The Shadow Catcher

Not that a frontier mentality makes a better corps of citizens — even today there are places out here that don’t have to fake, as Vegas does, that they’ve never seen the likes of Aunt Sally. There are places so removed from any civilizing germ that when you enter them for the first time you lose your own perspective, drop, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a history so much deeper than your own that your existence is too meager to make any mark in the historical record. The first time I drove out here on my own the land began to suck me under as if it were quicksand and the sky came down and whomped me. I’d come over to Canada from London on a job and I got the bright idea to drive south from Regina, Saskatchewan, to the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, because Curtis had been there and because I needed to see an American Indian reservation for myself if I was going to write about him and the people that he photographed. On a map the drive looks like a simple thing to do because you can run your finger down the page from Regina in Saskatchewan, through Montana, straight through North and most of South Dakota to Pine Ridge on a perfect north/south plumb line. But on any given map of land the one thing you don’t see is sky. I started out from Regina as the sky was lightening in pre-dawn and in about a half an hour I had left the civilizing confines of that western Canadian railroad town and was out on open land, looking south at a flat unbroken foreground toward unseen Montana just beyond the straight line of the horizon. The sky was crystal, clean, a deceptive non-menacing blue but it was crowding in, encroaching everywhere, flooding on the land and toward my throat, level to my neck, and if I couldn’t keep my head beneath it I would cut loose from the steering wheel and spin untethered into obliterating space. All around me there was nothing but uninterrupted space for as far as I could see, this single thread of road tethering me to what I knew, to where I’d been, where I was going. I pulled off the road to catch my breath and calm my heart from racing. I was the only human being on the scene. The only being, period. Except for a sky so vigilant and present it assumed all Being all itself, capital be. I got out and walked around the car and opened the passenger-side door and sat down in the door well and put my head between my knees. I am fairly robust, pride myself in my adaptability to foreign places, but for the first time in my life place was threatening to make me sick. Wind was an element of sky as it tore over the earth, no impediment to slow it down, to stand against its shapelessness and say THIS IS YOUR LIMIT. This is where you stop; and start. This is what you are. Be it for good or evil we are referential creatures, we need defining points, civilizing points of reference, and existence without antecedents panics us. Panicked me, at least. I realized I was having an unprecedented attack — a kind of agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. I stood up and kicked around the grass beside the road, tried to find an insect or any living critter, any living thing, but there was nothing out there. Nothing. Not even birdsong. Not even a single bird to follow in the sky. I tried taking full deep breaths, then clambered up the trunk and stood on the roof of the car. What was it Archimedes boasted—? Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth. If I was higher, I could see a longer distance, I figured. See a human, maybe. See a barn. See something. Something to enforce the myth of I, the myth of who I thought I was that day, the myth of day, itself; the recurring human myth of time. If you’re going to light out, there has to be a something you are lighting from. From’s a given; from’s a certain. To is out there, in our minds, uncertain. No one can promise us a to. No one ever gives a certain future to us in our hands, that we can hold. If they allege that they can guarantee the future — if we believe they can — they are charlatans and we are party to their lies. And when you stand there in a place as immense as our own continental west with not another creature in your sight for miles and miles and miles around, you realize you are standing in the jaws of your existence. That the journey that you make through time — where you light out to — is the only meaning you can claim. Our lives are our individual claims on the combined experience — our lives are not our names or our professions — and somewhere there’s a big rig driver who may or may not have ever told the story of how he was hauling ass one morning years ago south out of Canada toward Montana when out in the middle of nowhere there was this woman standing on the rooftop of her car waving a giant crazy Hello!! at him as he barreled by, so he opened up the air horn and boomed her one, and how she hung back but kept behind him for at least an hour, ’til he turned off on Route 2 toward the West. By then, the geology had changed, Montana’s seismology had kicked in, there were other intermittent passing vehicles and train tracks beside the road to ease my panic, but what I remember most about that big rig coming up behind me is that I hadn’t heard it coming, what with all the wind, until it was on top of me and how I turned around and gave the driver a thumbs-up to let him know I didn’t need assistance and how he set that air horn off out there in the middle of the continent.