"As a preschooler, Lisa Yellow Horse knew only one language, Lakota. Now a grown woman on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she embodies what many in her generation feel: a paralyzing fear to speak a language she is no longer fluent in and confusion about how to pass it down before it disappears.
The regret is hard to swallow."
A year-long series on the Lakota language and culture has been featured in the Rapid City (SD) Journal, and today's stories focused on the loss of language and the generational gaps that helped contribute to this loss as much as colonialism has (Yes, I do realize this disinterest was fostered by colonialism, as is pointed out in the series).
As I read this story, I was reminded my own small self, the only "brown" kid I knew, the only one who could speak another language. As I got older and my friends found plenty of things about my mom and her culture that were "wrong," I grew less and less curious in learning about that culture myself. Now, I feel ashamed only of the fact that I didn't take the time to appreciate my mom's culture more, as a child. Sure, today I take the time to visit relative in Colombia, and I'm genuinely interested in my heritage, but I don't feel like I'm "Colombian" anymore than I am "White." In action, manner and culture, I'm definitely White, north American. But this morning, as my mom rambled on and on and on about some story over breakfast (Colombian hot chocolate and a very America slice of cold, leftover pizza), I realized that in the way I tell stories, I am very much the Colombiana of my ancestry.
My aunts tell stories like my mom, loong, complicated rambling things that veer off in this direction for a while, then that one, then loop back around again and finally (or not) begin to make some sense. My grandma was the same way, and even my uncles tell stories full of stories, heaping one idea upon the next upon the next.
As I chewed and nodded, feigning in interest in her 7 a.m. nonsense, the work of Bruce Chatwin came to mind. A storyteller himself, Chatwin shared the work of the Australian Aborigines and their Songlines and Dreamtime stories, the stories by which all of Australia is mapped, plotted and held together by story. It seems like all cultures are held together by an intricate web of words, and for the Lakota people to lose that web is to lose their system of navigation.
Having spent a semester getting into the history of a place that I once knew intimately, I've found that my ideas of nature are as conflicted as I am. I'm a country girl who'd rather live in the city, but I have found that I want that city to have some of the pace and culture of my childhood landscapes. I still tell people that I left Chicago this semester because being in "nature" for a nature writing course made more sense than being in Chicago, so I guess I don't really think of Chicago as nature, although I know it does have it's own natural elements. This awareness is also conflicted, because I think of cities as places of learning, learned people,people who want more than a life toiling in the dirt. Cities are full of knowledge, and they have shaped the adult I am. They provided the education I received in college.
And yet there is a certain kind of knowledge to be found among the rural. The knowledge of cloud patterns and storms, the way plants grow, and animals; the simple understanding of the seasons and where food comes from.. all that is more a rural education than a concrete and book-learned one. Throughout the semester we've focused on the duality of this genre in the authors we've encountered, and even those who live in cities, or less rural places have a reverence for the natural land (land not paved or developed, in this case) that doesn't seem to have been bred of the city.
At the beginning of the course I felt that nature writing was the wild, lyric, expressive rambling and storytelling that a writer writes because he has to, is compelled from somewhere inside to create and honor with the gift of words and sentences. Environmental writing seemed to be the more scientific, book-learned stuff, and as the course ends, I feel mostly the same way. I know that there are cross-overs, as there should be in all good nonfiction writing; even in the fiction within the genre we see that the author hopes to inform as much as entertain. We see that as much care must be given to language as to the story itself, the story we tell in our existence on the land.
As I read the stories of the young women in this article, and then the story of a Philadelphian who came to the Rez to learn and then teach the Lakota language, I felt like I've spent a whole semester not just learning how to connect to nature and consider it, but how to speak to it, and about it, on its own terms, in its own language. What we need is a bridge over our failed communications, a means of spanning not just generations, but cultures and people and ideas. We need to close the gap between "nature" and "wild" as bad things, and develop a sense of understanding and fluency in our relationships toward all things. I'm just not sure how to go about getting at that fluency, other than writing. And exploring. And being.
Showing posts with label Prompt Posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prompt Posts. Show all posts
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Seagull: Prompt Post No. 7
The small white "boats" bob in the distance, like scoops of vanilla ice cream atop a dark, bluish float. I can't see the small black eyes of the gull, nor the vivid, sharp hooks of their beaks. Their cute little webbed toes are hidden beneath the surface of the water, but I know they're either tucked up into warm feathers, or paddling languidly. The seagulls pay no attention to me, but I am watching them. The tables have been turned. "The circle, as Joseph Bruchac writes, "is the way to see." In these warm feathered bodies, bobbing and drifing in the current, I see the natural world. I see a reflection and an interconnectedness. I see me.
I have always been fascinated with the seagull. As a little girl, liked the birds because I could throw my icky bread crusts overboard, and the loud birds would swoop in a for a meal, entertaining me and breaking the monotony of a day on the lake. I learned as a child that gulls are not picky; watching them scavenge on the shorelines for bits of fish skin, human refuse or even the living insects and water bugs showed me that these birds know how to make do with what they have.
Walk along the edge of any dump, landfill or polluted place, and there's the gull, loudly proclaiming himself king of all the things in the world that no one else wants. I've often wondered what, if anything, I can learn from these birds.
Once, while reading a book in a park in downtown Chicago, I'd set down the lemon bar I was eating, only to watch it slide away out of the corner of my eye, pages later. A craft gull had snuck in close behind me, nabbed the cellophane wrapper, and was slowly backing away from me with one eye trained on my face. It was the first time I'd even been so close to a bird like this, and I held my breath, not wanting to freak him out. I don't think he cared at all.. he scooted about two feet away, and looked up, then took his time pecking at my lemon bar. By that time, I realized I could no more offend him than he'd offended me, so I pulled out my cellphone and snapped a picture of him, in case no one believed me. Thankfully, my friends in Chicago "get" this kind of thing; one saw it as a message.
"You know, Mars, maybe the seagull is your totem animal."
Totem animal, huh? I'd heard of this concept, but hadn't felt like I'd even had an encounter with any animal to experience the coolness of this.
A totem animal, is, according to the Manataka American Indian Council, a spirit guide that may "teach us their powers and give as lessons of life (and these things don't necessarily have to be animals)."
Well, from that day on, I kept noticing gulls, all the time. Sure, they're all over Navy Pier in downtown Chicago, and I lived next to the lake on the North side, but even when I wasn't near water or trash or spilled food.. I'd see a gull.
There would be a magnet in a bookstore, a lighthouse with a bird atop it.
And one day, at home in Nebraska, I was feeding ducks at a small lake in the town where my mom works, and these gulls flew above me, and hovered there, caught on the wind current. Most of the flock moved on, but there was one gull in particular that kept riding the wind; he'd go higher, and move forward, then drop down and be pushed backward again, until he was above me yet again. It felt like this went on for hours, but it was probably no more than 60 seconds. There was this old dead tree behind him, and the way the sun was coming through the tree, dappled and reflected, broken into small squares of glittering, opalescent light, then landing on the bird's feathers, made me feel like there was more than woman and bird and wind involved in the moment. It made me feel like I was connected to something larger than the bird, or the sun or even that moment. It made me feel like all moments were the same and my entire life was as shot through with amber and gold and warmth as any life had ever been.
So what did the seagull mean? That a carefree, scavenging, wild attitude was always going to be part of my makeup? I guess I knew that already, but it was fun to see a similarity between me and the animal.
Since that time Raccoon has added himself to my cache of totem animals. Before I left Chicago for good, I'd been praying for a sign, and the night I first talked to my boss about possibly putting in my two weeks, a raccoon walked out of a dark street in front of me, and walked about 1/4 of a block home with me. Raccoon can often help people let go of things that no longer serve them.
I feel stronger ties and loyalty to Seagull, but it was really amazing to feel like I'd gotten the sign I was hoping for.
I know I am not alone in my kinship with animals in this manner; many indigenous peoples believe that there is power and connection and meaning in special animal encounters. For example, ancient cultures, such as the Mapuche, know that Puma and Jaguar are animals of power. Condor and Snake represent life and death and the great mystery surrounding us, and it is not uncommon for spiritual practice to invoke the names and strengths of these animals as needed. Even author Peter Coyote, who pays homage to his namesake in "Muddy Prints on the Mohair," calls upon the trickster spirit of the furred animal in both humor and contemplation.
"Coyote is the miss in your engine He steals your concentration in the Zendo… He is total effort. Any good afternoon nap. Best dancer in the house . The dealer and the sucker in a sidewalk Monte game. An acquaintance who hunts your power. The hooker whose boyfriend comes out of the closet while your pants are down. He's also the boyfriend…"
Seagull, too, is all of these things and more. He is the bird who flies with others but is not afraid to go alone. Seagull is like Gluskabe, or Ikitomi, depending on the tradition of story. He makes his home in any place, mates with anyone, finds what he needs to survive and knows how to go on. He is hated, cursed, studied, poisoned, diseased, make into cartoons and stuffed animals is stuffed and studied in museums and labs. Seagull is loud and annoying and always has something to say, like it or not or understand it. Seagull is also comfort.
I can't watch the birds bob on the water or pick through trash to this day without thinking of that day in Chicago or the moment in Nebraska at the lake. No matter where I am, what or who I encounter, I find a strength in these memories because I find a strength in seagull. I know I'm crass and loud and irritating and even animal in my actions at times. I don't so as far as theft of others' food, from behind their half-turned backs, but I know how to get what I need in order to function and survive. I am okay with going though the cheap-o bins at good will or the curbside junk left on the edge of my street corner. I am drawn to those who live likewise, the curious, the messy, the adaptable. We might be a stone's throw away from the edges of humanity and being pesky, pesty animals, but we are true to our animal nature. And for providing the example and reminding me to by myself, at all costs, I remain indebted to the seagull and the other guides who walk this planet.
I have always been fascinated with the seagull. As a little girl, liked the birds because I could throw my icky bread crusts overboard, and the loud birds would swoop in a for a meal, entertaining me and breaking the monotony of a day on the lake. I learned as a child that gulls are not picky; watching them scavenge on the shorelines for bits of fish skin, human refuse or even the living insects and water bugs showed me that these birds know how to make do with what they have.
Walk along the edge of any dump, landfill or polluted place, and there's the gull, loudly proclaiming himself king of all the things in the world that no one else wants. I've often wondered what, if anything, I can learn from these birds.
Once, while reading a book in a park in downtown Chicago, I'd set down the lemon bar I was eating, only to watch it slide away out of the corner of my eye, pages later. A craft gull had snuck in close behind me, nabbed the cellophane wrapper, and was slowly backing away from me with one eye trained on my face. It was the first time I'd even been so close to a bird like this, and I held my breath, not wanting to freak him out. I don't think he cared at all.. he scooted about two feet away, and looked up, then took his time pecking at my lemon bar. By that time, I realized I could no more offend him than he'd offended me, so I pulled out my cellphone and snapped a picture of him, in case no one believed me. Thankfully, my friends in Chicago "get" this kind of thing; one saw it as a message.
"You know, Mars, maybe the seagull is your totem animal."
Totem animal, huh? I'd heard of this concept, but hadn't felt like I'd even had an encounter with any animal to experience the coolness of this.
A totem animal, is, according to the Manataka American Indian Council, a spirit guide that may "teach us their powers and give as lessons of life (and these things don't necessarily have to be animals)."
Well, from that day on, I kept noticing gulls, all the time. Sure, they're all over Navy Pier in downtown Chicago, and I lived next to the lake on the North side, but even when I wasn't near water or trash or spilled food.. I'd see a gull.
There would be a magnet in a bookstore, a lighthouse with a bird atop it.
And one day, at home in Nebraska, I was feeding ducks at a small lake in the town where my mom works, and these gulls flew above me, and hovered there, caught on the wind current. Most of the flock moved on, but there was one gull in particular that kept riding the wind; he'd go higher, and move forward, then drop down and be pushed backward again, until he was above me yet again. It felt like this went on for hours, but it was probably no more than 60 seconds. There was this old dead tree behind him, and the way the sun was coming through the tree, dappled and reflected, broken into small squares of glittering, opalescent light, then landing on the bird's feathers, made me feel like there was more than woman and bird and wind involved in the moment. It made me feel like I was connected to something larger than the bird, or the sun or even that moment. It made me feel like all moments were the same and my entire life was as shot through with amber and gold and warmth as any life had ever been.
So what did the seagull mean? That a carefree, scavenging, wild attitude was always going to be part of my makeup? I guess I knew that already, but it was fun to see a similarity between me and the animal.
Since that time Raccoon has added himself to my cache of totem animals. Before I left Chicago for good, I'd been praying for a sign, and the night I first talked to my boss about possibly putting in my two weeks, a raccoon walked out of a dark street in front of me, and walked about 1/4 of a block home with me. Raccoon can often help people let go of things that no longer serve them.
I feel stronger ties and loyalty to Seagull, but it was really amazing to feel like I'd gotten the sign I was hoping for.
I know I am not alone in my kinship with animals in this manner; many indigenous peoples believe that there is power and connection and meaning in special animal encounters. For example, ancient cultures, such as the Mapuche, know that Puma and Jaguar are animals of power. Condor and Snake represent life and death and the great mystery surrounding us, and it is not uncommon for spiritual practice to invoke the names and strengths of these animals as needed. Even author Peter Coyote, who pays homage to his namesake in "Muddy Prints on the Mohair," calls upon the trickster spirit of the furred animal in both humor and contemplation.
"Coyote is the miss in your engine He steals your concentration in the Zendo… He is total effort. Any good afternoon nap. Best dancer in the house . The dealer and the sucker in a sidewalk Monte game. An acquaintance who hunts your power. The hooker whose boyfriend comes out of the closet while your pants are down. He's also the boyfriend…"
Seagull, too, is all of these things and more. He is the bird who flies with others but is not afraid to go alone. Seagull is like Gluskabe, or Ikitomi, depending on the tradition of story. He makes his home in any place, mates with anyone, finds what he needs to survive and knows how to go on. He is hated, cursed, studied, poisoned, diseased, make into cartoons and stuffed animals is stuffed and studied in museums and labs. Seagull is loud and annoying and always has something to say, like it or not or understand it. Seagull is also comfort.
I can't watch the birds bob on the water or pick through trash to this day without thinking of that day in Chicago or the moment in Nebraska at the lake. No matter where I am, what or who I encounter, I find a strength in these memories because I find a strength in seagull. I know I'm crass and loud and irritating and even animal in my actions at times. I don't so as far as theft of others' food, from behind their half-turned backs, but I know how to get what I need in order to function and survive. I am okay with going though the cheap-o bins at good will or the curbside junk left on the edge of my street corner. I am drawn to those who live likewise, the curious, the messy, the adaptable. We might be a stone's throw away from the edges of humanity and being pesky, pesty animals, but we are true to our animal nature. And for providing the example and reminding me to by myself, at all costs, I remain indebted to the seagull and the other guides who walk this planet.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Salebarn (part I): Prompt Post No. 6
wind blew across the parking lot as Tomi stepped from her car, crunching shit-stained snow with her black heels. Her small car, its shiny green body sure to get lost in between the staggered rows of tail-gated vehicles, was nosed in forward-- no need to parallel park, here, she thought, shaking her head slowly. Life in Boston had been a shock to her system, coming from the sweeping grasses of her Plains prairie, but grandfather, he had prepared her for that one.
"In the cities, there are so many cars people park in long rows down the street. It is different in many ways, and if you park funny, your difference will show."
Tomi had always hated it when her differences showed off the reservation, but on it, she was proud of her distinctions.
"There goes Tomi 'Too-Good'," joked the boys she had no time for, when they were feeling particularly mean and nasty, but Tomi would smile and nod her head into her books, trying hard to feign indifference. She knew she would get off the rez, leave behind the sadness and misery that had so long been suffered by her people. Grandfather told her he saw that in her future, and since he knew everything, she had always believed him. His comments about her differences being beautiful were something she had never believed growing up on the edge of the reservation, but in the city, well, people had loved them.
And now, she could remember his words like it was yesterday...had six years really passed already? Was her beloved Grandfather really dying? What had he said, crackling and wheezing from her cell phone?
"No more moons for grandfather?"
Tomi knew he'd said it in an attempt at humor, poking fun at his old ways, the things lost to her people that he'd held dear, those things she's once dreaded. Things like the dances, the way the drums spoke deep in her heart and her stomach, the way the rocks sang at the lodges and whispered the secrets of her people. She’d hated being known in school for those things, the Indian girl who was bused in to town on government funds, but now, her heritage was something almost magical.
Remembering her high school days Tomi slammed her door shut, and walking purposefully, moved toward the screened-in entrance.
it had been years since she'd driven past this lot, and now, back from college, the memories of her timeworking at the salebarn haunted her. The white paint was chipped and ugly along the north side of the building, and the scattered straw, manure and yelllowed snow puddles washed the ground leading to the chutes with an equal squalor. The men and women who worked here said that life on the Rez was putrid and ugly, but did they ever take a second look at their surroundings? The kids she'd guarded in basketball or ran against in track, the ones who'd been so hard on her for the way she'd ridden her horses in 4-H, did they ever think twice about the way they treated their own animals? Had she, when she slapped rumps and prodded ankles?
As Tomi reached the screen door-- still hanging at an uncomfortable angle after McClintock lost out on a heifer bid--she craned her head around to the east of the building, so that she could just see beyond the first pens and around the chute. The pens, once red and black, “in honor of the Herefords and Black Angus that come through,” Ellis had told her, were now rust colored and bronzed, or a flaky, dirty gray.
To the south of the pens, the loading chute was exactly as she’d remembered it: weathered wood, gone gray and warped in the harsh winters, covered with shit spatters of all colors, like brown,honey,gold,yellow,tan,chocolate,raisin polka dots. This was where the animals met their new enclosures: slatted semi-trailers, horse trailers or maybe just porta-pens in the back of a truck.
Tomi was hoping for a familiar face or two, but she couldn't see anything but cinnamon hide and loopy, bubble-gum udders. The cows were still in progress-- it would be a while until the bull sale started, so steadied by the determination in her mind, Tomi pushed open the screen door and was pulled forward.
The grounds had been kept up over the years, obviously, because the parking lot was full of trailers and pickup trucks and semis—hers was the only car—and that meant that today’s was going to be a big sale, but she had wasted enough time outside already. She knew how she felt about the commerce of animals. Boston had changed that, too. What she wanted to know…would Ellis be working here today?
The first time she stepped foot in the salebarn it had been dark out, but the sky was full of stars and the Moon was shining.
The 4-H sale had ended, and Tomi's steer had brought top dollar. Ellis Drum, who's dad Gene owned Drum's auction and officiated at the 4-H sale proceedings, spoke to her back in the pens when she'd returned her steer to his holdings.
"You know, Tomi.." he'd said, slow and calculated, with the mind of a man who is used to sizing up female animals for their heft, durability and reproductive capabilities "I could take you inside the salebarn sometime, show you around.. get you a drink."
Tomi's hand had stopped brushing whorl in the middle of her steer’s hindquarters. She knew Ellis in the way everyone knew him-- good looking, funny, Gene Drum's son. Golden. They'd talked at the 4-H dances each year, shared a few, shared more than that many beers, but they'd never been friends. Not really. Why did he want to do this for her now?
"Oh, really? What for?"
Tomi knew that there would be a cost of some sort involved in this; the Drum family hadn't wrangled the largest salebarn and auction reputation in the tri-county area with nothing but their good looks and silver tongues.
"I dunno, just thought you might like to see the place we kill the animals."
Tomi snorted, whipping around and bending upright to face Ellis.
“Cut the shit, Ellis. You know as well as I do that I’ve seen death before, and I’m not scared of it. You’ll talk to me here, ask me to see your salebarn while no one’s around, but you really want something. What.”
No nonsense, matter-of-fact. Tomi still talked that way, always had; it was this sensibility that had interested Mr. Brookings when he encouraged her to go into law.
Ellis’ dark eyes had almost glowed that night, like the firebugs she’d chased up from the grasses as a child, and when he answered her, she knew he meant it.
“Business, is all. You’re a good looking girl, gonna be a woman before school starts again.. I know you want offa that wasteland up north. Come down and work for us rest tha’ summer. Help out during the year.Put up some money for college. Dad’s on the Golden Clovers scholarship board… maybe he could work something even better.”
Tomi had pulled at the steer’s halter when Ellis offered her the job, a little harsher than necessary, and the young animal had bawled. And bawled and bawled, she though, shaking the old sounds from her head, then realizing that the lulling she heard was taking place now, in the present.
Without stopping by the small cafeteria to see if Cookie still worked here, Tomi had made it from the front door to the orchestra-pit style auctioneer pen, and there, teeming and gnashing and bawling, was an old Holstein and two little calves. The cow’s black splotches were haphazardly inked into her white hid, and if Tomi squinted, they looked mildly circular. The caked-on mud and shit that had spread across her back was dried and chunky, covering up her natural color. She was a mess, and her swollen udders, looking like pulled-taffy that had been stretched waaay too far, had cracked from a winter spent being milked hard.
It was not a scene Tomi had hoped for, when she’d parked her car, or at least not the first thing she saw upon entering. Why couldn't it be the little Brayden twins, in their matching Wranglers, chasing each other over the seats and playing "bangbang" with pistol fingers? Of course it wouldn't be them.. they had to be grown up now.. junior high school at least. Or Sally, the other Native who swept out the pens and sometimes snuck inside to watch the sale? Something nice, something warm and comforting.
Right. Comforting, at the saleabarn, where lives are bought and sold and deals are made among the human animals.
That fall, after the fair was over and Tomi skipped out on the carnival and dances to go drinking, Ellis had taken her inside the salebarn. No livestock, no humans, just the two of them, and that smell. That wet, earthy smell that comes from and is a range animal. It had been her first time inside the salebarn, and even though all they did was sit up in the crow’s nest and drink bourbon, Tomi thought it felt familiar. Like maybe she belonged. She made up her mind that night to work at Drum Auction and Packing, because she knew that working in the white man’s town, trading his commodities and understanding them, was crucial to her success when she left her own broken land.
“Iminabid iminabid, iminabid, five, five five, no, six, no, seven, no, ten, do I have ten? Up ten, up ten, up ten on the dollar, to the man in the white hat, the white hat, the Stetson, yessir, number 45, is that you Bob? You are number 45, if I am not mistaken?”
Tomi was jerked again from the past into the present, hearing Gene’s undulating voice drop down and run up octaves as he raised the bidding price on the cow in the pen. It surprised her how easily the language of the auction came back to her. The “man in the white hat white hat white hat,” Gene knew him, he was a regular at the auctions, and it wasn’t uncommon for Gene to sneak in greetings and observances in the middle of a sale, then carry on with the bidding without even taking a breath. The cow and her calves, looking to be about two weeks old, sold for just over $800 dollars.
Eight hundred dollars for her life, and the lives of her children. Surely worth more? But how would Tomi know? Hadn't her own life, her hopes for something better, been commodified in a similar way, in this very place, just a few years ago?
Tomi sniffled at the cold air and watched the next items lope inside: two small, red heifers. The thing about watching an auction that always bothered Tomi was not that the animals would be killed and eaten—dinner—but that they had served as entertainment first. Mick was still working here, brandishing the prod that kept the animals in line, and as he shocked one of the heifers from behind, she jumped forward, slipped on the wet, shitty dirt, and skidded across the pen floor. The men around Tomi, intent on the sale in progress, didn’t seem to notice the animal’s fear, or frantic energy. iOr perhaps they did, and they just didn’t care? She was never quite sure which it was, but either way, it didn’t matter. What was clear was that the animal had suffered, then rushed into this pen, thinking only of something different, yet not knowing quite what.
"In the cities, there are so many cars people park in long rows down the street. It is different in many ways, and if you park funny, your difference will show."
Tomi had always hated it when her differences showed off the reservation, but on it, she was proud of her distinctions.
"There goes Tomi 'Too-Good'," joked the boys she had no time for, when they were feeling particularly mean and nasty, but Tomi would smile and nod her head into her books, trying hard to feign indifference. She knew she would get off the rez, leave behind the sadness and misery that had so long been suffered by her people. Grandfather told her he saw that in her future, and since he knew everything, she had always believed him. His comments about her differences being beautiful were something she had never believed growing up on the edge of the reservation, but in the city, well, people had loved them.
And now, she could remember his words like it was yesterday...had six years really passed already? Was her beloved Grandfather really dying? What had he said, crackling and wheezing from her cell phone?
"No more moons for grandfather?"
Tomi knew he'd said it in an attempt at humor, poking fun at his old ways, the things lost to her people that he'd held dear, those things she's once dreaded. Things like the dances, the way the drums spoke deep in her heart and her stomach, the way the rocks sang at the lodges and whispered the secrets of her people. She’d hated being known in school for those things, the Indian girl who was bused in to town on government funds, but now, her heritage was something almost magical.
Remembering her high school days Tomi slammed her door shut, and walking purposefully, moved toward the screened-in entrance.
it had been years since she'd driven past this lot, and now, back from college, the memories of her timeworking at the salebarn haunted her. The white paint was chipped and ugly along the north side of the building, and the scattered straw, manure and yelllowed snow puddles washed the ground leading to the chutes with an equal squalor. The men and women who worked here said that life on the Rez was putrid and ugly, but did they ever take a second look at their surroundings? The kids she'd guarded in basketball or ran against in track, the ones who'd been so hard on her for the way she'd ridden her horses in 4-H, did they ever think twice about the way they treated their own animals? Had she, when she slapped rumps and prodded ankles?
As Tomi reached the screen door-- still hanging at an uncomfortable angle after McClintock lost out on a heifer bid--she craned her head around to the east of the building, so that she could just see beyond the first pens and around the chute. The pens, once red and black, “in honor of the Herefords and Black Angus that come through,” Ellis had told her, were now rust colored and bronzed, or a flaky, dirty gray.
To the south of the pens, the loading chute was exactly as she’d remembered it: weathered wood, gone gray and warped in the harsh winters, covered with shit spatters of all colors, like brown,honey,gold,yellow,tan,chocolate,raisin polka dots. This was where the animals met their new enclosures: slatted semi-trailers, horse trailers or maybe just porta-pens in the back of a truck.
Tomi was hoping for a familiar face or two, but she couldn't see anything but cinnamon hide and loopy, bubble-gum udders. The cows were still in progress-- it would be a while until the bull sale started, so steadied by the determination in her mind, Tomi pushed open the screen door and was pulled forward.
The grounds had been kept up over the years, obviously, because the parking lot was full of trailers and pickup trucks and semis—hers was the only car—and that meant that today’s was going to be a big sale, but she had wasted enough time outside already. She knew how she felt about the commerce of animals. Boston had changed that, too. What she wanted to know…would Ellis be working here today?
The first time she stepped foot in the salebarn it had been dark out, but the sky was full of stars and the Moon was shining.
The 4-H sale had ended, and Tomi's steer had brought top dollar. Ellis Drum, who's dad Gene owned Drum's auction and officiated at the 4-H sale proceedings, spoke to her back in the pens when she'd returned her steer to his holdings.
"You know, Tomi.." he'd said, slow and calculated, with the mind of a man who is used to sizing up female animals for their heft, durability and reproductive capabilities "I could take you inside the salebarn sometime, show you around.. get you a drink."
Tomi's hand had stopped brushing whorl in the middle of her steer’s hindquarters. She knew Ellis in the way everyone knew him-- good looking, funny, Gene Drum's son. Golden. They'd talked at the 4-H dances each year, shared a few, shared more than that many beers, but they'd never been friends. Not really. Why did he want to do this for her now?
"Oh, really? What for?"
Tomi knew that there would be a cost of some sort involved in this; the Drum family hadn't wrangled the largest salebarn and auction reputation in the tri-county area with nothing but their good looks and silver tongues.
"I dunno, just thought you might like to see the place we kill the animals."
Tomi snorted, whipping around and bending upright to face Ellis.
“Cut the shit, Ellis. You know as well as I do that I’ve seen death before, and I’m not scared of it. You’ll talk to me here, ask me to see your salebarn while no one’s around, but you really want something. What.”
No nonsense, matter-of-fact. Tomi still talked that way, always had; it was this sensibility that had interested Mr. Brookings when he encouraged her to go into law.
Ellis’ dark eyes had almost glowed that night, like the firebugs she’d chased up from the grasses as a child, and when he answered her, she knew he meant it.
“Business, is all. You’re a good looking girl, gonna be a woman before school starts again.. I know you want offa that wasteland up north. Come down and work for us rest tha’ summer. Help out during the year.Put up some money for college. Dad’s on the Golden Clovers scholarship board… maybe he could work something even better.”
Tomi had pulled at the steer’s halter when Ellis offered her the job, a little harsher than necessary, and the young animal had bawled. And bawled and bawled, she though, shaking the old sounds from her head, then realizing that the lulling she heard was taking place now, in the present.
Without stopping by the small cafeteria to see if Cookie still worked here, Tomi had made it from the front door to the orchestra-pit style auctioneer pen, and there, teeming and gnashing and bawling, was an old Holstein and two little calves. The cow’s black splotches were haphazardly inked into her white hid, and if Tomi squinted, they looked mildly circular. The caked-on mud and shit that had spread across her back was dried and chunky, covering up her natural color. She was a mess, and her swollen udders, looking like pulled-taffy that had been stretched waaay too far, had cracked from a winter spent being milked hard.
It was not a scene Tomi had hoped for, when she’d parked her car, or at least not the first thing she saw upon entering. Why couldn't it be the little Brayden twins, in their matching Wranglers, chasing each other over the seats and playing "bangbang" with pistol fingers? Of course it wouldn't be them.. they had to be grown up now.. junior high school at least. Or Sally, the other Native who swept out the pens and sometimes snuck inside to watch the sale? Something nice, something warm and comforting.
Right. Comforting, at the saleabarn, where lives are bought and sold and deals are made among the human animals.
That fall, after the fair was over and Tomi skipped out on the carnival and dances to go drinking, Ellis had taken her inside the salebarn. No livestock, no humans, just the two of them, and that smell. That wet, earthy smell that comes from and is a range animal. It had been her first time inside the salebarn, and even though all they did was sit up in the crow’s nest and drink bourbon, Tomi thought it felt familiar. Like maybe she belonged. She made up her mind that night to work at Drum Auction and Packing, because she knew that working in the white man’s town, trading his commodities and understanding them, was crucial to her success when she left her own broken land.
“Iminabid iminabid, iminabid, five, five five, no, six, no, seven, no, ten, do I have ten? Up ten, up ten, up ten on the dollar, to the man in the white hat, the white hat, the Stetson, yessir, number 45, is that you Bob? You are number 45, if I am not mistaken?”
Tomi was jerked again from the past into the present, hearing Gene’s undulating voice drop down and run up octaves as he raised the bidding price on the cow in the pen. It surprised her how easily the language of the auction came back to her. The “man in the white hat white hat white hat,” Gene knew him, he was a regular at the auctions, and it wasn’t uncommon for Gene to sneak in greetings and observances in the middle of a sale, then carry on with the bidding without even taking a breath. The cow and her calves, looking to be about two weeks old, sold for just over $800 dollars.
Eight hundred dollars for her life, and the lives of her children. Surely worth more? But how would Tomi know? Hadn't her own life, her hopes for something better, been commodified in a similar way, in this very place, just a few years ago?
Tomi sniffled at the cold air and watched the next items lope inside: two small, red heifers. The thing about watching an auction that always bothered Tomi was not that the animals would be killed and eaten—dinner—but that they had served as entertainment first. Mick was still working here, brandishing the prod that kept the animals in line, and as he shocked one of the heifers from behind, she jumped forward, slipped on the wet, shitty dirt, and skidded across the pen floor. The men around Tomi, intent on the sale in progress, didn’t seem to notice the animal’s fear, or frantic energy. iOr perhaps they did, and they just didn’t care? She was never quite sure which it was, but either way, it didn’t matter. What was clear was that the animal had suffered, then rushed into this pen, thinking only of something different, yet not knowing quite what.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Little House on the Prairie Dog town: Prompt Post No. 5
Shrieks and squeaks and mounds of dirt surround me. Prairie dog town in the pasture, and small brown animals scurry underneath and beyond me. These small furry rodents dig up the sod, the roots, the prairie, and because they are a “nuisance” to the farmers and ranchers who want the land for their crops or their animals, the dogs are deemed unnecessary.
But what really makes an animal “necessary,” or –un? What can I do as an advocate if I'm not even sure where I stand?
Ever since the 70s, when the prairie dog was placed on the endangered species list, these mama ls have made large "comebacks," according to the University of Nebraska- Lincoln.
But for someone living in an area that has never seen a decline in these animals, it's hard to know the difference between a comeback and a threatened animal.
"The fact that prairie dogs live in colonies indicates they are highly social animals. The largest social unit is the colony or town. Towns are often divided into "wards" by topographical barriers such as roads, ridges or trees, and are generally five to 10 acres in size. Although prairie dogs in one ward may be able to see and hear animals of an adjacent ward, movement among wards is unusual. Wards are divided into several smaller prairie dog social units, called 'coteries'."- from the NE Game and Parks Commission.
I pause alongside the Kearns' fence-- they don't like people on their property or in their business, and even though they are relatives somewhere back in history, I'm not about to get shot at or razzled for watching prairie dogs on their property. The small animals run back and forth, scamper atop the mounded entrances to their burrows, and chatter, squeal and roughhouse with each other. I like thinking about the burrows and tunnels they have built underground-- I am reminded of walking along the interconnected streets in foreign cities. I think of Cartagena and Barcelona, cobbled streets shielded from the sky by balconies, arches and the vines and flowers that reach for the sky from them. Even in our differences-- people and prairie dogs, the Spaniards and the Anglos and U.S. Europeans-- as social being we are similar. I see these things, but I can't find a place in the argument for one side or the other.
On the one hand, I realize that prairie dogs make up the ecosystem where I come from. Owls, weasels, rabbits, other small mammals all use the burrows once the prairie dogs have left them. But on the other hand, I know how dangerous it is for livestock who are pastured in these fields.
I drive home, sliding across the muddy road, thinking about the small animals and their communities; my community. Our girls basketball team made it to state again for the third time in a row, and they blew up on the court, for the third time in a row. They are young, but have experience... I know that they get to the big city (Lincoln is huge to most people around here) and freak out, snapping under the pressure. The media, the full gyms, the competition.. I think they feel threatened by the outside forces. That's what life is like around here. The outside world is distant, we only know what is before us until we get away to see more of it. And anywhere you go, people are leery of the unknown, the unfamiliar. A small town, simple (I don't mean dumb, just.. simple) people; a challenging region: we are sheltered, to what I would say is our detriment. But I think we are also sometimes unaware of even that which surrounds us.
I think about the Crow Butte uranium mine to the west of us (about 1.25 hours from where I live). Even though this is something local, and therefore not "threatening" and unfamiliar, I wonder how many of my friends who work there really know, I mean KNOW of the hazards of their environment. My friend Ray went to work there for his family, a better life, more money, but is he aware of the ways his work come later come back to haunt him? I'm not sure, but I doubt it. I never learned about any of that while I went to school here. I know that I don't want uranium leeching into the steams and rivers around here, but even I am not that concerned about it that I feel like picketing or writing my govenor. Those who work there have made that choice, and it's not up to me to stop them. Same thing with the prarie dogs- they aren't bothering me, so I feel more strongly about letting them live. Is this apathy, ignorance, or just my personal sense of how it is?
But what really makes an animal “necessary,” or –un? What can I do as an advocate if I'm not even sure where I stand?
Ever since the 70s, when the prairie dog was placed on the endangered species list, these mama ls have made large "comebacks," according to the University of Nebraska- Lincoln.
But for someone living in an area that has never seen a decline in these animals, it's hard to know the difference between a comeback and a threatened animal.
"The fact that prairie dogs live in colonies indicates they are highly social animals. The largest social unit is the colony or town. Towns are often divided into "wards" by topographical barriers such as roads, ridges or trees, and are generally five to 10 acres in size. Although prairie dogs in one ward may be able to see and hear animals of an adjacent ward, movement among wards is unusual. Wards are divided into several smaller prairie dog social units, called 'coteries'."- from the NE Game and Parks Commission.
I pause alongside the Kearns' fence-- they don't like people on their property or in their business, and even though they are relatives somewhere back in history, I'm not about to get shot at or razzled for watching prairie dogs on their property. The small animals run back and forth, scamper atop the mounded entrances to their burrows, and chatter, squeal and roughhouse with each other. I like thinking about the burrows and tunnels they have built underground-- I am reminded of walking along the interconnected streets in foreign cities. I think of Cartagena and Barcelona, cobbled streets shielded from the sky by balconies, arches and the vines and flowers that reach for the sky from them. Even in our differences-- people and prairie dogs, the Spaniards and the Anglos and U.S. Europeans-- as social being we are similar. I see these things, but I can't find a place in the argument for one side or the other.
On the one hand, I realize that prairie dogs make up the ecosystem where I come from. Owls, weasels, rabbits, other small mammals all use the burrows once the prairie dogs have left them. But on the other hand, I know how dangerous it is for livestock who are pastured in these fields.
I drive home, sliding across the muddy road, thinking about the small animals and their communities; my community. Our girls basketball team made it to state again for the third time in a row, and they blew up on the court, for the third time in a row. They are young, but have experience... I know that they get to the big city (Lincoln is huge to most people around here) and freak out, snapping under the pressure. The media, the full gyms, the competition.. I think they feel threatened by the outside forces. That's what life is like around here. The outside world is distant, we only know what is before us until we get away to see more of it. And anywhere you go, people are leery of the unknown, the unfamiliar. A small town, simple (I don't mean dumb, just.. simple) people; a challenging region: we are sheltered, to what I would say is our detriment. But I think we are also sometimes unaware of even that which surrounds us.
I think about the Crow Butte uranium mine to the west of us (about 1.25 hours from where I live). Even though this is something local, and therefore not "threatening" and unfamiliar, I wonder how many of my friends who work there really know, I mean KNOW of the hazards of their environment. My friend Ray went to work there for his family, a better life, more money, but is he aware of the ways his work come later come back to haunt him? I'm not sure, but I doubt it. I never learned about any of that while I went to school here. I know that I don't want uranium leeching into the steams and rivers around here, but even I am not that concerned about it that I feel like picketing or writing my govenor. Those who work there have made that choice, and it's not up to me to stop them. Same thing with the prarie dogs- they aren't bothering me, so I feel more strongly about letting them live. Is this apathy, ignorance, or just my personal sense of how it is?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Coyote and the Lake: PromptPost No. 4
"A sleek gray-faced prairie wolf! his pointed black nose tucked in between is four feet drawn snugly together; his hand-some bushy tail wound over his nose and feet; a coyote fast asleep in the shadow of a bunch of grass!--this is what Iktomi spied."
So begins "Iktomi and the Coyote," one of several "Old Indian Legends" compiled by Sioux tribeswoman and historian, Zitkala-Sa. I first began reading her stories in grade school, and to this day, her tales live on in my mind as the zenith of regional folk legends whenever I think of Plains stories. Iktomi, the "spider fairy" is a trickster, one of many who live on in oral traditions. In this particular story, he has met his match, Coyote, who is also known throughout the Native American legends as the trickster who can out-trick anybody. The site that I've linked to Iktomi's name lists Coyote right after him, and I find it interesting that there are two different manifestations of craftiness and manipulation embodied in these individuals-- man vs. nature is a clear interpretation, but I wonder what others might exist. What has been lost in the oral traditions we no long know, or could never know, as a literate society fond of linear thinking and structured sentences?
I think about these things as I research Coyote, who is known to biologists under the Latin name of Canis latrans Say-- canis for dog, latrans for barking, and Say for Thomas Say, who, as a 19th century Plains explorer first described the "prairie wolf" in 1823. I think about Coyote's reputation, his craftiness and cunning. These are the things that keep him alive in the wild, that make him him, but these qualities are the same ones that have earned him a spot alongside prairie dogs and bean blight in the hearts of ranchers and farmers. Coyote is sent to the earth by the Creator to teach man how to live, say some old legends, yet his intellect is tainted by his nature of sneaking chickens out of the coop. He is an animal of multiple personalities and personas; this gives storytellers great range in using him as a character to explain and entertain.
Coyotes are omnivorous, eating everything from berries and grasses and bugs to cottontails and family animals. These sleek animals have been documented in much of North America, so it doesn't surprise me that each Native nation has its own version of a Coyote story. We too, the descendants of settlers who took over the Plains (pushing around both native man and animal) have our own coyote stories, our own ways of dealing with the animal.
Living 40 minutes away from Nebraska's Museum of the Fur Trade, established here because of the plenitude of pelts in the 19th century, I know all about the ways in which people around here try to get rid of coyotes. We've had some around lately, and dad's been toting his gun in the evenings, hoping to put an end to the howling animals before they have a snack of mom's lil' doggy.
In the story of Iktomi and the Coyote, Iktomi carries Coyote home, thinking he will cook him up. Coyote is not really dead, but enjoys being carried across the prairie by the man (in this story Iktomi is a man, not the spider/snareweaver). Coyote has manipulated Iktomi into doing the work of walking for him, but when he arrives as his teepee, Iktomi lights a large fire and chucks Coyote into it. Upon being burnt, Coyote flees, splashing ashes and flame on the warrior; his parting laughter is a reminder to Iktomi that animal is more wily than man.
don't know if it was reading about Coyote's antics as a child, watching the Road Runner kick his hide over and over with my dad, or seeing the living animal pop up on occasion around here, but the levels of Coyote Nature interest me. His metaphor is one of being both obnoxious and wild, yet smart and resilient. He is the clever man, the fool; the savage animal and the hero. I want to think there is some of him in all of us, if only we could see him and embrace that.
During my initial visit to Walgren Lake a coyote ran across the path in front of me, and since then I've been wanting to use Coyote in a story. I don't like making things up, so it's really hard for me to imagine making up a whole world for Coyote and peopling it, but here goes.
Coyote and Iktomi at The Lake
It was winter time in the North, where Coyote lived alone in his warm home. For many long days he had been wrapped up like a blanket, wet black nose tucked into layers of wiry, buckskin fur. His stomach spoke to him sometimes, and when it did so, he ventured from his small room and foraged among the lake reeds for buffalo berry stems and the nourishment of bitter, bitter rose hips and water. His stomach did not quiet at the taste of these small, shriveled husks, but the water dimmed the pangs of animal hunger like sun star did when it lay down in the sky at night.
Coyote was growing thin, like the Two-Legged he sometimes saw dangling strings of sinew through the thick skin that Winter had grown over the water. He knew it was sinew, made from the cords of muscle and hide that Elk clothed himself in, because he could smell it anytime the Two-Legged drew near. It smelled so good, so alive. Something that Coyote hadn’t felt since the Autumn and his fat harvests of rodents, pheasant and sick deer. Coyote was known among the Animals for his pounce, his hard jaw. He could stalk animals in silence, swooping like Raven. He wore his stealth in dusky, sand-colored fur, and the strength of his mouth also rivaled Raven’s, who was known for his unending chatter CawCawCaw. But because Coyote’s mouth was not used for constant noise, but to quietly secure his dinner, his strength was more valuable, his action more beautiful.
Spring was coming—Coyote could feel the excitement of knowing another and chasing young pups in the sun—but before the Sun Breeze returned, he needed to find a meal, something warm and living. This would restore his weight; he would be bigger than Dog and glossier than Ferret once again. Coyote knew how he would do this: he would call on the Two-Legged and ask for help from him. The Fur that One wore was not his fur naturally—Coyote saw Rabbit and Beaver and Deer every time he saw this One, but because the Two-Legged did not move with the swiftness nor possess the knowledge of these Animals, Coyote knew the Two-Legged must put these covers on. Could he offer his hide, in return for a meal?
Iktomi watched the ducks fly overhead as he walked quiet across the lake. His eyes sparkled like the gemstones some Nations traded, but he knew better than to think of such folly. He was at the lake for dinner, not riches. And dinner he would have. His best tobacco had been burnt that morning—the great Water Snake would send his spirit to the surface and attach Crappie and Perch to the wishbone snare at the end of Iktomi’s sinew. He knew it would happen as he had envisioned, and as he squatted over yesterday’s opening in the water’s cold skin, he imagined how good the fish would be when steamed over young ash wood. Water wetted his lips now, and Iktomi barely noticed the way the Moon Breeze ruffled the delicate hairs of his winter furs. He had patched last season’s leggings and shoulder cloth with what was available, but he knew that lining them with Coyote would turn away the cold.
“HunHa!”
A small laugh, bitter like winter berries, escaped from Iktomi’s set mouth. Coyote. He would be lucky to catch such a one, in winter or summer Coyote was cunning; he would have to be desperate to turn himself in for a ransom of shelter or marrow bones.
Iktomi kept his sinew in the water all afternoon and evening, and before Grandmother showed her face in the west, he had lined up three rows of Crappie and one Walleye. The Finned ones said nothing; they knew the ways of the winter world above water.
As Grandmother’s face revealed itself above the horizon, Coyote stepped out of his home, arching the ruff of his collar and giving his jaw a good stretch with a yawn. His front arms slid forward as he kissed the ground, thanking Earth once again for his presence. First his right leg, then his left stretched out behind him as he warmed the muscles he used for pouncing. Coyote was proud of his abilities as an Animal, but it was his mind that he needed to stretch and exercise on this cold winter night. As he searched the horizon for movement—a feather, a tail, something—a shimmer of frost on the road caught his eye.
“Oh Grandmother,” he said, rounding his mouth as he spoke to the Moon, “your night jewels are beautiful, and I enjoy seeing the way they sparkle around you.”
Grandmother said nothing, because she didn’t need to.
Coyote started down the path across the water skin—he would see if the Two-Legged had left any fish behind from this morning. As he came closer to the spot where moccasins crouched in silence, he realized that the Two-Legged had not returned to his fire. Here was Coyote’s chance to ask for a meal, or sneak one, if necessary.
“Oh, brother Deer,” he said, hoping to trick the Two-Legged into thinking he was family. Coyote’s eyes were lowered, and his tail was pulled under tightly—if the Two Legged saw his submission, maybe he would share something with Coyote.
“I am cold and hungry on this Moon Night. You have much food and only one stomach. Your coat looks thin, but you are still alive. Will you share with me?”
Iktomi couldn’t believe his eyes. Was Coyote this close to him, this desperate in his hunger?
“Brother Coyote, It is I, Iktomi, not Deer, as you have imagined. My coat is thin, yes, you are right. I have much Fish here with me, and truly, one stomach. But if you give me your coat, I will trade you warmth for hunger.”
Coyote thought for a moment, his deception pulled out from under him. He could trade his coat for Iktomi’s fish, and return home to sleep off the rest of the Winter Moon with full belly. He would get a new coat in the summer, so this one didn’t matter. But Coyote was not sure he could trust Iktomi to give him the Fish before trading him the coat. He knew there had to be another way, and as he thought on it, Grandmother winked her eye at Coyote. And he knew how to get Iktomi.
“Here, then, follow me, Brother, down this path out of the shadows of the night.” Coyote led Iktomi off the Lake, toward the path where he first encountered Grandmother that night.
“You see, there is a sparkling rock magic on this road ahead, and I do not know what it is, but it gives off a great light. There I will remove my coat in the light.
Iktomi could not believe his luck. Not only would he get Coyote’s warm dressings tonight, but the Animal had no idea that the sparkling rock magic was only the light cast from stones glistening under the sky above.
As Coyote neared the path, the frost on the road sparkled like springtime in a mate’s eyes. If Iktomi saw this glow, Coyote was certain that the Two-Legged would become entranced with the magic, forgetting both the Fish and Coyote’s promise. Soon, Iktomi glanced the sparkling ahead of them, and he ran ahead, forgetting the delicious comfort of a meal in the greed of his desire for hard, magic rocks. He removed a small pouch and shoveled handfuls of Winter ground into the opening, smiling at the meals and the coats this richness would bring him.
Coyote snuck back toward the Lake, shrugging his coat around his ears and thanking Grandmother again for her guidance.
So begins "Iktomi and the Coyote," one of several "Old Indian Legends" compiled by Sioux tribeswoman and historian, Zitkala-Sa. I first began reading her stories in grade school, and to this day, her tales live on in my mind as the zenith of regional folk legends whenever I think of Plains stories. Iktomi, the "spider fairy" is a trickster, one of many who live on in oral traditions. In this particular story, he has met his match, Coyote, who is also known throughout the Native American legends as the trickster who can out-trick anybody. The site that I've linked to Iktomi's name lists Coyote right after him, and I find it interesting that there are two different manifestations of craftiness and manipulation embodied in these individuals-- man vs. nature is a clear interpretation, but I wonder what others might exist. What has been lost in the oral traditions we no long know, or could never know, as a literate society fond of linear thinking and structured sentences?
I think about these things as I research Coyote, who is known to biologists under the Latin name of Canis latrans Say-- canis for dog, latrans for barking, and Say for Thomas Say, who, as a 19th century Plains explorer first described the "prairie wolf" in 1823. I think about Coyote's reputation, his craftiness and cunning. These are the things that keep him alive in the wild, that make him him, but these qualities are the same ones that have earned him a spot alongside prairie dogs and bean blight in the hearts of ranchers and farmers. Coyote is sent to the earth by the Creator to teach man how to live, say some old legends, yet his intellect is tainted by his nature of sneaking chickens out of the coop. He is an animal of multiple personalities and personas; this gives storytellers great range in using him as a character to explain and entertain.
Coyotes are omnivorous, eating everything from berries and grasses and bugs to cottontails and family animals. These sleek animals have been documented in much of North America, so it doesn't surprise me that each Native nation has its own version of a Coyote story. We too, the descendants of settlers who took over the Plains (pushing around both native man and animal) have our own coyote stories, our own ways of dealing with the animal.
Living 40 minutes away from Nebraska's Museum of the Fur Trade, established here because of the plenitude of pelts in the 19th century, I know all about the ways in which people around here try to get rid of coyotes. We've had some around lately, and dad's been toting his gun in the evenings, hoping to put an end to the howling animals before they have a snack of mom's lil' doggy.
In the story of Iktomi and the Coyote, Iktomi carries Coyote home, thinking he will cook him up. Coyote is not really dead, but enjoys being carried across the prairie by the man (in this story Iktomi is a man, not the spider/snareweaver). Coyote has manipulated Iktomi into doing the work of walking for him, but when he arrives as his teepee, Iktomi lights a large fire and chucks Coyote into it. Upon being burnt, Coyote flees, splashing ashes and flame on the warrior; his parting laughter is a reminder to Iktomi that animal is more wily than man.
don't know if it was reading about Coyote's antics as a child, watching the Road Runner kick his hide over and over with my dad, or seeing the living animal pop up on occasion around here, but the levels of Coyote Nature interest me. His metaphor is one of being both obnoxious and wild, yet smart and resilient. He is the clever man, the fool; the savage animal and the hero. I want to think there is some of him in all of us, if only we could see him and embrace that.
During my initial visit to Walgren Lake a coyote ran across the path in front of me, and since then I've been wanting to use Coyote in a story. I don't like making things up, so it's really hard for me to imagine making up a whole world for Coyote and peopling it, but here goes.
Coyote and Iktomi at The Lake
It was winter time in the North, where Coyote lived alone in his warm home. For many long days he had been wrapped up like a blanket, wet black nose tucked into layers of wiry, buckskin fur. His stomach spoke to him sometimes, and when it did so, he ventured from his small room and foraged among the lake reeds for buffalo berry stems and the nourishment of bitter, bitter rose hips and water. His stomach did not quiet at the taste of these small, shriveled husks, but the water dimmed the pangs of animal hunger like sun star did when it lay down in the sky at night.
Coyote was growing thin, like the Two-Legged he sometimes saw dangling strings of sinew through the thick skin that Winter had grown over the water. He knew it was sinew, made from the cords of muscle and hide that Elk clothed himself in, because he could smell it anytime the Two-Legged drew near. It smelled so good, so alive. Something that Coyote hadn’t felt since the Autumn and his fat harvests of rodents, pheasant and sick deer. Coyote was known among the Animals for his pounce, his hard jaw. He could stalk animals in silence, swooping like Raven. He wore his stealth in dusky, sand-colored fur, and the strength of his mouth also rivaled Raven’s, who was known for his unending chatter CawCawCaw. But because Coyote’s mouth was not used for constant noise, but to quietly secure his dinner, his strength was more valuable, his action more beautiful.
Spring was coming—Coyote could feel the excitement of knowing another and chasing young pups in the sun—but before the Sun Breeze returned, he needed to find a meal, something warm and living. This would restore his weight; he would be bigger than Dog and glossier than Ferret once again. Coyote knew how he would do this: he would call on the Two-Legged and ask for help from him. The Fur that One wore was not his fur naturally—Coyote saw Rabbit and Beaver and Deer every time he saw this One, but because the Two-Legged did not move with the swiftness nor possess the knowledge of these Animals, Coyote knew the Two-Legged must put these covers on. Could he offer his hide, in return for a meal?
Iktomi watched the ducks fly overhead as he walked quiet across the lake. His eyes sparkled like the gemstones some Nations traded, but he knew better than to think of such folly. He was at the lake for dinner, not riches. And dinner he would have. His best tobacco had been burnt that morning—the great Water Snake would send his spirit to the surface and attach Crappie and Perch to the wishbone snare at the end of Iktomi’s sinew. He knew it would happen as he had envisioned, and as he squatted over yesterday’s opening in the water’s cold skin, he imagined how good the fish would be when steamed over young ash wood. Water wetted his lips now, and Iktomi barely noticed the way the Moon Breeze ruffled the delicate hairs of his winter furs. He had patched last season’s leggings and shoulder cloth with what was available, but he knew that lining them with Coyote would turn away the cold.
“HunHa!”
A small laugh, bitter like winter berries, escaped from Iktomi’s set mouth. Coyote. He would be lucky to catch such a one, in winter or summer Coyote was cunning; he would have to be desperate to turn himself in for a ransom of shelter or marrow bones.
Iktomi kept his sinew in the water all afternoon and evening, and before Grandmother showed her face in the west, he had lined up three rows of Crappie and one Walleye. The Finned ones said nothing; they knew the ways of the winter world above water.
As Grandmother’s face revealed itself above the horizon, Coyote stepped out of his home, arching the ruff of his collar and giving his jaw a good stretch with a yawn. His front arms slid forward as he kissed the ground, thanking Earth once again for his presence. First his right leg, then his left stretched out behind him as he warmed the muscles he used for pouncing. Coyote was proud of his abilities as an Animal, but it was his mind that he needed to stretch and exercise on this cold winter night. As he searched the horizon for movement—a feather, a tail, something—a shimmer of frost on the road caught his eye.
“Oh Grandmother,” he said, rounding his mouth as he spoke to the Moon, “your night jewels are beautiful, and I enjoy seeing the way they sparkle around you.”
Grandmother said nothing, because she didn’t need to.
Coyote started down the path across the water skin—he would see if the Two-Legged had left any fish behind from this morning. As he came closer to the spot where moccasins crouched in silence, he realized that the Two-Legged had not returned to his fire. Here was Coyote’s chance to ask for a meal, or sneak one, if necessary.
“Oh, brother Deer,” he said, hoping to trick the Two-Legged into thinking he was family. Coyote’s eyes were lowered, and his tail was pulled under tightly—if the Two Legged saw his submission, maybe he would share something with Coyote.
“I am cold and hungry on this Moon Night. You have much food and only one stomach. Your coat looks thin, but you are still alive. Will you share with me?”
Iktomi couldn’t believe his eyes. Was Coyote this close to him, this desperate in his hunger?
“Brother Coyote, It is I, Iktomi, not Deer, as you have imagined. My coat is thin, yes, you are right. I have much Fish here with me, and truly, one stomach. But if you give me your coat, I will trade you warmth for hunger.”
Coyote thought for a moment, his deception pulled out from under him. He could trade his coat for Iktomi’s fish, and return home to sleep off the rest of the Winter Moon with full belly. He would get a new coat in the summer, so this one didn’t matter. But Coyote was not sure he could trust Iktomi to give him the Fish before trading him the coat. He knew there had to be another way, and as he thought on it, Grandmother winked her eye at Coyote. And he knew how to get Iktomi.
“Here, then, follow me, Brother, down this path out of the shadows of the night.” Coyote led Iktomi off the Lake, toward the path where he first encountered Grandmother that night.
“You see, there is a sparkling rock magic on this road ahead, and I do not know what it is, but it gives off a great light. There I will remove my coat in the light.
Iktomi could not believe his luck. Not only would he get Coyote’s warm dressings tonight, but the Animal had no idea that the sparkling rock magic was only the light cast from stones glistening under the sky above.
As Coyote neared the path, the frost on the road sparkled like springtime in a mate’s eyes. If Iktomi saw this glow, Coyote was certain that the Two-Legged would become entranced with the magic, forgetting both the Fish and Coyote’s promise. Soon, Iktomi glanced the sparkling ahead of them, and he ran ahead, forgetting the delicious comfort of a meal in the greed of his desire for hard, magic rocks. He removed a small pouch and shoveled handfuls of Winter ground into the opening, smiling at the meals and the coats this richness would bring him.
Coyote snuck back toward the Lake, shrugging his coat around his ears and thanking Grandmother again for her guidance.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Breakdown: Prompt Post No. 3
Growing up in the country, one has a sense of life and death at all times, in all places. Thick snows blanket the winter wheat sprouting and growing below; warm wind and sun thaw these crusts, and spring comes. A calf is born in the snowstorm; its mother's dead, bloated body is hauled away by the rendering truck the next day. Kids out here don't learn about life and death from the purchase and flush of a goldfish sparkle.And even when we don't yet know it, we are a part of the cycle.
I showed swine and poultry and beef throughout my years in 4-H: Starsky and Hutch, the pigs who ran away and frolicked under the pivot in the corn field gave way to Caesar and Calpurnia who gave way to a new set of speakers for my Jeep. Fauntleroy and Napoleon, the proud green-plumed Araucana roosters won me purple-plumed ribbons and spots in the paper and prize monies. That what these animals stood for then, in my adolescence. And Burgermeister (who funded my senior-year wardrobe and took the place of Hamburgler)...they all helped me know not death, but its place in the cycle of work and reward and creation. Here, on the unforgiving grass plains that break men with as much regularity as men break the earth, here the cycle of being is always around us.
I am thinking about loss and decay today, as I drive to the lake. The readings for my nature writing class have all focused on death and loss this week, and I am struck by how unique departure is as it graces or destroys us, as different as the sunset or the patterns in the melted mud-caked snow. The Nebraska Glaciation period cut and carved the gullies behind my house and yard then ended; the natives, the buffalo, even the people who lived here before me are all gone now. One with the earth. One essay in particular regarding death has stuck with me, not for its beauty, but because of the author's innocence.
In Apologia, author Barry Lopez performs the last rites for several road-killed animals on a drive across the country. While in Nebraska, pulling a dead badger off the road, he feels himself the recipient of a stranger's blessing.
"A car drifts toward us over the prairie, coming on in the other land, a 1962 Chevrolet station wagon. The driver slows to pass...an arm and the gesture of his thick left hand...opens in a kind of shrug, hangs briefly in limp sadness, then extends itself in supplication."
"Limp sadness?" I read this essay a week ago, shaking my head at its naivete, its misunderstanding of life and death and this Nebraskan gesture. Roadkill is not a thing of contemplation when both sides of the road are littered from day to day with the bodies of dead animals. It doesn't invite the holy, nor does it teach us a lesson other than be mindful. We are few and far between the humanly-populated sites of Nebraska; we wave with a hand out the window when we see you.
I am a skeptic, too used to roadside death to care about Lopez' badger, but I do wonder, do I not feel reverence for these deaths because they are so common, or because of how they've happened? Has growing up with an understanding and acceptance of death removed me from it, instead of making me humble?
Turning to the lake road and passing the old potato shed, I decide to stop and take pictures. It's been at least two decades since people grew and harvested potatoes in my community, but there's still talk of the industry in the state. This old building sits about four miles from my home, and I can't believe the state of things as I pull into the gravel lot around it. What was once a proud, two-story building and landmark next to our turnoff is now a pile of rotted wood and humming aluminum.
I walk across the wreckage of a ceiling littering the floor, and feel a piece of my childhood drift away. How many years did I drive past this building to the lake? Or to school? What was steady and permanent is now nothing. As much as anything, this too, is life. But inanimate and quiet when it stood, why does this testament to human ingenuity move me more than the absence of life decaying along the road?
I return home after my time at the lake, restless in mind and body. Sometimes a walk in the canyon will diffuse this frantic energy. I take my camera and my feelings to the open spaces around me. The snow has melted after the warm days, and I know the trail to the spring won't be too muddy. This trail begins at the edge of our yard and wanders through barbwire, beyond the boundaries of fencing, and down a valley before ending at the spring sunk low in the side of a hill. Faint oatmeal colored sand leads the way passed junked out cars, broken piles of feed bunk rubble and today, the long-gone body of a coyote.
Terry Tempest Williams writes that "Artifacts are alive," that "They remind u
s what it is to be human--that it is our nature to survive, to create words of beauty, to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in." I pass first the human artifacts, the reckless tracings of modern society, and I wonder, really? Is abandoning our buildings and our vehicles to the earth really paying any kind of attention to anything? Is this any worse than abandoning each other? The First Nations left us arrowhead and oral stories; in their footprints we have deposited rusted metal and biohazard warnings.
s what it is to be human--that it is our nature to survive, to create words of beauty, to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in." I pass first the human artifacts, the reckless tracings of modern society, and I wonder, really? Is abandoning our buildings and our vehicles to the earth really paying any kind of attention to anything? Is this any worse than abandoning each other? The First Nations left us arrowhead and oral stories; in their footprints we have deposited rusted metal and biohazard warnings.I nudge the teeth out of the jaw bone gently, thumbing the deep cleft of the canines with my finger. This animal knew life and death in the wild, more naturally than the modern people who came before me, and certainly more fully than me. I enjoy the readings and the essays and the contemplation of life and death and nature, but until we go there ourselves...we can't pretend to know it or understand it. Not really.
A sharp wind is howling across the old riverbed, dry now in its wanderings. I kneel, rake bare fingers through the pebbles, and hope for something wonderful. I used to come out here and hunt for fossils when I was little, sending promising specimens to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I wanted to find a dinosaur, a valuable creature.. something. I can't remember now the "value" of my childhood finds, but each of the letters came back to back to me from someone who was most likely a grad student, sighing again over the newest odd fossilized thing from the 6 year-old in northwest Nebraska. No dinosaurs, no mammoths. Nothing "special." Even in my childhood innocence I had already labeled the values of death's lessons. There is nothing to hold my attention in the pebbles my fingers turn up (the shell of a land snail), so I snap some pictures and stand up.
I feel each step crumble slightly under solid pressure-- the soil here is crumbly and breaks down before blowing away for ever. Over the dried cake-batter yellow sand of the butte ahead is what I came for. The spot of land my brother once wanted to inhabit and build a house upon.
The last time we were out here, dad stood among the scrubby cedar shrubs and eyed the ground with menace, as if he distrusted the very land holding him up.
The last time we were out here, dad stood among the scrubby cedar shrubs and eyed the ground with menace, as if he distrusted the very land holding him up.
"Why anyone would want to live clear out here," he says, shaking his head at whatever it was he was imagining. I don't remind him that that just a quarter of a mile away is the house he lives in...also "clear our here" by anybody else's standards. My brother had only been situated to his new surroundings for a few weeks then, his body barely left alone in the ground. I knew it wasn't the emptiness of the land that really rankled my dad, but rather the distance that had grown between the two men. I don't know that dad would have done anything to have him back, neighbors, buddies, as it had been once before, but with something like that is better no knowing.
I come out here, to this sandy spot on a lonely hill when I need reminded that death is really its own kind of power. The quiet dip and bend of dried-out grasses or the remains of small bodies around me offers a kind of raw solace that can't be found in human comfort. I come out here to feel death in a way that roadkill and obituaries can't seem to manage.
He visited me once, in a dream, and we made our peace then, in that shimmer of a moment. We weren't close in life, my brother and I, but I come here now to visit him and his memory, instead of the place outside town that holds his body. I come here because it is my only way to get to him. And sometimes, it's the only way I know to get away from me. I come out here to know things I can't know with book smarts or language or by walking in the traditions of other ways. There is intimacy in death, and in this land, and if, as Dictionary.com tells us "intimate," as an adjective, means "relating to or indicative of one's deepest nature: intimate prayers,"
then I might not pause for thecoontail or the bits of deer on blacktop, but I know where to kneel when I feel compelled to pray.s
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Stability in the broken places: Prompt Post No. 2
Hay Springs was settled in the 1800s, a burgeoning village of tents and shanties set up along a line of railroad track snaking through Northwest Nebraska. Saloons and ladies-of-the-night were as plentiful as the hay shocks and pools of water for which the town was named, according to tales told about the area. A couple of centuries later, we are a one-bar and five-church town; the one-night-stands of which we are all guilty are without monetary cost, and as removed as a church bell or last night's tab at the bar. I wish I could say that I never wanted to be a part of this culture, but even as a child I wanted action, excitement, something other than the farm. In junior high I started hanging out with the town kids (I was a country-school girl), and I knew that I would someday fit in with them, because their lives were the apex of exciting at that point in time.
Eventually I made it through high school, and thinking college would be different, I went to South Dakota and found myself in the same situations, with similar people (with no cops in town, we often spent Friday and Saturday nights in the bar during high school). The only things that had changed were our names, my location, and the bars. But in surrounded as I was by the friends and co-workers I had in Sioux Falls, I knew the loneliness and emptiness that all people out here seem to know. Small towns and rural lifestyles cut off from what the rest of the world seems to know; some people are as bitter and sharp as the wild grasses that grow along our quiet ditches and dirt roads. These lands are good places to exist if you want to get away from it all, but that seclusion catches up to you if you aren’t careful.
In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes that the Dakotas are not a place of emptiness, but openness.
“More Americans than ever, well over 70 percent, live in urban areas and tend to see the Plains as empty. What they really mean is devoid of human presence. [But] the Plains seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow.”
Norris moved to South Dakota as an adult, without the luxury of growing up in this part of the country and feeling the crush of that solitude and emptiness every day, she didn’t realize that the limits of the land really made it impossible to grow. For her, coming to this place with a career path in mind, and by choice, made South Dakota feel like home. Not a horizon of forever stretching out and doubling back again into nothing.
South Dakota for me too, felt like home, in a way I'd never known before, and I did go there by choice. I stayed there for five years by choice also. But in the time I lived there I felt a part of something, but a part of something that had its own ugliness. Norris found peace in the solitude of the openness in Dakota, but in the places I’ve called home, that openness is an empty longing, one filled with the bottle. My people--whether they are in South Dakota or Nebraska, the two places I can think of as home--are all looking for something. We tell ourselves to buck up and be strong, that another person cannot provide us what we need, that we are independent individuals; we are of the plains. We are feisty, we are as strong as the wind that blows over trees. We tell ourselves we don't need the rest of the world, or outside influences (all the while wanting them) and I wonder... are we wrong?
One of my friends drove her car into a stop sign two weeks ago, waking up only when another car approached. Last week she was in the ditch again, passed out a quarter-mile from home. She was asked to leave her fiancé’s home in November; now the two of them sit at opposite ends of the bar while a grandparent watches the baby at his or her home. Five of my friends are in the middle of divorces; last night at the bar I wondered how it happened that we are suddenly so "old" and tired. How did we get where we are?
"Rarely does any creature have the luxury of fouling its own next beyond redemption," writes Barbara Kingsolver in her tracing of "The Memory Place." It may be rare for Kingsolver's people, or the animals she so loves to pollute their own surroundings, but increasingly, in a world so choked with the broken refuse of humans, these people and animals may have no choice. I love my homelands of South Dakota and Nebraska, but I cannot help but feel dirty and polluted when I am home, fouled by the inescapable loneliness of my friends and the openness of the land that surrounds them.
I am probably close to the age Norris was when she moved to South Dakota and began to make it her home. Closer to 30 now than the newbies at the bars in either of my homes, I wish for solitude simply because I want to sit down to work that is important. I want to sit down with my writing and find a place for myself between the lines. I know I cannot blame anyone for the way I act when I come home—the vodka tonics that keep on coming, I can send them back and tell the buyers no—but I hate that my writing isn’t enough to keep my occupied while I am at home. That too, is no one’s fault but my own.
As Hay Springs grew and allotments were registered and settled, the men and women of the region learned to work hard as they always had, and play hard in their newfound times of leisure and success. An escape to the saloon or an afternoon hunting rabbits provided relief from the demands of a farmer/rancher life. The sins of the father…have been passed on through the generations, as have the virtues and the patience with the land and its demands. For those who have established farms and families and successes, the lands here are not so hard, their yields much more productive. I wonder what secrets these people learned, how they came to be contented amid the frustration and the sorrow of life out on the prairie.
In “The Memory Place” Kingsolver wants to know "who will love the imperfect lands," the places that might be considered to some "a waste of finite resources to save." I drive home under the full moon, sometimes biting my lip, and sometimes sighing. I would like to be able to stay here, where my people are buried, where my memories are. But for me this is an imperfect land that goes beyond the prairie dog towns ruining pastures (and even that, some would say, is not ruination but nature) or the narrow-mindedness and gossip. This is a land so calm and peaceful and laidback that it only has itself to chew on. A majority of t he people here feel blesed to have it so "easy" but I see them at the bar looking ruined, for whatever reason. It this life any kind of real living? Because it is so simple and easy to live here, when I find myself following in their footsteps I am only moving into inertia. Stagnation. A kind of preservation I want no part of. Even in Sioux Falls, by the time I left it I realized that staying there would only ruin me too. It’s not so much different than being here at this home in Nebraska—no one to blame other than myself for what I do—but so easy to step back into my old habits when visit. I have choices, always, and so I leave these places, as easy as it would be for me to stay and sink into the oblivion and vastness of the nothing that matters here.
“One of the vows Benedictine makes is stability: commitment to a particular community, a particular place,” writes Norris in her chapter on “Beautiful Places.” My people are committed to their communities and their places, their ways of life, why, I wonder? WHY this kind of stability, if it comes only with ruins and heartache?
Eventually I made it through high school, and thinking college would be different, I went to South Dakota and found myself in the same situations, with similar people (with no cops in town, we often spent Friday and Saturday nights in the bar during high school). The only things that had changed were our names, my location, and the bars. But in surrounded as I was by the friends and co-workers I had in Sioux Falls, I knew the loneliness and emptiness that all people out here seem to know. Small towns and rural lifestyles cut off from what the rest of the world seems to know; some people are as bitter and sharp as the wild grasses that grow along our quiet ditches and dirt roads. These lands are good places to exist if you want to get away from it all, but that seclusion catches up to you if you aren’t careful.
In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes that the Dakotas are not a place of emptiness, but openness.
“More Americans than ever, well over 70 percent, live in urban areas and tend to see the Plains as empty. What they really mean is devoid of human presence. [But] the Plains seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow.”
Norris moved to South Dakota as an adult, without the luxury of growing up in this part of the country and feeling the crush of that solitude and emptiness every day, she didn’t realize that the limits of the land really made it impossible to grow. For her, coming to this place with a career path in mind, and by choice, made South Dakota feel like home. Not a horizon of forever stretching out and doubling back again into nothing.
South Dakota for me too, felt like home, in a way I'd never known before, and I did go there by choice. I stayed there for five years by choice also. But in the time I lived there I felt a part of something, but a part of something that had its own ugliness. Norris found peace in the solitude of the openness in Dakota, but in the places I’ve called home, that openness is an empty longing, one filled with the bottle. My people--whether they are in South Dakota or Nebraska, the two places I can think of as home--are all looking for something. We tell ourselves to buck up and be strong, that another person cannot provide us what we need, that we are independent individuals; we are of the plains. We are feisty, we are as strong as the wind that blows over trees. We tell ourselves we don't need the rest of the world, or outside influences (all the while wanting them) and I wonder... are we wrong?
One of my friends drove her car into a stop sign two weeks ago, waking up only when another car approached. Last week she was in the ditch again, passed out a quarter-mile from home. She was asked to leave her fiancé’s home in November; now the two of them sit at opposite ends of the bar while a grandparent watches the baby at his or her home. Five of my friends are in the middle of divorces; last night at the bar I wondered how it happened that we are suddenly so "old" and tired. How did we get where we are?
"Rarely does any creature have the luxury of fouling its own next beyond redemption," writes Barbara Kingsolver in her tracing of "The Memory Place." It may be rare for Kingsolver's people, or the animals she so loves to pollute their own surroundings, but increasingly, in a world so choked with the broken refuse of humans, these people and animals may have no choice. I love my homelands of South Dakota and Nebraska, but I cannot help but feel dirty and polluted when I am home, fouled by the inescapable loneliness of my friends and the openness of the land that surrounds them.
I am probably close to the age Norris was when she moved to South Dakota and began to make it her home. Closer to 30 now than the newbies at the bars in either of my homes, I wish for solitude simply because I want to sit down to work that is important. I want to sit down with my writing and find a place for myself between the lines. I know I cannot blame anyone for the way I act when I come home—the vodka tonics that keep on coming, I can send them back and tell the buyers no—but I hate that my writing isn’t enough to keep my occupied while I am at home. That too, is no one’s fault but my own.
As Hay Springs grew and allotments were registered and settled, the men and women of the region learned to work hard as they always had, and play hard in their newfound times of leisure and success. An escape to the saloon or an afternoon hunting rabbits provided relief from the demands of a farmer/rancher life. The sins of the father…have been passed on through the generations, as have the virtues and the patience with the land and its demands. For those who have established farms and families and successes, the lands here are not so hard, their yields much more productive. I wonder what secrets these people learned, how they came to be contented amid the frustration and the sorrow of life out on the prairie.
In “The Memory Place” Kingsolver wants to know "who will love the imperfect lands," the places that might be considered to some "a waste of finite resources to save." I drive home under the full moon, sometimes biting my lip, and sometimes sighing. I would like to be able to stay here, where my people are buried, where my memories are. But for me this is an imperfect land that goes beyond the prairie dog towns ruining pastures (and even that, some would say, is not ruination but nature) or the narrow-mindedness and gossip. This is a land so calm and peaceful and laidback that it only has itself to chew on. A majority of t he people here feel blesed to have it so "easy" but I see them at the bar looking ruined, for whatever reason. It this life any kind of real living? Because it is so simple and easy to live here, when I find myself following in their footsteps I am only moving into inertia. Stagnation. A kind of preservation I want no part of. Even in Sioux Falls, by the time I left it I realized that staying there would only ruin me too. It’s not so much different than being here at this home in Nebraska—no one to blame other than myself for what I do—but so easy to step back into my old habits when visit. I have choices, always, and so I leave these places, as easy as it would be for me to stay and sink into the oblivion and vastness of the nothing that matters here.
“One of the vows Benedictine makes is stability: commitment to a particular community, a particular place,” writes Norris in her chapter on “Beautiful Places.” My people are committed to their communities and their places, their ways of life, why, I wonder? WHY this kind of stability, if it comes only with ruins and heartache?
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Resilience: Prompt Post No. 1
Grass swells and sandy hollows, the topography of Hay Springs, Nebraska.
A patterned expression of single mindedness, rows and rows
wheat corn beans sugarbeet potato
chase each other to the horizon.
Here the land is as thirsty for moisture
as the people are for excitement
gossip
firewater
Busch Budweiser Calvert
and an escape from the nothingness,
the never-ending
forever found in the fields.
Full of secrets, this land requires
a keen eye, a sharp mind
and the ability to look and listen,
a desire to learn.
This landscape yields nothing easily,
but in town
the voices whisper behind your back
like sandstorms,
so loud you know what you've said
before you even speak.
Fifty mile-an-hour winds today;
How easily the rich dirt leaves us.
Sometimes I think it should take me too,
up and blow me away.
I hate the wind when it blows like this,
galling rasping breaking
and wearing us down.
Funny
that I should love the weariness of travel,
the dirt-packed roads,
the ache for place the dwells in my soul.
Diagrammed and tangible, like memories at the quilt show,
here the seasons carry on around us.
A cold spell,
brittle and unforgiving
sits like iron atop the county;
underneath we are rusted and cold.
The only people who move now are the ranchers
or the hunters.
There's talk of spring
some years,
a figure of speech we'd like to welcome,
but she reveals a downy swell
curves a gentle finger,
then teases
and is gone.
Black ice invisibility gives way
to paintbrush summers
heat waves
mirages on the road
and a forgetting of the cold.
Then harvest.
Of course there's that one,
a season that stands alone.
Smack in the center of middle America
the melting pot placed here is cold.
homogenized, related, similar
--If you are from here, then you know.
But outsiders, passers-by, the unusual or unfamiliar
--best be just a passin' on down the road.
Stick around and stay a while,
but don't forget your place
must be established slowly
roots riverbeds and cowtrails
among the people that I know.
After college, each time I came home for a visit I laid low on the farm, avoided town (unless it was a holiday equalling something exciting) and all public places. I didn't really want people to know I was home, for however short a period it might be. What do you tell people when they ask you how D.C. is, or Chicago? Most of the people I grew up with were born here, stayed here for college, and will be buried along with their relatives in the cemetery outside town. Most of them are of farming/ranching stock, and it is this profession they entered after high school.
Well, things have shaped up differently this time around. I poked my nose out from under my rock by going to basketball games and junior class prom fundraiser dinners my second weekend back, and since then, I've managed to see people from town about once a week. I'm finding it amazingly easy to fall back into the swing of life here--this is both comforting and sad. Nothing ever changes, not really, and when I first thought about how to answer this prompt, I wasn't sure how I'd write about this feeling (what I see as stagnation, others might call a beautiful pattern), so I'm pretty happy with the neutrality of my writing.
I appreciate the ease of life my friends experience (searching for this is after all, part of what prompted me to leave Chicago), and for those who truly have grown into themselves, I am happy. But for my friends and community members who are battered by farm debt, mistrust and insecurities, I feel a deeply reaching hairline of sorrow.
And yet, even though there is no novelty here, for me, I see the ways the land and the weather and the living of life is a challenge, and maybe that's the only kind of challenge some people really want or need. In coming home, maybe I'm beginning to finally understand that; what worries me is that with comfort, comes comes the disinterest in any other kind of challenge.
A patterned expression of single mindedness, rows and rows
wheat corn beans sugarbeet potato
chase each other to the horizon.
Here the land is as thirsty for moisture
as the people are for excitement
gossip
firewater
Busch Budweiser Calvert
and an escape from the nothingness,
the never-ending
forever found in the fields.
Full of secrets, this land requires
a keen eye, a sharp mind
and the ability to look and listen,
a desire to learn.
This landscape yields nothing easily,
but in town
the voices whisper behind your back
like sandstorms,
so loud you know what you've said
before you even speak.
Fifty mile-an-hour winds today;
How easily the rich dirt leaves us.
Sometimes I think it should take me too,
up and blow me away.
I hate the wind when it blows like this,
galling rasping breaking
and wearing us down.
Funny
that I should love the weariness of travel,
the dirt-packed roads,
the ache for place the dwells in my soul.
Diagrammed and tangible, like memories at the quilt show,
here the seasons carry on around us.
A cold spell,
brittle and unforgiving
sits like iron atop the county;
underneath we are rusted and cold.
The only people who move now are the ranchers
or the hunters.
There's talk of spring
some years,
a figure of speech we'd like to welcome,
but she reveals a downy swell
curves a gentle finger,
then teases
and is gone.
Black ice invisibility gives way
to paintbrush summers
heat waves
mirages on the road
and a forgetting of the cold.
Then harvest.
Of course there's that one,
a season that stands alone.
Smack in the center of middle America
the melting pot placed here is cold.
homogenized, related, similar
--If you are from here, then you know.
But outsiders, passers-by, the unusual or unfamiliar
--best be just a passin' on down the road.
Stick around and stay a while,
but don't forget your place
must be established slowly
roots riverbeds and cowtrails
among the people that I know.
***
After college, each time I came home for a visit I laid low on the farm, avoided town (unless it was a holiday equalling something exciting) and all public places. I didn't really want people to know I was home, for however short a period it might be. What do you tell people when they ask you how D.C. is, or Chicago? Most of the people I grew up with were born here, stayed here for college, and will be buried along with their relatives in the cemetery outside town. Most of them are of farming/ranching stock, and it is this profession they entered after high school.
Well, things have shaped up differently this time around. I poked my nose out from under my rock by going to basketball games and junior class prom fundraiser dinners my second weekend back, and since then, I've managed to see people from town about once a week. I'm finding it amazingly easy to fall back into the swing of life here--this is both comforting and sad. Nothing ever changes, not really, and when I first thought about how to answer this prompt, I wasn't sure how I'd write about this feeling (what I see as stagnation, others might call a beautiful pattern), so I'm pretty happy with the neutrality of my writing.
I appreciate the ease of life my friends experience (searching for this is after all, part of what prompted me to leave Chicago), and for those who truly have grown into themselves, I am happy. But for my friends and community members who are battered by farm debt, mistrust and insecurities, I feel a deeply reaching hairline of sorrow.
And yet, even though there is no novelty here, for me, I see the ways the land and the weather and the living of life is a challenge, and maybe that's the only kind of challenge some people really want or need. In coming home, maybe I'm beginning to finally understand that; what worries me is that with comfort, comes comes the disinterest in any other kind of challenge.
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