A LITTLE DOT ON TIME AND PLACE
The prairie rises from east to west as it approaches the Rockies because the hidden forces of tectonics under the cordillera are in hard contact that drives the mountains higher. They say that some can hear the hum of the two deep elements pushing against each other. Most humans simply admire the peaks along the horizon and enjoy both the water stored in the snowpack over winter and the katabatic winds that warm the eastern slopes. “Not all downslope winds are katabatic. For instance, winds such as the föhn and chinook are rain shadow winds where air driven upslope on the windward side of a mountain range drops its moisture and descends leeward drier and warmer.”
They say that it was not the Indians who drove the frontier women mad, but rather the constant rattling of the stovepipes in the wind that drove us into shelter through relationships with other humans, which is a madness of its own. One could take refuge in knowledge about the winds with names. The two strategies do not exclude each other. Or one could admit living under an ocean of air, the bottom of the big sky, with currents and creatures both named and unnamed, perceptible and invisible, constantly changing, suitable for people who can adapt to it.
Blackfeet country — the east slope from Edmonton to Yellowstone, the Rockies to the Black Hills — where a hundred small groups of semi-related and well-adapted people followed the food sources, both bison in their great moving herds, and the camas roots or berries in their seasons. “Walking people” had an interwoven “tribe” of dogs invested in the fortunes of the groups. Dogs persisted even after the horses came, even after the pickup trucks came, even as some people became sedentary after starving onto allotments. Then people and dogs almost prospered as they became multiple.
In June the land can be gentle in temperature and glorious with wildflowers. Nothing lives for a long time but anything that doesn’t reproduce is lost. Nothing that stays the same can persist. June is a time for reproduction.
We drove through by accident, transporting me and my books to Portland where I grew up. My father had routed us through Glacier National Park years earlier but took a nap while my mother drove and she took the wrong fork in the road so we went through Yellowstone again. As for me, I was thinking of Navajo when I thought at all, slumped in the backseat with my bare feet out the window. Lost, lost, after four years of college that prepared me for nothing, but was revelatory. The Peace Corps had just been invented and I realized that Indian reservations were a way to go to a foreign country without crossing an ocean.
My father knew nothing about reservations. He knew to talk about “picaninnies” and “squaws” but he grew up in Indian country with all the indigenous people removed from Sioux Brulé and Swan River Cree country. He was of the homestead generation with a father raised and educated in Scotland. His “religion” was the governments of the US and Canada, and how they were built by the industrial revolution, how they divvied up the land and marked it on the maps. He loved railroads, dams, and harvest machines. In pursuit of prestige and success, his best achievement was playing chess.
My mother knew Indians by their individual names but they were the Oregon people now noted in the new museum, Five Oaks. Kalapuyas. https://fiveoaksmuseum.org/exhibit/this-is-kalapuyan-land/ My fourth grade teacher, Mildred Colbert, was a Chinook elder. To me “Indians” were not romantic and removed, but people among us. Or us among them.
The marriage of my parents was uneasy and weighted to the competence of my mother. The marriage of Bob’s parents was uneasy and weighted to the culture of whites on reservations. What was between Bob and I was not a marriage nor an affair nor a partnership but some kind of attachment that developed out of experience. But we were often secret from each other. Also, secret with each other because we had so little to do with the rez whites.
With some nice tourist lady, Bob struck up a little romance. He arranged to meet her in Great Falls for dinner and whatever might develop. After all, they both loved walks on the beach. (There are no beaches in Great Falls.) I went to his house and slept in his bed that night. He didn’t come home, but the lady’s brother called to see if she were there. I answered the phone by the bed and told him quite a story. Once she got home, she never came back. Bob never figured out why. It was a lot of fun.
Once a highway patrolman, young and handsome, wanted to “date” me and came to the shop to ask Bob if he minded, as though he were my father. Bob said, “Sure, go ahead! What do I care?” I was shocked by the whole thing. First that Bob didn’t protest. Second that anyone would think I would want to date a highway patrolman. My life-plan had nothing to do with such a person.
At every lunch time that winter I went charging down the hill to the post office, wearing the old-fashioned warm footgear that Bob had explained and that I bought at the Browning Mercantile: 4 buckle galoshes and inch-thick felt liners. I remember how cold it was, even with the sun pouring down, and the old Blackfeet man who stopped me and made me fasten the jsngling clasps of the galoshes. “You’ll fall on your face, Sister!”
When I got to shop with the mail, we took the pickup to Crabby Jack’s lunch counter at Joe Show’s and ate roast beef sandwiches that were better than any I’ve eaten since. I was the only woman except for the waitress, who told me years later that she could never figure out what I was doing there. Then Bob paid and dropped me back at school.
The town watched, the whites disapproving and the Indians fascinated. What new thing would happen next? Scriver’s women — they were all white, but this was the first educated one. My junior high classes watched me with beady eyes, taking notes but not on English subjects. Some of them not even IN English.
(Maybe beginning a book . . . )
