The Standing Rock Indian Reservation is the sixth largest reservation in the United States and straddles North and South Dakota.  It is 3,500 square miles and supports a population of roughly 8,000 people.  The Sioux had been a nomadic tribe of hunters and gatherers and once they were put onto reservations, expected to give up their traditional ways and adopt European lifestyles and mannerisms that held no appeal.  The Great Sioux Reservation, that at one time spanned across most of South Dakota kept getting broken down into smaller reservations, to keep the occupants isolated. 

In 2016, the Standing Rock Reservation got a lot of media attention when three to four thousand activists, which included members of three hundred recognized tribes, descended on the Sacred Stone Camp to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was threatening the primary water source for the reservation.  Protesters chained themselves to machinery to stop the work from taking place and police responded with pepper spray and attack dogs. 

Later in the year, 2,000 US Military Veterans arrived to help shield the protesters from the police.  The protest had earned a lot of support.  Eventually, some concessions were made but the pipeline was completed regardless.

After leaving Sitting Bulls grave, I drove into Fort Yates and visited his original burial site.  There were a few plaques telling his life story, including one that had a picture of him with his family.  Another showed him standing with Buffalo Bill.  I drove past murals of a chief in a headdress and a white buffalo, and then reached the Standing Rock monument, beside the Missouri River.  It is a rock that is purported to once have been a woman or child who was turned to stone, and is regarded as sacred, with great healing properties.

The sun had already set by now and I had no idea where I’d sleep that night.  The plan was to travel to Bismark, so I just drove in that direction, north on the 1806.  I thought I might search for a campsite when I got to the capital, but instead just happened to pass one along the way, the Sugarloaf Bottoms, just outside of Fort Rice. 

A full yellow moon had just risen, and it felt like a magical night.  There were only two RVs at the site.  By now it was fully dark, but then the moon, white and phosphorescent, rose up over the trees like a lantern.  I hurried to throw my tent up, and then went off to look for a fee box.  It was ten dollars, no reservation required.

It was freezing cold that night.  Wolves howled in the distance.  A flock of geese flew overhead.  Somewhere an owl started to hoot.  I lay on my side, exhausted, but still scheming.  Before the sun rose, I leapt up and got on the road, driving all the way to Bismark in the dark.  There, I visited the United Tribes Technical College, which had hosted a powwow a few weeks earlier.  If things had worked out differently, that may have been my first destination.  The sun still hadn’t risen.  I drove in and drove out.

It was only when I got back on the highway, heading west on the 94 towards Jamestown that the sun made its first appearance of the day.  It looked like it was rising up out of the yellow stripes on the road ahead of me.  I would make a stop in Jamestown but had bigger fish to fry that day. 

My father had been a preacher and I’d grown up as a nomad.  Our greatest period of stability had been four years in a small farm town in North Dakota, Ellendale.  Four years isn’t long, but I’d attended school there from the middle of seventh grade to the middle of eleventh grade, in this town of only two thousand people.  Those are influential years and the people and places from that time had become part of my personal mythology. 

The only reason I pulled over in Jamestown was to visit the biggest buffalo in the world.  It is twenty-six feet tall, weighs eighty tons, and stands at the end of Louis L’ Amour Lane, named after the great western novelist from North Dakota.  Whenever we drove past the buffalo as kids, someone would have to shout and point it out.

The buffalo was there, looking rather shapeless, but imposing, nonetheless.  All around it and leading up to it was Frontier Village, a model Old West Town, with wagons, a saloon, a sheriff’s office, dentist office, trading post, and the Pioneer Church.  They also had the Louis L’ Amour Writing Shack, but it was closed.  I walked up and down the little Main Street, amped up and almost shaking in my shoes. 

Then it was time to go visit another little prairie town, one that had only existed in foggy memories and dreams for the past forty years, full of pieces of the past, maybe nothing more than that.  It was time to find out.

Ellendale, North Dakota, is a small farming town on the border of South Dakota.  It was where my family moved to after my father had lost his job at a Bible Camp in Iowa.  Prior to that, my parents had been Jesus Freaks in Hawaii.  I grew up mostly putting my things into boxes and moving on.  As the oldest kid, that pattern of migration would go on to dictate my life, long after everyone else had stopped playing by those rules.  We moved to Southern California in 1984, and the rest of the family settled.  All these many years later, I was still bouncing.

From Jamestown, I took the 281 to get to Ellendale.  About a half hour out I began recognizing some of the other small farm towns in the vicinity; Edgely, Monango, Fullerton.  The closer I got, the more my chest began to swell with anticipation.  Then I could hardly believe it, but I was driving into town. 

There was the Oxenrider Hotel, right across from the Nursing Home where I’d worked for a year taking out food carts and scrubbing dishes.  There across highway 11 was Jay’s Highway Furniture, and opposite it the church, Christ the King Lutheran, where my father had been pastor for four years.  I drove into the parking lot and felt like I was hallucinating, seeing the actual church that had appeared in so many dreams since the time we moved.  Then I made my way over to the parsonage.  Someone had added a deck, but it was the same house where we’d lived, the six of us.  Out back we’d once had a colossal garden that had returned to being tall grass.

The houses of the old next-door neighbors were still there.  Who knew who was living in them now?  Everything I’d learned about sex education had come from the older neighbor girl across the street, Lynn Nichols. Across from her house was the one the Schwartzman’s used to live in, with the twins and the girl in my grade.  If I caught up with them now, we’d all be middle-aged.  That was a trip.

I drove over to the drive-in restaurant where my father had once pestered the manager, a member of his church, into giving me a job.  That hadn’t lasted long.  I’d brutalized soft-serve ice cream cones and burned hamburgers.  My father had also gotten me the job at the nursing home.  Left to my own devices, all I could ever think to do for money was rustle up empty bottles.  We always had a roof over our heads and food to eat, but there was never any extra money lying around.

From the block we used to live on, I drove up to the Fireside Steakhouse and Lounge, once known as The Ranch, one of the only places in town to get a fancy meal.  My friend, Rick Hazard, used to live close to The Ranch, beneath the emergency siren, but his house was gone.  I found the County Courthouse, and that looked the same, but the school we’d all gone to, the one that housed the elementary, junior high, and high school, all in the same complex, had been restructured and was all just one story now.  The entrance had been moved to the other side, but I did see that the school was still using the Fighting Cardinals as their mascot. 

It is such a small town, the Main Street, just three or four blocks along, that it didn’t take long to drive through.  The corner bar that I remembered was still there, but many of the retail spaces were vacant, these days people preferring to drive to the Walmart in Aberdeen or order off of Amazon, I imagine.  I drove down to the park and swimming pool, then past the mansion that Martha Best, the girl who ditched me in ninth grade for my best friend, Ritchie Wallace, used to live in. 

Trinity Bible School is still in operation.  Our high school used to use their gymnasium for our biggest sporting events.  From there I passed the Dickey County Fairgrounds, site of the annual summer Rodeo Days, and the baseball field where I’d played, quite poorly, in the Babe Ruth League.

Seven miles outside of town is a dammed-up river called Pheasant Lake, really almost as much of a cow pasture as it is a lake.  We’d once owned a small lot out there, with a tar and paper shack and a dock.  I headed west on the 11, past the bowling alley and familiar old grain elevator, and found the lake.  The nice houses are on the west side of it.  Our shack had been up a dirt road on the east side. 

I drove down a mile or so and found the lot, the only thing left on it being an outhouse that we’d dragged over from an old homestead.  That and a small shed that had been constructed since that time.  I pulled into the lot and walked down to the lake. The water was really low.  The docks on the neighboring properties jutted out into a few inches of mud.  It seemed like you could walk across to the farm on the other side. 

There was a rock pile underneath some powerlines where I used to chew tobacco and fish for northerns.  Now it was twenty feet from the shore.  I walked back up through the green grass and sat with my back to the outhouse.  The town was still there.  The lake, though fairly famished, was still there.  Some of the houses and building were still there.  The people I’d known, however, had mostly grown up, grown old, died, or moved away.  There was no one left for me to call or look up.

Why is it that we feel things so strongly and then at some point just vanish from the face of the earth?  A chilly breeze came through, rustling the leaves in the trees.  There were the flies, always the flies, and the crickets, sometimes the crickets.  Who was the one holding onto all these memories?  What was I looking for?  A herd of cows was bellowing from across the lake.  The wind picked up.  It was almost blowing through me. 

Overhead there was the sound of an airplane, faint at first, growing louder, reaching a crescendo, the starting to fade away, almost like a life span.  I remembered the time my mother’s parents had stayed at the lake in their camper and my grandpa had shot a raccoon.  We’d considered him a modern-day Davy Crockett after that.  Martha Best had lived in a beautiful cabin across the lake.  Once I’d driven over in our little fishing boat, ashamed to show up in our family station wagon with all the religious propaganda pasted to it. 

What had happened to all the kids?  Where had Davy Crockett gone?  Was Marth Best still alive?  If so, I wondered if she ever thought of me.  Geese flew overhead.  Wind tore at the trees.  Pages were flying away all around me.  There was no way to catch them.  The only thing I could do was let them go.

Nothing bad had happened in Ellendale, but on my way out of town I felt lonely and depressed.  I had been back a few times since my family moved to California, but the last time I’d seen the old crowd, I’d changed and nobody else had.  Now I was adrift on my own, either unable or unwilling to commit myself to relationships or a community.  When you romanticize them, you don’t remember what a drudgery they both can be, but they can.  They can even turn deadly.

I thought I knew how to find Ritchie’s Wallace’s farm, where I’d worked as a hired man for a few summers, mostly just hanging out with Ritchie, driving the farm truck around, helping out with chores.  Either it had changed hands, however, or I was just lost.  I wasn’t able to find any of the landmarks I was looking for.  I made my way back to the highway and crossed into South Dakota, pulling over at Frederick, where we used to look for seniors to pimp us beer, since the drinking age across the state line had been eighteen at the time.  It was just about thirty more miles to Aberdeen.

When we lived in Ellendale, Aberdeen had been the closest big town.  We used to drive down there if we wanted to get fast food or shop at a mall.  It was more than just that though.  My mother had a step-grandfather in a nursing home there.  The first time we went to visit him he was throwing water at the nurses.  The second time we brought him a box of chocolates and he yanked a rubber knob off his bed post and ate that instead.  She also had a step-uncle who lived in Aberdeen with his wife and well-endowed, blonde daughter.

Nowadays, I’d been around the world, and Aberdeen seemed more like a big town than anything.  I looked for the Pizza Hut where my friends and I used to try to get served pitchers of beer at.  Then I tracked down the Holiday Inn where my family had gone for brunch after my confirmation and my friends had held a going away party for me before we moved to California.  My mission was to track down the little farm town, Pierpont, where my mother’s side of the family was from.

Both sides of our family come from Scandinavian immigrants who came over to homestead South Dakota at the end of the 19^th century.  My mother’s family had a farm around Pierpont.  My father’s family was from Viborg.

It was just forty miles from Aberdeen to Pierpont, but I never would’ve found it without Google Maps, as it wasn’t even on the map.  Karen, the voice of Google Maps, by now my savior a dozen times over, directed me there.  I’d only been there a few times in my life.  My grandpa’s sister had been married to a farmer who’d shown us a good time when we stopped by, letting us ride the riding lawnmower and shoot a pistol.  Along with some second cousins, my brother and I had put ourselves in some danger, walking a beam along the pig pen and pissing on an electric fence.  Now I was there, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but Google Maps and a small sign to tell me I’d arrived.

My Grandpa had gotten sick of life on the farm and gone off to business school with a cardboard suitcase.  It was hard to say who was left in the town.  The population is just over a hundred people, perhaps most of them on the outlying farms.  I found a small service station, restaurant, and baseball park, but that was about it, beyond a few blocks of houses.  The family farm was long gone by now.  There was no trace of any living relatives.

From Pierpont, I drove to the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation, home to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.  It was created in 1867 and has some ten thousand inhabitants.  There I drove past the Sisseton Wahpeton College.  One of the buildings features four drummers in a circle, holding drumsticks in the air.  I then followed a sign pointing to the powwow grounds and came to the Winfield Thompson Sr. Memorial Dance Arena.

By now I was just frazzled.  My circuits were starting to short out due to over-stimulation and fatigue.  I had some idea about driving into Minnesota and finding a campground.  It shouldn’t have been that difficult to do.  Instead, I got on Google Maps and went from the 127 to the 9 to the 108 to the 59, through Pelican Rapids and Detroit Lakes, past all these beautiful lakes that seemed perfect to stop at, but only had resorts, rather than campgrounds.  I followed one lead for a long way, only to find myself in a field where they occasionally staged big concerts, with no one else out there and no facilities.

The leaves were changing all around me, orange, yellow, red, green.  It was spectacular for a leisurely drive, but I was about to have a seizure and run my car into a ditch.  I got on the 34 and headed west, ready to just pull over and sleep by the side of the road.  Karen, from Google Maps, had a last place to check out for me, the Hungry Man Forest Campground.  I took the 37 east, past Shell Lake, then the 58 to the 44.  Night had fallen.  Oh my, God.  There was a sign. 

I pulled off and followed in in the wrong direction, down a private driveway.  I turned around and took it the other way, pulling into a spot, just when the night couldn’t have gotten any blacker.  What a profound relief.  I kept the headlights on and threw up the tent, then crawled inside and just lay there panting.

It was so dark when I pulled in, that I’d had no idea where I even was.  As soon as the sun came up, I found I was only about a hundred yards from a lake.  I went down and found a dock that I walked to the end to.  Mist was rising from the water. 

The lakes of northern Minnesota are frozen and buried beneath the snow for half of the year.  When they break free, they are rare jewels, a testimony to those who suffer, that beauty is right around the corner.  When it is time to go out again, they do it in grand fashion, waving flags of every color, knowing that it is not really the end, but just goodbye for now.  They were getting ready to say goodbye for now.  I was lucky to be crashing the party.

Among the legends of America, the Mississippi River is one of the greatest and most enduring.  It is the second largest river in North America, running from Northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and for many years served as a natural boundary for the frontier and great wide-open West.  If I’d driven so hard the day before, it’s because I’d wanted to get close to the source of the Mississippi, Lake Itasca.  There it begins as a small stream, leaving a glacial lake.  I knew about it because I’d been there once before, floating down it naked to celebrate a record I’d just made called Deep River in my Heart.  The plan for today was a more conservative one, simply to revisit the stream and walk beside it.

It was only a half hour from the Hungry Man Forest Campground, where I’d arrived late the night before, in a dark spell of exhaustion and mania, stumbling to set up my tent like a disoriented child in a Grimm Brothers Fairy Tale.  Now in the daylight, the forest and roads were easy to navigate.  How could I have gotten so lost?  The world is not such a frightening place, not all of the time.

There were only a few cars in the parking lot of the Mississippi Headwaters Center.  An arrow pointed out that the headwaters were only eight hundred feet away.  There were a number of exhibits about the history of the river and flora and fauna of the region.  I made my way to a signpost, stating that the Mississippi starts right there, at 1475 feet above sea level, and flows 2,552 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.  My idea had been to sit right at that spot and meditate.  Instead, I found a woman had shown up first and snaked my idea, so I had to turn it into a walking meditation in an attempt to walk off my annoyance.

A trail ran beside the stream, back in the direction of the Visitor Center.  I stuck to that and counted my breaths, only managing to draw them to the middle of my chest.  There was a small bridge that crossed the stream.  I walked out and stood in the middle of it, looking down on it, only fifteen feet wide and very shallow, white stones breaking the surface, the sides of it cluttered with bushes and small pines. 

It had been fourteen years since I’d gone floating down it naked, pushing myself along the bottom with my hands.  Where had that guy gone to?  All over the world since then.  What about that record that I’d been so proud of.  It had vanished without a trace, not garnering a single compliment.  So, it goes.  When you finish a project, you open up the door for something new.  You need to look at it that way.  If you wait around for results, you’ll die prematurely of a broken heart.

There were three reservations I was close enough to visit that day.  The White Earth Indian Reservation was only forty miles away.  I plugged it into Google Maps, and Karen began to guide me towards it.  Driving west on the 200, however, there was a road work project that made it impossible to go left on the road she’d directed me to.  From that point on, she began to harangue me, ordering to turn around or take a left at even the smallest lanes I came to.  I got confused and began to argue with her.  What are you talking about?  I can’t turn left here.  Are you out of your mind?  That’s not even a road.  By the time we got to the 3 south, I was seething, determined to shut her up as soon as the reservation was in sight.

The White Earth Indian Reservation, named for the white clay in the ground, is a thousand square miles, with a population of close to 10,000.  They are one of the six band of the Minnesota Chippewa, or Ojibwe.  In 1867, ten Ojibwe chiefs met with President Andrew Jackson and came to terms over the reservation, but over the years the government attempted to make it a catch all for all the other tribes, including some from their historic enemies, the Lakota.  The Dawes Act of 1887 allowed the government to break down the reservations into allotments of land to each individual member, the surplus then being put up for sale.  In this manner, many tribes lost a great deal of their holdings.

At a Cenex station, I filled up on gas, only twenty-seven dollars for almost a full tank, and got a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich.  Just down the road was the Shooting Star Casino, offering Bingo, a Sunday Brunch, and upcoming concerts by Ambrosia and A Flock of Seagulls.  The tribes may have been stripped of their culture but look what they got in return.

It was an hour to Bemidji from the White Earth Reservation.  There I pulled over at Library Park to see their version of America’s first dynamic duo, once again Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe.  I’d seen them in California and now they were in Minnesota.  If anything, that’s a testament to how much they got around.  Across the street, in front of a jewelry and souvenir shop, a ten-foot shirtless Indian was raising his hand and saying How!

To get to Red Lake, the largest lake in Minnesota was another hour.  I took highway 18 north to the Red Lake Reservation.  The reservation is unique in that it never left control of the tribes.  It is about 1,200 square miles and seven clans reside on it; those of the bear, turtle, bullhead, otter, eagle, marten, and kingfisher.  I passed the Red Lake Nation College, stretched out beneath the wings of a giant eagle, and a veteran’s memorial, beside the frame of a sweat lodge.  There was also a recovery center I pulled up in front of, a reminder of the plague that addiction has been, not only for the tribes, but for vulnerable, sensitive people from all walks of life.  A hand-painted sign across from it said When you mess with meth, you mess with death.  True that.

The last reservation I passed on my way to Duluth was the one in Leech Lake.  It was created more out of an amalgamation of different treaties and executive orders than any one act and was also the site of one of the last major Indian uprisings in the northwest, the Battle of Sugar Point.  In 1898, two US Marshals attempted to arrest a native of the Pillager tribe they suspected of bootlegging.  In the standoff that ensued more troops were brought in and 6 soldiers were killed.

I’d contacted some friends in Minneapolis and planned on breaking up my trip by stopping there for a few days.  In the meantime, I had one night to kill and figured I’d get a hotel in Duluth, get cleaned up, and organize the car.  If it looked like I’d been living out of it, it was because I had, living in the driver’s seat, driving sixteen hours a day, up the West Coast, across the Northwest, now smack dab in the middle of the Midwest, following the Mississippi River. 

I don’t know if I’d call what I was doing living in a car, but it was definitely living.  That was for sure.

If Avis had a problem with me driving their Kia Rio, the valiant and trustworthy steed I’d come to know as the Mountain Bluebird, all over the face of the land, I didn’t want to know about it until I’d brought it back.  By now I’d put over four thousand miles on it and figured I should probably change the oil sometime soon but didn’t want to pull into one of their service stations and be prohibited from taking it any further.  I resolved to take a day in Duluth and get it done on my own, keeping the receipt to prove I hadn’t overlooked it, but not planning to present it unless they called me on it.

Back in the day, I’d spent whole blocks of time slumming in a Motel 6 on the San Ysidro border at Tijuana.  If I remember rightly, a room could be had for fifty dollars a night, which was still a lot, but seemed somehow possible.  By now, however, there were almost no rooms for that price anywhere in the States.  Did they think you were making a down payment on the room in the hope of one day owning it?

The Motel 6 I pulled over at in Duluth wanted nearly a hundred dollars a night.  That gave me a long pause, but I was so exhausted I caved and just paid.  One incentive was the gas station next door that had a deal on oil changes.  I figured I’d get up first thing in the morning and drive the Kia over.

Duluth is a unique place, a harbor city on Lake Superior.  The only time I’d been there before it had been ridiculously cold, a gray ice sculpture of a place where you need to run from your car to get inside before you freeze to death.  By the end of September, it wasn’t there yet, but still gave me flashbacks to the ten years I’d spent in Minnesota, in three distinct phases, and the final, fateful breakdown that had driven me back out West for good.

For nearly a hundred dollars, my room wasn’t much to look at.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if the DEA or a SWAT team had kicked my door in at any minute.  I was used to the surroundings, but not used to paying so much for them.  Some guy was parked right outside my window, with his radio cranked up all the way.  There would’ve been big trouble if that continued, but after a while his engine roared to life and then it quieted down.  Later, I went over to the Burger King.  The dining room was closed but they let me walk through the drive through.  For the day I was having, that was just perfect.

In the morning, I got up and drove straight over to the garage to get my oil changed.  They let me know that the Kia used synthetic oil that only needed to be changed every seven thousand miles.  I told them to go ahead and change it anyway.  The price went from forty dollars to ninety dollars.  At least I now knew my parameters.

When the car was finished, I drove it back to the room, determined to get the very last minute out of it, then checked out and drove out to the Point, passing the Aerial Bridge and finding a park on the north shore of the lake, where I could sit for a moment and try to get my bearings.  There was a bench beneath a pine tree.  Small waves were crossing the surface of the lake and slapping the shore.

It was a perfect day.  How many of those had there been?  Almost every day had been perfect, not only the weather, but everything that had happened, the way things had all unfolded.  Why did life never feel like that?  Only my travels.  I’ve learned not to question good times too much, however.  Celebrate then wait.  They can sure turn fast.

A cool breeze came off the lake.  The small waves continued to slap against the shore in a rhythmic pattern.  A seaplane flew overhead, with floats where there might’ve been wheels.  It circled and returned, either practicing or contemplating a landing.  Here it came again, this time touching down, skimming the surface of the lake, and making that landing.  That had been good timing. 

Two men were getting ready to take a sailboat out.  The younger one was the expert, giving all the directions.  Across the bay, some church bells began tolling.  Then the whistle of a train cried out.  I closed my eyes and could see the plane, the way it had touched down on the lake.  I played it over and over, three or four times.  Every time the church bells rang, I saw the plane land.  Then they stopped and the train screeched again. 

The two men were putting their sailboat into the lake.  The name of the boat was the Deedle Bug.  It was written on the side.  Why not?  The Deedle Bug.  Once it got cold, it might be seven months before they got the chance to take it out again.  If they were hoping to sail, it was the right day to do it.

My classmate from Saint Olaf, Jaimey Gustafson, had agreed to put me up for a few days.  She lived with her husband and two kids near Lake Calhoun.  It had been a while since I’d seen any of the old college crew.  Most of my friends would be working that day, so I still had time to kill once I left Duluth.

I drove over to Wisconsin and followed the Saint Croix River through Stillwater, eventually getting on the 94 east and taking it to the Twin Cities.  I’d become totally dependent on Google Maps by now, simply punching in directions and going where Karen led me.  If she started to nag, I just tried to ignore her, in the same way that I’d handle a backseat driver.

When I got to Jaimey’s house, she came out to greet me.  She looked about the same, maybe a little grayer.  Kirstin Johnson came over.  Lindy Sorenson stopped by.  It was like the good old days, Charlie’s Angels and their dear friend, Bosley.  We were all older but had reached the point where you’re just happy anyone still cares that you’re alive.  Although everyone was coming from different situations and our circumstances had changed, one thing I became aware of that night is that we all carry the same cup of sorrow, never knowing what can fill it to capacity, different triggers for different people.

That night I slept on a hide-a-bed in the basement.  Although I’d lived almost half of my life in the Midwest it had been a long time since I’d been back there, sleeping in a basement.  We don’t do basements much in California, not a good place to caught in an earthquake.  When I came up in the morning, Jaimey’s husband, Devon, had taken their daughter to school.  Her son was off at college.  We drank coffee and caught up.

My goal for the day was to run down to Saint Olaf, about forty miles south of the Twin Cities, in the town of Northfield.  I’d gone to Saint Olaf because my family had only recently moved from North Dakota to California, and I was used to dealing with Midwest types.  Things had worked out pretty well.  It had been a small enough school that I was able to make friends and get encouragement for my writing.  Due to their study abroad program, I got to spend a semester in Oxford and learn all about the traveling lifestyle.  My four years in college made me what I’d be for the rest of my life, messed up, but still looking for meaning.

Northfield was a straight shot down the 35 south.  I got gas halfway there and continued on, turning left onto highway 19.  Before arriving in town, I reached the campus and drove up the long driveway to get to it.  Wow.  There it was.  Still intact.  I parked and set out on foot, past the International Dorm I’d lived in my sophomore year, then over to my freshman dorm, Kildahl, then to what used to be the cafeteria.  It was now an art building.  There was a new building, Hoyme Hall, that housed the new cafeteria and student store.  I walked past Ytterboe, then over to Old Main, the first building when Saint Olaf was founded in 1874.

Behind Old Main, I found a chair, at the top of The Hill.  When I’d shown up for college, I’d had no idea who I was or could be, just a depressed preacher’s kid, getting as far away from his family as he possibly could.  Now what was I, beyond just a leaf in the wind.  It was a good place to be a leaf in the wind.  I had a lot of company that morning.  Yellow leaves and memories were swirling all around me, like butterflies descending on a flower. 

We used to take trays from the cafeteria and use them to sled down the hill.  That’s probably the most innocent activity we ever engaged in.  Before going off to college, I’d never known that artists could be heroes.  I’d discovered a whole slew of dangerous new role models, stopped believing in God for a while, started taking new drugs, and plotting new adventures.  It was there I’d constructed my vision, an almost laughably impossible one, that I’d stuck with all these years.  Sometimes I would grow quiet for a season, do whatever job I needed to raise funds, but never let go of the vision.  Life, without it, would’ve been unbearable.

Leaving the college, I drove towards downtown on St. Olaf Avenue, detouring to visit the Arboretum at rival college, Carleton, a site of many spring concerts and parties.  Parking beside the Cannon River, I discovered that the Archer House Inn, built in 1877, had nearly burnt to the ground.  Walking a little further, I reached the Northfield Historical Society.  In the front window was a picture of the legendary outlaw, Jessie James.

The lawless Wild West was in many ways a byproduct of the American Civil War, fought from 1861-65.  After a peace was surrendered from the South many disaffected soldiers and militia men went on to become Indian fighters or roving gangs of outlaws.  This was the background of Jessie James and his brother, Frank, who’d both fought as guerrilla Confederate bushwhackers under Bloody Bill Anderson.  The James-Younger Gang became famous for robbing banks, trains, and stagecoaches, and Jessie went on to develop a reputation as a modern Robin Hood, even though there is no evidence he ever shared any of his loot with the poor, and the worst of his crimes were beyond cold-blooded.

One of Northfield’s top claims is thwarting the gang from robbing the First National Bank in 1876 and killing three of the robbers in the shoot-out that ensued.  Both Jessie and Frank got away.  Jessie went on to live six more years, until he was shot by Robert Ford in the back of the head while straightening a painting on a wall.  Ford had earned his confidence and killed him for the reward money.  He then got his in 1892, when a man walked into a saloon he was working at and shot him in the throat with a double-barrel shotgun.

Pieces of the past were scattered all over on this trip, like the falling leaves that had engulfed me sitting on The Hill.  I knew nothing of the future, but still feared death.  When it came for me, my hope was to go out like Jessie James, all of my focus on a beautiful scene in front of my eyes, never knowing what hit me from behind.

One of my college friends, Lou Ann, half Chippewa, and half Norwegian, was out of town that weekend, but told me about a powwow that was going on at Roosevelt High School.  I’d had a mad crush on her back in the day, but she’d had a boyfriend she eventually married.  At Minnehaha Falls there is a statue of Hiwatha carrying the maiden Minnehaha in his arms.  That’s the same vision I’d had for Lou Ann in college, taking her in my arms and carrying her over the threshold.  Since I’d go on to be broke and unstable for the next thirty-two years, it appeared she’d chosen the right man.

Before tracking down the powwow, I drove over to Saint Paul to visit Luther Seminary, where my father had attended and been ordained in the Lutheran Church.  He’d been an English teacher when he and my mother moved to Hawaii, staying just long enough to have me, before he was accepted into the seminary.  My first memories are from that neighborhood and the houses we lived in.  It was there that my brother John was born.

Marin Luther was a German priest, who, in 1517, went against the Catholic Church and launched the Protestant Reformation, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg.  Both sides of my family were Lutheran, so there was a good deal of celebration when my father was ordained, until a year later in Hawaii, when he’d dropped out and become a Jesus Freak, going so far as to nail his own theses to the front door of the establishment.  About six years later, back on the mainland, with a growing family on his hands, he’d have to get down on his knees and beg, just to get back on the clergy roster.

The memories from those years are like still photos from a dream.  Finding the seminary wasn’t hard.  There was the house I thought we might’ve lived in.  Something about the porch seemed familiar.  Next door to it had been the family with the girl about my age and the sandbox.  There was the hill we used to go rolling down.  A flock of wild turkeys came lurching down the street.  I walked over to the campus grounds.  There was a bench beside one of the dorms that I went and sat down on.

The bench was beneath an oak tree.  The sky was gray, and the wind was cold.  A radio was playing loudly a few blocks away.  I thought about the time the girl next door and I had taken flowers to an old couple we knew.  They’d invited us in and gave us candy, so we tried it again the next day.  This time the old man had gotten very angry and chased us away.  All these years later, the memory was still upsetting. 

The radio tuned into a techno beat and began to thump away.  Two cars passed by.  The wind blew high through the trees.  There were bird cries, and then suddenly the honking of geese.  A woman came out of the dorm and sat down on the steps.  A few minutes later a second woman came out and joined her.  Another memory came to me, perhaps the memory of a dream, walking through a chapel, then looking back at a projectionist’s window, and seeing the face of a donkey.  What a frightening thing it had been.  The techno beat was dominating the soundscape.  A bicyclist passed with a green shirt and a helmet.  He seemed to be pedaling in time to the music.

The Back-to-School Powwow was being held at North High.  The grand entrance was at one o’clock and I wanted to be there for it.  I’d hoped to come across a powwow on this trip, and as fate would have it, Lou Ann, who’d helped fill my head with all those Native American fantasies in the first place, had been the one to hook me up, even if she couldn’t be there.  It seemed like a good sign. 

Even with Google Maps, I had a hard time tracking it down.  It was being held in an athletic field a few blocks away from the high school.  On a fence in front of the bleachers, hung flags from all the tribes that were representing that day.  About fifty dancers were dressed in the full traditional regalia to participate in the opening and compete in the dances.  A Head Man and Head Boy were on site, as well as a Head Woman and Head Girl.  Some of the featured drum groups had names like Midnight Express, Little Otter, and Little Kingfisher. 

I walked around, asking if I could take pictures of certain dancers, trying to convey enthusiasm and respect, not wanting to be intrusive.  The outfits seemed to combine traditional elements with a modern and personal flair.  There were feathered headdresses, buffalo bonnets, elaborate beadwork sashes and breastplates, wild displays of color, moccasins, and leggings, even one or two COVID masks tossed in.

The Master of Ceremonies introduced the performers and paid the proper respects.  The host drum team kicked into the opening song and the dancers streamed onto the field in single file, spreading out once they reached it, and dancing to their own interpretations of the music.  I felt ecstatic in this moment.  It was all I’d dared to dream of before hopping in a rental car and hitting the road.  The dancers danced this way and that, like birds, sacred animals, gods, and goddesses.  The overhead sky was all purple and blue ripples, with no wind at all.  I closed my eyes and felt the power of the moment pulsing through me.

Before heading back to Jaimey’s, I took a quick drive through downtown Minneapolis, stopping outside of the venerable First Avenue, where much inspiration had been found in my early twenties.  I then drove through Uptown and found the basement apartment where as a young songwriter I’d faced my own brutal day of defeat, not quite starving, but as broke and humiliated as a man can be, finally packing it up and going back to California to stay with my folks, rather than end it all there on a cold, bathroom floor. 

There was never a time that came after when I’d been so wild and free, but all that energy had gone awry, wanting so much, with no idea how to get it.  If I didn’t drink all day back then, I’d head down to Lake Calhoun and walk two or three laps to try to take the edge off the anxiety.  Now I drove down to the lake and took a calmer stroll in the early evening.  What had changed?  Everything and nothing. 

Living in that basement apartment, I’d once bought a box of old National Geographics at the Salvation Army, and cut out the pictures, pasting them all over the walls.  It was a symbol of what I’d wanted my life to be like.  Now I’d been to most of those places, the pictures were memories, not fantasies.  I was still as broke as I’d ever been, but not quite as desperate.  Give it six more months.  Then, when all my unemployment money was gone, I’d catch up on that front.  All I needed was time.