On a Stone

 

“A Parable” is a poem in Louise Glueck’s 1985 collection The Triumph of Achilles.  In “A Parable,” the poet recounts two episodes from the life of David – the killing of Goliath and his desire for Bathsheba.  The verse has a double-perspective.  We see David and his accession to power after killing Goliath through the eyes of the Jews that he rules.  Then, we are provided with David’s emotional response to the power that he has attained.  The poem’s strategy involves doubling: we interpret the two scenes from David’s life, one military and the other erotic; an interior and exterior perspective on these episodes is also provided.  

Relatively short, “A Parable” is built from about 30 unrhymed lines.  The poem locates the heart of David’s story in the moments of transition – from “hero to god, god to ruler.”  These transitions are instants in which energy changes form.  David’s power passes over a “precipice” in which “the stone is gone; now / the hand is the weapon.”  The verse advises that it is these moments in which power changes form that “we don’t want to hear about.”  I think this means that we are interested in hearing about exploits – that is, the death of Goliath – but, not, the manner in which this adventure becomes something else: in this case, oppressive political power.  From David’s victory on the battlefield, Glueck cuts to an image of the King, now entrapped in his power and isolated amidst his own “amplified desire” watching Bathsheba “like a flower in tub”.  Her face appears against “the shining city of Jerusalem”.  The woman and the city are the prizes that David has won through his exploits.  But he is now becalmed: he realizes that “he has attained / all he is capable of dreaming.”  The poem is curiously inert and still – in the moment of transition, power, like a spark of electricity, leaps the gap between different states of being.  But what seems to be important in the moment of transition is the gap itself, the silent empty space between stone and hand, between hero and god, the space between Bathsheba and David who contemplates her, the abstract serene emptiness of a dream attained.  

Glueck’s diction is clear and she doesn’t litter her poem with showy descriptions of the events portrayed.  Her writing takes on the scrupulous, abstract plainness of parable as suggested by the poem’s title.  This plain style of discourse is made evident in Glueck’s account of David picking up the stone that he will use in his sling: (“this young boy”)...picks up a stone among the cold, unspecified / rocks of the hillside.”  The word on which I wish to focus is the adjective “unspecified” – the rocks are “unspecified”, that is not identified by their “species” or kind.  The lethal stone amongst them is similarly “unspecified”.  It’s just a generic rock.

Two reflections on “unspecified” stone occur to me.  First, there is the problem of representation.  When an artist sets out to recreate a scene known from parable, inevitably details must be supplied.  Such details are superfluous to the bare skeleton of the parable’s narrative.  The speaker conveying the parable left out certain elements of the scene or, more likely, didn’t even bother to imagine them.  The Biblical writers don’t tell us what the Virgin Mary looks like – she is a generic, “unspecified” young woman: we don’t her height or weight or the color of her eyes and hair; we don’t know what her face looks like or how she moves or whether her teeth are straight or crooked.  None of these characteristics are significant to the writer’s conception of the parable or Biblical account.  But when an image of the Virgin is created, all of these elements must be imagined and represented.  Painted in oils, the Virgin must have a certain physical form, a shape, hair color and complexion – her eyes must be imagined and the shape of her nose and lips.  A young woman may be “unspecified” in a narrative, but she can’t be a mere generic fog in an oil painting or sculpture.  Similarly, Glueck’s poem begins with modest description – there’s a hillside, some flowers, a few corpses lying at “the bottom of the hill.”  David is first seen as a “nobody” (that is, without specificity) moving from “one plain to another” – there is a pun on the word “plain”; the poem is about transitions from one plane to another.  But as he becomes a hero and emerges into history, details have to be supplied – he can’t remain a “nobody”.  The stone can remain “unspecified” at the outset, as vague as Glueck’s “nobody” protagonist, but when hero becomes god becomes ruler, the fall into history is also a descent into the specific.  

There is a second broader point that arises from consideration of the “unspecified rocks”.  We can glimpse this idea in the description that Glueck provides of the flowers on the hillside where David picks up the stone: they are few, “white flowers / like stars, the leaves, woolly, sage-green.”  Here, a plant is named – sage.  The texture of the leaves is described with considerable specificity and a simile is used to convey the appearance of the “white flowers”.  Two colors are identified: white and the highly specific “sage-green.”  Comparison between the “unspecified” stone and the highly specific flowers points to an interesting phenomenon in writing: in world literature, so far as I know, flowers are named and made specific; stones, by contrast, aren’t specified with respect to their nature or composition – we aren’t told whether David’s stone is metamorphic, sedimentary, or igneous; the color of the rock, it’s crystal structure and hardness aren’t made specific; in Glueck’s poem, the stone doesn’t even have a shape.  

Flowers have names; a stone is just a stone.  This is particularly obvious in Shakespeare.  In the spectacularly flowery A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the course of one short speech, characters specify wild thyme, violet, oxlips, the sweet musk rose with eglantine.  Elsewhere, Shakespeare’s figures speak of wood bine, rosemary, fennel, columbine, pansies, daisies, daffodils, savoury, lavender, mint, marjoram, marigolds “that go to bed with the sun,” veitch, poppy, plantain, parsley, pimpernal, love-in-idleness and heart’s ease.  Examples can be multiplied from the poems of Milton, Wordsworth and, even, William Carlos Williams.  When a plant is described, the poet takes care to make its kind known.  But when the mise-en-scene requires a rock, it’s just an “unspecified” stone.  Obviously, the human imagination is wired to identify plants and flowers by name. Minerals have names too and specific characteristics, but these are rarely mentioned in literature.  (The situation is somewhat different in oil painting; a few artists have painted specific stones of a certain geological aspect – a notable example is Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” (1480) at the Frick Collection; Bellini seems to have painted real rock formations with great specificity to the extent that the minerals comprising the formation can be identified.  Cezanne’s paintings of rock quarries have this characteristic as well.)  It’s worth asking why writers take care to specify the exact types of flower imagined in a certain landscape but show little interest in the stones and sediments from which those flowers grow.  Of course, stones are inert, at least across the time spans in which we are capable of observing them whereas flowers are animate: they bud, blossom, and wither.  Writers tend to characterize precious metals and gemstones – topaz, agate, sapphire, emerald are, I suppose, the flowers of the mineral kingdom.  But who speaks for schist, granite, sandstone, feldspar, rhyolite, quartzite, and all the other “unspecified” stones in the natural world?

On Pueblo Bonito and the Quaternary

 

Pueblo Bonito, the largest and oldest archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, was excavated (more accurately despoiled) twice – the Wetherill expedition (Smithsonian) conducted digs here between 1896 and 1900 and, later, National Geographic explored the ruins in the 1920's.  These excavations took place at the dawn of modern scientific archaeology and they were primitive and destructive by today’s standard.  Explorers remarked that desert nights were cold and so the archaeology teams burned big timbers found in the debris to keep themselves warm.  These bonfires forever eliminated tree-ring evidence in support beams that might have been used today for very accurate dating as to building construction and, then, remodeling at the site occupied from 850 to 1150 AD.  Everything that could be found was rooted up from its context and sent to museums on the East Coast.  Accordingly, it was generally thought that the Great House has given up its secrets and that there was little left to discover at Pueblo Bonito.  This may be true in some respects, but the original excavators kept copious notes and journals of their findings and this written record can be explored –that is, excavated in its own right – to make new and additional discoveries.

Dr. Hannah Mattson (Department of Anthropology at New Mexico University) has examined record entries made during these excavations, now more than 100 years old, to determine whether this written material contains clues as to Chaco cosmology.  The Chaco people are called “ancestral Pueblo” in light of the fact that their descendants radiated away from the canyon to form the Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni communities in Arizona and New Mexico, particularly the well-understood villages near Taos and Santa Fe on the Rio Grande River.  Dr. Mattson’s study was to determine whether directionality intrinsic to Tewa and other modern pueblo cultures can be linked to evidence found in Chaco Canyon, particularly in the heavily excavated Pueblo Bonito great house.  

Native American cultures divide space into four quarters with an up (“zenith”) and a down (“nadir”).  Unlike European societies that imagine lines radiating from a so-called “compass rose,” Indians thought of horizontal space as comprising four quarters – that is, a quaternary organization of landscape.  Colors are associated with the different quarters – typically white, red, yellow and black, as well as blue-green (Southwestern Indians didn’t distinguish between shades of blue and green ordinarily using one word to denote that part of the color spectrum.)  Various historical pueblo societies orient colors according to different paradigms.  However, the principle for spatial organization into color-coded quaternaries remains a pattern throughout these cultural groups.

There’s no reason to think that the people in Chaco Canyon didn’t map space in a similar way.  It’s evident that Chaco Canyon’s great houses are organized according to a quaternary geometry and that its architects designed structures and road systems to embody this sort of directional order.  Pueblo Bonito, the type-site for Chaco great houses, is shaped like an enormous “D” lying on its side.  The long axis of the “D” is oriented east-west to within about two degrees of the true directions. The “D” shaped assemblage of enclosed rooms is divided at its center with a bisecting wall, a stout structure that runs perfectly north-south.  The great house varied between 600 and 800 rooms.  Many scholars, notably Stephen Lekson, describe the vast complex (it occupies three acres) as a dynastic palace.  Despite the building’s great size, it did not house many people, likely only members of an elite family and their retainers.  The place contains two celebrated mortuary crypts, the most famous being “Room 33".  A walled enclosure in the center of the oldest part of the pueblo, the chamber contains a subsurface, timbered shaft-grave in which two skeletons were found.  One of the individuals had perished violently and was buried with thousands of marine shells and turquoise beads.  Similar, mortuary trappings were found around the second skeleton, presumably someone relating to the first body.  It’s generally believed that these are the bodies of the founding family at Chaco Canyon.  Over the next three-hundred years, eleven other people were interred above the sub-floor crypt in Room 33.  DNA testing published in 2017 revealed that the skeletons were related through matrilineal lines – apparently, political power was passed down through mothers and the people buried in Room 33 must have represented a political dynasty.  

Lampedusa in his novel The Leopard has one of his aristocrats ask the rhetorical question: “What use is a palace in which every room is known to its owners?”  The vast labyrinthine structure now called Pueblo Bonito may have expanded to embrace a similar concept of grandeur.  Many of the interior rooms would have been airless black cavities in the huge pile of masonry core walls – the construction style is called “core and veneer,” that is, a stone rubble core covered in lime-based plaster.  In places, the palace was four or five stories high.  Therefore, it seems unlikely that anyone could have mastered a map as to the interior lay-out of the pueblo.  Most likely, whole portions of the edifice were abandoned or devoted to storage for hundreds of years.  The people who ruled from the Pueblo dwelt inside a vast intimidating maze which even they didn’t fully understand.  

Within the pueblo, there are 35 kivas.  Modern-day pueblo people uses round-shaped, subterranean pits for ceremonial purposes and as lodge headquarters for ritual or secret societies.  The function of kivas in Chaco Canyon’s buildings remains a matter of conjecture.  It seems that some were sacred spaces, others were used for domestic activities and storage; some may have been public places for large meetings.  Each ancient pueblo contains one or two so-called great kivas – that is, round silos sunk in the ground that may be between 30 and 60 feet in diameter.  These structures are ringed with stone benches and have various ceremonial appurtenances, including astronomically aligned fire pits and vent holes as well as the so-called Sipapu, small navel-like orifices thought to simulate the hole through which the races of men and animals emerged at the dawn of time.  Mattson, in her study of Chaco directionality, examined evidence recorded in the 21 smaller “court kivas” in Pueblo Bonito.

“Court kivas” are similar to the Great Kivas but smaller – they are between 12 and 24 feet in diameter.  These structures feature a circumferential bench, masonry and heavily built, from which spring brick pilasters.  The pilasters support elaborate ceiling structures comprised of log-cribbing.  Chaco Canyon lacks timber resources; it’s set in an arid and treeless desert.  Accordingly, the log beams comprising the “Court kiva” ceilings were harvested in the Chuska Mountains fifty miles to the West.  Each ceiling contains dozens of heavy beams and represents an enormous investment in labor.  The people at Chaco Canyon had no pack animals and so the 15 foot long beams would have been cut in the wooded mountains and, then, carried by hand across the desert to the complex at Pueblo Bonito.  

It is sometimes surmised that the potency of elaborate ritual structures arises, at least in part, in the expenditure of energy and human capital in building these places.  In other words, construction is sacramental in itself and may comprise an important aspect of ritual consecrating these structures.  Clearly, the use of heavy wood timber in a barren desert was significant in itself, a lavish expenditure demonstrating the importance of the sacred space.  This is further established by the fact that offerings were placed in alcoves in the pilasters supporting the wooden beams.  These alcoves were sealed and became inaccessible to the people using the kiva.  The pilaster alcove offerings are the source of the data that Mattson amasses in support of her conclusions as to Chaco directionality.

A total of 122 pilaster offerings are documented in field notes as to the excavations at Pueblo Bonito.  Depending on its size, each Court kiva had between six and ten pilasters.  The location of pilasters can be reconstructed from field note sketches and measurements.  And, with some difficulty, Mattson was able to correlate recorded offerings – that is, the objects extracted from the pilaster alcoves – with the location of these support structures.  Chaco Canyon “Court” kivas are carefully constructed accordingly to directional plan – east-west axes are within 2 degrees of true.

Mattson classifies the 10,000 objects recorded as pilaster offerings into six categories: white, red, black, blue-green, multi-colored and translucent.  Offerings were arranged in the following quaternary colors: East is mostly white with some green-blue; South is mostly green-blue; West is red and North     Translucent objects were found in all quadrants.  The color-scheme isn’t exact – all offerings contained some artifacts from each quadrant – but statistically the color system identified by Mattson is obvious and intentionally observed by the Court kiva builders.

It helps to visualize the artifacts making up the color groups.  White is represented by marine shell (imported from the Gulf of California 800 miles away), gypsum, and bone.  Ocher, chert, spondylus shell, and hematite comprise the red group.  Black objects are jet, shales, obsidian, and galena crystals.  Blue-Green objects are mostly turquoise, but also azurite and malachite.  Iridescent abalone shell (also from the Gulf of California) is characterized as multi-colored by Mattson.  Translucent objects, found in each pilaster offering, include crystals of various kinds, selenite, and quartz.  White artifacts with blue-green are found in all offerings.  However, there is four times the amount of turquoise in the South-Southeast pilaster offerings.

Blue-Green, possibly representing water, is heavily correlated with South-South East alignments.  In fact, Chaco Canyon’s structures are generally oriented along a South / Southeast axis – five of the seven great houses in the canyon embody this feature.  The Chaco world, in general, was bounded by natural landmarks – to the South, Mount Taylor, a high peak that is capped in snow for much of the year; the green-black evergreen ridges of the Chuska Mountains are located to the West.  Shiprock, a massive volcanic plug that assumes the colors of the time of day in which it is seen appears to have been a Northwest boundary to the Chaco homelands. To the East, Huerfano Mesa bounds the San Juan basin (as it is called today) in which the Chaco people lived.  

All modern pueblo people imagine the cosmos in terms of a zenith, nadir, and four quadrants.  Historical pueblo people living in post-contact times, always associate white with the East.  All present-day pueblo cultures have a yellow quadrant, although it’s directional association alters between Tewa, Zuni, and Hopi groups.  Mattson points to longstanding cultural continuities between the Chaco people (ancestral Pueblo) and modern Pueblo; however, she also observes that cultural patterns change within the fixed quaternary template.  Modern tribal archaeologists regard the Chaco kivas as symbolizing a cosmography.  The elaborate, massive, and labor-intensive kiva roofs, probably, symbolize the sky.  This sky is upheld and supported by four cardinal directions, that is, kiva pilasters oriented in quadrants.  This world-map is further organized according to qualities associated with these quadrants, those qualities identified by the pilaster offerings which signify the red of the earth, blood and human flesh; bone and sea shells correlate to the white quarter; turquoise signifies the throb of water flowing underground or falling in greenish sheets from the sky.  In modern pueblo thought, the sky is a basket inverted over the earth or, perhaps, a ceremonial ceramic – the Chaco people may have believed something on this order and, possibly, kivas imagined as representing this world-structure.  (There is similar continuity between the Chaco kivas and archaic basket-maker pit houses the preceded the Chaco cultural phenomenon – pit houses also show directionality and are oriented according to S - SW axes.)  

In London, there is a painting executed by the French artist, Nicholas Poussin called “Dance to the Music of Time.”  On the canvas, we behold a rondel or ring-dance: four figures with linked hands, facing outward and skipping in a circle.  The figures are classically attired in flowing drapery that fails to fully cover their breasts and shoulders.  The dancers seem to be color-coded: one wears a vivid green skirt, two are clad in tangerine colored smocks, and the fourth, a rosy-cheeked and self-satisfied maiden who gazes with a complicit smile at the viewer, is dressed in blue flowing blouse and red-orange skirt.  This figure wears an elaborate floral garland in her hair.  To the left of the ring dance, a herm of two-faced Janus scowls at the dancers – the ritual dance takes place in the past and future simultaneously. The columnar pillar of the herm is also draped in flowers.  At the right lower edge of the painting, a putti plays with an hour-glass while an old man with wings strums a figure-eight shaped lyre, also vaguely orange in color – this is Father Time.  Apollo flies overhead in blurry chariot shaped like a golden bowl – some female figures floating behind the chariot recapitulate the terrestrial ring dance and a goddess carrying a laurel precedes the god.  Apollo brandishes a big golden ring – it’s a bit like an enlarged hula hoop; this represents the Zodiac.  The landscape in which these events occur is a bit misty, moist, as if exuding vapors in the aftermath of a Spring shower – two trees that seem to be just budding decorate the watery landscape and there are some storm clouds overhead, a bit like the thunderheads that you see in New Mexico threatening rain that never quite reaches the ground.

The painting is an elaborate allegory: the dancing figures represent an eternal procession in human affairs: Poverty induces Labor, Labor leads to Wealth, Wealth is spent in Pleasure, and a surfeit of Pleasure leads back to Poverty – hence the ring dance is has no beginning and no end.  Further, the dance of these four emblematic figures is organized according to the four musical modes recognized by the ancient Greeks:  the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian.  Poussin’s “Dance to the Music of Time” was painted in 1632.  Around that same time, a renaissance writer, Giovanni Battista Doni wrote a treatise called Il Trattato della musica scenica.  Doni’s ambition was to revive the Greek musical modes in the context of masques or scenic interludes presented during plays by Seneca that he staged for the Barberini family and their intimates. (The Barberini were Roman nobility and art patrons, prominent in the 17th century – Pope Urban the VIII was a member of the clan; Bernini worked extensively for them.)

Doni imagined the Greek musical modes, representing the four principal and equal tones, as quaternaries complex with symbolic associations.  Each mode correlated to a season of the year, one of the four humors governing human moods, as well as to one of the four elements.  Doni writes:

For example, the Dorian we assign to Melancholy, to Autumn, to the earth and to dryness.  This Phrygian, to the choleric temperament, Summer, Fire and Heat.  The Lydian to the sanguine temperament, to Winter, to water, to cold...to the Ages and Passions: infancy will be given to the Mixolydian, Adolescence, the Lydian, Youth, the Phrygian and Old Age the Dorian.  To Love, Joy, and Delight, the Lydian, to Pain, Sadness and suffering, the Mixolydian,; to Wrath and Fury, the Phrygian.  

Thus, Doni conceives the four-fold or the quaternary that governs human existence in all its forms, moods, and ages.  Probably, Chaco philosophers imagined their world, constructed in four quadrants, in similar terms.  If we substitute an Indian drum circle for the figure of Father Time in Poussin’s painting, we can conceive of the four dancing figures as executing a circle-dance, a shuffling rondel rotating around an axis representing the dimension between the nadir and the zenith.  All of the characteristics of the world and its four quadrants can be interpreted as present in the rondel. But the Indians with porcupine roaches, elaborate feather headdresses, turquoise bracelets and pendants, beaded moccasins and shields of galena and copper mirror catching the sun would have been much better dressed than Poussin’s classically attired dancers.   

On a Battlefield full of Fish

 

1.

Not one of the 332 miles between Austin and Fargo was without rain.  The day was grey, cold, wet.  Distances receded into veils of mist.  Rain hid the ends of roads.

2.

I thought it would be, perhaps, preferable to spend my visit indoors.  Was there a museum in Grand Forks that we could visit?  Bismarck and the State Historical Society were too remote – three hours away in the fog of falling rain.  Maybe there was a movie that would amuse my grandchildren, Hannah and Lucas.  But nothing interesting was playing.  My son, Martin suggested that we visit some battlefields from the Indian War of 1863.  The places weren’t marked on a map but he said that he knew how to reach them.

3.

Next to my hotel: a flat vacant lot with lagoons of melt-water goose-pimply with falling rain.  Shoals of garbage and ruts around the dumpster, more ruts squeezing up parallel columns of black mud in the puddles, plastic bottles, fast food sacks melting in the water, horizontal slabs of featureless grey sky fallen to earth as reflected in the shallow lagoons.

4.

Pelting rain on the way west on I94.  Roadside ditches brimming over with water in long estuaries running beside the freeway.  Fenceposts peeping timorously above the flood.  At Valley City, the Sheyenne River has overflowed its banks and a community of sheds and outbuildings are all swamped – obscure outflows and eddies and whirls in people’s drowned backyards.

5.

West of Jamestown, the freeway skirts glacial potholes, lakes standing between barren hills, always one of two of these bodies of water in view from the highway.  The prairie is naked between the ponds and narrow water-filled slots in the hills.  Braided white-water rapids pouring down the sloping ditches next to the road.

6.

Medina Rest Stop – mile marker 224, seventy miles east of Bismarck. The rest area occupies a triangular spit of land between two lakes or, perhaps, the lobes of a single body of water.  The lakes are green, agitated, pushing up water to their edges, pulsing as if anxious to overwhelm the fringe of reeds encircling them.  Cold wet wind blows in the copse of trees sheltering the brick toilet building.  The storm has energized the landscape, made it active and tense, coiled like vibrating spring.  Put all these lakes together – each about three-hundred yards long and a hundred wide – and you have a tremulous inland ocean.  Sheltering in shallows next to the reeds: ducks of all species, geese, loons like miniature battleships bobbing on the turbulent water.

7.

On June 16, 1863, Henry Hastings Sibley, commanding 2050 men, left Fort Ridgely in the Minnesota River Valley, marching West into Dakota Territory.  A year before, the Dakota had risen in an insurrection against the Federal government.  The Indians massacred the settlers living around the Minnesota River, abducted women and children, and laid siege to the fort from which Sibley’s force departed in 1863.  Of course, the rebellion was short-lived and after some intense fighting, the hostiles who had killed the most pioneers fled north to Canada.  Captured warriors were hanged and those Indians unable to flee the State were marched cross-country to a prison camp on the cold flats under Fort Snelling where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers come to a confluence.  Sibley’s 1863 summer campaign was to strike westward with militia troops, and some units of federal troops recruited from within Minnesota, pursuing the hostile Indians remaining south of the Canadian border.  Bands of aggrieved Sioux still roamed the border between Minnesota and the vast prairies of the Dakota Territory and, in fact, settlers had been killed even after the mass execution of warriors at Mankato.  Since the raids continued, Sibley’s objective was to drive the Lakota-speaking tribes across the Missouri.  The army column also would interdict the Sioux bison hunt, deprive the Indians of sustenance, and, if possible, starve them to death.   

8.

Henry Hastings Sibley was born in 1811 in Michigan territory near Detroit.  He was educated at a frontier academy and learned some Greek and Latin.  His father urged him to study law but the young man found the discipline “irksome” and he joined the American Fur Company as an agent.  In 1834, the 23-year-old Sibley was appointed manager of the Company’s Mendota agency.  This was a fur trading operation located in the shadow of Fort Snelling in the Minnesota territory.  Sibley established cordial, and mutually profitable, relations with the Mdewankanton band of the Santee Sioux living in the rich river bottoms where the two great rivers joined.  Indeed, his relations with the Sioux were more than cordial.  He married a chieftain’s daughter, Red Blanket Woman “after the Dakota manner” and had a daughter with her, Helen Hastings or Wakiye (“Bird”). A couple years later, Sibley married a white woman, Sarah Jean Steele with whom he had nine children (only four survived the rigors of the frontier).  Sibley remained close to Helen Hastings and, in fact, participated in her marriage much to the chagrin of Sarah Jean.  (Bird died a year after she was married and Sibley was said to be grief-stricken, although he never legally acknowledged the young woman as his daughter – alliances based on kinship were common in the fur trading enterprise and most of the successful agents were involved with native women or mixed race themselves.)  Sibley became wealthy, invested in dry goods stores, saw mills and steam ships and, indeed, was Minnesota’s first governor, serving a two year term between 1858 and 1860.  When the Sioux Uprising occurred, Sibley led militias against the Santee band involved in the conflict.  He was an inept commander, timid and indecisive and he moved his forces at a snail’s pace.  Nonetheless, he achieved some victories in the field, liberated prisoners held by the Santee Sioux, and received some acclaim, albeit limited, for his success in the 1862 rescue campaign.  Sibley was a handsome man, although engravings in the 1860's show him with a perpetually astonished look on his somewhat soft and cherubic figures.  He had good posture and his ramrod-straight carriage on horse-back looked impressive.  When the second governor, Alexander Ramsey, after the 1862 conflict, vowed to drive the Sioux “forever beyond the borders of the State”, Sibley, although not much of soldier, was the available man.  He was commissioned to lead the summer offensive against the Indians in 1863.  Someone might have asked Governor Ramsey, after the manner of dialogue in Rio Bravo: “A former fur trader and small-time merchant with no military experience except wrangling vengeful pioneers into a rag-tag command, a poor tactician and worst strategist – is that all you’ve got?”  To which, of course, Ramsey would have responded: “It’s what I’ve got.”  

9.

Inkpaduta was a Lakota-speaking war chief and Sibley’s adversary during the 1863 campaign in Dakota Territory.  He was a big man, very ugly, and, probably, about 70 years old during the fighting with Sibley’s forces.  Inkpaduta led a band of Dakota who roamed northwest Iowa as “wild” Indians – in other words, his clan wasn’t signatory to any of the treaties with the Whites.  Being a “wild” Indian in the 1850's was perilous – Inkpaduta’s people were outside of the law and the victims of all sorts of egregious injustice.  Members of his family were killed by White militias and his brother’s head was nailed over the door of a prosecuting attorney’s office near Fort Dodge, Iowa.  During the severe winter of 1857, Inkpaduta’s band was starving.  The Indians raided settlements at Spirit Lake, Iowa and killed 38 Whites.  Some columns of militia cavalry were sent to punish Inkpaduta, but he fled west into Dakota territory and escaped retribution.  (Some historians think that Inkpaduta’s success in killing settlers and eluding punishment emboldened the Minnesota Sioux’s insurrection in 1862.)  Inkpaduta was the senior war-chief when Sibley marched west into the Dakotas.  Among his warriors was a young Hunkpapa brave named Sitting Bull.  Inkpaduta never surrendered, was never taken into custody, and, in fact, died in Manitoba in 1881, probably about 84 years old.  He was at the Little Big Horn and saw Custer’s force rubbed-out.  A single photograph purports to show Inkpaduta (like Crazy Horse he didn’t like cameras and the picture is obviously taken without his consent.)  Inkpaduta is an old man with a huge nose and little slit eyes – the photograph is not sufficiently clear to show the small pox scars that disfigured his face.

10.

Martin says that the 1863 battle sites are north of the Tappen exit off I-94.  We have come to within about 70 miles of Bismarck, now 130 miles west of Fargo.  Sheets of icy cold rain are falling.  The exit sluices down off the freeway where the blacktop highway ends at the end for ramp.  A grim-looking gravel road, running along a section line, I assume, angles to the north.  If there is a town somewhere around this place, it’s invisible to me.  

11.

In fact, Tappen is tic-tac-toe grid of streets on the south side of the freeway, a tavern, post-office, and an abandoned school.  In July of 2021, 215 people lived there.  The place is so small that on the north side of the interstate, where 397th Street runs through the prairie between frigid lakes, there are no services of any kind, no gas station, no convenience store, no trace at all of the tiny habitation on other side of the interstate.  It’s just naked prairie, rain-sodden and windy.  This is Kidder County, pop. 2394 (in 2018), 1,433 square miles of which 82 are water.  

12.

Northeast of Tappen, water fowl gather in great flocks at the glacial pothole lakes.  These lakes are part of several wild life refuges and, therefore, monitored by state authorities.  In 2004, a population of 29,000 white pelicans simply vanished.  One day they were on the lake, the next day they were gone.  (Birds have wings and they fly, but, apparently, the sudden disappearance was alarming to those who study such things.)  The next year, 2005, the birds had returned albeit in lower numbers – the estimated population of the flock was 19,000.  The birds nested and produced chicks.  But, for some reason, the chicks all died, probably about 8000 of them.  Authorities suggested West Nile disease, but the cause of the die-off wasn’t established.  Natural Resources officials also noted conspicuous die-offs in the cormorants nesting the the wild life reserves.  Sea gulls also frequent the glacial lakes area and they also seemed to be dying in great numbers.  What was happening?

13.

In October 2005, a cattle rancher living near Tappen lost a cow and a big suckling calf.  He said that the animals had “overeaten and bloated”.  The dead cattle had fallen in a gully a few hundred yards from the ranch house, a small compound of buildings with a long metal shed located in an old shelter belt.   Normally, coyotes and other predators cleaned up dead livestock and so the rancher, Torrey Briese, just left the animals where they had dropped.

Six months later, Briese was surprised to discover that cow’s carcass was completely intact, apparently untouched by birds and coyotes.  By contrast, the dead calf had been stripped to its bones by predators and the bones, scattered across the ravine, had been gnawed apart. The intact, mummified cow still rested in the bottom of the gully.  When Briese inspected the animal in April 2006, he found that incisions, seemingly cut with a scalpel-sharp blade, had been made in the hide covering the beast’s shoulder.  The incisions outlined a wedge-shaped pattern on the animal’s hide, this figure criss-crossed with a grid of straight-line cuts.  Briese had never seen anything like this and, so, he took several pictures with his cell-phone.

On April 6, 2006, Evan Briese had a couple of cows that were ready to calf.  Evan was 16 years old at that time, the eldest son of five children in the household of the rancher, Torrey Briese.  It was midnight and with his cattle-dog, Buster, Evan walked out into the corral near the house.  The cattle were fine.  Then, Evan saw some blue lights flickering behind a hill in the pasture.  With his dog, he ascended the slope and look down over the rolling praire to a “dug out” – that is, a manmade pond – located about 140 yards away.  From the hilltop, Evan saw a round triangle-shaped form resting next to the “dug out”.  (There was a pig corral in that area.)   The triangle-shaped vessel had three oval apertures from which bright blue lights were flashing.  The lights didn’t seem to follow the normal laws of optics.  The beams bent over hills and turned corners, slowly sweeping over the adjacent landscape “as if searching for something.”  Evan’s dog was startled and sat quietly for awhile.  Then, the animal began to bark and ran toward the wedge-shaped vessel with the blue lights.  The triangle-shaped craft lifted into the air without making any sound at all and, then, flew away over the Briese’s homestead, blue lights raking across the fields and outbuildings.

Torrey Briese, Evan’s father, was startled by a “rushing noise” – apparently, now, the blue triangular vessel was no longer silent.  Gazing out his bedroom window, Torrey saw the blue light sweeping over his compound.

A few days later, while Torrey Briese was working with some friends on a car, the flying wedge appeared again and its beams searched the prairie.  Several people witnessed this event.  Torrey and Evan Briese were convinced that the “etching” on the dead cow’s hide was a representation of the strange flying triangle; a “calling card” they said.  It seems peculiar that extraterrestrials with advanced technology would announce their presence by inscribing an image of their craft on the hide of a petrified cow.  But the world is full of marvels.

14. 

Between Friday, July 24 and Tuesday, July 28, 1863, Sibley’s forces fought the Sioux three times in the hilly, lake-dotted prairie north of present-day Tappen, North Dakota.  These encounters have been named the battles of Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Stony Lake.  The fighting resulted in about a half-dozen dead on Sibley’s side.  Sibley estimated that the Indians lost 150 warriors in this combat.  But Indian-fighters were always prone to over-estimate enemy casualties.  One of the combatants, Standing Buffalo, counted 13 Sioux killed in the fighting. The armed forces on the two sides engaged in these battles were about equally matched in manpower.  Sibley’s expeditionary force had far superior fire power, including the two mountain howitzers, weapons that the Indians feared.  This was before the Wagon Box fight in the Powder River War five years later and before Fetterman’s forces were wiped out by Dakota armed with sophisticated repeating rifles.  Most of the Sioux were armed with bow and arrow and war clubs.  Further, the Indians were hampered by the fact that they were fighting rear-guard actions to cover the retreat of non-combatant women and children.  Sibley’s strategy was to squeeze the Indians between his forces marching westward and General Sully’s army ascending the Missouri to cut off the Sioux retreat.  But the Spring and Summer had been hot and dry and Missouri River was very low; Sully’s expedition made slow progress northward, often having to unload the troops and tug the steamers upriver over muddy shoals, and so the army approaching on the Missouri was nowhere near the theater of battle when the fighting occurred.

15.

On Friday, July 24, 1863, the day was humid and storms threatened.  The air was still but distant thunder could sometimes be heard.  Patrols in advance of Sibley’s column sighted large numbers of Indians fanned out in a crescent formation in some high country between two big, somber lakes.  Marshes everywhere impeded Sibley’s march and there was always water in sight – the troughs between the treeless hills of the tall grass prairie were full of lakes, some of them long fingers of water, others oval or polymorphous with many little inlets and bays.  In some places, narrow causeways of marsh separated adjacent lagoons.  The columns movement across the country was through labyrinth of water.  

Sibley was never anxious to rush into battle; his style was timorous and hesitant.  His column stopped its advance a few hundred yards from a knuckle of grass protruding from steep, broken prairie ridges.  The hostiles seemed to want to parley.  Sibley sent his Indian scouts, friendly Sioux themselves, forward to meet with their counterparts, enemy scouts who had been directing the Dakota movements.  A few advance elements of Sibley’s force hunkered down near the round knoll where the two groups of scouts met, the so-called Big Mound.

16.

It’s not entirely clear what was discussed between the scouts during their conversation atop the mound.  The friendly and hostile scouts would have known one another and, likely, been kin.  No doubt, they wished to avoid a battle.  The Sioux were retreating toward the Missouri and surely intended to cross that river.  It was obvious Sully’s force was nowhere near and couldn’t cut off the Sioux hostiles at the river.  So what would be the point of fighting?  The Indians were going, more or less, where Sibley wanted them to go.  The stakes at this parley were higher for the Sioux than for Sibley.  Sioux warriors were under no compulsion – you fought if you wanted.  By contrast, Sibley could have recalcitrant soldiers flogged over, even, hanged.  Each Indian was a free agent and made his own decisions.

17.

An army surgeon named Josiah Weiser was watching the parley on the hilltop.  He recognized some Indians among the hostile scouts with whom he had been friends.  Probably, he had gone hunting with them and likely provided medical services to their families when he was stationed at one of the forts near Indian encampments.  The Sioux looked hungry and disheveled so Dr. Weiser brought some hardtack and tobacco with him as he walked uphill to where the Indians were conferring.  A photograph of Weiser shows a man of about 35 dressed in military uniform with impressive black whiskers.  Dr. Weiser greeted the Indians that he knew and shook hands with them.  He distributed the hardtack and tobacco.  Then, he turned around to walk down the hill.  A hothead from among Inkpaduta’s people shot Weiser in the back.  Gunfire erupted from the opposing forces, although the combatants were at long distance from one another.  Inkpaduta’s warriors were the most aggressive.  They had killed many White settlers five years earlier at Spirit Lake, taken women and children prisoner (and, then, slaughtered their hostages when they couldn’t keep up with the march), and all of Inkpaduta’s braves knew that, if captured, they would be hanged.  Probably, the young man who killed Weiser was afraid that any settlement between the opposing forces might result in his arrest.  In any event, the die was now cast and fighting ensued.

18.

The shooting lasted about three hours.  The Indians made some desultory charges in the cover of grassy ravines splitting up the soldier’s position.  Sibley’s six-pound howitzers cleared these avenues of attack.  The guns were tugged up to the top of the Big Mound, possibly called MacPhail Butte today.  The sky darkened and falling rain blistered the surfaces of the lakes.  Lightning began to strike and probe at the skirmish lines.  A bolt of lightning crashed down on Colonel Samuel MacPhail who was directing the artillery fire and he was killed.  There was more rain and lighting and, in the storm, the fighting ceased.  Weiser’s body was retrieved from the slopes of the Big Mound and carried to camp where it was buried that night.  MacPhail was buried where the lightning killed him, on the high point of the ridge.  

19.

The aliens weren’t done with Evan Briese.  In September 2006, the 16 year old boy got up at 1:20 am (by the kitchen clock) to go to the toilet and get a drink of water.  A window over the kitchen sink opens onto the farmyard where there was a steel pole barn and a hog corral partially walled by tall strips of corrugated steel.  (In the pictures, the steel panels look to be cannibalized from a defunct grain bin.)  A yard light cast its rays over the hog corral and Briese saw some figures amidst the pigs.  Briese picked up his loaded .22 and went out to investigate.  The figures were unearthly, very tall and slender with long arms and hands bearing black talons.  Two of the figures were clawing at the pig.  The animal seemed to be dead – at least, it wasn’t squealing or making any noise.  Briese was appalled that the creatures were “screwing around” with his pet pig.  This was docile female, very friendly, who came to Evan’s call when he went out to the corral to scratch her ears and belly.  Evan Briese raised his .22 rifle to his shoulder and shot one of creatures.  It emitted a high-pitched howl, an alien sound unlike the noises that people make “when they are hurt.”  Then, something grabbed Evan from behind and he blacked-out.  When he awoke, he was alone in a pasture, running toward the house where his sister lived with her fiancee.  Several claw-marks had slit open his black Adidas tee-shirt.  Amazingly, the long, hooked talons on the creature’s hand had not cut open his skin.  A couple of tiny scratches were visible on his chest under his clavicle.  Authorities were called, but the sheriff’s deputy was afraid to enter a stand of shelter belt trees behind the hog corral.  The pig that the aliens had been clawing vanished without a trace.  A couple days later, a dead ram was discovered on a neighbor’s farm.  The animal wasn’t wounded in any way except for a surgical incision in its scrotum – one testicle had been removed.  Evan was traumatized.  He was angry that he hadn’t been able to save his pet pig.  He said that God had made many planets but only one Earth.  Jesus had come to save the people of the Earth and God “didn’t care” about the other planets.  So the creatures that had attacked Evan’s pig were without the benefit of the Gospel.  Evan was haunted by the notion that his pig had been tortured or somehow otherwise abused.  He said that the creature’s bodies were shiny but he didn’t know whether this was their skin or some kind of armor.  The extra-terrestrials had large black eyes.  In order to recover memories from his close encounter with the aliens, Evan was hypnotized and interviewed while under that influence.  

20.    

A few days after Evan Briese shot the pig-molesting alien, a hypnotist sought to retrieve memories of the encounter.  There is a name for this procedure: regression hypnosis.  Briese was hypnotized “after a long period of relaxation” at his home near Tappen.  His mother and father were present as well as two representatives of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network).  The hypnotist was Craig R. Lang from Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.  An eighty minute transcript of the hypnotic session was recorded and, then, typed.

Evan doesn’t change his story and, in fact, adds only a few details.  The hypnotist tries to lead him to claim that the largest alien (said to be 6'11'’ in height) levitated into the air – there seems to be some aspect of confirmation bias as to the size of the creatures; obviously, Briese’s interlocutors think they are too tall to match other similar accounts.  Briese recalls the big alien standing one terrra firma.  The hypnotist repeatedly questions Briese about what he recalls after he was dragged backward and hit his head.  The young man stolidly refuses invitations to recall some sort of diagnostic encounter with the creatures when he was unconscious.  He repeatedly tells the hypnotist that he was “knocked cold” and can’t recall anything after hitting his head on the ground.  The hypnotist applies various ploys to “recover” Briese’s memories during the time that he was unconscious: he tells him to “freeze-frame” the memory or to imagine himself disembodied and hovering over his unconscious form.  Evan is unimaginative and simply says that he doesn’t remember anything from the time that he was knocked-out.  (Hypnotists frequently recover lurid accounts of aliens penetrating human subjects with metallic probes – aliens access our insides through the rectum or vagina; it’s not clear to me why they wouldn’t put a probe down their victim’s throat, and, perhaps, this is alleged to happen also.  There’s a curious parenthetical remark interposed in the hypnosis transcript – a woman in Colorado describes being vaginally and rectally probed by space creatures who tell her that it is for the good of mankind; she responds that “you should have asked my permission first.”)

Evan tells the hypnotist that he shot one of the creatures in the side and that “it limped” after that injury.  The other creatures, he said, “bowed to (him), sort of kneeling.”  So the space invaders have come across eons and light-years to find themselves bowing to a North Dakota teenager.  He describes the creatures as having “lifeless” black eyes.  They are tall with slender shoulders and tendril-like hands with black “metallic-looking” talons.  Around their mid-sections, they are a little more “wide.”  

Evan repeats essentially the same story, at least, three times.  I don’t have access to the full transcript and so I can’t tell what efforts were made to guide the young man’s account during portions of the interrogation that are not provided.  The parts of the 80 minute interview that are reproduced are impressively consistent with Evan’s first account – but, of course, I don’t know what he says in the parts of the transcript not provided.  When Evan revives, his head is aching and his “brain feels two sizes too big for his head,” a curious detail that is cited to imply that the space creatures may, indeed, have tinkered with the young man’s physiology.  Evan recalls running to his sister Trista’s house.  We aren’t told where this place is located in relationship to the family’s humble compound within its shelter-belt.  When he reaches the house, at about 2:00 am, Evan screams “they’ve taken her”.  This alarms everyone although less so when it’s revealed that he’s referring to the pig.  Evan’s sister, boyfriend, and their child are sleeping on a couch in front of the TV, a chair, and “on the floor.”  This seems to concern the hypnotist.  What kind of earthlings are these?  Don’t they possess beds?  “Is that how they usually sleep?”  “Yes,” Evan responds.  

21. 

After the fight at Big Mound, Sibley spent a day regrouping in camp.  Then, on Sunday, July 26, 1862, he marched southwest and, around noon, established a new camp on the shore of Dead Buffalo Lake.  The body of water was large, shallow and brackish-looking, irregularly shaped with a half-dozen inlets surrounded by marsh.  Presumably, Sibley selected the place to protect the encampment from attack from the north and west, the directions into which the Sioux had retreated on the 24th of July.  But the Indians had come around to Sibley’s south and east and appeared on the hill tops.  They had a few rifles and began sniping at the encampment.  Sibley sent out skirmish lines to clear the Indians from the high country to his east and the howitzers dropped some shells behind the low, rolling buttes.  A mule train had lagged behind Sibley’s advance to the new camp and, for a few minutes, the column of mules and wagons was encircled.  The Indians pressed toward the mule train.  Sibley’s picket lines, ultimately came up behind the rear of the attacking Sioux and they melted away.  During this fight, a young Indian rode his horse through the supply column and, dashing up to a muleteer, struck the man with a sort of riding quirt.  The Indian could have killed the mule-driver but didn’t bother – he was satisfied with counting coup on him.  This warrior was Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa acclaimed for this exploit among this people. Mid-afternoon, the soldiers were still firing volleys at the places where the winds ruffled the prairie grass.  But the Indians were gone.  This was the Battle of Dead Buffalo Lake.

22.

Two days later, Tuesday July 28, 1863, Sibley was moving again, cautiously creeping over the broken prairie toward the Missouri River.  Again the Indians encircled Sibley’s advance column and there was more fighting at a place called Stony Lake.  The advance stalled and the column deployed its howitzers to shell the hillsides and ravines ahead of them.  The Indians set the prairie afire and made a few attempts to stampede Sibley’s livestock. After some more long distance sniping, the Sioux retreated beyond range.  

23.

On July 31, Friday, most of the Dakota had crossed the Missouri and occupied the rugged rock and sand buttes looming over the west side of the river.  (The west banks of the Missouri are badlands, much more broken and wild than the gentle river terraces on its opposing shore-line.)  Sully was nowhere near.  A rear-guard of Sioux warriors fired at long range at the advancing skirmish lines.  The troops shot back but no one hit anything. Sibley’s artillery shelled the Sioux as they were massing for an attack and three Indians were knocked off their horses by a round, apparently stunned but not otherwise injured – they crawled off to hide in the tall grass.  The Indians then swam across the river. Three soldiers cut off from the main force were found to cut to pieces in a gulch overlooking the river. Both sides thought that they had been successful.  The Sioux were now driven beyond the Missouri, Sibley’s immediate mission (although he hadn’t been able to trap them between his army and Sully’s force so that they could be exterminated).  The Indians had successfully evacuated their women and children west across the Missouri where the white soldiers couldn’t harass.  A barge dragged upriver over the shallows came too close to the Sioux defending the rough country above the Missouri’s west bank.  The Indians attacked in force and killed everyone.  Twenty-two Whites were slaughtered in this sortie – more casualties in the massacre than in Sibley’s entire campaign.  General Sibley was alarmed by the barge massacre and his supplies were running low – the country was empty and desolate and there were no resources to provision his men.  So, he turned around and returned to Fort Abercrombie on the Red River about 160 miles to the east.  

24.

Sully reached the ruins of the Mandan villages decimated by small pox, a location about 30 miles north of present-day Bismarck.  No one was around.  Scouts told Sully that Sibley had returned to the Red River Valley.  Sully moved west, chasing the hostiles.  Sibley’s army, reprovisioned, again marched into Dakota Territory.  In September, 1863, the two armies acting in concert raided a large hostile encampment at the base of Killdeer Mountain, a long wooded ridge that rises about five-hundred feet above the prairie and badlands country around the Little Missouri.  This was a large encounter involving desperate fighting as the Sioux defended the retreat of women and children who scrambled up the wooded mountain side while the men fought off the soldiers in the gullies and ravines around large village.  Probably around 200 Indians were killed, mostly noncombatants who had been shot down in the encampment.  The attack was not without significant cost to the two armies of White soldiers – twenty-two soldiers were killed and 38 wounded.  After the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, the Sioux retreated into the Powder River Country where there was more war in 1868, a conflict that Indians won.  The government ceded the Black Hills to the Indians but the discovery of gold in that mountain range led to further settler incursions into Indian country.  Fighting began again culminating in the Battle of the Little Big Horn and, finally, the defeat the Dakotas after protracted guerilla warfare at Wounded Knee in 1891.  

25.

In a way, the world is a battlefield and we are all soldiers.  

Torrey Briese, Evan’s father, died at home on March 6, 2021.  He was 61.  No cause of death is stated.  The Briese farm, where space aliens murdered a pig, is said to five miles northeast of Tappen, North Dakota.  Briese had farmed the place with his parents before taking over the ranch in the 80's.  Torrey Briese drove grader for Kidder County, worked sometimes as an aide at a mental health facility, and bred (and exhibited) livestock.  He served on the school board.  With his wife Myra, he had five children – Evan, to whom the aliens bowed and kneeled, was born in 1990.  Today, Evan Briese works for Bauer Built, a firm that supplies tires for trucks hauling long-distance.  He lives with his wife in Bismarck.  He managed the Tappen Oil and Tire Company for two years before moving to Bismarck to work for Bauer Built. Evan Briese is presently 31 years old.

A photograph on Linked-In shows a husky young man wearing black sunglasses.  He has a beard and long hair.  Torrey Briese’s photograph accompanying his obituary shows a burly man with a red, flushed face.  He is handsome with long hair.  The obituary says that he had a side business, manufacturing home-made ammunition for special use shooting.  His customers included the U.S. government and law enforcement as well as big game hunters.  I wonder about his death.

Torrey Briese and his son, Evan, liked to watch shows about UFO encounters.  But they always scoffed at those programs.  You can laugh and mock until it happens to you.

The Mayor of Tappen was asked about the alien encounter.  He said: “I’m not saying it didn’t happen.”

On some of the websites discussing the 2006 events, photographs show round fields irrigated by center-pivot watering systems.  The implication is that the aliens were attracted to Tappen by the strange, completely circular forms of their soybean and corn fields. 

Craig R. Lang, the licensed hypnotherapist who performed regression hypnosis on Evan Briese, operated a clinic in Anoka, Minnesota.  The internet listing for his clinic says that it will be open today (Friday, May 6, 2022) from 1:00 to 5:00 pm.  This seems unlikely because Lang died in 2018.  Lang had a day job as an engineer working in the field of bio-medical devices.  He was a past-president of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) and was an expert in alien encounters.  His obituary photograph shows a youthful man with the big hair and whiskers of a seventies disco hustler.  He wears steel-rimmed glasses.  

It’s interesting that Evan Briese and his father, Torrey, didn’t seek out MUFON.  As it happened, the president of MUFON was attending a funeral in Tappen at the church where Torrey and Myra had been married.  This was only a couple days after the encounter.  Torrey and Evan spoke with the MUFON president at the dinner after the funeral and that was how the case came to the attention of the UFO investigators.   

26.

Ten days before we drove to the battlefield at Dead Buffalo Lake, the gravel road would have been buried in snow.  Two-and-a-half feet fell here in Kidder County and some patches of the stuff lurked on the north-facing sides of the flooded ditches.  Cold rain splashed on the windshield.  The gravel under my wheels was soggy and ripped up by agricultural vehicles in dark black ruts.  It was a bad place to be driving and I wasn’t anxious to spend time on remote gravel roads in this empty country.

27.

A brown sign with white letters on the west side of the road marks the battlefield.  A map shows where Sibley camped south of the lake shown as a white cephalopod-shaped splotch on the diagram.  I can see the open water of the lake beyond a shelter-belt running inexplicably north-south about forty yards west of the road.  (What is the shelter-belt sheltering?  Who planted it?  There are no houses or farm buildings anywhere in sight.)  On the map, the lake looks like a skull that has sprouted tendrils or an Indian wearing a complex feathered headdress or a round orb that has caught fire and extrudes flares from its upper surface.  Some arrows and dotted lines show where the Indians advanced over the prairie and the route of the beleaguered mule-train.  The wind feels bitterly cold and the rain that slaps our faces is icy.  

28.

The shelter-belt opens a little so that someone on foot can walk through the trees and stand on the drowned edge of the marsh.  The grass here and the reeds in the swamp were all bent double by the weight of snow and they haven’t yet recovered.  The grass is sodden under foot as if it’s a mere web of straw is floating over a bog.  The lake edged by several hundred feet of marsh shows white under the rainy sky, a big flat expanse stretching to the north and west.  The wind sweeps across the open flat terrain around the lake and reeds in the marsh are bent over in the turbulent air.  Rain and patches of snow shivering in the drizzle and the gusts of wet wind make the scene seem wild, desolate, eerie.  Of course, except for the sign, there’s no trace of the skirmish fought here.,

29.

In this country, the ruled grid of section roads is law.  The straight-line of the gravel road passing the Dead Buffalo Lake actually transects a lagoon extending to the west of the main body of water.  The gravel doesn’t deviate but runs with lunatic rigor right through the lake.  The water slops around a few inches before the gravel road surface resentfully.  Puddles cover the gravel where tires have gouged out craters and the edges of the road are flooded.

30.

We drive for a long time looking for the marker at Big Mound.  It’s not where its supposed to be on the map.  I’m increasing querulous about the gravel road which shrinks sometimes to a mere muddy track between black-rimmed puddles.  A half-mile ahead of us a stationwagon marked with the logo of the United States Post Office splashes through puddles and half-drowned parts of the roadway.  It’s not clear to whom the postal carrier is delivering mail.  There aren’t any houses anywhere in sight, no farmsites, no agricultural buildings.  The road rises up and down, cresting hills from which we can see into the fog for a few hundred yards – the country ripples with dune-shaped knolls like waves on a sea.  It’s treeless as far as your vision extends which is not that far in the rain.  Deep vee-shaped ravines flowing with floodwater cut through hillsides.  In the mist, lakes fill up the low places in the terrain, cold-looking and austere, like lake-diagrams drawn by six or seven year-old children.  

31.

A perfectly triangular black cairn shows atop a tall hill.  This must the marker at the Big Mound Battlefield.  The road climbs steeply to the hilltop and trucks struggling for traction have shredded the layer of gravel over slick black mud.  I’m afraid of getting stuck.  Another pyramid appears behind the first – what is this?  Two historical markers in the rain?  On the steep hillside, someone has abandoned a house-high furnace for drying grain.  The furnace is bright yellow.  Other debris is rusting in the drizzle and the first pyramid turns out to be nothing more than a big evergreen, conical in shape, next to an abandoned farmhouse.  The structure is a little bungalow with a row of broken windows across its facade facing the road.  The door is open and flaps in the wind.  Some outbuildings squat among a few more trees and a drive-way that hasn’t been used for a decade – some saplings are growing along the access road and the grass is chest-high.  The second pyramid is just the outline of another evergreen.  In the hollow below the ruined farmstead, a long narrow lake stretches across the countryside.  The postal carrier has reached the end of the road, or, perhaps, a place where the water has washed away the right-of-way.  Windshield wipers hiding the person driving, the car reverses and comes toward us where we have parked to turn around on the hilltop.  Is this Big Mound, unmarked except for this decrepit farmhouse?

32. 

Who knows how deep the puddles are on the gravel road?  Some of them are unavoidable and, when my tire splashes through the rut, a great filthy wave of water floods over the windshield drowning the whole car which rocks on its chassis.  

33.

At a corner where two roads intersect, Martin sees a great flock of white sea gulls rising and falling like flies on carrion.  In the rain-spattered distance, the sea gulls hover over the black furrowed field, sometimes dropping down and, then, rising up to soar over the mud.  There are hundreds of seagulls, dipping and soaring to feed on dead fish.  The field beside the road is full of two-foot long fish, sprawled and ungainly atop the furrows.  What can this possibly mean?  We stop to investigate.  Shoals of dead fish, a dozen or more in each group, lie scattered at intervals all across a field that is visible for perhaps five-hundred yards.  At the far edge of the sloping field, a white slash shows another lake.  But the lake is, at least, fifty feet below this hillside where the dead fish rest like strange finny garbage in the muddy furrows of the plowed field.  The presence of more carrion fish, far away in the field, is shown by the swarms of seagulls that are swooping down to strut among them and peck at the corpses.  It’s an uncanny sight.  The fish seem fresh and some of them are bloody where the birds have pecked them partially apart.  

34.

Martin suggests that the land was flooded a few days ago and the fish swam through the muddy water to this hilltop and were, then, stranded when the flood retreated back into the lagoon at the bottom of the hill.  But this would represent a flood of truly Biblical proportions.  Perhaps, the fish mistook the deep drifts of snow here a week ago for water and swam through them up to this hilltop.  But this seems improbable to me as well.  

35.

If you look up Tappen, North Dakota on the internet, you will find a link to an eerie video.  Against a gun-metal blue wall-cloud, a translucent cyclone curves down from the sky.  The tube of the cyclone spins on the ground.  The caption on the video says that this is a “land-spout”, that is a terrestrial version of a water-spout over the sea.  The vortex is so shapely and elegant that it seems fictional, perhaps, some sort of elegant CGI effect.  It’s like the pale spiritualized ghost of a tornado.  A couple of witnesses make some low-key nonchalant remarks.  The land-spout, perhaps capable of plucking fish from water and transporting them elsewhere, whirls overhead, bent like a sinister rainbow in the stormy sky.

36.

I want to get off these soggy gravel roads and return to asphalt and concrete.  But there don’t seem to be any paved highways anywhere nearby.  We drive south toward where the freeway should be.  The rain smears my windshield.  Another sign lettered white on brown background labels a high point on a spine of ridge as “MacPhail’s Butte”.  But there’s no access, no turn-off, and, later, I learn that the place where lightning killed Samuel MacPhail during the Battle of Big Mound is on private property, a boulder bearing a plaque screwed into stone marking the place.  Barbed wire fences surround the site and it’s a quarter mile or more from the dirt road.  From the crest of the hill, we can see a jumble of hills, some white oblong lakes in gulches, a crown of sea gulls soaring to the west over the battlefield littered with big dead fish.

37.

We rejoin the freeway on an empty stretch of highway to the west of the Medina rest-stop.  Fargo is 130 miles away.  The hillsides foam with run-off, white streams pitching down slopes.

38.

The rain continues on I-94 down to Melrose, Minnesota, the place where I stop for the night.  The distant shelter belts look like low black cliffs, tangles of trees all blurred together in a dark, wet mass.  It’s grey when I reach Melrose, the last light fading in a lightless day.

39.

A truck has pulled up to the Super 8 motel where I am staying.  In his “Works and Days,” Hesiod counsels that if one desires to reap the benefits of Demeter, the farmer should “sow naked, plow naked, and harvest in the nude.”  Perhaps, something similar has been commanded of truck drivers.  The door to the truck swings open and a naked man wraps a blanket across his mid-section, feet clad in sandal flip-flops, padding across the puddled parking lot to the motel office.  A woman emerges around the front of the cab, also swathed in a blanket around her shoulders and mid-section.  I blink at the half-naked truck driver and his girlfriend.  She’s wearing sober-looking eyeglasses.  She blinks back at me.  

40.

The next morning, at a rest stop near St. Cloud, I find the sidewalk all marked with big, blood-colored earthworms.  The water has driven them out of the soil and, now, they writhe on the concrete.  People had trodden on the worms and their crushed bodies look like letters in a foreign alphabet.  The rain writes with earthworms but I can’t read its words.

Phoenix and Tucson (and KC)

1.

Beneath South Mountain, at the place where Tempe and Phoenix intersect, rows of linen-white condominiums back up against the park-reserve.  The green ribbon of a golf course is wrapped around the base of the mountain.  Quiet, expensive neighborhoods slow visitors with ruinous speed bumps – hit one of these too fast and it feels like the bottom of your car has fallen out.  

One of the boulevards curves away from the condos and, on a grassy ridge between dry arroyos, leads into the foothills.  The road dead-ends at a couple of large parking lots divided by a median full of cactus.  Some concrete block toilets mark trailheads leading into the mountain park.  It’s midday Monday about 10:30 and the sky is overcast, a grey pall slumped over the mountains.  The temperature is 70 degrees, a little chilly for this time of year in the Valley of the Sun.  

I walk about a mile into the desert along the Pima Wash.  The trail is level, running along a terrace overlooking a dry gulch.  There are plenty of people walking, many of them with small enthusiastic dogs.  Most of the people are older, retirees, it seems, and they come into the desert well-prepared, bottles of water strapped to their hips, big broad-brimmed hats, hiking boots with elaborate hook-and-eye lacing, and light-weight graphite walking sticks, the sort of trekking poles you might observe on an elite Finnish athlete in the Winter Olympics.

I leave the main trail to scramble down into the sandy arroyo and, then, up the opposing hillside.  A path leads up to an overlook.  From that vantage, I can see the golf course at the base of the mountains and a row of transmission towers leading downslope in the smoggy basin.  The ground underfoot is bare desert pavement, a hard calcined surface shedding pebbles from eroded channels cut in the hill.  It’s unlovely landscape, grim and, mostly, featureless.  Sometimes, a small lizard darts away from where I am walking.

2.

A winding road ascends to one of the buttresses under the high ridge of South Mountain.  The road skirts dizzying drop offs and the exposure is plain to see – there are no trees of any kind, just some creosote brush and cactus clinging to the crumbling cliffs.  

At the end of the seven mile drive, a lookout tower surveys the basin a couple thousand feet below.  The valley is full of pale yellow haze.  Latino families have gathered here and everyone seems to be having a good time.  Hispanic culture sometimes seems carefree to the point of being reckless.  Toddlers are wandering around the edge of the cliffs, mostly ignored by family members who are picnicking in shadows of the tower.  A couple of Native women in dark shawls are selling turquoise and silver jewelry displayed on jet-black blankets spread out in the parking lot.  Kids are exploring the environs and some of them are perched on pedestals of rock hanging over the canyon.  Higher up the hill, an array of baffled-looking dishes and towers are aimed up at the sky.  How would you know if they are transmitting signals or just receiving them?  Every other vehicle in the crowded parking lot is a large black SUV.  Some playful crows are robbing overflowing trash bins.  Mexican polkas go hoo-hah on big radios and CD-players.  Up here, I suppose the silence could be oppressive.

3.

The Capitol Grille is on Camelback Road in the Biltmore neighborhood.  The restaurant is an expensive steak house.  It has a fancy bar with a very handsome and hospitable bartender.  (These sorts of places always have deluxe bartenders and wait-staff.)  The bartender chats up the people waiting for tables or those loners who are willing to eat their lobster rolls or filet mignon at the bar.  Bartenders aren’t judgmental – they accept you for whomever you are that night.  The dress code in the restaurant is implicitly exclusive – women, at least, need to be attired for an evening at the opera; it’s more casual for men.

The dining room is large full of mirrors and glass walled alcoves.  Hanging in a position of honor: a large portrait of Barry Goldwater.  Goldwater wears horn-rimmed glasses like Federico Fellini or an Italian mobster and his skin is enameled, greyish-pink like an embalmed corpse.

4.

Visitors to Phoenix, if they are young and in good health, all want to hike the trail to the top of Camelback Mountain.  This poses a logistical problem – the parking lot at the trail head is tiny and it will be full of cars by mid-morning.  

I didn’t plan to climb the mountain but wanted to see the trail head.  At a saddle on a desert ridge, gated communities huddle under the stark eminence of mountain.  Road construction was underway.  The stockade of a privacy fence ran along the side of the boulevard set back about 12 feet from the right-of-way.  I noticed several middle-aged couples, men and women, fast-walking along the strip of desert between the palisade and the concrete roadway.  The walkers wore spandex and had velcro-furred water bottles adhering to their buttocks.  The road leading up to the mountain park was blocked by road crews excavating trenches next to the road: big rigs slowly, and with callous indifference, obstructed the intersection.

I made several passes at the cross-roads but couldn’t figure out how to execute my turn.  It was pointless anyhow.  The sleek-looking couples walking quickly along the edge of the highway sometimes gestured up to mountain looming like a bad dream over the intersection.  They were apparently planning to ascend the mountain on the trail to the summit, but hadn’t been able to get anywhere near the inadequately sized parking lot at the trail head.  My drive to Scottsdale to the base of the mountain was futile and I returned to the hotel.

5.

Guadalupe is a Latino suburb under the long austere flank of South Mountain.  Like its upscale neighbor, Tempe, all residential roads are mined with porpoise-sized speed bumps.  A place recommended for breakfast, the Vane Café, was marked on the map as near the freeway to Tucson.  We found the intersection with ease, but the location of the café was concealed.  On one side of the street, there was a day care and elementary school.  A structure that looked like an abandoned adobe shopping center occupied the other, opposite side, of the road.  A couple of Mexican restaurants with gaudy storefronts showing big, grinning sword-fishes were in the third quadrant of the intersection and its fourth corner was a vacant field slashed with trenches overgrown with thorns, a construction project that had not progressed beyond some initial excavation work.  About eight men dressed in shabby work clothes were loitering around the blank mud-colored walls of the forlorn shopping mall.  Presumably, they were day-laborers waiting for someone to drive up in a van and offer them work.  

The neighborhood looked a little intimidating.  Furtive figures were moving unsteadily around the edges of the vacant lot and the men squatting outside the adobe shopping place were talking a little too loud and seemed, perhaps, to be slightly drunk or, at least, contesting their hangovers with displays of macho bravado.  After a couple of passes, I pulled onto the broken-up concrete next to the shopping center and found that, in fact, the place was a Mexican style Mercado.  A plaza opened up beyond some steel gates pulled apart to allow pedestrians to enter the Mercado.  Apparently, the market was busy on the weekends, but we were there on a Wednesday morning and the big concrete pad where the merchants set up their booths and sold produce and wares was empty.  Some restrooms down a little open-air corridor were unlocked – I saw an Uber driver picking up food for delivery use the Ladies’ toilet.  The Vane café was a tiny place, three tables inside of an alcove with plaster walls painted bright green.  A girl was sitting at one of the tables studying a calculus text.  A woman on a stool behind the  counter was watching a Spanish-language TV show.  Someone had painted portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O, and John Kennedy.  Kennedy’s picture was hanging between the paintings of the two women.  Of course, the Virgin of Guadalupe was on hand to bless the place, pasted to the front of a refrigerator and, also, gracing a big calendar.  Across the from the President, two smaller paintings depicted John Wayne and Elvis Presley.  

I had an omelet, made with about a quarter pound of jalapenos and chorizo sausage.  The jalapenos were sweet and I was surprised that I could eat the dish without much discomfort.  Julie had French toast with maple syrup together with a side order of bacon. The café seemed to be well-known in the neighborhood.  About every ten minutes, an Uber driver arrived to pick up an order of food.  

A small tax-preparation place and a travel agency, closed this morning, were the only other businesses operating in the Mercado.  Someone was hosing down the concrete.  The sun was high overhead and the day-laborers waiting outside the plaza had moved into the shade of some bushes with greasy-looking spiked leaves.  So far no one had offered any of them a job.     

6.

After he became famous, Ettore (“Ted”) DeGrazia sold paintings to Vincent Price, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin and other Hollywood luminaries.  For a time, DeGrazia claimed to be the most widely reproduced artist in the world.  Perhaps, this is true, although DeGrazia was an accomplished fabulist.  Certainly, the artist’s fame reached its height around 1960, UNICF acquired the rights to reproduce an image that DeGrazia had made of Indian and Mexican children, Los Ninos.  The painting was sold on UNICF seals and stamps and was, indeed, known world-wide.  (I recall seeing the picture reproduced in a copy of Arizona Highways, a magazine to which my grandmother in Nebraska subscribed; DeGrazia was the house-artist for the periodical and everyone my age has seen his paintings at one time or another.)  Los Ninos isn’t half bad – it shows a group of urchins dancing in a ring: the little kids have black shaggy hair that it picturesquely unkempt and they wear ragged clothing – their faces are indistinct blurs, smears of mahogany and cinnabar pigment; the little boy at the top of the ring dance and it’s apparent leader wears an exuberant sun-colored cowboy hat.  When UNICF picked up the picture for its stamps and Christmas seals, DeGrazia knew he had stumbled onto a good thing and, so, he made hundreds of variants on the ninos, many of them nakedly kitsch.  

DeGrazia was an aggressive self-promoter and capitalized on his adventurous life.  The child of Calabrian immigrants, DeGrazia was raised in a mining town, Morenci on the New Mexico border.  When the Morenci mines closed in 1920, his family moved back to Italy, but returned when the copper industry revived in 1925.  He claimed that he had forgotten his elementary school lessons in English and had to start over as a first-grader when he was 16.  DeGrazia said that he didn’t finish elementary school until he was 23.  Although he posed as a self-taught, eccentric outsider artist, in fact, he attended art school and had an MFA from the University of Arizona – his 1945 thesis was on art education and synesthesia: he claimed to have invented a machine that converted music into paint and light.  (While studying for his MFA, DeGrazia traveled widely in Mexico and was friends with Diego Rivera; he had several well-reviewed gallery shows in Mexico City while he was intermittently studying at the University in Arizona.)  DeGrazia played trumpet in Mariachi and big bands, was a notorious ladies’ man, and, after college, opened a studio in downtown Tucson.  Later, as the city expanded, he moved his studio to a ten acre site in the Santa Catalina foothills, about five miles from downtown.  This was DeGrazia’s famous Gallery in the Sun, still a popular tourist destination in Tucson, although the acreage with its archaic looking chapel, museum and gallery, and the artist’s grave (he died in 1982) under a heap of what looks like shattered black pottery, is now surrounded by the suburbs.  DeGrazia made thousands of paintings and, also, worked extensively in ceramics.  He was an expressionist artist by temperament with an agile palette.  His best work is as good as Chagall and, indeed, the compositions often are reminiscent of the Russian artist’s work.  DeGrazia’s figurative art (he also painted, less successfully I think, abstractions) kept him outside of the mainstream of American painting between the fifties and seventies, when he was most active, and he avoided the art world and its institutions – DeGrazia always claimed that he was most happy when traveling by mule in the mountains of south Arizona or Mexico, visiting his Yaqui and Tohono O’odham friends.  

7. 

On May 30, 2017, fire in the suburban foothills of Tucson set The Gallery in the Sun ablaze.  Traces of the conflagration were visible in the compound when I visited in March 2022.  The chapel to the Virgin of Guadalupe that DeGrazia built with his own hands was damaged – it’s being restored today and the murals that DeGrazia painted on its inside adobe walls are sooty and charred around the viga penetrations through the clay bricks and plaster.  In a way, burning improved the place – the chapel, at least, now presents an ancient patina that is appealing in a perverse sort of way.  

The gallery is large, showing hundreds of paintings.  By my estimate, about sixty are worth looking at – the rest are just exhausted variations on themes that DeGrazia found profitable with his patrons.  A picture sequence on the adventures of Cabeza de Vaca after his shipwreck in 1527 is powerful and effective.  Some paintings of Tohono O’odhom myths and legends have a strong mysterious presence and another picture cycle on the missionary to the Indians, Father Kino, is also compelling.  The rest of the stuff is colorful junk, although interspersed, here and there, with genuinely effective canvases.  DeGrazia was not as reactionary as he pretended and there are traces of European surrealism and cubism in many of his paintings.  I’m not competent to judge his ceramics which are also numerous.  

Some aging acolytes of the Master, now old women, guard the front door, answer questions, and take admissions.  The exhibition spaces are warmly lit and have brownish-cream walls and people speak in whispers.  I’ve never seen a DeGrazia painting or print in any conventional museum – the artist belongs in that rank of painters, popular with the public, who have to create their own museums in the face of institutional indifference.  (There is, for instance, a lavish exhibition hall in Watertown, South Dakota that celebrates the works of the wildlife artist Terry Redlin.)  Gradually, he is being forgotten everywhere but in Tucson and, I suppose, that in another two generations, the Gallery of the Sun will be gone as well.  

There is an impressive cactus garden in the plaza between the living quarters, the half-ruined chapel, and the galleries.  A fountain splashes water on colorful Mexican tile.  An old man has gone into the Men’s Room in the little building next to the mountain.  He’s taking his time.

8.

DeGrazia said that he was happiest prospecting in the Superstition Mountains.  In Arizona, it seems that everyone who has lived here for a decade or so, takes a shot at finding the Lost Dutchman Mine, hidden, it is alleged, somewhere in that mountain range.  DeGrazia was no exception to this rule.

With a mule heavily laden, in 1976, DeGrazia ascended into the foothills of the Superstitions.  The mountains are sheer, protected by huge rubble fields at the foot of mighty escarpments.  In remote canyons, there are stone pinnacles of rock as tall as skyscrapers.  It’s hard country and people wandering around in the labyrinth of gorges and peaks die all the time.  DeGrazia didn’t go too far.  On the hillside, he lit a bonfire from wood gathered from deadfall near one of the springs at the base of the peaks.  The site was accessible by jeep and journalists watched as he burned 150 of his paintings – a protest against the Federal inheritance task.  The government had assigned a high value to his works and DeGrazia was concerned that when he died, his Estate would be saddled with crippling taxes.  (One presumes, he would have been offended if the government had not assessed his paintings as valuable.)  There are a few photographs of DeGrazia burning the canvases.  Probably, the wanton destruction of his own work was too disturbing even for a tax protester like DeGrazia and I suppose he didn’t destroy all 150 paintings.  There’s a legend that he buried the rest of the paintings.  People still find nuggets of gold washed down from the high cliffs perched over the desert – as they say, “thars gold in them thar hills.”  Do treasure-hunters comb the Superstition foothills in search of DeGrazia’s lost cache of paintings?

9.

San Xavier del Bac is still where I left it four years ago at the edge of the Tohono O’odham Reservation beneath a stony calvary where the Stations of the Cross make their penitential way up the bare, sun-scorched hillside to a splintery wood cross that is the deadest thing in a dead landscape.  On this morning, the church is open only to a side exit in the nave and the richly decorated chapels can’t be seen and visitors are blocked from approaching the gaudy altar screen.  A thousand painted angels peep at the tourists who enter between the pews, gawk at the spectacle and, then, depart through the door into a little enclosed garden under the great white turret of the church.  White geometry soars upward, great curved buttresses beneath the pale bell-tower, forms massing overhead like some sort of abstract destiny.

Two-hundred yards away from the church with its lavish facade, some booths are arranged around a small square with a couple of picnic tables beside a small fountain.  The fountain is dry.  When I was here before, I had a vegetable burrito (squash, beans, chili and corn) that was one of the best things I have ever eaten.  But the tribe is taking the COVID virus seriously and the little taqueria and snack bar is closed.  You can’t even buy a can of pop.  The booths selling pottery and Indian jewelry are open and wares are displayed.  A couple of old White ladies are inspecting turquoise-studded earrings.  

10.

Around sunset, while Julie was napping at the hotel, I followed the avenue downtown to the center of Tucson.  It was very still and the roads were empty, fortunately, because street construction interfered with traffic flow and, more than once, I found myself driving the wrong way on a one-way road or, even, traversing sidewalks. Markers on the pavement and affixed to the corners of concrete block administrative buildings show that the core of the city is very old, although nothing really remains of it.  Some sleepy looking government offices form a compound near an art museum that seems so fortified against the sun and heat that there is no way to enter the building – in any event, it’s closed.  Probably, a river ran through here once, but it’s long since gone underground or simply been desiccated to dust and paved over.  

I park in a lot buried under the square in front of the courthouse.  It’s a spectral place, dimly lit with only a few scattered vehicles under the heavy concrete lid of the ceiling that supports the monuments and fountains, the public art above and the benches and walkways of the courthouse square.  Greenish light makes the chrome on the parked vehicles look mossy.  Probably, the owners of the cars are in custody as a result of calamitous court hearings or, perhaps, have committed suicide in alleyways somewhere.  Ghosts wander the remote corners of the underground lot – it’s not exactly Hell, but, more like an indifferent Hades, a place leached of its color and light and the emotions that color and light embody.    

The courthouse has a Moorish dome with inlaid mosaics of semi-precious stones.  (Arizona is full of minerals with color and luster when washed and polished a little.)  The facade under the dome is Spanish baroque with embedded fluted pilasters framing a big door, now padlocked shut, carved swags and fruit decorating the arch over the entrance.  Some bronze statues that look like massive oxen skulls stand on plinths and half of the square is occupied by two reflecting ponds paved with shiny black bricks like the scales on a fish or lizard under the clear, limpid water.  A causeway runs between the ponds and they are sheltered by twelve-foot berms, surfaced with forearm-sized filets of polished petrified wood.  This is the January 8 Monument, a memorial to six people killed when a gunman opened fire on a political rally in a Safeway parking lot at Casa Adobes near Oracle, about 12 miles north of Tucson – the shooting was in 2011 and the monument, it seems, is new, apparently dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the massacre.   (In this mass-shooting, a politician named Gabby Giffords was badly wounded when she was shot in the head and a Federal Judge was killed.)  The names of the casualties (there were 18 wounded in addition to the dead) are inscribed on granite panels inset into the petrified wood berms wrapped like “embracing arms” around the pools.  At ground level, the memorial is cool, dignified, and, of course, in the desert, water always signifies grace and, indeed, something like mercy.  It’s all too large for the rather small terrace in front of the Courthouse and, indeed, the monument seems to crowd both the buildings and the other commemorative statuary in the plaza.  (A few yards beyond the encircling embankments, there’s an old bronze bas relief showing Father Kino, the missionary to the Indians living here, hiking along briskly in the desert – on the memorial relief, an Indian boy scampers ahead of Father Kino a bit like a coursing hound on a leash.)  Tohono O’odham symbols for water and other natural features are engraved on bricks and set into the walls above the ponds.

An aerial shot of the monument is less flattering.  From the sky, the January 8 Monument looks like a giant vulva, raised labia represented by the curving embankments around the deep vaginal opening of the reflecting ponds.  I suppose no one thought what the thing would look like when seen from above.  After all, people aren’t supposed to view the earth from a vantage in the sky – only angels and birds of prey hover above the earth to watch us.   

11.

The next morning, Julie and I make our way downtown again.  We park next to a large mural a block from the January 8 Monument.  The wall-painting is inscribed Tour de Tucson and shows desert animals riding bicycles – there’s a tarantula, a javelina, a scorpion, a coyote, and a gila monster all competing in the race.  

For some reason, the art museum seems half-buried in the earth (it’s not) and curving walls exclude visitors from a sunken courtyard displaying a few vaguely anthropomorphic slabs.  We can’t figure out how to access the building’s front door and end up entering through the back at the Café al a C’Art, the upscale snack shop affixed to the galleries.  The lunch crowd is backed up into the entry-way but the line moves.  You can get an expensive sandwich here or a slice of cake with mineral water or a four-dollar infusion of juice in cucumber water.  The tables are occupied by groups of elderly ladies and service is very slow.  

A corridor leads from the C’Art into the museum.  The place owns a half-dozen very mediocre Old Master paintings but the strength of the collection, not surprisingly, are archaeological artifacts from Meso-America and some very fine folk art from across the border.  The pre-Columbian objects include a nice redwood-colored Colima dog inexplicably wearing a human mask, some Mayan beakers with scrawny-looking and tattered gods somewhat like Callot’s commedia dell’ arte figures gesturing at one another in a sprightly manner – one of them is administering an enema to another figure: apparently the beaker was used for theobromine – that is, hallucinogenic cacao.  Some formidable Aztec sculptures hunker down in a glass case and there are a number of charismatic Moche portrait vessels.  A Wari textile, remarkably preserved, brightens the gallery.  The Peruvian colonial-era paintings on the walls are wan, dimly lit martyrdoms of white-faced saints.  The Native American and folk art is superb: gory scenes of violence from the dark and bloody ground of Ayachuco province in Peru – little retablo images showing men with machine-guns massacring peasants.  An alarming breastplate of hammered tin, enormous and weighty like a kind of grim anchor, was worn in Corpus Christi processions by men impersonating Roman centurions – the thing is scary, an object designed to convey an impression of brute force.  Another retablo shows the hand of God hovering like a storm cloud above a hapless man painted in shackles with a monstrous goat and a skeleton wielding a scythe threatening him.  On an opposing wall, Fidel Castro is portrayed embracing some Latin American dictator.  An artist named Abraham Mauricio Salazar (born 1957) is represented by parchment scrolls painted with religious processions – campesinos are gathered around a knoll on which there are several crosses; the sky above them is half night, lit by a grinning moon surrounded by stars, and half day dominated by a great fiery sun.  This artist is a formidable talent and I write in my journal that I should learn more about him.  But there is really very little published about this painter – he comes from Oaxaca and produces the parchment on which he draws and paints himself, from agave fibers.  In the late seventies, he seems to have published a book depicting the religious ceremonies in his home village.  The book is very rare and expensive and, probably, not a good representation of his art – the artisan paper on which he paints has a unique coarse texture that probably can’t be successfully photographed.  

Outside the day has become grey.  On a wall, some painted tiles seem to illustrate proverbs from a world turned upside down: A man waving a scythe threatens a cowering skeletal death; a bird gloats at a man in a cage; a malicious chair is sitting on top of a figure; an upright bull dressed like a matador prods a naked man with a picador’s lance; for some reason, a wolf-dog is giving a man a haircut.  These blue, glazed tiles flank the Coat of Arms for the City of Tucson – Alma de Pueblo 2010, the tiles proclaim.       

12.

 

The divided highway leading north to Oracle passes strip malls, fast food places, tracts of new houses, grocery stores and places selling liquor and guns. White clusters of modular dwellings are perched on ledges above the valley.  The Santa Catalina Mountains are to the east and, in the morning, they cast long blue shadows over the chaparral on the foothills at their base.  There are no trees and the sky is enormous.

A two-lane road intersects the main highway leading eight miles or so toward the mountains.  The range rises to a high-dome dark with pine trees, 9000 feet at the summit.  It’s not a fierce-looking range, rather gently sloping with more rugged terrain at lower elevations where gorges chop up the rock pedestal on which the peaks pose overhead.  A big State Park occupies the north-eastern foothills where some wide sandy draws fan out from an angular canyon piercing the side of the ridge.

The trail-head parking lot is as crowded as super-market.  Polo verde trees with their sinuous soft-green trunks and boughs crouch close to the car-park and green brush shadows the arroyo where the trail lifts off toward the mountains.  The vigorous elderly are adjusting their rucksacks and trying out their boots among the picnic tables by the pit toilets.  

I walk along the path pointed toward a notch in the foothills known as Romero Canyon.  After climbing a little bluff above a broad sandy draw and, then, pitching down to cross the wash, the trail is mostly flat looping across brown grasslands toward a cut-off about a mile from the parking lot.  In fact, this branch is the main trail that rises through Romero Canyon to the high country.  I follow the loop to where the path drops on some steps cut from logs down into a ravine where water is trickling over a rocky stream bed.  Yellow-pink boulders divert the water in tight meanders so the little creek twists and turns. This is an inconsequential water-course by any measure but in the dry desert the presence of flowing water seems remarkable – the sound of the stream washing over the stones in the gully brightens the air and, indeed, revives the spirits.  At intervals, tongues of sand and pebble impound the stream creating little pools, vividly bright in the sunshine.  Dragon-flies course over the trickling water, seeming to guide the stream forward through the desert. The trail skirts the creek for about a half-mile, then, ascends the bluff to the barren chaparral overlooking the parking lot.  It’s warm now and the parked cars are thinning out – best to hike here before mid-day even in the first week of March. 

The walk demonstrates this phenomenon: the merest presence of flowing water in the desert is fabulous, the manifestation of something mythical – the legend of Eden with its lost gardens.

13.

A mile down the road in the direction of the strip malls on the highway, another small parking lot (empty when I visited) marks the short trail to the Romero Ruin.  The topography is similar to the landscape under Romero Canyon: a terrace elevated over a sandy wash and, then, a great expanse of chaparral extending to the rocky promontories of the Santa Catalina foothills.  

A rancher named Francisco Romero lived at the high point of the terrace.  Some stacked stones make the square footprint of a house, really just a rock cell.  Romero raised cattle on the chaparral and periodically engaged in long distance rifle duels with Apache raiders. Apparently, he and the Apaches had achieved a sort of detente – they took a couple cows from him each year, shot at one another without anyone getting hit, and, then, did this all over again six months later throughout the decade of the 1850's.  The Indians knew better than to rub-out Romero and his family; after all, he was a reliable source of beef to them when they were in need.  

The stony detritus of Romero’s dwelling sits atop an much older and larger habitation, a Hohokam pueblo that occupied the terrace six-hundred years earlier.  Nothing really remains of the pueblo on the surface of the grassland – the ruin is of the order of the archaeology maxim that three rocks in a line represents a wall.  Some markers point to a few alignments of random-looking stones, low walls that apparently determined the boundaries of the pueblo.  A round depression faintly visible on the terrace marks a ball-court where Indians played a team-sport imported from the Aztecs and their precursors in old Mexico. (Archaeologists have identified a second ball-court – it’s not clear to me whether this is a precursor to the facility marked next to the trail or whether the village used the two courts at the same time.) The village once occupied 15 acres and the lower hillsides sloping down to the wash were extensively farmed.  A large ridge-shaped midden rises near the edge of the site, a wrinkle in the land that you wouldn’t notice except for the marker describing it.  As many as 350 people may have lived here around 1100 when the village was at its height.  I surmise that there must have been a half-dozen smaller satellite communities in the foothills – you don’t need elaborate sunken ball-courts unless there are other teams that the village can host in home and “away” games.  Rancher Romero undoubtedly built his hut and corrals from cobbles strewn around the hilltop remaining from the pueblo.  His humble walls are made from stones that once comprised the bigger and better dressed walls at the Hohokam village.

Some sturdy Sonoran saguaros flank the steps leading down into the wide, white draw.  For six months of the year, slivers of flowing water snake over the sand.  During the rest of the years, a woman with a pot and a scapula-digger could cut down through the sand to the wet seep about 18 inches below the surface – and, so, water was available here year round.  Some bees in cactus-flowers mumble at me as I pass.

14.

A couple of glass cases with artifacts occupy a corner of the small visitor center at the entrance to the State Park.

Inside one of the cases, a tiny bell about the size of a thumbnail rests between fragments of pale grey pottery.  The bell, cast from copper, was made 800 years ago in Valley of Mexico 1400 miles to the south.  Urban Nahuatl-speaking craftsmen made the bells as a trade item for the wild nomadic Indians roaming the northern deserts.  Somehow, the bell ended up at the Hohokam pueblo in the shadow of what we now call the Santa Catalina mountains.  

The shapely little bell seems querulous – what does it tell us about human destiny and commerce?  Once the trinket made a silvery tinkling sound.  Now it is silent.

15.

In 1861, 120 horseman from New Mexico rode into the dusty Mexican village at Tucson and claimed the entire territory for the Confederacy.  California territory was aligned with the Union and a column of cavalry was dispatched from settlements around Los Angeles to drive the Confederate forces out of the desert southwest.

The Sonoran desert in southern Arizona was vast and empty.  The Union cavalry couldn’t find anyone to fight.  The troops captured a flour mill that was said to be somehow connected to the rebels in Tucson.  The soldiers didn’t know what to do with the several hundred sacks of flour that they commandeered at the mill and, so, these foodstuffs were given to a band of Pima Indians living nearby.  

The rebels in Tucson sent a couple dozen horsemen to the ridges under a prominent mountain north of the village, a ghastly looking plug of volcanic magma called Picacho Peak.  This was in April 1862.  The Union cavalry approaching Tucson were camped under the rock spire where there was a small spring.  

At least two accounts of the action of Picacho Peak (sometimes called “Pichacho Pass”) exist and they are completely different.  This was a skirmish arising from blunders on both sides.  No one claimed any glory from this fight and exactly what happened is unclear.  One account says that the Confederates staged an ambush from positions in the rugged terrain under the peak.  The other story is that the Union troops contrived an ambush for the purpose of capturing the rebel patrol and, thereby, weakening the forces holding Tucson.  (The Union objective of the expedition was to take and hold Tucson for the North.)  

Both accounts agree that the ambush was botched.  Either the Union troops hiding in the rocks opened up too soon and triggered a firefight or the Union troops, descrying the Rebels hiding behind their stony fortifications, made a calamitous frontal assault on that position.  Seemingly, both sides to the affray knew what they were doing, although no one effectively executed their maneuvers, and both sides knew the positions of the other.  In the first fusillade, some soldiers were shot down.  Then, there was a ninety-minute exchange of gunfire with much long distance sniping.  In the end, both sides had casualties, more than two and less than six, with a couple fatalities – accounts vary even with respect to the number of people shot in the skirmish.  Three graves existed for a few years at the site and all accounts agree that a young man named Barrett, commanding the Union patrol, was killed in the first exchange of fire – either he died fatally leading a charge on the Rebel position or he ordered his men to open fire too soon on the Confederates and was shot in the botched ambush.  Two of the dead were exhumed after the War and re-interred at the military graveyard in the Presidio at San Francisco.  Barrett’s grave was unmarked and his bones couldn’t be located.  Later, a rail line cut through the field of combat and historians surmise that Barrett’s skeleton is somewhere under the railroad track right of way.

16.

Pichaco Peak is a gaunt claw of stone maliciously twisting up into the naked burning sky.  You can pull off the freeway there and look at the monument and the small State Park in the shadow of the 1500 foot pinnacle.  The summit looms overhead atop impossibly sheer grey cliffs, a jagged spike that, viewed from the east, seems brutally inaccessible.

A little town with a convenience store and bar services a small encampment of trailer houses.  When I visited every single parking lot in the State Park was jammed with cars and campers and people were illegally parked along the sides of the loop road leading to the trailheads.  There was no place to stop and we couldn’t even get out of our car to stretch our legs.  Old folks were sitting at picnic tables in the empty desert, playing with small furry white dogs.  

Amazingly, a trail leads to the top of the pinnacle.  Most of the moderate part of the trail follows a ridge on the west side of the mountain not visible from the facilities under the peak’s east flank.  However, there is also a trail that snakes up the side of the mountain on the freeway (east side) of the lava plug.  Only a fool would attempt the climb to the top, although, of course, fools abound.  On its upper heights, the path is marked by iron stakes with metal airplane cable stretched between them.  You haul yourself upward, gripping the metal cable.  (Of course, gloves are “recommended.”  The cable becomes unbearably hot in the sun – it’s often 110 degrees F. in this basin and, I suppose, the fraying metal strands of the cable would also shred your hands.)  Of course, there are scorpions and snakes underfoot.

Some photographs of the view from the pocket-sized summit of the pinnacle may be seen on the internet.  What can you see?  Endless miles of featureless desert, cobalt blue ranges of mountains at some indefinite distance away, dust devils whirling in the basin, the stark scar of the freeway cutting across the barren land shimmering in the heat haze.  

17.

Every year, Civil War enthusiasts crowd the State Park and stage re-enactments of the battle.  The actual battle involved about forty combatants at most.  Modern re-enactments involve several thousand costumed troops complete with infantry battalions and artillery, both of which were conspicuous by their absence in the original skirmish between small cavalry units.

Out here, where the Civil War really didn’t happen at all, the conflict gets bigger and bigger each year.    

18.

The day darkens as I drive east from Liberal, Kansas traversing a diagonal stair of highways, at first two-lane blacktop leading from grain elevator to grain elevator, and, then, freeways funneling into Kansas City.  Storm clouds loom over the tall buildings in the city’s downtown.  A few cold drops of rain pelt my windshield.   

My cell-phone navigates for me and I reach the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at about 1:00 pm.  There’s a hollow place under the slanting hill on which the museum is built, a underground car-park in which the air smells like chow mein and fried rice.  It’s Sunday afternoon and the galleries are crowded.  

The museum consists of a square classical temple with columns framing a marble atrium around which gloomy galleries are arranged.  The exhibition rooms are dim and enforce hushed whispers upon the visitors and the art is displayed in sedate repose, like rouged corpses bemused and sitting up in their frame-caskets.  Annexed to the beaux arts temple, standard for just about every museum built in the United States between 1890 and 1930, a long narrow corridor, a bit like a concourse in an airport, descends the hill.  The concourse is wide and equipped with both cascades of steps and ramps at intervals of about 100 feet – the galleries are located in white rooms with towering ceilings to the right of the broad descending corridor.  In this part of the complex, the Bloch building, everything is white on white and the pictures hang in a pale void that seems to be simultaneously bright (lit by overhead skylights) and, yet, like a mine adit deep within the earth.  On the day of my visit, the skies were grey, mottled with pale wormholes through which rain and, sometimes, whiffs of sleet fell. 

Every part of the museum smelled of chow mein and pork fried rice.  The guards emitted this odor.  The patrons of the museum were saturated with this smell.  I could perceive the scent in my hair and moustache and in the folds of my garments.

19.

Here is where I describe the highlights of the Museum’s collection, at least as I perceived it on the day of my visit.  I’ve toured this museum four or five times and, probably, written as many reports and, so, dear Reader, you may glance away from this section if you so desire.

Assiduous museum-goers know that your eye is most fresh and perceptive during the first forty-minutes looking at pictures.  After that, things deteriorate into a technicolor muddle.  Therefore, my narrative as to a trip to the museum is always skewed toward admiring things that I saw early in my visit and, probably, neglects the galleries through which I hastened after two-and-a-half hours on my way out through the gift shop. 

An Etruscan Zeus dominates one display case in the old part of the museum.  The bronze figurine’s state of preservation seems suspicious to me.  Only 16 inches high, the little god, nonetheless, threatens to fling a thunderbolt at his worshipers (our status, I suppose, as we gaze at him in his vitrine.)  The thunderbolt is missing but the god wields a curious serpentine dagger in his left hand.  He’s conspicuously naked although with a sort of shawl casually draped over his shoulder and forearm.  The Etruscans called Zeus “Tinia” and the figure is much more slender than Roman counterparts – the god looks lithe and athletic.  Nearby, a marble Roman sarcophagus has been carved in deep relief.  The deceased, a bland-looking and elegant matron, seems baffled by the fact that she is dead and surrounded by gesticulating figures of the muses.  George Bellows is represented by an alarming portrait, the life-size figure on the canvas named as “Frankie the Organ Boy” – meaning that the urchin is an organ-grinders (hurdy-gurdy) assistant.  The kid seems mentally defective and his face is painted in a manner that presages Francis Bacon, a meaty blur of features, all folded together under black bulbous eyes.  The remarkable aspect of this canvas is that it has been painted with all the sensual gaudiness of a society portrait by John Singer Sargeant – a few examples of the latter’s paintings share the wall a bit uneasily with Frankie.  In another gallery, a supernatural bison confronts viewers on an Arikara shield – the creature is clearly some sort of deity with a great hirsute breast, curved horns, and eyes widely spaced (the artist has eschewed perspective in painting this apparition’s head) so that the beast-god seems to gaze directly into your soul.  A short walk away, a very elegant bulto or hand-carved statue of a saint, stands on a plinth, a bit helpless because her hands are either missing or mutilated.  Although the image is described on the label as a bulto, it’s not clear to me whether that term is completely apposite: the figure represents the Virgin Mary – is she a saint or something else?  The wood mannequin is shaped like a triangle or Christmas tree.  Her skirt bears the pattern of a Navajo blanket, a strips of color with tear-drop shaped pendants, probably an image of water falling from a sky-band.  In one hand, the figure originally held the Christ child and there was a rosary dangling from the outstretched fingers of her other hand.  The goddess was fitted for silver crown that, like the baby Jesus and the rosary, has now gone missing.  The figure was made in New Mexico, probably between 1830 and 1850, and scholars have, even, recently put a name to the artist that made this devotional effigy.  The Virgin’s face is the most notable aspect of this 30 inch tall figure – the wood-carver has given her tiny head strangely precise features, as if the image were modeled after a real person known to the artist.  It’s a memorable work, once seen quickly forgotten in the very forefront of the imagination, but lurking forever in the mind’s more shadowy recesses so that once you glimpse the thing, you feel as if you have always known and, even, perhaps, reverenced it.

Among the modern paintings, there’s a big, chubby “Woman” by de Kooning, a pastel-colored smear on the canvas that looks like Basquiat or as if someone had applied paint to the Willendorf Venus or some other robust paleolithic goddess carved from stone or antler.   A painting by Marsden Hartley of Mount Katahdin in Maine proposes a landscape comprised of the peak’s black stela looming over a green blur of forest and lake.  One gallery is hung with big pictures by Thomas Hart Benton, a native son: there’s bumpkin peeping at a voluptuous nude girl reclining in the hay and straw, a suitably impressed tableaux of the Hollywood dream factory, also equipped with a half-naked girl, and the fierce image of Carl Ruggles, the composer, bent over his piano as if it were a tool box in an iron foundry.  Benton’s pictures are sophisticated in that they manipulate the viewers to see things from the perspective of some bemused rube fresh from the country, voyeuristically inspecting the art with naive and baffled eyes.  

20.

A challenging conundrum for a museum of this sort is its large collection of mediocre paintings.  What should be the fate of 400-year old devotional images, for instance, very carefully painted but either uninteresting or, perhaps, even laughably inept?  Although the status of such things as “fine art” may be problematic, nonetheless, museum curators may feel doubts about simply deaccessioning these things or, even, hiding them to gather dust in a storeroom.  After all, pictures of this sort possess an undeniable historical significance even if incompetently executed.  This problem vexes not merely big and encyclopedic museums like the Nelson-Atkins but, also, I suppose Ted DeGrazia’s Sun Gallery in Tucson.

The Nelson-Atkins museum shows the work of artists who may have produced a half-dozen reasonably good paintings.  But they are in other museums.  For instance, how is the viewer supposed to respond to a Northern European Madonna and Child, presumably roughly contemporary with Jan van Eyck – the pinched-looking mother is wax-white and she seems to be suffering from rigor mortis and her eyes are painted like black raisins?  In stiff arms, she holds the Baby Jesus who looks like a scalded baby monkey shaved down to its pale flesh.  These are Old Masters who are Odd Masters – they get the perspective wrong, can’t depict figures as foreshortened, and, sometimes, the application of color is idiosyncratic or just plain wrong.  In a nearby gallery, there’s a Romanesque sculpture of the Virgin, probably fake, I think, that seems to be influenced by Botero – the Virgin is fat with a round smiling face and the babe on her hip is also jolly: here Baby Jesus looks like a plump Jaycee, a miniature civic booster who extends his hand in a cheery greeting.  The artifact is carved from raw porous stone that is half-eroded around the edges, the work poorly executed, but, also, (if authentic) very old.

21.

Sleet pelts my windshield as I drive the freeway north from Kansas City to Kearney, Missouri.  Somewhere behind these curtains of falling ice, there must be a city but I see nothing more than an intersection beside my motel with two competing gas stations, a couple of fast food places, and, on the hill, an anonymous strip mall.  A red flare of neon advertises The Hunan Garden in the strip mall.  (There must be 400 Hunan Gardens scattered between various cities, suburbs and towns in the United States.)  For some reason, I have a hankering for Chinese food and I’m hungry, not much to eat during my long drive across Kansas except gas station food on which it’s better to pass.  I skid through a couple intersections to reach the Chinese restaurant on its bleak ridge above an empty snow-smeared parking lot.  When I try to exit the car, my foot slips on the ice and the windshield is now caked with freezing sleet and, it seems, that if I go inside for my Chinese supper, I’ll depart in any hour onto a parking lot that has become an ice rink and, perhaps, it will even be impossible to reach my vehicle due to the slipperiness underfoot and, then, when I am there, if pedestrian transit is feasible, the car doors will be frozen shut and I’ll have to spend a quarter of an hour chipping ice off the windshield, all these operations conducted with zero traction on the concrete below and the danger of spinning out of control in the intersections, or at the stop lights, on my way back to the motel.  And, so, I pull shut the door and watch The Hunan Garden receding in my rear-view mirror and there is no other choice but to use the drive-through at a Burger King to buy some fast food that I will eat in my room as the ice storm continues in the darkness outside the window of my motel room.