Ron and I were sitting at the round table at the corner of their kitchen and living room, having our second cups of coffee. I had set up my camp. Ron was describing the sweat lodge ceremony and beginning to explain a dangerous spirit he had warned me about when we first spoke on the phone a week earlier. About the time Ron was beginning to explain, we were interrupted by a light knock-knock on the metal storm door. The door opened, and a man’s sizable brown hand eased the main door open. I followed the hand to the weathered work coat sleeve and found the face of an old man wearing a small ponytail beneath a black baseball cap. Ernest Red Elk, Ron’s brother-in-law. Like Ron, Ernest had a broad, brown face naturally inclined to smile and shared the same twinkle in his dark eyes.
Before Ernest arrived, Ron had told me that his friend is an elder Oglala Lakota, about seventy years old, a grandson of Joe Chipps, direct descendants of Horn Chipps, a medicine man who advised and sweated with Crazy Horse. Ron told me that Ernest himself was not a medicine man. He told me the last of the Oglala medicine men had disgraced himself with a woman, and there were no more medicine men among the Oglala. He told me Ernest would lead the sweat ceremony because of his family’s connection with Crazy Horse.
*****
Ernest is a big, tall, athletic, and angly man. Broad shoulders, wearing a tan working jacket with a brown corduroy collar and dark blue jeans. He stoops to walk through the door of Ron’s house, but gets around well for a man who is going on seventy and is as tall as he is.
Since our first meeting, I have learned that Ernest was an excellent basketball player in his day – second in the state in scoring his senior year at Crazy Horse High School in Wanblee.
I stand to introduce myself, and we shake hands. Ernest’s eyes smile into mine with the gleam of a father who has not seen you in a while. He bows slightly, as do I. I learned the pleasure of this humbling gesture in South Korea – put all western pretense aside for the moment of meeting – and it has stuck with me. Where did the Lakota’s bow come from? Ernest sits down with Ron and me, and Nancy pours him a cup of coffee. Ernest stands, bows, and doffs his black baseball hat to Nancy with a respectful hesitation, then puts it back on and settles the back of the hat on the small bun of hair he wears. His hair is mainly black, only a spangling of white.
Ernest says little to me, but his countenance puts me at ease. He speaks English sparingly and has trouble hearing. He and Ron ham it up a bit. I have trouble following the conversation, which is mainly in Lakota. I learn little from Ernest about the sweat lodge ceremony he will lead.
After a brief conversation, Ron leads us outside, turns left, and we walk through the well-kept grass west along a white metal building. The grounds are relatively tidy, especially as we approach the place of the sweat ceremony. You can find it on Google Earth if you know where to look.
There is the bare wooden frame of the lodge. Like most Lakota sweat lodges I have seen, this lodge was framed by thin (about one by two-inch) strips of ashwood bowed and interlaced in a conical formation – not like a pointed tipi, more the shape of an igloo. The frame is skeletal. Nothing covers it. At one point, Ron explains the components of the frame structure – everything in counts of twelve.
As we near the ash frame of the sweat lodge, still ambling west from Ron’s house, we come upon a large pit – not quite as deep as the lodge is tall but similarly proportioned – dug out of the ground, upside-down igloo. The dirt from the pit is piled around its southwest side. This embankment shields the fire from winds on one side and abates the drift of ashes on the other. There is an old wooden bench beside the lodge. We will sit there occasionally as we prepare for the ceremony. Just beyond the lodge is a pile of canvas, which would eventually cover the frame.
The ashwood frame sprawls on the bare earth like a giant white spider on pointed toes. Twenty-four large stones are piled in the center of the earth underneath the wooden frame. A ring of bricks encircles the stones. Ron tells me they are lava stones that eventually will heat the small lodge. I would become familiar with each stone.
*****
Earlier, between cups of coffee, with direction from Ron, I had set up camp about thirty yards north of the sweat lodge. I pitched my one-body tent near the large arched trunk of a tree – my guess is willow or ash – that had never gotten far off the ground and undoubtedly sagged with the help of gravity as it aged. Others had camped there, Ron told me. There was not a scrap of bark on the white tree trunk, the stub of its largest remaining branch, elbowed and nearly touching the ground like a giant handless arm.
Later, long after the sweat ceremony and dinner and conversation and falling asleep, I awoke in the night to the blue moonlight mirroring onto the arched tree. The arm, perhaps only a thumb of some behemoth appeared as one of those strangely unearthly things you see only when you wake from deep slumber. God-like, something Michelangelo or Thomas Hart Benton might conjure.
*****
Three of Ernest’s nephews arrive not long after their uncle. There are no formal introductions. I meet each man as we go about and do things. I help as I can without getting in the way. We have a chance to get to know one another a little. All of Ernest’s nephews are in their thirties or forties. None are brothers. All are cousins. The Lakota keep track of cousins better than we do. Their names are Junior, Lorenzo, and Tyson. I will tell you more about them later.
At the bottom of the fire pit, Ernest and two of his nephews wordlessly assemble a large, tipi-shaped stack of firewood. They work together as naturally as the winds whisper between us. The thick branches of what appears to be cottonwood or ash, two to three inches in diameter, are cut about four feet long. This will be a big fucking fire when it is going.
Becoming part of something, I help the men move the heavy lava rocks from the fire ring in the center of the earth underneath the sweat lodge frame. With no words and few signals, we form a chain. I lift one stone at a time from the fire ring. The ring is about two feet in diameter, encircled by red bricks. I don’t take the time to count the bricks. These are heavy rocks. From my new vantage point, I see that each brick is angled into the earth floor and buried halfway. Each of the twenty-four lava stones piled within the circle are about the size of a junior football. I lift them one at a time, handing off to Lorenzo, who, like his uncle, is tall and angly. Lorenzo walks each rock down the slope of the fire pit and places it in his uncle Ernest’s hands. The cold stones have been smoothed by the heat of past fires and handling. Each is hefty, a burden to be borne one at a time with care and two hands. You feel the weight of something sacred in your palms. A pearl belched from the belly of the earth. How did it come into my possession if but for a passing moment? A gemstone from some godlike guttural utterance. I am unduly blessed.
After the fire is started, we have time to wait for the stones to heat. Childlike, I watch the fire roar and cast its smoke to the modest winds rushing through the valley. I think of my sister and times at the beach, roasting marshmallows over bonfires full of life and fury. If you zoom out again on Google Earth, you find we are near the remnants of a small river valley, the dark parasitical foliage still leaching to its banks. Zooming out further, you find a maze of similar valleys and canyons scattered like the branches of the trees that mark them. Trying to understand the logic of the works of hydrology and erosion, you discover, is like counting stars.
Ernest sits alone, silently on the bench, his long fingers creating prayer ties – little cotton pouches each stuffed with a pinch of tobacco and tied together on a string like a ribbon. There are four colors: red, yellow, black, and white. Eventually, he ties the ribbons to the framework of the lodge. They will become part of its interior. Each prayer tie - each pouch - represents a prayer.
We wait for the fire to heat the stones. The other men and I talk on occasion. Nancy brings us coffee in a pot with a set of nice cups. We sip our coffee and drink our water and electrolyte-laden liquids. We wander around alone on others. I walk back up the road Ron and I had driven down, trying to put my mind in the right place for the experience, finding it comfortably clear of concern. The world seems behind me.
Later, between Christmas and New Year's Eve, when I was praying for my dying sister to go gently into the night and sleep in heavenly peace, I found out the significance of each of the four colors of the prayer ties, which happens to be associated with the principle directions on the European compass. Red is south, associated with the heart, the blood of living beings, and the emotions. Yellow, east, sunrise, new beginnings, warmth of day. Black: west, signifying wisdom gained through struggles and challenges. White north symbolizes purity, peace, and spiritual enlightenment.
As the coolness of the burnt orange autumn evening settles into the valley, the near-matching glow of the lava rocks can now be seen in the fire. The late summer winds have waned, and the sun has begun its plunge into the earth. All of us help lay out six blankets inside the frame of the lodge, surrounding the fire pit. We smooth the blankets on the dirt.. Two nephews take the sheets of dark green canvas piled up near the lodge and wrap them around the frame. Ernest speaks, summoning us to prepare for the ceremony.
1 comment
Love this!