The Black Hills, The Gorey Road
1998; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 2; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.1998.a926629
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoEamonnWall The Black Hills, The Gorey Road My children were asleep and my wife was inside reading on a bed, while I was sitting outside of our rental cabin in a campground a few miles outside of Custer, South Dakota. It was the longest day of the year and the evening was cloudless and cool, the sky enormous in one direction and blocked by pine trees in another. I was a long way from home, aware all day as I drove westward of the widening gap between where I was now and where I had left on my American journey, begun twelve years before when I had loaded suitcases into a car and headed for Dublin Airport. But I was so happy: since childhood I had dreamed ofdriving across America but doubted if I'd ever get the opportunity to accomplish it. As kids, we referred to Custer the man as "General Custard;' which made him familiar to us, and this was one silly thing which occurred to me this afternoon when we rolled into Custer, the town. We had driven here from Omaha, where we live now, so we had not come far; however, each of us, in our own way, as the radio played a steady diet of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, felt the impact of the miles, markers, and the steady rising movement toward the hills. The West had begun to become a presence we could feel. Somewhere west ofValentine we had crossed into a new and sacred territory. To a degree, I'd been prepared for this: two sentences from Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography had been running round and round in my head for a couple of weeks. The first went like this: "Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy."1 The second followed thus: "The sense ofplace is unavoidable in western Dakota, and maybe that's our gift to the world."2 I suppose it was this book more than anything that had inspired my visit. I wished to view for myself this "holy" landscape, experience this "holiness " first-hand, and measure it against "the holy ground" of Ireland that I knew so well. Also, I wanted to drive to Dakota and witness "sense of place" in a topography I felt strangely drawn to, but for which I felt singularly unprepared . In Ireland, place, personality, and identity are inseparable; however, I 1. Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), p. 1. 2. Norris, p. 169. NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 2:4 (GEIMHREADH/WINTER, 1998), 9-23 The Black Hills, The Gorey Road doubted whether the Irish emotional lens I observed the world through-the narrow street, the small field, the wet grass --could accommodate these huge, dry vistas located in the center of the American continent. In this frame of mind, I arrived. A few hours earlier, we had been delayed because the main road was blocked by construction. We took a secondary route and got blocked there too. A Native American woman directing traffic, with a STOP/ Go sign, told me to drive back a few miles and turn onto a dirt road that would connect with the main road beyond where another crew were working, so I followed her directions-I went back, and turned left, and proceeded slowly up the winding dirt road, over the red earth of the Black Hills. It was an extraordinary , and quite accidental, experience-to be in the dark center of a forest in the middle of a continent, in a white station wagon with my wife and children . When we stopped the car, which we did frequently, I listened to the sound ofthe brei:ze blowing the low lying branches ofthe evergreens, and felt the cool air coming from the forest into the car and touching our mesmerized faces. Above the road was the brightness ofa skywithout clouds, and to each side the great darkness and mystery ofthe forest. I remained quiet. I listened to the excited voices ofmy wife and children who were in awe of the opportunity to be present here that chance had presented. I knew too, because...
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