Mato Paha and the Clouds

An aroma of warmth and dry floated on the air from the south over the grasslands. The fields shined gold under lowering light, shadows lengthening on the rippled landscape. From the side of the highway snaked a dirt road, two brown parallel tracks winding through the empty stretch toward the distant rays of the sun. It led through a space undeveloped, unoccupied, and relatively undisturbed, a lone island among quilted monochrome patterns of crops in repetitious rows I'd left in the east, behind me. This land held a diversity of life written with rhythm and order legible to the eyes of nature alone. I rode the bare ruts, climbed upward and coasted down from the hillsides. Moved generally west, off the map, knowing it would lead me right. Throngs of cows ranged on the slopes or stood in the crevices steeping their heads in scummy dark ponds with soft ripples round their faces. They'd bellow out to me in unison as I pedaled between them, some startling and some turning to me with their eyes wide at my strange intrusion.

The primitive road wound a ridge round a hillside, affording me a panorama on the open extents of the east, and then bent its broad face to the open south. I pushed up the hill, sweat spidering on my forehead. On the path ahead stood a jackrabbit. It, slender and tall, with long legs paralyzed, looked along the grassy middle of the road. Its probing nose turned to the side, and it watched me in its glassy black eyes' periphery. I came to a stop to study its shape, but the scrape of my shoe on the gravel sparked it to flight. It bounded away on all fours, hopping like a whitetail does in high grass. With its huge linen ears flopping behind, it disappeared down the hill into the shroud of blooming goldenrod and sagebrush.

Over the western hills the sun faded into orange. I set my tent juxtaposed to the hard white flowers of a hillside yucca, unrolled my sleeping bag over my pad inside and sat myself down. Lying back and resting my tired head on a bunched up sweater, I gazed up through the mesh at a bright pearl moon as it rose into the dark above the flickering eastern clouds. Tomorrow it would storm. Stars began to pierce the overhead darkness, one at a time at first as the last salmon hues drained from the sky, then came in a flood of pale light flowing like spilled cream along the plane of the Milky Way. Wandering cows murmured a song into the silver grass, moonlit at my hill's base, and the sound wafted through the night, lulling me into dreamless sleep.

The clouds overhead were overcast and dull. To the south the rain curved away from the sky, bending and flowing in heed of an unbroken wind. The two lanes of asphalt wound like a thread to the distance, withering to point of infinite smallness at the Earth's true horizon. Little raindrops dotted the pavement. Whatever dregs of hope I grasped at that morning under a dismal sky evaporated when the rain began to fall. It was always that way. There was no shelter in sight, and I wouldn't delude myself into hoping for any soon. I was able to see as far into the fielded emptiness ahead as I could ever have wished to, but it yielded no reassurance in these blank plains.

A rickety red and white pickup slowed into the opposing shoulder ahead and came to idle halfway off the road. A man wearing an old trucker cap and beard of deep gray looked out from the rolled down window and waited for me. Then, as I approached, in a kind of shy way motioned to me. I recognized the truck from a minute earlier when he'd passed me by, looking at me in his mirrors, and remembered that the bed had been mostly empty, so I went over to greet him.

“Not the best day for a ride. Where are you from? I'm heading east if you might be wanting a ride through this rain. Only looks worse farther on there.” He helped me to fit my bike in the truck bed atop some stray metal pipes, and then he cleared off the passenger seat of loose papers, some old batteries and plastic bottles, sweeping everything onto the disheveled floor with his leathery hand.

I introduced myself and with a warm smile and handshake he told me his name was Clay. A glint in his eyes and the congenial creases of his face betrayed a timid sort of excitement, and childlike delight at having some company on his lonely drive. He turned back to the road, “That brim of rock up ahead, you see, is called Custer forest. I'm really not too bright, you know, but I think going up and over that hill would not have been at all kind to your equipments.” Then he said curiously downtrodden, “But, what do I know?” The string of highway bent south, turning away from that eroded cusp of chalky gray spread which he had pointed at, prevailing over the otherwise flat horizon. At its foot the tranquil green of South Dakota bowed and was broken into rugged disarray.

Some time later we'd come nearer to the dark blue clouds and streaks of lightning hanging over the vast plain southward. Down in the distance a hundred miles off stood the lone peak of a butte with the heavy sloping shoulders of an idle behemoth, pivoting for long eons under the plied earthen crust. Its hazy blue figure dominated the landscape, standing above its less ominous flat headed brethren. “That's all the Slim Buttes down there a ways. And that, the big one, that's Bear Butte there, a holy place for all the Plains Indians. Mato Paha they call it.”

The face of bare rock, the dark forests and thundering clouds; all of it amid the scope of the docile surrounding plains put a shudder in me. The crown of Bear Butte penetrating a full and fecund sky breathed of pure beauty and awe. We continued in silence.

We came into Newell, a small town where Clay left me and my bike in the parking lot of a western style restaurant. I rode around searching for some kind of shelter from the rain while it continued falling in the streets. On the edge of town I found an old baseball field and in one of the dugouts decided to lay down on a long wooden bench. Rain drops drummed on the aluminum roof. It was a bleak afternoon and I fell swiftly to sleep wondering if it were possible that the sky, filled with clouds, might be blue when I awoke.

The sky stayed smeared gray, but the pitter-patter abated toward a pace I could stand, so I started riding. Belle Fourche (bell-foosh), a big town, cropped up with its buildings on the dark northernmost remnants of Dakota's Black Hills. I took indoors at the library when a second, thicker, downpour began to fall. All the contents of the sky seemed to be spilling out on the other side of the glass pane. Then sudden blue holes filled wherever variance formed in the overcast. Streams of sunlight fell from them on the town, throwing delicate street corners and vibrant shop rows and misty people with umbrellas to reflections in the roadway puddles, trembling. And a high wind blew me west, my tires spattering forth beyond the town roads, the cattle exchange, auto junk shops, to the highway again.

Blood beat in my veins as I pushed my pedals hard but in gust-driven ease. A stone littered hill rose on my north. I stopped and went towards it through a break in the barbed roadside fence to make camp away from the highway. Pulling the bike through the sparse grass I realized too late that the ground was unnavigable mud, my shoes and tires caked and heavy with sod. My bike no longer rolled. I heaved its weight a foot at a time back to the road, resigning to make my bed in the ditch. Purple sunset pulled under the uniform blanket cloud which rolled over all the west. Illuminated not far off by the fleeting yellow headlights of vehicles, was a sign: the bucking silhouette of a cowboy on his bronco over the glorious, bold title, “Wyoming”.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

The Rodeo

A subtle breeze flowed with the hours, following our six-wheeled caravan's procession between the pastures. Strands of wheat brushed on the warmth of the air in waves and folds, heeding the wind. A line of black cows ambled in the patches of grass of an enclosed hillside, staring blankly on our moving figures with dark, fixed eyes as we went. Watching us, their heads shifted in intervals like a clock's ticking hand. Adam put his thumb and finger to his mouth and sent a great whistle piercing through the open silence. The cows roused from their reverie and started, only a few at first, plodding alongside the fence. Then followed the group with young calves hinged to swaying tails and heels of their cows.

We reached a pale town called McIntosh and decided to stop for the day. The main street of it broke from the highway, harboring a lonely shop with a rickety screen door and a faded post office amid a line of nondescript building faces. Beside these was a playground park and a blue water tower standing high on its four narrow metal legs, the only thing breaking the surface of the one story town. We rolled our bikes into the park and settled down by a covered picnic table.

Christie went off down the street for a walk to more closely examine things. I dug hastily through one of my panniers for my stove, ready to boil some ramen for dinner and then set up on the table.

Christie returned carrying a grocery bag in one hand. She sat down across from me and gave me a peculiar look.

“That's not a very substantial meal,” she said, removing a box of cheese crackers from the bag. She broke open the box and slid it over the table toward me.

“Did you name your bike yet?” she asked.

I told her it was called Yakul. “It's from a movie.”

“We both just got around to naming ours. It's weird the things people name. We met a family who was living in an RV and they'd given it a name.”

“I've been investigating what it is that makes people do it,” Adam said, sitting down and leaning forward, “So far, it seems to me that once an object acquires a meaning and purpose from somebody, more so than it can have in and of itself, once that's happened, it gets a name. The people with the RV named it Puff. Apparently their kid had named it.”

“So what do you call yours?” I wondered.

Christie pointed and looked toward their bikes, leaning on a near tree, “Mine's Ontwa. Adam's is named Jenny.”

“Like Forrest Gump's boat, if you've seen it,” Adam said, nodding.

“And what's Ontwa mean?”

“There's actually a story behind that,” Christie started. “So a while ago when we were riding through Minnesota we came by a street that was Christina Road. Christina's my full name. And then the next street was Adam Street (or maybe Road?). But that's crazy, right? The next street after that even was Juneau Street. Juneau is the name of our dog in Connecticut, so obviously this was destiny or something. I told Adam that whatever the name of the next street was we would have to name our first kid. But it might have been a mistake, because the next street was Ontwa Road. I decided it would be a better idea to just name my bike Ontwa, so I did that instead.”

Christie disappeared over a hill ahead, coffee-saturated blood pumping in her veins, and Adam pushed as best he could to keep up. I fell behind them both, keeping a slow morning pace, distracted from time by the eloquent folds of land on either side of me. The road bent around a hillside and, slowly, a town of substantial size relative to those we'd seen recently was revealed in the distance. Coming into it, I found Christie and Adam in the packed parking lot of a gas station, waving me down as I approached.

“I told you she does that, didn't I,” Adam said in reference to Christie's morning energy, “And do you see all this?” They were both looking on the bustle of vehicles bouncing around on the lot and the road.

Looking down the length of the main street which ran along the station's side I saw parked cars lined on left and right, pick-ups and cars filling the designated diagonal spaces and spilling onto lawns and everywhere else not actively prohibited. A yellow sheet of paper taped up in the gas station window explained the cause with a bold-faced headline, “Lemmon Boss Cowman Rodeo! Friday, Saturday, Sunday.” We were at the local hub, the densest town a hundred miles out, and on the primary occasion of the year: rural life jubilee for western times past.

We went into the station and bought some food to eat for lunch. I came out after them and we pedaled down the street to find a table. Instead we discovered the origin of all the weekend's hubbub. 

A full public block, framed on all sides by haphazardly strewn vehicles, was occupied with the celebration. White pavilions were propped up over lines of plastic tables. Everywhere were mustached men under ten-gallon hats with plaid cotton shirts tucked neatly into iron-pressed Wranglers. Neither stitch nor crease was out of place. Each was bound up by his leather belt and great gleaming buckle, jogging among the jumbled crowd with paper plate and pop in hand, or else standing tall with thumbs hooked on his pocket brims, surveying the crowd with soft eyes and lips curled in a smile of deep approval, polished boots planted wide and firmly in the grass. The women beamed with warmth at each other, their faces shining, scrutinizing each others' skirts and elaborately jeweled collared shirts, the permed or straightened hair meticulously done up. Children bounced around inside a giant inflated castle. They were perfect replicas of their parents and wore the same costumes.

Everyone gathered with their neighbors hoping to preserve a culture that had been stripped and made virtually obsolete by modernity. In their way they meant to glorify the dead cowboy, revive the settler, the trailblazing American past, and honor the tradition of the hardy Western nudge. But behind the simple facade lay an unintended mockery. Their visions were unconsciously distorted by what had become of the place, the country. They were each a glorified image following after a fairy tale born of movies; cosmetic imitations of a somber and rugged past reality. They celebrated themselves, their own unsoiled, over-civilized lives, making an innocent show of an idolized fantasy.

They were excited. Murmurs floated about between the tables describing what was expected of the wild rodeo to come in the evening. Men in bright shirts and leather chaps would lasso from horseback, rope and tie the calves, or strive for the most seconds spent tightly gripping the strap atop an aggravated bull or a bronco's back. They were proud, simple, honest, and pleased with the pomp and daring of it, even if it were diluted of the utility which had made it great. I couldn't begrudge them anything.

It was only early afternoon when we'd finished our meal. Adam and Christie stayed for the show to see the lingering fragments of the West. I knew there remained riding to do that day so I bid them goodbye, leaving them to celebrate with the people. Further solitary distance laid ahead.


Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

The Plains

A panorama of divine blue shown over a terrestrial pool, issuing a pale imitation of the scattered light and greater hues above it from its lesser body. Westward the water broadened. In its limited scope, it mimicked the infinite image of deep, pure sky, this lesser half complimenting its twin. The reflected symmetry was softly divided by a distant arboreal horizon, unifying forded east to coming west.

Now on the blank prairie a rare tree stood, robust, overlooking its company of grass-laden hills and beloved neighboring window lake. A subtle breeze folded through the open, pulling ripples across the lake's crystalline surface, brushing between the twiddling leaves of the tree. The limber bows were galvanized into a tendril dance of vivid, mystic motions. It waved as I passed.

A pheasant, in brilliant coat to match the prismatic season erupted from the green depths of the roadside and clucked away, flapping its wings violently on the quiet air, descending, then fading beneath the strands of grass at a distance, safe from my threat. On a pond, a terrorized mother duck bugled her warning, pressed and ushered on her startled ducklings, all who scooted forward with spurts across the surface toward a shroud of yellow-gray reeds and tall green leaves sprouting up round the water's edge, thrusting a quivering trail behind them in their paddle-foot retreat.

The hills grew in height as I approached the Missouri. It snaked a path between the green, waving lands, swollen and raised by northern flood rains, distributing the eroded soils of agriculture southward. At Mobridge I crossed the river and followed west into further open prairies and bounding hills, all vacant but for the purple and yellow kaleidoscope of wildflowers sprouting from the wild grasses. A trailing length of wire fence paralleled the roadside, and an occasional distant, solitary unit of reservation housing stood on the plain, a dirt drive bending over the land from each.

Distance and duration between towns increased. I was entering what was once the Western frontier, and it was evident by the names of the towns (Little Eagle, Thunder Hawk, White Butte) and also in the tangible feeling of an absence in the land. The towns Bison, and then Buffalo passed by, both dull and forgotten, the surrounding lands all vacant of their namesake. These empty hills were meant for the bison to roam, slowly walking, massive, brown faces and beards dipped to the ground, gnashing blades of grass in rows of teeth; a collection of broad shoulders, chests, forelegs, and heads draped with matted fur; bald sinewy bodies and rears in spring shedding the last tethers of fur from winter; cloven hooves dug into the soil beneath the great weight; wild horns bending from the skulls' opposite hemispheres to the burning sun; a fluid unit of life flowing, undulating over the slopes; literal behemoths plowing the land, pausing occasionally, throwing themselves with a great rumble on a barren patch and rolling in the dust, great clouds billowing to the sky; the vast body spreading and multiplying, dispensing seeds and perpetuating the prairie and enduring the annual, disparate shifts in climate; docile, black eyes looking patiently on a frozen white landscape, penetrating arrows of wind flowing over and around the phalanx; curling drifts sculpt round the solid matriarchal ring, they themselves a bulwark against the frigid months, unwintered young shivering in the sheltered core; insulating beards and locks grown thick and long on their bodies in the designated season, gathering lengths of frost to them as they stand stalwart, patient, wind-blazoned, or trudging through the barren expanse; steam rising from the nostrils, staring on white space, preserving their lives, strong, resolute, beyond humility or pride. I see their absence, an invisible scar of a once richer west spent.

Plains undulated to every distance, rolling, rolling with brushing wind. The tops of silos and a water tower on the horizon laid along the length of road, peaking above the grassy waves. Old wooden buildings, weathered by centuries and faded, grew toward me and I came to a gas station, a propped up pickup shedding its parts in the oily garage. The prairies here were all designated reservations. A few native men hung out in front of the shop window in greasy t-shirts, shooting the breeze on their midday work break. I went into the station, bought some chips and refilled my water, the next town being thirty miles off and without a guarantee there'd be a station there. I had to keep better stock of my supplies now.

I threw my leg over top of my bike, kicked my foot into its strap cage, and started pedaling off the lot. Squinting down the street the way I'd come from I saw two odd shifting dots on the roadside. I stood and waited, with excitement growing, and decided it had to be two far off people on packed bikes riding through these same afternoon plains toward town. Once they'd come closer to the station I distinguished clearly a guy and girl, hauling along on white bikes with four saddle bags each strapped to the sides. They wore black spandex shorts and matching riding jerseys, helmets strapped on, crowing their heads, and every exposed inch of skin colored brown by so many cycles of the sun. These were clean adventurers in all the vestments of their trade. Everything between the two matched. They coasted across from the street's far shoulder, hopped up the curb and squeezed on their brakes to a stop on the sidewalk beside me, meeting my big smile and wide eyes with great smiles and eyes of their own.

Through an exchange and brief talk we told each other of our separate origins, routes, and destinations and I came to know them each as Adam and Christie. They were pausing here at the station for lunch. Christie unhooked a pannier from her bike, “You want to come hang out for a bit?” I grabbed my chips, followed into the store's meager deli, and we each took seats in the folding chairs at the solitary square table.

Christie unbuckled the pannier she was carrying and removed a bag of tortillas, placing two on the table. Adam tore neat corners from two mayonnaise packets, and then drew a winding white line over each of the tortillas middles with finesse gained only from routine. Christie carved the top off a tuna can and spooned dollops over the mayo. Adam waited with eager eyes and then trickled almonds and cranberries on top of it all from a clear plastic bag. “It's kind of like having chicken salad,” he explained while he rolled his up, grinning in response to my quizzical look. “Anyway, we've experimented and rotated meals quite a bit by now, and this just never seems to get old.” Everyone really does develop their own unique patterns.

They'd been out since January, crossing bitter New Mexican colds under the freeze and blizzards of the southern Rockies. Across they'd gone through Kansas and Missouri flats, the bayou Louisianan coasts, bridging the Mississippi, Florida panhandle, pointing noses north to Maine, stretching themselves across the east in the flourishing green spring, then bending route west, and rolling out a similar path to what I'd done since Ohio. Come mid-October they hoped to have hit at least a piece of every state on the way to a continental finish in Washington state. “Then once we get there we'll take off on a Pacific ferry from Seattle for Alaska, and spend a few days riding round Anchorage,” pulling a full-circle in the seasons before one final jump to the island paradises in Hawaii, completing their self-propelled circumnavigation of the country.

“What's been your favorite state in all your travels?” Christie asked me for comparison.

“South Dakota,” I responded instinctively. “Maybe it's just because I'm here now, and it's most rich to me since it's most recent, but I love every part of this land. The barren wilds of the Badlands to the fields and fields of crops. It gets me and I get it. What about you?”

“We liked Wisconsin a lot. It's all trees and hills, beautiful, all picturesque, and the most kind people and positive experiences, I think. Plus we had nice weather the whole time. It was just simple and beautiful riding through there.”

I started thinking about where we were now in all this land, how, out of the immense length and breadth of it, in our slow paces we crossed ways here. A great expanse of thousands and thousands of miles behind us and now we sat, in the midst of months with months yet to follow, and so many unseen things lying beyond the fielded horizon.

I looked out on the peaceable plains, and I wondered why I'd said that this place, of it all, was my favorite. Maybe this was still home? but no, that was limited to the ways of nostalgia and reminiscence now. It didn't harbor that feeling for me anymore. If it had once fully possessed that position, those days were old and gone to me. Its people and soil were known to me and pleasing, its scent and sight satisfying to my discontented depths. Its substance was integrated with me more so than the substance of any other save one: Arizona. That raw state of infinite canyons, the points of the San Francisco peaks, the towering pines there, the transitory Flagstaff streets, the three mesas and their prophetic tribes: all these own the same perfection I find in Dakota's stalks of corn, the pristine stillness of the Black Hills in winter, a copper sun on the primordial Badlands, or quartzite columns on the Split Rock Creek. All of these, in thought and presence, comforted and placated me. Both put me in a reverence still (and always would), but were these those things which defined for me home?

My past and childhood, a strangely nomadic modern American life, which was defined by a chain of migrations, my parents and sister and I tossing each year between the various states and regions during my most impressionable age, instilled in me a grand appreciation for the beauty that is perpetual change. My home has exceeded the boundaries of states. It be only this country, America, having held me all my life, who has served me as home. Her parts had cradled and grown me in her arms, turning me over in her many fingered hands, bringing me up to intimately know the textures of her various touch. Only America as a whole, herself, may claim what her individual parts cannot. She alone is my land and my home; she alone, my bed and my rest.

My new friends were going west along the same road as me, the only road, and so we went on together for the next couple days' ride. There was a warmth in their company and the brightness in their eyes. They had a well of perfectly measured friendliness that begged to be drawn from. We all wanted to take the country, so we did.




Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4. Just click those numbers and enjoy! Off to Mexico for a week, then more posts.

Old Home Familiar Pt. II, or Red Iron

A bright afternoon, Broeks, Jeremy and I set to fishing for bluegills at a silky green little pond. The oblong water was circled by a crop of cattails and rushes with grass hills rising radially from its indent. We dangled our feet in it, sitting on the edge of the dock, casting, reeling. Eventually the warmth of summer coaxed us in to taking a dip. Jeremy dashed and flopped off the dock and then tried swimming to the bottom. At the surface with a splash and gasp, “Oh, it gets cold down there! Even just as deep your feet are.” It was a hot day. Broeks sprinted off the edge, long-jumping, and I followed my own casual way. We splashed, dove and jumped again and then trudged up through the slimy weeds on the bank, gathered up the poles and tackles and drove back along dirt roads to the house. It all made me want to get a telescoping rod to pack with me and go riding around the vast northwest wilderness from water to water harvesting my catch and having my hunger satisfied by my labors directly. I was starting to become preoccupied with the thought of riding again, but these days provided a kind of rest it's not so easy to wake from.

The next afternoon Bork, a friend I hadn't seen in two years, knocked on the door and came in trying to gather everyone up for a tubing trip down the Big Sioux. It's a big brown tributary of the greater Missouri and it was, at the time, bulging with the heavy rainfall of a flooded North Dakota. He'd brought a big case of beers in hopes of persuading all to come and float down it in the heat, drinking as another happy summer day slipped serenely by. Everyone's plans conflicted though, so we sat around and drank inside, watching the lazy time go all the same.

Broeks was going to his parents' cabin for the fourth of July. The cabin sat on the brim of Red Iron Lake in the northeast South Dakotan plains, a land carved into hills by the glacial Pleistocene and pockmarked blue with myriad lakes in its gullies. Jeremy and another friend, Jordan, would drive up to meet him to catch fish on the lake, and I decided I'd go along with them. I didn't so much want to repeat my path of two years ago across the state, watching the broad untouched land flow so tantalizingly behind the barbed-wire limits of the interstate.

The morning of departure we made up seventy-two hambuns (a simple sandwich of burger bun, ham, and slice of American cheese) and packed them all into the plastic bun bags. We met with Jordan in front of his house, strapped down all the luggage, rods and my bike onto the boat which he'd hitched to his truck, and then we started our way north with a hurry later in the afternoon than had been intended. The soft orange sun was already setting to the west as the land transitioned out of smooth flowing fields of crops to dapples of water laced with more cattails and rushes, here in the dreamy wilderness where the migrating geese and emerald and sapphire ducks, great pelicans, and wading cranes waft about the pools' wooded islands, trembling leaves; solitary pheasants wander throughout fallow fields, beautiful proud turkeys promenade on plowed amber lands, and timid soundless deer all gather together, in hidden recesses of the tall dry grass, peaceful and curious.

One hundred-fifty miles north we crossed into Sisseton as shuffling silhouettes appeared, bound in the yellow of windows against idle blue evening. We came to a gas station where we bought our week's worth of drinks and then it was only a short distance to the cabin. Off of the highway a dirt drive led through a tunnel of trees coming out along a line of cabins which overlooked the lake's pebbly shore. The fleeing crescent moon fell on the western horizon across the black lake, ripples breaking and bending its thin yellow curl.

We parked and walked down the hill and around the cabin into the backyard, finding everyone sitting in a ring of plastic chairs around a rising, biting fire. All of their faces turned to us, attempting to distinguish who we were in the scattered light, and with realization came smiles and welcoming. I hadn't seen most of these people since years ago. Broeks was across the fire beside his parents' flickering faces, and continuing round the circle there sat the Hubers, a family whose cabin was a little farther down the drive and whose sons had been our schoolmates. Next to them was a family from Minnesota who introduced themselves as friends of the Hubers' and Broekhuis's. This was the meeting place this year for friends on the Fourth.

Away back to the truck we went and unloaded the things we'd need for the night, and set up our tents in the yard while fighting off mosquitoes. Jeremy fixed a cooler full of condensed orange juice, vodka, and beer all mixed together and we hauled it down and sat at the fire with the everyone else. He scooped me up a plastic cup of it. The smoke of the fire supplied a kind shelter against the bugs. Everyone wanted me to tell what stories I had, and so I started on the drink to loosen my tongue and started rattling off a few. Everyone else was already steeped at least a little in alcohol, so they were a lovely audience giving all the appropriate gasping and interjections. The night quickly descended into a hazy stupor (for me at least) and some of the party eventually faded off to bed indoors. Drunken ramblings between those of us remaining was directed inevitably to a discussion of God, upon which differing assumptions put a schism in the company. The talk disappeared but between me and one other. Black night pulled in cool around us, the waves of heat sighing from the fire against the warmth of my red face compounding my delirium. I didn't want to talk of it anymore. Soon thereafter, everyone conceded that the night was over and Jeremy, Jordan and I stumbled up across the grassy hill to our tents, tired and wondering, and I felt lost.

When the first hint of orange fell on opalescent clouds above Jeremy and Jordan had taken the boat and were on the lake fishing. I slept until I was sweating in my sleeping bag, woke and went down to the end of the dock to read. Eventually Broeks called to me from the top of the stairs and we went into the Hubers dining room where everybody else was for a big cabin-type breakfast with pancakes, fruit, little pancake balls with cream cheese in the middle and eggs. Me and Broeks took his motorboat out to test the cut of the lake afterward. We roared over the water, bouncing heavily against the undulating, crested surface, with wind-in-face and bur-r-ring toward the opposite shore. He pulled the boat around and sped to another edge of the lake. Jordan and Jeremy were there, scooting along guided by trolling motor, both standing erect on the hull of the long sleek boat in sunglasses, with t-shirts under the caps on their heads like a keffiyeh covering their raw, red necks from the sun, lines cast, searching out the illusive fish's haven. They spent every day like this, or else bouncing from lake to lake putting every spot to the test, expanding their location list, what they'd caught there and with what lure, trying every secret and hidden place they could endeavor into.

Broeks and I went with them a few times. I had no license so couldn't fish, but I watched the gurus and learned what I could through my laymen eyes. Sometimes they'd go to the truck bed and trade the rods in for bows with arrows tethered on the fletching side to a reel on the bow. In silent attention they'd carefully step among the reeds by a culvert or through the grassy ridges by aquatic tree roots probing to find where the beastly carp were gathered below water's glare. They whispered to one another, “There's a big one by your feet. You see it?” as the carp slipped against the stream. With a release of the fingers the arrow embarked, and in a fraction of a moment dove discretely with barely a “plunk.” Its point struck the fish's muscly middle and drove in through the tightly knit scales opposite. As it writhed and pumped against the tension, it was pulled up, greeted with cheers and compliments.

After dusk on the Fourth we celebrated with fireworks on a neighbor's dock, joining our stocks to have a big light show and a loud night in honor of independence. A light wind blew in from across the water causing some of the hot sparks to fall on top of us, which burned a few, so everyone pulled the chairs farther away from the dock, and settled back again with beers in hand to watch the banging, sparkling sky from a greater distance.

In the morning, after Broeks' parents had got back from their early walk, they fried us eggs, toasted bread and cut up some moist fruit as well. Jeremy and Jordan arrived at the dock after we'd finished eating and we all embarked onto Red Iron. Meandered along the shore following the lakeside, I sat in one of the chairs reading while they stood casting in the shallows, switching between buzz-baits, spinners, or jigs testing what would work. There hadn't been any catches. The trolling motor pulled us slowly by an old brown house on the shore. In its window a native lady stood, still and watching us, lit by the day against the comparable darkness of the artificial light inside.

The house pulled out of sight behind a grove of trees as we came farther along the shoreline. “What is she doing?” I looked up and saw Broeks' gaze was intent on something behind us. The lady was in the water and swimming at us, her head bobbing over the flurried surface. She kept on, pressing and pushing, dove down beneath and I saw she still wore her jeans and all her clothes. She rose a little closer to our boat and continued pressing her body toward us. Broeks yelled out to her, “Are you okay?” Exasperated she uttered something mysterious and ghostly in her native tongue, her ethereal voice reverberating from the trees and over the clear warmth of the lake. She couldn't maintain the mechanical pace of the boat's engine and eventually stopped her pursuit, floating in the darkness of the water, her hand resting on a log at the foot of the tree grove, glaring after us.

We tried to reason why she had pursued us, but never could understand. I left the next day, meeting Broeks' parents on the highway while they were on their morning bike ride over the near green hills of the northern plains and I went farther west into forlorn lands.


More pictures on Facebook: Albums 1, 2,  3.

Old Home Familiar Pt. I

A vigorous, opposing wind blew, bending against the growing, green-row slopes. The hills curved with perfect fields and grasses, moving with a turbulent midday dance of bright green jubilation to the great white sun. Cottonball cream clouds with the baby blue abyss threw patches of shade and sun alike onto the waving slopes.

I rode against the sharp piercing air, a bandana over my ears to silence its howl, the brim of my hat tugged down and my glasses on to keep my eyes from drying. Slowly and constantly moving west, I inched for hours into the wind. Everything turned monotonous. My eyes settled to the asphalt streaming immediately before me. But slowly, unconsciously, the black road faded from vision. My mind began to wind with ecstatic, vibrant dreams of the amber evening ahead, and I forgot where I was.

Straight ahead, Sioux Falls: my old home familiar. Just out town past the white water tower and beyond the dusty line of railroad tracks to the dirt road, opening on glowing stretches of fields where from far off piqued does watch intensely the billowing dust of the road dispense, and turning left down the drive - there the blue house of all my old friends from golden old high school days seeming so far away and so long passed. These dear delicate images stirred up in me with an imminent sense of proximity while a blur of Iowan pavement dragged on, ineffectually. I'd get rolling papers and tobacco, and off to the ice cream shop for my sweet pint of coffee-brown chocolate ice cream in a big Styrofoam cup, to the grocery store's great big beer room to deliberate over a while, and then seeing all of my beloved people of that town, to clink frothy beers round a rollicking front-yard fire hearing all about their lives of the past year.

Looking up I recognized the rolls of hills ahead and was pulled from my daydream. I was tired but most of the day had escaped without notice and knowing I was near was a relief. The first veil of buildings passed me and the town grew thicker. The place returned to me like a pair of lost shoes, worn in, long forgotten, but found afresh and slipping me into it, comfortable and perfect. Being in town gave me a yearning for a cigarette. I bounced from store to store looking for tobacco, and at the third shop and I'd found a packet. On the hot concrete outside the store I sat down, sore, aching and wind-beaten. Pedestrians striding by, seeing me and my bike, went without acknowledging or shot me with sharp eyes of contempt. I didn't care. I rolled a cig and tried to call Jeremy, but he didn't pick up so I started to move across town toward the house.

On the south side I stopped at a restaurant for tater tots and spicy cheese. Sitting on the curb outside a man came by and handed me a folded up $10 bill. Flabbergasted, I said thanks and then tried again at calling Jeremy.

He answered, “Nathaniel Benjamin!”

I told him I'd got to town and was eating at Cliff and 57^th.

“No you're not. Where? Do you see me? In a red truck.”

I looked around and I actually did see him, in a red truck idling at the red light. He turned and pulled through an adjacent parking lot, then drove up jolting to a halt at my curb. Biggest town I'd been in in what seemed to me a long while, yet, out of the whole preoccupied place there he stood before me. We caught up briefly. He was just off work and had half a pizza which he took out, offered me a slice, and then went straight to perusing my bicycle and its, what were to him, strange furnishings. He did this a good while then with a “See ya there,” drove off to meet me at the house.

I went straight to it and knocked on the front door. Drew opened it up, “Thanny! How've you been?” That was how I'd been known in those old days. In the main room Jonah was sleeping on the couch, and dragged himself slowly to waking. Those two lived reversed days, staying up through the night to count their cards at the new casino complex on the brim of town, or else kept up by video games in a dry-eyed stupor, tethered to the blinking television into drowsy dawn.

The ancient golden retriever, Buddy, lazily roamed the carpet. He stopped and looked at me a moment with his dull, far-removed eyes of a sage and flapped his tail a little. Then he collapsed onto a deliberately chosen patch of carpet to doze, his big tired body perpetually devoid of energy. Jeremy came down the stairs, stepped around the dog and told me Broeks was on his way.

I followed Jeremy through the garage and around to the backyard to let out his black Labrador, Diesel, from the chain link kennel. Last I was here this had housed three pet ducks, not a dog, but they'd apparently escaped or more likely been cooked up and eaten. Diesel bounded off into the grass, sniffing and biting at the little wild flowers. He was a burly black hunting dog bred and intended for fetching and listening. The South Dakota wilderness is one only experienced with a rifle or a fishing pole.

Broeks arrived. “Are you reading anything right now?” he asked me, then also if I'd searched through the bookmobile yet. We always exchanged our recent discoveries, musical or literary, but now I didn't know what he meant. “That bus out back is stuffed full with dusty books.” I'd never known.

We walked over the grass to the faded red bus on the edge of the property, its tires deeply entrenched in the ground. “Sioux Falls Public Library Bookmobile” was traced on its sides in worn red. Behind the springy door and up the steps hung the stagnant, musty air of a vault. Broeks eyed the dim book spines all around us, “It's all the landlord's, but I've come in plenty of times and taken stuff out. He'll never read 'em anyway. It's been back here for eternity.” Books of all kinds filled the shelf walls, or stood in precarious piles on the front seats and floor, mingled among boxes of old analogue records in paper sleeves. War histories, girths of fiction, politics collections, archives of Nat Geo arching back to the sixties, Socrates dialogues, intros to archeology, astronomy, economics, elementary school texts, & everything else. A film of dust had settled on all upward faces, burning auburn in the angular sunlight bent through the round rear window. I took five novels. I was hauling too many books around as it was.


More pictures on Facebook: Albums 1, 2, & 3.