Burying Lynch

By JAMES BRUGGEMAN

This past summer was dogged by deaths of friends and acquaintances. We buried Lynch in August.  He died in June in his motel room where he had moved several years ago after the International Falls city/county health department condemned and then tore down his family home.  For six years, Lynch lived, or more accurately camped, in his house with no heat, no water, and no electricity for want of paying his bills.  And then, no sewer after the bathroom fell away from the house.   Rats ran the place. A scraggly hedge grew around the house and its tiny backyard, shielding it from the world. Eventually the world, in the form of the county health officer, came knocking on Lynch’s door.

Lynch had been dead for four or five days before the police broke into his motel room. His disappearances for weeks on end were not alarming. He had become an urban hermit, venturing out to SuperOne across the street for groceries and taking taxis to The Jug to pick up his week’s supply of vodka and Miller Lite. No relatives. No assets. No autopsy. No inquest. We wondered if Lynch realized he was leaving us in the moments before darkness seized him? Koochiching County cremated him at public expense, conferring a kind of provisional immortality until we could scrape together funds and gather together his friends for the memorial service.  We all expected Lynch to die like this. When we pestered him about his health, his mantra was, “I am in fine spirits and good health. I expect to live a long, long life.”  Over the years, Lynch spurned our repeated attempts to dry him out, proclaiming more than once, “I am living the life I want to live. I don’t want to live according to your expectations of me.”

What did we expect of Lynch? He was our town’s fair-haired boy of athletic and academic promise, ascending from his working class origins to honored accomplishments: All-American in high school football, basketball and track, setting state records in the hurdles, one of which still stands. Lynch truly excelled in track. He was fast, agile, and precise. Occasionally, our high school track coach would set sewing thimbles on top of the high hurdles and challenge Lynch to run the course at full speed, brushing the thimbles off with his trailing leg without toppling the hurdles themselves. Lynch rarely failed the challenge. He won a full scholarship to Harvard and was elected captain of the Harvard track team.  Few matched his sports accomplishments: All-American, All-Ivy in the high hurdles.  He set the Harvard and Harvard Stadium records in this event, all the while maintaining a solid B average.  Lynch was an alternate to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.  He would have been selected for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City had he not pulled a hamstring at the Drake Relays. In 1993, he was inducted into the Harvard Varsity Hall of Fame, one of only 400 athletes so honored.  We expected a great deal from Lynch. However, his athletic prowess didn’t matter to me.  What mattered was that he was a very good friend.

A week after Lynch’s memorial, the question of what we expected of him still rattled around in my mind. I was living for a couple weeks Ranier, a village of two hundred that stretches along Rainy Lake and Rainy River, two miles from the mill town of International Falls, Minnesota where Lynch and I grew up. I own a piece of land in the village, back in the forest along Park Street, away from what passes as its business district. On my annual summer visits, I park my small travel trailer there.  I have water and electrical hookups but no sewer. I leave just before my trailer’s black water holding tank fills up, goes toxic, and must be emptied. That suits me; every visit needs to end.

My aunt June’s father, Joe Holler, platted Ranier in 1903, laying out some of it in Quebecois-style long lots, twenty-five feet wide, one-hundred-and-fifty feet long­– just enough room for a house up front, stables, barn, outhouse, chickens, milk cow, and garden out back. I own eight contiguous lots. Like other residents, I am bereft of Joe’s agrarian ambitions. Ranier residents sensibly chose other occupations: commercial fishing, logging, guiding, and factory work. Even Joe had to open a general store in yet another town he platted immediately south of International Falls, one eponymously named Holler. In early photos of Ranier sits among stately red and white pine, but early on the International Lumber Company logged off the pine, opening the door for an unruly, second growth of basswood, birch, oak, spruce, and balsam to push its way in.

My brother refers to my property as “Dicky Land” because one Dickie O’Bannon once resided there in his trailer.  Dickie also drank himself to death. When clearing brush off the land, I stumble on his castoff pint bottles and beer cans.  He shared Lynch’s taste for vodka shooters chased with cheap beer. For a few years, Dickie kept bar at the Ranier Municipal–“the Muni”. When Lynch still owned a car and possessed a drivers license, he would drive the few miles to the Muni to drink himself insensible.  By 9:00 PM, Lynch’s head would fall to the bar, asleep, his mouth agape, become the object of much twittering by other tipplers on how the great have fallen. Dickie, however, understood Lynch’s thirst.  Before closing, he would send Lynch home in a cab, saving him from yet another DUI.

Though tiny, Ranier is among the busiest international railroad ports in the nation. Every hour, the Canadian National Railroad’s container trains–some more than a mile long–roll and rattle through Fort Frances, Ontario, across the lift bridge over Rainy River, clear Homeland Security’s high energy x-ray scanning system, and rumble into the long, white Ranier railroad station for further inspections by the blue-uniformed, Glock-armed guardians of our international border.  The shipping containers themselves bear gnomic insignias: China Shipping, Safemarine, Pan-Arabia, Raffles, NYK Logistics, ZIM, and P&O Nedlloyd. All are festooned with the graffiti of nameless railyard Banksies, artistic remoras fastening themselves on the body of global commerce. The shipping containers carry the goods cranked out in the sweatshops of our erstwhile enemies–China, Vietnam, and the other “Asian Tigers.” They arrive at the seaport of Prince Rupert, BC and are shipped southeast along what is called the Prince Rupert- Ranier-Chicago Rail Corridor. From Ranier, these trains rumble southward to stock the shelves of Cosco, Costco, Macys, and Walmart. Federal regulations require CNR’s engineers to sound their locomotives’ horns every time they cross Ranier’s Spruce Street, day or night, not once but multiple times. Their engineers’ promiscuous, even gleeful, performance of this duty is the bane of the town, the cause of disturbed sleep, jarred nerves, jumpy dispositions. You never really get used to it.

Nearly every hour, Ranier suffers the sonic shock of this commerce. A long-suffering people, most residents tolerate the squeal of locomotive wheels, the crash of coupling cars, and the screech of train brakes, though not the horns. After all, are these not the sounds of prosperity, at least for someone? Furthermore, Ranier owes its very existence to the Canadian National Railroad, one of the few foreign railroads operating on U.S. territory. In the early days, CNR moved the timber and fish of Rainy Lake to the south, and brought immigrants and the wherewithal of life to the north. My grandfather came into the Rainy River country a hundred and eleven years ago on the first train that rolled into the Ranier station, just behind the gandy dancers as they finished laying down its rails and sleepers. The oldest of a family of sixteen children, raised on a hardscrabble homestead in southern Minnesota, grandfather stepped off the train with all his possessions in a Number 2 Duluth packsack and contract in his pocket to teach school for “Snowshoe Annie” Shelland, the formidable country school superintendent. During her epic winter inspection trips, snowshoeing over frozen muskeg and snowy ridges to visit the county’s scattered schoolhouses, she was known to drag drunken fathers by their ears out of backwoods bars, restoring them to their homes, wives, and children. Shelland hired grandfather because his sisters’ sterling reputations as industrious homesteaders, proving up without burden of husbands as well as tough schoolmistresses, ruling with iron fists over the rough children of loggers and Finnish homesteaders–“jackpine savages” in the patois of the northwoods­. After suffering a year as schoolmaster of the Manitou Rapids School, grandfather resigned and took up employment cruising timber and scaling logs on the Canadian National’s timberlands.  Years later, he told me that a loggers cant hook felt more comfortable in his hands than a schoolhouse primer.

One morning before Lynch’s service found me clad in cheap hazmat suit, long gloves, and a face mask pulling up the toxic wild parsnip, throwing their stalks and roots on to my burn pile, a ten-foot tall tangle of brush slash, felled trees, and weeds. Wild parsnip (Heracleum maximum) thrives on disturbed ground.  I’ve disturbing the ground for years, using chainsaw and brush hog to keep the encroaching forest at bay. It has been a zero-sum game. More often than not, mosquitoes, heat and humidity hold the better cards. They played their best cards that morning, leaving me bitten, awash in sweat, and suffocating in the nylon suit. Fearing heat stroke, I stripped, changed into swimming trunks and walked, towel in hand, down to the Ranier city beach, a half-block away.  Walking pass Mike and Diane’s log house on the corner of Park and Oak, I saw Diane rush out of the back door.

“Jim, please don’t burn your trash pile right now.”

“No worries.  I always have it burned after it snows … Why?”

“Mike’s cancer’s back.  He’s got it real bad.  In the lungs.  The oncologist in Virginia gives him no more than six weeks.  Anyway, he can’t stand the smoke. Oh, Jim, it’s just awful.”

“Jesus! …He once told me he was in Vietnam.”

“Marines. Radio operator up front for two years … it’s the Agent Orange.”

“Diane, what can I do to help?”

“Nothing.  He doesn’t want to anything done.”

Mike’s cancer?  Not McNamara’s cancer, or Dean Rusk or Clark Clifford’s cancer, or Kissenger’s cancer…or Nixon’s? Into these soldiers, those prime movers injected a malignant incubus, one that discloses itself in nightmares, fears, panics, and tumors. Vietnam abides, though American has forgotten it. A few can’t. Men such as Mike embody it, suffer it, endure it like actors in some obscene passion play that daily unfolds unnoticed by the rest of us.

The day already bleak suddenly got darker. As I walked along the beach, I saw a man in a motorized wheel chair scooting along Oak Street towards me.  His white beard cascaded to his lap. A camo Vietnam Vet hat shading his sallow face was jammed tightly over long white hair. Over the blanket covering his legs, lay his left forearm, wrapped in blood-spotted gauze, barely obscuring the PICC line beneath–a rig for delivering chemotherapy directly to the heart.  He hailed me by my high school nickname, “Boogey.” Desperately scanning his face, I fumbled for his name, too wrong-footed to ask.

“Boogey, sounds they’re going on the warpath.”

“Who?”

“The Indians, Boog, the Indians!”

“Whatdda you mean … the Indians?”

“The drums! Is my old classmate too deaf to hear the drums?”

“I think you’re hearing the trains coming from Canada over the lift bridge. It goes on day and night.  Keeps me awake.”

“No, it’s the drums … you deaf fuck. Think they can drum this cancer shit out of me?”

Drums? Indians? What do I say to this loon?

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

As I groped for a reply, he grinned, accelerated and sped away.  Who was this wraith? No, I don’t know you. He shamed me.

The beach was empty.  It is a working people’s beach: on the weekdays it doesn’t get swimmers until after 4:30 PM. Wading up to my knees in the water, I braced myself for the plunge into the expected chill of Rainy Lake. Then, I heard the drumming, drifting two miles from the Canadian side of the border across Sand Bay. When the wind shifted, I heard the singing too. Call and response, irregular meter, shouts beginning and ending each set–Anishinabeg music. I later found the reason for the event, duly posted on the website of the Couchiching First Nations Reserve. The MINO-AYAA-TA-WIN (“Helping Ourselves Heal”) were conducting a healing ceremony.  For the young people and those family members not in treatment, the elders had arranged a Pokeman Go contest. The Couchiching First Nation was taking care of business.  But … Pokeman Go?  In earlier times, the elders would be teaching the young the skills of trapping, hunting, and fishing. Juxtaposing “the modern” and “the traditional” might confound sympathetic whites but not the Anishinabe. Always pragmatic, they embrace diverse paths to what they call Bimaadiziwin: health, happiness, and the “good life.” The genius of Anishinabeg tradition lies in its flexible responses to modernity: tradition is what the elders say it is.

In 1902, Ontario confiscated part of the Couchiching Reserve to provide for the Canadian National’s right of way and construction of the lift bridge over the river. So, the drumming and singing provided a rhythmically ironic counterpoint to the jarring dissonance of the rail traffic. The drumming, the singing, and the healing ended at ten that evening; the trains’ rattling, rumbling and the bleating continued through the night. I slept fitfully.  I awoke in the earliest hours of the morning when the clouds parted from a waxing moon, its feeble light shone through my windows. From far to the east, came the yipping, howling, and caterwauling of wolves. I finally fell into a half-sleep as train after train rolled southward through the darkening fields of the republic.

In my eulogy I said that I rejected framing the story of Lynch’s life as a tragedy– you know, the story: fair-haired boy of promise rises from a small-town to honored accomplishments, but falls from grace by dint of pride (and, in his case, alcohol), descending deeply into degradation and untimely death. Framing his life that way doesn’t do Lynch justice, though this narrative satisfies some people’s shadenfreude. Until alcohol finally eroded away him away, he seemed to be enjoying life: he once drove cab, cleaned toilets in the paper mill, and drove disabled vets to the VA hospital in Virginia; he took frequent trips up the lake; he was an swimmer; he kept a canoe and a cabin on the Little Fork River; he wrote and read widely; he enjoyed a vigorous social life, becoming something of a raconteur, an engaging conversationalist who could snare just about anyone into interesting dialogues on any manner of topics, conversations that could last for hours. Not that long ago, Lynch and I even took a thirty-mile canoe trip on Rainy Lake. Yet, despite this, Lynch drank heavily and lived squalidly in ways that foreclosed the even richer possibilities that his life presented him.  He collided head-on with William James dictum that “If ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valued human experience.”  Lynch served as our proof that it isn’t.

Lynch frequented the Ranier Beach. After swimming, he would sometimes visit my brother John and sister-in-law Sue’s at their house on the Rainy River side of the village, downstream from the old railroad lift bridge where it spans the rapids that divide Rainy Lake from Rainy River. They would have coffee or cocktails on their deck, discussing books, politics, the affairs of the town. Lynch sometimes related his encounters with political luminaries. As a starry-eyed Harvard freshman, he once shook John Kennedy’s hand and conversed briefly with his brother Robert. Much later, when he worked for VISTA, he and his colleagues also once took lunch with VISTA director Sargeant Shriver who concluded their visit by asking them to chip in to pay for the meal. Undeterred by the legendary Kennedy tightfistedness, Lynch remained a life-long Democrat, continuing the affiliation of his long-dead parents, Miles and Ivy. The New Deal for them had been their hope in hard times.

Sue had watched over Lynch during his decline: washing his clothes, soliciting donations, securing medical care, arranging residence in a motel after his house was torn down, and organizing his memorial service. A few days before the service, she laid out all of Lynch’s worldly possessions on a table in their garage: photos, albums, his poetry, report cards, resumes, letters, transcripts, diplomas, scrapbooks that his parents had filled with newspaper clippings of his sports accomplishments dating back to elementary school, his Falls High letterman’s jacket and Harvard letterman’s sweater, his medals, awards, cups, ribbons, and plaques. The remnants of Lynch’s life stripped and etherized on a table. For him, there will be no more time. No more long walks home from football practice in the autumn air, down narrow alleys, under pale streetlights, fallen leaves crackling underfoot. No longer the touch of a basketball’s pebbly skin or the sound of its staccato report against hardwood floors.  No more confident stroll in the soft, warm light of a springtime afternoon across cinder to the starting blocks. We will grow old without Lynch.  Memories of him will abide until that day when memory itself falters and dies. Our time will come. But, right now, how do we make sense of this sad jetsam and flotsam of his shipwrecked life?

These remnants provide a few clues to why Lynch ran his life aground.  Upon graduation from Harvard, he married Marcia, his girlfriend since sixth grade–a bright, forthright, lovely woman, an Oberlin graduate. I served as bookends to Lynch’s wandering life, best man at his wedding and eulogist at his funeral. Picking through his belongings, I came upon their wedding photo–an oddly somber portrait of the wedding party.  Only Marcia looked happy. She had flown in from Colorado for the funeral where she delivered a frank, but loving, tribute­­–“a class act” in everyone’s estimation. Afterwards, as we sorted through Lynch’s belongings, she told me that her parents wanted her to “marry up,” meaning marrying Lynch. Lynch’s parents wanted him to “marry up,” meaning marrying one of the heiresses he dated at Harvard. In his sports photos, he exudes vitality and confidence. In the wedding photos, Lynch looks confused, hesitant, even panicked, like a wolf caught in a foot trap. His expression seemed to say, “Now, what is expected of me?”  “How do I live this life?”

The Vietnam War stalked our lives during those years. After graduating, Lynch served as an assistant Harvard track coach under the legendary Bill McCurdy, head track coach and Lynch’s mentor.  But conscription wheeled over us like some baleful raptor at its hunt. Lynch found safe haven in a 2-S deferment when he was hired to teach and coach at Fountain Valley Prep School in Colorado. He needn’t have worried.  In 1965, Selective Service Director Lewis Hershey had instituted a system of academic evaluation in the Ivy League under which local boards would defer students based on intellectual ability determined by class rank and scores on a national aptitude test.  Somehow that system didn’t apply to the University of Minnesota from which I was drafted out of graduate school.  No one offered us an aptitude test.

General Hershey’s deference to class and achievement also excluded the working class kids from International Falls who were drafted out of the paper mill. Some of their names are etched into the walls of the Vietnam War Monument. Woody’s name is there. Woody’s parents and his grandparents lived on each of two farms within easy walking distance of my maternal grandparent’s farm. My cousins, Woody, and I rambled their farms, shot grouse out of their hedgerows and squirrels out of their trees. In the winter, we would play paratroopers, jumping from the hayloft door in my grandparents’ big, red barn into the six-foot snowdrifts so common in those winters before global warming. My uncle Bernard, uncle Eugene, and Woody’s uncle Lester once even invited Woody and I to ride shotgun in the pickup, operating the spotlight while they jacklighted deer in the fields behind Lester’s turkey farm. When I recently asked Uncle Eugene about those days, he said, “You’re right. I’ve never, ever, ever shot a deer in the daylight hours. Not sporting, you know.”

I last saw Woody one icy November morning when he appeared at the old Minneapolis Federal Building for induction. Woody and I hadn’t seen each other since high school. I stood on the front steps, shoving anti-war leaflets into the hands of inductees as they shuffled into the building. I was surprised that my brief, but impassioned, pitch persuaded him to ditch his induction. He agreed to take my offer of the shelter and support the Minneapolis draft resistance movement had to offer­––giving him time to consider other alternatives.  We walked as far as the bus stop. Then, he hesitated, slowly turned, and started walking back to the Center. “It would just kill my dad and my grandmother if I didn’t go into the Army,” he said in parting. I understood.  All of our parents, uncles, and aunts served in either the Army or Navy during World War II, the Korean War, or both.

Our families shared a tangled history extending over several generations. For decades my grandparents played cards with Woody’s every Wednesday evening, despite a long-standing rumor that Woody’s grandfather was among the Klan-sheeted squad that burned a cross on the lawn of the public school one night in 1926 to protest my Irish Catholic grandfather’s election to the school board. My mother remembered the cross, still smoldering when she came to school the next morning. Fifteen years later, on December 7, 1941, Woody’s dad, Woodrow Sr., took my mother to the Sunday matinee of “The Philadelphia Story” at the old Grand Theater in International Falls.  Midway through, the manager stopped the film to announce the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Woody’s father abruptly rushed out of the theater and sped home to put on his Navy Reserve uniform, hoping to impress my mother with his martial zeal. By the time Woodrow Sr. proudly returned to the theater in full naval regalia, she had already left the theater in a snit, vowing never to date him again. He survived his war; his son didn’t survive his. A few weeks after deployment in Vietnam, a North Vietnamese rocket landed on Woody’s hooch. So I was told. After Woody’s funeral, his heart-broken grandmother took to her bed and died a few weeks later, collateral damage that my mother attributed to Woody’s death.

Most of the men drafted from my home draft board’s pool were luckier than Woody. Most who survived are proud of their service even though they might question the morality of the war. Some make monthly visits to VA hospitals for radiation and chemotherapy. My friend Bob, who grew up Ranier, did a tour in Vietnam as a Navy corpsman attached to a Marine combat unit.  “We worked, slept, and ate in Agent Orange,” he once told me. “We would conduct surgery in bunkers, clad only in shorts, shoes, and helmets, but conditions were much better than those at Khe Sahn where our surgeon threatened to send us if we screwed up.” Bob is fighting and surviving his third bout of cancer. He leads the Minnesota Move to Amend project. Several years ago, he and his older brother Laird, also a Vietnam Vet, walked all the way from San Francisco to the steps of the U.S. Capitol to protest Citizen’s United. Laird died last year of Agent Orange related cancer.  Robin couldn’t make Lynch’s memorial service because he was attending Veterans for Peace event in San Francisco.

Oddly similar stories drift out of casual conversations as if Vietnam produced its own distinct narrative frames. When I was principal of an elementary school in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, our kindergarten teacher was Byron, also a high school football champion and a former Marine captain with two tours in Vietnam He once told me how a North Vietnamese Regiment pinned down his company on a ridge, preventing him from sending relief to a platoon of Marines in the jungle valley below. Unable to endure the beleaguered Marines’ desperate pleas for help, Bryon turned off his radio. There were no survivors. After an honorable discharge with a Bronze Star, Byron traveled across the country, visiting the families of those of his men who died in combat. He then married Jane, the first female locomotive driver for Montana RailLink.  Together, they had Nick. Six years ago, cancer triggered by Agent Orange killed Byron.

There are so many other aging men spending time on this cross. I remember Frankie weeping in front of the portable Vietnam War Memorial erected on the lawn of the Falls Public Library: “I got it all over inside me,” he said. But he survives. There is John who downs a few Black Russians every Friday night and listens to Viet Cong sniper fire that he recorded in-country on his old reel-to-reel. A week after Lynch’s service, I spied our old neighbor Bruce far down an aisle at Menards Hardware in International Falls. With his abundant white bear, he resembles Santa Claus. He and his Mrs. Claus play those roles whenever asked. Beneath his frosty beard, Bruce was wearing a t-shirt, emblazoned with the message, “Agent Orange. I was killed in Vietnam, I just haven’t died yet.”  Grinning, he caught my eye, pumped his right arm up and down, and then swooped out his flattened hand at waist level­–the signal to a combat medic to “come quickly but keep low.”

Upon turning twenty-six and no longer needing his 2-S status, Lynch began to drift: a researcher at the West Virginia Department of Education, then off to Columbia where he earned two masters degrees in educational administration, but cut short his doctoral program, penning a letter of resignation in which he characterized education administration as “nothing more than learning the techniques of manipulation and domination,” anachronistically citing Thoreau.  Returning to work in the West Virginia Department of Education, he and Marcia bought fifty remote acres, two ridges flanking a small valley where he lived as much as work would allow.  Cocaine entered his life, and an unyielding wanderlust gnawed at his work.  In a poem from that period, he wrote, “Can you imagine me, then/ working day-after-day/ in an office with no windows/ just because I need the pay?” What could replace the adrenaline of passing first over the finish line? Apparently not marriage. Lynch and Marcia’s marriage slowly spun apart. He tried to persuade Marcia of the virtues of an “open marriage.”  When she demurred, Lynch cracked opened up their marriage anyway. Long suffering but not infinitely so, Marcia fired Lynch’s ass after his repeated dalliances, open liaisons, and implacable hanky-panky.  She moved on to a better life.  He moved on to Richmond, Virginia.

Living in Richmond with Diane, his new love, and working for VISTA satisfied Lynch for a few years. During this period, he wrote sheaves of poetry. Then one night, sleeping next to Diane, he awoke to “The sound of a hard rain ceasing/ the quiet highway told me the hour was late./ Listening to the darkness and the breathing next to mine/ the fact of death broke through the shell of my senseless working life and/ caught me unaware.”  Shortly thereafter, he left Diane, moved back to International Falls, ostensibly to take care of his ailing parents but more likely because he didn’t know anything better to do.

Lynch already stepped off the high-speed escalator to the top that his Harvard pedigree promised. He rebuffed his roommates’ repeated offers of executive positions in their prosperous firms. He walked away, with nary a goodbye, from a well-paying administrative job that influential friends had secured for him in the Minnesota community college system. He drove cab.  He drank. His parents died. He tried to write for publication but faltered. He embarked on a series of disastrous love affairs that spiraled into fights with ex-husbands, clashes with his girlfriends’ parents, finally a term in the country jail for making “terroristic threats with firearms.” In the slammer, Lynch wrote this poem: “Demons pass us in the night like owls/ Ghosting over winter fields/ Sensing timid blood beneath the moonlit snow.”  Lynch dodged his demons… until last June.

In September, lung cancer took Mike, my neighbor on Park Street. His obituary reads in part: “Mike served active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps from November 29, 1966 to November 20, 1970 in the front lines as a radio operator … Michael was a proud union man. He was a member of Pipefitters Local #771 International Falls and Local #589 Virginia, Minnesota for 41 years. He worked in Boise Cascade until the Insulite [factory] closed. He then worked construction from Washington State to Michigan spending most of those years in the Dakotas, the Iron Range, the Twin Cities and International Falls. He was a gifted welder …” The obit then enumerates his half dozen decorations for military gallantry and service.  Mike’s life was not plagued by Lynch’s wanderlust but rather by the exigencies of a skilled craftsman who had to travel widely to find work.  He would have been content to spend his days in his log house on the shores of Rainy Lake where he could look out across Sand Bay to Canada where the Anishinabeg drum and sing to promote Bimaadiziwin, their health, their “good life.” That Mike was able to die in that house consoles me a little.

In late August, I left Ranier. Halfway home to Montana, I camped in Buffalo Gap, a small Forest Service campground just outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.  I started this narrative there. Buffalo Gap is a low copse of cottonwoods around a spring, ringed by low ridges–a defile where the Lakota ambushed countless buffalo. You can kick up their bones where the duff is soft. The previous night’s chill had beaten down the mosquitoes, permitting me to sit outside my trailer and look out across the undulating prairie.  I thought about what Walter Benjamin wrote: “The story-teller borrows his authority from death.” Yes, the dead will not rise up from their graves to dispute what I say about them.  The living might. Our stories strike like flint against steel, sparking us for an instant before we fade into the irrevocable night. But the world speaks with other voices too. As the sun set, I listened to the warm wind stir the cottonwoods, the dying chatter of grasshoppers, and then heard the low, staccato song of a bird whose name I do not know, lilting across the bunchgrass and fading into the darkening sweep of the Republic.