A tall, serious man started talking to me in Lakota. He shifted to Spanish and back to Sioux, as if he were giving me the secret of the universe. Tekuskanskan! I frowned and he repeated himself. “That is the wind behind the wind. This bridge you are making^ We call it Tekuskanskan. It is hard to translate, but you will see where it carries you. We say, ‘to the place behind the place.”’ Then he smiled a large, gentle, toothy grin, picked up a little child, and walked away. The next day, Greg and I stopped where the Madison, Gallatin and Jefferson rivers convene to form the Missouri. We made a ceremony out of a watertight in the burning heat. As we imagined the river’s history, an enormous recreational vehicle pulled alongside. A tall, heavy-set man stepped out and squinted at us. He jerked his thumb at the mural and signs on our truck. “You gentlemen taking that all the way?” “Yup!” we said proudly. I was fearful that this might be the first negative contact of the trip. The man grunted and pulled himself down the bank to shake our hands. “I just wanted to make sure you hear me saying thank you! Those folks down there need us Americans bringing some peace that way for a change.” He struggled back up the bank and drove away. We stood in the water, speechless. 7. THENOSEOF THEBEAST An Anatomy Lesson July 21-23 A fter a long, wild sweep of the plains * * and the abrupt mountain edges, built-up Colorado was a shock. Boulder was an arrogant and self-amused California suburb. The sister-city people seemed weary. Loading the several hundred boxes while standing on burning asphalt was not conducive to communication. I asked a volunteer if an evening activity was planned for us. “We’re tired out. We threw an event last month and nobody showed up. We’ve been at this a long time. We raise money for Witness for Peace people to go down. We’ve built a day-care center in Jalapa. We’ve put time and money into the health clinic. It’s hard to give support to a city under siege from your own government.” She sighed and moved deeper into the shade. Speaking in Colorado Springs’ Acacia Park we had our first contact with true hostility. The Catholic Worker activists call this town, built around the Air Force Academy, ‘the nose of the beast,’because so much of the policy they are opposing is formed and carried out there. Trim, pig-shaved men with deep tans and mirror sunglasses circled the park cursing us, “Don’t come back from that commie country if you make it down!" More and more angry Corvettes drove around the park. The initial energy that had charged my days had faded. The fevers which had heralded my last cancer surgery were coming on with my exhaustion. Leaning against an elm tree, I pulled on the red thread for the first time. An exMaryknoll priest stepped up to where I was trembling. “You look like you need a place to rest!” As a linguist and community development worker in Guatemala, he had seen things too awful to recount. Somehow he had retained his essential innocence. Leaving the priesthood, Stephen Weil married and moved to the nose of the beast with his family, to fight against fighting. He was still almost numb with the pain of his Guatemalan experiences. His house, hauled up on a slag heap outside town, had been an abandoned hulk. The family was living on donations, food from the soup kitchen he managed, and part-time jobs. Tax protesters with no television nor other middle-class appurtenances, their lives stood outside the tenuous prosperity we had shared with kind hosts in Cheyenne and Casper. Exhausted, I took a few aspirin and lay down. When I awakened, I was strangely recharged, drinking tea with these people living on the edge of America. I told them I felt guilty taking their food. “Oh, food is never a problem here. It’s how you eat it that’s the problem. Just the opposite of the Mayans. Don’t ever refuse food you get offered in Nicaragua. Being able to share is considered an honor.” He smiled at his children, the wan look of a man struggling to sustain his ideals, like the desperate look of a deer trying to swim between islands. 8. TIERRAENCANTADA July 24-25 rom the top of Raton Pass, New Mexico did look somewhat enchanted. The broad plain below us was fogged in so only isolated volcano cones lifted above the smoke. Greg was savoring every minute, knowing his leg of the trip was almost over. 56 strong, they rode ever southward. In Santa Fe, we stayed overnight with some old poet friends from my days with the National Indian Youth Council. Larry and Harold Littlebird, from Santo Domingo and Laguna Pueblos, were pleased to see me looking healthier than reported. We had performed many feats of poetry over the last fifteen years. The New Mexico Arts Commission had sent us, Laughing Bear and Littlebird, out to the Pueblos and the Navajo Rez, to read and sing our stuff. Harold asked, “What do you intend to do with the Bridge?” “What we used to do in the old days.” “Make a little magic. Like the time at Jemez when the teachers just walked out of the classes and turned the school over to us.” “I can see the headlines now. Savage Poets Take Over Curriculum. Children Found Singing in Hills." Harold sent a few of his works with me. We come, we go We leave behind song and flowers We are the songs, we are the flowers. In Albuquerque, Bonny Christina Celine interviewed us for a local radio station. As I was explaining the Bridge, she turned off her recorder, drove home, and came back with a sheaf of poems, including a description of her feelings driving home after hearing Russell Means speak: New Mexico is mine alone tonight, wild and mysterious as God. Nothing sleeps out here, even after sundown. The hills, deserts I sense but cannot see, come alive in the dark. Greg departed for the north, leaving me with a poem about his grandfather’s death. Bob Zimmerman, Lutheran minister from Port Ludlow, flew in to join me as co-driver. Bob brought with him the complete works of WH. Auden and a book on avoiding co-dependency. We headed for Texas early the next morning, with Bob Holmes urging us onward, unrelenting. 9. CROWNOFTHORNS The Cowboy Poetry Connection July 26-27 / R n am A s m ey ar i a ll n o d w hi e s fa s m ta i y ly e . d A w n it o h ld B co u w ck boy, in a wheelchair after a roping accident on the llano, he’s a father figure in the burgeoning Cowboy Poetry circuit. Buck worked as a campaign coordinator and writer for Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. As a local troublemaker, Buck attracted several young people to his house that evening to discuss community peace activities. Again, the numbers were small but the people were determined. On his rain-soaked veranda, we traded such songs as his “She Was My Bed of Roses, I Was Her Crown of Thorns.” I came back with “You Stole My Wife, You Horsethief!” With his easy Texas drawl, Buck read us his cowboy ANTHEM, “dedicated to that other horseman, Yewjeen O’Naigin, out of Poosh-kin.” . At the cowboy trucker breakfast his wife conducted, Buck turned to me, after furiously typing ANTHEM to send to Nicaragua. “You know, them old boys loved the earth just like the Indians. And they was sorry for what they done, the best of 'em. Here, pilgrim, you show this one to the comandantes. ” . . . And as I fly out on the morning, before the birds, before the dawn, I’ll be this poem, I’ll be this song. My heart will beat the world a warning— Those horsemen will ride all with me, and we’ll be good, and we’ll be free. I was moved by his attention to the Bridge. “1kinda like the idea that poets got something to provide.” 10. SITTINGINLIMBO Many Rivers to Cross July 28-31 1 1 7 e joined the 54 other Pastors for ™ Peace at the Shrine of the Virgin of San Juan del Valle. I was appointed to the Group Reflection Planning Team. Lucius Walker, the founder of Pastors for Peace, joined Sister Anna Marie Broxton, Kent Harrop and Father Dick Sinner. In our first session, we tried to pump Lucius for his goals. He smiled quietly and waited for us to process our reflections. Kent, a Methodist minister from Ohio, wanted his daily morning prayer needs satisfied. Anna Marie, a school administrator and modern nun, wanted focussing and guided imaging of peace, along with communal breathing. We put her in charge. Father Dick, a Chaucerian priest from North Dakota, wanted to lead group campfire singalongs, 3,000 miles of “Kumbayah.”As a composer, 1wanted to unleash imaginations and build energy with every mile we covered. Each of us took a different day to order the spirit of the truckers. Lucius seemed pleased with our compromise. As a Brooklyn Baptist minister and social-change artist, he had developed IFCO (the Interfaith Foundation for Community Organization) in the '60s as a catalyst for social transformation through interfaith action. 1later learned some of my old Indian Movement friends had been active on his board. A gentleeyed man with a large head and an interesting combination of ease and tension, he holds his anger deep inside, under a layer of religious principles. Four days of preparation were perhaps too few. Many on the trip were dealing with years of anger at the Reagan-Bush administrations’ treatment of the Nicaraguans. Most were good church people. Few had been to Latin America and only a handful of us spoke Spanish. As we struggled to get ready, people were beginning to grumble and look for problems. “If we were in the Army, we’d take a month preparing for this thing, not a few days,” said Jim Barnett, Viet Nam veteran, quality-control officer and expreacher. He stared at me. I smiled back. “We are asking for trouble, just going down on a wing and a prayer,” he continued, “like most Christian groups do.” He frowned at me. “What are you grinning for?” My conscious decision was to make all my actions part of a poem. I was going to be cheerfully creative; to express my own enthusiasm, damn the desperation. Jim had been in the old Civil Rights movement in North Carolina. He had seen a thousand dreams smashed, and when he got going, he sounded like he’d taken vocal lessons from Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. “I tell you this. Nothing matters to me but getting my truck to my town in Nicaragua. And you ain’t helpin’none. Before this trip is over, I’m gonna see that smile wiped off your face. You’re too damn cheerful as it is.” “It’s how I am,” I answered. “Well, just keep your foolishness toned down. I’m on serious business.” Watching all the serious travelers working on their trucks, greasing the axle zeks and putting in fan belts, I felt like the grasshopper among the ants. I went looking for other grasshoppers. Erl Kimmich was a rugged, radical New York streetpoet and truck mechanic, traveling with the beautiful grease-covered Christine Devine. They were involved with guerilla art theater and together we designed a play. Nobody came to see our Lost Convoyista, so Erl read a few of his works: I have strong responses, a red mark slashed across the snow. When I sleep, I guess I have hairy dreams. We finally lined the trucks up to cross the border. Groups had come down the West Coast, picking up the Phoenix contingent, our section from Montana, a group from Minnesota, another group from Boston. There were New Yorkers and groups from Cleveland and Chicago. People had joined in North and South Carolina. Our purple Pastors for Peace T-shirts made us look very unified and impressive when the television crews came to cover our press conference. Lucius talked about how the idea was born. “My daughter and Iwere riding in a boat from Bluefields when the Contras opened fire on us. We were farmers and Clinton St. Dec. '89-Jan. ’90 23
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