by track repairs meant that the train was due to arrive at a barbaric 2:15 a.m. rather than a more civilized 11:00 p.m. Arriving in Salt Lake City, the headquarters of the Mormon Church, I had already had my expectation of a haven of calm and contemplation dented by the roadside signboards on the way in. None more so than “Call Laser Lipo ‘We suck . . . FAT.’” I had also imagined that it was completely safe, and it probably was, but the darkened sidewalks set off all the familiar urban alarm bells and we found temporary refuge in a hotel until the train arrived. The Zephyr eventually came in, and we located our third and final Viewliner Roomette and went straight to sleep. I would have liked to see the Bonneville Salt Flats, scene of many attempts at the land-speed record, and what is left of the Great Salt Lake, but I was already miles away.

  When I awoke I was suddenly struck by an all-consuming sadness. This was our last day on the train, and almost the final day of our three weeks together. Richard was leaving for England to begin college, and I knew things would never be the same again. He was eager to begin his new phase of life. He had said, a day or so earlier, that two weeks is long enough in the company of parents and that he needed to be with young people. He was right; it was right; it was what should happen. As I looked at him asleep in the upper bunk, slow tears formed in my eyes.

  We were definitely in desert country now. Sagebrush and yellow-flowered ragweed flanked the track. Lonely cattle, Herefords, possibly, to my British way of thinking, grazed on nonexistent grass. How did they manage out here, these beasts of the apple-flanked meadows of England? This was a parched and thirsty land. Then, all of a sudden, we crossed a proper river about twenty yards across, flowing east away from the sea and into the desert. The drops that made this river would never reach the sea.

  There seemed no end to the Great Basin, but eventually we reached Reno, Nevada, at its western fringe. Reno is nowhere near as spectacular as Las Vegas, but still crammed with casinos. A few miles farther on we crossed the last of the twelve state lines of our trip. We had traveled more than three thousand miles and there were now only just about two hundred to go to the Pacific. But we were still 4,500 feet above sea level, and the necessary descent began soon after we crossed into California. We slid slowly down the most difficult section of the track between the hills of the Sierra Nevada covered in redwood and Douglas fir, sparse at first then in dense stands on either side. The line had been built in the 1860s by ten thousand imported Chinese laborers, many of them the ancestors of the present-day residents of San Francisco. The numerous tunnels, embankments, and cuttings blasted from the rock had all been made by manual effort long before the age of the machine. Once again I found myself contemplating the dual nature of events. On the one hand the railroad was an absolutely magnificent engineering achievement, built with determination, skill, and courage. On the other it was the steel needle that had been thrust through the thin skin of the prairies, injecting its paralyzing anesthetic into the dying world of the Indian.

  My ears began to hurt. After more than a week at elevation
s well above five thousand feet, the sudden descent was painful as my ears equilibrated with the higher air pressure. Eventually the gradient flattened out, and we were in California’s Central Valley. We saw our first palm tree at Rockland and our first orange tree a little farther on. And another thing we had almost forgotten—soil. Here was rich farmland, black under the plow. The train speeded up, and it was then that I noticed another change in the tone of the whistle. No longer the assertive “Out of my way” of the Midwest prairies, its tone now was much more exuberant, more triumphant. Now the Zephyr seemed to be saying, “Look at me. Look how far I’ve come!” Through Sacramento, the state capital, and on toward the ocean, towns were dotted all over the flat and fertile plain. We met the sea at Grizzly Bay, where dozens of mothballed navy ships were anchored offshore awaiting demolition, and edged our way along the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay toward our final destination at Emeryville. The train and the track were diminished by the urban surroundings. No one took any notice of the Zephyr—no longer the only man-made thing for miles, the pioneer of the desert and the high sierra. After such an epic journey surely the tracks would be lined with spectators, cheering and throwing their hats into the air. But no, it was just another busy day with no time to stand and stare. And then we arrived, not in the marble art-deco splendor of Chicago’s Union Station, but into the uncovered platform and low-level booking hall of Emeryville, California. This was as far as the Zephyr went—the track does not cross the bay into San Francisco itself. Apart from the section closed for repairs, we had traveled the whole 3,497 miles “from sea to shining sea.”

  We spent our last night together, without ceremony, at the airport hotel. And we finished our chess tournament. Richard won by eight games to seven. The next day we packed his bag and took the shuttle to the airport. We waved goodbye, father and son, and I watched as Richard moved up the security line. One last wave as his bags went through the X-ray machine, and he was gone.