The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  * * *

  The road to nowhere actually led into somewhere: the Nebraska Sandhills, one of the lonesomest regions in the country. An expanse of virgin mixed-grass prairie and cactus-specked dunes more than two-thirds the size of Maine, with fewer people than you’d find on a single block in New York City, it’s no place for the agoraphobic. I’d been to the Sandhills before, in 1997, the year of the Hale-Bopp comet, and remembered standing in a lunar silence outside the town of Valentine, the vagabond comet a brilliant streak among stars so numerous there seemed as much white as black in the night sky.

  The hand of man lay lightly on the Sandhills. Plows had never scarred them—the arid soil guaranteed that a farm would fail—and the threat of erosion checked cattlemen from overgrazing. A reincarnated Francis Parkman could have stood in those spaces and, if he were out of sight of the road and its file of telephone poles, gazed at a landscape almost unchanged from the one he’d seen more than a century and a half ago. Yellow-head crows clung to barbed-wire fences. A lone buck antelope stood atop a hill, as if posing for a calendar photograph. In the hollow below, a pond glittered, fed by springs bubbling up from the Ogallala aquifer, an underground sea bigger than Lake Huron. The scenery was grand, but living in the Sandhills wasn’t easy. I recalled another picture from my first trip: a ranch family driving their cattle to new pasture, the father riding point, sons on the flank, hunched in their saddles against snow flurries whipped by a raw March wind, their mother at drag in a dirt-caked pickup truck. If I’d had any romantic illusions about the cowboy life, they would have dissolved right then.

  At thirty-five miles an hour, it took about five seconds to drive through Arthur, shut down for the holiday. Beyond, white birds rose off a pond, flew to another, and settled. Snow geese?

  “Pelicans!” Leslie said as we drew closer.

  Pelicans, fifteen hundred miles from the nearest ocean? I thought we were hallucinating. The sighting was confirmed at That Stop gas station and café outside Hyannis by the woman who ran the place. She was seconded by Troy Debbs, a broad-chested rancher who looked as if he’d been a steer wrestler in his younger days. He was eating a Father’s Day dinner with his wife and two sons.

  “Migrate here every year from the Pacific,” Troy said. “I don’t know why they come here. Never seen them breeding, never seen any young pelicans. We get seagulls, too. We love the seagulls. They eat the grasshoppers.”

  He seemed up on local lore, so I asked how the town got to be named Hyannis. Troy gave a brief nod that said he’d heard the question before.

  “There’s only two Hyannises in the country: this one and the one back East where the Kennedys lived. When the Burlington Northern was being built in the early nineteen hundreds, most of the section hands came from New England. You go up to Route Two—the railroad runs along it—you’ll see a lot of the towns are named after the towns they came from.”

  In Cherry County, bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together, almost as vacant as the Mohave Desert—one person per square mile—there was nothing but static on the radio, and our cell phones were as useless as semaphores. We were, for the moment anyway, disconnected from the world, and I was happy. Disconnected.

  * * *

  Most state boundaries are arbitrary, but the landscape told us when we’d entered South Dakota. North of the line, the heave and toss of the Sandhills leveled off into a broad, gently rolling plateau, and the virgin grasslands became hay meadows, mown in stripes of green and brown.

  We made our way to the Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota (the tribes we call Sioux call themselves Lakota, meaning “friend” or “ally”) and scene of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and the militant uprising in 1973. Looking for the massacre site, we got marooned on a muddy road that dead-ended in a church parking lot near Wounded Knee Creek. A skinny Lakota man with crooked teeth materialized from out of nowhere and asked if we were lost. After introducing himself as John High Hawk and showing us where we could turn truck and trailer around without running into a ditch, he presented a business card: “Wounded Knee Lakota Youth Organization,” it read. “Promoting wellness through a healthy environment. Dakota High Hawk, Executive Director.” John motioned toward an SUV parked nearby, with a young man inside. That was Dakota, his son. John produced a plastic bag containing dream catchers—rings of fine beadwork hanging from rawhide loops. I sensed a sales pitch coming and wasn’t disappointed. Proceeds from the sale of dream catchers helped fund his son’s organization, which ran programs to keep Lakota kids off drugs and booze. The asking price was exorbitant. I bargained without much seriousness and managed to chip off a buck or two before succumbing. There were two reasons for this capitulation: I was eager to pull the rig out of the muddy cul-de-sac and find a campground before nightfall; and it seemed fitting, sort of evening things out, for a white guy to buy a trinket from an Indian. I hung the green-and-white dream catcher from the rearview mirror. John didn’t say what dreams it would catch, but he offered to show us around the reservation the next day, promising a tour of “poverty areas.”

  21.

  We camped under willows beside the White River. The nearby town of Interior consisted of a gas station, a grocery store, two bars, and sixty-seven inhabitants. The Horseshoe Bar issued a mandate on its highway sign: BIKERS MUST STOP. Harleys parked outside indicated that the summons had been obeyed. A poster on the grocery’s front door advertised the upcoming Interior Frontier Days rodeo, noting that it was voted the second-best rodeo in the United States in 1920. It’s rare to see second best as a boast, rarer if the honor was conferred ninety years ago. The campground restaurant dished out fry bread tacos for dinner. Fry bread—flat dough deep fried in oil or lard and leavened with yeast—is a staple in Indian country. It’s very bad for you and therefore very good to eat. I ordered a plateful, adding a new item to my diet to horrify Leslie.

  The fry bread taco had been invented, said Steve, our chef, by a Lakota entrepreneur, Ansel Woodenknife. He’d owned a restaurant serving his mother’s recipe, got discovered, appeared on the Food Channel, franchised his specialty, and then retired.

  “You should meet him. He’s quite a guy.”

  I found Woodenknife’s house in the morning, next door to the Wooden Knife Café at a crossroad in Interior. His wife, Teresa, answered the door, then summoned him from inside. Out came a broadly built, broad-faced man with cropped black hair and black-rimmed glasses. I explained what I was up to and told him I was curious about his journey from the reservation to the Food Channel. For some reason, I expected him to be a little guarded, but he was warm and engaging and responded enthusiastically. He, too, was amazed by the size and diversity of the country and that it all somehow held together.

  “It’s because of change,” he said. “This is the only country where everything changes all the time. People come here expecting change, and if they’re going to survive, if they’re going to be successful, they’ve got to learn to adapt to change, to different people from different races. I’d like to talk to you more about this stuff.”

  But he couldn’t at the moment; he was a volunteer firefighter and was studying for an EMT test. Maybe he’d drop by our trailer that night the or next. As I was to learn, Ansel Woodenknife had a PhD in adaptation, and he hadn’t acquired it in a classroom.

  * * *

  A steady rain scotched our plans to hike in the Badlands. Leslie attempted to e-mail her office, perfectly routine in civilization but in those parts an adventure. She drove up a slippery mud road, where, a campground brochure promised, she would be sure to get a signal. But the gaily colored wheel on her laptop spun as Fred’s wheels had in the mud. She parked in the middle of the road and with the wipers and flashers on held the connection device out the window in the rain, waiting for its little green 4G light to glow. The little blue wireless light flickered, telling her that it was trying. But not hard enough. After half an hour, she gave up, muttering that Verizon’s vaunted coverage was like a cheese grater. />
  We headed south, returning to the Pine Ridge Reservation to try again to find the spot where the last battle of the Indian wars was fought. I use the word battle loosely; most of the twenty-five cavalry troopers killed at Wounded Knee were victims of friendly fire; more than half the 350 Lakota involved, including old men, women, and children, were slaughtered in a maelstrom of bullets and shrapnel.

  One of the largest Indian reservations in the United States (almost twice the size of Delaware), Pine Ridge is also one of the poorest. The “poverty areas” John High Hawk mentioned covered nearly all of it, and it wasn’t romantic poverty, no, it was dire, here-to-stay poverty. Tumbledown houses and battered double-wides, each with its collection of rusting automobiles, cast-off appliances, and bits of scrap that didn’t look as if they had ever served a useful purpose, reeled by like footage from a grim documentary. Tiny settlements—Potato Creek, Sharps Corner, Kyle—clung to a precarious existence out on the grasslands. The few bright spots, a well-maintained home here or there, or the groomed campus of the Oglala Lakota College, did more to accentuate than to relieve the surrounding wretchedness. The weather added to the gloom, likewise the radio, mixing traditional Lakota chants with country-and-western tunes—the empty bar at 2 a.m. variety, Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams lamenting cheatin’ hearts and errant men seeking solace in a whiskey glass. Most bizarre: Williams’s fifties-era rendition of “Kaw-Liga,” about a cigar-store Indian who never gets a kiss from a wooden Indian maid. To hear that on a reservation radio station was like watching an Amos ’n’ Andy rerun on the Black Entertainment Television Network. When Paul Revere and the Raiders began singing “Cherokee Nation,” Leslie rolled her eyes.

  Looking for an uplift, we stopped off at the chamber of commerce in Kyle. Inside, the varnished floor gleamed like a yacht’s deck, the mounted heads of bison, elk, and antelope protruded from pine-paneled walls above paintings by Native American artists, and leather easy chairs only needed to be occupied by well-heeled sportsmen to complete the picture of a high-end hunting lodge.

  Twenty-year-old Cole Hunter, seated behind a computer screen, manned the office with his younger sister, Kylie.

  Cole, slim and tall, was the talkative one, good-humored and smart. He had to be. His task was to plant seeds of commerce in uncongenial soil. He told me that 80 percent of what money came into the reservation left it within twenty-four hours, because there was almost nowhere to spend it. A handful of groceries and shops and little else.

  “We’ve got a shop local campaign, to promote local businesses,” he said in the musical accents of the Upper Midwest. “We partner with the Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore to get people to visit the reservation. It’s not scary, it’s a third world country, yes, it is, but there’s good people and bad people, and the majority of us aren’t bad, if you just approach us nicely.”

  “Some people don’t?”

  “Some people come here and ask: ‘Where are your teepees at? Where are your villages?’”

  “They’re being smart alecks?”

  “No. They seriously want to know where are our teepees and our horses so we can chase buffalo. And we tell them, you know, we’re a developed nation.”

  “Are these Americans?”

  Cole nodded. “Most of the educated people come from overseas, and they’re more interested in how we live today. Like the other day, I had a guy come in here from London. He was making a film about modern Native American life.”

  It will be a pretty bleak film, I thought after a few more minutes of conversation. Cole told us that the unemployment rate on Pine Ridge was 80 percent.

  “That’s stunning,” I said. “The rate in the Great Depression was only twenty-five percent, and that was considered a catastrophe.”

  “Yeah, and that’s just one of the factors. Teen suicide is a crisis…”

  “And the drop-out rate,” Kylie interjected in a shy undertone.

  “Heart disease, diabetes, cancer,” her brother went on. “Our life expectancy is, for men, fifty-five, and I think it’s sixty, sixty-four for women.”

  Kylie, again in her quiet voice, said that only some of her friends—those who hadn’t dropped out—went on to college, and hardly any of them made new lives for themselves off the reservation.

  “Most of them come back.”

  “It’s the reason I didn’t go away to college,” said Cole. “Because I didn’t want to be away from my family. We live just down the hill from our grandmother, and our aunt is just down the road. On the reservation, we’re so close together, in this one little area. Here, the family unit is so important.”

  Was it fair to say that family bonds tied young Lakotas to the reservation, but at the same time it did not offer them any opportunities?

  “Yeah. It’s a love-hate thing.”

  We’d seen cattle on the drive through the reservation. Was there any agricultural work to do?

  Cole shook his head. Most of the big ranches were owned by whites. “Some of them married into the tribe,” he said. “Or they found some other way to get in, but they found a way.”

  Whites, however, offered one vital service to the Lakota.

  “Before diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alcoholism is the big killer on the reservation. Anything that can go wrong with alcohol is on this reservation.”

  “Even though it’s dry,” said Kylie.

  “Like I said,” Cole added, “eighty percent of the money that comes in goes out.”

  And much of it flows into Whiteclay, Nebraska, only a mile from the Pine Ridge border. The town exists solely to peddle alcohol to Indians. Stateline Liquors and three other establishments sell four million cans of beer a year. Their customers aren’t from town; twenty people live in White Clay, twenty-eight thousand “on the rez.”

  “White businessmen saw an opportunity, and they took it,” Cole said. “That’s corporate America, that’s capitalism. I mean, what’re you gonna do?”

  There probably were a host of reasons why Cole had not succumbed to drink, or to more direct forms of self-destruction. His wry sense of humor had to be one of them. One anecdote he recounted was of the time, in high school, when he went to Washington, D.C., with a program to acquaint minority students with the workings of government.

  “It was a big culture shock for me. I’d seen only people like us, and there were Mexicans, blacks, all kinds of people. I thought, We’re all from the same country? It was so funny, because we were all in this big room and they still singled us out.” He imitated the high-pitched voice of the host. “‘We have some special guests with us today, from South Dakota! From a Native American charter school in South Dakota!’ We had to stand up, and I said [to myself], Oh, dear Lord, in a room of minorities, we’re a minority.”

  * * *

  On the Big Foot Highway, newly paved with federal stimulus dollars, we rolled south toward Wounded Knee. Ahead, a cavalcade of cars and tribal police cars, lights flashing, cruised slowly in the right-hand lane. SACRED HOOP RUNNERS: SLOW DOWN! read a message painted across the cargo door window of an SUV bringing up the rear. Leslie let up on the gas, and we passed a line of teenage Lakota jogging at the roadside, chests thrust out, determined looks on their faces, batons flying eagle feathers in their hands. Spectators cheered the runners on. I signaled Leslie to stop, lowered the window, and asked an older man wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat if this was a reservation marathon. No, he said. It was a relay race to instill spiritual power in Lakota youth, so they would live sober lives according to the Lakota Way. Each band of runners covered two or three miles, then passed its batons to another band. The course started in the Black Hills, as holy to the tribe as the temple wall is to Jews, passed through parts of Wyoming and Montana, and ended where it began, completing a five-hundred-mile circle around what had been, long ago, the heart of Lakota lands. The sacred hoop envisioned by Black Elk, the great shaman.

  We heard more about the dysfunctions of reservation life, and lost traditions, at the Wounded K
nee cemetery, where a stone obelisk marked the mass grave in which Chief Big Foot and 152 other victims of the massacre were tossed on December 29, 1890. Individual graves surrounded the monument, including those of Lost Bird Woman, a survivor who died in 1919, and Lawrence LaMont, a Vietnam veteran killed by a federal marshal’s bullet during the standoff in 1973.1 Over some graves, strips of red, white, yellow, and black cloth tied to stakes snapped in the wind.

  “Those represent the four sacred directions, a color for each,” said a man wearing a windbreaker and a Los Angeles Angels baseball cap. His face looked as hard, pockmarked, and brown as a walnut; black, mournful eyes flanked a large, blunt nose. “Red is East, stands for dawn, new beginnings. South is yellow—that’s youth and strength. Black is West, for inner reflection. White is North, that’s where we turn for wisdom from the grandfathers.”

  His sepulchral voice fit the setting.

  “And you are…?”

  “Carl Broken Leg.” A rough hand shot out of his jacket pocket, then he jerked his head toward a cluster of frame houses and trailers—the village of Wounded Knee. “I’m from right over there.”

  While Leslie read the grave markers, Carl attached himself to me and expounded on the massacre. I was familiar with its history, but it seemed the polite thing to listen, and so I did. We were standing, said Carl, on one of the hills from which the Seventh Cavalry had fired on Big Foot’s band of Minneconjou Lakota, camped down there—he pointed toward Wounded Knee Creek, and I realized that was where Leslie and I were stranded the day before. With clouds scudding in the wind and sunlight and shadow dancing over a landscape much the same as it had been on that bitterly cold day in 1890, I could almost see the bodies ripped by the troopers’ carbines and Hotchkiss guns.2