The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Because this was February and because there was snow on the ground and because my daughters did not share my fascination for replicas of ancient sacred shrines in the middle of what most people might agree is nowhere, my husband stayed with them and built snowmen and drank hot cocoa while I headed to the nearby Holy City of the Wichitas. The Holy City sits on land in the 59,000-acre Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which was itself set aside from the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Indian Reservation and declared a national forest on July 4, 1901. The refuge shelters American bison, Rocky Mountain elk, Texas longhorn cattle, white-tailed deer, and a remnant of native prairie that escaped the plows of pioneers only because the ground beneath was too full of stones. Fort Sill was originally a frontier fort, established to protect the settlements of those same pioneers from Native tribes in the border states of Kansas and Texas. It was here, in June of 1875, that Quanah Parker and his Quahadi Comanche tribe surrendered, ending the Indian Wars on the southern Plains. And in 1894, Geronimo and more than three hundred other Chiricahua Apache were brought here as prisoners of war, eight years after having surrendered in Skeleton Canyon, in the Peloncillo Mountains of northern Arizona. At Fort Sill the Apaches were held in scattered villages, where they raised crops and cattle, adapting, because they had no other choice, to this new, sedentary existence. Geronimo would spend the last fifteen years of his life at Fort Sill, dying of pneumonia in 1909, still a prisoner of the United States. Three years before his death, he dictated his autobiography to Steven Melvil Barrett, superintendent of education in Lawton. In the final chapter, he makes a plaintive appeal that he and his remnant Apaches be allowed to return to the mountains surrounding the headwaters of the Gila River, in Arizona. “It is my land, my home, my fathers’ land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return,” Geronimo entreats. “I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.” His cairn, surmounted by an eagle, lies in the Apache cemetery at Fort Sill.

  The thing about the Holy City of the Wichitas is that, replica though it may be, it’s strangely beautiful, laid out along a low rise of scraggy terrain, where jagged rocks erupt from the soil and grasses and stunted oaks and cypress claw through the spaces in between. Beyond, farther hills and abraded mountains. Nothing—except a few telephone poles and the road that brings you here—man-made. The Holy City itself consists of a quarter-mile swath of crenellated structures made of the same native red granite that juts from the earth. It is anchored on one end by a sturdy chapel with two square towers, and at the other end by three wooden crosses. In between: a temple, an arched gateway, courts, a stable, the tomb. The Christ of the Wichitas, a white marble statue, stands 23 feet, palms open at his sides on the road approaching the Holy City, near the entrance. Encased in the red granite base of the statue is a white rock from the Mount of Olives.

  Though the surrounding topography does resemble pictures I’ve seen of the Judean Hills, the Holy City itself strikes me as the vision of what someone who has never been to ancient Jerusalem, which I have not, might imagine it to look like. To be fair, this recreation was built not to replicate in exact detail the real Jerusalem but rather to stage an Easter pageant—“The Longest-Running Outdoor Passion Play Drama in America,” as the cover of the program likes to remind its audience. Against a backdrop of cedar and stone, the Holy City of the Wichitas is a place where the devout come to see the story of their Savior reenacted before them, as the devout have been doing since the Middle Ages, when passion plays first began to be performed. Back then, through the visual representation of scripture, a largely illiterate faithful could feel the palpable presence of God. Similarly, the Holy City today and the pageant that takes place there represent an attempt to give body to a symbolic landscape the way Christ, as viewed by Christians, became the Word made flesh. The place is aligned with those Judean sites and relics that the translator Aubrey Stewart noted—a visible and tangible aid to faith.

  When I drove up that winter morning, the cast was practicing for the upcoming performance. Teenagers leaned against what appeared to be the walls of the temple. Children in puffy, brightly colored coats chased each other around. Middle-aged men carried ladders from building to building. Women in earmuffs bustled about. During a break in rehearsals, I was lucky enough to get a tour from Richard Matthys, a retired printer from Lawton and that year’s pageant director, and to meet some of the devoted cast and crew.

  Matthys wore crisply pressed blue jeans and a flannel shirt under a hunter’s camouflage jacket. His hands were those of a man who had worked them hard for the seventy or more years he’d been using them. When he spoke to me, he looked more at my chin than into my eyes. He explained that the narrative of the Holy City Easter pageant is composed of scenes plucked from the four Gospels and arranged to tell the story of Christ. “We have the whole life, from birth to Resurrection,” he told me, clearly proud. “In South Dakota,” he continued, referring to the Black Hills passion play, “they only focus on the last seven days. And Mel Gibson, he just shows only right there at the end.” We walked across the grounds of the Holy City and arrived at a low-lying stone structure with a timbered roof, one long side open to us so that we could see in—more like the plastic crèches in suburban front yards at Christmastime than an actual stable. Matthys explained that this was the stable where the Christ Child was born because there was no room in the inn. Inside there was a manger filled with hay, and hovering over the roof, on a pole, was a blue neon star.

  “We do use a donkey and a live baby Jesus,” Matthys told me. “We’ve never had to use a doll.” In past productions there have also been live cows and sheep. A riding club from the nearby community of Meers provides horses for the Roman soldiers. The Lions Club in Elgin loans camels, perhaps descendants of the U.S. Camel Corps, imported from Smyrna in the mid-nineteenth century to help the army during surveying missions in the West. And Jesus rides into Jerusalem on an honest-to-goodness ass. “We try to make it as back to the natural as we can,” Matthys emphasized. Sweeping his arm out over a small field just below the stable on the hillside, he pointed out where the shepherds and the Wise Men come. “We used to have a cable with a star attached that would light up,” he said. “Someone would be walking with the cord in the dark and all you could see was the Wise Men following the star to the stable. But we had to give that up. You would always hear it squeak.” They also had to give up the possibility, during the Resurrection scene, of lifting Jesus up into the clouds on a cable. The Department of the Interior, which manages the refuge, said no way.

  But this insistence on authenticity was something a number of the cast members would reiterate to me that February day. Bob Burgher, who at seventy-two was the oldest cast member and who had begun participating in the pageant in 1946, recalled that one year the temperature was one degree below zero. Someone bought the cast flesh-colored long johns to wear during the performance. “They said no,” Burgher told me. “They wanted to be authentic. That’s the kind of dedication you get here. It gets in your blood.” Burgher himself seemed to be a model of that dedication. As a young man in the service, he had once taken a three-day pass just to participate in the pageant. “I flew out of Korea. Took a hop to Tinker [the nearby air force base]. Got into costume. As soon as the Hallelujah chorus was over, I headed back to Tinker.” Another year he had three heart attacks while on set. “One guy had to hold me up. But I wouldn’t leave to go to the hospital. I wasn’t about to louse it up.”

  Before this city was built, the Easter service took place on a mountaintop, beginning in 1926, as Florence Guild Bruce records in her 1940 local history, He Is Risen: A History of the Wichita Mountains Easter Pageant. In the predawn hours of Easter morning that first year, Reverend Anthony Mark Wallock, an Austrian immigrant and minister of the First Congregational Church of Lawton, led his flock to a
mountainside just outside Medicine Park, near the bluff sacred to the Native people, where the Comanche medicine man had rent the stones. At the summit, verses of scripture were read, interspersed with songs accompanied by violin—“In the Garden,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Christ Arose.” As the sun began to ascend, five women enacted a tableau of the Resurrection: the three Marys (Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Mary Magdalene) and two angels stood by a whitewashed spot on the rocks—the door of the tomb.

  Wallock was born on April 25, 1890, in Schildberg, Austria, a small village south of Vienna. In an article on the 1941 pageant, the Daily Oklahoman pointed out, with perhaps an outsize sense of Wallock’s realm of influence, that Hitler too had been born in Austria, in a town not far away, and only a year earlier, and that “in each was to swell a singleness of purpose to dominate his life—but the purposes were direct opposites.” The hagiography of Wallock’s life, recounted in Bruce’s He Is Risen and reprinted year after year in pageant programs, records that Wallock’s parents immigrated to the United States when he was only two. He grew up in Chicago, was reared a Catholic, and would often spend his days cutting out stage settings and biblical figures from cardboard boxes, perhaps laying the early foundation for the religious drama that came to define his life.

  In the years that followed that first simple tableau on the mountainside above Medicine Park, the production became more and more elaborate. Wallock wrote a script, based on the Gospels, that alternated hymns and chapters of scripture. It remains largely intact to this day. Over time he added more tableaux to the repertoire: Jesus healing the lepers, Jesus praying in the garden, the march to Calvary. One year an organ was carried up the hillside. He had electric lights strung along the pathway, and, at intervals, small stone shrines installed with glass-encased pictures showing the last days in the life of Christ. The Knights Templar, a Masonic group that takes its name from a medieval monastic military order whose mandate it was to protect Christian pilgrims en route to the Holy Land, began forming an enormous human cross at the beginning of each year’s service. Though the pageant now takes place on the Saturday evening before Easter, in the early years it began in the wee hours of Easter morning, ending three or more hours later, at sunrise, with the Resurrection.

  Every Easter the cast and congregation grew. According to Bruce and to various newspaper accounts, already by 1928 the audience was 1,000 people strong and the cast was 45. In 1932, 150 congregants took part in nine tableaux; 15,000 people attended. And by 1934, just eight years after the pageant’s first performance, the cast of 500 actors performed for a crowd of 40,000 from all over the Southwest. Word seems to have spread first through the local Lawton Constitution, then the Daily Oklahoman, out of Oklahoma City. In 1932 the American News Reel Company shot footage of the pageant and released it to theaters throughout the country. The Columbia Broadcasting System began airing the entire pageant over the radio, beginning in 1939. The following year Ernie Pyle, a Scripps Howard roving reporter, attended the performance and wrote, “In Lawton is a master showman. He wouldn’t call himself a showman, and probably wouldn’t even like being called one. But he is . . . His creation is an Easter morning pageant. There are hundreds of them over the world. But Lawton’s seems to have risen above the others.”

  Searching for a suitable site to which the growing pageant could be moved, Wallock stood in the Wichita Mountains gazing down upon what appeared to be a large natural amphitheater of granite. In the stones he saw the shape of a cross formed by the sunlight. In He Is Risen, he recalled of that moment, “This was God’s garden first. When we discovered it, we were inspired by the majestic granite walls of Mt Sheridan in the background. The only inhabitants were the deer and the birds. A lone eagle flew over our heads. Like the Greeks, we believed it must have been a divine benediction.” And as with the Greeks and the medieval keepers of Jerusalem, for Wallock these mountains seem to have been another omphalos, a place where God speaks directly to men who listen.

  In 1934 the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a permit for the use of approximately 160 acres of land, part of what was then still called the Wichita National Forest, but which just one year later would become the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. President Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually approved a grant of $94,000 (a little less than $4 million in today’s dollars) from the Works Progress Administration for public improvements, which in this case meant building “the Holy City,” as it was referred to in the WPA files. Among other, smaller structures, the WPA constructed watchtowers, the gateway to Jerusalem, the temple, Pilate’s judgment hall, Herod’s court, the Lord’s Supper building, the garden of Gethsemane, the tomb, Calvary’s mount, and the crenellated World Chapel, with murals and wood carvings inside by Irene Malcolm, who is remembered by Ellenbrook in his Outdoor and Trail Guide as “the Michaelangelo of the Wichitas.” In the midst of the Great Depression, publicity for the 1936 pageant, the tenth anniversary, was nationwide: announcements were made over radio stations across the country; feature stories and maps appeared in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the New York Times. According to the April 13 Daily Oklahoman from that year, some of the congregation of a hundred thousand lit fires to stay warm and camped in tents all over the hills surrounding the Holy City. Three years later the same paper would report of these crowds that they resembled “the march of the refugee Spanish Loyalists lugging blankets, cots, mattresses, baskets of food, and portable cookstoves; they were dressed in warm old clothes, many of the women with their heads swathed against the chill of the night.” On that tenth anniversary, as dawn broke over the mountains and the pageant came to an end, Wallock read a telegram from President Roosevelt over the public address system:

  EASTER GREETING by Western Union

  KMY103 104 GOVT NL=THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON DC

  REV ANTHONY MARK WALLOCK=

  DIRECTOR EASTER PAGEANT

  TO ALL OF SINCERE FAITH THE DAWN OF THIS EASTER DAY IN THE WICHITA MOUNTAINS WILL BRING THE SAME MESSAGE OF HOPE THAT THE ANGEL OF THE RESURRECTION BROUGHT TO THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE TOMB OF THE MASTER IN THE HILLS OF JUDA STOP THE MESSAGE OF THAT FIRST EASTER DAY COLON QUOTE HE IS RISEN UNQUOTE HAS EVER SINCE SYMBOLIZED FAITH AND HOPE AND NEWNESS OF LIFE AND STILL HAS POWER TO STRENGTHEN AND SUSTAIN STOP IN GRATITUDE FOR ALL THE RICH GIFTS WHICH EASTER BRINGS I JOIN MY HUMBLE PRAYERS TO THOSE OF MY COUNTRYMEN WHEREVER THEY ARE GATHERED THIS MORNING=

  FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT

  Colonel Arthur C. Goebel, famed airplane stuntman and speed flyer, wrote He Is Risen with smoke letters across the sky.

  “This is the boat where Jesus starts calling his first disciples, Peter, James, John, and Andrew. They were fishing here and Jesus said to them, ‘Put away your nets and come follow me,’” Matthys was explaining as we stood in the cold light beneath an inconceivably blue sky. Wallock had originally envisioned a Sea of Galilee as part of the Holy City. A dry creek ran through the grounds of the Holy City, and Wallock tried to expand this creek and then pump water from a well with a windmill, but what with the hard-packed earth and the scorching Oklahoma summers, they could never, as Matthys told me, “resurrect the river.” As for the boat, weathered gray, it now lay amid the winter grasses. On its starboard side, in hand-painted block letters, were the words S.S. HOLY CITY.

  Both the grandiosity of Wallock’s vision for the Holy City Easter pageant and his desire for authenticity link this contemporary passion play not only with those of the Middle Ages, but also with those of the Renaissance, that time of the flowering of modern theater. Some productions employed music and scenery and hundreds of actors in elaborate costumes. Often they lasted too long to be performed in one sitting. In some, the scene of the Crucifixion took as long as it would have in reality. Georges Bertrin, an early twentieth-century professor at the Paris Catholic Institute, notes that in the 1437 production in Metz, the curé who was playing Christ nearly died on the cross. During that same performance, another priest, playing the part of Juda
s, was left on the cross so long that he collapsed and had to be lowered down and carried away. Prefigurations of the Holy City’s Bob Burgher.