The last time I saw my sister Reci was after I’d climbed Bear Butte to pray for, and honor, her son who’d passed the year before. I can see the date on a calendar. I can look in my journals, on my blog, and see the date, wonder at its precise numbers marking some past instance, so insignificant. What was significant was that she was smiling. I had met her and her roommate grocery shopping after coming down, then followed them home to unload. She was smiling when I drove off, her cupboards were full, her son was remembered.
Last year I went back in the middle of winter, before the virus hit. Last year I went back to climb the hill, pray, and send my sister off. But I was old. It’s a thirteen-hundred-mile drive through mountains. I know it like the back of my hand, but last year the drive left me feeling mortal. My doctor scolded me after, said at near sixty, I was too old to let blizzards chase me through the mountains. But I’d had big Yeti coolers full of salmon for the tribe and a promise to keep. My little Subaru could crawl through anything, but it was the ice that left me frayed by the time I landed in the Black Hills. I rested for a day before I went out to Bear Butte. I only went part way up in the snow, stopped before the rock fall, sat and prayed with the wind. Good enough. I knew the cold of the wind further up could kill. I’d been here before.
When I was in first grade, Reci and I had skipped school together. I don’t remember what we did all day, I do know we saw the world. And being the smart little kids we were, we waited near the bushes in the late afternoon to see when the stream of our classmates would return down the street, heading home. Our plan was too let them pass, then head home ourselves. But Reci couldn’t keep herself from waving to friends as they walked by, so other not-so-much friends spied us too. We were busted.
In years to come, we would run away from home together, live on the streets. Grown up, we’d sit around wood pits, passing fatties and getting drunk with bikers. Do too much seemed to be our way. But college extricated me, not her. After raising a son, she went to prison on drug charges. After losing our mother, I started praying on Bear Butte.
We were a family of 9 kids, three fathers, a fire starter of a mother who would be a tribal judge on the Pine Ridge reservation, take her family to the Twin Cities to do nonprofit work, and then bring us middle children home to the Salish sea in the seventies. This is home to me. That road through the mountains, back to the Black Hills and the reservation, is my red road. Coming back to the coast, it’s a multi-striped highway, reminding me of my white blood, carrying me to the sea and the city here on Puget Sound.
After I started going to Bear Butte to pray and climb, I started going up Mount Si here in the Cascade foothills, outside of North Bend. It is only a short drive East of Seattle, but thousands of feet up. I laugh. We call these foothills. There’s a big rock up there called the haystack. It adds a couple hundred more perilous scrambling feet. I’ve sat at various elevations on the side of that rock many times, knee throbbing, knowing it wouldn’t be safe to keep going. You judge more keenly when the air is all around you, and the unforgiving surface underneath falls away to nothing too quickly.
In Missouri, my nephew Robert pulled his motorcycle out on to a highway, his girlfriend on the seat behind him. Something blinked in the universe, and a semi erased them.
Reci was on the phone. I could hear her labored breathing even before she spoke.
“He’s gone”. Then she broke down.
I didn’t have to ask who. In the weeks following, I’d told her I would carry tobacco up for him.
Sometimes the wind on top of Bear Butte wants to tear me away. Even now, I can feel it separating the whiteness in me from the part that remains for tribe and family. I can feel myself telling it “I’m here, not giving up”’, that these ones I love are here too. And it isn’t until those times, when I get to the top, that it lets me rest.
There can be ice on those last few hundreds of feet. Ice on the trail, perched on the long ascent of a grade that might not kill with the fall, but would break a bone, leave you stranded in the cold. Ice caked over snow on the last steps, so there is more of a type of snowy ice fall in front you.
I’ve pushed through too much, I know. It always seemed something inside of me was pushing me through, something outside pulling me on. It seemed like our childhood lives were surrounded by peril, all we could do was run. But sometimes you have to stop. Sometimes you have to turn around, or turn aside. The spirits demand it. The danger demands it. The air all around you at heights forces a hard judgment. I trust it as much as I trust my inner motivations.
Bear Butte is a many days trip for me. I go up in late winter, early spring, to avoid the summer motorcycle rallies. Their noise, and the smell of exhaust rolling around the town of Sturgis, all the way up to the turn off to Bear Butte, destroys my quiet mind. It takes away the grounded and chill coolness I feel driving towards the park, and the buffalo there. It reminds me of our younger adult selves, still lost, only feeling at home for a moment. Greasy jeans, crime and smoke only felt like home. I’ve clawed through it, but even in these later years, free and away, it isn’t those summer climbs that I remember.
One year the snow was heavy on the mountain. I parked at the lower lot and trudged through the snow to the upper parking and trail head. The snow was crusted on the early trail through the first thicket festooned with colorful tobacco ties. Everything was quiet. I felt grateful for a mighty tribe of prayerful ancestors. Further on, where the cutbacks started, the mountain emerged against a dome of blue. I could feel sky like a weight on my back.
The wind was slight mid-climb, unlike I expected higher up. I was able to follow the trail quite a distance. Finally, I came to a point where the snow was too deep to keep moving safely so I stopped, sat on a log looking out towards the distant horizon and meditated. I could feel the cold of my breath going in and out, see it too. Everything was quiet. I remember thinking about our people who had walked on—too many.
After a few minutes, I was deep in a revery of cold.
A sudden noise near and behind, padded foot falls rushing down the slope, caused me to jump. I started up, instinctively stopped myself from jumping off the trail into air, and spun around ready, but there was nothing there. Shaken, I wondered at my own mind, and if the mountain wanted me to leave. So, I brushed myself off and turned to go. As I did, I heard a sound almost like music on the air rolling down the mountainside. It was a sound of geese. I looked up and saw the first point of their overlong and jagged V pattern, breaking and spreading in fractal patterns across my vision.
There were so many, they filled up the sky. Their flight took long moments as the first flew past and the trailing edges followed. All the while, the sound of their song was growing and echoing off the sides of the drawback and the surrounding sheltering mountain sides. The resonating music grew until I could feel the vibrations in my body. I’d never felt anything like it before. I stood still, wondering how long that moment could last.
If I had not gone at all, I would never have experienced that. If I had pushed through snow and danger until I was up on an exposed ridge, straining against the grade and slope, I would not have been in that resonating hollow. Sometimes, whether reaching some goal, or having to turn back, I am right where I need to be. The mountain finally gets through to me with the only language it knows. It’s the only language that provides a bridge—one that I won’t fall off of–back to us. And those lines of sisters and nephews, brothers, mothers, cousins, grand, and great grand relations stretch back across a sky of time to bring a resonance to my soul that I could never ask for. I must only stand and listen, rapt at their song and obedient to their call.
