His Own Vocation: A Short Story by Phillip Hoyle

Judaculla Dream
Mixed media painting by Phillip Hoyle

The grandfather sits alone in his apartment, smoking a cigarette, enjoying a CD of anthems by the Baroque composer Henry Purcell. He is intrigued by the unusual qualities of the English voices: the exceptionally fast vibrato of the soprano, the overwhelming resonance of the bass baritone. He wishes he owned a stereo with larger speakers so he could hear more sonorities of the orchestra and organ. Still, he is contented, drawn into the music and the memories it evokes.

As a boy, he lived for music. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra standing before the front room mirror. He heard choirs singing in four part harmony when he closed his eyes at night. He listened over and over to his favorite recordings of Harry Belafonte, Barbara Streisand, Mahalia Jackson, and the Wings Over Jordan Choir. He learned art songs from his voice teacher plus jazz and pop standards from his father. When the school choir sang Vivaldi’s “Gloria” and Faurè’s “Requiem,” music seemed the most important thing in his world.

His dad offered him two words of vocational advice. First, “Whatever you do, be sure you really enjoy it.” Second, “Don’t be a musician.”

The grandfather realizes his dad feared the alcohol and drugs that seemed indispensable to so many performers. He wanted to save his child from temptations that might lead to a life of dissipation. Although his advice was meant to help, it missed the reality of his son’s dreams.

When the CD ends, the grandfather loads a collection of songs by Dinah Washington. Although her life spiraled out of control like the experience his father feared, she thrilled her audiences and left a tremendous legacy of recordings. The grandfather loves the sassiness and tonal accuracy of her voice. He chuckles at the words of the old blues numbers, their subtle and blatant allusions to sex.

In his childhood he enjoyed sex with boys his age. Mostly they played kickball, war, and tag. When they were older they camped, hiked, and hunted. Always they played sex games. Eventually even that changed. In junior high school, he studied art, music, and languages while his best buddies followed their interests in sports, wood shop, and girls. Oh, he liked girls, always had a girlfriend with whom he attended school functions. He followed the rules about how many dates were necessary before you hold hands, dance close, or kiss at the end of an evening. But he continued to miss having sex with guys.

When he was fifteen, his family moved to another town. A member of the church youth group, a real jock, came onto him. Their nine months of vigorously satisfying sex seemed an extension of childhood into adolescence. Their affair ended, though, when the friend moved away at the end of the school year.

That summer, his dad talked with him and his sister about another church youth who was so effeminate the dad was afraid he would be taken to be homosexual when he went to college in the fall. He went on to say, “Neither of you will have that problem.”

The grandfather recalls that at the time he had thought his father imperceptive since he had just spent the school year having sex with a guy. Now he realized that, like the vocational advice, the words may have been wisdom arising from the father’s view of what constituted a successful life, or his dad may have been expressing a deeply hidden dread about his own son cloaked in a concern for another. Whatever the truth of the interaction, the son knew he was different and realized that the difference caused his father anxiety.

Dinah Washington sings her blues in a voice that seems almost too full of joy. Her playfulness doesn’t match the grandfather’s mood. He wants a different feeling, so scanning the shelf, selects an album by Sting. He loads the CD, taps another cigarette from the pack on his lamp table, and lighting it, draws in the rich smoke. He relaxes in the chair, cushioned by the music. He likes the singer’s rough yet rich voice, the range of expression, the variety of lyrics. When Sting mentions losing his belief in the holy church, the grandfather’s thoughts again turn to the past.

The dad’s love for the church led him to hope his son would become a preacher. Responding out of a desire to please his father, the son attended a Bible College. He assumed he would become a minister but by the end of his junior year realized he didn’t want to tell other people what to think or how to live their lives. He changed his major to music. Happy to support the work of others who did enjoy preaching, he entered church work as a choir director and religious educator. Eventually the son was ordained, but he continued associate ministry, pursuing his preferred emphases in music and education.

Once the father attended a Bible study the son was leading. Afterwards, he said, “You’re a good teacher even if I agree more with your conservative students than with you.”

Over many years the son pieced together an interpretation of his father’s support. For instance, the father seemed gratified that his son had married and reared children. He was happy that he pursued his music within the church. He seemed pleased his son held responsible positions in large congregations. The son could hear his father saying these things even if without great enthusiasm and realized this pastiche would have to satisfy his need for his dad’s approval.

The grandfather wonders what the dad would have made of his son’s leaving both career and marriage. What words of advice would the father have proffered had he lived long enough to see his son living in a major city far from his family, working as a massage therapist, painting pictures, and writing about his homosexuality from a religious perspective?

The song changes, inviting the grandfather to wonder what he may have said to his own son that hit or missed the truth of his life. The old man lifts the phone and dials as he puffs away on his cigarette. He listens to the ringing.

“Hello, Able?” he greets his son. “How are you doing? ... How’s your wife? ... Your kids? ... Your work? ...” The two men, old and young, talk candidly. Their conversation proceeds with warmth, laughter, and occasionally surprise. The grandfather asks, “And how is your artwork going?” He hears of new paintings, developing ideas, and a proposed art show. Satisfied, the grandfather hangs up. He leans back into his feelings as Sting observes, “How fragile we are.”

Denver, 2006

Revelation

What IS this walking figure from
Shavano Valley? Mixed media
painting by Phillip Hoyle

Some biblical and artistic revelations combined for me in a most important way, one that helped me realize the ultimate revelation of God’s love. I begin with the image of a boy drawing illustrations of the visionary creatures in the Bible. These word monsters had origins in the apocalyptic literature of the Hebrew prophets, especially Daniel and several others whose writings were deemed aprocryphal or became part of the extra-biblical collection known as the Pseudoapigrapha. Jesus as a prophet was credited with some such images related to the destruction of Jerusalem, and due to a fourth century decision, the New Testament ends with the memorable book, The Revelation to John. 

We didn’t hear much about these writings in our church until Stan Lecher preached a meeting one spring. He specialized in prophetic speculation in order to raise a crowd. The magical world of knowing the future held great appeal and Lecher knew how to use it. Although in my childhood I was too scared to be interested in monster movies, I did find these images in the Bible quite intriguing, not so much for their meanings about the future but simply for their inclusion in the sacred book. For me, the phenomenon seemed much the same as when I later discovered the Goodspeed translation of the Bible that used such clear words as ‘rape’ or the erotic images in the Song of Solomon, or the image of God’s love for Israel compared with the hopeless commitment of the prophet Hosea for his prostituting wife. I was fascinated by the unacceptable being found within the content of the holy. I still am.

So when sermons got boring I paged through the Revelation and entertained myself by drawing these wild monsters: for instance, in Revelation 12 a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and ten crowns on his heads and a tail that swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them on the earth and whom Michael and his angels fought; or in Revelation 13 a creature that looked like a leopard with feet like a bear’s and a mouth like a lion’s and with horns and ten crowns arising from the sea; or in the same chapter another beast that rose out of the earth and featured two horns like a lamb and a voice of a dragon. I knew nothing of metaphor and symbol for I was a child as literal as he could be. I didn’t know what else to do with these visions except to draw them.

Mom was interested in my drawings, at least enough to put them in her purse. I don’t know what became of those scratchings, but I do remember not knowing how to distribute horns and crowns among the various heads of the angry monsters. Such is the life of even the most literal of illustrators. Too many decisions, too much specificity, and the revelations became a problem of literality and meaning. But my memory of the experience is one of artistic decision making not unlike what I face now when I am making paintings of centuries-old visions of the Ute artists in Shavano Valley in western Colorado or of Cherokee interpretations at Judaculla Rock on the Tennessee River in western North Carolina. I was making such artistic decisions as a youngster. All those years ago I was an artist and, of course, a frustrated one just like my son Michael years later when in disgust he threw away some of this drawings because he couldn’t get them perfect. I told him then what I wish someone had told the young me, that the art arises from incorporating your mistakes, trusting that they may be as important to your work as what you deem ideal. And to imagine that I was thinking somewhat that way even as a youngster trying to fathom the images and truths of the wildest symbols in the Bible.

The art is in the process. For me, the art of living religiously grew to mean being able to incorporate the common with the holy not to accommodate the sins of my own life within a vision of the perfect God but rather because the authoritative book of my religious upbringing declares that the murdering King David was in fact a man after God’s own heart. My deeply artistic and deeply gay heart knew life must recognize the good in all, in me. What a revelation!

As I mentioned before, I still feel that way.

Denver, 2014

This assortment of figures from Judaculla Rock was both
challenging and rewarding, but someone will surely wonder
what it means. Mixed media painting by Phillip Hoyle

ATCs Galore

A few of my earliest ATCs

Two and a half years ago Sue, a good writer and artist friend of mine, suggested I accompany her to a Saturday morning Artist Trading Card swap meet at a local art gallery. She said, “Bring some cards to trade.”

“I have some,” I told her and wondered if I’d have time to make more, some fresh ones for my first time to trade.

She’d explained the card-trading movement had its beginning in Switzerland when an artist invited his artist friends over to a party. Each was to bring enough artist trading cards to swap one-for-one with the other guests. Apparently the party was a success since many years later people around the world are gathering to swap cards and sometimes to make them together. They’re sent in the mail, traded on line, and sometimes show up in galleries like at the Denver County Fair.

“How cool,” I thought in uncharacteristic informal expression. Artists can meet each other, enjoy the company of the sometimes like-minded, appreciate each other’s latest approaches, and go home with samples of the other’s work. They no longer have to swap paintings they’d rather sell at a gallery for full price or feel that they traded a better piece for a lesser piece. The small size of the cards prevents the big feeling of unevenness. “I get it,” as Sue would say. “Genius,” I thought and started packing my bag of cards to share.

We arrived early, before the gallery opened or others had arrived. “I want to swap with you first,” Sue said while we were still seated in the car. “I want to pick first, before the others can.” We each reached for our stashes of cards. She looked at mine, smiled and shaking her head said, “You can’t trade these,” They’re too large.”

“Oh, I thought you meant we would trade greeting cards.”

“Well you can’t take them to the trade, but I want to trade with you anyway. One on one.”

“Sure,” I said both embarrassed and thankful. Sue went on to tell me more about the cards, that they were 2 ½ by 3 ½ inches like baseball trading cards. She had assumed I’d look up ATCs (shorthand) on line and get the specs. (Oh how little she knew me!) After trading with Sue, I went inside and watched the proceedings. Sure enough people came in with boxes, bags, or folders of cards. Many of the cards were on the same theme although differently interpreted. I watched as people swapped. “I’ll trade you one.”

“Oh, I found three I like a lot. Can you trade me three?”

“I’d be delighted.”

There was no exchange of money, just cards. One card for one card. How nice, and what a good way for artists to get together, laughing, having their work admired, being delighted at what they discovered flowing from one another’s imaginations. It seemed the perfect setting and celebration of art for people who often are short on funds but long on ideas and feelings.

That was the first time. On the way back to my house Sue told me about the studio of a man I had met at the gallery. “It’s really a compound with two large studios, several galleries, and thousands of collected things arranged carefully. The whole place is actually a work of art.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but a couple of weeks later she took me to his studio compound for another kind of ATC gathering. It was “swap, make, and swap some more,” an evening lasting about four hours, beginning with a swap of cards made to a theme, then a workshop without a theme but in which participant could rifle through many of his supplies (including a huge drawer of pre-cut ATC grounds arranged by color and texture) and make, hopefully, a card to trade with each other person present. Although I was pleased to be there, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the host’s orderly array of supplies and his extreme generosity. The place and company brought out in me an artist I barely knew! I laughed and ate and drank with other artists in this magical place making friends and art. What a life.

Since then I have attended many such gatherings and traded hundreds of cards. I now have quite a stack of loose leaf binders with plastic pages, nine pockets each, representing the work of many, many artists. When it’s too cold to go out to a museum or gallery for inspiration, I simply go to my little studio and take down the volumes of work by these people I now know. I know their styles, their approaches, and notice their changes and experiments. I have source books of actual art to inspire me in my own quest for creating beauty, expressing my feelings, practicing my techniques (in miniature), and creating a medium for trade.

Eggs was that trade's ATC theme

To read more specific information about the groups I participate in, go online to Denver Make & Trade ATCers. Check out other web sites with cards from around the world. Feast your eyes and get out the scissors and paper and glue and pens and paint and sand and whatever else you have around the house. Make and trade an ATC.

Some cacti ATCs I made

Denver, February 2014

Missouri Odyssey

My Missouri odyssey was short on ecstasy. Still, it was a trip I’ll never forget although the memory itself may transform into some old-age looping adventure. Should that happen, surely the story will only get better! But for now…

Plans were set for departure from Denver on Sunday morning, December 22. It was to be an early shove off in my friend’s SUV. There had been lots of conjecture over travel conditions. With dire warnings, TV augurers predicted mega-storms. The navigator wanted to go anyway; I was game.

When Tony arrived to pick me up a half hour early, I wondered just how fast he would drive across I-70. He was hoping to get to Missouri in time for a niece’s birthday party. I thought his idea hopeless; there were just too many miles to drive even in good weather. Since there was a storm in eastern Kansas and across all of Missouri, we’d probably drive right into it. We set out in the dark before five o’clock.

In my original plan I had envisioned spending time in Missouri in late spring when there was no threat of snow and ice. Since I wanted a leisurely trip that allowed time for writing and sketching, I faced the wintry departure with a sense of loss and some feelings of foreboding that had nothing to do with the weather. A vision had flitted through my mind that grandpa (me, that is) had become a patient in a Missouri hospital. What a bummer of a Christmas that would provide for both the children and me.

I’m sure my foreboding arose from my intention to initiate a relationship with my new doctor; one I assumed would quickly focus on the shabby condition of my prostate gland and likely lead to some kind of surgery. I wasn’t even sure I should go, but my daughter from Veracruz, Mexico was already in Missouri. I needed to see her and her children. In a proper Christmas spirit I set aside thoughts and visions and started packing presents, sweaters, long johns, and of course, books to read.

Going on a trip requires preparations for going and for being away. So at the same time I was preparing presents for grandkids, I was also closing a fifteen-year massage practice, getting rid of many, many things, bringing to the house boxes of artwork, CDs, towels, sheets, and the like, knowing I needed to organize the mess in such a way that its presence would not drive my sometimes over-focused partner nuts during the week of my absence. Other preparations included finishing up January postings for a storytelling blog I monitor and baking Christmas cookies with my friend Dianne. The weeks before the trip were especially emotional for me with important endings (as in saying goodbye to my clients), beginnings (as in meeting folk and learning responsibilities related to the co-op art gallery I had just joined), and continuities (as in selecting just-right stories for the blog and observing changes in details of my own health—both physical and emotional). I approached the Sunday morning departure worn out and on edge.

Tony and I clipped across the plains at 75 mph. We found snow for a few miles, but mostly the roads were clear. I transferred from car to bus at Kansas City and finally got into Mid-MO in great pain. Somewhere along the way my prostate gland went on strike. Early the next morning I ended up in the emergency room in the county hospital in Booneville where I received the wonderful treatment of a nurse installing a urinary catheter. I said to the nurse as he worked, “I can’t really say that feels good, but I’m really looking forward to the relief I will get.”

Laughingly he replied, “Yeah, and it should bring your blood pressure down too.”

“Merry Christmas to us all,” I said smiling as the pressure on my abdomen abated, the pain in my lower back disappeared, and my sense of calm was restored.

One unexpected result of becoming a patient was that I spent more time at the farm near Boonville than I had anticipated. There my son’s family home with its great porch, sunny rooms, and radiating wood stoves warmed me as did the love its residents expressed towards me. All these things helped me cope with the limitations. The attention of grandkids and their friends, the noisy environment with constant laughter, even the purrs of cats and licks of dogs helped me heal. My ex-wife and our daughter and her family came out on Christmas Eve and stayed over. We played cards, made music, talked every topic under the sun (that refused the shine), and ate a wonderful assortment of cookies, cakes, meats, salads, and soups, all washed down with great-tasting coffees and teas and for me glass after glass of water.

We celebrated the holiday well although the weather was cold. Ice took three days to melt off trees and grasses. Lots of wood was burned to keep us warm. Of course that meant many hours of splitting logs and the like. I caught up on my grandkids’ lives in school and work and performances. Of course, the adults had even more projects underway—one beginning an FM radio station, another going to college, another teaching writing, another designing costumes for dramas, and so on.

The next few days in Jefferson City with my ex-wife, our daughter, and her kids, gave me an even clearer view of their lives. Of course, we played cards and otherwise entertained one another. With one grandson I had a Japanese meal at a Korean-owned restaurant named I Love Sushi while we listened to and watched K-Pop videos. That seemed grandly intercultural. Finally I had to say goodbye. Myrna and Desma drove me to Kansas City to meet Tony. We crossed the plains all in a hurry and got into Denver late at night.

The next morning I went to see my doctor. He had a nurse remove the catheter—an act of relief that lasted for a very few hours. Around midnight on New Years Eve I got to know more nice medical people went at another emergency room where I got a new gizmo. What a celebration!

I’ve been having many thoughts related to the conditions of bladder, prostate, and kidneys, the treatments I’ve received, the decisions of others, the reactions of even others that mightily irked me, and the many sympathetically helpful responses I have received. I also have come to a greater understanding of myself, my needs in illness, my setting aside many personal needs to make things better for others. These are mostly old themes revisited in a new way. What I find most important is the level of frailty I experienced, the slowness of my movements, the difficulty to get simple things accomplished, and the general frustration at limitation.

The present truth of my Missouri odyssey surely lies in the stark contrast of personal frailty with familial perseverance. I am wiser about myself. I am much more appreciative of my family’s loving support. I find those themes enough.

So in 2014 my internal editor says:

“Odyssey on, Mr. Hoyle, 

but the next time you tell this story, 

make it more interesting.”

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.

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.