soapboxdiner

Where I was raised

Do you believe that the stories you hear as a child stay with you? Affect you and who you become? I don't mean listening to your mother reading you Little Red Riding Hood causes you to fear going to granny's house with parcels of day-old bread. I mean like stories about your regional history or perhaps a specific person who mesmerized you as a child.

I don't know. I suppose it has a lot to do with growing up in a place very much steeped in natural history. There was always a place to wander in my head based on what was right outside my door. Stories from prehistory. Stories from the Ice Age. Stories from two hundred years ago.

All growing up, I wanted to be an archeologist. Can you imagine how much we've changed as a species over time? What was it like to live in a teepee or a lodge? What was it like to know no God? What was it like to travel thousands of miles across glaciers with nothing but your feet to carry you? Traveling along inland seas where dinosaurs died and laid their bones?

Fascinating.

I grew up in Billings, Montana, for those of you who don't already know. I find that particular website very funny because the Billings I grew up in was tiny. A hole surrounded by cliffs called the Rims. Oh, and a river. And that was the extent of Billings. Yet to see that website, you'd think Billings was NYC or something. Hosting an image of the skyline - pshaw. Billings has no skyline. It is a flat little basin of economic nothingness. Shoot, it's home to only 100,000 people!

And I suppose that is one reason the schools and museums there talk so much about it's history - there is no modernity to the place. But there is a lot of history.

Billings was once in the center of an inland sea, 300-65 million years ago. The cliffs that I grew up running up and down are the sedimentary remains of that sea's bottom. I know this because that is one of the stories they told me as a child. To this day when you walk in those hills you can find fossilized marine animals and coral. To be able to hold in your hands something so indicative of your immense smallness in the scope of things. To feel the rough texture of unimaginable age. How surreal is that?

Now imagine your childhood history teacher telling you about the Ice Age native migration across the Bering Strait. How unlikely is that story? Imagine taking a field trip seven miles from your home to Pictograph Cave State Park. Of course, we did not call them by their "fancy" name; we called them the ice caves. But they were still amazing. There we were, standing ten feet in front of 4,500 years old etchings and paintings. Nothing found in the Neander Valley can top that. Before baby Moses floated down the Nile, men sat in the caves I wandered in my youth. They painted the walls with stories of their hunts. Please form a mental picture of a chubby little four-eyed girl standing slack-jawed in awe. 30,000 artifacts have been found in those caves. Thirty thousand. How many primitive peoples have to sit before a fire, for how many years do they have to take that cave as a refuge, before 30,000 arrowheads and eskimo barbed harpoon points get discarded?

But of course such lofty imaginings are oft times too distant to hold one's wonder. How about something more current?

196 years ago, explorers traveled through Montana. You might have heard of them before - Lewis and Clark? They were pretty big in Montana and still their names found on business plaques and marquees. Everywhere, Lewis and Clark. But did you know that only one place along the expedition's route hosts physical evidence of their passing?

William Clark, in 1806, chipped his name in a rock he named for Pompey, son of Sacagawea, his Shoshoni Indian guide. The mount may not look too impressive, but for 10 miles all around, Pompey's Pillar is the only bump on the horizon. And our small little spot in history has been solidified by its continued presence.

70 years later, the White Men came to Montana bearing gifts of blankets for the Crow Indians. The blankets were infested with smallpox. Men and women, young and old were plagued with the disease. They were all dying. When the brave warriors fell ill, they sat themselves atop their blindfolded horses and ran them headlong over this cliff. They took with them their earthly possessions, and then crashed on the rocks below. They sacrificed themselves to save the ones they loved from being ravaged by the disease the white men brought.

History nearly floods you in Billings Montana. How can a person be anything less than inspired when they have walked and breathed in the presence of it? When they've held it in their dusty hands?

1:26 pm - 12.22.02
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