Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty. 

In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May Have Life, Sneve states the little chapel was first built in August 1870 from logs gathered by the Native Americans who wanted a church on their reservation. In 1873, W. Hobart Hare, then Bishop of the newly created Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara, arrived at Yankton Mission and chose the church for his cathedral, making his home in a small room built onto its side.

The frame structure as we found it in 1989 was not the original; it wasn’t concecrated until 1886, a little over one hundred and three years prior to my setting foot within its interior. One of the things I enjoyed about the history of the Native Americans I was reading was their embracing of their own brand of mythology, something they seemed to do as naturally as any culture since the ancient Greeks. In fact, they were steeped in their version of it before the wasichu, white perople, came along and tried to snuff it out of them. In Yankton, one of the earliest bits of folklore relating to the Episcopal Church and its entrée into Sioux society was the story of the conversion of Tipi Sapa, then the chief of the Yanktonai whose name in Dakota meant Black Lodge. Once “Christianized,” Tipi Sapa had been given the name Philip Deloria, and was lauded as “the best known of all the native priests.” 

Sneve tells the story of the day his interest in the church was first recorded. Tipi Sapa rode by the chapel in full war regalia when he heard the congregation singing “Guide Me Thou Great Jehovah” in Dakota, stopping for a brief time to listen to the words. He didn’t enter the chapel at that time but returned another day to hear the same hymn being sung. It is said the words of the hymn made a great impression on the young chief, a response that eventually led him to approach Bishop Hare about becoming a Christian. When the bishop told him he must give up his chief’s position, cut his hair and become a simple man, he balked, stating he was a powerful chief. He did eventually agree to be baptized, and was sent to Shattuck Military School for the beginning of the inculturation process. After completing the educational and service requirements to enter the priesthood, he was ordained a deacon at St. Stephen’s chapel on the Cheyenne River reservation, then spent forty years on the Standing Rock reservation as a priest, returning to the Yankton reservation in 1925. His story expanded beyond Native American culture when his visage was placed in the reredos of the high altar in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—one of only three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages.”

My stewing about the abandoned chapel in Greenwood was the counter opposite to how the parishioners were feeling. I could have taken a cue from my grandmother, who loved to say the more you stirred shit, the worse it smelled but I couldn’t let go of my disgust over how the church had treated Native Americans in the past. My viewpoint was not shared by the Wagner congregation whose excitement had reached a fever pitch by the day Bishop Anderson was visiting for the groundbreaking. Just before his closing comments for the ceremony that day, the Bishop read a prayer: “Oh Lord God of Israel, the heavens cannot contain you, yet you are pleased to dwell in the midst of your people, and have moved us to set apart a space on which to build a house of prayer: accept and bless the work which we have now begun, that it may be brought to completion, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

He then remarked how the great spirit had waffled through the framed shell of a building we had been standing within, the studded walls surrounding a rough concrete slab foundation still fully open to the elements. “The heavens cannot contain you,” he said, raising his hands to let the wind stir the papers he held. I thought this was a fitting statement considering how the strong breezes had fluttered our clothing and programs throughout the entire service. The pages of the Bibles the lay readers had been holding danced as if in a ceremony of their own as the men tried to keep their places. Finally, the Bishop ended his closing statements by declaring the wind was indeed the spirit, or breath, of the “word,” because it had joined in the celebration of a new beginning for the Church of the Holy Spirit. 

Father Hobbs, who led the congregation, had spoken of miracles during the service, his list including the $55,000 grant from the United Thank Offering, the construction knowledge Jim brought to the project, and the free labor given by all the volunteers who traveled with us from Chattanooga. “The miracle of this spirit of volunteerism will allow the church to be debt free,” he said: “a luxury, yet a necessity in the life of this small parish.”

A feeling of pride that we had brought something of value to a group of people who’d rarely caught breaks in our country was battling it out with my feelings of regret. Would our hymns sung in English have drawn Tipi Sapa in if he’d rode by on horseback today? I questioned. The only answer was the breeze stirring the skirt I’d worn, the fabric whipping into a frenzy as the Bishop walked over to shake Jim’s hand. The silence of the undulant air provided no answer as I smiled and tried to appear gracious while my emotions buffeted my heaving mind. Where would this turmoil lead me? I wondered as the Bishop embraced me in a gentle hug.

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We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money. 

The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?

With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.

Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.

I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good." 

I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church. 

The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.

The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week. 

And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself. 

Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?

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The Let's Blog Off topic today is "What are you looking forward to in the new year?" Hands down for me, besides adroyt being a smashing success, is a book deal for The Road to Promise. I thought I'd take this opportunity, as this is the first post of 2012, to thank everyone who has stopped or continues to stop in and read my ramble through my past. Happy New Year to all of you, and don't forget to read the other forward-thinking posts by our merry band of revelers. Today's installment follows: happy reading everyone!

Gumption

We had made our way back to Wagner to begin our work on the church, and the quirkiness of the contradictions held within the town’s boundaries were apparent from the start. We had rented a house the color of crème caramel with dark brown shutters and a perfectly manicured yard. The china hutch in the dining room held a carefully arranged collection of plates stamped with Norman Rockwell's nostalgic vignettes. By stepping out the front door, I could find any one of these twenty Rockwellean scenes superimposed on life! 

Most mornings, the counter at the Spot Café on Main Street was filled with farmers and ranchers in frayed overalls. Their white tank undershirts shone through the wash-worn fabric of their faded plaid shirts, and their cleanly shaven heads nodded as they discussed unrelenting weather, unyielding land and the day's news.

These hardy men fit the stereotypical image of the American farmer, fixtures at the popular diner every morning, just as Elmo was. It seemed to me that he had been sent to teach me a lesson about stereotypes because he looked nothing like the Native American I had fixed in my mind's eye before traveling to South Dakota. In fact, he was practically indistinguishable from those stalwart men whose backs rose like stout tree trunks above the swivel stools except that his age and elderly leisure had softened his once robust build. He shuffled into the diner our first morning there, swinging his cane, which he used to oblige his rhythmical rolling gate, as he launched into a monologue about Columbus Day a few weeks away. 

The fact that he had latched onto the subject proved he had a joke for every occasion. He asked me if I knew why they celebrated the holiday on the reservation. I had actually wondered why they would commemorate an event that had introduced so much turmoil into their culture and I was genuinely interested to hear where the conversation would go. He didn’t disappoint, answering, "Because it's the day the tourist trade opened in America!" I recorded snippets like these in my writers notebook, recording how he laughted heartily at the cleverness of his joke, my legs crossed on the toffee-colored sofa awash in a sea of oatmeal-hued blandness in our temporary living room as I relived my conversations with our new acquaintances. Each time I was treated to Elmo’s boyish humor, I thought about how Vine Deloria, Jr., had been so right about his treatment of even unsavory subjects, a trait Deloria claimed was common among Native Americans. 

The author maintained that it’s a great disappointment to them that most experts who wrote about their lives rarely mentioned their propensity for humor. Jokes about Columbus and Custer were especially popular because these men had left indelible marks on their culture, mainly negative ones. The more desperate the subject, Deloria pointed out, the more humor was warranted. 

In the southern tradition that had shaped me, we were more likely to grow maudlin when extenuating circumstances left us reeling. Far too many of us had bought into the myth that we were doomed to the inferno of God's Baptist-sized wrath, which was mirrored by our hellishly hot summer climate. How, after all, could the intense heat of purgatory be any worse than that of the deep south in August? went the refrain. Maybe the impudence displayed by the Native Americans who made fun of their oppressors could have taught me something about lightening up! And yet, I wondered whether the humor was merely scabs covering deep festering wounds.

As I was journaling about their ability to be lighthearted, I felt the need to name it and I hit upon the word “gumption.” My mother’s mother had had it, as had my father’s father on his side of the family, but it been beaten out of the next generation to come along so I inherited none of what passed for backbone. I wanted to get my gumption back—and I was trying—but it wasn’t playing very well with my husband who wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted. Elmo was worth watching, I thought to myself as Jim and I walked through the late summer sunlight in the mêlée of Wagner’s centennial celebration. Maybe I could learn how to have a voice while keeping my pluck in check. Piece of cake, right? Hardly!

An insanity had gripped the small town, transforming it from sleepy to frenetic. It was Americana run amok as I had never seen it—an arts and crafts fair had taken over the park; there was a rodeo in the afternoon; an outdoor dance went into full swing on Saturday evening; and the parade, which lasted the good part of an entire day, was a spectacle to behold. The variety of entries traversing Main Street was astonishing, including everything from covered wagons to a veterinarian in a dog suit on his four wheeler onto which he’d fashioned a mechanized dog’s leg raising and lowering as a kid in a fire hydrant costume walked beside it! Hundreds of people crouched on the curb or lounged in lawn chairs as they watched the long line of tractors, trucks and horse-and-buggy rigs move by. Participation by Native Americans was almost non-existent, with Elmo and the other representatives of the all-Indian American Legion being the largest group. Thirteen of them marched in a color guard formation while six preceded them in the bed of Elmo's battered blue truck—too frail to make the trip on foot. 

Soon after they made their way past, a National Guard tank lumbered down the street. The small children ran to their parents to hide their faces from the huge, noisy machine while the older kids jumped up and down, shrieking with glee from the adrenaline rush. They supported Uncle Sam with gusto in this town as the proliferation of painted wooden replicas of the gray-haired gent, his finger pointing relentlessly from front lawns, proved. The tractor still represented a symbol of strength and continuity, and they had models from 1920 to the current one rolling down Main Street. But nothing made the kids go crazier than the tank, its articulated metal track grating on the asphalt as it chewed its way along.

I had decided to bring my buddy Sam with me for a taste of life in Wagner, and we walked him to the park to take in the arts and crafts, bumping into Edna, Elmos’s sister, and another parishioner named Rocky once there. Jim went to the bank with Rocky to meet “everyone who’s anyone in town,” as he put it, and then to get a haircut with him. I wandered around for a while, noticing how the tumult of the Midway increased after the sun set. The children’s faces were luminous in the neon-soaked air, their screams ricocheting from the buildings surrounding the square as bodies were jostled about—slung one way forcefully only to be quickly jolted in the other direction. It was difficult to walk because the kids were so excited to make their way from one ride to the next, they didn’t care whether anyone was in their way. Arms stretched forward, they simply plowed through the adults milling around without a thought to manners. 

A group of Menonite girls stood in front of me as I watched the beauty contest. The uniformity of their outfits—made alike from a variety of conservatively-patterned materials—brought them stares from everyone else gathered around the stage. The black scarves covering their long curls were held in place with clips so that the wind didn’t expose them. I wondered how they felt watching the girls on stage, their bare shoulders gleaming with the lights trained on them and their high heels clicking on the planks of wood. Did it rankle them to see those teens being celebrated for their physical beauty, their prettily coifed hair blowing free in the breeze? Was there an ounce of feeling in them that life wasn’t fair? I couldn’t help but wonder. Or were they relieved to be free from the burden of adornment?

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The hawk was keening in the distance, likely as displeased with the steamy air it slogged through as my writer’s notebook, its pages rippling as the hot moisture seeped into the fibers. I had not been exploring myself there for a while and a fear had been building in me. What if, once I was able to get back to the blue lines and black ink, I would not like what my handwriting would record? Even worse, I thought, what if nothing would flow from my pen at all? It was a sad thing I had been becoming and I wanted to rewrite the script but I was having the toughest time with the beginning. Truth be told, it was so difficult to start because the ending scared me to death. Once begun, somehow I knew there would be no turning away from that trajectory.

I had taken a break from reading about Native American culture knowing we’d be back in that world soon enough. I had turned to some kinder, gentler authors—Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau among them—as I researched an article I was writing. Being so steeped in nature through their words brought me great pleasure and I thought about how influences like that could seep into a writer’s work without him or her realizing it. I had seen this happen in my narratives: as I read these “mentors” my writing seemed to naturally deepen to a point that everyday subjects, especially where nature was concerned, were infused with significance through a personification I was somehow driven to achieve. 

I was carrying a book of Frost’s poems to the screened porch when I caught sight of a spider web spun tightly to the railing on the deck. It caught my eye because the dew had collected in spots and the droplets were tiny prisms as the morning light flashed into being. I was always in awe of these webs—so beautiful in their artfulness while being deathtraps for winged things. How could the murderous snare look so pristine in the freshness of the dawn? I wondered, thinking of Frost’s poem “To a Moth Seen in Winter.” 

Just as a spider web could be considered in a deeper context, this poem held reverberations for me. A moth, destined to die from the cold, lights on the poet’s hand, inspiring a reverie that has great emotional depth. The spider web I continued to examine from the shade of the screened porch and the unfortunate insects who ended up being the arachnid’s meal held echoes for me, as I felt caught in the web of a life that kept me from having the peace I dreamed was possible. If only, was the refrain that pressed itself into my mind over and over. It was as if Frost’s last three lines were as much a caveat for me as they were for that moth: no one could touch my life, much less save it, if I couldn’t figure out what it would take to solve my own dilemma. If only…

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Once we had exited the Rockies, driving from Steamboat Springs to Wagner, South Dakota, was a lesson in monotony, the Plains stretching into oblivion as we struck a straight coarse on the shaft of asphault that ran right up to the horizon. We passed over so many dried creek beds, I wondered how anything could survive on the sun-scoured expanse of brittle grasses. Old Woman Creek had packed up and gone, leaving behind a scattering of brittle bones and the splintered scaps of cottonwood limbs begging for rain while the sky refrained. 

The first elevation relief came as we neared the border between Wyoming and South Dakota in the form of the Black Hills. They were being pounded by a scowling storm, visible from as far away as Newcastle—its cloud-choked head feathering heavenward and its dark heart bearing down on the outer edge of the hills. The closer we drew, the angrier it seemed, I thought, and I was right: once we reached its proximity, we were pounded with hail so thick we could hardly see to drive. At one point, we were barely advancing as quarter-inch-sized balls of ice blanketed the ground an inch and a half deep.

I was thankful we were in such a macho vehicle—the old Bronco had seen much worse having been through four college-age boys in succession as Jim passed it from one son to another and had weathered a decade of being kicked around by the partying set that took over Steamboat each winter. Though it never shrugged, the sound of ice striking the thin metal of its hood and roof was deafening at times. I’d had kinder welcomes but in spite of the weather’s tantrum, I decided I wanted to return to the Black Hills someday because it was where the Native Americans believed nature had the most amplified spiritual voice. She had certainly been exercising it that day as we drove past tourist traps and tacky intrusions on a gorgeous backdrop of jagged peaks covered in the verdant thickness of pines reaching high into the sky. 

Once past the Hills, the flatness of the land returned until we reached the Badlands, an incredibly bleak and frightening landscape if there ever was one. It was as if the earth was eating itself, and the bleached-out, bone-dry colors were the counter opposites to the Black Hills’ lush infusion of blue-greens and deep grays. I wondered how quickly it took the Badlands to change as plateaus and buttes melted away, then formed again as the edge of the grasslands caved in on itself. Is anything ever constant here or is this a treacherous world of continual dissolving? I wondered.

We skirted the Buffalo Gap Grasslands to see its buxom namesakes grazing—some in pairs and others wandering the expanses in small groups. The first prairie dogs came into view as we dipped a bit further into the park, their “Prairie Dog Town” a field of dirt mounds, some of which had the straight-backed homeowners themselves popping up from within as they haughtily surveyed us from their tunneled residences. 

It felt as if it had taken weeks for us to make our way to Wagner, though it had been only a day and a half. When we arrived, we were greeted by the stalwart parishioners of the tiny town, and it wasn’t long before one stood out. We parked the Bronco at the house Jim had rented and made our way to the community center where we were being honored with a dinner, and I knew immediately who was going to be Jim’s favorite among our new friends. The minute we entered the open room, Elmo’s booming voice and thin cackling laugh, which shook his large girth, welcomed us, not once letting up during the entire evening. 

He reminded me of an overstuffed teddy bear with its ears torn off because his head was shaved and his jowls were so pronounced, his tiny ears seemed tucked away behind the protruding cheeks. He wore baggy pants that had never been “in fashion,” the thick suspenders holding them up smudged where he would fiddle with them as he pontificated about one subject or another. His smile was so endearing to me because it reminded me of my grandmother’s when she was soaking her false teeth at night—the indented oblong of his big grin hiding his lips as if for safekeeping. 

His eyes were perpetually twinkling because he was always thinking of his next joke or a riff he could interject into any conversation, whether it was actually fitting or not. That night, he pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. It was darkened and worn smooth from being handled innumerable times. He held it in front of him and paused for effect, finally saying with a drawl, “Well, lookie here!” As he said it, he slowly pulled a fly from its interior, which prompted Jim to ask, “Do you fish?” 

Elmo answered, “Not anymore; but if I got stranded on the river somewhere I could catch my dinner!” He broke into a hearty laugh at his own joke, the only thing making it funny besides the fact he’d not likely been on a river in decades. As evidenced by his portliness, he did like to eat. “My Grandpa told me to always get a look at the cook before I eat at a restaurant,” he said that night. “He told me, ‘If the cook is skinny, don’t eat there; fat, jolly cooks mean a good meal because they constantly sample their own cooking!’” He referred to himself as a Siouxwegian because his ancestry was a mix of Sioux and Norwegian. When he explained this to me, he slapped his knee and shook his head as he sniggered, seeming so particularly amused he must have been hearing the fact for the first time, though that was not the case.

I couldn’t help but giggle myself as I scribbled my impressions of Elmo into my writer’s notebook on the flight home—a 12-hour journey that left me feeling exhausted but happy to see Sam after nine days away from him. I had picked up a number of books in South Dakota, among them Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr. It was a scathing book aimed at white culture but the chapter about the Native American sense of humor gave me extra insight into Elmo’s personality. I was working my way through the tough material during mornings on the screened porch—feeling my skin burn with shame that a people’s civil rights were still being breached in our country, especially since we were so fond of proclaiming we were the land of the free. I was receiving a painful education as to the ways of the world, the ways of our government and the ways of ugly racism. 

I found myself wondering time and again why these weren’t the stories we were taught in school: why did our lessons stop after the Pilgrims and the Indians shared that supposed meal on that first Thanksgiving? Should it still be looked upon as such a thankful day? I questioned, closing Deloria’s book and wondering what other inconsistencies were about to come to the fore. According to the history books, the Native Americans gave their best to the Pilgrims who’d made their entrée into their world during that lauded celebratory meal, and I had just experienced the same level of generosity during a dinner in Wagner when a group of Native Americans who had so little to give provided us with a delicious and heartfelt experience. 

I had been told that many Sioux took the rations they received from the government—cheese, sugar, flour and butter, for instance—to the dump and tossed them into the trash to make a point. Peter Cook was not one of those. He brought several of the most magnificent apple pies I’d ever seen or tasted to that dinner. As I watched his face gleam with pride when Jim relished his first bite, I thought about how very different history could have been. If only I could rewrite it, I’d include a great deal more true “thanks giving” and a lot less fanfare.

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I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause. 

Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:

“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”

As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.

“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.” 

Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning. 

With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying: 

“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”

With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences. 

The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all. 

As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.

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As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”

I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.

Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared. 

As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.  

The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.

The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind. 

The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day. 

I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.

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This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

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The airport coffee shop—a long, thin room with a garishly bright red tile floor and beige, nondescript wallpaper rising above the wood paneling—was separated from the bar by a rounded wooden partition of staggered boards. I was studying the random patterns of the roughhewn slats when Jim brought me a cup of strong coffee and toast grilled in butter. As we waited to board what would be my last flight from Costa Rica to the U.S., a constant flow of camaraderie enveloped us—the travelers awaiting their chance to wander out of the country with a nonchalance bordering on disdain in spite of the fact that they were obviously determined to go elsewhere. 

Rick and Christy were still kidding Jim about an episode that had taken place at the San Jose McDonald’s drive-through the evening before, causing his face to go as red as the floor and a nervous chuckle to slide from his throat. We had wanted French Fries after weeks of rice and beans, and since Jim was in the driver’s seat, he was the one who had to place the order. He stared at the menu board with its sunken speaker and no matter how many times we coached him, he couldn’t wrap his tongue around a large order of French Fries in Spanish. After a very pregnant silence, we resorted to shouting papas fritas grande in unison in the hopes that the person receiving the order would hear us. When it became obvious that it wasn’t working, Jim held his hand up for us to be quiet and shouted with great bravado papas fritas Gandhi. This sent us into throes of laughter as we thought of skinny little fries with bald heads. It’s one of the stories that would be repeated often as our volunteers came together to talk about their times in Costa Rica.

It seemed an excruciatingly long wait before we were ready to board the plane and take off. Once TACA Airlines finally whisked us away, we climbed above misty mountains, the clouds resting peacefully as they clung to the volcano Irazu’s textured slopes. I thought about how we’d made so many memories in the lush country, one of the funniest of which was our first day of the trip that our flight home was bringing to a close. Jim and I had been walking around San Jose when we noticed a man following us for an alarmingly long time. Jim had finally worked up the nerve to ask him why and he answered, in broken English, that he wanted his autograph. “Why?” Jim asked. “You Sean Connery!” the man had replied, grinning from ear to ear. “No,” Jim said, “I’m not.” The fellow simply wouldn’t believe him no matter how many times he said it wasn’t true and he continued to doggedly follow us until I convinced Jim to acquiesce because the guy was giving me the creeps. The piece of paper the man had been waving in our direction every time we had looked his way was finally signed with Jim’s own signature but that hadn’t mattered to the sincerely excited man, who held the scrap of paper in the air as if he had just received a priceless treasure as he walked away from us! 

The silliest things had always come about because the people were so genuine, I thought as I took a long last look at the fading peaks below. I said goodbye to the rich coast that had held such a paradoxical mix of experiences for me, thinking to myself, “Emma, how could I forget you or anyone else here?” I realized I’d mouthed her name aloud when my warm breath fogged the portal-shaped window, which had grown frigid as we climbed higher, and we sliced into a cloud that further obscured the land below. I leaned back in my seat, wrestling with a mixture of relief and grief, as I wondered, Was this all there would be of my relationship with Costa Rica and its gentle people? 

The question faded only slightly once I was back at home, a two-week respite before traveling west to South Dakota. During the rare down-time we visited a development called Dunaway, a getaway for the area’s elite with wooded lots large enough that cabins could be tucked into the middle of lush foliage for privacy. It was in its early stages of being carved from the Tennessee hills and Jim was purchasing a sequestered parcel of land on which we would build a cabin. The seclusion was a must for the wealthy determined to have safe havens when they attempted to escape from their “lives”—a fact that I found ironic because “they” always took their lives with them (I suppose this is where I should own it and say “we” because I was among them at this point in my life)! There was a beautiful lake on the property and I sat in a canoe one afternoon, filling myself with the comforting silence broken only by the intermittent buzzing of cicadas and the occasional click of dragonfly wings. 

I was so steeped in the deep dampness of the abundant setting that I was able to quiet my mind for the first time in months. As my eyes followed the shoreline hemmed in cattails, a thought took hold of me so forcefully that it was as if some unseen force had grabbed me and shook me hard. My own voice, buried deep inside me, whispered, “You don’t have to wrestle with your spirituality; you don’t have to worry that you are at odds with religion—there is room for your way of being. Yes, there is much to know for certain, but you have begun your search for your meaning and that is all you need to know for now.”

This is a participating #LetsBlogOff post; to see my fellow bloggers taking up the subject of privacy today, click here. For a writing exercise that I have used to push myself to my highest quality of description for this post, visit adroyt, and if you are so inclined take up the cause of quality in writing yourself, I’d love to know what you create from it. If you are new to this blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

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I had imagined that I would spend my hours during our final trip putting thoughts like this on paper, but I was unable to translate anything into a coherent narrative because Jim had put me to work making stained glass windows for the church and the chaos of being worried that I wouldn’t finish them—anxiety that had me up at 4:30 a.m. and on the site straight through until 7p.m. each day for over a week—had sapped my concentration. I’d finally taken a day off and was sitting in Restaurante Carucy in the center of Siquirres—a welcome relief after days of being on my feet as I bent over a makeshift table cutting glass and soldering lead. Feeling unfettered for the moment, I let my vision sift through the untold number of faded colors and shrunken patterns of worn cotton clothing parading around town on the backs, thighs, buttocks and chests of its boisterous residents. Disco Evan, across the street, was empty after a weekend of the flashing pin lights and blaring music it employed to draw night owls away from the sticky inky air into the more claustrophobic moisture of sweat dripping from bodies that writhed in unison.  

I retreated to our rented house in the hopes that I could find some relief from the furnace of midday but there was not one inch of the interiors that offered anything resembling a respite. I sat and watched the movement of the heat radiating from the tin roof of the house next door, a frenzied swirling haze that danced its way toward me, not in the least threatened by the snippet of breeze brushing across my face. I felt the swelter approach and it unapologetically took my shoulders in its grasp as I willed myself to remain still and let it surround me—any movement, after all, would simply have made its embrace far more intense. It passed and I began to breathe again while silently awaiting the next onslaught. What a way to spend an afternoon! I thought, sweat dripping from the tip of my nose onto the book I was trying to read.

I finally gave up as salty moisture seeped into my eyes and blurred my vision. I let my mind wander over the events of the day before when the church we’d built had been dedicated. Jim and I had been given a plaque with our names on it—the misspelling of our last name somewhat comical, and representative of the lack of detail that made Costa Rica so endearing at times and maddening at others. Jim’s emotions got the best of him when he tried to speak, and he’d told me afterwards that he was embarrassed because big, strong guys weren’t supposed to cry. Before all was said and done, he had almost everyone in the Chattanooga contingent in tears. Emma King had asked us to sign her prayer book when the service had come to a close and as I handed it back to her, she patted my hand as she said, “Please don’t forget me.”

As tough as moments like those had been for me, they had been especially emotional for Jim, as he felt he was closing a chapter of his life, one that had represented the beginnings of a dream he’d held since he’d been a little boy. The group of volunteers we had hosted had become completely enamored with the people in the small town, and it was always interesting to me to see how some groups bonded with the locals while others did not. It often depended upon the women who were with us. One of our volunteers, Prestine, had drawn the children in and welcomed their overwhelming affection with joy—Estevan, Manuel, Carol, Jessica, and the others we’d come to know so well were seemingly starved for her attention and not at all shy about demanding it. Her hands were full the entire time she was on the job site each day, and it was obvious that she was thrilled about it.

I had managed to complete the stained glass windows but we had not been able to install them because the government had decided to shut off the electricity in Pocora during our last day there. Jim said he wouldn’t likely make it back to put them in place until the end of the year so we would have to store them in the Diocesan office in San Jose. This meant that Rick and Christy—two of our volunteers—and I ferried them on our laps while Jim drove the undulant roads to the capital. We had to hold the colorful panels upright because the truck bounced so forcefully they would have shattered had they been placed flat in the bed. Balancing them was a tedious task given the amount of movement the curves threw at the small truck as we made our way through the monster mountain range between the Caribbean Coast and San Jose. I paid close attention to the terrain as we slid along, knowing it would likely be my last time to experience the dusky wetness that birthed such lushness along the familiar ribbon of pavement. 

It was near twilight when we reached the highest altitude of our journey, the atmosphere made uncommonly bleak by the rainy weather. Trees sprouting orchids dangled them like jewels they were wearing to the opera or like tiny escape ropes lowered from toy helicopters, the blooms deciding they had had enough of their woody perches for the time being. Having made the trip so many times, I recognized the progression from lower elevation foliage to high mountain vegetation, the density of varied hues of green growing from lush to cloying. As we reached the abdomen of the range, giant bulges jutted from towering peaks and one particular type of tree that had always fascinated me came into view. It seemed fragile like a giant maidenhair fern, its limbs covered in clusters of delicate leaves that fanned out like ostrich plumes arranged symmetrically in a vase. They arced skyward then dipped their tips back toward the ground, making me wonder if I’d ever see foliage as abundant again.

We drove through clouds for miles—the soupiness of the air bathing the sleep-filled world in dankness. Drowsy weather, I thought, which made the mountains yawn into their caverns and nestle into their deep valleys for a good night’s sleep. Dark was wrapped fully around us as we drove away from the last tall slope and the city of San Jose came into view, its lights strung like sparkling dewdrops along the maze of a spider’s web that had been spun throughout the valley and up the opposite hillsides.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may have noticed I’m not posting as regularly as I have in the past. I’ve launched a new social media consultancy, adroyt, so the mainstay of my energy is going toward building the business as beautifully as we can. I will still be posting here but not likely with great regularity and I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your continued interest in this blog, which has meant and still means a great deal to me. 

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Jim was racing around with only a week to prepare for his final trip to Costa Rica because he was determined to cram three week’s worth of activities into the seven days he had in town. His meetings with his cronies segued to long lunches at the Mountain City Club; and his determination to taste the best of summer filled our evening and weekend calendar with barbecues, al fresco cocktail parties and boating on Lake Chickamauga. 

He would spend a week in Central America before I joined him with six volunteers, and I was up early the morning I took him to the airport, watching as his sunburned head—all that was left of the leisure time he had known—bobbed in and out of view as he heaved the heavy LL Bean duffle bags out the door. I stood at the window admiring the bluff trees, which I knew would envelope me in coolness once I was back from dropping him off because I was determined to park myself on the screened porch for as much of my week of freedom as was possible. I settled myself there the minute I returned, sitting quietly for a few seconds in order to attune myself to the waterfall smattering against the gully of rocks into which it spilled. It seemed that the staccato notes mimicked my lack of output at the typewriter—the tap, tap, tap echoing the stilted rhythm of my creativity gone bone dry, the keys sticking in mid-strike so that the words came out of me in a halting trickle. 

I was waiting for an imaginative storm to blow through and leave the ideas cascading from my brain in a torrent but that had not happened in far too long. This made me fear the long summer months ahead, knowing the heat would diminish the waterfall’s voice to a dribble. Would mine be sentenced to the same fate? I wondered. What would it take to get my writing back on track? It was then I realized the sound of that splattering was identical to the noise that falling water made as it splashed into a deep, boxy concrete sink. I closed my eyes and let the sensory memories wash over me as they brought Costa Rica, where I would soon return for the last time, flooding over my senses.

I was still trying to process what I had experienced in South Dakota—a time of controversy, conflicts and extremes. During the convocation, I had felt the need to hang back and remain aloof. I had never met such shy, closed people and I felt there was prejudice against me, though I hardly blamed them because I was just another wasichu. I could only imagine how much deep-seated mistrust had built up in them and I felt sad that there was no unity among tribes because it kept them from moving forward in a way that might have enabled them to assuage some of the despair I had witnessed. 

I moved through the days of Jim’s absence with this fretfulness jangling around in me even during the delicious mornings I spent soaking in the beautiful mountain backdrop. The surroundings calmed me as always, but I found that I was so weary it was all I could do to put two sentences together. I kept at it, making false starts as my annoyance at the sound of the heavy equipment cutting the road far below, which sounded downright evil juxtaposed against the soft spraying of the waterfall, edged out the faint momentum that offered itself to me. This must have been the same sound the people who lived near the strip mining operations heard when the ruination of certain parts of the Appalachian Mountains came to pass, I thought. Oh, why do I care? I am a peace here, and I wish I could sit like this for the rest of my days!

I had seen the play “Steel Magnolias” with friends and found myself wishing I could capture the eccentricities of the southern character as brilliantly as Robert Harling had. The only other time I had been as enamored with the authentic rendering of the eccentric southern personality was when I had seen Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” Would I ever get my act together so that I could leave something as forceful to the world?

The Fourth of July dawned and the weather was a deluge. I realized that most people must have been angered by the weather but I was reveling in the fact that I had peace, quiet and every excuse to hole up. The tropical-like downpours had created a snarling waterfall that ravaged slick rocks lit by a queer fog-filtered light—to the point that they glowed, alien-like. Within that odd radiance, hammered silver contrasted shiny green leaves so brilliant they appeared to be made of patent leather.

I’d been reading an article in Harper’s titled “In Deepest Gringolandia.” In it Bob Shacochis declared Mexico was being used as a third-world tourist theme park by North Americans. He wrote, “North Americans, boarding their planes, take North America with them—in varying degrees, yes, ugly or beautiful, but North America nevertheless.” I thought about how uncomfortable some of the places we’d stayed in Costa Rica had been and how I had succumbed to this myself. Being overwhelmed by roaches had certainly thrown me, and living at the mercy of the elements had challenged me to no end. If I was a snob by admitting that being in a clean environment soothed me enormously, then I was guilty as charged. 

Since my writing voice was firmly on strike, I found myself reading voraciously while Jim was away—making my way through a stack of books and magazines I had been intending to read for months. I’d thought that focusing on fiction would help me to escape the lack of momentum in my own writing so novels held high priority, but the tactic was having little effect. I awoke on the fourth morning of my solitude, my knee bumping the books tossed haphazardly onto the opposite side of the bed, and looked out into the dull sky. Where the clouds hung thicker, there were puffy lines of deepest gray—a scowl to interrupt the endless monotony of graphite. I felt restless and edgy so I laced up my running shoes to take advantage of the misty umbrella nature had sent before the sun burned it off and brought on the sizzling heat. 

It felt good to let the warm moisture move through my hair as the sweat poured from my body. I felt my breath enter and leave my lungs, marveling that flesh and bone had the fortitude to endure when my emotional self felt so beaten down. As I made my way past the familiar vantage points I always saw on my runs, I wondered how my life would look in twenty years; thought about Picasso’s premise that the artist lies in order to reach another kind of truth. What lies could I tell in order to create a life with a truth I could tolerate? I wondered as I turned the corner toward home, accelerating my speed to match they pace of my disconcerting thoughts.

This is a participating post in a bi-monthly exercise known as Let's Blog Off. I don't know what it is about the choices LBO leaders make for topics, but somehow my ramble through the past 20 years seems to always be on point. The material for this post and the photo of me on Lake Chickamauga were created, oddly enough, 20 years ago almost to the day. I can't wait to see how much headway I make as a writer in the next 20 years! To see posts by the other #LetsBlogOff participants du jour, click here.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

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Once we crossed to the western rim of the river, the land grew a bit wilder, feeling more isolated and lonelier, especially on the Cheyenne River Reservation where the Convocation was underway. I was trying to nail descriptions of what I had seen in my writers notebook when the hymns that had filled the breaks in the programming ended, leaving only the sound of distant chainsaws to rend the sudden silence. They were being run by heavyset Native American men cutting and stripping the pine poles used for building the bowers, the new ones necessary to accommodate a swelling crowed. The rough-hewn constructs were fastened together with wire and topped with mesh over which dying limbs and branches were tossed to create dappled shade. The spots of light beneath them glinted on folding metal chairs and peppered crude benches made from planks of raw timber that had been nailed onto short sections of tree trunks.

A long line of presenters moved across the dais under the largest bower straddling the podium as the day’s agenda progressed. First up were the varied chapters of the Episcopal Church Women. Beulah Turgeon shared her details of the activity that had taken place on the Rosebud Reservation, noting that they felt a sense of accomplishment given the monies they’d raised from their series of lunches. Mrs. Runs With Enemy asked that grave markers be maintained more vigilantly in her parish because it was a sign of respect for the dead. The pleas of the women to follow were similar, each noting needs beyond their parish’s means. As the women wrapped their agenda, a group of men filtered in, separating into small clusters. 

Mr. Little Soldier was the first to step up to the microphone. He asked, “Who is our God?” paused and stared keenly at the audience before adding, “Is he in favor of a separation of church and state?” Every so often he would break into the Sioux dialect, which made his sentences sing as his voice rose and fell, going soft on syllables like "ha" and "cha." English phrases emerged in the midst of the melodic language—“all this time” sandwiched between Woniya Wakan, or holy spirit, and niyelo, “it’s up to you.” He was a member of the camp advocating a vote to approve that both Lakota spiritual activities and Episcopal services be embraced by the Diocese. Some men offered murmurs of acceptance and others dissent, depending upon which side of the issue they supported. A critical argument had to do with whether traditional customs of the Episcopal services could be altered, namely the sips of wine during the Eucharist. 

Not everyone wanted the custom to be changed, but the ones who did were adamant that using grape juice or non-alcoholic wine was of grave importance because it took only a tiny bit of alcohol to ignite a setback for the addicted. The sun illuminated the handmade quilts hung behind the podium as the debate wore on—the colorful stars and the war eagle so exquisitely crafted. Set in relief against the artful backdrop created by these beloved symbols, Reginald Bird Horse spoke of how the native religion was a comfort to those who still believed in the old ways. The parade of names of the ardent speakers as they presented their heartfelt positions on a string of issues quickly became a jumble. 

Father Makes Good delivered his impassioned plea to preserve the Episcopal services as they had always known them. A lay reader from St. Elizabeth’s named Reginald Bird Horse remarked, “I’ve been to the hill. How long since we’ve been involved with alcoholism? And now it’s bingo. I have found myself by communicating with God; going to the hill to fast and pray.” He was advocating the use of the peace pipe and the drum in church services, and was one of the speakers to address the plight of those who had beat alcoholism only to be faced with the wine at the communion rail. 

Nelson Young Hawk came forward and spoke of his tiyospaye, or extended family—his grandmothers and great grandfathers who had adopted the white man’s way by accepting their religion. He was certain that they should not change the services in any way; that these weekly rituals should remain exactly the same as they had been since the church first entered their lives. Simon Speaks approached the microphone and said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, “We don’t come together to think about the almighty dollar from the U.S. treasury—the Indian got along without it for a long time until they took our gold mines and now we can’t get our own money—we should take our religion back, too.”

As clipped, grey clouds drifted through a Wedgwood blue sky, Father Bears Heart took the dais and the men nodded as his voice cascaded through the Sioux language, a dialect that such a small minority within our country’s borders would recognize. His friendly face disappeared as another—thinner and more haggard—took its place, and the back-and-forth continued into the afternoon. I thought of Black Elk’s statement: “They talked and talked for days, but it was just like wind blowing in the end.” As the last man exited the low stage, the sound of crickets and the clink of metal from a small group of men playing horseshoes were suddenly drowned out as the recorded hymns flared from the giant speakers, which had been heaved onto a tall wooden platform.

I learned that day how important the word tiospaye is to Native Americans, and I also came to see that I was intruding on a discussion that wasn’t mine to hear. With a heavy heart, I moved to a bower away from the activities of the church after hearing Bishop Anderson tell those who were asking him to make a decision as to how their church services would be shaped that it was their decision to make, not his. He said decisions had been made for them for far too long and it was in their best interest to talk amongst themselves and come to their own conclusions.

As I noted how sadness seemed to be leaking from each person speaking, I wondered about the jovial demeanor of the people milling around a large pot of buffalo stew—such a contrast to those speaking that day. It took several men to stir it as it bubbled furiously, the intense flames beneath the black vessel holding the soup dancing vibrantly against the pot’s rounded bottom. I stared at the ground a great deal as the hours passed, walking around as I tried to get my bearings. As I did, I saw how the fine, silt-like dirt beneath the grass, which was so dry it crunched with each footstep, eagerly took the imprint of the logos and patterns carved into the bottom of each pair of sneakers that had passed over its surface. I had read that the dirt in this part of the U.S. was the drift left by glaciers of long ago and I wondered whether our version of hieroglyphics would be the motifs on the bottoms of our shoes when the next Ice Age hit. 

A priest from Colombia struck up a conversation with me as I sat off to myself scribbling my impressions of things. He told me that he was Lutheran and that he’d had a falling out with his church. He had married an American and found himself on the Pine Ridge Reservation ministering to the Ogalala Sioux. “The American Indian is rich compared to the poor in Latin America,” he remarked. “Their poverty is not in their world, it is in their minds.” His words reverberated as we drove the serpentine road to Mobridge, stopping there for coffee before heading back to Sioux Falls. We laughed as Randy thought to officially welcome us to the land of “tortured water”—the name they’d given their particular brand of joe in South Dakota.

As we flew back to Tennessee, my mind was exploding as I attempted to process everything that I had seen and heard. My confusion as to whether western religions had any relevance for Native Americans had been amplified, and I thought it fitting that one of the first Lakota words I learned was skinciya, or struggle. Stevie Smith once wrote that a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. At that very moment, I was living, breathing proof that this was powerfully true.

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As we left the outskirts of Sioux Falls, our drive to the Yankton Reservation took us through an expanse of checkerboard farmland. It was deemed an open reservation due to the mix of Native Americans and white landowners within its boundaries, and this became clear as we pulled into Wagner, which looked as all-American as any other farming community in the Midwest. We met Father Field and his wife Mary, Rocky, Elmo, Edna, Peter and Annette that day—names of people we would come to know very well as we built a church they had been asking the Diocese to provide for them for many years.

Our second stop was Greenwood, which rests in the nipple extending below the rectangular state at its southeast corner, its meandering outline there defined by the Missouri River. The church we would be replacing with the one we would build was eerily quiet—its interiors musty from being closed up for quite some time because the community that once utilized it had moved to Wagner to be closer to the services a town provides. I’d never been as moved by “The Lord’s Prayer” as when I saw a large framed needlepoint of it, written in the Sioux language, hanging in the vestibule. It was as rag-tag as the little strip of land along the Missouri River we found ourselves walking along that day—the waterway nothing more than a stream indolently moving through a deep ravine the river had made before being dammed upstream. The quiet spot held a collection of abandoned churches and a few run-down houses, and I could feel the sweep of history, though not the bustling one that had long been silenced along the jagged banks. 

After the lush vegetation of Greenwood, our next stop—Lower Brule, a closed reservation—felt barren and dry. We met Marilyn, Boots, Gloria and Mr. Small Jumper, all eager to greet us because they welcomed our help. Father James, who was younger than most of the priests we’d met in the mission field, had been assigned to the isolated reservation that held nothing but buttes and flats spanning for miles. When we left the Lower Brule, we traversed the Crow Creek Reservation, moving through undulant gold grasses as we listened to Randy explaining that the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were all arms of the Sioux tribe, and that the first-letter change of their names designates their linguistic differences—certain words used by all the Sioux would begin with “D,” “L,” or “N,” depending upon which segment of the tribe the speaker had been born into. 

As we headed farther north and west, we drove a rain-soaked road that rose and fell away, mimicking the undulant profile of the hills. The Missouri River tracked us, slithering out of sight through distant gorges and reappearing when the cliffs gave way to expansive meadows. We glided along the silvered ribbon winding through velvety green for several hours until we came to a field of flattened grass that was littered with beater cars, giant speakers, several pine bowers and an odd assortment of people, both Native American and white. 

The four-day, out-of-doors Convocation was in full swing. Christian hymns blared from the speakers as we walked through the trampled prairie grass rousing grasshoppers with every step. I attempted to make eye contact with the Native Americans I passed, but my searching looks were met with stoic distance. I sat alone for most of the afternoon, watching puffy clouds glide effortlessly through an enormous sky as I wondered why my attempts to connect were being met with such resistance.

I realized there was so much to learn. I had always taken my ability to connect with other human beings for granted, and I had already been told once since we’d arrived that I was being very idealistic. What else is new? I thought, admitting that I could see this in most of my dealings, though I wouldn’t have been so quick to put a name on my emotional makeup. It was a bit like being categorized, then stamped with a number to be shelved in the “Idealist” section of the library. How did I come about these “utopian” attitudes? I wondered as I scribbled in the notebook in my lap, the smell of pine infusing the air. 

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We were a few days away from taking our first trip to South Dakota and I had no idea what to expect. We would be attending the Niobrara Convocation, a church convention for Sioux Episcopalians, in Promise, South Dakota. The Bishop had mentioned we’d see a bit of the wild wild west as we traversed the Great Plains—prairie dogs, buffalo, antelope and miles upon miles of barbed-wire fences. Though not as “exotic” to me as the animals he listed, I was battling some pretty sneaky Tennessee wildlife as I tried to protect my herb garden on the mountain, and it had me wondering whether the native animal kingdom on the Plains could be any more troublesome. 

For three mornings in a row woodchucks had decided it was their duty to dig around in my newly planted pride and joy—a series of mounds of dirt skirted by carefully placed stones from between which plumes of perennials and knots of herbs sprouted. I had planned this perfect garden for months and it had taken me an entire week to physically create it so I was understandably feeling a bit territorial. I had pegged the perpetrators as our regular visitors, the raccoons, until I caught the groundhogs red-handed one night. Just before heading to bed I had heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like terra cotta scraping on wood. I flipped on the deck lights to see the critters pulling my bay tree out of the dirt, placing it carefully on the deck beside the pot they were plundering. I left them alone, knowing the plant would survive the night in the open, and just before drifting off to sleep, I wondered if I should put some dried ears of corn at the bottom of the steps for them the next evening—a peace offering of sorts. Then I quickly realized how silly the idea was, as they didn’t consider their behavior destructive; they were simply foraging for food.

Jim had built me a remarkable potting bench for planting herbs and flowers, and I’d found the perfect place for it in a nook facing the woods. I was making my way to it to repot my bay tree the next morning when I nearly stepped on a large snake sunning on the deck. I thought I was going to drop dead from fear before I could reach the door to the garage, high-stepping more successfully than any drum major I had admired when high school bands were still known for turning out such prancing leaders!

I shuddered all afternoon thinking about how close I had come to stepping on the slithering creature. When I described it to my neighbor’s gardener, he declared it to be a harmless chicken snake but I felt certain it had been of the deadliest sort. I raced down to the bookstore to buy a guidebook so I’d be able to identify snakes from then on. Needless to say, I never nonchalantly walked around any corner on the deck from that day on, and when I would see an elongated reptile sunning on one of the large, flat rocks on the bluff below, I’d pull out my handy book and see if I could tell its type. It was a ridiculous effort, of course, because you had to get pretty close to a snake to make out its details and I certainly wasn’t signing on for that task.

The next day, we took off for South Dakota before the light had come up on the city and I felt inexplicably nervous on the flight to Sioux Falls as I fingered a newspaper clipping with my grainy visage stamped into it—an advertisement I’d used to mark my spot in Black Elk Speaks. I’d agreed to model for this ad at the request of several friends who owned First Impression, a clothing store they’d just opened. I scanned the image for some hint of myself—some sign that it was really me—and I found nothing that told me I was present when the photograph was taken! In fact, it had been an embarrassing endeavor as I tried to figure out how to pose because I’d never done so. Afterwards, I realized I should have practiced before I went to the shoot but that wouldn’t have occurred to me either. The photographer was completely green so he didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, and I had left feeling self-conscious. That’s what I thought about when I saw my wide smile, the discomfort causing me to jam the flimsy piece of paper into the back of the book as I vowed never to do something as out-of-character again.

I had made it about three-quarters of the way through the story of Black Elk’s story and was gaining a Native American’s view of how their lives were changed by the whites they encountered in the days preceding, during and following the “Indian Wars.” Black Elk, who lived in a log house on the Pine Ridge Reservation between Wounded Knee and Grass Creek when he was relating the story to John Neihardt, said,“…the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature…Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here…”

Until reading the book, I’d never heard the word wasichu, which means “white person” in Lakota. It was bizarre to be perceived as different because I’d never been put in a situation of minority before. I suppose something told me I was heading into tricky territory given the anxiety I felt as I finished the book, which I closed as we were beginning the final approach into Sioux Falls. I found myself swallowing tears as the medicine man’s words lamenting the moment when Native Americans were relegated to reservations echoed in my mind. 

“And so it was all over…I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…” 

Black Elk’s story had been lived one hundred years before my arrival in South Dakota, and it made me sad that there had been even further decline for the freedom-loving people. “O make my people live!” Black Elk had wailed. It occurred to me that I would likely look back on Costa Rica as a piece of cake compared to the emotional territory I found myself entering in South Dakota. The thought was sobering as I stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps into the heat of the Great Plains.

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As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!

I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms. 

I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.

On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.

Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.” 

The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…

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I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.

The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms. 

One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.

As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.

Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black. 

His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.

Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.” 

I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!

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The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather. 

I thought about how most people wouldn’t think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim’s oldest son’s wedding. I lamented to my writer’s notebook, “I can’t wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort.” Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. “I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen,” I wrote. “Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready.”

As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person’s hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.

The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary. 

The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet. 

It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to “representing the church” with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?

With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:

            Plume

It is difficult

to face

someone else’s struggle

when it stokes the fire

of your own

painful burning,

especially when 

you’ve labored for years

to swallow the smoke.

          -Saxon Henry

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It stopped when its backside met the deck railing and stood there, just far enough away to feel safe while being close enough for its pointy nose, which it held high in the air, to identify Sam’s scent. I imagined this must have been as foreign a smell as it had ever encountered in relation to an animal given that Sam, who trembled with desire to get at the raccoon, had been to the groomer that day. Little did my beloved dog know he would have been no match for the teeth in that pointed snout.

Suddenly out of nowhere, a smaller fur ball came rushing in, tumbling under the larger animal as it playfully nipped at its feet. Sam was beside himself with the desire to play, prancing on his hind legs in frustration. The smaller creature, who had no fear whatsoever, stepped right up to the screen and stood nose to nose with Sam. I was guessing by then that the larger raccoon was the mother because the little guy was herded out of harm’s way the minute Sam ran his manicured nails noisily down the woven metal mesh. As the duo skipped out of range of the floodlights flanking the deck, Sam moaned in disappointment that his potential new friends had escaped without a properly sniffed “meet and greet.” 

I’d never been able to experience raccoons that closely and I had to admit, even while knowing they were dangerous, I’d loved to have cuddled both of them to my chest. It made me realize why people fooled themselves into thinking that they could domesticate wild animals. I’d always been fascinated with the outlandish behavior of non-domesticated species, and some of my favorite childhood memories were when my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” We’d tune in and find ourselves crying over a dying bear cub during one episode or fighting back hysterical fits of laughter during another that involved a flock of wild birds being startled by an airboat. My dad had a passion for auto racing and had owned his own series of quarter-milers for years so when the leggy birds bolted, wings flapping and feet skimming the shallow waters of some exotic glade, the skinny wakes they made in the surface of the water made them appear as if they were in a dead heat in mother nature’s version of a quarter-mile race. 

This was the only program, besides sports, that my mother would allow us to watch together because we were prone to being overly emotional and our tender psyches seemed to feed off each other. “Little House on the Prairie” had long been forbidden as the drama never failed to cause us to sob by the end of each episode. Before she nixed the show all together, she would walk through, roll her eyes and change the channel as we wiped our eyes and blew our noses, laughing a little too self-consciously at our silliness, which she thought was ridiculous! I’d never seen “Wild Kingdom” feature raccoons—maybe they weren’t exotic enough for Jim Fowler, who seemed to prefer eagles, ocelots and monkeys—and I wished I’d known more about them when the duo visited again and again as winter progressed.

Sam never lost his desire to tussle with them—an ever-present frustration in his life as the weather grew colder and we had a second significant snow near Christmas. As the holiday loomed, I was determined not to admit that I was battling a serious case of depression, plagued by nightmares and bouts of sadness that left me feeling spent and wasted. I would make the briefest of entries in my writer’s notebook and then go days without logging anything as I filled my personal journal with dark struggles: “The sky dulls with evening and my mood takes on its color.” I felt like a the protagonist in a movie I’d watched—a dying man who knew his life had been lived in vain—when he said, “All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.” Would I succumb to a life lived in futility? I wondered. As I journaled about it, the red-tailed hawk patrolled the bluff, drawing me away from the page. I watched as it clung to a tree in strong winds, its talons gripping the limb as its body swayed in anticipation of its next move. Suddenly, it flattened itself against the currents and dove through the icy air, disappearing beyond the stony outcroppings at the edge of the yard. 

I was trying to write poetry but only snippets emerged. As the new year dawned, I made a resolution that I would put more words on the page, hopeful that I could hold my resolve better than I had in the past. My first entry for 1989 felt like a strong start and as was most often the case when I was at home, nature was my inspiration: “The sunrise burned to expose itself as the knobby heads of mountaintops penetrated wispy clouds. The moon was as thin as a clipped nail last night, bent and useless in its loss. I watch the falls and wait for the water to take on the color of the awakening sky but it refuses to be anything but itself: cold, clear and uncaring—it falls not for orange glory but for its own clarity.” 

Life kept reaching out and I couldn’t help but intertwine my fingers with its tentacles, which meant I was being pulled headlong after it and all it had to offer. I was often fooled into thinking I was planning the music of my days when more often than not I would end up dancing to songs I’d never intended to have as my soundtrack—all chosen by others. Why was it that life played its own tunes, forcing us to dance along while knowing the loving stances were the hardest to strike? 

My stances had been as far from loving as any could be, and it truly bothered me but I was dancing as fast as I could, the poses I managed to hold not so graceful. Besides Sam, the natural world surrounding the Signal Mountain house continued to be the only bright spot in my life. I studied the raccoons as the baby grew, interacting with Sam beyond the screen in guarded but curious ways. I watched the hawk as it rode the thermals, circling above the falls for hours on end. I wished I could glide as effortlessly through life as it was able to sail on those stiff breezes.

I had been watching for several weeks as a highway was being bulldozed through the landscape below—a connector that would make the morning and evening commutes for thousands of people easier. The machines were busy at work day after day, mowing down trees and cutting into hills. I realized that I had a problem with development in some ways. It took strength for human muscles to brandish an axe against a great tree, but I felt it took minimal effort to bulldoze one flat. As I watched the “progress” day after day, I thought how ironic it was that we were a people professing strength while simultaneously being a culture that plowed across the land without any consideration for the future. Would anyone ever be able to see this? I wondered as I walked away from the windows that looked out onto the long brown ribbon of a scab growing on the land below.

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While the unruly visitors were in residence, my entries in my writer’s notebook took on a despondent tone: “I am one with the waterfall. I feel myself spilling over the bluff that is my life. The output continues when nothing comes to replenish the flow. I gasp for breath and, dehydrated, fall into jumbled dreams. I languish on bleak sheets, too tired to care. I feed those around me as I starve to death.”

I wondered if suicide was really senseless and dallied with the idea that maybe when the pain was so great, it wasn’t such a stretch. With these dark thoughts flitting through my mind, I studied a shimmering ice pellet hanging on the railing of the deck—caught by some invisible thread as it quivered at the mercy of wind-whipped patterns of chaos. It was odd to be thinking of something so momentous with about the same intensity as wondering when the ice crystal would let go. These subjects reverberated in me—death was simply on my mind—as I felt the rain wanting to come to end the dance of the pinprick of ice. I could feel it as the sky puckered its brow in petulant warning but the crystal danced unafraid, its frozen strength refusing to budge until it was ready to leave. I knew that ice was fragile when temperatures rose but for the moment, it was a symbol of strength—a trait I felt I lacked so desperately. The fact that it could perish so organically without a shred of remorse made me wonder why we humans were so terrified of letting life go.

As I journaled about how the idea of death and the act of dying were not one in the same, it occurred to me that if I’d had a stable emotional life to underpin me, it would have been impossible for me to be unhappy in a home that surrounded me with windows on the world, lenses from which the pink fresh light of a brand new day replaced starlit nights filled with trembling pinpoints of illumination as far as the eye could see. I was fascinated by how the atmosphere changed throughout the hours of any given day, the sun marking the sky as her own. She took, greedily, the tangerine tranquility of morning and bathed herself in it until she knew the world was fully awake, that each of her subjects would be awaiting her. Only then would she burst above the mountain’s silhouette, leaving no doubt that she had arrived. She was vanity personified. 

I was feeling her need for attention, her intensity blinding me as it reflected from the white page, as I journaled about a friend I had dined with the night before. She was a resident alien and her “take” on our inaugurations in America fascinated me. She hailed from Holland and said that a historian from her country deemed our celebrations of an incoming president as somewhere between a coup d’etat and a coronation! She had blocked off the entire day to watch President Bush being sworn in because she said it was important to honor the process (though she did admit she wouldn’t have tuned in if Dukakis had won!). 

I was ashamed of myself for feeling so frustrated with politics that I had no stomach for a day of ceremonies and I realized she proved that Americans, myself included, often take liberties for granted. It was the posturing in the political realm that made me feel as if the arguments being waged amounted to a discourse as inane as whether the world is round or flat. When would the rhetoric advance beyond whether we would fall off if we wandered too close to the edge? I wondered, feeling as if the ineptness of it all was a gigantic waste of time. 

Equally frustrating was my attendance at my first Vestry retreat for the church. The politics were just as insidious and I felt the insecurity of being a novice weighing on me the entire time I was there. I returned home to a rainy Monday, spent from the activities that found me giving my all without receiving anything in return. Worse than my outpouring of myself was the fact that our priest and Jim berated me for admitting that I had been nervous. “It was supposed to have been a relaxed time,” Padre said. Jim chimed in, “She doesn’t work that way; always tense…”

I suppose I was perpetually anxious but I’d never seen it as a negative thing. I simply saw it as my desire to give every moment the quality it deserved. Knowing that this was a flaw in Jim’s eyes sent me into a dejected place. I was so ready to chase the light—revel in vanity like the sun—but it seemed my life was determined to keep me wallowing in shadows, as the snippets of poetry I managed to record illustrated:

The pain goes deep

The storm grows wild

and darkest night swallows

my evolution

Stars collide in a skyless void

our world lacks

true solution. 

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When there was moisture in the air, morning meant fog’s dull mask would overtake us and the waterfall would rage when rain had been present, hissing as it spilled itself over the indention in the bluff that allowed it an outlet to the rocks below. I couldn’t see it when the fog moved in but its smattering filled the house. It sang me to sleep at night and I often set the alarm so I could awaken before the sun rose in order to watch the sky change. The lights of the city seemed frenetic in the cold air as daylight took over—vibrating intensely as if they were attempting to ward off the passing of their torches by amping up their energy. There was, of course, no way to compete with the sun’s eminence and I thought about how so much of life was like that—a lesson in futility.  

The silhouettes of the mountains ringing Chattanooga’s verdant valley seemed to meander when seen from an equal height, their profiles rugged as they rose against the soft orange that went white as morning launched herself with abandon. The trees beyond the windows looked as if they’d been stamped there—so dark against the coming day they were like a serigraph embedded in a lively watercolor. There was one bright star glimmering like a beauty mark just before the night lost its grasp on the firmament. The “changing of the glowing guard” made me question whether light in life was similar to the “light” of knowledge. Neither was consistent as it meandered through its conduits, and I felt there was a similarity to avenues of thought and paths of light, though I couldn’t yet explain how. I was merely left with the question, “How far do we have to travel to grow into consciousness and is there any way to predict where the road leads?”

I was scribbling about this as we drove to Davenport Gap to scout Jim’s next hike on the Appalachian Trail. We faced some wild weather as moments of intensive sunlight were followed by obliterating clouds that seemed to devour the car, spitting sleet and snow before they swirled away to reveal another spell of glaring light. The sunset was blood-orange as it bathed the hills and trees in tones that made them seem as if they were born of fire. Everything was tinted in warmth, which was such a paradox given that it was brutally cold beyond the windshield. 

We stopped at a restaurant nestled into the front rooms of a log cabin where there was a glorious fire in the fireplace. The ladder-back chairs were hard and knobby but the flames bathed the room in welcoming heat. One woman tended the restaurant—waiting and bussing tables, and keeping the fire ablaze. We were the only customers and after she read us the specials, she removed the large screen covering the yawning opening of the stone fireplace, then teased us about not bringing in any wood—a comment that had Jim sliding back his chair in order to grab some logs from the porch. She put her hand on his shoulder as she passed, telling him that she was teasing. When she reentered—followed by a blast of frigid air as the screened door slapped closed behind her—she had an armful of small logs that she tossed onto the back of the fire. The blaze caught but the flames were still a bit softer than they had been when we’d first arrived. 

“Now come the big ones!” she announced as she disappeared through the door again. Jim couldn’t let her carry them by herself so he went to help her, following her back inside and standing like a good Boy Scout as she picked the pieces of wood from his grasp, placing them in a careful pattern atop the flames. “I’ll scotch it now!” she announced as she placed one in the back. “Did I do alright?” she asked as she returned the screen. Jim told her she’d built the best fire he’d ever seen and I could tell he meant it. When she came to take our order, I noticed she wore no makeup and I wondered if every facet of her life was so free of pretense. I thought about her as we drove home in the dark: there was something about this woman that was so genuine it deserved attention. It didn’t matter that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was disheveled. In fact, it could have been these very details that made her so interesting to me because they were the ones I couldn’t shake. These bare facts made her seem more real than anyone I’d ever met, especially the women in my life who were dressed to the nines and wore slathers of makeup beneath their perfectly coiffed hair.

We were going through one of those periods of being deluged with parties, which meant we were spending far too much time with the “perfectly put-together.” I was hanging on for dear life yet again, and I wrote my notebook, “This writer feels empty: no words flow willingly from her pen.” The only thing that soothed me was nature and her inexplicable moods. She brought me a sparkling gift when she left a blanket of snow on the bluff—so softly and gently it fell, muting the world and making me feel like a child tucked into a nursery wearing my footie pajamas. I was noiselessly padding my way through my cloistered world when the sun came up, the woods glistening and the trees turning to pristine lace. Spaced down the bluff as they were, the frosty progression of limbs joined with the liquid that had frozen as it cascaded over the mountain’s edge to create the illusion that a beautiful bridal veil had been unfurled. This was Bridal Veil Falls, as it had been named decades before on just such a day no doubt. The house was so blissfully quiet in the snow-pack that I could hear the steady rhythm of my shallow breathing. What a miracle for a winter morning!

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She certainly used her surroundings for creative fodder, as is illustrated in this passage describing the Wild Turkey from Our Southern Birds: “Any one who has followed the trail of the turkey through its native woods, or who had made the acquaintance of some lustrous purple-legged baron hatched from a wild egg and raised in a poultry yard, will not grudge this species the phrase that has often been applied to it—‘noblest of American birds.’ An appreciative southern wrier, Mr. Lanier, once suggested that the Wild Turkey would be a better choice for adoption as our national emblem, instead of the rapacious and quarrelsome Eagle; but, however suitable to American ideals and character this change might be, it is not likely to take place, for the reason this splendid game bird is being killed off at a rate that insures its disappearance from all but the wildest parts of its ranges. In short, the Wild Turkey will probably be nearly extinct before the general public becomes acquainted with him…”

Fall was coming full on and the bluff was being leached of its greenness, the leaves coloring as they clung to the barely hidden branches of trees that heaved them into the dull sky. A thunderstorm raced through, bellowing as the limbs danced its bidding. I went to the screened porch to feel the drifts of mist racing up the gully, enjoying the cool moisture caressing my face. As the storm moved away, the sun radiated red-orange, spilling its hues like a paint pot someone had overturned, its contents seeping earthward until it infused the entire atmosphere with its pigments. 

I was just beginning to learn how the weather affected the spot on which we were perched. The wind would race over the cusp of the rocks that formed our foundation, blasting around the house and rattling the windows with its fury. As one gust would die, another would rush forward, its fist closed tightly to pound the door and to pummel the trees, which were forced to cling all the more mightily to the puny soil beneath their roots. The beating seemed more sinister at night as everything went black beyond the windows. I was drawn to the cold panes, curious to feel the fury of the gusts—the rattling of the pulsing glass keeping me company as I watched for shooting stars. They would arc through the sky every so often and I had finally made enough peace with my life to have wishes ready to salute their passing.

As night tiptoed in on a dusty pink horizon wedged between layers of soft blue one evening, I wrote, “I can say I will not be a writer as many times as I like but it will never keep me from writing.” The next morning as the sun rose above the far horizon, I listened to the “stars” of a writer’s conference read poems and fiction on public radio. The broadcast pulled at my insides, making me want to write as they had written but I was stuck in some strange rut of fearing the very thing I desired the most (and the thing what would set my spirit free if I’d only allow it).

Even as my internal angst with my identity roiled, I must have been embodying my desire to become a writer without even knowing it because a man I knew continued to approach me with his own need to accept himself as a writer. He was not nearly as far along as I was in the discipline of journaling and I felt his desire to connect with a kindred spirit ooze from him when he would seek contact with me, a needy look in his eyes giving away his internal angst. I guessed that having an exchange with someone who was struggling as much as he was shored him up, something I thought about frequently as I fumbled through my own chaos. 

As I bought myself a new writer’s notebook one afternoon a thought flashed into my mind. I stood looking at the shelf of journals, lips pursed as I tried to decide if my idea would cross any inappropriate boundaries, when the doubt fell away and I decided to buy one for him. The next time I saw him, I gave it to him along with one of the special pens I favored. I wished him well when I handed it to him and I could tell it meant so much to him. The next time I bumped into him, he thanked me profusely and I could feel his anxiety mixed with joy over the book of blue-lined pages he clasped in his hands, the blank surfaces gnawing at his desire to fill them, hungry as they were for his words.

I wanted to tell him that the moment before he began his path toward a desire to write would likely be more peaceful than any moments following; wanted to tell him about how the impulse to write complicates a normal life in ways that are difficult to explain. But I decided it would be best for him to find this out in his own way in his own time. After all, that’s an important part of a writer’s journey, and who was I to say where his process would take him and how it would unfold? If nothing else, writing is an incredibly personal discipline, one that demands of its collaborator his or her own blood, sweat and tears…

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