“All over the world, even today, people live best when they live in small social arrangements. You spoke of one, the one your daughter wants to live in. Do you know what you described for me?
“No, what?”
“You described a tribe. Your daughter wants to live as a member of a tribe. And so do you.”
Liz issued a nervous laugh. “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”
“I think you do. I will tell you, if you will listen.”
“Oh, I’ll listen to you, Benjamin, but I must tell you, I’m more than a bit skeptical.”
“Well, then, I will give you a modern example, very up-to-date. Months ago, before Yellowstone brought the ash and the cold, I saw on television something remarkable.”
“And what was that?”
“It was a televised sermon delivered by an evangelical minister in the West. They call him a… televangelist, I think is the word. I was not interested in the message he was preaching. He was on a stage ministering to 10,000 people sitting in what I first thought was a stadium. Only the stadium was a church; it was that big. It is in southern California, I remember. The gathering looked like a concert for the rock music. That is what captured my interest.
“I watched the people in the audience mostly and saw something remarkable, too. The parishioners were all Whites. They were dressed in similar clothing. They had a particular look, a particular style. They were listening to a codified creation myth, limited in its vocabulary and imagery, but delivered in a ritualistic manner that all in the audience recognized, knew well, and felt perfectly at home with. It was uplifting for them. For them, it was life in balance. In that place, in a rough and tumble city of ten million strangers, they had found balance. Now why was that?
“I can’t imagine, Benjamin.”
“They were a tribe—a tribe, the very oldest form of organized social structures—affirming their beliefs and their customs before their fellow tribesmen and women.”
Liz placed a hand on her forehead. “I’ve never thought of something like that in such terms. That’s quite a compelling argument you make.”
“The Blackfoot do the same thing, all native peoples do. We honor our ancestors by keeping alive their beliefs, dressing in ceremonial costumes from their time, holding festivals and dances that they passed down to us, listening to the ancient creation stories and repeating tales of great deeds from the distant past so that the young may know them. These are the things that people do as members of a tribe. Such things affirm who tribe members are in ways modern societies do not.
“As a Blackfoot, I can hold myself up to the mirror of my native culture and see a reflection that I expect to see and am comfortable with. I am Blackfoot, a man of the Blackfoot tribe. I know what that means in the depths of my heart. Knowing that gives me great strength, gives me a spirit that cannot be taken from me, not even in death. That is what native peoples mean by life in balance.”
The woman turned her gaze out a window and sat silently until she could organize disparate thoughts in her head. She sighed. “Benjamin, the man I married, Abel Whittemore, he knows something about what you are telling me.”
“Oh, what does he say?”
“In his writing, his words constantly speak about what you call, umm, koy-an-a-what?”
“Koyaanisqatsi.”
“Yes, thank you. The way to free oneself from life in chaos, he writes, is to reject mass modern culture, the industrial monolithic culture you speak of that Europeans brought with them to the New World. He advocates the establishment of small post-modern self-sufficient communities that have their roots in living arrangements from the deep past, ones employed by indigenous people all over the globe.”
White Elk nodded quietly.
“I was up to my ears in his New Age philosophy from the day I met him. And here you are saying precisely what he was writing about for a decade. It’s astonishing.”
“Hmm,” purred White Elk, “I think I might like your husband.”
Liz’s lips turned up and exposed her teeth. A quiet laugh popped its way out from between the incisors. White Elk found the little laugh infectious. He chuckled, too. In a few seconds, the two were howling in a knee-slapping laugh fest.
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Cloistered in his cabin, Abel was visited by a parade of demonic characters, cheerless memory masks residing in penitentiary; they found the key to their confinement once Pelee’s coffin lid was sealed. By day the fugitives scratched at his skin with sharp nails and probed his brain with lances. By night, they rolled his eyelids and propped them open with sticks, then poured pails of acid color and flicked monstrous shapes into his eyes.
The unholy lot dismantled his daughter’s bed, rendered it to pieces and carried it to the woodstove. There they burned the whole of it. They swept her closet and small bureau clean of her clothes, ran off with all the stuffed toys and the wall posters. When they were done, the room was stark. But they forgot to take one small token, a small photo in a gilded frame of the child, her mother and her father; that they did not have the strength to lift up and cart away.
In the darkness of early dawn, awake following a night of exhaustion, Abel paced the cabin floors, agitated, desperate to leave the confines of the walls. He scrambled to the front room to locate his parka and a backpack when he noticed a note under the door. “Look on the porch,” it read. Abel threw the lock on the door, pulled the latch and discovered a small container on the threshold. Penny had left a vessel full of soup and a crust of potato bread. Abel stuffed the container into his pack, dressed for the cold, and left his little home for Lakota Lodge at the height of land atop the bluffs.
Abel wanted to work, wishing only for warmth and quiet. After the long climb to elevation, he entered the frigid space of the little lodge, climbed to the second floor studio and closed the door. Within minutes he had fire going; within the hour the space was warm enough for him to remove all his cold-weather clothing. With hot flames snapping in the woodstove, Abel pulled a small table near the stove and sat bare-chested. In longhand, he set about writing with those Old World inventions, pen and paper.
Wedged into his tight culvert of despair, Abel groped for solace in ideas. Creative endeavor had always been his salvation. Whenever inspiration surfaced, Abel embraced it fully, knowing that for a day or a week, he might enter a blessed state of sweet invention, where time was timeless and work was exquisite pleasure. He never knew when the door to his creative machinery would creak open.
Soaking in the stove heat and scratching at beard stubble growing like succession forest in an abandoned pasture, Abel pondered the fate of his little society below, lost in folds of the bluffs. He agonized over its future. Would the decade-old walls of the peaceful fortress on the bluff hold? Would the terrible conditions and the murders breach those walls and disgorge the citizenry, fleeing in panic? Which would it be?
Independency had not been conceived or organized as a lifeboat, designed to float free of the fallout from a global natural disaster. Abel couldn’t conceive of a natural disaster on the scale of the Yellowstone eruptions. Such an event was unthinkable. But, he pondered, didn’t Independency now fit the definition of an ark? Surely it was something of a 400-acre life raft, not adrift without a compass, but capable of steering a course through an ocean of horrific prospects.