By
David A. Willson
While the men were preparing to go into the sweat lodge, Carson, the sweat leader, played CDs of Indian ceremonial music, mostly chanting with some drumming and what sounded like occasional flute. The music set a tone while the rocks were heating in the fire and wood was added to the fire. Placement of the wood in the fire was discussed. Logs were not thrown on haphazardly. Carson was quietly in charge.
Each of the men pissed in the same corner of the compound before entering the sweat lodge. James raised an eyebrow at Simon, and Simon advised him that it was a good idea. During his first session James realized that something about the experience had the physiological effect of making him want to piss. He had drunk a lot of seltzer water before the ceremony. All the men had been drinking Gatoraid or a similar beverage. Alcohol was strictly forbidden.
Although tobacco was part of the ceremony in a way James didn't understand, a cigarette had been shredded and tobacco had been offered to the fire. The shredding of the tobacco had reminded him of an incident at the American River Ski Lodge when he'd been a Boy Scout. He and his fellow scouts had collected cigarette butts from the lodge ashtrays, had shredded them and were smoking the tobacco in a souvenir corncob pipe one of them had purchased in the souvenir shoppe. The scoutmaster (his own father) explained to them that T.B. would be the natural result of their escapade.
Pissing in the public pool in Yakima in those 1940s and 1950s summers had seemed as natural as urges get. Public gossip always traced cases of polio to that same pool. He wondered if the Indians had had time to draw any conclusions about the connections between sweat lodges and smallpox. But as Simon had said, they would probably have died anyway. He thought now that the history books in grade school mentioned the two things (sweat lodges and smallpox) in the same paragraph to dismiss Indian health practices and to shrug off responsibility for the White Man bringing disease to the Indians whether carelessly or on purpose in contaminated blankets. "If they had not been so dirty and primitive they'd have not died the way they did," he remembered a grade school teacher in Yakima saying, when a student had expressed sympathy for the Indians.
James remembered sweating for hours in the heat in Vietnam, the red laterite dust sticking to his chest and back as he labored to fill the green bags. He and his partner took turns. One would shovel with the entrenching tool and the other would hold the bag open. Either role produced serious lower back pain and sweat. Lots of sweat. There was no shade in the large red pit they worked in and water only on the hour. Who told him that Vietnam was jungle? What he would give for some jungle shade now. What horrible crime had he committed to end up as enslaved as William Holden in Bridge on the River Kwai? He had to keep reminding himself that it was his own Army not the VC or the Japs who were mistreating him. And he didn't sweat or tan as elegantly as Holden did either.
Carson poured a dipper of water on the hot rocks in the center of the sweat lodge which produced a cloud of sage and cedar scented steam which brought James back to the present, and he bent over to put his face in the mud of the floor so he could take even shallow breaths. He was almost thirty years removed from Vietnam. He was in a sweat lodge on the Nisqually Reservation with brother Vets. He hadn't filled a sandbag since the middle 60s, but the experience in Vietnam of thirty years ago still was with him every day.
It was hot here and he and his brothers were sweating and troubled by the things which trouble middle-aged men. But none of them wished themselves back in Vietnam or needed hand grenades thrown at them to help them focus. They had gotten on with their lives.
James was not sure if he was the only vet in the sweat lodge who had served his tour of duty without the experience of combat. Simon had been in the Navy. But who knows what that entailed? He could have been on a ship out in the Gulf or he could have served with a Marine unit. People who had not been to Vietnam still assumed jungle was a universal experience for Vietnam vets. You would think they had only seen Platoon and avoided Full Metal Jacket. Full Metal Jacket looked like the Vietnam he had known, urban and with a palm tree here and there. The palm trees in Full Metal Jacket looked made of paper mache and so had the palm trees outside the window of the office building where he had typed memos of obfuscation and evasion.
The doorkeeper put up the flaps and this round was over. Each man crawled out to his left, carefully avoiding putting a hand or foot on the hot rocks. Each cried out "All my relations," before exiting the lodge naked on hands and knees, each took a turn at the water faucet, pouring dippers of cold water over head, shoulders and the rest of their bodies. Carson stayed in the lodge longer than the rest of them.
When James had been encouraged to wet himself down from the water barrel before first entering the sweat lodge, the shock of the cold water on his warm body had caused him to involuntarily emit a cry. Simon discouraged such display. Upon reflection he realized that none of the Indians had cried out. Only the other white guy. Stoicism had nothing to do with it, he thought. This was not a stoic Big Chief Buffalo Nickel bunch at all. In fact, they were much more emotionally demonstrative than the Norwegian Lutheran family he'd grown up in. Occasionally an especially tasty piece of lutefisk would cause one of his great uncles to chortle with what passed for Lutheran glee at a festive family gathering. But that was a rare occurrence.
They sat on the wooden benches and breathed deeply. Danny George, the elder in the group, began reminiscing about the fishing rights clashes at Frank's Landing in the 1970s, being jailed and the treatment they received. Danny, in his 70s now, was lean and fit and healthy, but only a year or so ago he was unable to walk and was down to 115 pounds. He attributed his current good health to the sweats. He had been told that surgery was the only thing that would fix his dry swollen knees and make him ambulatory again.
Simon had told him the sweats worked for guilt and self-loathing as well as swollen knees. He hoped Simon was right. Simon should know. James had great faith in what Simon knew.
As Danny talked about the tribal clashes of the 70s, James thought about his accomplishments of that time. He had divorced his childhood sweetheart and got a job. He still had the job, and he was still divorced from Missy. He had only just finished a novel about that marriage. It had taken him almost thirty years to deal with that marriage in fiction. If he retired tomorrow and took the same amount of time to write about his job, he would be 82 and it would be the year 2025. He guessed he shouldn't wait so long. There was no guarantee he would live that long. He would have to live to be 68 just to see his daughter graduate from high school.
Wood smoke dominated his attempts to describe the sensual aspects of Carson's yard and the sweat experience. He had brought a load of seasoned alder to heat the rocks. Every stick and log was burned by the end of the four trips into the sweat lodge. The blend of old and new amused him. An electric fan on a long extension cord kept the fire burning hot. The volcanic stones had been brought from Yakima for this sacred purpose. Some stones are unfit. Simon and Carson told a funny story about the time one of the rocks exploded during their prayers. Scared them half to death in the hot steamy confines of the lodge. "Must've had a gas pocket in it," remembered Carson.
Carson had reminded him (and the rest of the men) during one session in the sweat lodge that secrets told in the lodge stayed in the lodge. He tried to think what comments had immediately preceded that cautionary remark. Certainly nothing he said. In his prayer, "Grandfather, grandmother, the Vietnam War left a dark spot on my soul. I did things I'm consumed with self-loathing for having done." He'd begun in his usual vague way and he'd never gotten more specific than that. What could he have talked about? Would they understand his feelings of guilt about killing more men with his letters and memos than any M-16 could ever have killed? Of course it was friendly fire. He was certain the enemy (whoever that was) had been beyond the reach of any of his stenographic talents. Would combat veterans dismiss guilt incurred through clerical effort? He doubted he could ever explain it to anyone.
Certainly Simon and Danny and Carson had been much more specific. Especially Carson. He envied Carson his ability to speak straight out about things which obviously tormented him and had made his life difficult. His wife had not understood when he had returned from Vietnam after narrowly escaping death from serious wounds, that he wanted a year or two to heal and take stock before getting a job and working the rest of his life.
James understood perfectly. He'd wanted to do the same thing when he had returned the Winter of 1967/68 and had not wanted to get a job. All he had wanted to do was work on his Vietnam War novel and wander late at night on foot up and down the streets of the University district. "Get a job or at least go to school," Missy had kept saying, so he had.
Carson had talked further of being of a chiefly lineage, of being in line to be chief of an Oregon tribe, but being at least temporarily precluded by politics from putting himself forward to be chosen. The current chief was not doing a good job, was neglecting his duties, had his mind on other things. This is frank, open stuff and hard to top, James thought. He was in line for nothing, was barely clinging to his job.
The sweat lodge experience was a truth serum situation in a way, but even naked physically, James still kept his emotions cloaked. He thought of Lame Deer's comment that if you enter the sweat lodge in shorts "people will think maybe you have something wrong with your dick. So don't be bashful." When he'd mentioned this to Simon, Simon had said, "No, when you're naked they'll know for sure something is wrong with your dick." And in being bashful about things of the spirit, they will know for sure something is wrong with James' soul as well.
But things kept happening that emphasized James' kinship with these sweat lodge brothers. He's more like them than not. When helicopters from nearby Ft. Lewis fly low over the little beehive shaped sweat house all the sweat brothers look up as one and then look at each other significantly. There was a time when Ft. Lewis land was Nisqually land. The two reservations are still interlinked. The road from the interstate keeps intersecting with Nisqually land and the government land.
During one break, maybe between sessions three and four, Carson commented on his fierce headache, on it being Sunday, on how tired he was and how the headache came from dealing with James' guilt. Danny said that in the old days gamblers and hunters took sweat baths the day before gambling or hunting. No sexual activity was allowed between the sweat and the event. If one gives in to one's fleshly desires the purification was invalid. Danny said in the old days murderers went through sweats for purification. This was different than the ceremonies for warriors who killed in war. James thought that what he needed was the murderer's sweat, not the warrior's sweat.
When James left the enclosure to help with the fire, he noticed again how bare the back of Carson's property was with the woods gone. It had all been cut for a subdivision which was soon going in. When he had lamented this, Simon had remarked that this area had all been open prairie before the advent of the White Man, that the White Man had planted the trees, that in the time of Leschi there weren't many trees. In the time of Leschi there had been no subdivisions either. Simon talked about the white man and small pox and the inadequacy of the sweat lodge to cure Native Americans of small pox and the mass graves that had been excavated years later, found by shoving long iron rods into the earth until they broke the bones of the dead Nisqually.
When James was back in the lodge for the final session of the four, Simon took large pour after large pour until James thought he'd faint. He pressed his nose close to the mud of the floor and clutched the hard willow of the skeleton of the lodge until Simon called that he wanted all men upright and straight during his prayer.
James sat up straight and thought the skin on his back would lift off of his flesh and float up to meld with the skin of the lodge. He had sat up straight and breathed as shallowly as he could and still breath at all. His eyes felt parboiled. He had thought of pearl onions in a beef stew. Simon's prayer as always had gone on forever and beyond. "Give me strength, oh willow, to endure the prayer and the heat." James had thought. He had even attempted to recite the ten precepts of his anger management strategies, but had lost it at about #8, "Smile, it won't break your face." He wasn't about to smile, not while his ears were cooking like asparagus in a steamer.
He thought about Carson's story of his boyhood roaming his reservation with his dog, happy and free, innocent of government school. James thought of his own boyhood, roaming the shore of Lake Coeur d'Alene with his cocker spaniel, Wiggletail, not having a clue about what lay ahead, Vietnam, all of it.
James thought of school and how little he had learned there, of Carson not learning anything in his school either but being passed from grade to grade, as though he had learned. He thought of Danny George's stepfather, of his saying, "Don't never steal nothing from nobody." Good advice. Advice to live by. He thought of Simon's story of his marriage to a white woman for six months. One morning he was lying in bed, and he heard the water running in the bathroom, and he assumed his wife was getting ready to take a bath. Next he knew, she tossed a basin of cold water on him as he lay in bed. That was the end of the marriage.
James fixed his mind on that image. The cold basin of water, as he sat stock still, spine straight, the top of his head touching the willow spine of the sweat lodge as Simon prayed on and on and on and on. Mesmerized, tranquil, but more than half cooked, but still at least half raw, he realized it was over. The sacred keeper of the doorway had thrown back the flap. Light and cool air streamed in. He crawled to his left following the others. "All my relations" he murmured, barely audible as he crawled out of the lodge into the cool air. Soon he was baptizing himself with dipper after dipper of ice water. And he made not a sound. He rubbed his body briskly with his hands, towelled down and got dressed.
All he could think about now was his hunger.
Simon had advised him that the sweat was a potluck affair and that after they would all eat together. That he would be very hungry. So he had brought a couple of eight-piece chicken units at the supermarket and some Coke and seltzer water to wash it down. As others arrived he had realized that there were ceremonial aspects to this practice as well as potluck aspects. He realized that everything had a lot more to it than he immediately realized. He was going to spend a lot of time thinking about this experience and its implications for his condition. It made his head hurt to do much thinking but maybe it was time for him to try thinking more and see where it got him. Now it was time to eat.
After eating dinner with the other men, James said his goodbyes and went out through the dark yard to his car. Enough light filtered through the trees in the yard for him to see a large dark bird sitting on top of his car. Was it a raven or a crow? It stared right at him as he approached the driver's side door. It flapped away reluctantly when he stood next to the car and made shooing away noises. "Fly away, big bird," he muttered. It wasn't until James was in the car and driving away that he noticed the big puddle of white droppings on the windshield, right in his line of vision. What did at all mean, he wondered. Why couldn't a coyote have winked at him from the clear cut field adjacent to Carson's yard? The symbolism in that scene would have been fun to conjecture about. James turned on his windshield wipers and sprayed the washer, effectively smearing the bird shit unevenly over the left side of the windshield. It's going to be a long drive home, he thought, squinting into the darkness ahead of him. Plenty of time to cogitate about the meaning of all this. Plenty of time to think. He would think about the obvious first and then go after the subtle implications. One by one.