The Shadow Catcher

I pull up behind the CHP cruiser, block the hole with my car as he drives away, turn the engine off, roll down all the windows. High desert air. Another roadside attraction. Sheep like to light out for the territory, too, I guess. You build a potential escapee every minute that you build a fence. And a fence might make good neighbors but not when it separates two parts of a self. When I first started charting the parts of Curtis that he had left behind, I figured that the panorama he saw from the train ride he had made out West with his father was what had set him off in search of American Indians. I thought it was wide open space that he had longed to light out to. That what he was afraid of, his Aunt Sally, was the cramped intimacy of family. The intimacy of love. He had fallen in love — or seemed to have, at least — with Clara, slightly younger though better educated than he. She was the perfect helpmate for him — frugal, where he was extravagant; level-headed, where he was too quick to pursue his fantasies — but as soon as their first child was born, Edward had lit out. He was gone two or three days every week; then a whole week at a time; then for a month. Soon he was out in the territory, among the tribes, for six or seven months.

I had always thought that what he was running from was the imprisonment of domestic life; from Clara, from their children. Then I took that trip to Pine Ridge and ended up spending the night in Wall, South Dakota, an outpost of ANGLO cowboyism outside the rez where tourists to the Dakota Badlands and Pine Ridge stop to spend the night, eat beef, booze up and buy the fake Sioux tat that passes as real Indian SOUVENIRS. Curtis is an industry in a place like Wall — I had known that postcards of his photographs were big out West but it hadn’t sunk in until I saw a six-foot rotating display in Wall Drug of his reproductions made small. It was the same day I’d had my little crise with the land and the sky and the agoraphobia so I was still feeling the effects of panorama. Panorama was all I could think about: the immensity out there: the uncompromising BIGNESS. And then I came face to face with a display of Edward S. Curtis postcards and all I could think was Oswald, Oswald, Oswald, Oswald—one after another—Oswald, Oswald, the disgusting Lee Harvey slang attribution for a HEADSHOT.

All the Curtis postcards were HEADSHOTS.

A whole rack of them.

And I realized: you don’t go into the West to make HEADSHOTS.

You go into the West the way Ansel Adams did — the way Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins did: for The Big Picture.

For the Views.

The pan-o-rama.

But there they were, lined up on a metal rack in Wall, South Dakota: face after face after face of intimacy—and oh, my Aunt Sally: who are we kidding when we think we can run?

You can flip through the entire Curtis oeuvre—all his photographs from Arizona, the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and my beloved California — more than 50,000 photographs in all, and you’ll find that less than half of them were photographed outside.

We reveal ourselves in everything we do. We reveal ourselves even when we think we’re hiding, even when we think we’ve got the wagon streamlined, when we think we’ve left the stuff we need to get away from far behind us.

It’s a tricky business, this invention of identity.

So I make the call:

“Hello, good evening, it’s Marianne Wiggins calling again.”

“—oh, hello, Miss Wiggins, what can we do for you?”

“I just wanted to let you know I decided to make the trip, maybe I can help you figure out who this guy is, posing as my father. But it looks like I won’t get to Vegas ’til the middle of the night.”

“Go to Emergency. I’m on ’til six. Have them call me and I’ll come and get you.”

And then, even though I know the man cannot be my father I ask, “How’s he doing?”

“Still unconscious. They don’t think he’ll linger long. You know, his age. The Indian’s still with him.”

“…the—??”

“—man who called the ambulance. Looks to be some kind of Indian. Truth is, we can’t get him to leave…”

Out in the dark, sheep gather like reflecting pools of moonlight. I realize I’m wearing sandals in snake country and climb up on my car roof. I lie down and gaze up at the stars. I know this man is not my father. Just like I know HAN JIN containers come all the way from China even though my sensory logic tells me the world is only what I see. Maybe that is ultimately the reason anyone lights out. To learn how big the big world is.

To find stories.