Markin comment:
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Ten: Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- The Ghost Dance-Late 1969
Damn I missed Angelica, road-worthy, road-easy, easy on the eyes and easy getting us a ride Angelica as I traveled down that Interstate 80 exit out onto the great prairie Mid-American hitchhike road after we parted at the Omaha bus station, she heading home East and I to the savage search for the blue-pink great American West night. And every ride after than, every miserable truck stopped or sedan ride, it didn’t matter, made me utter that same oath.
Here I am though well clear of that prairie fire dream now in sweet desert night Arizona not far from some old Native American dwellings that keep drawing my attention and I still want to utter that oath. Sitting by this night camp fire casting its weird ghost night like shadows just makes it worst. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies”, Jack and Mattie, playing their new-found (at least to me) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone. Hey, I just remembered, sitting here wrapped up in Angelica and ancient primal tribal memories out of the whistling black star-filled night that I haven’t filled you in on where I have been, who I have seen (like John and Mattie), and how I got here from that star-crossed Neola night. Jesus, and only a few hundred miles from the ocean that I can almost smell. That only makes the Angelica hurt worst as I remember that she had never seen the ocean and I was to be her Neptune on this voyage west. Well let me get to it.
After a series of rides, and a short but scary two day delay by a serious snow squall hurricane-wind tumult just before the Rocky Mountain foothill leading into Denver I got there in good order. If I didn’t tell you before I was to hook up with now traveling companions, Jack and Mattie, there for the final trip west to the ocean and serious blue-pink visions. If you don’t remember Jack and Mattie, they are two guys that I picked up on the Massachusetts highways heading south in the days when I had a car this year in the early spring. We had some adventures going south that I will tell you about another time before I left them off in Washington, D.C. to head west from there. We agreed then to meet up in Denver where they expected to stay for a while. My last contact from them had them still there but some when I arrived at the communal home where they were staying I was informed that they had gotten nervous about being stuck in the snow-bound Rockies and wanted to head south as fast as they could and had left a Phoenix address for me to meet them at. I stayed at the commune for a few days to rest up and then headed out myself on what turned to be an uneventful and mercifully short hitchhike road trip to Phoenix to connect with them. At so here we are making that last push to the coast but not before we investigate these Native American lands that, as it turns out, we all had been interested in ever since our kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.
Early today we had been over to Red Rock for an Intertribal celebration and the sounds, the sights, the spirit are still in our heads. So right now in this dark, darker than I ever saw in the East even though it is star-filled, in this spitting flamed campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Angelica I an embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior kings and their people. And if my ears don’t deceive me, and they don’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s pennywhistle I hear, and hear plainly the muted war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warrior to avenge their not so ancient loses.
And after more pipe-fillings that sound gets louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, I swear, I swear on anything holy or unholy that off the campfire reflected canyon walls I see the vague outlines of old Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that I had heard got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, we three, we three television Indian warriors get up and start, slowly at first so we are actually out of synch with the wall action to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya,…..until we speed up to catch the real pace. After what seems an eternity we are ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices. But just as quickly the now flickering camp fire flame goes out, the shadow ghost dance warriors are gone and we crumble in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance. We, after regaining some strength, all decide that we had better push on, push on hard to the ocean. These ancient desert nights will do us in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment we, or at least I knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.
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