LISA JONES
FOUR EXCERPTSTHE SWEAT LODGE
PORTRAIT OF DANIEL
YOUNG STANFORD
PREFACE
The day I met Stanford Addison, I sat with him outside his corral watching the horse inside it try to escape. First she got down on her belly like a cat and tried to crawl under the pole fence. Then she snaked her head between the upper poles and pressed her chest against them in an unsuccessful attempt to push the whole thing over. Then she ran around and around, squealing her disapproval of her new surroundings. Until the day before, she had spent her entire three years of life on the open range.
After a few laps, she stopped in front of Stanford. He sat in the wheelchair he had occupied for 23 years, letting the mare’s skidding hooves throw up a small hurricane of dust onto his long black braid, his half-toned, half-atrophied arms, and slack legs. He squinted up through the fence. The mare tossed her head and whinnied, rolling her eyes piteously. I didn’t know much about horses, but it struck me as strange that she would make a point of stopping right there in front of Stanford. She tossed and whinnied in what started to look to me like an appeal. Stanford watched her until she was finished. Then he said in a low, gentle voice, “I can’t save you.”
This was a common occurrence at the corral – horses explaining things to Stanford. In the months and years that followed, he never discussed this phenomenon with me. He would finish up at the corral, roll his electric wheelchair into the house and turn on The Cooking Channel, now and then interrupting the program to ask me questions about pesto and sushi. Or we’d sit at his battered kitchen table sipping on mugs of Folger’s, and this paralyzed, six-toothed, one-lunged Plains Indian would take a drag of his Kool Filter King, sigh, and say something like, “I guess the thing I miss most since the accident is ski jumping.”
A joke. Stanford made me laugh a lot, which was a nice break from the confusion that often enveloped me during the four years I was a frequent visitor there. I wasn’t trying to write an authoritative book about Native Americans or native life. I was there to write a book about Stanford’s evolution from what he had been, a bad-boy outlaw, into the renowned medicine man he had become. But I didn’t get the information I needed in the quick question-and-answer sessions that had been the staple of my work as a journalist. I learned to wait and watch. And a lot of what I ended up watching was what was going on inside of me.
Only when I was nearly finished with this book did I realize what it was about – the journey I took following Stanford’s gentleness back to its source, a journey so different from anything I’d experienced before that there was no way to prepare for it.
Which brings me back to the mare, breathing hard and kicking up dirt and trying to make sense of where she had found herself. This is exactly what I did for much of the time I spent at Stanford’s. I too skidded to a halt and silently pleaded with him to save me, or at least to explain what was happening. But he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
The thing is, not only horses get broken around here. Everything does, starting with the ground itself. Millions of years ago, a new mountain range broke through the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, leaving the original mountains’ broken remains leaning against the flanks of the Wind River Range and the other mountain chains that comprise the modern-day Rockies. In 1878, at the end of the Indian Wars, the Northern Arapaho people arrived at the foot of jagged upthrust of the Wind River Range in their own state of brokenness, defeated, hungry, and ravaged by smallpox.
And then there was Stanford. His accident smashed his spine and left him on a slab in the morgue. He revived only to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Along with his physical paralysis came some powerful healing gifts. At first, both his disability and these gifts seemed a terrible burden, but he haltingly came to understand that he had emerged from a small life into a big one. He had broken, broken through, broken out. His body was changed forever, but so was his heart. This happened in different ways to a lot of people around Stanford. I had no idea, that first time I visited him and watched his curious dialogue with the mare, that the same thing would happen to me.
After a few laps, she stopped in front of Stanford. He sat in the wheelchair he had occupied for 23 years, letting the mare’s skidding hooves throw up a small hurricane of dust onto his long black braid, his half-toned, half-atrophied arms, and slack legs. He squinted up through the fence. The mare tossed her head and whinnied, rolling her eyes piteously. I didn’t know much about horses, but it struck me as strange that she would make a point of stopping right there in front of Stanford. She tossed and whinnied in what started to look to me like an appeal. Stanford watched her until she was finished. Then he said in a low, gentle voice, “I can’t save you.”
This was a common occurrence at the corral – horses explaining things to Stanford. In the months and years that followed, he never discussed this phenomenon with me. He would finish up at the corral, roll his electric wheelchair into the house and turn on The Cooking Channel, now and then interrupting the program to ask me questions about pesto and sushi. Or we’d sit at his battered kitchen table sipping on mugs of Folger’s, and this paralyzed, six-toothed, one-lunged Plains Indian would take a drag of his Kool Filter King, sigh, and say something like, “I guess the thing I miss most since the accident is ski jumping.”
A joke. Stanford made me laugh a lot, which was a nice break from the confusion that often enveloped me during the four years I was a frequent visitor there. I wasn’t trying to write an authoritative book about Native Americans or native life. I was there to write a book about Stanford’s evolution from what he had been, a bad-boy outlaw, into the renowned medicine man he had become. But I didn’t get the information I needed in the quick question-and-answer sessions that had been the staple of my work as a journalist. I learned to wait and watch. And a lot of what I ended up watching was what was going on inside of me.
Only when I was nearly finished with this book did I realize what it was about – the journey I took following Stanford’s gentleness back to its source, a journey so different from anything I’d experienced before that there was no way to prepare for it.
Which brings me back to the mare, breathing hard and kicking up dirt and trying to make sense of where she had found herself. This is exactly what I did for much of the time I spent at Stanford’s. I too skidded to a halt and silently pleaded with him to save me, or at least to explain what was happening. But he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
The thing is, not only horses get broken around here. Everything does, starting with the ground itself. Millions of years ago, a new mountain range broke through the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, leaving the original mountains’ broken remains leaning against the flanks of the Wind River Range and the other mountain chains that comprise the modern-day Rockies. In 1878, at the end of the Indian Wars, the Northern Arapaho people arrived at the foot of jagged upthrust of the Wind River Range in their own state of brokenness, defeated, hungry, and ravaged by smallpox.
And then there was Stanford. His accident smashed his spine and left him on a slab in the morgue. He revived only to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Along with his physical paralysis came some powerful healing gifts. At first, both his disability and these gifts seemed a terrible burden, but he haltingly came to understand that he had emerged from a small life into a big one. He had broken, broken through, broken out. His body was changed forever, but so was his heart. This happened in different ways to a lot of people around Stanford. I had no idea, that first time I visited him and watched his curious dialogue with the mare, that the same thing would happen to me.