During the re-construction of Wyoming’s Route 14A, highway engineers received onthe-
job climbing instruction from the National Outdoor Leadership School to help them remain safe while they cut the road through the harsh cliffs of the Bighorn Mountains.

The ancient mountain range, a massive arch of Precambrian granite, rises 13,000 feet above surrounding plains of sagebrush and grama and buffalo grass. To the west,
the Bighorn River basin stretches flat and tan, bounded in the distance by the volcanic
Absarokas. To the east, steep slopes cut with cliffs and canyons descend into Powder
River country, a greener plain rolling toward a horizon hiding North Dakota’s Black Hills.

The eight cylinders powering my 1972 Econoline roared through the damp air as I coasted at dawn down this eastern face in 2nd gear, engine compression slowing my descent. Before me, 14A slashed acute, north/south angles down the steep slope. A rising August sun flashed flat golden beams over my white knuckles, blinding me each time the camper rotated eastward around a switchback.

The Bighorns boast the oldest granite found on the face of the earth, formed of magma that cooled deep within the lithosphere more than 2 billion years ago, then was forced upward sometime during the Mesozoic. The rising bedrock had thrust overlying sedimentary rock layers skyward, then split and bent them back upon themselves so that the oldest lay broken below the granite peaks and the youngest crumbled around their bases.

Some inspired geologist had prevailed upon the state highway commission to mark this inverted geologic timeline. As my camper struggled downward, the morning sun caught the reflective brown signs labeling the rock layers; Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and Mississippian road cuts rolled past my open windows at a cautious 30 miles per hour.

The Ordovician layer, an ocean floor laid down 440 to 500 million years ago, contains the oldest vertebrate fossils known, jawless, armored fishes whose genetic sequences may still lie coded, in part, in our chromosomes.

• • •

The tiny town of Dayton, Wyo., lies waiting at the bottom of this long descent. I stopped at its diner to eat breakfast, to let the engine cool and to ask directions to the day’s destination: a nearby canyon on the Tongue River. The Tongue is a tributary of the Powder. It draws strength from melting snow and rain captured by headwaters high in the Bighorns east through the center of town.

Poking around, I found a potholed access road and followed the river upstream, returning toward the mountains up a deepening valley. The camper’s aluminum siding scraped against thick, dusty bushes as I cranked the loose wheel to avoid the tirepuncturing edges of broken cobbles.

The canyon rose above my camper, watching as I rolled west. Layered rust and sienna cliffs rose on both sides of the river. Small bushes struggled to grip the motte-like scree below the steep walls. Stone barbicans with juniper finials guarded the access road.

I pulled the camper under some shade and bathed in the river to wash off the night’s drive, then climbed into my bunk above the cab and took a nap.

• • •

I woke at noon to the strange song of a foreign language and stepped outside. A crumpled, two-door Oldsmobile was parked upstream, a small group of American Indians lounging around it.

There were four. A slender, middle-aged woman sitting on the dented hood wore glasses, dirty lenses in thick plastic frames. Her shoulders hunched as she stared at the river. The tips of her ears poked through the bangs of her dull hair. A wiry teenage boy stood beside her. His eyes darted around the canyon, dark and birdlike. Three cans of Pabst dangled from plastic rings twined in his fingers.

Opposite from me a heavy shape sat in the passenger seat, a man I couldn’t see well. Only the top and back of his head and the thick meat of his shoulder showed around the reclining velour.

The fourth, and last, stood silent, apart from the others. He was huge, six-and-a-half feet of thick muscle with two black braids, a broken nose and no shirt. Horizontal Sun Dance scars slashed livid bars across his bulging pectoral muscles.

I must have been staring. He sauntered over, splashing Vodka from a plastic bottle of Stolichnaya into a 32-ounce gas station soda cup. The large red and white plastic
cup looked small in his massive hand.

“I’m a kindergarten teacher,” he said, flatly.

“I just got out of prison,” He looked at me, evaluating. “Got any food?” he asked.

I told him I was out and, afraid he might think I was lying, invited him into the camper to prove it, showing him its empty dust-covered cupboards. I pulled the peanut butter jar from under a pile of fly-fishing magazines on
the counter and offered him a scoop.

He looked disdainfully at my dirty spoon, then sat down on the camper’s pullout couch to sip his Stoli and gazed out the window, falling silent. Not knowing what else to do, I sat there with him. To kill the uneasy silence, I picked up a book and pretended to read, keeping watch out of the corner of my eye, but a few minutes later, when the woman and the skinny teenager came looking for their friend I abandoned the pretense, put the book down and we all sat in the camper together, staring at each other and out the door at the cliffs above.

They were Crow, from a reservation north of the Bighorns in Montana. I learned this from the boy, who talked a lot. He asked me for food and for money and for marijuana, but I had none, so he asked what I was reading, what it was about and if I was in college.

He had recently returned from Los Angeles and his gaze shifted between his two friends as he bragged of drugs and schools and jails. As the boy ran out of stories, quiet descended. Uncertainty and road dust settled through the tense air so that when the big warrior spoke up, breaking a thousandyard stare to point up at a large arch topping one of the canyon’s stone towers, I jumped.

“I brought my brother here to see that big hole,” he said. “Him,” he nodded with authority toward the Olds where the other Indian hadn’t moved. “Someday I will climb with him and sit with him up there and watch the sun rise.” As he spoke, I could see expectation lighting his battered face, perhaps from imagining the glory of climbing and conquering the arch-topped spire, then it passed and he fell silent again.

The woman watched him speak, then looked at the cliff where he pointed. A sad expression drew her forehead together and she spoke for the first time. “Why is it like this?” she asked, plaintively. When her mouth opened, I could see her tongue struggling in the gaps left by missing teeth. “This canyon…. “ She trailed off to gesture helplessly up at the sheared rock cliffs and asked me how I thought they had been created, as if my comments might help her work through their place in her modern life. We talked, and from our conversation I gathered the canyon had once been somehow sacred to her people. In her words I could feel the conflict, the rift between Crow culture and a Christianity that had forced its way into her life.

I wanted to tell her what I thought I knew, of the unity of man and nature through evolution, of the disconnect, the arrogance, generated by relying on the supernatural to explain creation, but sitting there watched by the man with those thick scars on his chest I felt shallow, lost in a tiny present.

The Sun Dance is an ancient plains tribe festival, held on the summer solstice, during which the bravest young men allow skewers of bone to be thrust through the skin of their chests, then tied to rawhide ropes hung over high tent poles. The ropes are drawn taught until these “dancers” lift from the ground, hanging in pain for days until the bone
skewers rip from their flesh. Their sacrifice is considered a great honor; their pain and release symbolize the cycle of life and death.

• • •

The three left eventually, their curiosity in the dirty white boy with his books satisfied. I had become accustomed to their presence by then, so when the big one’s brother stumbled to the door I was not, at first, as nervous. He was obviously younger, also tall, but not muscular, just padded with that sweaty fat that comes from drinking too much. His round scalp glistened underneath the inchlong black stubble of a ragged buzz cut.

Swaying in the doorway, both hands grasping the sills for balance, he blinked at
me through fumes rising from vomit stains on his shapeless gray shirt, then reached
down to the ground to pick up a large rock. He held it for a moment, weighing a granite
cobble broken from the exposed bedrock and rounded by floodwaters from the nearby
river, then handed it to me.

I took the rock, but not knowing what he wanted, dropped it. It bounced down the camper’s yellow linoleum steps to thunk into the sandy road at his feet. He watched dust puff from the impact, then picked it up again and thrust it back aggressively, with a drunk’s blind insistence. I shook my head, confused and growing uneasy.

Frustrated, he started to speak, then stopped and instead grabbed my wrist, this time placing the rock clumsily in my hand and curling my digits around it with his own sweating fingers. Then he leaned forward, bowing through the doorway. Turning his head sideways to blink up at me from his left eye, he spoke. “Crush my skull,” he said, pantomiming. His meaty fist thumped loosely against his scalp.

Blood rushed to my face and goose bumps sprouted along my scalp. There was a deadness in his gaze, a blank stare that made me think of crypts, of depthless holes, and I felt sick. I tossed the rock past him onto the road, and when he went after it, shut and locked the camper door, my hands shaking.

I saw him later through the window as he wobbled out of the nearby outhouse, a dark stain spreading from the crotch of his faded jeans, and I decided to leave early. Yet, as I started the camper, the woman walked over and leaned into my open window, then held out a handful of change.

“You have less than us,” she said. “Go buy some food.”

“You better take it, college boy,” the Sun Dance warrior called out from where he lay on the grass next to their car, staring up at the clouds. “She’ll be offended.”

• • •

We’re connected, the dead and the living.

Our sins and our victories form the earth’s uppermost crust, a sediment of lives that will someday be thrust upward, exposed like Ordovician sandstone. As that guarded canyon haunted those four Crow, our own crumbled remains will haunt our children. What lessons will they learn? The past is a fertile soil.

• • •

A few years after visiting the Bighorns, I found an arrowhead on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, near a Lake Superior beach.

A friend and I were returning from a late October exploration of the peninsula’s southern shoreline, taken in brightly colored kayaks rented from an outfitter in Copper Harbor. The last night out we had camped next to a fall that poured water golden with tannic decay down a stair of dark basalt directly into the lake. Blue and gold had mixed as the plunging river displaced the frigid waves.

The campsite, a carbonized swath of compact dirt, was well used, trampled but clean. Only a few small shards of broken glass glinted in the fire pit at its center. It was an ideal spot. Fine fishing by the falls, flat ground for the tent, low bushes blocking the wind.

Others before me thought so as well. That last morning, as I had walked a narrow, eroding path to the water to wash my pot after cooking, my eye somehow focused on a small white triangle jumbled in the dirt and I reached down to pick up a perfect late woodland point, meticulously chipped from quartzite, a metamorphic sandstone.

Later that evening we took off for home from Houghton Airport in my friend’s single engine plane, a red and white Piper Cherokee. A strong crosswind jostled our ascent as the falling sun shone underneath dropping cloud cover. The trees below had peaked during our trip and now, lit at a low angle, they flamed with color — orange, scarlet and yellow leaves catching the sunset and casting it upwards against and above the rising plane’s white wings. The painted light illuminated dark tendrils of water vapor swirling down from the low clouds. Looking down at the receding colors, I couldn’t stop thinking of that eroding beach campsite, and wondered if the one who had lost his point there once carried his own Sun Dance scars.

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Author’s note: Based on linguistic evidence, ethnohistorians believe a westward migration of Paleo-Indians from the upper Great Lakes region that occurred during the late woodland period (1200-800 B.C.) included the tribe that spawned the Crow.