Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
doing what?”) and kindness. In truth when you're traveling like this, the subject of con-
versation with local people has to do with food and shelter and directions and weather
and safety, and in those circumstances, as the saying goes, we're all Americans.
Still, specific flavors in the culture hereabouts make a Greenwich Village homeboy feel
like a space alien, a stranger in a strange land, a sensation at once spooky and titillating.
Part of this is simply a New Yorker's provincialism, an astonishment at being so isolated
and a sense of exposure and vulnerability to forces of nature like the glaring sun and the
wind. Funny, but I never feel that walking through Washington Square Park.
Last night Rich and I ate a dreadful meal at a diner in Wolf Point—a reasonable trav-
eler's axiom is, The more remote the town, the worse the restaurant food—and then we
drove twenty miles down U.S. 2 to Poplar, a poor community on the Fort Peck Indian
Reservation, home to Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. I've been to reservations before, but
on this night a powwow was taking place. The weekend-long event, a celebration of tra-
dition that amounted to a rather wild yet rather wholesome dance party—no drugs or
alcohol permitted—attracted hundreds of people, many from hours away. The surround-
ing grounds had become a temporary tent city.
The dances were propulsive and ritualistic. The dancers, most clad in startlingly col-
orful costumes featuring beaded leather and gorgeously feathered headdresses, many
wearing bells around their ankles, ranged from preschoolers to tribal elders. They were
accompanied by several men seated around a single drum, furiously beating out a
rhythm and singing, in the Cree language, a mesmerizing, warblelike call to the dance.
I'd never seen—or heard—anything like it. Throughout the evening I had to ask what
everything meant. Even though people were genial and happy to explain their cultural
idiom to a newcomer, I felt foolish and naïve, embarrassed at being so uninformed in my
own country.
Now I'm here in Circle, which is even more remote and seems even further removed
from my city-centric idea of contemporary life. What's here? A rickety motel at a cross-
roads, a crummy diner, a ramshackle downtown that was deserted on a Sunday except
for a convenience store at a gas station, a dozen streets with compact but surprisingly
nice-looking houses and well-tended yards, and a sturdy school with tidy grounds.
The leading landmark is a life-sized, realistic if friendly-looking sculpture of a bron-
tosaurus. I say life-sized—this one's about ten feet high and maybe twenty-five from
nose to tail—but I'm actually not so sure how big brontosauruses actually were. It stands
watch over a little picnic area that is next door to my motel and peers out in the direction
of the highway and beyond it to the wide prairie.
This part of the country is a paleontological wonderland, it turns out; carcasses,
skulls, bones, and fossil remains of prehistoric creatures—triceratops, stegosaurus, and
