Al Kesselheim

It’s complicated, right?

There’s the election, which has made me a little catatonic. There’s the fact that my father died, in mid-October, an event both difficult and lovely, if you know what I mean. He was ready, so ready. He was resolved and calm. In fact, during his final week, he crossed a threshold back to his sweet, gentle self, a transformation that made me understand just how difficult these years since mom died have been for him; how much he struggled, and how that struggle surfaced in his irascibility and selfishness. Suddenly he smiled, he reached out, he gave and accepted warmth. And we were lucky enough to surround him with family that final week together in a comfortable, loving setting. No hospital room, no tubes and interventions, just an 89-year-old body accepting the inevitable, and the will to go.

Of course, too, the usual clamor of life – making ends meet, paying property tax, teaching classes, finding and writing stories, feeling our way into our empty-nest (at least sporadically) phase of life, making plans, being social, being political, being sane. The juggling act that sometimes feels like it is taking place on a tightrope.

But then, it isn’t complicated in the least. As when, the first weekend of November, just after my 64th birthday, I noticed that the gauge on the Smith River was high enough to float, and that the weather for the weekend looked good, and that my Thurs. classes weren’t meeting, and we loaded up the boat, drove to the put in and slipped away, or back into, for four days on a stream where the float season usually ends sometime in July. Jesus what a window of beauty. Long, cold nights set off by deep-blue days in the grip of limestone canyon walls and chuckling current; four days of reset button, where the order of things shuffled back into place and the timeless, seamless power of the world, the seasons, the night skies, the unfurling water, the soaring birds, the sharp, fall light – all of it came back into focus.

There is so much more, so many events, from the summer that remain unrecorded, except for the memories, the marks on maps, a few photos, the images that come stabbing back at unexpected moments – how suddenly I’ll find myself in a snow squall on top of a pass in the mountains of Utah with the world rolling off into the foggy distance when I’m walking down Main Street on my way to a coffee shop, provoked by, something – a smell, a sharp sound, a movement at the edge of vision.

But here, a fragment from the summer, at the end of our week-long hike across the Highline Trail in northern Utah. It was a journey back in time for me, to a mountain range I spent months at a time in during my early twenties. This piece takes place on our final day, when we fell down another rabbit hole and only re-emerged near dark when we finally fumbled our way out again.

“DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE”

Should have paid attention. Should have known better.

At dawn, for instance, sitting in camp waiting for light to strike, when I notice how far north the sun is rising. Odd, I think. Must be my orientation. Or, on the previous afternoon, when we noticed a couple of horse riders crossing the same ridge farther up the basin. But then, from the ridgeline, looking down at the lake I expected to be there, I discounted it. Must have been herding up some stray sheep. Or, last evening, watching a band of elk graze uphill toward the ridge, feeling a strange need to follow their line. Weird.

But we know where we are. Lake Wilde, 3 or 4 miles from the trailhead at the base of Leidy Peak, a week in and nearly 80 miles from our start at the western end of the Highline Trail. Seven days spent along the spine of the Uintas, at or above tree-line between 10,000’ and 12,000’. A handful of peaks. 9 passes. Feeling pretty good for a couple of Social Security types.

Of course we study the map, as we have studied maps along dozens and dozens of trails over 40 years of backcountry travel. My eyes rove over the terrain – neighboring drainages, peaks, isolated lakes, places to go next time. No GPS crap for us. Seems like everyone we’ve seen along the trail has been riveted to their device, spitting out mileage, time moving, time sitting, waypoints, elevation. No thanks. I don’t even like wearing a watch.

Since passing the wilderness boundary, a couple of days back, the trail has become more sketchy. We’ve had to stay focused, match landmarks, search for cairns, discount the ‘helpful’ rock piles people leave, thinking they are on-route when they are not. A little challenging, but not bad. Last night I wandered past the end of the lake, along the slope we would follow toward the trailhead, looking for sign. Didn’t find much – a vague tread here and there, some cairns.

After breakfast we set out, aiming for the rounded mass of peaks, working our way gently up the ridgeline toward it. “We’ll be out before noon,” Marypat says, securing her poles.

Fateful words. Because now, 10 hours and maybe 10 miles later, it’s evening and we’re back within a mile of that same lake, having spent the day tromping around with our packs on, growing increasingly frustrated and confused. Damn!

In that disquieting trip down the rabbit hole, we persisted in trying to make a not-quite-right landscape line up with the map, like forcing the wrong pieces into a puzzle. We climbed the peak, walked around the peak, found cairns – some quite substantial – and tried to figure out where they led. We circumnavigated a mass of peaks, staying above treeline, looking for roads, parking areas, lakes, drainages. We stumbled across boulder fields, retraced our steps, looked from different vantage points. All the while we kept assuming that we were within a maddening mile of our car, and that somehow we just weren’t seeing things right.

Mid-day came and went, and anxiety loomed at the edges of thought like an eclipse, threatening to overwhelm basic safety protocol and common sense. When we glimpsed a snippet of distant dirt road, Marypat argued for bushwhacking our way to it and figuring things out from there. I felt the same seduction, something tangible, that ribbon of dirt that had to lead somewhere, that might have vehicles, but then, I couldn’t bring myself to plunge further into the unknown, down into the forest, where we would likely lose the thread back to the last spot we had the trail. The knowledge that, no mater how turned around we were, we could still find our way back to a solid reference point, was my life raft.

More than once, I was reminded of Geraldine Largay, who wandered off of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, got turned around, and slowly starved to death over the next month. Her remains and a journal were found 2 years later less than 2 miles from the trail. Or of earlier explorers who lived in a constant state of geographic unease, and of the mental fortitude it took to stave off panic. I also thought of moments of geographic confusion in my life – searching for the outlet of an Arctic lake on a remote canoe expedition, or setting up an orienteering course in dense Wisconsin woods when I suddenly realized that I was completely turned around myself. I knew I was less than half a mile from a dirt road, but in those dense, trackless woods, I had no idea in what direction. Those were moments of barely contained anxiety, when I was prone to fantastic suggestion, not to mention stupidity.

It is as if, in those confused, unmoored situations, everything is questionable, nothing makes sense. If I don’t know where I am, what else is certain?

Here in the Uintas, it was compounded by the appearance of substantial cairns that must lead somewhere. We even found ourselves building a few rock towers at moments when we thought we were on the right track. At one point I had the absurd notion to take out the key fob and try to unlock the car doors, hoping to hear the car beep back at me.

“Where the hell are we?” we each said, at various points and with increasing vehemence.

Around mid-afternoon, I suggested my Plan B. “Look, we know how to get back to the trail. Rather than getting more lost, if we really can’t find the car, we should retrace our steps to the last trailhead, 10 miles back, and hitch a ride out. It would be a total pain, but it beats getting good and truly lost with no food.”

“No way,” Marypat said, at first, but as the day wore on, and our confusion deepened, she began to relent.

All of this confusion stemmed from our absolute conviction that we camped at Lake Wilde the night before. Every time we looked at the map, we began with that premise. I couldn’t get past that certainty. From there, nothing quite fit. Close, but not right.

Which brings us back to evening, back on the ridgeline above our previous camp, the ridge I’d watched the elk graze over, feeling the odd urge to follow. Too stubborn to admit defeat, we climb to the crest and look over. Marypat hikes to a nearby prominence to get a better vantage. I get out the map again.

Below me, another lake glimmers at the base of another ridgeline. Like mist dissolving in the day’s warmth, an idea emerges. What if, I think, that lake is actually Lake Wilde, and the lake we camped at was Blue Lake, one ridge over. A very similar topography, but not the right one. I orient the map, line things up, look in front of me, behind me. I still resist, but it starts to make sense.

When I show Marypat, she studies it for a long time, then nods slowly, ruefully. We are still so untrusting of terrain, of ourselves, of the map, that even as we start, we vow not to get pulled off into another goose chase. If it doesn’t really look right when we get there, we’ll still default to my Plan B.

We trudge toward the new lake. I lie on my belly to drink melt from a snow bank. We haven’t eaten since the half-cup of granola at breakfast. We are beat. But a quarter mile up the faint trail past the lake, lying on the ground next to a rock cairn, is an old wood sign with an arrow pointing east – Leidy Peak – 2. I prop it back up, make sure the arrow points in the right direction.

We set about getting food out, lighting a stove. Then Marypat makes her suggestion. “What if we eat some dinner and book out? Even if we don’t make it all the way, we can camp wherever.”

Twenty minutes later, daylight waning, we are hiking again under our packs. This time, finally, the landmarks align with the map. Lakes are where they are supposed to be. Still, every time something looks off, that eclipse of panic starts rising again.

More than a mile along, we come across a couple camped above the trail. We share stories. It turns out that they endured a similar day, following an errant trail sign, walking an extra 8 miles, questioning everything, before finally realizing that they had to bushwhack more than a mile up a steep slope to regain the trail. And they have GPS.

Twilight deepens. Cairns emerge out of the dusk, contouring around the correct peak. An occasional sign appears. A few times we lose the thread of trail, talk about camping, but then find another cairn, keep walking into the shadows. And ten minutes to full dark, when I push the key fob, our little Toyota chirps back through the gloaming, a cheerful and reassuring connection to the known, mapped world, and a reminder to pay attention to the damn clues next time I’m so wedded to the topo sheet.

“It’s like everything is wrapped in gold,” Marypat said, when we set our two solo canoes into the lower reaches of the East Gallatin on Sunday morning. It was supposed to rain later. The winds out of the west were going to pick up, so we got to the water early, around the time church-going people cinch their ties and shine the scuffs from their shoes.

For the first hour it was all serenity, beauty and awe. The valley glowed with fall. Three sandhill cranes climbed up the bank and soared off over the fields, calling. White-tailed deer watched us swing past. An owl lifted from a pile of logs on the outside of a bend. A beaver swam under my hull. The river tugged us along, sweet and clear and low.

Then, the sermon of the wind kicked in. Fitful gusts built into full-on headwinds. The river pushed forward, waves kicked up, whitecaps. We both reverted to kayak paddles to keep up momentum, leaned into the weather, found wind eddies to rest in. Near the end, on a long westward reach, the wind became a wall. Marypat, in her light canoe, was finally driven to shore and had to line her boat along. I paddled back up to her, hitched on, and we managed the last mile or two in tow, shoulders aching, trees flailing against the sky.

Off the river by noon, out of church. A dose of beauty, a little fire and brimstone, the pew of canoe seat, a hymnal of air and leaves and bird call. Amen.

I just finished a book featuring a cast of gypsy characters in the British Isles. There is something romantically appealing about gypsies. The stubborn pride in their homeless status, for one. Their lack of interest in being rooted or having a bricks and mortar home, the roaming culture – insular, invisible, on the edges. And there is also something tragic and dark about gypsies – their history, how they are treated, the things they are driven to, why they live as they do.

Because, essentially, they are not tied to any kind of home place, nationality, country, state. They have carved out a way to survive, a way to maintain pride and identity, in a fraught world. And it got me thinking about all the homeless in the world. Millions and millions of people, awash on the seas of war and politics and strife, surviving to the next day. Or, like the gypsies, people who have staked their identity on the very condition of homelessness.

There are others, like the gypsies, who for different reasons find themselves with a culture but no nation. Many Armenians, for example. Kurds, Hmong, the hundreds of tribes within the African continent, thrown into nations at the whim of colonizers.

Always there are the homeless who have been exiled or terrorized by war, by genocide, by religious campaigns . . . never more than now. The hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking places, streaming from Somalia, from Syria, from Libya, from Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine the heartbreak, the angst, the tortured discussions – to leave home, to head, carrying what you can, into the unknown. To clamber onto uncertain boats, to walk through the night, to leave children and spouses behind, to endure crowded camps, because home had become untenable.

And I think of the homeless I see, and that I know exist, all around me. Families living in cars because rent has become too dear. People camped along a creek on the edge of town, or sheltering under a highway overpass, or making camp in a thicket of woods where no one goes. I see them. Not long ago, walking our dog, I came across a man sleeping under the skirts of a conifer tree in the park across the street. Good spot, I thought. Outside, under a tree, but absolutely protected from the weather by the canopy of branches. I noticed that he had an electric skillet and had found an outlet near what is a skating rink in the winter. Smart, I thought. And I imagined myself, occupied with the urgency to find a place each night – a place with privacy, with protection, warm enough, away enough. An electrical outlet would be an unexpected gift, a treasure to hoard and enjoy, because, somehow, you also know it wouldn’t last.

I see the homeless at the public library, where they find warmth, reading material, shelter from the weather, a bathroom. There was an unshaven man I saw for a time on my walks around town. Every time I saw him he was buried in a paperback book. Always reading. Once I asked what he was reading. He could barely find his voice. He was so used to being invisible. “Just a mystery,” he finally whispered. And there’s the guy who rides a bicycle around town and watches birds. He has even found occasional work with some local environmental outfits, documenting species and habitat. When I see him, we invariably get into a conversation about sandhill crane hatchlings, or the nest of a Cooper’s hawk behind the library, or the sharp-shinned hawk he’s been watching in some conifers across from the bench he likes to sit on. Where he sleeps, I have no idea. And all of them, eventually, disappear, move on, find other places, get sick, die, or, perhaps, find a home.

Sometimes it seems like freedom, being homeless. And it is. As well as lonely hardship, exposure, illness, early death. Whatever it is, it is a common state, now. A state worth pondering.

Well, this year it took a while. I watched the gauge rise, saw the muddy water hurrying under bridges, itched to re-ignite my yearly spring affair with my favorite local creek, the East Gallatin. Things got in the way. April seems to have been the month of visitors this year – cousin Drake from Friday Harbor, friends from Kenya, sister Noel from Massachusetts. The weather has been unpredictable, unruly – typically springlike, in other words – so that the few times a window presented itself, it happened to be snowing or blowing like stink. And there’s work, and sloth, and whatever else keeps me from getting out the door.

But yesterday afternoon, after my last class of the semester, Sawyer showed up. It had been sleety and cold earlier in the day, and was still windy and chilly, but improving. We loaded up, drove to the edge of town and dropped in the silty, cold, rising flow. That current I have adopted over the years, that mix of hidden ambush and hairball maneuver, lovely bends, white-tail, golfers, homeless camps, scraps of old cars, beaver dams, sandhills, geese. That chance to reawaken the paddling moves, see what’s happened over the winter, when I glided past some of these same bends on cross-country skis.

For an hour or two we dissolved through the portal, left the world full of Facebook checking, SnapChatting, Instagramming, Netflix bingeing, emailing, texting, device-charging bullshit. Never mind the escape from the more existentially disturbing world of hospital bombings, kidnapped children suicide bombers, banking mischief, earthquake rubble, mass shootings, and Trump rallies. Never mind. Never mind.

No, for two hours we let our arms and paddles remember. We met and communicated through the hull of that old Dagger Legend canoe. Swinging around tight corners. Ducking underbrush. Hearing the complaints of geese, the scream of red-tail, the splash of mallard. The wind held off. Three or four times we had to scramble to shore, pull out, haul over a log jam or past an overhanging bush. We diverted down a golf course irrigation canal but decided against the culvert move – how embarrassing to endure an obituary featuring culvert decapitation.

We talked all the way. About the end of Sawyer’s college era, the angst over what’s next. About his brother and sister. About summer plans, life plans, friends, his hopes, my memories. Then there was the not-talking, just swooping around bends, skirting logs, pointing at nests, shooting through new gaps, listening to the talk of river and bank, bird and wind. Feeling the teamwork, the dance that tastes so good. Once we got out the saw and cut some overhanging branches, an inch of freeboard on our rubber boots.

What a simple thing, right? Settle into a boat on a river where no one goes and disappear into what is so real and profound and always right there at our fingertips, but that we so easily forget in the noise of life. And now, memory still brimming with it, a mile away, the East Gallatin rushes under roads, through subdivisions, past golf greens, impartial to our ‘improvements’, and my old red boat sits next to the garage, ready, always ready, whenever I am.

Okay, I’m calling it. The paddling season is on. Sure, we’ve been out before this, even in January and Febuary, dodging ice floes, and then over spring break on the San Juan in Utah, but this, today, felt like the real start.

Marypat went for a ski this morning, and invited me along. I was nice about declining, but are you kidding? 65 degrees, the water coming up, bluebird spring day – you want to go ski?

She went, had fun, but I ran out to the lower Gallatin R. with a solo canoe and a bike, rode the shuttle between the Missouri Headwaters Park and Manhattan, MT, even had a bit of a tailwind, and was on the water before noon.

From there it was that sweet, rising current, some nice dancing down narrow side channels. It was kingfishers rattling over the water, geese calling, a fat marmot dodging into a burrow on the bank, all the mergansers and mallards and goldeneye paired up. It was new logs in the river, bald eagles in the cottonwoods, fresh buds on willows.

I stopped for lunch on a gravel bar, just me and the sliding river, and thought about how nice, and how rare, to be quiet – no cell phones, no earbuds, no conversation – only the wind gusting through the still bare branches across the way, and the river rippling past, and the ringing call of a flicker in the cottonwood grove.

This past weekend was one of those interludes where I thought of my family scattered in a crazy constellation. Marypat and I were driving to Hayward, Wisconsin so MP could take part in the annual 50K Birkie ski race with 10,000 of her closest friends. Eli was the only one holding down the Montana fort, slogging away with school and work in Billings. Sawyer was nordic racing on the college circuit in Red River, NM. Ruby was in Toronto giving a speech at a wilderness canoe symposium.

Nearly to Hayward, our phone rings. It’s Ruby in the Toronto airport. She had borrowed a phone from a stranger because her phone refused to function in Canada. Her debit card wouldn’t work. She had to make her way to an unfamiliar address in downtown Toronto and had no cash. We gave her the bank number to see if she could get her card working. She hung up and we didn’t hear from her again for 3 days. No news is good news, right? Right. My 20-year-0ld daughter in a strange city with no money and no communication and human trafficking rings lurking around every corner.

The Birkie absolutely overwhelms the small town of Hayward. A sea of lycra folk jostling through registration lines at the high school, every motel and bar and ski shop overflowing. All to ski a 30-mile course through the woods with waves of competitors, in conditions that, 3 out of 5 years, are crappy. We pay good money to participate, take on a 30-hour round trip drive, lose sleep to race anxiety, navigate the maze of traffic and bus drop-offs. Call me a dud, but I’m not feeling it. Marypat, on the other hand, is all over being 60 and joining a new age class, and damned if she doesn’t come in 4th in her category with a time of 3:32, despite drizzle, slush, and a few, butt-bruising mishaps.

Me, what I’m feeling is seeing old friends and colleagues from that northern Wisconsin era in my life. Staying with Hayward friends who once took my writing workshop, and who know the reservation cafe with light, fluffy pancakes and only four people at tables, who are full of canoe stories and know just when and where to intersect the race on a back road and cheer for our favorite skiers.

And I’m feeling the Sunday breakfast in Ashland with two of my best and oldest friends, catching up on life’s poignant and resonant roll toward old age over scrambled eggs and english muffins with classical music in the background and Lake Superior out there, down the street, rolling off against the winter sky. Yeah, I’m feeling that.

Somewhere in the middle of that plate of breakfast, we get an email from Ruby, relating the “shit-show” of getting into Toronto, giving her talk to a “bunch of old people who I made cry” and threading her way back through thin air to Arizona.

A couple of weekends ago we needed to get out and test a boat. Almost November, our chances were dwindling. We put the word out, but everyone was hunting, or recovering from knee surgery, or on to another season. So we went, the two of us and Beans. Nothing heroic, just popped over the pass to the Yellowstone, put in on the edge of Livingston, paddled 40-some miles down to Big Timber.

You know the scene. Driftwood fires, hot drinks held close, geese overhead through the nights, deer taking refuge on the islands, ice in the jug at dawn, the cottonwoods browning and brittle. Not dawdling, really, but not pushing either. The pace of the river, the short days, the lining up of our strokes. Strolling around on gravel bars, heads down, looking for agate. That.

But then, on the second night, camped on the inside of a gravel bar along a narrow side channel, evening coming on, Marypat stoking the fire, I wandered down to the edge of the flow with a pot to fill. I stood there in the wet sand. The current swung into the narrows at the tip of the island, funneled down to a deep, green ribbon. On the far side water chattered over a shallow gravel bar, joining the flow. And how the river was, there, with the small roar of water dropping into the main flow, and the line of current curving and bending, the sense of joining and going on, and how I pictured our boat being carried along by that thin power, the small joy of it. Jesus, it made me salivate. That sliver of beauty with me standing nearby.

And now, weeks later, that’s what stays clear. That one moment, on the way for water, when the slick of river ran pure and heedless in front of me, and knowing that it is still running there, while the ice starts to form and the days shorten toward winter and the eagles shift in the snags, thinking of food.

It wasn’t much. I didn’t even leave the house last Saturday before noon. A 45-minute bike shuttle, a couple of hours alone in a canoe on the lower Gallatin. Nothing much, except the music of water, the sleek heads of mergansers, the croak of raven, the sweep of river pushing against bank, leaves beginning to yellow, the rattle of kingfisher, a side channel I’d never tried before, a floating lunch at the pace of current, at rest in the late fall warmth. And, near the end, a sheath of glass-clean river pouring molten over a step of ledge, small beauty enough to make the heart yearn.

Yes, I know, I can’t be accused of overdoing my blog posts. Life gets in the way, and that’s mostly a good thing. Occasionally, though, something happens that deserves a post.

First, a couple of awards I’m proud of. I won a first place and a third place award at the annual Society of Professional Journalists competition for 2014. Third place for my story about the tiny school in Bynum, Montana where every kid knows how to dance and how to play an instrument. In fact, every school day begins with an hour of dancing to old-time tunes. The story was titled, “No Child Not Dancing”. First place for my story about Kari Swenson and the sport of biathlon in Montana. Both stories appeared in issues of the Montana Quarterly.

Second, a film clip that just went live. Marypat and I were invited to take part in a Seasons film project, highlighting different outdoor activities in a seasonal format. We were Spring – Paddling, and the short clip is as much philosophy as season, but it’s quite beautiful (in spite of us). Have a look, enjoy and pass it on if you see fit.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo5W9_LkAdpGVSDD7JEl1nA

The dilemma for a blogger – if you are busy blogging, you aren’t busy living.

And yes, this is my excuse for not posting since late summer . . .

The threads of life keep weaving through the days and months.

Fall was a lingering and lovely season that went on into mid-November, both a blessing and an ominous portent. Blessing in that we were able to get out and enjoy mountain biking along the Maah Daah Hey Trail in North Dakota for a long weekend in late October, and a paddling jaunt to Bighorn Canyon on the Montana/Wyoming border two weeks into November.

Winter arrived on our way home from Bighorn Canyon. We went from the take-out boat ramp at 60 degrees, to snow and zero late that same night. That afternoon, while winter was dropping in, we scooted up high in the Bighorn Mountains to visit the Medicine Wheel there, and then, on the way home, also drove over to visit Plenty Coups State Park, south of Billings. Both were sweet, sacred spots and worthy visits. I’ve inserted a piece I wrote about the Medicine Wheel, and which was published by the news syndicate, Writers on the Range. Read below for my take on that remarkable spot.

———–

The riddle of the circle of ancient power

Walk left, the sign says, at the entrance to the roped-off site.

It’s a place that hammers me in the chest. The world spills away, down into the Bighorn Basin, across Wyoming and north into Montana, a huge gallop of space. Brown miles stretch out veined with river courses, serrated with ridges and mountain ranges. Gray clouds bulk up on the horizon.

The Medicine Wheel is made of stones and rests close to 10,000 feet on the exposed northern end of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. It is mid-November, the end of a lingering fall, but it feels like storm. Wind tugs across the bare ridge through tufts of brittle grass. A skiff of snow sticks to the ground, blowing in hard pellets.  I fight the urge to return to safety, to lower ground, to pavement and the warm car.

I’ve been instructed to walk left. So I do.

I edge around the roped circle, looking in, wondering how to be here. Hundreds of offerings flap in the wind: Knotted scraps of red fabric, intricate bows, medicine bags, beaded necklaces, a pottery bowl, a buffalo skull, a hawk feather, a jaw bone. They are the artifacts of prayers and stories, gratitude and pleas, all gathered to this airy perch so starkly moving yet mysterious.

The wheel is nearly 100 feet across, a ring of stones seamed with 28 spokes, which some think might represent the lunar cycle. Stone markers sit at the four directions; including the points where the sun rises and sets on summer solstice. All laid out in this most remote, most wind-bitten, most grand perch. What it means, no one knows, or is saying, any more than anyone knows what Stonehenge in England means. What the Forest Service says is that circles like this one reflect the 7,000-year-old occupancy of Native Americans on the continent.

The Crow Tribe has a legend of a young man with a burned face who traveled here on a vision quest, and who first laid out this wheel. It has been noted that this site forms one point of an equidistant triangle, the other points being Devil’s Tower and Hell’s Half Acre, near Casper, Wyoming.

There are a great many stone sites scattered across the Great Plains – sacred hoops, altars, animal designs – some added to over many generations. Few are preserved. Most are unrecognized. Many have been plowed up or paved over or otherwise destroyed — another part of the legacy of oppression. Some are kept secret. The Medicine Wheel has been recognized and made a National Historic Landmark, for better or worse.

I walk left all the way around, looking in, then out across the sweep of distance, and close up, into the mountain valleys. The wind hammers my face, and then my back. I contemplate the offerings, imagine the people and lives they signify. I pull out my bandana and knot it around the rope, thinking about Mother Earth. It flaps in the wind. I imagine it fraying and fading along with the rest of these tattered prayer flags. It is inadequate, I know, not properly considered. It is also an impulse I can’t deny.

We lap once more, lingering, our faces cold, the wind rising. It had been an effort to come here, up the winding miles of 10 percent grade, out the snow-crusted dirt road and slippery track to the ridge. I think of the ancients walking up the long river valleys, climbing past the last tongues of trees, emerging into the exposed high country.

To do what? To sit? To fast? To dream? To sing? To pray? To dance and celebrate? To be grateful? To find solace? To understand?

It isn’t the impulse to be of that culture that I feel, standing here in this raw wind. Nor is it the voyeuristic urge to peek at forbidden sanctuary. It’s more the sense of emptiness and yearning in the cradle of the earth, the lack of ease or context as I walk around the ancient ring perched against sky. And also the ignorance about what to do with it, what ceremony to bring, how to act, what tradition to uphold.

All I have is the abrupt command to walk left, and to make what I might of this lonely circle of stone humming with power on the lip of the earth.

———————-

Since that weekend in November, winter has been capricious and odd. I’ve been bike riding in January and February. There is really no snow on the ground, and in the backcountry, even high up, things are thin. Marypat and I skied on crust into a Forest Service cabin in early Feb., a place usually buried under snow, and we saw bear tracks in the snow – bears out of hibernation in February! Strange stuff.

And family circumstances have become a looming factor, with Dad’s health sliding. He is now in Denver at a hospital, where he’s had a toe amputated and blood vessel blockages removed in his legs. Ann Noel is with him this week, but his prognosis, now, seems pretty dire.

So yes, blogging seems a strange and surreal luxury, and who knows when I’ll post next.