JOURNEY TO ALASKA, A novel that I'm working on, but it isn't published yet, Chapter 1, 1st Draft

Chapter 1

     Warm rain fell gently on my thoughts as we left home and headed for Alaska.  It was late spring and everything smelled of newness and possibility.  The balmy night air was thick with humidity and the sound of chirping crickets as we traveled through the bright darkness of the new moon past watery shadows bathed in starlight.  What I like most about crickets is that there’s a cheerful innocence to their song like that of a beautiful young girl standing by a river watching the water flow by with languid eyes that know only dreams; it always makes me happy to hear them.  Cicadas though, they give me a different kind of feeling.  Their music reminds me of all the years that have passed and of all those that are yet to come.  When deep summer arrives their song always fills me with a mood, a longing for something.  It’s then, just when the first hints of autumn are in the air and alive in the trees, that’s when their music rises and falls in waves until seemingly one by one their voices fade until out of the silence the song begins anew.    

     Perry tilted his seat back and pulled his boots off.

     “Daniel, we’re doing it.  We’ve talked about it for so long I can’t believe we’re really doing it.  We’re not just talking about it; we’re going to Alaska!”

     “That we are.  The journey has finally begun.”

     Perry opened a bag of sunflower seeds.

     “I don’t know about you, but I'm relieved that we’re finally on the road.  Saying goodbye to everyone wasn’t easy.  I didn’t think it would be, but it was worse than I expected,” he said, after he swallowed a mouthful of seeds.

     “I know what you mean.  It’s never easy saying goodbye.  It wasn’t for me either, but it’s over and done with now.”        

Perry closed the bag and tossed it on the floor.

     “Let me know when you get tired, Daniel.  I’m going to get some rest so I’m ready to drive later.”

     “Sounds good,” I said, as he placed a pillow behind his head and removed his glasses.

     I turned some music on low, eased back in my seat and settled in for the long drive to our first destination; the Badlands in South Dakota.  It rained hard like it must have rained years ago at the dawn of creation when the first rains fell and caused oceans to overtake land.  It rained with the same furious passion as it did when life first crawled out of Neptune’s turquoise seas.  It rained and rained and rained like it did when the dark womb of the universe filled with galaxies and stars, and out of the darkness of that starry dream everything became wet with the light and time of infinite cosmic motion.  If it keeps raining it might turn into a flood, a deluge of immense proportions that washes the old away so that the new can take its place and grow in virgin soil again. 

     A calm smile emanated from my heart.  There’s no other feeling like driving through the rain at midnight with stars looking down at you through watery prisms running down the windows as you listen to rainy music pounding out its steady beat.  But it wasn’t just wet, dreamy starlight that we were driving through; it was the unknown.  We were heading for fresh territory where mystery awaits us.  It felt good to know that my life would never, could never, be the same again. 

     I had what would be considered to be a good job with a steady paycheck.  I had a girlfriend who said she loved me.  As long as I was getting laid and getting paid life seemed to be okay.  I was comfortable, but I wasn’t content.  Something was missing; some elusive feeling that pleasure and security couldn’t give me.  I was in a rut, a very comfortable rut.  I did my best to avoid thinking about it, but it was inescapable.  I woke up one day and looked at myself in the mirror.  It was the same reflection that had always looked back at me, the same face that I had shaved each morning for years.  Something was different though.  I no longer recognized myself.  I was lost, so lost that I didn’t know who I was anymore.  I was lost in my possessions.  They no longer served me.  I served them.

     I can’t recall exactly when the feeling went away, when the adventure of being alive had died to the struggle to feel alive.  I only know that it did.  Like a song building to a senseless crescendo my life had progressed to the point where it had become an endless quest for comfort and pleasure, an endless pursuit of hedonistic ecstasy that was intended to approximate something like happiness as long as you don’t really question or think about anything and you’re content to drift through life sedated like one of the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

     Over time I began to realize that desire and consumption would not bring about any lasting sensation of fulfillment.  I also realized that buying things, though they made me comfortable, did not make me happy.  The most difficult realization of all, the one that was hardest for me to accept, was that sex and drugs were momentary pleasures at best and I needed to increasingly consume more of them in an effort to be happy, until I concluded that these things would not bring about happiness.  On the contrary, the reality was they made happiness more difficult to attain.  I was so preoccupied with my things and seeking sex and drugs, both available on demand in any form imaginable, that I was in a continual cycle of seeking; a cycle that made the present seem less than perfect.  Living in the present had become a thing of the past.  The present always seemed unattainable.  The weight of the past and the allure of the future captivated my awareness to such an extent that I rarely lived in the present.  I would feel better if…rather than relishing the present of the moment.  For too long I allowed myself to be seduced by television commercials and other media.  Everyone was trying to sell me something; some product or some thought.  The synopsis of the message was always the same, ‘If you buy my product you will look better, feel better, be better.’  Thus, my reality was based on acquiring whatever it was I thought I needed, or what I pursued due to being bored.    

       When you’re so comfortably satiated beyond any limits why fight it?  I don’t know why exactly but for some reason there was still a spark inside of me, a spark that wanted to feel again, to live again, and not just exist.  So, I sold the furniture and gave up all things of my former life.  I thought I would miss what I had given up, feel a sense of loss, but there was a surprising lightness to it.  There was freedom in uncertainty, life in uncertainty.  As I was thinking I grew tired; I decided to ponder these questions of life at another time.  I stiffened my back, leaned forward and opened to approaching dawn. 

     Deer were feeding in the fields as the first rays of orange and yellow sun began to warm the horizon.  The soft colors illuminated the sky as we drifted over rolling hills where an occasional tree or stand of trees looked lonely and twisted from time and the sun.  If not for the wind there would only have been an endless sea of prairie grass and wildflowers.  Several birds flew near us, the light of morning touching their wings, as the stars faded away one by one until none could be seen amongst the ponds of water reflecting the early morning sunlight. 

     “Are you awake yet, Perry?”

     “Kind of.”

     “Can you drive for a while?  I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.”

     “Yeah, I guess I’m ready,” he said, as he stretched his arms and yawned.  “Has it stopped raining yet?”

     “It stopped about an hour ago.”    

     “Where are we?”

     “Minnesota.”

     “How long was I asleep?”

     “I don’t know.  Four or five hours, something like that.”

     “Five hours!  Are you sure it’s been that long?” he asked, as he reached for his glasses.

     “Look at the sky.  It’s getting light out.  We’re going to have to stop and get some gas in a little bit.  You can drive after that.”

     “All right.  I should be awake by then,” he said, as he sat up and rolled down his window.        

     We pulled into the next gas station we came to.  I fell asleep the moment we were on the road again.  I still felt tired when I awoke several hours later, but the bright sunlight streaming into my eyes made it impossible to fall back asleep.  I glanced over at Perry.  The placid look on his face shimmered in the light that surrounded us.  It reminded me of the first time we met.  We were both freshmen.  We lived on the same floor of a dorm when we were going to school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  The leaves on campus were turning color when I passed his room one day.  The door was open and he was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall.  He looked out at me with his calm blue eyes and invited me to come in, so I walked in and sat down.  Empty beer cans and bottles were everywhere and propped in the corner next to his desk was an acoustic guitar, the body of which had been fashioned from a rich, dark wood.  On the wall above his bed, the one that bordered the only window in the room, there was a colorful poster of a busty blonde woman with braided hair holding frothy mugs of St. Pauli Girl in her hands.  Needless to say, it was obvious that he enjoyed cleavage and beer. 

     More compelling though was what I saw on the wall next to his closet.  Above piles of clothes and stacks of books and notebooks there was a large black and white poster of Einstein.  It wasn’t his eccentric white hair or the way his distinctive moustache cascaded over his lips that captivated my attention.  I had seen pictures of him before.  He is, after all, the most famous scientist to enlighten us about the workings of the cosmos since Isaac Newton pondered gravity.  It was the words beneath him that transported the atoms that comprise the entirety of my existence to another world.

     “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

     I just sat there reading the words over and over until the sound of Perry’s voice reminded me where I was.

     “Do you want some pizza?” 

     It was still warm so I accepted his offer.  As I was taking a slice out of the cardboard box he set a chess board down in front of me and asked if I played.  We became instant friends as we knocked off game after game on that carefree September afternoon. 

     We started hanging out regularly after that.  There was a bunch of us that hung out together but Perry was the one that I hung out with the most.  One of the biggest factors that led to us becoming such good friends was due to the fact that we’re both from small towns outside of Madison that no one’s ever heard of.  We had other things in common too.  Neither of us had any idea what we were going to major in.  He was trying to decide between political science and journalism.  I was leaning towards philosophy but history and physics appealed to me as well.  Neither of us had much money either.  Even though we both had part time jobs we considered ourselves lucky if we had a few dollars between us.  We both liked Neil Young and the Grateful Dead but most of the music that he listened to was stuff that I had never heard of before.     

     He was more revolutionary back then than he is now.  I don’t know if his father’s death had anything to do with it or not.  We’ve never talked about it much.  We’ve never talked about the death of my father either.  Perry has a soft spoken solitary nature.  I wouldn’t call him shy but for the most part he keeps to himself.  He’ll go on and on about things that aren’t personal but when it’s something he considers to be a private matter it’s rare that he’ll say anything about it at all.  There were differences between us too.  I attended a public high school but he went to one of those private religious schools.  I played some football but I wasn’t a star or anything.  I was big enough and strong enough but I wasn’t fast enough.  Perry’s sport was basketball.  He was their all conference center.  At six foot seven he was the tallest guy on the team.  They went to the state finals, but the other team won.  He still thinks about that loss today.  He’s not a muscular guy that looks athletic; his long legs are so thin that they give him an awkward and gangly appearance.  You wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he has really good coordination and agility.  When he’s kicking a hacky sack around he doesn’t miss that often. 

     For whatever reason we both more or less lost interest in sports by the time we had arrived at college.  I was never really that into it in the first place.  I mean it was fun and all at the time but other things were becoming more important.   Even though it’s one of the qualities that most defines him I never did figure out what he was rebelling against.  To this day it remains a mystery.  Sometimes I think that he was sheltered for so long he just wanted to do anything he could to break free of that little farm town that never had any concerns other than milking cows and watching the corn grow.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply that he’s no longer full of passionate ideas.  He’s still revolutionary in a Beatles White Album kind of way, just not as much as he was a few years ago.  Back then he talked about it constantly.  His brain was seething with ideas.  He always had a new idea or theory that he couldn’t wait to discuss.  It didn’t matter if it was something he had read somewhere or if it was something that a professor had mentioned in class.  He was always reading books, but they weren’t the kind of books that any college or university would assign.  To him those were boring books, books for idiots shoved down your throat by the establishment, the system that he despised.  He was after something else, something bigger; something that would lead him to the truth behind things.  More than once I received the impression that he was attempting to become a modern day Renaissance man. 

     He always had his nose buried in some Kerouac or Bukowski.  Myself, I’ve never read Jack.  One of these days I’m going to get around to it.  Then again, I say that about a lot of things.  I do know, however, that On The Road is one of his favorite books.  I also know that some of the literary aficionados in the more exclusive boroughs of New York consider it to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, greater than The Sun Also Rises.  It doesn’t matter though; Hemingway had long since left the avant-garde cafés of Paris behind for the adventures he would find on the broad plains of Africa and in the hot Picasso sun of Spain.  I guess you could say that was how Perry experienced it, as a late jazz age masterpiece that by its very essence could only be shaped by the vast open spaces that is America.  Voices of the past that once crowded bus stations and train depots came alive and listened once more to the imaginative brass renderings of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis as Kerouac hitchhiked through cactus laden deserts before arriving in Hollywood where Marlon Brando was about to become as legendary as the fists of Jack Dempsey.  It spoke to him, all of it, the lonely nights by the bay in San Francisco, the wilderness of Wyoming and Colorado, the desolate emptiness of riding through Nebraska on the back of a flatbed truck.  It brought to life his dreams of getting away from it all and going west.  What he was hoping to find there I don’t know. 

     Bukowski, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely.  I could always tell when he was reading one of Hank’s stories because he couldn’t stop laughing.  Even after he had finished one of his books he’d walk around for days, even weeks sometimes, with a stupid grin on his face.  He went on and on about him so much that I ended up reading some of his books.  Like many people I found his approach to the written word to be rather brazen.  His vulgar, profane use of language caught me off guard at first.  Once I got past that though I came to realize that there is so much more to him than the shock value that you first encounter.  For a man that was born in Andernach, Germany shortly after World War I ended, a man that grew up desperately poor in America during the harrowing days of The Great Depression with severe debilitating acne, not the blemishes that most teenagers wake up to one day with alarming dismay, the kind that maims you and leaves scars all over your face and body, for a man that received vicious beatings at the hands of his deranged father year after year, he went on to accomplish more than most men do; men with much better circumstances than the cruel arbitrary nature of fate ever afforded him.  Any one of those things would have defeated most men but they didn’t defeat him.  He had the strength and courage to somehow retain a sense of humor through it all.  What I like most about him though is that now and then he makes an observation about the inane peculiarities that tend to characterize the way we relate to each other, or proffers an insight concerning the banality of our existence and it couldn’t be more accurate. 

     He’s not a man that will lead you into refuge.   Personally, I find that to be one of his best qualities.  If you’re honest with yourself, you realize there’s no shelter to be found there anyways.  Perhaps there’s something akin to a release that some find in such places, a satisfaction that brings momentary comfort; but if that’s the kind of thing you want, you need to look for it somewhere else.  Many writers will take you there but when all is said and done you have to ask yourself where are they taking you to?  There are an infinite number of worlds that don’t exist and never will.  At the end of the day though, none of it matters in the least.  When you can’t stomach any more of that stuff Bukowski’s still there waiting with his penetrating, cynical, sardonic humor.  He’s not a man that will lead you anywhere, nor does he try to.  Nonetheless, his uncompromising integrity captures the brutality of reality as well as or better than most. 

     Marcuse, on the other hand, fascinated Perry.  The intellectual depths he discovered within the pages of One Dimensional Man occupied his thoughts for the better part of a semester.  I’m not sure how many times he read it, but it was at least three or four.  Every time that he went through it he’d highlight certain sections and scribble notes in the margins.  It was more than a book; it was something his mind lived on and could not do without.  It was Toffler though, more than anyone else, that influenced him the most.  His words not only inspired him, they also made him angry.  He really got worked up when he was reading him.  He thought his social perspectives and predictions were beyond intriguing.  In a rather pronounced, frenzied display of emotion he proclaimed them to be the insights of a genius.  Despite his tremendous admiration for him he didn’t much care for the world that he was predicting would soon come about.

     Eastern religions were another one of his favorite subjects to read about.  He’d light a joint and open a book about reincarnation or meditation and get lost in it for hours.  Sometimes he had music playing at the same time.  I don’t know how he was able to concentrate with all of those sitars and other exotic instruments of the east vibrating in the smoky air.  It was always interesting to look over at him and see the expression on his face when he was like that.  It made me wonder what thoughts were going through his mind, what feelings were drifting through him as he contemplated his karma and past lives or the infinite dimensions of consciousness contained within his soul.  He attributed all of his knowledge to some Hindu ascetic he had come across at the library, never to himself.   I have absolutely no idea how he passed his classes.  I never saw him doing any homework.  He had girls around now and then but most of the time he was wandering through campus preoccupied with whatever it was that he was after.  I couldn’t tell you if he’s good looking or not.  To know something like that I’d have to be able to see through the eyes of a woman.  What I can tell you is the girls that I saw him with seemed to take a liking to his kind, gentle face.

     After we finished school we both remained in Madison.  Neither of us had any desire to go back to the small towns that we grew up in.  Perry took a job as a bank teller until he was able to secure a position with one of the local newspapers.  It was about then, shortly after the warm days of summer had arrived, that I met a sultry brunette named Christie.  The first time I saw her was in the hallway of the research firm I was working at.  I could tell right away that her vivacious personality was nothing short of exacerbating, but it was impossible not to notice her.  Before long she was more than a seductive intern with a supple, voluptuous body.  We were inseparable.  Her eyes were the color of sapphire skies on a balmy summer day and her skin had a soft Mediterranean tone to it.  Her eyelashes were always thick with mascara and she adored perfume.  It never would have occurred to me, but she was self conscious of her feet.  She thought they were too big.  She was rather pleased with the rest of herself though and for good reason.  She was gorgeous.  When she smiled everything around her became more beautiful.  She was playful and impulsive, funny and compelling.  The sex was good and her laughter was contagious.  Things went well at first, as they usually do when love is new, but after a while we both knew that we didn’t love each other. 

     One night I came home from work and gave Perry a call.  We got together and I told him that my life wasn’t going anywhere.  I was tired of knowing exactly what the next moment held, the next day scheduled.  He asked about Christie and I told him that it was over between us.  He said he wasn’t happy with his life either.  That was the night we started planning the trip.  We had been camping together before.  Last year we camped out west in Colorado and New Mexico along with Justin, another guy that we had gone to college with, but this time we decided to really do it, to go all the way.  Before long we were both consumed by the thought of going to Alaska, only this time it wasn’t going to be just another camping trip.  This time we were going to keep the journey going as long as we could.  That was a year ago.  Then, a few months before we were getting ready to leave, he met Nicole.  I guess you could say it surprises me that he followed through on the trip.  I was worried that he was going to back out because of her.  I have no idea how they left things between them.  I don’t know if he told her that he’ll never see her again or if she promised to wait for him.  It’s hard to leave your girl behind so I never say anything about her to him. 

     I had already noticed changes in him before they started seeing each other.  Like most people, he had become increasingly lethargic and conservative after we finished college.  His long blonde hair is the same length as it was back then.  That’s one thing that hasn’t changed.  Mine was down to my shoulders back then too, when the nights were filled with so many things they seemed to last forever.  It isn’t exactly short now but it’s nothing like it used to be.  Once he met her though, that’s when he really started to change.  He’s always been on the quiet side, and I am too, but he became even more withdrawn.  We got together less often and when we did he didn’t seem like the guy that I used to know.  It didn’t take long for her to help him to no longer care about what used to be important to him.  I know things are different now that we’re twenty six years old.  Time has a way of changing things.  I don’t blame him for being taken with her, she’s a pretty girl with a sense of style and she’s got a nice body too.  She never shows too much.  That’s one of her best qualities.  She only gives you a taste of her succulent nipples.  I think one of the things that he likes most about her are her thighs.  They’re heavy, but not too much, just enough to make him feel the passion of her intent when she’s on her back with her legs wrapped around him.  We’ve never talked about it but I get the feeling she knows how to move her heels up and down the back of his legs at just the right moment.  That would be enough for most men, but Perry isn’t most men. 

     Her face has a refined sensual quality to it.  Just above her lips she has a mole that gives her a mood when she pouts as girls of her sophistication are inclined to do.  The mixture of French and Dutch descent gives her soft skin a milky smoothness.  Like Perry, she also has blue eyes and blonde hair.  The difference is her eyes are larger and they have more of an almond shape to them and her hair is more of a strawberry blonde.  The way it falls around the delicate contours of her face makes him happy.  He’s never told me this, of course, but you can tell when they’re together.  Not only is she demure and classy, she’s intelligent too.  She’s an architect.  She grew up out in New England in a somewhat privileged way.  Her politeness and good manners don’t give you the impression that she thinks she’s better than others, but you can tell that she’s used to having her way.

     I have no idea how the Badlands got their name, it could have something to do with the land isn’t any good for farming, but we had driven close to eight hundred miles by the time we arrived there in the early afternoon.  Perry took some photos of the eroded buttes and bluffs and then he recorded where he had taken the photos and how many photos he had taken in a notebook.  We won’t see them until the film is developed, but they should turn out pretty good.  Perry had an interest in photography before he worked for the paper, but once he started working for the paper he became their go to guy when they absolutely had to have a great photograph to put on the front page.  After Perry put his camera and notebook in the backpack that he kept them in we climbed back in the jeep and drove through the park until we located the Sage Creek campground.  We pitched the tent and pounded in the stakes and then we carried our sleeping bags and pillows over and placed them inside the tent along with the other things that we needed for the night.  Perry’s eyes were taking in the rolling hills that were all around us as I slipped inside the tent to change into a pair of shorts.  I had just finished taking my shoes off when I heard him say, “I really like this place.  I’m glad we decided to stop and camp here.”

     “I am too,” I said, as I pulled my pants off and replaced them with a pair of khaki shorts.

     “I’m ready to do some exploring.  How about you, Daniel?”

     “A walk sounds good,” I said, as I opened the flap of the tent and crawled out.

     The hot sun was shining on us as we hiked up a steep hill.  By the time we reached the top of it we were drenched in sweat.  We were standing there drinking some water from our canteens when we spotted a small herd of buffalo grazing on a distant hill.  It wasn’t so long ago when their herds were so vast that the ground trembled and shook beneath the thundering of their hooves.  That was, of course, before ruthless, ignorant men slaughtered them by the millions.  They shot them from horseback and from trains, and then they left their carcasses to rot on the prairies and plains.  They weren’t killed for the meat that they would provide; they were killed for the money their hides and tongues would bring.  It was the civilized people back east that wanted them.  They wanted their bones too.  They sent them back to Chicago and Philadelphia on trains.  They ground them into dust, and they made money from that too. 

     Sadly, what happened to the buffalo also happened to other animals, trees too, anything that was in the way of greed and progress suffered from the thoughtless carnage that took place when wagons full of immigrants that barely spoke English, or no English at all, made their way westward through the wilderness towards a destiny they believed was waiting for them.  They had left the poverty and tyranny of the old world behind for the promise of gold and freedom in a new land, but freedom and gold weren’t as easy to find as they thought they would be.  Many pioneers, young and old alike, died on the trail from measles and cholera.  Those that didn’t die from hunger or disease or from some other misfortune panned for gold and silver in rivers and streams.  Some found the riches they were seeking, but many did not.  They only found enough gold dust to drink their lives away in saloons frequented by outlaws and gamblers.  If they didn’t spend all of their money on whiskey, or lose it in a poker game, there were ladies that were known to be of ill repute that were there too and they were more than willing to help them spend what little they had to show for their backbreaking work.   

     Perry had his camera with him.  He took it out of the waterproof case that he kept it in and started taking photographs of the buffalo.  He had snapped seven or eight shots when four of them broke away from the rest of the herd.  They weren’t running; they were just slowly but steadily moving towards us as they fed on the grass.  Neither of us felt that we were in danger so we just stood there with the hot sun shining down on us as Perry took some more photographs of them.  We should have kept more of a distance between us and them, but Perry wanted to get some good close-ups of them, and they seemed far enough away, but before we knew what had happened they were suddenly very close to us.  Three of them were content to feed on the grass, but the fourth one continued to make his way towards us.  His legs didn’t stop moving until he was only about twenty feet away from us.  Perry was no longer taking pictures.  The hair stood up on the back of my neck as I looked at its massive head and horns.         

     “Any suggestions as to what we should do, Perry?”

     “The most important thing is to stay calm and not make any sudden movements.”

     “Do you think we should stand our ground or slowly back away?”

     “I think it’s better if we stay where we are.”       

     “We’re in a real predicament, Perry.”

      “That we are, and he doesn’t look too happy with us.”

     “Maybe he doesn’t like getting his picture taken.”

     “This isn’t a time to be funny, Daniel.”

     “What do you think he’s upset about?”

     “Maybe we’re in his territory.”

     “Buffalo have territory?”

     “I don’t know, Daniel.  It’s just a guess.”

     “We should have listened to your uncle and brought a rifle with us.”

     “Right about now that sounds like a good idea, but I wasn’t planning on getting trampled by a buffalo on our first day.”

     “It’s not something I took into consideration either, but that’s what’s going to happen unless we can figure something out.”    

     “I don’t know what to do anymore than you do, Daniel.  I’ve never been stared down by a mad buffalo before.”    

     “There’s not much we can do.  We can’t outrun him and we’re unarmed.”        

     Just as we were getting ready to seriously panic the other ones ran past him and he decided to run off with them rather than trample us.

     Perry sighed with relief.

     “Thank God those other ones came along.”   

     “I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if they didn’t.”

     “It would have been ugly, that’s for sure.”

     “That was the longest minute of my life,” I said, as I heaved a deep breath and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the bottom of my shirt.    

     “Mine too.”

     “You can’t get an adrenaline rush like that sitting in an office filling out paperwork.”    

     After talking it over for a while we both decided that it was best if we stayed close to the jeep.  It was unlikely that they would wander towards us again, they were now so far away that they looked like little brown specks, but just in case they did it was the only protection we had.  We smoked a cigarette and then we smoked another one and then Perry slung his camera strap over his shoulder and we started on our way back to our campsite.  We were pale when we left home last night, but after being out in the sun all afternoon we had a good deal of color on our faces and arms by the time the sun went down.  We were both still feeling a little worn out from the long drive last night, so after we had something to eat we called it a night.  Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep, but I was out soon after I crawled into my sleeping bag. 

      When morning came the sky was blue again, and the sun was yellow and warm.  After we ate breakfast and packed our gear we checked the oil and gave the tires a glance, and then we headed west towards Wyoming.  It wasn’t long before the otherworldly beauty of the Badlands gave way to the heavily forested mountain slopes of the Black Hills.  I was hoping to get a glimpse of the Crazy Horse Monument, but there weren’t any mountains that resembled the man that’s famous for defeating Custer on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.  The vision that the Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull had before the battle took place turned out to be prophetic.  He saw soldiers falling off their horses as they rode into their village.  He didn’t see the Civil War hero dividing his forces, a fatal mistake that would lead to the demise of every man under his command, but he did see them losing the battle that would become the most legendary one that took place in the old west.

     It wasn’t the first time Custer attacked an Indian village.  Eight years earlier he and his men attacked the Cheyenne when they were camped along the Washita River.  Black Kettle tried to flee from the bullets, but he didn’t make it.  He died on that cold November day along with other old men, and women that were running through the snow with babies in their arms.  Custer thought he could do the same thing with the Sioux, but Crazy Horse stopped him.  The seventh cavalry weren’t the only soldiers that he defeated.  He also defeated General Crook in the battle that took place only days before on Rosebud Creek, and he was there that day too when the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho overwhelmed Captain Fetterman and his men.  They suffered the same fate as the seventh cavalry, not one soldier survived the battle; every one of them was killed.  The Sioux lost men too, and others were wounded, but Crazy Horse went unscathed.  The Sioux believed that he couldn’t be harmed in battle.  True or not, the army couldn’t defeat him on the battlefield so they stabbed him in the back with a bayonet when he surrendered at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.

     I wasn’t able to see Mt. Rushmore either.  Their faces could have been sculpted out of any mountain, but our ancestors chose one in the heart of sacred Sioux territory.  It wasn’t enough to force them onto reservations and take their land, it wasn’t enough to give them small pox blankets and rotten meat, it wasn’t enough to break treaties that had been made with Red Cloud and other leaders, it wasn’t enough to slaughter hundreds of women and children with Gatling guns at Wounded Knee, the annihilation would not be complete until the civilization that conquered them carved four colossal faces into the hills men with feathers in their hair once roamed.  Their arrows no longer fly through the sky.  Smoke no longer rises from their teepees.  The footprints of their moccasins have long since faded away.  Their dreams died along with them, but there is something that remains.  It is their blood and bones that have now grown into grass, it is their tears that fall as rain, and it is their spirits that whisper in the wind on starry nights when the moon lights the way for those who care to remember.