Wednesday, September 9, 2009

So I bought a pack of cigarettes...

...and Mrs. Wagner pies.

1:30 PM, 9/9/09 (an intriguing date, no?) Roasters coffee house, Red Lodge Montana

Whoa. By my (admittedly unreliable) math, it’s only been 39 hours since I logged a blog. (Ah-ah-ah; scatology is all in your mind.) I’m on one badass midway ride of emotions out here y’all. How on earth can I translate them into English? I am very tempted to just let this all “be” what it is and NOT try to fuss it into words. But this is one of the “Sabbatical Challenges” I’ve given myself, so on I plunge.

First, some technical information: the pathetic little wretch of a Kodak I had hoped to resuscitate into service recording images of this trip is stubbornly refusing to heal. So I beg your indulgence; I’m perfectly aware that my otherwise way cool iPhone makes a poor substitute for a real camera. I’ll have to make do.

Indian Country. I thought at first that this was an example capitalism at its sleaziest. Turns out I was in fact on the Potawatomi reservation, in northeastern Kansas So I filled up –that’s the sabbticalmobile at the pumps, and decided I would, whenever possible, buy my supplies on the rez.


 
(The view from my front -tent- door)                     
These are images from Niobrara State Park. Finally made it, at around 11:30 PM. Nearly full moonlight bright on a ridge overlooking miles of glowing river bottom; spectacular, and spooky as hell- never underestimate the humble prairie’s power to take your breath away. If the spirits of the Ponca ever visit their lost homeland it would surely be on nights like these. Of course some of them can just hop in the truck and drive a few miles. Not spirits though; living, breathing Ponca. Though forced, in 1877, to leave this valley and walk from here to their government chosen reservation in Oklahoma, their Chief, Standing Bear, refused to be a good little injun, and through very harsh winter weather, (“just going out for a little walk, dear”) walked back, and sued the federal government, winning an important legal precedent; that “Indians” were indeed, after all, human. Damned activist judges! But by that time the feds had abolished the Ponca’s tribal status (how does THAT work, by the way?) and so; no tribe, no reservation. They do, however, have an “agency” on 160 or so acres. Just a few miles downstream from their traditional homeland.

Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation
South Dakota, United States of America.


Not much of a town left; a raggedy ass tourist trap “museum” and a handful of dusty, pine-bough covered pole huts by the roadside devoted to “tourist information” and trinket sales, only two of which were occupied today. And, of course, the mass grave/memorial. Just as raggedy and covered with tokens, tobacco, sage and other ritual offerings, the memorial today was “staffed” by young woman and her toddler begging at the entrance of the memorial, and a drunk trying to pass his panhandling off as collecting a fee for his services as a memorial majordomo. Fortunately, Emma Ten Bears had warned me to “just ignore the kids and inebriated individuals” that hang out at the memorial, collecting “fees” from tourists visiting this memorial who didn’t know any better. Emma was today’s proprietor of one of the pine-bough huts; I got a very understated, somewhat routine but nevertheless authentic brief on the history of the massacre that is widely understood to be the last “battle” of America’s “Indian Wars.” God Bless Manifest Destiny. Wasn’t much of a battle; the U.S. Army 7th cavalry regiment, waiting in ambush and fueled by booze and pure race-hatred, slaughtered 300 mostly unarmed mostly old mostly sick women, children and old men. I’m sure the fact that the 7th was formerly Custer’s regiment had NOTHING at all to do with this brutal outcome. Here’s something Emma told me that I didn’t know; in the infamous photo, Bigfoot in Death depicting the old chief’s frozen corpse, what I always took for a scarf worn against the cold…
…is in fact a rag placed by the photographer. To hide the gore of his having been scalped.
silence


long silence



I left Pine Ridge in the late afternoon, driving around the back of the Badlands National Park, and just made Wyoming before I conked out and spent the night in the sabbticalmobile, in the Best Western parking lot in Sundance Wyoming (no, definitely NOT that Sundance) whereupon it was discovered that the seal on one of the topper windows wasn’t. Sealing, that is. I discovered this, when, upon apparently reaching critical volume, a good cup of cold rainwater was suddenly and summarily dumped onto my not-sleeping-anyway recumbent self. I was also reminded that the living quarters of the sabbiticalmobile don’t allow much room to “jump away from” unexpected and unpleasant sensory experiences. Oh well. Dawn was gray, drizzly, cold and windy enough to make “living in the moment” not all that pleasant. But by the time I had climbed to the high bluff plains around Sheriden Wyoming, the weather turned friendly- really, really friendly. ATT wireless coverage was spotty though, so when I found myself (temporarily) in range, I left the freeway and drove up into the hills to find a nice spot to tend to real world emails and phone calls and such. Which turned out to be in the shade of a stack of hay bales. The accommodations were, let’s say rustic –very rustic- but the view was killer.

 
 (Hunter S. Otter in the hay)

(Rustic accommodations, but dig the view!)
It was right about now, when I got back to chewing up freeway miles, that the spirits of Neal Cassady and Hunter S. Thompson found me, and I felt a surge of gut-level appreciation for the 75-so-really-80-85 mph speed limits of Wyoming and Montana; Hup Hup! Yass… zoom, man, zoom into the high blue Montana afternoon! Hunter S. and Neal urged me to “go on, man, SMOKE ‘em if ya got em!” And I did have them. I bought a pack of unfiltered Senecas at the Indian Country Mini-Mart in Kansas, so I would have a tobacco offering on hand when I got to Wounded Knee and the Little Big Horn battlefield.  I didn't, but I did christen Otter Hunter S. Otter, in the spirit of things.

3 comments:

  1. Car broke down in Red Lodge once. That creek was cold as hell, even in July. Nice brewpub, though.

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  2. VERY nice brew pub- Fosters and ??? Logans? Can't remember the name, but I had what I think was the best beer & burger of my life there. Glacier Ale (local) and a buffalo burger (also local. Thanks for signing up dude!

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  3. Oh, yeah, the burgers. Forgot about that. I do remember that. And $900 for a transmission. In fact, I think that began our odyssey of credit card debt--one that was only brought to a close this past summer.

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