wednesday evening at the library

M and I have developed a new and relaxing mid-week habit. The Woodstock Library remains open until 8PM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we've taken to stopping by during our evening neighborhood strolls. We both enjoy a good hour or more perusing the stacks at random and picking out whatever catches the eye. This evening I scored a few handsome volumes right off the bat: Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, E.M. Forester's Where Angels Fear To Tread, Wallace Stegner's Recapitulation, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Of course, it is unlikely I will sink my literary teeth into each and every one of these tomes, but it is nice to have a handful of worthy candidates on hand at all times should time become a sudden luxury. M spent most of the evening hunkered down over the CDs, stacking them one by one on the table as he discovered fresh sounds.

Browsing among the memoirs and prose, I happened on a text by Kim Stafford, local son and the biological son of the great poet, William Stafford. The book is entitled Having Everything Right: Essays on Place and features various meditations on his experiences traveling the back roads of the Pacific Northwest. Having done a bit of adventuring myself of late, I was intrigued and settled in at a table for a bit of reading.

I happened to open to an essay about his journey through eastern Oregon and into Montana to investigate the site of the US Army's siege of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce ("A Few Miles Short of Wisdom"). Rather than face relocation to a distant reservation or resist and risk the great bloodshed of war, Chief Joseph opted to lead the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce out of the Wallowa basin, across Idaho and Montana towards Canada where freedom awaited. The US Army would have none of it and pursued them all the way. The men, women and children of the Nez Perce tribe eluded capture for three months, fighting intermittently over 1700 miles when finally, at Big Hole Montana they suffered some of their greatest losses. They were captured soon after. A National Battlefield now marks the spot of this devastating massacre.

Kim Stafford describes his visit to this national monument and his attempt to glean some measure of meaning from his experience there beyond that of your average tourist. He asks the ranger if many Nez Perce people visit the site, to which the rangers gives the rather cryptic, halting reply that yes, they visit, except only at night for their ceremonies. The ranger tells him that you can tell they have been there from the ribbons that they leave in the trees and in the glade. Stafford wanders onto the battlefield, noting the plaques and markers that told the story of snipers positions here and Army positions there and the numbered lost and injured. And then he sees the ribbons, some new and shiny fluttering from the tree branches, others from a time gone by, lying rotted and fading in the dust, beads and bullets scattered nearby. He writes (and I quote at length because I found it beautiful):

"A century collapses into this moment of ground, where generations of private celebration grew outward from one story. This square yard of pine duff bound a guest register that could never be tallied, only renewed, only inhabited by the night-faithful memory that walked in the form of the people. Twenty steps east from the tree with the ribbons a ton of granite, hewn to a block and polished, was carved with the story as the US Army had lived it through. That was one way to remember 1877: carve the truth in stone and draft a platoon of guardians, write books and print brochures and script slide shows and build a hall to house them all, then carve a trail with numbers like a tattoo on the hill...

...The books, the message on stone, the trail's configuration would all have to be revised by an act of will; the ribbons were either renewed or lost by the very nature of their fragility. Sun and rain destroyed them. Pine budded and grew. Flowers withered, and the ribbons.

Suddenly in the heat a kind of fear chilled me --fear about my fellowship with the sometimes acquisitive tribe of patriots named America. Even in small things, we wish to map our conquest of the planet and the past. My own childhood collections flickered through my mind: stamps, stones, leaves pressed in a Bible, insects stilled by cotton soaked with alcohol and pinned to styrofoam in a box. And arrowheads. Smoky obsidian and blood-red flint. Modern habit is to lay such things away safe behind glass, and I had learned that habit well. I knew how to lift each bead with tweezers, plot and take each bullet up, sift them all out from the dust and alter them from a part of the world to an illustration of it. Could I leave the bones of the story still, and carry only its breath away in my mouth? Or would I thread five beads on a pine needle souvenir, saying softly to myself no one would know them gone?"


(ribbons and feathers adorn the tree beside Chief Old Joseph's grave -Wallowa Lake, Oregon)