by James Dodson
I paddled across the lake, to the spot where I’d seen so many rises the evening before. On my fourth or fifth cast, using a #16 Hairwing Caddis, I caught a small brown trout, unhooked him, and dropped him in my water bucket. I made another cast and caught another fish. The caddis was working beautifully. The water was so still I decided to ignore the cardinal rule of responsible canoeing and actually stood up and stripped line at my feet and made several casts that grew longer with each pass overhead, the line softly sighing. A figure appeared on the shore, a woman out for a dawn walk. She waved and I waved and then a large fish broke the surface off to my right and I flicked my line and made a slow, long cast in that direction.
The sun was just reaching the summit of Harney Peak, where the Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk had experienced his astounding Great Vision at age nine. The spirits of his six grandfathers swept him away to this sacred spot in the center of the Sapa Hapa, or the Black Hills, which were considered the center of the universe by the plains people, an Indian Eden untouched by the waichus, or white men. He was led away by dancing horses that changed into animals of every kind to a tepee made of cloud, with a rainbow for an open door. And the oldest of the grandfathers spoke with a kind voice and said: “Come right in and do not fear.” And as he spoke, all the horses of the four quarters neighed to cheer me. So I went in and stood before the six, and they looked older than men can ever be—old like hills, like stars….I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. The Powers gave Black Elk the power to heal and destroy, the power to make things flourish, the power of the cleansing wind. They showed him the flowering hoop of the world, but also a black road that led to the thunder beings, the coming of the waichus and the iron horse, a fearful road, a road of troubles and of war. He saw his people dancing with great joy and weeping with great sorrow. He learned it was his destiny to travel and heal, and he woke from his Great Vision smote by sadness, with both his parents hovering over him.
Perhaps it takes a poet to really understand madness or to fathom why a man’s life suddenly breaks apart. Mystics believe there is divine purpose in true madness, a shattering of the old self that permits entry to enlightenment—a power we all possess but fear to unleash. It took a Nebraska poet named John Neihardt to record Black Elk’s extraordinary mystical experience, which eerily mirrors the story of Buddha’s saga of enlightenment at the foot of the bodhi tree, and even Christ’s journey into the desert.
At the moment of his enlightenment, his transformation into a healer, Black Elk’s people were already doomed. Four years before, gold had been found in the Black Hills and the U.S. government had illegally seized it, breaking all of the existing treaties it had made with the Siouan peoples in order to allow white prospectors and fortune hunters to flood their holy land. Horse soldiers were sent to protect the newcomers and among other atrocities a policy of systematically exterminating the bison was undertaken to remove the spiritual life source of the Indians.
The beginning of the end came on June 17, 1876, when the combined forces of Cheyenne and Lakota warriors under the leadership of Crazy Horse attacked General Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crook claimed victory but beat a hasty retreat, while more warrior groups streamed into the area, assembling twelve hundred tepees strong, an estimated fighting force of nearly two thousand warriors, near the banks of a Montana stream called the Little Bighorn. The newspapers of New York and Washington created a goldenhaired hero-god out of George Armstrong Custer, portraying him as excellent presidential timber despite the fact—or perhaps because of it—that his ruthless treatment of Indians and his thorough disregard for legal treaties caused native peoples to call him “the Chief of Thieves.”
On June 27, Custer’s command of 210 soldiers was surrounded on a small rise of land and wiped out in less than an hour. Exact Indian losses remain unknown.
As Black Elk recounts, by the fall of 1883, seven years after the battle at Little Bighorn and three years after his Great Vision on Harney Peak, below which I now sat flicking my fly line, the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the waichus. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more waichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The waichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal [gold] that makes them crazy, and they only took the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I heard that fireboats came down the Missouri River loaded with mountains of dried bison tongues.
The terrible vision Black Elk had been shown on Harney Peak finally came to pass when settlers and fortune seekers poured into the Black Hills, panning for gold and slaughtering as many as fifty million bison. A single green hide could fetch $1.25 in the West, while a finished buffalo robe sold in the salons of Europe for $100, and shopkeepers couldn’t keep them on the rack. Waichus like Buffalo Bill Cody made glamorous names for themselves in dime novels and newspapers back East by shooting buffalo and scouting for the army as it subdued the last holdouts and herded remnant tribes onto reservations. Cody himself, according to one popular legend, shot over a thousand buffalo in one day. All our people, Black Elk told Neihardt, now were settling down in square gray houses [federal reservations] scattered here and there across the hungry land, and around them the waichus had drawn a line to keep them in. The nation’s hoop was broken.
Black Elk’s response, under the circumstances, was an interesting and brave one. Like Ohiyesa, he decided to venture into the world of the waichus to see if he could create a bridge between the victor and the vanquished. Buffalo Bill, whom the Indians called Pashuka, sent word to the Oglalas that he was looking for a band of warriors to perform in his Wild West Show. They told us this show would go across the big water to strange lands, and I thought I ought to go, because I might learn some secret of the waichu that would help my people somehow….Maybe if I could see the great world of the waichu, I could understand how to bring the sacred hoop together and make the tree bloom again at the center of it.
Black Elk joined the show. He saw the sights and met the citizens of New York, London, and Paris. His winter in New York was particularly painful. Between shows at Madison Square Garden, he wandered the streets of Manhattan dressed in waichu clothing. I felt dead and my people seemed lost and I thought I might never find them again. I did not see anything to help my people. I could see that the waichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.
After nearly three years on the road, during which he met “Grandmother England” (Queen Victoria) and got lost for a time, wandering alone through Europe, he decided to go home to the Black Hills. He felt his holy powers were gone, dried up, his heart dying. In a vision, he saw his parents’ tepee and longed to be there. Bill Cody gave him $90 and a boat ticket home. Then he gave me a dinner. Pashuka had a strong heart. Arriving home, Black Elk found the American government had taken even more of his people’s lands, but his mother and father’s tepee was exactly where it had been when he left. My parents were in great joy to see me and my mother cried because she was so happy. I cried too. I was supposed to be a man now, but the tears came out anyway.
I was floating in my canoe on the lake below Harney Peak, reading bits of Black Elk’s memoir between casts, glancing up from time to time to look at the rock peak, which grew yellower by the minute from the rising sun. I thought of the famous psalm that said the sun comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber. Pretty soon there would be spandex-clad rock climbers scaling the peak, which is one of the premier mountain-climbing experiences in the West.
I put down the book and made another long cast and thought about Silent Sam, how the hoop of
his world had suddenly just snapped. That’s when I saw a white dog standing on the shore. It was Amos. A moment later, Maggie appeared, waving. I paddled over and showed her my two little trout in the bucket. One by one, we let them go.
“I’m sorry I left you at the cabin,” I said. “I hope you weren’t afraid when you woke.” She smiled and shook her head, then looked down at the last fish, her oval face still softly dented from sleep.
“That’s okay. I wasn’t scared. I knew you were here, even before I woke up.”
“How’s that?”
“I dreamed it.”
“How interesting,” I said. “Indians believe their ancestors communicate through dreams.”
“Maybe Aunt Emma told me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cody
WE LEFT THE Dakota grasslands at 9:05 Mountain Standard Time and began our ascent into the Bighorns on Route 16, passing a sign that said WYOMING—LIKE NO PLACE ON EARTH! and stopped in Upton for gas. The Conoco station appeared to be the only functioning business in town, half a block from a sun-faded sign that read: WELCOME TO UPTON. BEST TOWN ON EARTH.
I asked the clerk at the Conoco, directly across the asphalt from the Cowboy Bar, what made Upton, which appeared to have seen its best days, the best town on earth. The Cowboy Bar looked as if it had been closed for decades. “Been here near on ten years and I’m still tryin’ to figger that out myself,” she admitted, tapping the computer register. We were buying Gatorade and apple juice and a jug of spring water for Amos. Her smile was pleasant enough. “Reckon it could be that we haven’t had no drive-by shootin’s yet and the rivers round here are pretty clean. That’s about all we got for charm.”
We kept climbing, crossing Crazy Woman Creek and getting our first sight of the snowcapped Rockies eighty miles to the west. A hundred years before, this had been part of the Oregon Trail that first carried trappers and mountain men and later settlers and prospectors farther to the West after the gold fever subsided and the Black Hills became too danged crowded; the same route, a few years prior to that, was used by Sitting Bull and other remnants of the Indian force that wiped out Custer at the Little Bighorn and fled to the West and thence to Canada with the whole U.S. Cavalry on their heels. Now we were following a white Crown Victoria with Florida tags that had caromed past us doing about ninety, a dangerously swaying barge captained by a small elderly woman whose head barely reached above the wheel, occasionally wiping out ranks of wildflowers on the road’s narrow shoulder and throwing up gritty dust whirls in her wake.
I slowed and tuned in to the late morning news. Fifteen midshipmen at the Naval Academy had been kicked out for cheating, the worst scandal in the school’s history, and Jack Kevorkian had just presided over his thirty-fourth assisted suicide, the death of a Cincinnati woman who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Out-of-work coal miners in Beckley, West Virginia, had come up with a novel way of making ends meet: They’d flooded the unused mine with spring water and begun commercially raising char and rainbow trout. For the second year in a row, the U.S. Postal Service had shown a decent profit, and a team of scientists examining part of a meteorite that fell to earth thirteen thousand years ago found evidence of microorganic life, perhaps indicating life-forms on Mars. The president, reportedly thrilled by this discovery and about to depart for his western vacation, was so pleased that he’d announced an upcoming summit on the subject, while down in Atlanta, coming soon to a Wheaties box near you, a gymnast named Kerri Strug had courageously completed a critical floor routine the night before on a strained right ankle, assuring the U.S. Olympic squad a gold medal.
The Crown Victoria became a dot on the horizon and, being one of those gifted individuals who can read and drive simultaneously, I browsed a geologic guide to the region. The hills we were passing through were striated with layers of umber, gold, and sulfurous yellow—dolomite hills, Mississippian in age and tawny with limestone, 580 million years old if a day. Now Paul Harvey had come on, fretting that the reason America was going to hell in a handbasket was because we no longer had front porches on houses. Porches taught people civilized behavior, he said, encouraged them to slow down. What that Crown Victoria really needs, I thought, is a nice front porch.
We stopped for lunch in Ten Sleep, a town no bigger than the hips on a snake. There were a dozen dusty cars and pickups in the gravel lot of the Flagstaff Cafe, whose menu engagingly read: “Ten Sleep, Wyoming: West of worry. East of envy. South of sorrow. North of normal.” Elevation 4,206 feet, population 311. I asked our waitress how the town got its name and she explained that an Indian measured distances by the number of sleeps required to reach his destination. Ten Sleep was located at a water source exactly halfway between traditional Indian winter camps on the Platte River to the south and their summer quarters near Bridger Mountain to the north, ten sleeps in either direction. The desert valley where the town sat looked as desolate as a moonscape, but a good-sized creek rushed through it out of the Bighorns. She recommended the hot dog special to Maggie and was rewarded with a dazzling smile.
The cafe was full of men in sweat-stained straw hats, the usual lunchtime crowd of ranch hands save for a table of German tourists directly beside us, two shockingly skinny couples wearing short haircuts, short shorts, and sandals with dark socks. They looked profoundly unhappy, but then German tourists always look profoundly unhappy to me, and one of the men, squinting over a pocket-sized road atlas, leaned over to me and said, in heavily accented English: “You know about me-rages?”
Me-rages?
He nodded, a lean, sunburned face. “Ya. Das iss here, ya?” He jabbed his finger at a yellowish patch on the map, indicating high desert country north of Utah’s Wasatch Range.
“Is that the way you’re headed?” I was leaning over to look at his map.
“I think he’s saying ‘mirage,’ ” the waitress chipped in helpfully. She’d just slung our lunches before us. “Do you mean mir-age?” she said to the German slowly and loudly, because shouting at foreigners always helps aid their understanding when they don’t speak your language.
A brisk nod. “Ya. Loss Ve-goss.”
“I think he saw a mirage,” said one of the ranch hands at an adjoining table. The table chuckled.
“Hell, I reckon I’d see one too if I was crazy enough to try and ride a bike across this country,” another one said, and the table chuckled harder.
I remembered the four bicycles weighted down with bulging travel packs we’d seen parked by the cafe’s front door. It then came to me what the man was asking.
“I think he wants to know if this is the best way to the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.”
“Ya, ya.” A brisk bob. One of the women gave me a bleak little smile.
“Holy shit.” The heavyset ranch hand muttered beneath his straw hat, poking his meat loaf with a fork and shaking his head.
“Y’all tryin’ to ride those bikes clean to Las Vegas?” The waitress seemed equally astounded. Three of the four heads bobbed, as if they were saying yes to the daily dessert pie special. The other German woman was busy leafing through a tabloid newspaper whose bold headlines announced that Dolly Parton’s chest had exploded and the “Secret Writings” of Gandhi had been unearthed, revealing the exact moment the end of the world would come. How terrible, I thought, to have your whole chest explode like that.
“Good luck,” said the first ranch hand with a mild snort. “You folks’ll sure need it.”
I felt sorry for them and tried to show the guy who seemed to be in charge of the doomed expedition the best possible route to Las Vegas, tracing a line down U.S. 20 to the Wind River Indian Reservation, then across the Green River to Salt Lake; then, assuming they were still alive at that point, they could pedal the remaining three hundred miles or so straight down I-15 to Vegas, perhaps arriving at the Mirage Hotel sometime around Wayne Newton’s annual holiday extravaganza.
I wondered what kind of deranged Düsseldorf tour operator had set this curious odyssey in motion and
if I might be sending them to their deaths. The leader profusely thanked me nonetheless and I went outside to take Amos some ice water and a bit of my sandwich while Maggie finished her lunch.
As Amos slurped the water, I studied the main drag in Ten Sleep. A merciless sun was beating down and not a thing was moving. It’s not fair to say Ten Sleep felt unfriendly, just remote as hell, the kind of place you could break down or throw a wheel and go frothing mad beneath the noonday sun. Thinking of a breakdown, I decided to be on the safe side and check Old Blue’s oil. I opened the hood and found we were almost a quart low, which perhaps explained the mysterious ticking sound she’d been making since the Adirondacks. I fetched one of the spare quarts I was carrying in back, switched on the engine, and was standing on the bumper pouring oil into the chamber when I happened to glance over and see an empty pay phone. Speaking of madness, I had a ph one call to make.
My friend Bobby sounded so small when he finally came on the line. That’s the only way I can think of describing him. Small. As in “reduced” or “diminished” or “fading away.” I made my customary little joke about being an enlightened pacifist with a bloodthirsty bird killer for a friend who would stoop to any cheap stunt to try and persuade me to hunt with him again and he didn’t laugh and then he told me he was going through something I couldn’t understand because he didn’t understand it, a sense of everything’s falling apart, a fear he couldn’t shake, a kind of living death. These were his exact words.
I listened with the hot Wyoming sun making beads of sweat on my neck, wishing there were something I could say that would fix what was breaking or broken in him. But the simple tone of his voice told me nothing I could say could fix him, any more than the things I’d said had fixed my broken marriage. Sometimes things, people, fall apart. It’s not fair, doesn’t make sense, doesn’t add up. You wish it would stop but it won’t. You wish it would go but it can’t. I told Silent Sam I was thinking about him and then fell as silent as the landscape around me, helpless to help, fairly certain he would hang up if I suggested he listen to his wife and take the doctor’s medication.