DESTINATION MOON: Fiction

“But he should take his coat,” objected the school secretary, who was bolder than the principal lurking in his office, pretending he didn’t know what was happening.  They both knew the father was a drunk, the boy was being abused and now would be missing for a few days.  What they didn’t know was what happened during those days, except that the boy often had bruises and scrapes when he came back.  They DID know that the man would not tolerate interference.  He was not big, but he was intense, and he could be explosive.  “A type,” thought the principal.  “One of those who built the nation and now find it a trap.  No more frontiers.”

But the father when he was drunk was seized by some drive  -- or did he drive in order to drink, because literally drive is what he did.  “Get in the car.”  The boy did what he was told because balking would have mean a blow.  This was not the first time.  He knew his father picked him up from school to evade the women at home, who would all object, uselessly.  He resented the school secretary for trying to intervene, because his father was his hero, the MAN.  Women fussed all the time and tried to control, but were too weak.  On the other hand, he was not stupid and had hidden a warm jacket under the spare tire in the trunk.

It was a big, showy, heavy car that his father had tuned and customized as carefully as if it were a spaceship.  All the men in the family worked for the auto industry and knew their engineering, not in paper theory but in actual hands-on grease mechanics.  And along with the car industry the highways had unfolded, leaving gravel pits along the way, calling out to the Daniel Boones without locating real destinations.  “Destination Moon” was a movie the same age as the boy, a yearning that wouldn’t be practical for decades. The boy understood that he was a kind of safety mechanism, taking over the driving when his father passed out, though he could hardly reach the pedals, yelling out when there was a hazard his dad didn’t see.  It was understood that if something really bad happened, he would survive and go for help.  It never occurred to the man that something bad might happen to the boy.

Nor did it occur to the boy either.  His father was all-powerful.  Everyone gave way before him.  The trick was to seem to comply while always watching and learning.  The other motive of the man taking his son along was that he was teaching the boy.  What were the rules of society and the rows of school desks compared to the far far older practice of apprenticeship in a world of skill versus environment?  Aside from his power plant job, his father was an official tester for a fishing tackle company.  How could success be better endorsed than by a business?  What better matching of strategy against results than fishing?  What better place to fish than unknown waters?

Usually they went north because that’s where the water was.  Once they tried the SW but it was desert.  Up north even in winter there was water under the ice.   His father seemed to know people, to have access to whatever he needed, to take things when there was no other alternative.  The boy followed suit since he got hungry more often than his father did.  Sometimes he thought his food stealing was observed but tolerated by people who somehow knew he was hungry, especially when they were moving among the Chippewa in the small communities.  Once an Indian woman came out to where he was lounging against the car, suddenly produced a wet washrag and wiped his face, then put some jerky in his pocket and disappeared before his father came back.  Like everything else, it gave him mixed feelings.

Eventually they transferred from the automobile to a canoe, moving among islands.  He had no idea where they were, though he soon learned to feel the compass points because of the light, both sun and stars.  He didn’t know the constellations, but he knew they existed and later in life he remembered, learned them and the stories they told.

They sacked out in sleeping bags, his father often too incoherent to talk sensibly, but he would sing in a wandering way.   He had taught the boy to watch their campfire.  In the morning the man would be too hung over to say anything until he’d worked up a good sweat by paddling, but he always smelled of booze.  Once in a while a few men, usually Indian, would join them overnight and tease the boy.  He learned to game them.  Sometimes they gave him things.  No matter where they were, people were pretty much the same.  Sometimes the two left before anyone else was up, taking the whiskey with them.

One chilly night he dreamt that someone was tugging on his pillow, in spite of the fact that he usually slept on his stomach with his arms folded under it to keep it in place.  Waking in the dark, he discovered that a half-grown raccoon had curled up between his shoulder and his ear.  Only half-conscious, he smiled and did not push the little animal away. It muttered and cuddled down, warm and soft.  

In the morning his father pretended he didn’t see the little raccoon.  Instead he went for his usual nude plunge into the water, as a Native American would, though he was a red-headed hairy man, the tribe of Esau.  He came back dripping, rubbing his face hard, his man nipples standing up through his chest fur.  While he was gone, the boy shared a bit of breakfast with the cub, which swizzled the bits in the bucket of lake water the boy had brought earlier to make coffee.   The coffee had to be there right away after his dad bathed. 

When they turned the canoe upright, loaded up, and got in, the boy stuffed the little cub into his jacket, which it resisted, struggling and turning over, scratching his ribs, even biting his little boy nipples until they bled.  It licked the blood which made the nipples stand up.  Then -- surprising the boy entirely -- it seemed to recognize them as comforting and began to suck.  The father witnessed all this, but again he said nothing, just handed the boy his paddle, and pushed the canoe out onto the water.  The raccoon settled and went to sleep, maybe because of the rhythm.  

Then they drifted and the day warmed enough that normally the boy would have shed his jacket, but he didn’t want to.  There was such deep contentment in this small creature against his breast, its little heartbeat palpable, its little hands spread out on his skin, its breath feathering him.  The canoe rocked gently and waterbirds made their ridiculous noises.  A bald eagle followed them intently, knowing that they were fishing.  From then on throughout his life the boy remembered that crystalline moment.  

When they had finished the work of the day and returned to the little fishing camp where the car was waiting, the father suddenly came to the boy, reached into his jacket, jerked out the little raccoon and threw it as hard as he could into the woods behind the few buildings.  He could throw very hard.  The boy screamed, louder than he had ever screamed when his father threw him.   Before he could do anything, the father chucked him into the car and gunned off onto the two-track road.  

The Chippewa nearby froze for a moment, then moved away quietly.  They understood.  And that was the second moment the boy never forgot, though it was not crystal, but obsidian, a substance that can be brought to such a sharp edge that it can be used for surgery, as in cutting out a heart.

He had been thrown into the car hard enough to bruise, but he hardly felt it.  He hardly felt anything for days.  When he did, pain and love had fused.  For the rest of his life, in some deeply hidden way, he looked for that little animal that had slept against his heart.  Maybe somehow it had survived.

JAY VEST IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

Talking to Tom Carrels about Jay Vest made me curious, so I looked him up on Google. It was a surprise of the good kind and I downloaded four documents:

I. www.uncp.edu/home/vestj/ which is his faculty CV and bib.

II. WHO COUNTS AS INDIAN IN POST APARTHEID VIRGINIA - ...www.mitsawokett.com/

III. [PDF] THE OLDMAN RIVER AND THE SACRED: A MEDITATION UPON APUTOSI PII ... Impacted by a water storage dam during the late eighties, the Old Man. River, in present-day Alberta
www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.2/cjnsv25no2_pg571-607.pdf -

IV. [PDF] THE HERO'S JOURNEY IN JAMES WELCH'S SACRED GEOGRAPHY by JHC Vest - 2005 - Using an auto-criticism reflecting the author's ... James Welch's Fools Crow has figured greatly in that odyssey
www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.1/cjnsv25no1_pg337-353.pdf

Jay came through Browning (I suppose he was actually in Missoula with side trips) at a liminal time -- meaning “on a threshold,” because that piece across the bottom of the door is called the limen. The same word, sometimes spelled “limin” means the threshold of perception, the least amount of sensation that can be detected. Psychologically and theologically, it is meant to be the point of entrance, transition, crossing, often into holiness or at least potential. It was a liminal time for the whole planet as the cultures shifted towards openness and experiment; for me because I was newly divorced; and for Jay because he was just reaching that point in a young man’s life when he’s trying to figure out his identity.

Normally there’s a lot of thrashing around, experimenting, emotion, and risking at such a time and that was certainly the case with Jay. I don’t think I ever exchanged two words with him, but there were conversations about him -- sometimes approving and other times not. He was one of the MANY who came thinking that if they could sort of meld with the Blackfeet, they would become powerful and knowing. The trouble was that they usually picked out advisors who were pretty full of it, to be frank. Tricksters. I won’t name them. Of course, I have a certain point of view which is that of a white female older woman. Sceptical. A little over-experienced. Okay, cynical. After all, I’d known some of these people since they were twelve and my husband and father-in-law were older than most of them, as old as the enrolled grandfather elders and here since 1903.

Liminal time in the theatre is when the curtain goes up. In church it is the call to worship. At a concert it is the first chord after the tuning up. At that time this country's crossing of the limin into some new way of being was almost to the point of critical mass, the tipping point. Something happened and the whole political scene backed off. I think just became terrified, maybe like now.

Jay was pursuing his degree, now in hand. Both of us have gone through many new spaces since then, stepped over many a limin. My hope is -- and I think there is some evidence -- that the world is again crossing a threshold, but the point is that in a liminal time/space anything can happen. The car is out of gear. There is space to be Dionysian, even with an Apollonian president. But immense destruction can be one result.

The paper about “The Hero’s Journey in James Welch’s “Fools Crow” is competent and engaging, useful in particular for people who don’t have much background in Blackfeet matters. I see that now Jay is claiming his own enrollment in the Mohacan Indian Nation but I don’t know much about that group.

The paper called “The Oldman River and the Sacred: A Meditation Upon Aputosi Pii’kani Tradition and Environmental Ethics” is the one that had me wielding two colors of highlighter and scribbling in the margins. There is really good stuff in this paper, mixing realistic sociology with story and theory. Of course, I like it because it’s theory I can understand.

SOCIOLOGY: “. . .the Pii’kani community was divided in response to the dam, which created a position easily exploited by the outside interests. Since Native Modernists, motivated by poverty, tend to be willing to accept change provided it brings the promise of monetary benefit, they were largely unopposed to the environmental degradation. It was, however , the Pii’kani traditionalists who had the most to lose. In the traditionalists’ identification with place, specifically the Oldman River, these Natives were impacted with a major disruption of their religious ethos and cultural identity.”

STORY: “According to Campbell, mythology concerns the mystical dimension, for without this you have ideology. Myth also concerns ‘the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along.’”

THEORY: “Elements of this [spiritual] integration include include: first, purification of body, soul, and spirit; second, spiritual expansion in realizing a relationship to all that is; and third, identity or realization of unity in a state of oneness with the totality.” (The reference is to Joseph Epes Brown, “ The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian,” 1982 p. 113. Vest studied with Brown.)

These ideas have not been exhausted and the development of ecological and scientific awareness of a changing planet makes them sharply useful. I’m a little surprised that Jay doesn’t pick up on some of the more recent thought. Many of the people he quotes have been gone for some years, which doesn’t make them less true and useful, but the torch has not been extinguished -- just handed on. Today the challenge is the Alberta Tar Sands and international high-tension power lines. The corporations are far more dangerous and powerful than anything in the Seventies.

Jay seems not to have heard about the “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY” . . . strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy that it tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes.” (Quote from the recent history seminar at Piegan Institute.) Nor has he heard about Jack Gladstone’s generous troubador synthesis of song, philosophy, tradition and land.

There is a website where students critique their professors and Jay took some hard comments, mostly having to do with rigidity. I realize that today’s college students tend to be a self-important and contemptuous lot, but it sounds as though now HE’s the Culture Police, quoting a stack of white men’s books and telling about things that happened to him a half-century ago. Why does this happen so often? It seems as though he ought to be here celebrating and growing with the rest of us.

Maybe we should organize a convocation of all those white and low-quantum guys who came through here in the Sixties and Seventies, looking for liminality. Some found it and were transformed. We should find out what it did for them. And see what they can do for us.

JOURNEY'S ON A DRY SEA

Montana on the east side of the Rocky Mountains is an ancient sea bed which is why it is sedimentary and embedded with the remains of ancient sea creatures like baculites, which seem to be little buffalo when they segment and fall apart. When you see patches of white, you’re looking at alkali and salt once dissolved in the water. It was a shallow sea, maybe four feet deep in a lot of places, and had many coral atolls which now show up as buttes and ridges. John McPhee wrote what I know about it. When the Rockies rose up from the basement of the world, the continent creased at the Mississippi River and all the water ran out to the Gulf of Mexico.

After we had been married a while and after he had had a heart attack that nearly killed him, Bob Scriver began to ask me to make long trips to pick up or deliver things. He said there was no one else he could trust, which might have been true, but he also knew that saying such a thing would guarantee I’d make the trip. The first trip really was a kind of emergency: we’d left the wax version of the heroic-sized (life-size plus one-fifth) portrait of Bill Linderman at a homemade foundry north of Regina but the guy wasn’t getting the job done and the PRCA head, Gene Pickett, was coming to see how much progress we’d made. Bob was terrified that the commission would be canceled if Pickett were irritated with us. So I made him a big roast and a mixing bowl of Jello, even knowing that as soon as I was out the door his mother, his true lover, would be bringing in food.

I drove our little red 1960 Ford van, which had already been to Alaska and back twice. Bob had barely taught me to drive when we bought it in Conrad and I drove it back in the dark because he had to drive the pickup. I was terrified and he followed closely, honking me over to give me instructions now and then. I drove right in the middle on the yellow line and he said I’d get a ticket for sure. I wobbled and wove and squeezed all the blood out of my hands by gripping the wheel. Somewhere along in there I hit that point one comes to when trying to do something hard, and all of a sudden I was really driving. It all smoothed out.

In “Bronze Inside and Out” I told about how I got to Regina okay but came back on what had seemed the smoothest road on the Canadian side so I could cross at a reservation port of entry where the officers would be sympathetic because of knowing us. The wax began to crack and shake apart and I kept stopping to buy electrical tape (no duct tape then) to keep it together. I didn’t get much gratitude when I reached home.

The next big trip was the worst. A load of bronzes and the hand-painted three-foot-across sculpture of the Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening had to get to Cody by May 1. I had had nightmares about a huge blizzard, which everyone laughed at. On the morning I was to leave, the blizzard hit. I wanted to postpone, Bob was afraid Harold McCracken would be angry, so off I went in slush up to the hubcaps. The only thing that kept me on the road was the enormous weight of my load, which was at the top limit of the carrying capacity of the little red van.

By the time I got to Great Falls, the motor was flickering out now and then, so I pulled into Bison Ford. The foreman took a look: the slush was packing up around the motor and shorting it as well as paralyzing the belts. The motor was under a sort of table between the two seats, so I went on with a stick in my hand and the lid up -- punching the snow back out when it built up. If I got the slightest bit out of the ruts, the van threatened to turn sideways. South of Great Falls there were drop-offs on both sides of the road. Every time a semi passed me, the slush wave nearly took me off the road and blinded me for a few hundred feet. Luckily the road was mostly straight. Finally there stopped being any semis.

It was dark, the snow was heavier, I could barely see and was struggling along at about ten miles an hour when I came to something solid I couldn’t interpret. While I squinted at it, someone knocked on the side window. It was the driver of the plow in the road, which was supposed to be closed. He made me follow him into Custer and stay for the night in an old boarding house reopened as emergency housing. It was packed with truckers. No eating place was open but I found some cough drops in the bottom of my purse. The next morning the storm was over and it was simply a matter of waiting for plows to clear away eight foot drifts.

On the way home the drive shaft fell out of the van. When I called Bob to tell him, he was angry that I would be late getting back, but I had some awareness that his anger came from worry. Still, when I got home, he had company. Not a woman this time, but an Indian artifact dealer I didn’t approve of.

Over the years there have been many long drives across this continent. I’ve broken-down, gone into the ditch, never been hurt or rolled or totaled a vehicle. When Bob and I were at war and I could hardly bear the anguish and loneliness, I just about drove that little red van to pieces on the gravel back roads of the reservation. It was best in the dark in a thunderstorm. Once I fled to Portland where my mother wouldn’t let me stay, went down the valley to my brother who got a job elsewhere and left, went down farther to stay with an aunt, hoping that someone would say something enlightening that would turn the tide. She said, “Go home. All men are children. They don’t know what they want.”

I took her advice and caught Bob with another woman. By this time he was beginning to be famous and they were lining up. He’d always had a reputation as a lover and they figured this was their chance to find out. But this time Bob was glad to see me and so were all his parts. The indiscreet detail I have never told before is that I was wearing a sunsuit with a long zipper down the front. In his haste, he nicked himself on the zipper teeth (oh, that vagina dentata image!) and the resultant howling, laughter, and blood squirts were cathartic enough to keep us intimate for months.

TWELFTH NIGHT CHINOOK

The last blizzard ended. Chinook winds are blowing hard. The snow, which was low-water-content, is sinking quickly. Today the temp is in the mid-forties and it looked like a window of opportunity for me to get to Conrad to the laundromat and the bigger grocery store. This is normally what I would have done on the first of the month. I'm a little psyched out.

So I went around asking people, “Been to Conrad? How are the roads?” And consulted the computer, which told me the road had frost. This means “slick” almost as much as black ice and just as undetectable except by slipping. Under these conditions one goes easy-peasy on the brakes, giving them a nice little squeeze about equivalent to a little encouragement on the shoulder of a rather tender loved one. Then little pumps, like pats. If you slam on the brakes all at once, you probably won’t have time to use your favorite expletive before you are upside down in the ditch.

Some people said, “Oh, everything’s passable.” Meaning what? Everything was passable to their big drift-busting 350 4X4 pickup with dualies? Or everything is pretty good if you’re an experienced local winter driver? The best answerers -- usually old ranch wives -- were likely to tell you where the bad places were. Homesteads along the highway tend to pile up snow that hard winds can move onto the road, so they’ll say, “The worst is by the Smiths,” or whatever.

The road on the way back appeared to be truly dry. Big semi’s pounding up and down I-15 make long grooves the width of their wheel-base, which means that my little pickiup tends to fishtail and wander. Combine that with sidewind, and a person has to pay close attention and keep a grip. Once I gawked at an eagle landing on top of a power pole and wandered into the left lane -- no one coming. Almost IN Conrad, an EMT truck went screaming past and I was thinking about that so much that I turned at the wrong place onto the freeway -- putting myself against the traffic as it exited. Luckily again, this is Montana and there was no other vehicle.

People who figure out gambling odds might suggest that a short trip -- this is a thirty mile one-way expedition because in the old days that’s how far you could ride on a horse in a day -- would give better odds than a long trip, but I figure one’s exposure to risk is about the same right now, just a minute ago, and a few minutes from now. It’s just as impossible to tell what might happen. Although, the first fifteen miles are on two-lane highway that is running east/west, so that it has to go down into the coulees created by streams leaving the Rocky Mountains, and then back up the other side. That’s more dangerous.

The second fifteen miles are on separated four-lane north/south highway, with more traffic, which is a different sort of danger. I passed a Canadian pickup that had been speeding -- now talking to two separate vehicles of law enforcement. Must not have passed a license plate check. This traffic is cross-border and may have triggered an intercept there.

The laundromat itself is beginning to be an adventure. Four machines and two dryers were out-of-order. The owners say they’re too much work. Not enough people to service them. I suppose I’ll be forced to buy a washing machine. If I were on the road all the time, I’d have to buy a cell phone because there are no phone booths. The television signal is switching over now and forcing some people to buy satellite service. Newspapers are cutting back on paper versions, so you’ll have to have a computer in order to read the news. So far, radio is still accessible for ordinary people.

I’m swerving off the mental road.

Today’s complex Chinook sky shows a great stacked battlement of clouds behind the Rockies -- what some people call a “snow ledge” -- then a semi-circular slice of intense blue sky, shading off into glowing high-ice thin enough to see blue through but much paler. Behind that is an edge of cloud, looking at though it forms a great arch in the sky that grows and grows. The high winds are pushing it and often gives it an edge like a knife where the wind has compressed the vapors. The rest of the sky is standard gray cloud cover, except that sometimes there will be another smaller wind arch in another part of the sky. When the sun sets over the Rockies, there will be an hour or so of sunlight which is just beginning now.

In the towns, the streets are slush and the diligent are pushing it off the sidewalks and driveways. In Conrad there is no chance of swerving into the oncoming lane because all the snow is piled up in between. (Streets wide enough to turn a wagon and team around.) There’s a huge mountain at the shopping center. Last year it was still there long into spring so the temporary greenhouse for plants was put up next to it.

I bought fifty cans of cat food, all kinds they like, plus cat laxative and treats. There are Third World people who don’t get that much protein in a month. Four bags of green stuff -- cole slaw, ordinary lettuce, spinach -- plus green peppers and cucumbers. The year has turned so things are growing in the south, far from Montana. Yesterday was Advent and Carl Sandburg’s birthday. Bill Long, who writes very reasonable essays-by-subscription on things like Bible translations and the Supreme Court cases, jumped Valentine’s Day by taking on the Song of Solomon, all about keys and holes and hands dripping with myrrh! Advent and Twelfh Night is when the Three Wisemen finally get to Bethlehem. I notice that the postmaster has decorated her house with four-foot-tall but quite flat camels, glittering rainbow as they come along with their wise men.

The trip was much easier than I expected. The long descent down Belgian coulee was dry and sanded and so was the ascent back up. A normal amount of traffic. Never met a plow. When I got home, the driveway wasn’t blocked. That’s always the best part. The clothes didn’t all get completely dry, so they’ll be hanging around in the house or maybe I’ll string a line in the garage, although if I build a fire in my wood stove they’re likely to be more smoked than dried. Not that I mind. I’m safe and relatively clean for another month. Now the cats will stop following me around like bummer lambs. Tomorrow the forecast is snow.