3--The Black Hills

Chapter 3
The Black Hills: War Years
Baker, 1944-46

About 2 billion years ago, western South Dakota formed the western edge of the continent that later became North America. Erosion there built up a layer of sandstone and shale, miles thick. About 1.6 billion years ago, a massive bubble of molten rock rose from the earth’s mantle. As it cooled it formed granite, either coarse-grained or smooth, depending on how fast it cooled. This mass of granite became the “crystalline core” of the Black Hills, an ideal medium for being blasted with dynamite into large figures with symbolic meaning. Rising, the molten rock turned the sandstone into quartazite and the shale into schist, which fractures easily into layers. Hundreds of millions of years of erosion washed the overlying rock out into the surrounding area. Only 70 million years ago, the Hills were further uplifted as part of the formation of the Rocky Mountains.

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The Black Hills were the site of my first vacation and my second memory of mountains as a brooding presence, after The Crazies. During the trip, my parents asked me to take a picture of them in the wide lawn in front of the cabins people stayed in before the word “motel” was even coined, or at least before I had heard it. I was supposed to look down into a thick glass on the top of the box and then push a lever down or up. Confused, I pushed it up and down, creating a double exposure—two images of my family standing slightly offset from each other. That photo is in the family files still.

Vacation was a foreign word to me when I first heard it after the war ended and we could get tires again, along with all the sugar we wanted. My parents had a hard time explaining to me that a vacation was a time when you “just did what you wanted,” perhaps because that was what I did most of the time anyway, excepting only the brief distraction of school. We lived then in Baker, only a few miles from the South Dakota border at the edge of the badlands that had been formed, at least in part, from the soil washed down from the Black Hills in two separate erosions 40 million years apart.

MOUNT RUSHMORE

The iconic faces of Mt. Rushmore themselves were only a blur of grey looming between the black pines. It was my first experience of being a tourist, milling along prescribed paths with dozens of strangers, looking at what I was expected to look at. Later I learned how the faces were carved by Gutzton Borglum, a Dane born in Idaho. He was classically trained in America and Europe, inspired by Rodin’s work, and skilled in getting commissions to carve political figures. His 1907 bust of Lincoln still sits in the capitol rotunda. He evidently could be difficult: Borglum’s earlier efforts in large-scale carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia bogged down in political confusion until he finally burned his plans and fled. His plan for putting transparent windows in to the Statue of Liberty’s torch allowed water into the structure. The renovation, complete in 1986, restored the torch to its original waterproof state. Obviously, the Rushmore sculpture went better, though he quarreled with the administrator of the project, John Borland, who at one point graciously resigned to allow the project to go forward. Borglum worked on mostly in the summers for 14 years, from 1927 until his death in 1941. His son put on some finishing touches but wisely left the design unfinished so that the faces emerge from rough-cut rock.

About the time I was staring up at the grey faces, another sculptor was starting to work just a few miles away on a much larger sculpture, of Crazy Horse, a man so shy and private that he never let himself be photographed, who would certainly be appalled by this misguided effort of the Boston-born sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked as an apprentice to Gutzton Borglum at Rushmore in the summer of 1939. Korczak came from a different mold than Borglum. Where Borglum was born to wealth and studied at the best schools. Korczak was orphaned at the age of one, raised by a series of foster parents, put himself through a technical school and worked first as a pattern-maker in a shipyard. Gradually though, he began to carve, first in wood and then in stone and to get commissions, including one to carve Noah Webster. He came to the Black Hills at the age of 40 and bought land with his own money. He also married and had ten children, who have carried on his work since he died in 1982.

He chose Crazy Horse because he was drawn to the warrior’s courage and eloquence in the face of a long series of betrayals, including the breach of the treaty of 1868. When Crazy Horse was asked at the end of his short life (he died 1877 at the age of 35), “Where are your lands now?” he pointed to the horizon and said “My lands are where my dead are buried.” That pointing gesture is what Corczak had in mind when he conceived the statue of Crazy Horse, mounted on horseback with his left arm extended. The two defacements of two mountains are study in contrasts—a kind of double exposure: Borglum the establishment sculptor using government money to carve the faces of successful white leaders; Korszak was the outsider, orphaned, raised by foster parents, self-taught, refusing government money, living in a tent at the foot of his mountain, carving the figure of a doomed and betrayed warrior who died at 35. Rushmore stands at least complete. Crazy Horse seems hopelessly bogged down with only the face and the top of the arm recognizable.

Together the two monuments the whole enterprise seem a study in irony. First, in exchange for the rest of the Western Plains, the White culture cedes to the Indian this sacred ground, and less than ten years later, takes it back for its gold. Then it carves into the sacred mountains themselves figures of white political heroes, none of whom (with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt) understood the Indian as anything but a problem to be solved. Finally, the Indians themselves to undertake a kind of competition by carving away another mountain, but sacrificing efficiency to integrity to such an extent that it may never be complete.

BAKER

Baker was my father’s first assignment after he left the sheep business in Crow Agency to take a job with the Soil Conservation Service. Family lore offers two reasons why he made this career move about 1943, when he was 40 years old: my mother had become unexpectedly pregnant with my brother, and the laws governing tribal lands changed so that he and his partner, Harvey Court, could no longer lease land cheaply. He evidently got good enough at what he did to became a kind of trouble-shooter, moving from town to town every 3-5 years as he was needed to pacify districts where inept managers had alienated the farmers. Going to work for the SCS delayed for 20 years his dream of owning his own spread, but it is hard to see how he could have done that in 1943 anyway, in the middle of the war.

At the edge of Baker there was a lake where I took some swimming lessons but did not learn to swim. In the center of town there was a natural depression covered, in some seasons, with white alkali that was common in the region. To get from one side of town to the other, we could cut across this little valley, walking on paths cut through the alkali. One side of the depression was bridged over with long boardwalk. Hobos slept under it, and when we were feeling brave, we would creep under there and peer at the remains of their campfires.

The boardwalk went by a little library where I discovered a series of books about a little band of boys about my age. I think maybe they called themselves Boy Scouts but they never seemed to go to meetings. Instead they spent their time exploring hills and ruins near where they lived. Each of the boys had a special calling. One carried a coil of rope that often saved the day when they were in trouble. Another carried a carved walking stick. My friends and I read these books with a fierce intensity and then went out on Saturdays to enact our versions of their gallant adventures.

RELIGIOUS STIRRINGS

Baker was also the scene of my first religious experience, though not of my first experience with religion. My friends and I were at a vacation Bible school, probably run by a non-denominational fundamentalist group. The only activity I remember was memorizing the names of the books of the Bible in order. But toward the end of the time, a kindly lady took each of us aside and had us kneel between the pews with our arms on the seat. Then she prayed that Jesus would enter my heart, and she asked me to pray, which I did. I suppose it could have been frightening or intimidating or even traumatic, but instead it seemed simply interesting—another odd thing adults do.

But then an even more curious thing happened. I went home and looked at a littered card table in my room, and I tidied it up. Furthermore, I had a clear sense that I was doing this because I was in some way transformed and that I would never again descend below a certain level of untidiness. And I never did. It was an odd gift for the Spirit to give and an odd way to give it, but it seems consistent with the rest of my experience of faith—that it always comes with a sense of crossing line. It is not an irrevocable crossing—one can imagine stepping back across the other way. But either way, it is a decisive step, with immense consequences that are felt immediately in the bones and behind the eyes. Faith is not—ultimately--the logical extension of any conceivable chain of thought. It is a thing that happens—with due regard to the etymology of the that word—at some sort of odd interface of chance and destiny.

THE TRACKS

We lived in three houses in Baker. The first one I liked the best and resented that we ever had to move. It was “across the tracks,” but just barely, so the train became part of our lives, as it has been at Crow. Some trains went through but others stopped to take on water or ice or coal, We could hear the comforting steam whistles at night, and when the trains stopped when we were near the track, we could stand and watch the three huge steel pushrods move in interlocking arcs, one end connected to the pistons that moved back and forth and the other end connected off-center to wheels to drive them round and round, gathering speed in time to the chuffs of steam escaping from underneath. Frequently we would have to wait for the train to pass when were going downtown. I found if I focused my eyes on a point on the other side of the train for long enough, I could begin to feel that the train was standing still and I was moving. I can still do this, but it becomes harder with time. In those days the boxcar doors were left open and hobos sat in them swinging their legs. They would sometimes come to the back door of our house, asking for food, and my mother would fix them a sandwich while I watched warily from beyond the door of the kitchen.

As they had been at Crow, the tracks became our playground. We would put pennies or nickels on the tracks and watch in joyful terror as the train roared by. Then we would scamper out to collect the gracefully bent ovals and bury them, because we could not take them home and take the chance that our parents might learn we had been playing by the tracks. We would sit on the hot rails and look down them to the point where they came together. They were our connection—in some ways our only connection—to a larger world. The only place I knew for sure that existed in that larger world was Chicago, because my mother took us there every few years to see her parents. We went there at least once during the war years, when the train was still a luxurious way to travel. The silverware in the dining car was heavy, like wrenches. The pewter cream and sugar containers gleamed on the spotless white table cloths. I think only once we had a sleeper, but riding coach was fine. Every other pair of seats could be reversed to produce a little nest of the four seats where we could sit, watching the telephone poles move by. They moved slowly as you looked down the tracks but then became a blur if you picked one and kept your eye on it.

MAKING FOSSILS

For one year in Baker, my uncle Edwin (my mother’s only brother and also my Godfather) had sent to me a little pasteboard box with the materials for simple experiments which taught simple lessons. It was a wonderful gift and my first taste of science. I must have read the lesson on fossils carelessly, but I was nevertheless so transfixed that I buried bits of corncob and broken pottery and then dug them up every few days to see if they had turned to stone yet.

The effort seems pathetic, but what I was trying to do then was what all of us try to us—grasp the implications of time, somehow wedge ourselves into its ebb and flow, using it to make permanent some trivial shards of life as it slips through our fingers. “Vaster than empires and more slow,” says Andrew Marvel, speaking of the leisurely pace of courtship that he and his lover do not have. But even a good empire will last you scarcely 400 years, not enough time to alter the visible topography that we know from research has passed through unspeakably violent changes since stellar dust coalesced to form the earth.

THE WAR

Those were the war years too. We had a victory garden, and the Morse code “v for victory (dot dot dot dash) was grafittied on the walls of the playground shelters that smelt of feces. Union Pacific troop trains went through Baker, and when they stopped, we put on our best street-urchin look so the soldiers would throw us chocolate bars from the windows, for chocolate was otherwise unobtainable. Other trains had tanks or army trucks strapped down to flat-bed cars and we stared at them solemnly. My father’s crippled leg kept him out of the war, and none of my close friends had fathers overseas, but many windows had pictures in the of uniformed sons or fathers, and sometimes caskets would be unloaded from the trains.

Death and suffering were all around us, but I was sealed away inside the bubble of youth and family. A wonderful Woody Allen movie, Radio Days, perfectly captures the feeling of oblivious innocence in an ominous atmosphere. In the film, the little Jewish boys in Brooklyn live their lives, resisting the teaching of the rabbis or trying to catch a glimpse through a window of a girl in underwear. But at the very end, we see an empty street, wind-blown and wet with rain. The street runs down to the sea, and as the movie ends, a German periscope surfaces for just a moment. The time for innocence is over. The enemy is at the gates.

My parents tried to catch my attention with the first test of the atom bomb in 1945. “They split the atom,” they solemnly said as we sat around the dining room table, and they went to explain how everything is made of atoms. I remember staring hard at an chintz couch we had, convinced that if I looked hard enough, I could see the atoms in it. I was highly resentful when my mother called in from my play to listen to the radio account of the signing of the Japanese surrender on the Battleship Missouri, but I was fascinated by the rowdy celebration on Baker’s main street.

I wrote a short story about that event and the the Baker years. I called it “War Effort.” In it I imagine a disturbing confrontation between my mother and one of the hobos she helped, on the very day the War with Japan ended. In the story, the mother, threatened by the hobo, kills him with a kitchen knife, and the boy finally feels the sense of personal danger he had only heard people talk about. After the mess is cleaned up, the boy, Nicholas, is allowed to go downtown to witness the celebration that accompanied Japan’s unconditional surrender. He sees mattresses being thrown out the second-story windows of the hotel. He sees his teacher with her arm around a man he did not know. It ends this way:

After while, Nicholas became very tired and wanted to sleep, but he could not. He asked his mother if they would able to get chocolate now and ice cream in cartons at the store. She said yes, and tires too so they could take a trip when his father came home.

He looked down the street where they drove slowly and saw how the road went on, just like the railroad tracks, past the elevator, past the city dump, past where Crazy Hong the Chinaman lived, to where he had never been. He said the words "surrender unconditionally" over and over to himself and then, dozing, he began to make a list of other words he liked: "security" and "war effort." Main Street became a path of words, broad at his feet, disappearing around a hill and then reappearing later on, narrower, bits of curve shining in the sun.

FRIENDS AND BROTHERS

In Baker, I developed my first fierce friendships. The fiercest was with Steve McClain, whose father ran the elevator near our first house, and who lived just down the block from our third. During those years, we were inseparable. We joined the Captain Marvel Club together and took turns posting a picture of our hero, whose eyes followed us around the room no matter where we went. We built club houses the way modern developers throw up suburbs. One of them was under the front stoop of our house. We lined it with cardboard from used it to plan our shop-lifting expeditions where one of us would distract the clerk while the other stuffed toys into the pockets of his winter coat. The treasures sat in the clubhouse radiating guilt like hot coals until we sneaked them back into the store and went on our way, reformed. Later I heard that Steve had been killed in the crash of his light plane.

Anolther friend was Jimmy Pat Nikkum, who, I used to joke, tried to kill me with an axe. That happened where my father kept his horses at the edge of town. I had very little to do with them, but one Saturday in mid-winter, he took me along to water and feed them. I was allowed to use an axe, a privilege, and the horses waited patiently while I chipped away until the water bubbled up through a small hole, forming a pool filled with ice chips. Then I would enlarge the hole and step back so the horses could approach warily and then lower their muzzles carefully down and slurp noisily. Once My friend, Jimmy Pat Nikkum came along to help. We were taking turns, but when my turn came, he refused to give up the axe, so I stepped in behind him just as he swung. The axe made a cut in my face, just below the eye. Jimmy screamed, “I’ll go get a band-aid,” and took off running toward town. I made my way to the barn where My father examined the wound, which was superficial, though it left a scar that is still barely visible. On the way home, we stopped by Jimmy Pat’s house to reassure him that I was all right.

In Baker, too, my brother, Bill, was born, in 1944. I remember my mother saying that the pregnancy was unplanned. She never said or implied that was unwelcome, though, only that the need for more security encouraged him to take a job with the Soil Conservation Service when he left the sheep business. In Bill’s mind “unplanned” took on the colors of “unwanted,” and this cast a shadow over his life. He said once that my father would have seized this chance to get his own spread and that the pregnancy deferred that dream for another 20 years. I never saw any evidence of this, but of course, I never looked. I remember only that I was fascinated by this infinitely soft, infinitely small creature that came home from the hospital. I was seven when he was born, and already absorbed in a life of my own, so I do not remember any feelings of jealousy or displacement. Later on, though, I found being a big brother a chore and conspired with my friends to rebuff his attempts to be part of our circle. We would do cruel things like challenge him in a contest over who could hold their breath the longest and then taunt him when he lost. I have apologized and he has accepted, but I have much to answer for. I was grateful when Bill and I wound up, quite accidentally, in North Dakota when our children were small, and I had a chance to establish a better relationship with him and especially with his three sons.

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

I only went back to Baker once more, in the summer of 2002, as part of a pilgrimage to each of the five places I had lived in Montana. In some ways, was the most poignant stop on that trip, because it was the only place I had not been back to at least once. I drove up and down the main street, which had become reversed end-for-end from my memory but was otherwise quite recognizable. All the distances had shrunk, of course, so it was like staring into a doll-house model of a huge mansion where I had once lived. The vast alkali slump had been filled in and turned out to be only a city block. The board walk that crossed one end of it was now a cement sidewalk and the library, which had even seemed tiny at the time, was now the Boy Scout building. The City Park had been renamed for my friend, Steve McClain. There was a nice little museum not far from where our third house had been. I found a city phone book from 1940’s, and there, sure enough, was my father’s name. From the curator, I got the name of Steve McClain’s sisters and from them I got some details about his crash. His body had never been found.

I looked east from Baker and thought about the last time I saw these carved faces. I was with my own children, in the summer of 1980. This was the first long trip with my sons after I separated from their mother. My oldest boy would have been 14 and the youngest 11, about my age when I saw the great stone faces for the first time. We had planned to camp, but rain drove us into a cheap motel so we went out to see the faces the next morning after the mist cleared away. As I looked up at the faces, I realized I was seeing them twice, slightly offset, like the double exposure I had accidentally created with my parents’ Brownie camera 25 years before.

In one image, I saw the faces for the first time, as I had seen them when I was eleven. They had been monumental, brooding artificial presences above the dark trees, but more important, they were something My parents took me to see, a family event. They were a primarily a symbol of the security I felt in the presence of grown-ups, people who could make all the complex arrangements necessary to get me here, who knew about vacations and rationing, and buying tires, and renting cabins, who were members of a larger group of grown-ups who could figure out how to blast a mountain range into the shape of famous men, who were somehow the epitome of what grown-ups were supposed to become or could become.

But in a second image, I saw the faces as my parents might have seen them, standing beside their children. The cycle had come round and brought me to the top. But with what a difference. I was a single parent, though already contemplating a second marriage. My own children were facing an uncertain future living with their mother during the year and me in the summer. It was hard for me to believe that they could look up at those faces with the same deep wonder that I had felt.