From Bell to Cell: A personal history of the telephone

In 1876, some years before my birth, Alexander Graham Bell changed the world of human communications when he received the patent for the acoustic telegraph now called the telephone. Soon after my father was born, someone improved it with the rotary dialing system. That was in 1919, although rotaries didn’t make it out to our part of Kansas until sometime in the 1950s.

My first memory of the phone was a black rectangle affair with a combined ear and mouth piece on a cloth-covered cord. It hung in the breakfast room and had a very small number printed on it, our number that I no longer recall. The phone seemed magical but not so much as the older model at the farm. Watching Grandma Pink on that phone excited me so much I wanted to join in the fun, waiting for the neighbors on the party line to quit gossiping, then cranking away on the handle on the side of the old wooden box, and finally yelling into the mouth horn, “Central, Central.”

We, too, had a party line in town but one with fewer phones connected. We never had to wait so long as Grandma. Of course, young people today would be scandalized to learn that people, namely your neighbors, could listen in on your calls. Where is the right to privacy?

Then we got a rotary phone and a private line. The new wall phone looked much the same as its predecessor, except the black box now had a dialing apparatus with numbers and letters and in the middle was posted CE (for Cedar) 8-2533. I can remember Mom going to that phone to call Santa Clause when we had misbehaved. My favorite memory though, is of my sister Holly who at mealtimes sat with the phone immediately behind her. She was used to answering it during meals. But that day she was just ready to say grace when the thing rang. Picking up the receiver, she began her prayer: “Our Father in heaven….” When she realized what she had just done, she turned red, nervously laughed, and said, “Who is this?”

We still had to dial “0” for the operator to make a long-distance call, but before too many years automatic dialing of long distance became a possibility and with it the introduction of Area Codes. The prefixes tell the rest of this story for AREA CODES began to indentify the important places and phone events in my life.

913 Junction City where I grew up, Clay Center where I went to high school, and eventually Manhattan, KS where I went to college all had the same Area Code. The college dorm had a pay phone in the hallway downstairs. When Myrna and I married our apartment had no phone. If we needed to contact anyone, we walked one block to a convenience mart where we could use a pay phone if we had a quarter.

316 Three years later, we moved to Wichita, KS where I had my first full-time job. There we had our first phone and began paying Ma Bell for the convenience. From its 316 number we made such announcements to the family as: “It’s a boy.” “It’s a girl.”

817 Some years later we moved to Ft. Worth, TX where I attended seminary. From that area code I eventually asked: “Ed, could you come to my ordination?” I wanted Ed, the minister who had influenced me to attend seminary, to deliver the ordination prayer.

314 One afternoon I received a call, my first one from Area Code 314. Jack in Jefferson City, MO asked many questions about my work in religious education. The congregation where he was senior minister extended a call, and we moved there to join him in ministry. Some seven years later I received another 314 from Jack’s wife. “Phillip,” she said at 4:00 that summer Sunday morning, “Jack’s had a seizure that knocked him out of the bed. The ambulance is here. I don’t think he is going to make it.”

505 A couple of years later there were many 505 calls to and from Albuquerque, NM. We moved there to a good job in an excellent church. But one day my good friend Ted called with news related to his AIDS illness. He told me, “Dr. Gold says it’s now a matter of months or weeks.”

970 Before too many months passed I began making calls from Area Code 970, Montrose, CO where we lived briefly to help out my aging in-laws. There I talked with editors, friends from many places, and eventually with the minister of another church where I would work.

918 Tulsa, OK. Months later, when we moved to Tulsa, we got an answering machine to go with our push button phone because I needed to know if people were going to miss choir rehearsals.

303 I brought that answering machine with me to Denver, Area Code 303, where it was useful as a tool for fielding massage appointment queries. I’d call my machine from the phone at the spa to see if I needed to get right home or if I could dawdle, shop, or visit the Public Library or Denver Art Museum. Some five years later, when I moved in with Jim, I quit using that answering machine. He and his mother were so private; I didn’t want to have the phone ringing with appointment requests. I bought a cell phone. That was almost ten years ago.

These days I’m beginning to feel somewhat like my partner Jim who long fantasized retiring to his home behind a high fence that would keep out the encroaching world. In my retirement I, too, am cutting off my accessibility related to a group of fine people. It’s not to block them out completely but, rather, to limit what I am available for. At the end of the year, 2013, I’m retiring from my massage practice but not at all from my life. I will be happily social but not available for either instant communications or for massage giving. I won’t have texting but will have a home number and will be on line with Email, Facebook, and Blogs. Surely the loss of the cell phone will spell a quieter, less bothered retirement. I am looking forward to that. Even though I won’t be available for giving massages, I’ll still be up for coffee, tea, or meals with lots of laughs. And I hope never again to change my Area Code unless to 720.

Denver, 2013

Searching Old Places

Central Kansas years and years ago helped support a buffalo
 population. They were long gone when my great
grandparents homesteaded there. Central Kansas petroglyph
of a buffalo. Arcylic washes. Phillip Hoyle

I drove to the farm years later, after my grandparents had died, so I could savor the place as an adult. I hadn’t been out there for nearly twenty years and wondered, among other things, why I was moved to go there now and what I might find lying around that could serve as mementos for my sisters and me. I was not disappointed with my discoveries.

The drive from Junction City seemed to move me back to earlier days. Out toward the river bridge I glimpsed the mill where Grandpa and Grandma had sold eggs, milk, and cream. As I passed the historic St. Paul’s log cabin church in a roadside park off Interstate 70, I recalled scenes of Kansas pioneer days I had learned from Mother’s stories and from books that had so enriched my childhood imagination. The rustic, adz-formed logs suggested lives of self-sufficiency supplemented by the interdependence of neighborliness, values that still support farm life in parts of America. The engine pulled hard as the car ascended the steep grade past the rock quarry. I glanced at the gated entryway and remembered going there for target practice with my 22 caliber, single shot rifle, a gift from my oldest sister’s fiancé. As I drove on I recalled a ride two friends and I caught on a road grader one summer day when we were walking the ten miles from the farm back to town. Our ride ended on this hillside when we spotted the car that was coming to meet us.

Beyond the quarry entrance, the road leveled off in an upland pasture and continued a mile or so. I felt a thrill when I came to the edge of the hill above Clark’s Creek that afforded a sight I had always loved: the Flint Hills, their grass-covered tops and wooded bottom lands, their peculiarly flat summits and steep slopes, the results of hard cap rock. I slowed my pace to take in the lush green of trees, grass, and planted fields. Steering down the serpentine road reminded me of Sunday afternoon trips to the farm, riding in Dad’s '54 Ford, the backseat crowded by four kids who like pioneers claimed and defended their territories.

At the bottom of the hill, I turned south up the creek, driving past the newer St. Paul’s Lutheran Church (the log cabin’s replacement) its walls and bell tower built of native limestone and a graveyard out back with the memorial markers of some of my own relatives. I wondered if the peonies were still growing where my grandmother planted them but chose not to stop to investigate, I wanted to get to the farm.
I hoped I’d recognize the turn-off that would keep me running parallel to the creek and felt relief when I did. I turned onto the gravel road trying to stay ahead of the white dust kicked up by my tires. Luckily a slight breeze tended to carry it to the side of the road, but not everywhere. When sharp turns slowed my progress, the limestone powder engulfed me. With closed mouth and shallow breath, I uttered a prayer of thanks for city life and paved streets.

The road took me past Wetzel School with its one room where my mother had attended eight elementary years and, turning two more corners, I saw the Wetzel family cemetery. I was getting close to the farm now. Seeing the terraces in the fields on the creek-side of the road stirred a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of rightness about my choice to drive out to the place. Then, as I rounded a bend in the road, I saw the driveway and turned up the lane.

There it stood—the farm, but it seemed much smaller than I recalled. Most of the buildings remained: house, cellar, smokehouse, well, granary, and tractor barn. The garage barely stood, seemingly propped up by an open door. Gone were the stock barn with its hayloft, the corral with its loading chute, the chicken house with its pungent odor, the brooder house where we kids were amazed at the fast growth of chicks, and the lean-to south of the house where Grandpa fed calves. A new fence surrounded the farmyard, and sumac had invaded the fenced-in area around the house. A large hole gaped in the west wall of the kitchen through which, I surmised, the old wood cook stove had been removed. Mindful of snakes, rats, and rusty nails, I carefully entered the ruin.

I didn’t find much as I walked along the strongest looking boards, just an old pie crust crimper on the cracked linoleum floor. But seeing the painted walls of the kitchen reminded me of sitting at breakfast listening to the farm market report on the plastic radio with the round dial. Seeing peeling wallpaper in the dining room reminded me of eating dinner around the big oak table with Grandma’s crocheted tablecloth, Fostoria glassware, and on holidays, pickled herring. I glanced through the doorways to remind myself of the sizes of the rooms, five in all. Of course, the furniture was long gone, some of it in my apartment and my sister’s homes, stoves in neighboring houses along the creek, pictures hanging on family walls, and the old clock still keeping time but now in Kansas City. I quietly left the house wondering just how much longer it would stand out here all alone.

As I exited through the hole in the wall, I faced Grandma’s rock garden. It was overgrown, but the rocks still were in place along with some plants she had tended. I decided to take a few items with me: an Indian grindstone I had long admired, a strangely shaped rock with a hole in it I found fascinating, and some iris bulbs. I wanted the stone bench as well but realized I wouldn’t be able to lift it by myself—hoisting the grindstone had been challenge enough. I imagined my granddad bringing rocks to Grandma’s garden: the grindstones he had found near the creek, quarried stones for the bench, and more. I had never really thought of him as an individual in relationship with Grandma. He must have loved her to bring such gifts both large and small.

I glanced at the cellar but decided not to go into that pit. It was just too creepy, and I had seen a snake there when I was a little boy. Walking away, I stopped at the smokehouse door, gingerly opened it, and glanced inside. I remembered seeing Grandma’s canning paraphernalia and the old hand-cranked milk separator in there, but they were gone, the room now standing empty. I wandered across the lane towards the ravine. The fence around Grandma’s garden had been removed, the rows that had produced beets, beans, corn, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and rhubarb eroded flat. When I opened the wooden top of the nearby well, I surprised and was surprised by several black snakes absorbing the sun’s heat through the old boards, safe from preying hawks. In the confusion and hurry, one snake fell into the water. I hoped it would be able to climb up the well’s rugged stones so the water would remain potable. I wondered if anyone still drank from the well.

I opened the gate to the barnyard. Cows had been grazing in this area that used to be open when the house was occupied. I envisioned Grandpa’s old wagons, plows, the tractor, the privy, and other now-missing items. The stock barn had five doors on the ground level—three on the east, two on the west; the hayloft had its main opening on the east, a smaller one on the north and, I believe small windows high on both south and north ends. I thought the barn huge when I was a kid but looking at the foundation now, realized it barely had room for Grandpa’s three cows and two horses along with their gear, feed, and mangers.

I remember a muscular man who helped Grandpa once when he was storing hay or straw. The guy stood on the hayrack, lifted the bales, and easily threw them above his head into the loft through the east door. Grandpa then used a hay hook to pick up each bale, moving it to the part of the loft where he was stacking the load. I had played among those bales by climbing boards nailed to the wall and carefully stepping from the crude ladder to the loft floor. I recalled the odor of the bales and my discovery that straw didn’t itch as much as hay.

Turning away from the memories, I tramped across the old farmyard to the garage where Grandpa parked his red and black 54 Chevy sedan out of the weather. I gingerly entered the listing structure afraid it might fall over on me but still curious what might be inside. Not much was there. I saw lumber that was too new to have been my grandpa’s, a few boards and a lathe-formed table leg. And then as I was exiting I saw it—the item I had come for even though I didn’t know it existed. I saw the star, a hand-cut tin star nailed to the outside of the garage door. Grandpa had made a decoration to embellish his garage. I wanted to take that star but had no tool to remove the weathered nail. I touched the cutout recalling cartoon characters Grandpa sometimes drew on pieces of board, his utility with a knife and other tools, his eye for unusual shapes, his clean fields, his singing, his harmonica playing, and his storytelling. My grandpa was joyful and artful. I wanted to emulate him. He was the artist in my background—not the only one in the family, but the only man I knew who did artwork when I was a child, the one I needed to remember. I realized my images of Grandpa had never matured; I knew him only when I was a young child. My own maturing seemed to demand I develop a mature view of him.

When I went back to the farm, I was in my forties trying to sort through my life themes in order to produce stability enough to face mid-life challenges. The trip occurred about a year after my work partner died. Dad was retired, ailing. My children were in the upper grades. Church work was becoming more difficult and less rewarding for me. I had fallen in love with my best friend. My whole world was changing. In this trip I may have been trying to counsel myself in light of a lack of insightful advice from elsewhere.

The trip to the farm was my pilgrimage into a past of my own, woven out of images that I had never before joined.
Those images thrilled me with their moments of beauty and their potent stirring of memories. Sometimes they choked me like the dirt from the gravel road as their meanings wrapped around me. Embracing them, I celebrated past, present, and future.

Now I look back from a changing perspective that surely relates to being over sixty. Perhaps now I’m seeking a way to grow old by somehow accommodating the biblical image of being caught up into the arms of my ancestors, seeking a security founded in the past and one that can allay uncertainties.

The star I discovered on that trip still shines although I never did recover it. In fact, I now own only one piece of furniture from my grandparents’ home and a few old photographs. Sometimes we cannot carry with us all the furnishings of the past, but my life still remains full of memories of the people who lived back then and whose reality continues to grow and transform in my mind and heart. May I continue on the path lighted by that artist’s star, doing my creative work, just like Grandpa.

I sometimes visualize Kansa Indians riding horses out at my
grandparents' farm years before any German and Swedish
settlers arrived. Acrylic washes painting of a central Kansas
petroglyph. Phillip Hoyle

Bravest Thing

One of the bravest things I have ever done may turn out to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever attempted. Last Tuesday evening I completed the rough draft of a novel I’ve been working at for over five years, writing what was going to be a collection of related stories. That’s how it began.

I’ve never before written a novel although I have written quite a few short stories. I got into them through writing up events in my own experience. Some folk thought they could easily become short stories. Up to that point I’d never even considered writing stories, but I set out to find if I could actually write short stories and discovered that my main character could certainly become more interesting than I am! Then I thought I could take some of my good ideas that I’d be too embarrassed to actually carry out and write them as stories. Then I wrote stories about a dog I knew. Since she was a great character as a dog I realized she’d be an even better character as a figure in a story. One night when out with her owner, I said we should bring Miss Shinti to the bar. She’d be a great hit. Soon my imagination dressed her in a red tutu and had her dancing on the bar. People applauded. That became my first Miss Shinti story. Before long there were eight more in which she danced with wonderful technique amazing other characters.

I got an idea to write stories about massage and decided I could set them in the mountains just west of Denver. I wrote up the first one thinking it might be the first of a group of connected stories. Soon the characters started talking to one another, and I seemed to lose control of the project. I got the strange idea the stories might actually be the beginning of a novel, a long story not a short story, not even a collection of connected stories. That’s when I got frightened. That’s when I knew I was going crazy. That’s when I knew I should immediately put away my word processor and find some way to go back into my old profession. No, it didn’t actually go that far. I did consider that I might be playing with delusions of grandeur, for while I had written all my adult life, I had always struggled to write anything more than twenty pages.

My fascination with novels started in eighth grade when I discovered James Fenimore Cooper’s stories included Native American characters. So I read Mr. Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales and then discovered historical novels by more contemporary writers. I was hooked and began a lifelong practice of reading novel after novel. Although my tastes changed over the years, I still read the stories as quickly as possible in my attempt to see what happened to the characters. I kept reading that way until I got the idea I might be writing a novel and realized I needed to know more about what I was intending to do. My novel reading became increasingly analytical. I paid attention to language, tense, usage, character development, plot, description, flashbacks, and other devices. I read about novels. I read more novels. I hoped to be able to do this strange and seemingly impossible task.

In an attempt to preserve the sanity of my overtaxed mind, I told myself I’d simply write more stories, short stories that could stand on their own. If they insisted on being more than that, I’d deal with the needed changes later. Then one day I finished what I’d intended as a story and realized it was a chapter. I just knew it. I read it to my writers group; they agreed it seemed more chapter-like than short-story-like. “Help!” I yelled deep within my writing soul. “I’m not sure I can write a novel.”

This week I printed out what seems to be a complete novel of over fifty-thousand words. It’s focused on a protagonist who meets with challenges and challenging folk, who works hard to fulfill a dream, who realizes how his whole life has made this possible, and who comes to realize how much he’d missed in his up-to-that-time wonderful life. It was as if fate or some other nasty thing was challenging him to be more, something different, and something he’d always wanted to be. So he did the work, suffered the consequences, learned heaps about himself and others, and of course, in the process fell in love. You must consider this is a novel written by a gay man about a gay man doing what the gay writer would want to have happen to him. But what the writer forgot was that writing itself is consequential! I feel like the High Priest Aaron who helped the wandering Israelites make the golden calf. (Surely you remember the movie if not the book of Exodus.) The Israelites were freaked out by their attempt to leave Egypt. Their leader Moses had been up on the mountain with the fearsome Yahweh so long they figured he’d been consumed by the Holy Presence. They needed the protection of the good old Egyptian gods they’d left behind. They collected gold. They made a calf.

Moses appeared. He was angry, yelling, roaring, threatening. “What have you done?” he screamed at his brother-priest. Weak-kneed Aaron yelled back, “The people gave me gold. I threw it in the fire and this is what came out!” Maybe Aaron just wasn’t brave enough for the job. It’s kind of like a preacher said of two kids who claimed they were just messing around in the back seat of the car and out came this baby. They were shocked. Well, I’ve had my baby. The problem with writing a novel is this: once you have a rough draft, you have to get it not so rough, you have to let other folk read it and express their sometimes not-so-nice opinions, you have to respond to what they say, you have to rewrite, you have to find an agent who wants or needs your manuscript, you have to rewrite it for the agent, and if you ever get to a publisher, you have to rewrite it again for their editor. Like poor old Aaron, you try to please and only seem to get into more trouble. Now I’m not belly-aching or excusing myself. I’m not even blaming my characters who may get me into a heap of trouble. I told a minister friend what my book was going to be about. He said that ought to make just about everyone mad. I said I hope so, cheeky me. And now I’m having some people read my rough draft. I’m thinking I’m brave in doing so. I know that these friends are not as scary as what is to follow. This may turn out to be my bravest whatever.

So I ask: what do you think of that: bravery caused by absolute stupidity?

Denver, 2012

I consider my being a novelist about as likely as my becoming
a hunter of bucks. Perhaps one never knows just what life may
make possible.
Mixed media painting of a Ute petroglyph. Phillip Hoyle

Going Green

My hazel eyes exhibit a pronounced red-green color weakness, the one I read about in biology, the one I’ve never been tested for. I realized more about the weakness when I said something about a green car that I was told was bright red. I lived in a world of my own perception, a world not much different than anyone else’s I knew. But the non-issue eventually became more unsettling. I began to wonder if I’d start becoming confused about red and green traffic lights. I never have.

In graduate school, a musicology professor told me both his parents were professional artists. He assumed he’d follow suit but was not allowed to when he started painting skies green. Since his parents couldn’t imagine an artistic career without absolute color accuracy, he was sent away from the studio to the music practice room.

My green-red crisis increased when I began applying myself to art. It wasn’t much of a problem in my first collages that featured only basic colors, but when I changed to collages made with magazine pieces, I faced a dilemma. Would I ever be able to distinguish the multitude of green shades? Would I make a fool of myself and make skies green? I could imagine it. To me many greenish shades appear gray. I did my artwork but shied away from greens. On occasion their employment seemed unavoidable, so I would lay out the pieces I wanted to put together and leave them arranged on a table. Day after day I’d stop by to glance at them in order to see if they still went together. Finally I would glue them to the ground but always with a sense of insecurity.

I gave one-such collage to an artist friend of mine. I knew he’d like the subject and the way I worked it, but I was unsure he’d like the greens I put together. I must have said something about hoping my color blindness didn’t ruin the piece. He studied it and announced, “The artist who put these greens together isn’t color blind.” I wondered if he was right, if I could really become an artist.

I liked the affirmation and realized, given time, I could determine what greens go together. I was determined to do the work no matter that my fifth-grade teacher made fun of my drawing and no matter what red-green challenges my color blindness might create. People with all kinds of disabilities still live lives full of skills and activities they are naturally ill prepared for. I could overcome my weaknesses.

I recall one autumn afternoon when Myrna and I set out on a drive from Jefferson City, MO to Columbia. We crossed the river bridge and wended our way through the river bottom. As we crossed Clear Creek, Myrna said with wonder, “Look at that tree.”

I looked and saw a hillside of green. “Yes, it’s pretty,” I replied, “But what tree did you want me to see?”

“The brilliant red tree; the only one there.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t see it.” As I drove on up the hill towards our destination I realized I probably would have been able to see it had I stopped the car and stared at the hillside. I further realized I had color blindness, a kind of blindness that is common in boys and men. I also wondered how much this was due to always being contented just to distinguish reds, blues, and yellows, greens, oranges, and purples, whites, blacks, and browns. I did know turquoise as well, but I had none of the fancy terms for various shades and hues, not like my mom and sisters. I had never learned to distinguish them, or perhaps I couldn’t see them at all. I was easily stumped by apricot, peach, tangerine, and shrimp; plum, purple, grape, and violet; crimson, carmine, vermillion, and candy apple. Perhaps I needed language development as well as color sensitivity

Now—many collages and paintings later and eight years of working jigsaw puzzles with Ruth who works by color—I have improved immensely in my ability to distinguish colors. I still perversely mix strange greens with the knowledge that such shades mingle in nature, so why not on my canvas. I haven’t painted a green sky although I have occasionally seen skies with a greenish cast since I grew up in Kansas where tornadoes turn the sky, clouds, and landscape strange hues. I do my work and delight in unusual colors combinations. And I am joining a popular movement by going green with increasing usage. Yes, I recycle; I even make art with recycled scraps and the like. I am careful not to waste. And I paint with green pigments like they might go out of style before I master their shades, tints, and mixes. I still don’t really like to eat greens, at least not collard and mustard greens, but who knows; perhaps I will grow to like, distinguish, and appreciate them too.

Denver, 2011

Mixed media on watercolor paper. Phillip Hoyle

Reflection

Photo from summer Scout camp one year. I took the
picture with my Brownie camera.

     I am sick of the first person singular, not of myself, but rather of writing about myself. Employing first person leaves me feeling like I have not heeded the advice of my teachers who found its over-use distasteful, but for the past eight years I have written almost everything in the ego person. I have become the only theme of my writing. Whatever the topic, I write about myself. My writing reminds me of a friend who authored a book about her grandmother but admitted that the real subject of the book was herself. I have tired of my self-focus but cannot seem to break the habit. Second person becomes tedious and nonsensical; third seems inaccessible. I seem stuck with myself.

     I wonder if I am trying to get over an episode of arrested development characterized by too many years of setting aside my own needs, even needs for personal recognition and acceptance. Now, in early old age, I may be striving to solve a dilemma of my personality hoping to complete some task of my maturing process. I hope I’m in some kind of developmental phase, something I will grow out of as I resolve its crisis. I’ve grown weary of writing “I” even while I recognize its economy and probable necessity.

     I re-read Conrad Richter’s novel The Light in the Forest. The story describes a white teen raised from early childhood by American Indians. He is reunited with his white family whom he has never known but is unable to adjust. Running away, he rejoins his tribe only to discover he doesn’t fit there either. He is an adolescent caught between two worlds. It seems to me that I am writing about a similar kind of situation in my own life, but one that started before my teen years and persists to this day.

     I enjoyed Richter’s story, and although I liked the idea of being raised by native folk, I wasn’t the rough and ready type. For me, the skills of forest survival, which had been fostered in me by Boy Scouts of America ideology—preparedness and self-sufficiency with an overlay of Indian images—held their appeal due solely to the Indian theme. I didn’t seem the typical Scout. I sang in choirs at church and school, made costumes, and hung art in my room. I did hunt rabbits with my rifle and camped out in a pup tent with my friends. I went to Scout camp and earned merit badges in pioneering, swimming, and hiking. I knew knots, could fashion a shelter, learned how to protect myself in harsh weather, and could identify beneficial and noxious plants. But I knew I would never live like an Indian in the wild. I liked my room, books, piano, school, friends, family, and church much more than Scouts. Still, because of the Indian images, I stayed in Scouts and continued to dream.

     I realized limitations of my strength. I could tie a knot but not very tightly. I could jump but refused when the gang dared me to jump off the garage roof. I could play basketball but not sink many goals. I knew many skills; often I could not do them well. Skinny, sunny, weak, witty—I was an artist. When it came to Indians, their art, crafts, dance, and music were my deep interests, not living out in the rain. I loved Indians but didn’t know any of them. I lived Indian in my imagination, and some Native American ideals influenced my values for people, fostering an acceptance of difference and a taste for the exotic. There were Indians living along the creek of my imagination, a constant flowing and sometimes flooding of images and thoughts. I lived among them with a sense of difference and reserve.

     Why this interest in Native Americans? Why not some other group of people such as knights in shining armor, soldiers fighting wars, or baseball heroes? Some of my interest surely stemmed from their having gone missing from one of my favorite places on earth, my grandparents’ farm. A treasure of arrow points and hide scrapers, corn grinders and flint knives stimulated my curiosity. And, as my oldest sister put it, “Mom pounded into my memory the fact that an Indian ceremonial ground existed just across the creek from the farm.” It was as if I lived in an Indian presence, but their presence was unseen.

     “The Indians” were a group whose current reality was first revealed to me when my mother was faced with a pile of outgrown clothing. She declared, “We’ll send them to the Indians.” The items were shipped to a mission outreach supported by her women’s circle at the church. These poor Native recipients of white castoffs became more real to me when Bob took his son and me to powwows. Bob introduced us to Indians who were living a life rich with socials, dances, markets, and laughter whatever clothing they were wearing. He taught us how to perform dance steps and soon we were dancing with Indians at Wamego, Wichita, Ponca City, and other White towns with Red names. We visited Indian City USA in Anadarko, were entertained in the home of an ancient Iowa-tribe woman near Hiawatha, and conversed with a Pottawatomie man on his reservation farm near Mayetta. But we had no Indian guests in our home. None came to our church. I didn’t know any in our city.

     I look back into those childhood and adolescent years, now assessing my interests from an adult point of view that suggests the images of Indians were especially meaningful to me as a developing homosexual person. Jamake Highwater’s book, Sexuality and Transgression, a queer theory study arising from Native American experience, helped me understand at least one important perspective of my development: the Indian represented my difference. Although I was unaware of the connection, the Natives kept living in my mind into my adulthood. During my undergraduate years, when I thought I had left the topic behind, I still treasured two suitcases filled with costumes I had made. In my mid-twenties, I discovered the literature of sexuality and threw myself into its mastery. At the same time, I found books by Native authors, gaining new and sometimes surprising images of Indians from their own testimony and perspective. In my late twenties I started reading several gay authors, whose books intrigued me with accounts of homosexual life. Some of the experiences described seemed attractive yet somehow impure. I persisted following the work Native writers, who for me represented a more pure type of difference although it too was often marred by alcohol and drugs, paralleling much of the gay experience about which I read.

     To my childhood imagination, Indian difference and independence, as interpreted by many nineteenth and twentieth century writers, had reflected my conflict as the only boy raised among many sisters. To my adult mind, Native minority symbolized my being somewhat gay among straight others. As an emerging gay man, I clearly resonated to the Native American commitment to arts, to their inability to become White, and to their choices to keep their traditional ideals and values. Their manipulation by others who assumed they knew best seemed similar to what I observed in church and state attempts to define and regulate gay life. These images kept me reading Indian literature while I forged a bisexual and then gay identity.

     Friendships helped change me even more. I loved an Indian man. We became friends through a common project and hung out together. He knew I was homosexual and would occasionally hold me. He didn’t kiss me, though, as he did his cousin (a fact that irked me). He loved me but didn’t want a sexual relationship. He was Indian but not gay. He was no idealized person, just a guy of average intelligence, conflicted over culture, religion, hopes, and desires. He was rather burned out from the drugs and alcohol of his past, in chronic physical pain due to an accident, and not very successful in relationships, but he was lovely in spirit and, mostly, he was accepting of me. I felt kinship. I felt love. Still, I realized the huge gap that separated us.

     A few years later, after I had left my mainly straight life, I met a queer Indian. This man’s lovely Mississippi accent melted my heart. His attractive body presented itself to me openly, invitingly. His religion, though, a central motivation in his life, became a barrier between us. I respected his spiritual search for its earnestness; his need to regain a Native grasp of divine realities made sense to me. But I realized its focus didn’t jive well with my own spirituality. I admired his commitment and his body. We had fun and still greet one another warmly.

     Indians in my imagination and experience have helped me understand and embrace my own gay life. I, who am living in relationship to my traditional family with ex-wife, kids and grandkids and to my life with another man, find a sense of kinship with Natives who have long bridged two cultures. Like Laguna poet Leslie Marmon Silko’s lost boy in “Story from Bear Country,” I had wandered among the bear people, had seen their beauty and already had started to become one of them. My bear people were the Indians of my imagination, a transformation of my sexual drives into fantasies of life in the wild, away from the stultifying influences of “normalcy,” and in an arts-centered and homosexual world. Indians—read gays—have long lived on the creek of my imagination, in both my earlier and present life. They symbolize a kind of individualization for which I have striven and a call for the perseverance, creativity, and fortitude required for my full development into a mature gay man. Perhaps someday I will understand this experience well enough to describe it in the third person, but not yet.

Denver, 2004

This mixed media painting depicts a deer hoof print. Still
when I look at it, I tend to see two people in conversation.
Acrylic washes, oil pastel, and Prisma color on paper.
Phillip Hoyle

I Was Wrong

The George Smith Public Library

     The librarian at the public library in my hometown introduced me to the Kansas Collection. She withdrew a key from her desk drawer and led me to an oak-paneled reading room. I had seen the room a few times, although its door was usually closed. Rare books were kept there in glass-fronted cabinets. Now I too was invited inside. Turning the key in the lock, the librarian opened a cabinet and withdrew a book, which she handed to me, an undersized volume titled Indians of Kansas.

     The librarian stood about five feet five inches, just under my height at the time. Although I don’t recall her name, I do remember she was always dressed in a skirt and blouse or a belted dress, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. To me she seemed as ancient as the library itself. She had been present every time I checked out books, stamping the return date on the flap inside the back cover, and telling me it was due in two weeks. She must have realized that I had read almost every book on American Indians from the library’s general collection. Now she handed me this rare jewel that in its faded blue cover seemed as precious as a sapphire. I could borrow it for two weeks.

     The librarian had plenty of chances to know me as a reader since, as a younger child, I had visited the library every Saturday. While Mom got her hair fixed at My Lady’s Beauty Salon, we kids would spend our time upstairs at the library. When we had selected and checked out our books, we’d descend the wide oak stairway into the building’s common hall, from which we could enter the back room of the salon through a screen door. Greeted by the sharp smell of chemicals, we’d make our way to the front, walking past a row of patrons having their locks shorn and styled. Others were sitting under beehive hair dryers—Mother often there perusing a fashion magazine or preparing her Sunday school lesson. Waiting for Mom, we’d begin reading from our week’s selection of books or sort through the variety of women’s magazines on a table by the front window.

     By my junior high years, I had read every Indian book in the children’s section, having taken them home Saturday after Saturday, memorizing their illustrations and, sometimes, the text. Then I started checking out the adult books, reading the Dewey-Decimal “970s” on Indians, their histories, tribes, and customs. I ventured into the American history section, reading about the Indian wars and studying maps and photographs from the Nineteenth Century. I read anthropological studies of Cheyenne culture, academic summaries of troop and tribal movements at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, handbooks on Indian crafts, and collections of Indian myths and legends. I even discovered a few biographies of Native American leaders.

     Although I read a lot, I was more taken by the pictures in books. Some photographs became like old friends who greeted me from the pages of several books I checked out often. To this day I love to come across historic photos of Sitting Bull dressed in a muslin shirt, an eagle feather in his parted hair, or Little Wolf wearing his otter turban with its silver cross, or Wavoka sporting his black felt hat. I am still moved by a candid shot in a National Geographic publication picturing a modern sun dancer with a plumed eagle bone whistle in his mouth. I shudder at the photograph showing the frozen corpse of an emaciated old man killed at Wounded Knee and am saddened when I see a familiar view of a line of Ghost dancers in a trance, stomping their earnest prayer for a new age that would bring sufficient food and an end to war. These photographic images burned their realistic impressions on my memory.

     Through books, I also started to recognize the world as seen through native eyes: the fear of antelope rushing from a prairie fire as painted by Black Bear Bosin and the grace of a deer leaping as depicted by Woody Crumbo. Interesting historical insights came from unknown artists who recorded tribal experiences and heroic deeds in ledger books and on animal skins. I studied their detailed paintings, available to me in library books, and discovered an unusual cultural and artistic sense of perspective, one that fostered my sympathy for Native American cultures and peoples.

     The books took me beyond themselves, helping me understand the stone artifacts found at my grandparents’ farm. They prepared me to enjoy the Indian powwows I attended in northeast Kansas and in Oklahoma. Their instructions and illustrations helped me create authentic costumes that decorated my bedroom walls. They helped me appreciate the Native American collections at the Kansas Historical Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The books gave me a growing view of the world as well as an appreciation of things past.

     The day the librarian handed me the small blue volume marked a change in my intellectual experience. I learned that some books were prized for their antiquity and rarity, others for their information. This book presented both. Being rare, the book was kept locked up, safe from candy-sticky hands. I was impressed by its Nineteenth Century publication date. Entrusting the book to me, the librarian warned me to be careful when I turned the brittle, yellowed pages.

     I carried the treasure home, where I looked first at the illustrations, line drawings that didn’t interest me much. To teenaged me, they seemed like poor substitutes for the photographs in modern books. Then I read the sections about the Plains Indians, my favorite tribes. The book revealed that the first group of Pawnee Indians to make their way north into Kansas were called the Skidi-ra-ri. My mind made a connection between that text and a small town just south of my grandparents’ farm. Surely Skiddy, Kansas, was named for the Skidi Indians that had camped there and planted their summer crops. As I read on about Pawnee life, the creek valley of my imagination filled with Native inhabitants raising beans, squash, and corn, holding harvest ceremonies in late summer, and returning to their permanent, winter camp about ten miles downstream to prepare for the fall hunt. Never again would I see the farm in the same way as before, never hear “Skidi” without seeing braids and feathers, never hold one of the arrowheads Grandpa gave me without wondering who had made it.

     I recall Skiddy itself. Grandpa drove me there in his dark green Chevy pickup, with running boards on the sides, gearshift on the floor of the cab, and dogs, Coalie and Jack, in the back. I went with him to pick up some part for a machine he was repairing. There was a store, a smithy, and a gas station. I saw a few old houses, not much. And that was fifty years ago.

     I started wondering about the place when I began writing these portraits. I searched the indices of a number of books at the Denver Public Library. Next, I tried their computer catalogue. It kept asking me to check my spelling. Finally, after several tries at titles, subjects, and words, I made a potential hit with a title about ghost towns in Kansas.* The book was located in a full-reserve stack. The librarian brought it to me to peruse in a huge reading room. Its paneled walls and old pictures reminded me of the reading room in my hometown library, but this time I couldn’t take the book home.

     I eagerly checked the index for Skiddy and found a reference. I was wrong. Long-gone Skiddy was not named for early Pawnees but, rather, for a wealthy entrepreneur who, in the late 1860’s put up money to route the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad through the village. In return, the residents promised to name the town for him. Skiddy flourished for a number of years as a farming and shipping center, but a newly constructed bridge moved road traffic away from the community, and their bid to get the Rock Island Railroad to come through failed.

     I imagine my sisters thinking this article should have been written years ago when, in their estimation, I was almost always wrong. They didn’t like my know-it-all ways. I was a curious young student but, apparently, too eager to share what I had learned. My siblings’ criticism was the occasion of lots of kidding and irritation, but it probably did help me monitor my enthusiasm when I was in school.

     Discovering that my junior-high logic was incorrect didn’t discourage me, but it did clarify why I couldn’t find direct Pawnee-related information in archaeological literature. In the late 1930’s several digs were made in the creek beds of the area, including Clarks Creek, but references to the finds were generalized as being of Hopewellian or Plains Woodlands groups rather than Pawnee or Caddoan. Fitzgerald’s article on Skiddy preserved local traditions of Natives in the 1860’s and 1870’s and mentioned a near-by spring where the tribe’s women and children often stayed when the warriors were away hunting. The written history of Clarks Creek places the Kansas there; reason concludes many of the relics from the Indian past were from the Kansa tribe. Surely the Skidis traveled through on their long journey north in prehistoric times, and other tribal groups roamed the area for hundreds of years before them. I still see braids, as it were, when I hear of Skiddy, but now they are on Kansa Indian heads, and I wonder if the spring where families camped and the fields they tended were on my grandparents’ farm.

     Libraries still call to me, intriguing me with information that enriches my understanding. I visit the 970’s now at a library that has more books with that number than the total number of holdings at the public library of my childhood. I love reading the shelves, glancing through books, stopping to look at pictures. In response, my imagination runs free with hints from them, ideas and images that bring alive the facts I read. Imagination enlivens the figures in illustrations and sends a deep thrill through my body as I join living scenes from the past.
Denver, 2004

* Daniel Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997.

Dancing with Indians

     At a park in Wamego, Kansas, the old park with the Dutch windmill, I became a Pottawatomie Indian. Bob Waters, a friend of my dad and grandpa, had taken his red-headed son and blond-headed me to an Indian dance slated to be held in honor of the town’s anniversary. He sought permission for us boys to costume and join in the dancing. We were invited in and with deep joy danced war dances and round dances alongside Indian women and men. With the rest of the crowd, we sat on benches to watch several Pottawatomie dances we didn’t know. Then the announcer called for an adoption dance and signaled the two of us to join them.

     As I recall it, the dance was a follow-the-leader affair, kind of like a snake dance. I carefully emulated the leader’s movements: stepping in time with him and the drum, turning my body left and right like his, stopping when he stopped, and dancing when he danced. The experience was more than doing steps learned from a book written by a White man. Here I learned movements of hips and arms, the position of the body, the interaction of dancer with dancer. I was encouraged by the approving nods of the Indian folk with whom I was dancing. I was thrilled to be learning a new Indian dance, but truthfully, I don’t recall at the time feeling anything related to being adopted.

     Later, as we drove west along US 24, back to our homes in Junction City, Bob reprimanded us boys for dancing the adoption dance. “It’s not appropriate to join a tribal ceremony,” he preached. “You didn’t even know the dance.”

     “But they asked us to,” we protested in whining junior high and grade school voices.

     “Okay, that’s fine,” Bob conceded, “as long as they invited you.”

     Due to Bob’s questioning, I started to wonder if I really was adopted by this tribe that had been relocated to Kansas a few years before my forebears imigrated there from Europe. Even though at the time I didn’t make anything of it, from then on I felt welcome when visiting on the Pottawatomie Reservation or dancing with various other Native groups in Wichita, Horton, Pawnee, or Ponca City. I enjoyed the hospitality of these Native folk, learned some of their traditions, copied their costumes, listened to their jokes, and ate their fry bread. Eventually I read Helen Hunt’s 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, her stinging critique of US government treaty breaking and underhanded misuse of tribal goodwill and ignorance, and pledged myself never to take advantage of Indians for my own gain and their loss. I was serious in my resolve even if the Pottawatomi’s gesture of adoption was only a simple kindness to children or a goodwill symbol between the Native and White communities. Whatever happened there was fine with me, for in my mind I did become an adopted child of the tribe. From then on, their interest was my interest.


Denver, 2008

Native American dancers, photo I took when a boy.

As a junior high student I met a number of older Native American men with whom I danced as in the story above. These particular men pictured here were participants in a Kickapoo powwow at the Armory in Horton, Kansas. I took their picture with my Brownie camera, very interested in their costumes. Although the Kickapoo tribe was Eastern woodland in descent, these costumes show plains influence. I recall studying the black beaded vest that I used as a kind of pattern for a similar vest I made and beaded. 
I no longer remember which man is which but wrote on the back of the snapshot the following names: George Allen, Hamilton, and Sacqua. I was aware of and appreciative of their kindness toward me.

Indians on the Creek

Warrior from a Kansas petroglyph
Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle

     By the time I started visiting the farm, its former Native American residents were a dim memory already generations old. I doubt my grandfather ever saw Indians there although his parents certainly did. They had arrived in the late 1860’s from Germany and Sweden eager to homestead in the fertile Clarks Creek valley. The Kansa Indians, the immediate former inhabitants, had lived until 1873 on a reservation a few miles away, just over the divide, on the headwaters of the Neosho River. Soon after my forebears’ arrival, the U.S. Government re-negotiated treaties with the Kansa tribe and accomplished their removal to Indian Territory far to the south. Seventy-five years later, when I went to my grandparents’ farm, the Kansa were only references in a few stories.

     The Indians left behind marks of their residency: arrowheads, knife points, grist mills, and corn grinders. These materials were a meager reminder of a rich tribal experience, but they were adequate to set my mind afire with imagined campsites, farming, ceremonies, and warriors. The place seemed alive with their lore and legends. I thought, “Isn’t it possible a lone Indian might still linger in the woods across the creek?” It seemed so to me, a kid who could imagine himself living away from his irritating sisters and sensible parents, enjoying the country solitude. Accompanied by my dog, I too could live by my wits, reaping the land’s bounty of rabbits, fish, and grapes. And, “If I were an Indian, I’d know a lot more. I could do it.” It seemed possible.

     A few years after my grandpa’s death, I spent several weekends camping at the creek with my Boy Scout troop. We set up our tents in a tree-sheltered area with the creek on three sides, just across the stream from the place that Grandpa claimed was an ancient ceremonial ground. During our campouts, I kept my eyes open for relics of the Indian past but didn’t find even one arrow point. Still, I wondered if an Indian family had camped in the same place and if their kids had smoked grape vines on the sly like we did. One fall afternoon we collected dried corn from the field above our campsite and that evening parched it over a small fire. Had a Native cook done the same years before? We studied the stars that guided the Indians across the plains at night, camped by the same creek, and probably dove into the same swimming hole. To my junior-high fancy, we seemed to share a lot.

     My imagination was fueled by my reading of Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest in which, Johnny, an Anglo boy was reared from early childhood by Indians. His return to the white world as a teenager left him longing for his former life among the Delawares, yet when he tried to return to it, realities of race and family intervened. The young man was left without a sure home among either people. I really wanted to experience Richter’s scenes of this sixteen-year-old boy and his Indian cousin living alone in the wilderness. No tribal or personal history dampened their weeks of utter delight in the bounty and beauty of the woodlands along the river and in one another. The young man’s life, caught as it was between tribal and white societies, matched some feelings I had as a teenager straddling my idealistic imagination and the reality of carrying out groceries at the store. Although, normally I attended classes at school, sang in the church choir, and lived at home, I longed for an existence in the woods along the creek, an Indian reality of my imagination. The Boy Scout outings at least got me into the woods and to the old campsite. But too soon, Sunday afternoon would arrive and we would pack up our damp tents, sooty gear, and mud-splattered clothes. Life resumed when we got back to town. There, alone in my room, images of the creek loomed as I recalled other passages from Richter’s tale or descriptions from James Fenimore Cooper about the tall grass prairies and the adventures of old Leather Stocking. I wanted an adventure.

     I imagined that one of the warriors who showed up at my great-grandparents’ homestead would scratch on my tent wall some weekend and invite me to follow him on his journey. I pictured him as a muscular, lean man, walking before me in buckskin moccasins and leggings, a blanket draped across his shoulders. His head was nearly without hair except for an old-style scalplock pulled back into a single braid. Beads strung on leather thongs hung from his pierced ears and swayed with the easy rhythm of his gait. He turned his dark eyes toward me and simply nodded, indicating that we should cross the creek and enter the primal arena of the crescent moon with its traditional rituals and mythical stories.

     He told me how his ancestors received the corn they planted in this valley. A warrior found red, blue, and white kernels of something that looked valuable to him. He hid them in a mound of dirt and some weeks later came back to see if they were still there. Instead, he discovered a cluster of green stalks growing atop the mound, and on each stalk, ears of fruit in the three colors. He took one ear of each color for himself and shared the rest with the people of his tribe. The next spring, they planted the kernels in mounds as had the warrior, and at summer’s end, harvested a multi-colored crop of the life-sustaining gift of the Waconda. As my Indian teacher knelt by a small fire, I noted his strong legs and the red wool of his breechcloth. The blanket dropped from his shoulder as he handed me some corn. I studied the tattoos on his shoulders as I ate the food. I didn’t understand the meanings of the designs, but they helped him appear fierce. I enjoyed the corn, which tasted better than what we scouts had parched, and I knew I had found what I wanted: a life that would take me far from the city, back in time to a carefree existence, and into a friendship with this wild man who seemed so beautiful. Then I recalled the stories of the devastation met by the very Indian people who formerly lived on this creek and realized I preferred to experience this idyllic existence as only an exercise of my imagination.

* * * * *

     Mother told me that friends used to kid my great grandfather, saying the reason he immigrated to the United States was because he didn’t want to march the goose-step in the Kaiser’s army. For whatever reasons, surely including a hope for adventure, he and other settlers moved to Kansas, a move that represented homes lost and found. As immigrants, they replaced Native Americans and re-lived the experience of barely making a living from the corn and other plants they harvested and the meat they took from herds they found or raised. Their life was always a challenge, with a few fat years and many lean ones. Although my relatives were pleased to be farming, they worked endlessly and didn’t even get to go on month-long buffalo hunts like the Kansa Indians. They had to stay home to milk cows and gather eggs daily. Still, the land sustained their lives on the creek, and they, too, thanked their maker for the gift of corn.

     Although the farm was homesteaded in the late 1860’s by my ancestors, it had already been a farm for hundreds of years. It remains a farm. As an adult, I cannot imagine living there, either in the woods or in a house, but I still feel a strong emotional connection to the place, to its traditions of farming and family rearing, and to its power to evoke memories of the past and to bring a sense of reality to the present.

Denver, 2002

Photo by my dad

As a young child I loved being at the farm with its old buildings, animals, crops, hills, paths, ravine, and creek. I loved being there with my grandparents the times I got to stay over and once when I spent more than a week alone with them. I liked when our family went out there for dinner or holidays as in this summer picture in summer when the wagon was being outfitted to serve as a hay wagon. Pictured here are my two older sisters and me probably watching barn swallows make their arced swoops hunting bugs in the sky of the barn yard. Simple pleasures. 

Cowboys and Indians

Author in Estes Park at age four playing the part.

     I was a cowboy before I became an Indian. Emulating my cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy, I wore square toed riding boots, western cut shirts, and bolo ties long before I donned a feather headdress. As soon as I ate breakfast and drank hot chocolate from my Hoppy plate and mug, I’d mount my stick horse to gallop around the house and yard. Out at the farm I sat on Grandpa’s wagons and gazed longingly at his huge horses. I rode a saddle pony at an Estes Park resort, round and round the ring, and was convinced I was a cowboy.

     From early on I heard Grandpa’s stories about Indians who had lived across the creek from the farm and who occasionally showed up to trade after Great Grandpa settled there. I was hooked, imagining myself meeting those strange and exotic folk dressed in skins and feathers, me wearing my cowboy duds. When I discovered books about Indians at the public library, I entered a world that gave new content to my childhood fantasies. Then I imagined being an Indian, not a cowboy. I saturated the new life with images from every Indian book I could find: the texts, illustrations, photographs, and maps from all the children’s books and then the adult books of history, anthropology, and biography. I especially loved volumes on how to make Indian clothing and crafts and began creating costumes, jewelry, war clubs, spears, shields, and the like. I ordered 78 rpm records of war dances and round dances and learned to dance them wearing my costumes. In matters of justice I took up a preference for Indians over the very settlers from whom I derived. The complexities of my Indian interest grew. I think I wanted an Indian hero.

     “Cowboys and Indians” was also a game we played as children. We would sometimes wear costumes, but mostly the game consisted of running around, lassoing one another with ropes, shooting play guns and arrows tipped with rubber suction cups, and arguing over who got killed. The deaths were agonizing dramas with great writhing and moans and eventual relaxation. We also played Army or Cops and Robbers, but Cowboys and Indians remained my favorite. It meant more to me than the other games.

     As my observations about Indians became more sophisticated, I realized they were not one but, rather, a lot of different tribes with contrasting reactions to the European invasion of their homes. Cowboys were latecomers in the conflict. They followed streams of farmers, land grabbers, state builders, and governmental representatives who often swindled Indians out of their homes. Settlers were more the focus of the conflict: the farmers, miners, and ranchers. Cowboys, by contrast, were a group of hired hands out in the late nineteenth century Wild West where cattle herds replaced the failing buffalo population. They had interaction with Indians, sure, but during their few years of driving Texas longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene or to some other railhead, most of the fighting with Indians was carried out by the US Cavalry or state militias. Still the historically suspect Cowboy and Indian pairing stuck in my mind as if it represented warring factions within me.

     “When I was a child, I thought like a child,” wrote Saint Paul. Eventually I followed the Apostle’s lead and left behind my childish things—well all except a couple of suitcases of Indian collectibles I kept at my parents’ house. I went to a church college and studied the liberal arts, concentrated on theology and music, and took a church job. A few years later, I furthered my studies at a Texas seminary. While there I almost became a cowboy again. I was talking with west-Texas twang, drawl, and vocabulary. I had started shopping for ostrich skin cowboy boots and a Stetson hat when I realized I had to move back up north before I converted, took up Texan, or became a cowboy. If the cowboy was still in me, what about the Indian?

     In my zealous quest for maturity I had easily left behind children’s things, but I couldn’t seem to get away from them. As I pursued my career in the church, the Indians followed me. They started introducing themselves as Native American elements in religious education resources I wrote. Sometimes they’d swoop off the mesas of my mind encircling our wagons of Bible stories and craft activities, like the time Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Story from Bear Country” insisted on being told alongside the biblical stories of Joseph’s coat of many colors, vivid dreams, and sojourn in Egypt. And then a whole host of Indian stories swept down from the hills to surround and threaten. Perhaps I had read too many books in my childhood.

     I realize most cowboys were no more interested in Christian ways than were most Indians, but the cowboys were mostly whites, my people. Perverse me, I found the Indians more interesting, their difference more challenging, colorful, revealing, and frankly, they were better teachers. Their primal relationship to myth showed me a new way to read my religious tradition. They taught me that I had my own tribal connection, a biblical one that survived as an ancient memory. The Bible stories I so loved came from that distant past—some written long before Greek logic could be applied to them, all told and believed centuries before the advent of scientific thinking. These stories needed a new consideration, so I re-read the Bible and in so doing discovered that the defensive posture of my enlightened eyes wasn’t necessary. What was I defending? An eighteenth century philosophy? A nineteenth century insight? A twentieth century dedication to development and progress? Finally, like wagon master Major Seth Adams on TV’s “Wagon Train,” I realized the Indians on the horizon were friendly, and I yelled: “Spread the wagons. Let ‘em in.”

     The Indians challenged not only my thinking, but that of anyone else who noticed. I recall especially those folk who tolerated such themes in Boy Scouts but judged them inappropriate in Sunday school or church camp. My Indians didn’t care and eventually went to Sunday morning worship. At one service a lone Native visitor showed up in the children’s sermon; then an Indian scholar made his point forcefully in an adult sermon illustration. Later a group of them appeared as the choir and soloists in a French Christmas Cantata. Bedecked in leather, turquoise, and hundreds of feathers, they sang, played drums, and danced in front of the altar. Like their tricky Coyote God, my Indians caused confusion.

     This aging cowboy-turned-Indian carried that confusion for years. Still does. When I lived in New Mexico, where I learned cowboy two-step dancing, I noticed that almost every Indian man I met wore cowboy clothes. Eventually I too bought cowboy boots and that Stetson I’d wanted in Texas, and by the time I moved to Denver, I even danced in them with an Indian guy in a cowboy bar. A confused life at times, but like my Indians in church, it was more confusing to others—my congregation, my family, and my friends—than it was to me.

     The Apostle Paul also said something obscure about how faith elicits faith. So for many years cross-eyed Lakota Holy Man Sitting Bull hung on my church office wall as an overseer of honest interpretations, open attitudes, and inclusive deliberations. Perhaps the old chief was a kind of Indian hero for me, one I’d admired in my childhood. Hanging there years later, he reminded me that stories of talking animals, tricky ancestors, and face-to-face interviews with angels, heavenly armies, and the Almighty were features of my Christian holy book. And their inclusion in both the Bible and Native American mythologies is still as much a modern Christian confusion as an anthropological one.

     I had to learn to play with religious symbols so I could approach them with awe and appreciate their majesty. I finally learned the playful reality of the divine and lost my apprehension of what had always seemed to me a kind of forbidden magic. In short, my cowboy learned to live at peace with my Indian. It makes sense to me. And think about this: I read somewhere that by far most real-life, working cowboys in America today are Indians.

Denver, 2009

Author as young teen at home entertaining his sisters.

Front room war dances seemed better than temper tantrums.

Painting Petroglyphs

On the Trail, mixed media by Phillip Hoyle

    “I am painting petroglyphs,” I write.

     My niggling internal editor suggests, “Isn’t that painting pictographs? One chips away to make petroglyphs.”

     “No,” I insist. “I’m painting petroglyphs.” I work wildly, spraying a water mist on paper, splashing paints of various shades of brown onto the wetness, letting the colors run.

                                                                                         

     Occasionally I look up at the petroglyph rubbings that hang on the walls of my studio. I recall standing against the escarpment as I rubbed them, my skin getting burned in the western Colorado sun. The designs seemed so beautiful to me, carved on the sandstone walls and boulders out there under the blue sky, but so ugly when I wanted to hang them on the walls of my apartment. Crayon rubbings on yellowing newsprint. Pathetic looking. I had to do something artistic with these crude rubbings so I could continue to enjoy their beauty and celebrate the feelings they stimulated within me. Collage was my answer. I bought mat boards and started cutting, arranging, gluing. I replicated depth, depicting the rough texture and cracks in the rocks. I was full of ideas and enjoyed creating design, color, and contrast. I started becoming an artist so I could remember.

     While my paper collage contrasted greatly with the hard medium of the original creators’ work, making them did connect me with those ancient artists. They chipped away at the rocks to create an environment of ideas, mnemonics, and myths. I cut and pasted together a world of imagination that carried me back into childhood visits to my grandparents’ farm and forward into a life grounded in such memories.

     The parade of deer, moose, bears, horses, foot and handprints, lines, arrows, stars, medicine wheels, and unnamable creatures elicited an ancient world in my imagination. They conjured a life of wickiups and teepees, of cooking fires and ceremonial smoke. The wind that blew down the Shavano Valley seemed to carry the sounds of chanting, hoof falls, snorting animals, and playing children.

I found in these rock carvings a way to imagine

a life of the past;

I found in them a topic for research;

I found a subject for reflection,

An experience of beauty.

     Crude. That’s what W. C. McKern called these Ute petroglyphs. From his point of view as an ethnologist doing a study for the Smithsonian Institute in the early 1920’s, they were crude chippings of an inferior culture. His evaluation reflected an assumption of trappers, who contrasted their impression of Ute life with that of the Plains Indian tribes much more influenced by white trade goods and ideas. His judgment also reflected philosophical and scientific biases that, in my opinion, missed what these petroglyphs were in themselves and what they represented to the people who made them. The great problem with these markings lies in the fact that it is impossible to know what they represented. Even Native American scholars admit they don’t know. The passing of centuries created an impassable gap, leaving us ignorant, unable to guess with any kind of certainty at the meanings of these scratches. Their permanence laughs at the changes of the societies that made them and of those that still gaze upon them.

     There they remain on isolated canyon walls, colored only by desert paint in blacks and browns. I imagine them peopled, complemented by the colors of feathers and beadwork, by the odors of cooking meat and smoking tobacco, by the sounds of milling horse herds and the melody of a flute. As I rub them, I hear a truck pass on the road below, a hawk call in the sky above, a grasshopper’s wings crackle in the dry desert atmosphere. As I cut the images for my collages, I hear the furnace in the apartment click on and the rush of wind pushing through the vent. As I paint them on paper, I hear footfalls cross the floor above and the motor circulate water in the hot tub.

     I lift the edge of the paper to make the paint run and wonder what the Ute was thinking as he pecked away at the rock. What was his artistic concern? How long did he look for the harder rock to use as a tool? Perhaps he was trying to remind himself of the spirit of the animal he killed to feed his family, his chipping a prayer of gratitude. Maybe he was simply making marks to distance himself from the activity of the camp like a student doodling during a lecture.

     What am I doing? I am thinking about what colors to select to best leave the impression of sandstone. Certainly I am distancing myself from the others with whom I live, but I think I am doing more. I am creating a reminder of the valley, of its plenitude of deer, elk, plants, beaver, gushing springs, rugged rocks, and endless blue sky. I am recalling the past of my imagination to keep alive the leisure of childhood, its unfettered freedom, its sense of unlimited possibility. I am celebrating my connection with the past, with a human spirit that reaches far beyond my family, society, and culture. I made collages and now I paint to show my children and grandchildren life is more than making a living. It is also, and necessarily, an expression of spirit, of beauty, of art.

     I paint my petroglyphs, or more precisely my petroglyph designs, in a work that seems to me as ancient as it is contemporary.

Denver 2006

Paintings by P. Hoyle On the Trail (above) and The Hunt; photo of me in my studio.

The Hunt