He’d quickened a memory in me. In 1973, I’d visited an ancestral village in southern Italy. A distant cousin took me to a mossy, vine-choked stone bridge built in the sixth century. “We’ve been here at least since then and maybe from before that,” she’d said, and I’d felt, well, something. A connection, and a sense that I could be a perfectly modern American and yet remain bound to an ancient past.
“What a beautiful thing to hand the world,” Woodenknife said. “One time I was giving a talk at a small college, and the young kids, all white, were asking me about my heritage. And I said”—his voice fell to a half whisper—“‘I’d like you guys to close your eyes for a minute. Imagine yourself waking up on a foggy, chilly morning, and you roll out from underneath your furs, and you hear a drumbeat, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom … And you start walking up this grassy hill, and as the fog starts to lift you see four men on a hill holding up a skull, and they’re chanting. As you get closer, you see other men pounding on a hollow log, and you look around, and there are women and children, and you get there and they turn around and look at you, and you realize they have red hair. Those were Celts, singing in the morning sun, as they had for a thousand years … You guys had a rich, rich, beautiful culture.’”
In one sense, Woodenknife’s story is like Filemon Sanchez’s—a Horatio Alger saga; but in another, it’s the story of a man who walks in two worlds. He’s an all-American entrepreneur and a Lakota shaman, or, as the Lakota put it, “a teacher of the way.” A teacher of the way, he said, “is a book, an encyclopedia of a whole way of life,” and it takes years to become one.
Under the wing of a mentor (Woodenknife’s was named Runs Close), a promising candidate is guided through levels of knowledge and understanding. Knowledge and understanding of exactly what he would not reveal; the deepest mysteries of Lakota religion aren’t shared with outsiders. At some point in his instruction, the apprentice takes part in the sun dance, the most sacred ritual of the plains tribes. He fasts and takes sweat baths for four days; then his mentor pierces his chest in two places with a knife and inserts into the incisions pegs attached by ropes to a forked pole. The sun dancer dances to the pole and back three times and, on the fourth, leans back with all his strength, ripping the pegs from under his skin. This is not a test of manhood but a rite of self-sacrifice. He has offered his flesh to Wakan Tanka (the Great Spirit) for the good of all the tribe.
There in the darkness, I pictured the man sitting across from me stripped to the waist, blood trickling down his chest. I couldn’t reconcile that with the image of the fry bread wholesaler, shipping orders to Walmart. How did he do it?
“It’s a very delicate walk to walk in both worlds,” he answered.
He’s had a lot of practice walking that walk. He was one of twelve children, crammed into a cabin without electricity or running water, near the town of Corn Creek.
He remembered the itinerant Indians who stopped in to help cut wood or work cattle and at night told stories by the light of lard-oil lamps, men with names like Quick Bear and Six Toes. He learned tribal lore and history from his father’s first cousin John Lame Deer, a famed Lakota holy man. He was fond of Six Toes, who’d lost his family in a fire and wandered about with a tin cup, an army blanket, and a double-bit ax.
That was one world. Then something happened that changed Woodenknife’s life forever. At age nine, he was kidnapped by the U.S. government and thrown into the white world.
“March of 1963, two guys from the Indian agency showed up at the Indian school with Dad. I thought I was in trouble. They put me in a station wagon, Dad tried to fight them, and the cops arrested him. They took me to Pierre, South Dakota, and gave me to a family in Philadelphia. Parents had no recourse. The government sent you to wherever it thought you needed to go—”
“Ansel,” I interrupted, saying that I’d heard about Indian children plucked off reservations without their parents’ consent and sent to boarding schools or white foster homes, but I thought that had ended a hundred years ago.
“No, it was practiced till 1977. It was part of the assimilation process. Send an Indian over here, over there, and he’d become white … And so they shipped us all over, and I’m one of them. They put me on a plane, and when we got to Philadelphia I ran away from the guy who was supposed to escort me. They caught me and gave me to this family. They were an Italian family, and they were nice to me, but it wasn’t my family, and so I kept running away. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know where Corn Creek, South Dakota, was. I could’ve been running toward the ocean for all I knew, but I just kept running away till they couldn’t deal with it anymore. I got sent back to the reservation as an incorrigible.”
That was in 1966. After three years away, Woodenknife discovered, as did thousands of other Indian children torn from their roots, that he’d become a stranger to his family.
“I never really came home,” he said. “I lived at the house, but everything was different after that … My brothers and sisters didn’t know what to do with me. They were glad to see me, but it was like I came back from the dead.”
He related all this with neither bitterness nor sadness. I think he was one of the most serene men I’ve ever met.
“When you got home, were you an angry kid?”
“Oh, sure. I fought a lot. Boxed for fourteen years. Carried a chip on my shoulder. Went through the gamut and … One of the tests. I passed.”
“You said you boxed?”
I’d had twenty-three amateur fights when I was young. Looking at Woodenknife in the hazy light falling through the trailer’s curtained windows—the thick neck, the muscle-bunched shoulders—I knew I would not have wanted to face him in the ring.
“I probably did it because I had a lot of anger, although anger does you no good in boxing. It taught me how to handle my anger. Then I started fighting in tough-man contests. I rodeoed, rode bareback and bulls…”
I caught a flickering out of the corner of my eye. It was Dani, walking back and forth while she twirled her lighted hoops. Because she was almost invisible in the moonless night, they appeared to be spinning on their own power, like miniature Ferris wheels. I’m talking to a Lakota shaman who’s also a successful entrepreneur, I thought, and over there a Johns Hopkins graduate is dancing in the dark with electric hula hoops. How weird, how wonderful.
The constellations rode the ecliptic westward, and the conversation turned with them, back to the purpose of my journey. What bound the atoms of America to one another? Or was it becoming ever more atomized?
“I don’t think so,” Woodenknife answered. “Getting to meet you and your culture solidifies mine. I embrace that. If you don’t embrace it, you fear it. If you fear it, you lock it out. I’m not like that, and I don’t think most Americans are like that. We have to learn from each other … To me, one of the most valuable things about this country is learning different cultures … That’s the most colorful fabric I’ve encountered in life. I don’t go up to people in fear.”
“Well,” I said, “what about people who aren’t like you?” Who are angry and afraid of the Other, of the immigrant, of the homosexual, of the secularist or of the evangelical, of the black or brown face or, for that matter, the white face?
“No,” he answered in a kind of growl. “Your grandparents who came over had to study everybody that was here intently, not only to get along with them or to work with them, but to be an American. We as Native Americans had to study you very intently to be able to live amongst you in a hundred and fifty years. Your grandparents didn’t have that much longer, either. And so they made the investment of self into another culture. Because we all believe in this country that we’re people who are free to be people. You get that, and you don’t have to fear anybody anymore. You know, I’ve never lost the fact that I’m a free person. The government may hate me because I’m an Indian, but my ancestors walked freely, and by God, if it kills me, I’ll walk freely too.”
He was a Lakota Whitman.
&
nbsp; Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road
Healthy, free, the world before me
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
“I really believe that when we start taking ourselves back, we’ll have more to offer the world,” he said. “I don’t want a gray world.”
“You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from.”
“Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that’s it.”
“So rather than a melting pot, it would be a…”
“A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.”
“A beautiful image,” I said, and looking at him across the table I felt that I was in the presence of a great soul. Earlier, he’d said something that now came back to me: “If I have too much, someone else has too little.” It was the Lakota way to share, and he didn’t want more than his share. He didn’t want to become the fry bread king of America, with a chain of coast-to-coast Indian Taco Bells. He’d earned enough to educate his children and ensure a decent retirement. Reflecting on that and on his thoughts about freedom, I grew confessional. You’re never free till you’re liberated from your own passions, admittedly a secondhand idea. But that didn’t make it any less true that we are manacled by the voice that cries, I want, I want. Once upon a time, I was eaten alive by ambition—for more recognition, more praise, more money, a bigger house, and then a still bigger house. No matter how much I had, I was like the Johnny Rocco character in the movie Key Largo, who, when asked what he wants, answers, “More! That’s right! I want more!” I was always unhappy. It had taken me years to work my way out of that. Years of thinking and study, mostly in the ancient Stoics: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus.
Woodenknife motioned in recognition—he’d been there. “Well, I pulled up tonight and see a man visiting with two people he’d never met before. I see two dogs laying contentedly that didn’t bark at me, and I see a small, self-contained trailer, and that’s enough. Here you have more than any king could want. You’re free to move about, free to engage.”
I threw out the idea that America’s binding force was its unboundedness. You could travel across every state line on the map and never have to show a passport, and knowing you had the freedom to go, just go where you pleased, even if you never went anywhere, liberated your mind to think as it pleased.
“Well, when you can live as you are, and I can live as I live, and we don’t ask people to make reservations for us, then we free them up as well as ourselves. Anytime somebody has to shift position just because of you, you’ve come into more than that person’s face, ’cause you’ve taken their freedom and exchanged it for something you probably don’t even value … There’s a lot more to this country than the next toy.”
“Oh, God, yeah!”
“You know, we’re fast becoming this nation that’s forgotten to give our kids that freedom of movement. If you give your kids nothing, give ’em the land.”
“Do I love that one,” I said, and I surely did. “Those two, Dani and Alex, they’re brother and sister,” I said. “I’m seventy, she’s twenty-one, he’s twenty-seven, and yet there’s this commonality.”
“Reaches across generations. And it reaches across all the segregations that the world demands we put up. Those segregations weren’t meant for you and me. They’re meant for those who want to be in control.”
23.
Alex invited us over for coffee—French-press coffee with cardamom, no less—and Dani performed with impressive dexterity, twirling a hoop around each shoulder, another around her waist, and a fourth around her knees, all at the same time. We felt a bit of a letdown when she and her brother left, bound for Oregon.
I was still set on photographing wild bison. Long ago, Lakota shamans went on vision quests, imploring Wakan Tanka to show them where the herds were. Having bonded with a shaman the night before, I hoped that some of his magic would rub off on me. My vision—a guess, really—was that we’d better our chances of spotting buffalo in the Badlands Wilderness Area, a more primitive part of the national park offering escape from crowds and signed trails.
We banged along the gravel Sage Creek rim road, parked, then hiked a sloping ridge down into a basin riven by wooded creeks, overlooked by far-off buttes and mesas, and webbed with buffalo trails as easy to follow as the man-made kind. Cholla sprouted yellow summer blossoms, mallow scattered orange across the sweep of bluestem and cordgrass. I loved it, two people alone in a vast and beautiful desolation, walking in the tracks of wild buffalo.
But after tramping more than an hour, we hadn’t seen a single animal. My foot was throbbing again, even though we’d covered less than three miles. We sat down by a pond, in a tallgrass meadow half hidden by cottonwood and more willow. Only us and swallows and ducks and jack-in-the-box prairie dogs and trees, sibilant in the warm wind. All quite magical. I took off my shirt, Leslie removed hers; I shed my jeans, she wriggled out of hers, and … Rocks began poking in uncomfortable places, the bugs found us while fleeing predatory swallows, and the luxuriant grass looked like ideal tick habitat. Realizing that this was not a Cialis commercial, we looked at each other, started laughing, got dressed, and headed back.
There were three of them about 250 yards away, two grazing, one lying in the shade of a solitary tree. I pulled the camera out of my backpack and began a stalk, crouching at first, then crawling on hands and knees. When I’d closed to within fifty yards, I raised my binoculars and was awed by their size. Each bull, weighing close to a ton, looked like he could take on Fred and win, humped shoulders mantled in a knotty brown cape, hindquarters the color of burned wood, horns burnished by sunlight hooking out from a shaggy head as big as a Volkswagen’s front end, dripping a beard and perforated by tiny black eyes.
I was too close for safety and too far for a good shot—I didn’t have a long lens. I dropped into a shallow ravine, slithered up the side to the lip, and realized that the ravine would bring me to within thirty yards. Thirty miles an hour, the warnings on the back of the map said. How long would it take to cover thirty yards at thirty miles an hour? Not long enough to keep me from looking like roadkill. The light was right now, and the bull was beautiful in it, hide shining as if it had been shellacked. I framed him and took two or three shots. Possibly he’d heard the shutter snap; he raised his head and looked at me with a kind of baleful stupidity. Enough. This was really, really stupid on my part. I slipped back into the ravine.
“It’s Buffalo Phil,” Leslie said when I returned. “I was having flashbacks to tenth grade.”
“What happened in tenth grade?”
“We read ‘The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ He was killed by a buffalo. A Cape Buffalo, but that’s close enough.”
“Actually, it was his wife. She shot him in the head.”
“Oh.”
* * *
North by northwest toward Rapid City on South Dakota 44. The Buffalo Gap National Grassland, sparkling in the clear morning, stretched for forty or fifty miles. Far off to our right, the Badlands formed a jumbled skyline, the cliffs and buttes dusty and wrinkled, like elephant hide. Fred’s tank was half full when we gassed up in Caputa, but I had to stop and find out if the town had been founded by a lost relative who couldn’t spell his own name. A Caputo in these parts might explain why the pizza we’d eaten the previous night had been more than edible. The man behind the counter in the general store had no idea of the name’s origin. He summoned Ryan Olson, a tall cowboy sporting a black goatee and Wyatt Earp mustache.
“My great-granddad built this store in 1908,” he said. “It was a mercantile for when they built the railroad. Our ranch is right across the highway. Been in the family more’n a hundred years.”
The ranch also had a place in the history of American cinema: it had been the location for the movie Dances with Wolves. Ryan was proud of that and showed us a wall full of photographs taken during filming. “Interesting,” I said, “but what about this name, Caputa?”
I pronounced it as I do my family name, with a short u. He corrected me: it was Ca-pew-ta. He’d heard it meant “railroad stop” in a foreign language but wasn’t sure which one. Could be Swedish or Norwegian.
Outside, Leslie asked Magic Droid to translate Caputa from Swedish, then from Norwegian. For a change, MD was at a loss.
The road began a sinuous climb into the Black Hills, which aren’t hills but mountains, isolated out on the Great Plains, as if a chunk of the Rockies had broken off and floated out onto that ocean of grass. It was a pleasure to look up instead of out for a change, a pleasure to see trees again, and there was an abundance of them. The dark green of the spruce and ponderosa bristling up the mountainsides, interrupted by bright alpine meadows, gave rise to the Lakota name Pahá Sapá (Black Mountains). To the Lakota, as to the Cheyenne, they were the center of the world, for practical as well as mystical reasons. Trout abounded in the streams; bison grazed in the open mountain parks; sheep inhabited the high, granitic peaks; elk and deer ranged through the forests, which also supplied wood for fuel and poles for lodges. In The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman describes riding into the hills with a Lakota band whose sole purpose was to cut trees for lodge poles. But for some, the journey was also a kind of religious pilgrimage. One day, while hunting deer, Parkman came upon an old man, “seated alone, immovable as a statue among the rocks and trees.”
“His face was turned upward, and his eyes seemed riveted on a pine tree springing from a cleft in the precipice above … Looking at the old man for a while, I was satisfied that he was engaged in an act of worship, or prayer, or communion of some kind with a supernatural being.”
The Longest Road Page 18