Engraved on a Rock

… O that my words were graven in a rock. Job 19:24

My car has 151,047 miles when I start another trip traveling one way to get to the other. This binge travel. I left my college in St. Paul, Minnesota after seventeen years, and live in Kansas City now. I was going to drive from Kansas City to Shawnee, Oklahoma, to the Red Dirt Book Fest, then on to Texas to see my son and daughter-in-law. But I am called to Minnesota to the Marshall Festival. I had said I wasn't going, but changed my mind when they called again because someone had canceled.

I long for the suspension of travel. When I drive, I feel lifted from earth like a flock of birds. The magic is there. The levitation.

I drive 466 miles to Marshall on a Wednesday. I give my talk on Thursday at 1:00 p.m. At 2:11, I leave Marshall on Highway 14, in the southwest corner of the Minnesota. I take notes once again from the land: The distance. The muted hills and fields. Maybe mound more than hill. Maybe rise more than mound. Hedgerows or windbreaks. Fields of windmills. The town of Verdi. The truth of fields. The gathering of trees. Pastures spotted with cattle. Section roads, furrows, dried cornstalks, old farmsteads, the houses vacant, the barns falling in, the smooth hills folded into one another.

Highway 14 eventually connects with I-35 in South Dakota. As I turn left to the access road, I hear a grinding. It is not long before the check engine light goes on. I am not going to make it. Several miles later, I come to a sign, Flandreau, 7 miles. I know I have to leave the interstate. I turn down the road. It seems 17 miles to Flandreau. Or 77. I have to find a Dodge dealer because I've been told repairs are made by computer, which only the dealer has. And there, on the edge of Flandreau, out on the prairie where there is nothing, I see a Dodge dealer. I turn in. Someone is available. The mechanic drives my car one way on the road. He drives another. It is a sensor that has gone bad. They have one in stock in Flandreau, South Dakota, though my car is six years old, and I am in the middle of the prairie. Nearly two hours later, I am on the road again.

I knew it would be a 10–12 hour drive to Oklahoma, and it was close to 5:00 p.m. as I neared Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

On the interstate, the shadow of my car runs along a field. As the evening sun goes down, the shadow of the car looks suspended over the median because the car is lifted off the road as I drive.

By the time I reach Sioux City, Iowa, it is dark.

During the long drive south through Nebraska and Kansas into Oklahoma, I looked up at the sky. The stars were stones in a black field. The stars seemed a paradigm of language. The constellations were shaped and named. They moved like fish swimming in a glass tank. They are stepping stones for my walk across the world. I have to stay on them or step into the mud.

I keep driving that night and arrive in Shawnee, Oklahoma at 4:00 in the morning. My hotel room is still there. I wonder if I am off the road when I am in bed. Can I fall asleep? There, in the margin between worlds, a dog has his head on my lap. I pet him and fall asleep. He has been riding with me, and I didn't know it. I've never had a dog. Is it my old cat dead now five years come back as a dog? I don't know who / what is there. But there is recognition of someone in disguise. I just don't know who.

The next day, Friday, I am on a Native American panel. They want Indian magic, but I know the cry of a bobcat. Rustling leaves. The voice of the wind. Someone gathered in the other room. No border between here and there. Those voices that are there. Tim Tingle, a Choctaw, also is on the panel. Several years ago, he gave me a medicine bundle to carry in my car. It is tobacco and some bark from a cedar struck by lighting, tied in a red kerchief. I tell the audience about my travel. The dog that rode with me last night. I have the medicine bundle in front of me.

The next day, Saturday, I drive to Texas and return to Kansas City on Sunday. My car now has 153,217 miles.

I always feel sadness at the end of travel. The old ones have been there. The moving ones. Those who have to depart once I reach my destination. I miss the immediacy and significance of their presence. The endurance of travel. The distillation. What is at stake. What is there. The transformation.

Fort Marion Prisoners

1875–1878

In 1875, at the end of the Southern Plains Indian Wars, 72 of the worst prisoners were taken by train from Fort Sill, Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma, to Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, an abandoned stone fort on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Indians had been defeated by the U.S. Cavalry. The buffalo had been slaughtered. A way of life was gone.

At Fort Marion, Captain Richard Henry Pratt unlocked their leg irons, cut their hair, dressed them in army uniforms, gave them ledger books in which to draw, and taught them to read and write.

They wrote letters to the U.S. government for their release, which was granted in 1878, three years after their arrival at Fort Marion.

There Were Clouds

There was the land and the sky over it.
When the clouds rippled, we saw the heads of our ancestors looking at us —
They were a gathering of those who had been here, and were now there —
They were the old ones standing before the Maker.
The sky speaks in its clouds. The clouds came in waves. The waves came in clouds.
I tried to see them together. I tried to see the water as land, but it was not.

I tried to hear what the land said, but the water kept getting in the way.
It was hard to hear all the voices at once.
Sometimes I sat on the wall and listened to the clouds humming over me.
They were talking together.
They were not talking to each other, but each spoke as if not knowing the other was speaking also.
There was no listening, but only talking. Each had their own agenda.
How could they be unaware of the other voices?
What had happened to make them aware only of themselves?
As if they were the only one there when there was a mixture of voices.
When there were so many talking that nothing could be known.
Nothing could be understood except that there were voices talking from their own worlds and together they were saying nothing.
They were locked in their own world, not knowing they were part of the other clouds that crossed the sky.

We had listened when we were on the prairie. We knew something had happened. The voice of the others arrived before they came.
We knew there was an arrival of something.
We didn't know what it was. But we knew it was.
The clouds told us — when they talked to us.
There was something we knew had come. Someone, our people said.
When we first saw them, we were startled there could be people so unlike us. They were white as clouds.
We thought at first they were from the sky.
They thought we were like the trees or the animals. They didn't recognize us as people. They had no understanding of us. They didn't know the animals.
We were something to push out of the way.
They did the same to the land, putting iron rails upon it. They just wanted to cross.
No, they just wanted to settle. No, they just wanted us to disappear.
They didn't want us there at all. We didn't matter. We had no account with them.

They buried us and our world under them —
our world that unfolds under all that passes upon it —
our world that rises above the clouds still mulling in their camps —
still stalling to hold council.