1.
How do you persuade a seven-year old child not to love her mother? This is not done easily even when the mother was abusive.
2.
Two days after Derek Chauvin was convicted by a Hennepin County jury of murdering George Floyd, amidst rejoicing and ubiquitous calls for something vaguely called a “racial reckoning,” I drove to Fargo, North Dakota. My twin daughters live there with their four children, two kids apiece. One of my daughters had a new baby, about ten days old when I made the trip. It also happened to be my daughters’ 35th birthdays. My son, Martin, hosts a program on a Fargo public radio station. He invited me to appear as a guest in his studio.
3.
In good weather and with light traffic in the west Metro, a road-trip to Fargo takes six hours from my home in Austin, Minnesota. The transit, north to south, crosses two or three zones of different weather – at least ordinarily. There is drought this Spring in the Red River Valley and so “red flag” warnings were posted – these caution against the danger of wind-driven grass fires.
4.
The Spring was dry and cold. The shelter belts in the Red River Valley were leafless, stark with wind-contorted trees, each a vortex of twisted brown bark and branch. South of the Metro (St. Paul and Minneapolis and their suburbs) the trees were less black and spidery, softened by a haze of brown and green bud.
5.
Worry knocked me awake at 4:15 a.m. and, so, I rose, bathed, fed my dog, and, then, left town about an hour later. I felt feverish and hungover, notwithstanding the fact that I hadn’t drank anything the night before. When the sun rose, the pale light on the prairie caused me to feel a little better.
6.
Visiting my children in North Dakota is always slightly troubling. Once I drove the six hour way to Fargo, only to be excluded from a parent-teacher conference that I planned to attend, because my ex-wife hadn’t alerted the school that I was planning to be present. One of my daughters, who has serious substance abuse and mental illness problems, has lost her parental rights with respect to her two children. These children live with their grandmother, my ex-wife, and, when I visit them, their mother can’t be present – this is by Court Order. My seven-year old, eldest granddaughter, who has been taken away from her mother, talks about her all the time, obsesses over what she is doing, and wants to see her. But this isn’t allowed. The little boy is more listless about his mother. He probably doesn’t remember much about her and the horrible circumstances that led to the termination of her parental rights. My son, Martin, who is de facto a primary caregiver for the children living with my ex-wife, can’t really tolerate his sisters, both of whom have histories of serious alcoholism and methamphetamine use. When you have to live with a person who is an addict, you develop strong feelings of aversion and, even, hatred toward that person whose misery is contagious and spreads suffering. Therefore, when I visit, Martin prefers not to be present when I see my twin daughters. So there are a lot of complicated issues to be navigated. (I have two children in Austin but they don’t play a role in this specific story.)
7.
There is no way to write about these things without hurting someone’s feelings or without slipping into a parlance that I despise. Getting to what I want to say requires stealth, reticence, and a crooked route that detours around truths that can’t (or shouldn’t) be stated outright.
8.
Do you understand me? Of course not. If people understood one another, there would be no reason to write.
9.
Normally, a trip to Fargo is easy – at least in theory. You drive on 90 to 35 and, then, take the western belt-line (494 to 694) around Minneapolis. In the northwest corner of the Metro, you 694 becomes 94 which then makes the hypotenuse of a triangle, running diagonally across the western to Fargo. The route is all Interstate, fast and direct but the belt-line freeway, once at the outer edge of the Metro is now enfolded in populous suburbs and, often, dreadfully congested. Furthermore, there’s no longer much in the way of open country between the northwest Minneapolis suburbs and St. Cloud seventy or so miles up the Mississippi River. Forty years ago, there were only a couple of town along the river corridor between Minneapolis and St. Cloud – now almost all of route runs between strip malls and vast tracts of apartments and other housing, the ancient cores of the villages surrounded by concentric rings of industrial parks and sprawling housing and commercial districts. If an accident occurs along that thoroughfare, traffic backs up for miles and, often, there is road construction and so the passage around the Cities can take several hours if there has been a crash or some other complication.
10.
Anyway, the Northwest suburbs include Brooklyn Center and this where the cops gunned down a 20 year-old Black kid on the very day that the jury in Hennepin County announced that the Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was guilty of three-counts of murder. There were massive protests in that suburb and the National Guard was deployed on the streets and, for all I know, the police rampage might possibly include in its depredations old White men driving to visit their grandchildren and, perhaps, I would be pulled over and frisked and, then, tortured with a taser before being shot to death and, so, this was something that I supposed that I should avoid.
11.
You never know if your license tabs are expired or your cab-card documenting insurance is out-of-date or a turn signal defective. Maybe, you have air-freshener shaped like little black pine trees illegally dangling from your rear-view mirror or, perhaps, a window is partly blocked so that you don’t see the swirl of red lights behind you or, maybe, the red of your Honda excites the State Troopers or the local deputies. It’s all unpredictable, arbitrary and capricious.
12.
A map showed me a State Park near a place called Elbow Lake, far away in Northwest Minnesota and there were said to be some Indian mounds in that area and, so, I decided to make my way to Fargo via that place on two-lane highways thereby avoiding the Twin Cities and its savage cops. So I drove to Mankato, then, angled up out of the Minnesota River Valley, making a dog-leg to Gaylord, then, north to Hutchinson, about ninety-miles west of downtown Minneapolis. From there, I planned to drive to Willmar and, then, continue in a pattern that would map out as right-angled steps leading up (north) and west toward Fargo.
13.
I bought some gas in Gaylord. I was surprised that there were a couple of young women fueling up at the Casey’s in town – but, then, I considered that was about 6:30 and the girls, casually dressed and without make-up, were heading to some factory job in one of the towns nearby. The cars on the two-lane highways were driving their familiar way to where people worked and, everyone, was speeding heedlessly to their employment. The rising sun was just a smear of yellow in the eastern sky, wan clouds blurring the sunbeams so that they were too diffuse to cast shadows.
14.
On the radio, I am warned that the funeral of the young man gunned down by police in Brooklyn Center will be broadcast on public radio at noon. This is something that I don’t want to hear. The Black Activists will overplay their hand – this is customary, now. The dead youth will be extolled as some sort of martyr and extraordinary, even super-human, virtue will be ascribed to him. Politicians and media stars from out-of-state will make fiery speeches. People will demand Justice as if anyone knows that means – although, I think, it is fair to say that we know what injustice, at least, looks like. There will be extraordinary music performed by accomplished musicians. But the music, most likely, will be in genre to which the young man would have been indifferent during his short life – the cops killed him over an expired license tag (and a gun warrant) – that is, church anthems and jazz. Everyone will be flogged into righteous indignation and will vow to take to the streets and, then, the cops will shoot some other Black man somewhere else and the whole traveling circus will move on to the venue leaving the next-of-kin to their sorrow and the prosecution of their civil damages lawsuits. None of this has much relevance to me and I don’t need to pour more sorrow and resentment onto what will likely prove to be a long and trying day.
15.
At Winthrop, a plant processing corn into bio-fuel runs beside the highway, a sort of factory made of huge, pale Lego blocks with pipes and spiral tubes that look like they are producing moonshine on a massive level (which, I suppose they are in a manner of speaking) and the air smells like beer and there are big puffs of white smoke and steam sculpted by the cold winds into the profiles of presidents or bears.
16.
Willmar is within an enchanted circle of detours and byways. The roads seem determined to lead the traveler around all of the outskirts of town, through weedy lots, gravel pits, auto salvage yards and car parts places, trucking firms, dilapidated trailer-home parks, a community college surrounded by big empty lots where cars could be parked, although all learning is now on a remote basis, lumber yards, modern banks built from brushed zinc and brick veneer at forlorn intersections, brand-new churches in metal pole barns, open land dimpled with inscrutable piles of gravel and sand and black dirt. It seems that I just keep turning and turning as the orange detour signs rotate me around the town.
17.
Then, there are crises in my office and I have to stop in an empty field next to a power substation, a plot of gravel studded with transformers and oblong metal blocks radiating high-voltage power lines behind a raw-looking cyclone fence. I talk with my receptionist and, then, an angry client. The day advances. The substation hisses and growls, no doubt irradiating me with some sort of electrical discharge that makes the tips of my fingers tingle and my lips numb and that causes the words that I am speaking to sizzle with static.
18.
In the next town, on the sidewalk, a Native American youth, big and round as a sumo wrestler is leading a tiny dog on a toy breed on a short leash. The youth has his black hair gathered up into a pony tail.
19.
In West-Central Minnesota, the road is never more than a half-mile from some kind of water. The landscape is pitted with marshes and eutrophied lakes now grown over with reeds and sedge and there are bodies of open water next to the road or scattered out to the horizon, sunk under the palisades of bare trees or with hapless little forests caught in the flood and killed, innumerable creeks braided and meandering across the land and, every four or five miles, a bridge spanning a peat-black and cold-looking river creeping across the land like a black snake. The villages sit on high spots among the sloughs, islands apparently, and, sometimes, there are low wooded ridges, moraines left by glaciers bisected by streams in ravines and encircled by round pothole lakes.
20.
On the open water, I see big flocks of white birds, most of them like small, compact swans, white as snow, big creatures with serpentine necks floating on the chill water next to prehistoric-looking pelicans, also large with great pouch-gullets, white armadas drowsing on lakes. Sometimes, I see the big white swans – perhaps, they are some kind of goose – quarreling among themselves over fallen ears of corn in the stubble of the harvested fields yet to be plowed.
21.
The newscaster says that it will colder tomorrow with rain and that the showers will commence around midnight “when you are sleeping” the woman says. The pre-recorded weather forecast plays all morning and into the early afternoon.
22.
A trumpeter is playing “Amazing Grace” on the radio with a wide, sobbing vibrato and elaborate jazz ornamentation.
23.
All the spooky little towns – at intervals of ten miles across the sodden landscape: streets broader than Broadway’s “Great White Way”, a scatter of dilapidated houses crouching under old shade-trees, a brick church pointing its steeple angrily into the sky, the village’s one impressive building, formerly a Bank, now selling antiques or converted to a museum that is open only one afternoon a week or serving as a “community center” behind heavy brick-walls and carved pilasters with scrolls and acanthus leave capitols, the name of the abandoned bank carved into the lintel above the door opening onto Main Street in characters intended to defy the years and the elements and vicissitudes of the farm economy but it’s all over now: the public school has been closed for two generations and when a house falls down into its cellar it’s not replaced and all the owners and directors of the old bank have died and gone to their rest in the cemeteries on the country lanes outside the village and the young people have moved away to distant cities and the hamlet has a desperate, dogged appearance as if it is just barely hanging on by its fingernails, suspended over oblivion which out here looks like a rusted mail box riveted to a pole that a snowplow has caught one too many times next to a long driveway leading to a tattered shelter belt where the house has burned down and the barn fallen over in the blizzards and all that remains is a wooded ravine full of corroding plow parts and harrows and an old brick silo with its dome shattered by long ago lightning strikes...
24.
There’s no State Park near Elbow Lake as far as I can determine and no Indian mounds either, although by this time, after seven hours driving I’m too tired to look for these places, probably hidden at the end of some nondescript gravel road.
25.
The two-lane blacktop arrows along a railroad right-of-way that is aimed, I think, for the train yards at Fargo-Moorhead. The next day, I learn that there was a fatal car crash on this very highway, a two car head on collision after midnight resulting in two deaths and I would like to report to you that I sensed a cool tremor of dread when I passed over the place where the people would be killed. I would like to report that the hair on the back of my hands stood up, horripilated when I traversed the place where in another ten hours there would be death on the highway. But, of course, I felt no such thing. The strange elbow-shaped lake wrapped around a promontory where there were a few grain storage bins and another eerie, empty Main Street and, then, I passed over some bluffs and dropped down onto the absolutely level and vast plains of the Red River Valley, the great alluvial delta where the soil is so sweet and fertile that you can eat it like chocolate and be nourished thereby.
26.
On the plain, the far off woodlots float like mirages in the shimmer of sunlight. The shelter belts are only one tree wide, stretched out like rubber bands or taffy across the empty land. A sugar beet plant sends a ray of smoke into the air on the blue horizon and there are little graveyards, shorn of their trees, clusters of red and white headstones standing along the railroad tracks, cast iron fences skirting the Great Northern Empire Builder right-of-way.
27.
After nine hours, I come across a bridge spanning the brown Red River, the channel all snagged-up with jagged-looking deadfall, current running a hand’s length below mud banks wooded with gnarled cottonwoods and elms and willows and, then, one-hundred yards into North Dakota (the river is the boundary between the States), I am in an urban sprawl, approximate to Sacramento, the flat land organized into a grid of great boulevards as wide as a football fields with hundreds of identical apartment buildings stretching as far as the eye can see, huge field-houses with metal roofs, shopping malls and commercial districts with the wide lanes lined with fast food place and enormous restaurants with various themes – wild west or nautical or chinoiserie – movie theaters and miles of parking lots, intersections with lights that hold you suspended so long in your car that you could nap between red and green, inscrutable industrial conclaves of windowless buildings or low structures like glass skyscrapers tipped sideways on the prairie, the wind whipping up little sullen-looking dust devils in vacant lots.
28.
The motel in south Fargo must know something about me that I don’t know. I’m assigned a handicapped room with a shower without a door, drains on the floor of the bathroom and various rails and other accessories to help someone navigate the space in a wheelchair.
29.
Later, I’m with Martin in the radio studio. He asks me to guess the genre of the tunes that he plays. I am wearing headphones and the studio in a brick building near Fargo’s old downtown is very warm. After listening to a song, Martin asks me how I would characterize it: “It starts off like Lou Reed’s machine metal music,” I say, “and then, goes into some kind of rhythmic drone with wall-of-sound flourishes and ends up with a industrial sort of rock and roll beat.” Martin replies on-the-air: “You used a lot of words to describe ‘Post-Rock’.” He has a loose leaf notebook from which he reads a scripted appreciation for one of the program’s underwriters – it’s a business that sells organic teas and ciders.
30.
We go to a restaurant. Martin used to run a bingo program here pre-Covid. People are pretty relaxed about the virus and no one in the restaurant is masked. A woman sings covers of old Top 40 hits. Martin knows her. She was a guest on his show a few months ago. I tip her 20 dollars for her efforts, pretty thankless work it seems, with no one in the joint paying any attention to her singing. “I gave her a twenty,” I tell Martin. “I hope you get credit for it.”
31.
The next morning is cold under low grey skies that are spitting sleet.
32.
At my daughter’s apartment, we take turns holding the new baby. Martin takes some pictures. I am shocked to see how old I look in the photographs, how grey and shrunken, my beard stark white above the new-born baby’s pinkish red head.
33.
We have some cupcakes in substitution for a birthday cake. My daughter who has lost her children looks very sad. When I say to her “happy birthday”, she replies that it is her “death-day.” She looks unwell and has tears in her eyes because she misses her children. Her teeth have all been ruined by methamphetamine and she has no smile left -- it’s all eroded away. A flabby white beer belly flops out from under her shirt. I suppose there is nothing to say to her to persuade her that her love for her children isn’t in vain. She missed out on the chance to save her parental rights because she was drunk and high or simply absent for weeks on end. Now, there’s nothing that can be done.
34.
Above the bed, there’s a tapestry depicting an ultimate fighting champion, a feral young man with bare chest who snarls at the viewer, showing a mouth full of shattered teeth. The tapestry says that this is
Ricky Diaz, but Martin, who knows about these things, tells me that the picture actually shows Ron Diaz, Ricky’s brother and that someone has made a mistake. (In fact, I think the picture shows the Cuban-born professional wrestler Ricky Reyes who was born Ricky Diaz – but who knows?) The wall tapestry imports ferocity into the room that seems inconsistent – even potentially damaging – to the small infant sleeping in my arms.
35.
My daughter with her boyfriend go out on the wooden balcony tacked to the side of the apartment. They smoke cigarettes and, reluctantly, my other daughter joins them. After a while, they push back the sliding window and come back into the house. My daughter’s boyfriend says that he is going to find a two-by-four, make a bridge, and climb over to the adjacent balcony where a puppy is being abused. Apparently, the owner of the animal, a pit bull mix, has left the little dog on the porch in the cold sleet for two or three days. My daughter’s boyfriend, the Ultimate Fighting Fan, isn’t very friendly and he takes the older child, a toddler, into another room where he vacuums. The toddler is afraid of me and wails piteously.
36.
I go out on the balcony to see the mistreated puppy. On a balcony identical where I stand, there’s a small reddish dog with a big, square snout. The dog has little inflamed eyes and it wags its tail hopefully when I appear. The wood slats of the balcony are encrusted with black globs of dog shit and the animal has no food in its bowl although there seems to be an inch or an inch and a half of water in a silver saucer, most likely deposited by the rain overnight. The puppy shivers and feebly keeps wagging its tail hoping that I will rescue it. This is very disturbing to me. On the lawn, under a bush, a little brown rabbit is grazing in the leaf litter.
37.
After the birthday gathering, we pick up the other two grandchildren and take them to a place called The Frying Pan. It’s an old-style family restaurant with a salad bar featuring wilted lettuce and various salads made with macaroni and peas and chunks of Velveeta cheese. It’s a long time since I’ve eaten a salad from an array like this under plexi-glass sneeze guards and so I’m happy to make myself a plate of lettuce with sunflower seeds and bacon bits and some rotini with green peas in sour mayonnaise.
38.
My eldest granddaughter is very severely diabetic. After she orders a plate of noodles in Alfredo sauce, Martin uses an app on his phone to calculate the insulin dose that the little girl will have to inject into the fat of her belly. She pricks her finger and takes a blood-sugar reading and, then, Martin reads the app – “thirteen,” he says. She opens her small handbag, prepares a shot, and stabs herself in the gut just above her belt-line. Notwithstanding these proceedings, she seems happy and enjoys her noodles although she ends up with her cheeks and snout smeared with the sauce.
39.
Streets are closed in downtown Fargo and we detour around the several blocks passing a place where the Red River runs fast with furious-looking rapids. A man is fishing in the channel pools below the rapids.
40.
Under an upswept curtain on concrete, the Hjemkonst, a facsimile Viking ship, is on display. It’s expensive to see the ship but the children haven’t been inside the museum and so we buy tickets to gawk at the vessel. On the curl of the prow, a fierce dragonhead imperiously surveys the galleries. The man who built the ship, a major venture requiring must sophisticated technology to bend the wood for the vessel’s curved prow, suffered from leukemia and he never saw the completion of the project. In 1982 the Hjemkonst sailed from Knife River on Lake Superior through the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal. Then, the ship departed Manhattan and, after four weeks, and some adventures at sea, made landfall in Norway at Bergen.
41.
A traveling exhibit reminds us how the world nearly ended in the late fifties and early sixties when the United States trembled on the brink of nuclear war with Russia. It’s disheartening. A map on floor shows concentric circles of total, severe, moderate, and light destruction. For some reason, the city targeted is Milwaukee and the blast zones are oriented around the waterfront on Lake Michigan with destruction extending far out into the suburbs. A video shows a campy public service announcement with servicemen exchanging quips about nuclear war – “she’s like a woman,” the captain says, “destructive, dangerous, and you can’t underestimate her strength.” The man is pale under a khaki fatigue cap and he looks like Bob Crane on Hogan’s Heroes.
42.
We stand in the sleet under the dark, shingled form of the Stavekirk next to the museum. The wood looks soaked and the dragon heads bracketing the building arch up the threaten the unseen demons that crowd the sky overhead.
43.
I’m back on the road at about 2:30. It’s Friday and I think I will drive through the west suburbs but, then, I recall that the police are deadly there and protestors are protesting on the side-streets and, so, at Alexandria, I take a highway south and east through what was once the Big Woods, the swamp country in Meeker, McLeod and Sibley Counties.
44.
Every place in Fargo is now hiring. Out in the country, every big hog or turkey building is posted with “Help Wanted” signs. The corn distillery in Winthrop is barricaded behind a half-dozen signs offering jobs with good wages and benefits.
45.
I pass through depressed-looking county seats. The court house buildings are well-kept and ostentatious with high, brown-brick towers and white cupolas but the villages seem to be half-abandoned and festering with burnt-out neighborhoods and abandoned store-fronts.
46.
All of the Minnesota schools named after the State’s second governor, Henry Hastings Sibley, the general who chased the Dakota Indians out of Minnesota have been given new names. Sibley, who began his career as a fur trader with an Indian wife, is now accounted a genocidal racist and a persona non grata. But what about the County named after him – is there some plan afoot to correct history and change that name? How would that be accomplished?
47.
Human history makes sense only in light of a certain project to which we are all obligated. Unwholesome, destructive love must be replaced by wholesome healthy love. Excessive love of self or smothering love for others should be transformed into love for nature or art or humanity. Doesn’t this make sense?
48.
On September 12, 1862, at the end of the Dakota Conflict, the war-chief Little Crow wrote to his old friend Henry Sibley. At the head of an army, Sibley was marching against the Dakota to avenge the massacre of White settlers on the Minnesota prairie. Before the fighting, Little Crow had counseled against the uprising, but reluctantly agreed to lead his people in the war. By September 1862, after only about four weeks of fighting, it was obvious that the rebellion had failed and that the Dakota would be brutally treated for their depredations. Little Crow must have been desperate to restore peace and avoid the mass-murder of his tribe. In his letter, he told Sibley that he would surrender hostages, mostly women and children, “who will fare with me as well as with you”. He concludes the letter with the words “Your truly friend.”
49.
A few days later, the Dakota tried to ambush Sibley’s column near a prairie pothole called Wood Lake. The attack went awry and the Indians were badly defeated. Little Crow fled to Canada where he tried to make alliances with Western tribes to continue the war against the White settlers. But it was all too late. The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota were imprisoned in a wretched stockade on the river flats at Fort Snelling (south of present day Minneapolis) and 38 warriors had been hanged in Mankato, the day after Christmas in 1862. Little Crow with his son, Wowinapa (“One who Appears”) left Canada and, traveling by night on trails far from the pioneer settlements entered the labyrinth of fens and murky lakes in the Big Woods.
50.
The murders of White settlers mostly south of the Big Woods in August and September of 1862 had put the pioneers farming in central Minnesota on edge. A family had been killed by Indians, hacked to death with hatchets, and settlers had built a stockade with birch palisades in which they sheltered when rumors of wild Indians circulated in the neighborhood.
51.
Nathan Lamson was a 62-year old settler with a small farm near Hutchinson, Minnesota. Lamson was hunting deer in the woods near his farm with his son Chauncey. (Accounts vary – some narratives claim that Nathan was looking for strayed cattle.) Nathan and his son were joking about being ambushed by Indians when Chauncey saw Little Crow and Wowinapa resting a few yards away under a tree. The Indians were, apparently, on foot and had stopped to pick some wild raspberries. At that time, there was bounty of 500 dollars, a considerable sum at that time, payable for killing any Indian found in the Big Woods. To this bounty, there was added a 75 dollar reward for scalps.
52.
Nathan shot at Little Crow, wounding the Indian in the hip Little Crow seized Wowinapa’s shotgun and fired at Lamson, hitting him in the shoulder with buckshot. Both sides were armed with muzzle-loading weapons and there was a pause in the fighting while the men re-charged their guns. Chauncey’s gun was loaded but Little Crow got off the next shot, narrowly missing the young man who was only about 35 feet away in the wooded thicket. Chauncey returned fire and the musket’s ball ricocheted off Little Crow’s gunstock, piercing his belly. After this exchange, the combatants went to ground. The White father and son retreated and Nathan told Chauncey to hurry to the settlement and bring help. It wasn’t clear how many Indians were in the war party. Little Crow and Wowinapa crawled into the dense woods. It was clear that Little Crow was dying. Wowinapa gave the wounded man a drink of water while his father told him to flee to Devil’s Lake to the Northwest where his mother was living as a refugee. Little Crow died and Wowinapa is said to have crossed his father’s hands over his chest and, then, put new moccasins on the corpse’s feet so that he could better walk the winding path to heaven.
53.
Where love has grown crooked and, even, malign, the fracture heals with twisted bone. It’s not easy to straighten places in the heart ossified into crookedness.
54.
Little Crow’s body was hauled to Hutchinson covered by a blanket in the back of an old wagon. The corpse arrived in the midst of the settler town’s 4th of July celebration. People were drunk and the body was dragged down Main Street while kids shot off whizz-bang fireworks. A soldier beheaded the corpse and, then, the gory mess was tossed in an offal pit. Later, someone retrieved parts of the body because evidence was required to collect bounties. Nathan Lamson was paid $500 for killing the Indian war chief. Chauncey received a $75 dollar bounty for the scalp. In that era, most people’s annual income was about $250.
55.
It took several weeks to identify that the decaying cadaver was, in fact, Little Crow. The scalp was displayed in the office of an Assessor at the Capitol in St. Paul for five or six years before the thing was tossed in the trash. (The display of fragments from Little Crow’s body was always controversial – even in 1908, Asa Daniels, who had been involved in the Uprising, decried the macabre spectacle as “barbaric,”a “sad commentary” on supposedly Christian people. Little Crow’s skull and deformed forearm, a childhood fracture that had healed into crooked bone, was kept in a case at the Capitol until 1918 when the war chief’s grandson, Jesse Wakeman, asked that the artifacts be put away. (Little Crow’s mortal remains weren’t put to rest until 1971 when he was buried on Indian land at Flandreau, South Dakota, the place where his kins ultimately had settled.)
56.
Wowinapa was captured three weeks later, west of Devil’s Lake and half-starved to death. He was gnawing on the rib bones of a wolf that he had shot. Wowinapa was Christian – it must be recalled that Little Crow had been a deacon in the Episcopal Church – and, later, was instrumental in founding Indian chapters of the YMCA. He took the name Thomas Wakeman and it was his son, Jesse, who asked that his father’s skull and forearm be taken off public display.
57,
Entering Hutchinson, I see a fire-truck red shed in a copse of trees marked with a black-lettered sign that says Little Crow Shooting Store. The Chamber of Commerce has erected a statue of an Indian, erect and wearing a sort of toga, as he gazes out over the lake the brushes up against the commercial district in downtown Hutchinson.
58.
Many trucks are gathered at the pumps at the Kwik Trip in Hutchinson. It’s Friday night and kids are fueling up for their nocturnal excursions. The mood is upbeat, even celebratory – people shout out to one another. The truck at the pump ahead of me has a decal in the cab’s window – Eat Fast Food with a picture of two deer, one with ornate antlers, leaping across a field.
59.
Minneapolis isn’t Minnesota.
60.
On the highway, I see a cemetery in which all the new graves seem to be 55 gallon drums tethered by chains among the old granite headstones. How can this be?
61.
The news on the radio is all about racial injustice, the nation’s unfinished business. I don’t want to listen to people pontificating on that subject. So I switch the station to The Current, a satellite of Minnesota Public Radio. Someone is singing: In my hour of darkness / In my hour of need / O Lord grant me patience / O lord grant me speed. It’s a beautiful song that I recall having heard once or twice before, although I don’t know when. (Later, I discover that the song is by Gram Parson’s and was released on his album Grievous Angel in 1974. The record is comprised of music Parson’s recorded before his death in 1973, two years after Little Crow’s remains were finally returned to the family plot in Flandreau.)
62.
East of Gaylord, on the road to Hutchinson, the lowering rain clouds dissolve for a moment and I am driving through a great sunlit amphitheater five or six miles in circumference rimmed by black and blue rainstorms. The beams of oblique light falling through crests of the storm-clouds paint the yellow center-line of the highway the color of a Halloween pumpkin.
63.
A little later, the prairie shines on remote hilltops, but I can’t tell where the light originates. Near the Minnesota River, the trees on the bluffs are colored like Rembrant paintings, dusky golds and browns, a soft blur of color where the rolling fields tilt down toward the wooded valley.
64.
As I drive along the channels of the Minnesota river, the sky darkens and raindrops spatter my windshield. The river looks immeasurably ancient, still and motionless under the cracked, naked trees that guard it.
65.
On the radio, an announcer tells me that rain will commence around midnight and will “continue while you are asleep,” assuming I suppose what the young must assume: we all sleep soundly in the gentle night.
66.
East of Mankato, on the road home, darkness slowly blurs the world. Do you know what it is like to be reading on your porch in twilight when it is too dim really to make our letters and words on the page before you? It’s the same with the landscape, the words of trees and swamps and plowed hillsides are now fading from view, too dark to be legible.
April 27, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment