by Julia Gibson
I drive slowly forward, looking for whoever’s walking. Debbie takes big deliberate strides, head down to watch the ground. The eagle staff casts a long shadow from the headlight beams. I creep along, windows open, heater on, birdsong flickering in. The sky starts to redden. One walker replaces another. The three sisters and the boys arrive with muffins and apples. Sunrise casts everything orange. Josephine configures us. She tells me I can walk with Violet. Nine people are walking now. Hilda, still on her moon, drives her van, accompanied by Kane and BJ, who’s been ordered by his Auntie Jo not to walk again today. He looks disappointed, but he doesn’t contradict her. I’ve seen nobody challenge or even question any of Josephine’s decisions. I’ve heard no complaints, no bickering, no mean jabs or gossip.
Nobody seems to snarl at anyone, even when someone messes up and misses the turnoff. There was a road down to the lakeshore, but we’re not on it. The water can’t double back. It has to keep moving clockwise around Lake Ontario. This is an instruction from the elder. The water can’t retrace its steps.
Because of this mistake, we’ll have to walk on the interstate. Violet’s son Adam drives along the line of vehicles to let everyone know. “Josephine says everybody should be extra alert,” he says. “Park way over on the shoulder, and be careful when you get out of the car. And when you’re walking, keep as far away from the traffic as you can.”
Violet is my walking partner. We walk a quarter-mile or so on the country road, then drive to the front of the line and park near the ramp to the interstate. When it’s our turn to walk, we walk up the ramp and onto the highway. We get to the van that’s waiting on the shoulder. Josephine’s the next walker. “Watch yourselves,” she says as I hand her the copper bucket.
“I hope we don’t have to be on this too long,” Violet says as we shut ourselves into the van and wait for a break in traffic so we can pull out. Violet’s almost always smiling, but not now.
The highway takes getting used to. Trucks shudder the bones as they whiz past, leaving greasy clouds and slicks behind. We have to shout to talk. The plants by the side of the road are grey and feeble. But why should a pilgrimage be easy?
“Thanks for what you did this morning,” Violet says. It seems we’ve been on this interstate for a long time.
“What did I do?”
“Driving behind the walkers. It’s great walking in the early morning, but you can’t see where you’re going. Having somebody light the way made a big difference.”
“It was Josephine’s idea,” I say. “I’m glad it was useful. I guess she wanted to give me something to do since I can’t walk solo.”
“Why can’t you?”
“The eagle staff. Nonaboriginals can’t carry it.”
“Oh.” This seems to be news to her. “Hey, is that us?” A cop car, lights flashing, pulls up ahead of the van two vehicles ahead of us in line. “Who’s in Melvina’s van?” Violet says. I’m the last person who would know. All conveyances look about the same to me. I have trouble recognizing the cars of family members. Most likely I won’t ever keep straight which van is Melvina’s and which belongs to the sisters and which to Josephine. And it’s impossible to keep track of where anybody is at any given moment. Even if you figure out who’s where in line, people drive off to get gas or find coffee or a restroom, so the order of walkers and vehicles is always in flux.
The cop leans down to the window of Melvina’s van. “I hope it’s Josephine he’s talking to,” Violet says. “She’s good with cops.”
I ask if there have been problems on the other Walks. She says not really, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the van. Then it’s time for us to walk. “Megwetch,” Lucy says, thanking Violet for taking the eagle staff from her. Barb has no words for me, no smile, no glance as my fist closes over the bucket’s wire handle. As Violet and I bend into the wind with our burdens, the cop gets back into his car and waits for trucks to whip by before pulling into the lane. Debbie waits for us by the next car in line, which happens to be my rental. “I didn’t see him take out his ticket book,” she says. “He probably just said to be careful.”
“So be careful,” Violet says. Debbie grins and strides away, holding the bucket away from her body as if it weighs nothing, the other arm brandishing the staff. Violet and I get in my car. I’d like to reconfigure my layers of clothing, but Violet tells me to hurry and pull up behind Melvina’s van. Josephine exits the van as I bump along the rocky shoulder. Violet and I get out of the rental. I leave the engine running.
“Young guy,” Josephine says of the cop. “Friendly. He just wanted to see if we were having any problems. We’ll get off this highway as soon as we can. Just another few miles. Did you get any of those muffins? There’s more in the van.”
I’m starved. I ask Violet if she wants to split one. She shrugs. “They’re on the front seat, Julie,” Josephine says. “Go take a couple.” I hoist up onto the step and reach into the open window. The scent of sage smoke hangs heavy. Crinkled dry broken leaves are scattered on the dash. Josephine must have charmed the young cop. In his shoes, I’d have thought she was a Deadhead.
The muffins are the two-fisted kind that come encased in cellophane. I stuff one into a pocket, hoping I won’t end up eating all of it. Violet and I leave Josephine and drive a distance ahead of the first car in line. I park. Violet peers out the window. “I don’t see any water,” she says, so we stay in the car.
I pinch off some muffiin top and hold out the rest to Violet. “I don’t eat much when I’m walking.” She waves it away. “I start taking my medicine drinks a couple of weeks before the Walk starts, and then I just don’t feel hungry.” Me, I’ve been starving since I left home. Nothing seems to fill me. The muffin makes my fingers sticky. If pressed to identify its flavor, I’d have to say jellybean.
“You’ve walked every year, right?” I say.
She nods. “This is my fourth.”
“Is every year kind of the same, or is each one distinct?” I ask her.
“The first year, when we did Lake Superior, we had almost nothing,” she says. “There was no money and hardly any people. It was just Josephine, Melvina, me, and a few others. Very few. We didn’t have the right shoes, so people got bad blisters. We didn’t bring enough medical supplies. One of the tents leaked, and it rained a lot. But somehow we always got what we needed. People would come out of nowhere and give us things – food or money or a place to stay. Now Josephine and Melvina start fundraising as soon as they get back from a Walk. They work all year getting ready. Things are a lot more organized than they were at the beginning. Maybe too much.”
“How so?”
“Personally, I miss the camping. It feels good to sleep with your body right on the earth. And also you get to be with the light. It makes it a lot easier to get up in the morning when you’re right out where the light is. Plus hotel rooms cost money.”
“As far as that goes,” I say. “Do people put money in at the beginning, or contribute as things go along, or what?”
“It depends.” She shrugs.
On what, I wonder, but I’m almost afraid to know. Should I have sent in a contribution before joining the Walk? Is Melvina refusing to take money from me so I’ll quit tagging along? Again I feel that I’m navigating an unknown country without a map or guidebook on a moonless midnight. I have to ask someone directions.
“I want to pay my way,” I say, “but Melvina won’t take my money.”
Violet nods. “A lot of native people haven’t had a lot of positive experiences with the white culture,” she says. “The white people they’ve been around are people with some kind of authority, who can make decisions that will affect your family or your whole life. Economics is a charged issue. Taking money can feel like charity.”
She talks more about white people. It’s not in a hateful way, but for context. Anthropologists and academics, probing and questioning for their studies and surveys, treating people like specimens. Spiritual seekers and new-agers, jerryrigging woo-woo mysticism onto ancient religious traditions. Hawkers and exploiters of sweatlodge ceremonies and vision quests. Pretenders to full-blood forebears.
I listen. I try not to be defensive. I know about these types, and hope I’m not any of them. But every step of this Walk, I’ve been probing and questioning. Have I been objectifying people? Have I been projecting Josephine onto a wise medicine woman cigar-store statue, hoping to nourish my emaciated spirituality? How would I act or think differently if I were among middle-class white strangers?
I think about other times I’ve been immersed in unfamiliar subcultures. A family holiday with boisterous first-generation Italian-Americans. Teaching angry delinquent teenage girls at a residential treatment center. A party sprinkled with celebrities. Spending time in a small midwestern town, where people talk more slowly than I’m used to, ask how you are and listen to the reply. Wherever I go, I’m nosy. I figure there’s something to be learned from almost anybody. I watch how people elbow and knee each other for rank and authority. I speculate about primal dramas and domestic dilemmas, ask as many questions as I can get away with, answer few. Sure, broad strokes can be simpleminded, but don’t we all catalogue in order to make sense of the worlds within the world, outside of our own world? No wonder he’s a commitophobe; his mother was an alcoholic. Of course she’s got hangups; she was raised Catholic. So he’s an obnoxious knowitall. He was raised in New York; what do you expect?
Despite my bent for indexing and ordering, the last thing I want to do is to stereotype anyone. Still, I have my preconceptions. Indians don’t trust white people. The average native person has been touched by poverty and substance abuse. A lot of them smoke cigarettes. They’re witty and like to make jokes. They eat fry bread and bannock. They operate on Indian time. My generalizations are based on almost no hard data. I haven’t been around many native people, except at the few powwows and dances I’ve been to and the guided tours of Southwestern pueblos I’ve paid to take. I’ve done some reading: histories and memoirs and the novels of Erdrich and Silko and Hogan and the prison writings of Leonard Peltier. I’ve seen the movie Smoke Signals.
“Grandma,” my 12-year-old grandson said when I was getting ready to leave on this trip, “why are you so interested in Native Americans?”
I told him that I’m interested to know how people lived before Europeans came to this land, with their solemn, forbidding savior and their lust for shiny metals. I said that I believe that it’s my duty and obligation as a descendent of those Europeans to acknowledge and face and know about what was done. Someone in our line, I told him, some forebear, some multi-great-grandfather, maybe many of them, participated in the wars against the first people – the conversions, the displacements, the politicking. We could well carry the blood of murderers. The least I can do is to try to educate myself about the descendents of the people who were here before my ancestors came and did them wrong.
So, yes. I’m asking questions. I’d be interested in the people on the Walk whether they were aboriginal or not, but I particularly am because they are. And the person I most want to know about, of course, is Josephine. What made her decide to do this? What is her spiritual work in the world, and how does the Walk fit into that? How does she get others to join her? What is the rest of her life like?
Then suddenly somehow I am walking with her. But of course it’s not by chance that we’re together. She’s the one who decides who walks with whom. Is she granting me an interview? Didn’t I explain to her that I’m not a journalist, that I don’t know what I’ll write about the Walk, or if I ever will? The longer I’m on this road with these women and their sons, the fewer words I have for what this is. I don’t want to slice her up and slide her into my microscope. I don’t want to chatter at her. But I might not get another chance to be alone with Josephine. Where to begin?
But conversation is easy. I don’t have to think of what to say next or how to ask what I want to know. We note where we are. This stream is clear, with clean smooth rocks at the bottom. This field is planted with, what, alfalfa? What’s causing this grove of trees to die? We talk about how the world is now. Children vid-mainlining. The epidemic of war. The need for healing. Cancers eating up loved ones. Scarred souls at every turn. The huge ravenous need of so many for whatever can be glugged down, breathed in, or shot up to chase the grey, revive dreams, amputate memory. The bulldozed defoliated squared-off stripmined bombed-out burning melting earth, mother of all of us with pulse and sap and blood. Water, the earth’s blood, laden with industrial sludge, radioactivity, parasites. Contaminated creeks into rivers into lakes into seas. Toxic groundwater, snowmelt, and rain.
We talk of women – women who put up with bad men, women who struggle to keep their families going, women who get rid of their babies. “Abortion is against the Creator,” Josephine says.
“Is that the traditional belief or are you personally opposed?” I ask her.
“Both,” she says.
“Were you raised Catholic?”
“No. I was lucky. All that guilt. I don’t think much of organized religion.”
“I don’t either,” I tell her, “but I don’t know much about it. My parents hardly ever went to church, except sometimes we went to this one Catholic church in the black community where the priest was a civil rights activist. We went if there was going to be a march or something, but there wasn’t much in those services about God or anything, only about justice.”
She walks down to the drainage ditch by the side of the road to put tobacco down by a little stream. I go on ahead with the bucket. The water must keep moving. “That stream wasn’t so bad,” she says. “Not as bad as some.”
“How do you tell how the water’s doing?” I ask her.
“Sometimes you can smell if it’s sick,” she says. “Or by how it moves, if it’s stagnant or if it’s moving along. Or you listen.”
You listen. The sounds around me clarify. That’s a bird flying overhead. That’s another one rustling in the bush. Wind tangles in tree limbs. Music blares by from a passing car. We get to the vehicle that waits for us and hand off the staff and bucket. I drive us to the front of the line and stop the car. She gets out. I get out too. She crosses the road, telling about Nanabozho, namer of the animals, bringer of fire, monster-slayer. Lean and mopey cows press against a fence, eyeing us from a shabby field.
“You poor things. You poor, poor things.” She strokes a nose. “If you were my cows, I’d let you roam in the woods. You know I would.”
The cows seem comforted. We pluck dandelion leaves and chew them to see how polluted they might be from proximity to the road. They taste all right. We talk about divorce and the raising of children. She says she and her husband tried to always be gentle with their kids, talking to them in a respectful way. I don’t try to keep hold of her words. I don’t take notes. We seem to be together a long time, long enough to speak of many important things, plant medicine and Jesus and missionaries and sacred pictographs and the migrations of her forebears.
On the walkie-talkie Josephine hears that Adam has found a spot for lunch right on the water. I haven’t laid eyes on Lake Ontario since I joined the Walk. I’m excited, and so is Josephine. “I smell water! I smell water!” she breathes as we get closer. She hurries to the shoreline as the rest of us unload grocery bags and coolers.
But she looks subdued as she hunches on a rock and dips into the mucky waves with a plastic cup. I want to go to her, but I don’t. She’s with the water, doing what she can for it, giving it tobacco, singing. Slicks of algae slither onto shore. The water seems glum and ill. “I’m going to have this water analyzed,” Josephine says, joining the rest of us with our bologna sandwiches on the rocky beach. “I’d like to know what’s in it.” The water in the plastic glass is a turbid green. She pours it into an empty water bottle and caps it.
After lunch, Debbie says she’s heading back home. She’d planned to stay longer, but she’s worried about her kids. “I’m honored that I could be here,” she states. The others nod and say little back to her. I wonder if Debbie isn’t liked, or is it just not customary to be expressive? If this were an AIDS ride, people would be shrieking and sobbing, declaring lifelong friendship.
That afternoon I walk mostly with Adam, and others too, but not Josephine again. I appreciate the time she’s taken with me. If that’s all she’s giving, it’s plenty. We walk until dusk, and there’s still no word that Josephine’s ready to stop for the night. Nobody seems perturbed about it. “We stop when Josephine’s ready,” Adam shrugs. Then Melvina’s sent to find somewhere to stay. She’s gone a long time. We walk and walk in the chill of the gathering dark until BJ’s voice on the walkie says Melvina’s back. “A B&B!” he exclaims. People hoot.
Everyone gathers at the spot Josephine has chosen as the stopping point. She pours a few drops from the bucket on the ground, says some words in Anishinabemowin, puts tobacco down. Everyone piles into vehicles. Nobody comes with me in mine. I’m okay with it. They are family to each other. Driving in the dark, I try to make order of the day, but it’s one long stride through light and shadow. Now that I know I’m done until tomorrow, weariness floods in.
It’s a nice place, the B&B, run by Colleen, a cheerful white lady. “You’ll get a real bed tonight, Julie,” Josephine says, showing me the room I’ll share with the three sisters and Violet. There are four beds for the five of us. Lucy and Barb are already on one of them, one’s head at the other’s feet.
Colleen will have coffee and muffins ready at 3:30 in the morning. “So you’ll all be on the road by 4 or so?” she says.
“Except the boys,” says Josephine. “We let them sleep in. They’re usually up by 8:30 or 9.”
“Lucky boys,” Colleen says. “Why do they get to take it easy?” I interpret her glance at me to mean that we civilized white women wouldn’t let our sons get away with such laziness, but what can you do? Everyone knows that squaws do all the work, while the men lie in the sun and smoke.
I’ve wondered about this myself. What I see is that Adam, Alex, BJ, and little Kane are on the Walk to honor their mothers. The women do cater to their sons, but the young men do their part, carrying, lifting, putting out food, gathering up trash. They’re gracious at all times and conduct themselves with dignity. Their respect for women is palpable. Water and walking for water are the responsibilities of women. In a way, the boys are guests. They walk as a gift given freely. In return, they can sleep.
Josephine doesn’t respond to Colleen’s question. She’s not much for explaining. When someone passes us on the road and asks what we’re doing, Josephine will say, “We’re walking for the water.” She’ll then walk on.
I manage to corner Josephine and Melvina in the closet-sized room the two of them are sharing for the night. I ask if I can pay for tonight’s lodging. “Sure,” Josephine shrugs. “Why not?” By the time I’ve tracked Colleen down and given her a check, everyone who hasn’t gone out to find supper is in bed. I consider collapsing, but I could really use a meal. Maybe I can find some fresh fish, or at least a salad. No such luck. I scrounge a patty melt at a gas station café.
The food is getting to me. Two solid days of nothing but white bread, greasy snacks, sugary drinks and my body’s turning plastic. Even a decent cup of coffee would be ambrosial. I crave an orange, spinach with garlic butter, a glass of cold milk.
In the morning I don’t have a chance to try Colleen’s coffee. Unless I follow someone, I’ll never be able to find the route. Violet and the sisters wordlessly dress in the dark. I scramble into my car and hope that the taillights in front of me on the winding roads belong to someone I’m supposed to be with.
All morning I’m seriously dragging. Only by continuous ingestion of whatever snacks are at hand can I muster the strength to pull myself along. Sugar fuels, then depletes, a toxic cycle. I find myself with Hilda, Lucy, and Violet on a store run, and my brain’s so soggy I can’t even think of what to buy. I end up with a sack of Famous Amos mini chocolate chip cookies. The white clerks stare at us in our long skirts. “Are you with some kind of group?” one of them asks me.
“We’re walking around the lake,” I said. “To raise awareness about the water.” I’m too tired to say more. If this is how Josephine explains it to people, it’s how I’ll do it, too.
“Good for you,” the clerk says. “When my kids were little, we went swimming in Lake Ontario every weekend. Now I don’t let my grandkids put a foot in that water.”
“That’s why we’re walking,” I tell her. She nods, as if this makes sense to her. The others have left the store. I hurry out to join them in the van.
At lunchtime I feel desperate at the prospect of more processed food. But Hilda has bought a watermelon, a miracle of sweet scarlet revitalizing flesh. It’s even cold. I could eat half of it by myself, but there are ten other pairs of hands braving the knife’s blade as Hilda cuts wedges. She brandishes the knife above her head. Everybody laughs.