Murrs Across America

Dear friends,

They say a photograph is worth a thousand words, so I strongly urge you to check out this album on our public Facebook page. I’ve captioned all the images, so hopefully along with the notes below you’ll get a good sense of these days. I’m flying over them quickly in the interest of catching you up with where we are today in Missoula, MT. If you have any specific questions about these days, please comment on the photographs or this post and I’ll address them.

June 26

• Talk with Healer
• Hills
• Making our own shade
• Mary and Pat, the governor of Fairfax, at the Koenig Corner Market
• Terra Cota building?
• A long ride
• Burke doesn’t have a restaurant after all
• Met Abby and Jon at Pete’s convenient store
• Abby, Jon, Dale, Mike, and Debbie
• Dale’s pickle trick and the largest marshmallows in the history of the world

June 27

• Ingredients for a 6000 acre ranch
• Drop-off in Peirre
• Groceries in Dakota Mart-Brady earns four stars for tantrum
• Lake play
• Walkin’ Tacos and evening with the Hansons (Hillary and Jason and kids)

June 28

• Jason drop off at substation (25 mile jump)
• Picnic at the electric substation
• Pleasant ride to Whitlock Bay
• Greeted with wine by Daisy
• Paul offers to shuttle us to dinner
• Dinner with a view of the Missouri

June 29

• Linda’s gift
• Ride to Selby
• How to order beer in South Dakota
• Kathy volunteers Vince
• Vince’s camper, gave up after discovering fourth break in waterline. Gabe.
• Neon and Argon
• The neighborhood
• Windy night
• A soldier returning

June 30

• Breakfast at Behrns: Get your own coffee and sit with people of your gender. Leave a dollar.
• Fond farewells and flowers
• Kathy’s sincerity
• Flying to Mound City for lunch
• Flying to Herrired
• Jane SWIMS!
• Struggling to Pollack and a visit from Mr. Puppe
• Home on the farm- cooking dinner in a kitchen!
• Cindy and Merlin
• Sunset on the prairie
• Pheasants Forever

July 1, 2010

• 100 degrees
• Coffee and Prairie
• Stuart helps pick out paint for the station
• Cheese plant tour and the big cheese
• Chicken hot dish with Jim Puppe- of history and stories
• Dinner with Cindy and Merlin
• Twenty Seconds of Joy documentary

July 2, 2010

• 100 Degrees
• to Big M town with Mr. Puppe
• Yellow Sub
• Historic sites/ Native American art at the casino
• Sitting Bull
• Grocery store foray- Mr. Puppe generously buys groceries!
• Dinner with Cindy and Merlin
• Grilled Peaches
• Farm tour/missing glasses
• Sunset

July 3

• Merlin offers to drive us to Bismark
• Sporting good store
• Campground
• Bounty Hunters and community
• Fire

July 4

• Kate sick
• Dairy Queen
• Hotel
• Naps
• Swimming
• Symphony and fireworks
• Walk home

July 5

• Grammy’s birthday
• Kate to coffee shop
• 1804 road out town
• Double ditch village/ prairie dogs picnic
• Setting off fireworks by the river

July 6

• Headwind
• Grumpy
• The generosity of Coleharbor- astounding.

July 7

• To Max
• headwind
• bees
• birds, wetlands
• gas station at Max
• Lightning McQueen washout
• restaurant warning
• city park camping

July 8

• Max to Minot
• Homesickness and Windmills
• The Waldsteins
• ND prosperity

July 9

• From Minot
• Highway 83
• Highway 2 bad shoulder
• Lists and poems
• Dinner in the bar with cursing
• Meeting Mike
• City park camping
• Meeting Chris

We awoke to the charismatic announcer, Jerry, crooning over the PA a song in the tonality and rhythm of those we had heard the night before. It was in English though, something about an elephant.

The first business of the day was recognition of the veterans and the raising of the American flag to songs of victory. At the evening ceremony Jerry would chide the singers for playing too long, as some of the veterans complained that this morning’s enthusiastic victory song was hard on their old wounds. Indeed, a footless veteran, who later would give Brady a drumstick, danced from his wheelchair along with the others that circled the center flagpole.  Respect for the men and women warriors of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota tribes was fierce.

I chatted next with the lead singer from the Hilltop Singers drum circle. He told me a story alternate to the textbooks about Little Bighorn, the battle where Custer fell and the victorious Sioux captured an American flag, the whereabouts of which is locally known, but purposely undisclosed here…

The singer told me about the meanings of some songs and that he is a maker of songs. He told me about a traditional way of making songs that involves sitting still and using the hills as a reference for a melody’s pitch.

Runners arrived from various important landmarks to celebrate their clan’s ancestry. They carried staffs and were mostly high school-aged, but one runner I’m told is an elderly distance runner who has run for kings and queens all over the world. I wish I had caught his name; he did look awfully spry.

We received tee shirts to commemorate the run and I volunteered to help serve lunch. My services were welcome and I was placed on fruit salad duty. We had soup again, this time it didn’t have potatoes but tomatoes. It was delicious.

The day was sticky hot and we all took a nap in the tent. The grand entry was delayed an hour for heat, but when things got underway for the evening there was so much color and spirit that the kids, quiet at first, had a blast, dancing and shouting. Jane pointed out that the Indians really knew how to play dress up, and she started plotting her new costume she’ll make when she gets home, a shawl with bells.

There were grass dancers that blessed the ground first, with their kinetic costumes and fluid stomping. Then all types of dancers with feathers, beads, spears, shawls, bells, and pelts joined the circle. Since it was a contest pow-wow, one of the 24 drum circles in attendance played music for each dancer category and sometimes for each age group within the category. Occasionally Jerry would announce an Intertribal Dance, which meant that everyone was invited to dance, regardless of their costume or area of expertise. Brady and I jumped at the invitation, Stuart and Jane joined us later.

Exhausted, we turned in before the conclusion of the evening, which I was sad about. But the early bedtime afforded one of my favorite memories of the trip so far: I fell asleep with the drummers singing a spirited song for the shawl dancers, and the moon didn’t bother me.

For more photographs of the pow-wow, please visit our Facebook page. Videos to follow.

I know Jane already recorded this day but there were a few things she left out. We decided to stay for the pow-wow. We biked down to Pickstown and ate pie and lunch at the gas station/grocery store/restaurant, where we ran into Dave, a biker we’d met in Missouri. We visited the interpretative center at Fort Randall dam, which said nothing of the controversy over the dam’s displacement of twenty-four native families, but did have a place for the kids to dig for dinosaurs and learn more about Lewis and Clark. The young ladies on watch were great with the kids.

We returned to the Casino to set up camp on the pow-wow grounds. The warm-up and blessing of the grounds was underway and the announcer was telling a story about the Dog Soup and fry bread we would all be eating for dinner.

It means something to shake someone’s hand in the Yankton Sioux culture. More than a greeting, it is a demonstration of respect, and as the drummers sang songs of welcome and blessing, descendants of the great chief White Cloud danced and feebly hobbled to a spot at which the entire assemblage shook their hands.

Soup served from huge galvanized tubs was filling and good, made with hominy, beef, and potatoes. As guests, we were encouraged to follow the elders near the front of the line and to eat as much as we like. We ate on the bleachers with a family whose baby entertained the kids. We took the offered seconds.

After dinner and some more songs, we retired to our tent. It was a moon night and sleepless, full of wind and anticipation.

The ride from Springfield to Pickstown, SD was rough. For nearly 50 miles we fought headwinds and climbed high prairie hills, sometimes on gravel roads. To complicate things, there were semi-trucks with double loads of gravel that dusted us on our route, which was heavily under construction. Men perched at intersections directed traffic and pointed us toward Pickstown. The landscape was richly lonely, reservation land, hot and forgotten.

We rode through a reservation town that had been completely flooded. In Marty grass lay down. Debris cluttered the yards of humble homes. Boys rode bikes on dirty streets.

Our final ascent ended at the Fort Randall Casino. We debated whether to stop there, at the top of the hill, or coast down into Pickstown, but we were hungry and we didn’t know for sure the restaurant situation in town.

As we parked our bikes a man named Henry began to tell us stories of the Yankton Sioux landscape through which we’d passed, and he immediately invited us to the pow-wow, two days away. He was a little fuzzy on his facts, we learned later, but he was very welcoming, especially after such a hard ride. His welcome was eclipsed, however, when a security guard came to where we were chatting with Henry, changing our shoes, and said, “We’ve been expecting you.”

How odd, I thought, or maybe said, we’ve barely been expecting ourselves.

The guard explained that the manager of the casino restaurant had seen us struggling in the wind on the road and she called ahead to tell them if the tired, filthy family on bicycles came by to comp their meal.

I melted into a dirty puddle then at the thoughtfulness and kindness of a stranger and the family went inside to enjoy a buffet meal. We decided to stay at the hotel for the showers and beds and to think about whether or not to stay the two extra days for the pow-wow.

The Jane Blog

By Jane Murr

We saw a caterpillar. He was green. He was eating a leaf.

We saw a dead butterfly. We picked it up and kept it. We pulled out its tongue and looked at it. Our tongues are longer than the butterfly’s. Tootsie’s tongue is longer than ours and the butterfly’s, but butterflies have black tongues. We looked at the white spots on the orange and black butterfly. It was a monarch butterfly. They are so pretty and I wish I could watch one fly around in a jar. I would put water in the jar and I would let it go if I saw another butterfly I think is its mommy or daddy. The butterfly dust on our hands was purple and a little sparkly.

We saw a tractor that pooped out hay. We saw 21 hays that the tractor pooped out.

We dug for dinosaur bones. It was fun because we were scientists digging up dinosaur fossils and we got to pick them up and put them in a pile.

We saw Prairie Chickens. They were my favorite!

We watched drummers sing—it was just screaming, actually. It was too loud for me. I ate all my soup so I could have some cake.

When I get home, I’m going to have an applesauce carrot cake for my friend party. Here are the things you’ll need to make the cake, Mommy:

• sugar,
• butter,
• eggs,
• applesauce,
• carrots,
• flour,
• applesauce icing.

There are one hundred mosquitoes outside our tent! Good thing we have a tent: if we were sleeping outside, we would get eaten alive!