The splashdown of American astronauts far out at sea, their welcoming by a President, a commander, a team of doctors and soldiers to guard their quarantine—all the modern version of Barbicane’s Gun Club—is shockingly different from Titov’s return. Titov landed on the ground, at the heart of Asia. No one knew where he would come down, and every citizen was out to find him. When Titov’s parachute bumped his capsule back to earth and he opened the hatch, a woman ecstatic with blood on her face leaped from her car to kiss him. Driving, she had seen his little ship descending. She had driven into the ditch by the road in her haste to touch him. She ran toward his ship. He lived on Earth again, and she welcomed him.
Three days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I made it to Denmark. It was good to stop in one place a few days; it was a relief not to hitchhike, not to climb into anyone’s machine and live at the mercy of their speed. Near the town of Århus, I met a girl named Helle. From her parents’ house we took bicycles along the path that wove past flashing streams, dark woods, through meadows thick with sunlight. The grasshoppers still had something to sing about, after so many generations. We were young, foolish, happy. As I drifted ahead around a long curve above the water, she called out, “Wherever heaven is, it must be like this.”
I turn to look.
A few nights in your life, you know this like the taste of lightning in your teeth: Tomorrow I will be changed. Somehow, in the next passage of light, I will shed reptilian skin and feel the wind’s friction again. Sparks will fly. It’s a hope for the right kind of fear, the kind that does not turn away.
A few miles short of Wisdom, Montana, I flipped open my sleeping bag at the top of Lost Trail Pass. Starlight prickled my shoulders with cold’s tattoo. At midnight there, August meant less than altitude. A long day’s winding drive from La Grande had left me numb with the car’s buzz, and abrupt dark silence was impossible to believe. But the tall stems of the trees made no sound. My ears were clouded with engine throb and tire whine. The whisper of stars I thought I heard was only a tune my head-bone played. Where I slid into the thin summer bag, I felt a bump of rock dent the small of my back. Sleep blurred my eyes, but I begged the rock to keep me wakeful. Tomorrow, I would drive down a valley that had burned my imagination, a place early trappers called The Big Hole. Tomorrow, Wisdom. The trees’ utterance was a pitchy fragrance.
Why did I wish to stay awake? Sometimes stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation. Tomorrow, The Big Hole. And there was the battlefield that books and travelers and my mind made shine like an icon. Tomorrow, wisdom—if my hunch could be true. Where Joseph and the Nez Perce band were attacked at dawn one year after Custer died, I meant to stand apart from my own life and listen. I meant to stand apart from my century, if I could. The people who raised me would recede, and I would stand apprentice to the place itself. If wisdom could be portable from history, I might read it there in some configuration of the ground. Then sleep.
Midmorning of the next day, I sat faint in the car parked at headquarters for the Big Hole National Battlefield. By the rearview mirror, pine-scattered hills were a blur of heat. Revelation was not going as planned. Dawn had come and gone. On my sleeping bag flung over the back seat, the dew had long dried, and sweat now trickled off my nose. Traveling alone, I had taken the exploratory vow: I will not eat until I learn from this place. I was untaught, and faint.
The personnel at headquarters, the tan-suited rangers inside their buff museum built to suggest a Nez Perce tipi, had tried hard to prepare an experience for me. Beyond the glass-cased photographs and furs, the guns and arrows, they had ushered me into a little auditorium for my command performance of the slide show. I had sat alone among the gray folding chairs while an artist’s sketches of the battle flashed before me scene by scene, and a strident male voice on the tape loop told what the sound effects were to mean—the pulse of firing guns, a woman’s scream, hoofbeats from invisible horses—while the watercolor faces of the stern and the doomed went flickering through their show. Then suddenly the music came up and it was over. A little motor whirred, and curtains were automatically drawn aside from the windows facing west. There was the battlefield below, on a flat place by the river. Sun had bleached the replica lodgepoles gray. One cloud dragged its shadow toward Canada. On the sill of the view window, two flies had died side by side.
Now, in the car, leaning back against the hot head-rest, I understood the chronology, and the battlefield’s topography. From my vantage point at headquarters, I had seen the signs strung out along the river where named warriors had fallen, and the pine-thicket knoll where the U.S. Army had been surrounded and pinned down when the tide of battle turned against them. I saw where they had their all-day chance to think on Custer’s fate, before the Nez Perce slipped away by night, ending their thirty-six hour siege, abandoning their joyless victory for flight. I could follow the events and feel, in my faint of hunger, a shred of what the original cast of this drama lived. But where I sat in the car, all this was nothing. The windshield wore the small debris of shattered yellow bugs.
What did I expect? The past wears an armor that thickens, and I was a fool to think hunger and a wish could pierce it. I had learned the dates and the map, had seen in photographs a long-braided woman and the anguish of old men. I had browsed on books in the National Battlefield gift shop, and I was fed full with history, with news that stays fact:
During the morning of August 9, 1877, . . . 163 soldiers of the U.S. 7th Infantry and 33 civilian volunteers endured a 36-hour siege as the final scene in the Battle of the Big Hole. The battle began with a dawn attack by the military force upon a camp of 800 Nez Perce men, women and children encamped in 89 tipis on the grassy bank across the river. . . . Follow the trail and explore the military defensive positions. Recreate the struggle of the besieged men and the hostile feelings of the surrounding Nez Perce warriors.
I folded the brochure, and closed my eyes. My government was trying hard to help me. They had made a building and a show. They had scratched out a trail and numbered it, had given me a brochure with matching numbers. I would follow the path. I was grateful. Still my head was a vacant room. Before I took the trail, I had one more try.
Inside, at the headquarters reception area, a ranger with his flat-brim hat on the desk beside him was tallying information from the guest register.
“I bet you get people from all over.” I faced him over the glass display case filled with books and souvenirs.
“Excuse me one moment,” he said. “1984 to date, out-of-state 87 percent total.” His tanned fingers worked the blue ballpoint as if it were a shovel, scooping figures off one page and tossing them neatly onto another. Then he looked up at me. “Yes, from all over the world. Have you had a chance to sign the register?”
“Right here.” I pointed to the word “Oregon.” The space for my remark was blank, but the column above that blank was filled with “Beautiful display,” “Very moving,” “Worth the drive,” “Howdy from Texas,” “My third visit and better than ever.” The ranger glanced at me, then turned away to usher a couple wearing identical sunglasses into the small auditorium for the slide show. I could hear the music begin as he closed the door behind them.
“I’m curious,” I said. “How many Nez Perce people visit the battlefield?”
The ranger turned to the register, then to his tally. “We had a woman from Iowa last year who said she was one-quarter Nez Perce.” He looked into the air between us for a moment, then back at me. There was a pause, and I could hear the muffled pulse of gunfire from the auditorium. My eyes asked the obvious question, and he answered it.
“We know others visit the battlefield itself,” he said. “They just don’t come here to the Visitor Center to sign the book.” He looked into the air again. We both knew this was the part of the show about the Nez Perce warrior named Rainbow—how he was shot as he ran through the dawn mist, how