Kent Nerburn

It’s happened. What a fine bit of human sharing, come together around a family’s simple need.

In a world where the large forces often seem brutish and beyond our control, it is the small gestures that sometimes speak most eloquently.

Marvel, for a moment, at the profound ordinariness of this all, then consider what we, together, have done.

For those of you who have not been following this or have come late to the party, go back and read “Candles on the Grave” in the excerpts, and the weblog entries for February and March.

For any of you, click on the individual photos if you’d like to see full-sized versions.

This, sadly, is the sign the cemetery put up after they made Tyler’s family remove their decorations. It was one of the reasons I became so intent upon doing something to help the family. Maybe I’m being naive about issues of gravesite etiquette, but this seemed, and still seems, mean-spirited and unjustifiably directive. Grief is personal, and takes its own shape and course. Just yesterday I saw a man about my age walking through town pulling a bicycle pull-behind carrier filled with clothing, etc. This morning there was an article in the paper explaining that he was walking around America in response to his son’s suicide several years ago. If our cemetery folks had been in charge of the sidewalks, he likely would have been arrested or removed for violating community standards with an inappropriate expression of grief.

The balloon launches take place each year on Tyler’s birthday. For those of you living in the bright lights and well-pressed reality of our big cities, you can see how ordinary — even dowdy — our life is here in the northland. It’s just a reminder that stories of goodness and human hope can come out of the most mundane and seemingly inconsequential settings. Notice the solitary lantern that had become the only marker the family could afford that was permitted under cemetery guidelines. Even this the cemetery officials tried to have removed.

Tyler’s balloons rising up. A simple ritual, but one that draws the heart upward toward mystery and the unknown.

Here is what the family was left with after their decorations were removed. Carrie, the grandmother, came every day and lit the candle in the receptacle. That was all the memorial Tyler had until we all joined together to do something.

The gift of many anonymous, caring people, some of you among them.

It is a small gesture with a big heart. I think we can all be proud.

I truly thank you all.

There comes a moment in any creative project, whether writing, painting, composing, or anything else, when the work suddenly comes alive in your hands. What was a mass of disconnected materials mystically congeals and takes on a life of its own. You become almost an observer rather than a creator — you are a midwife to a new birth.

It is for this moment that all creators live. Instead of cogitating and anguishing, you rush around in a kind of dionysian frenzy. “Yes, this!” “No, not that!” Decisions come fast, seeming to be made for you rather than by you. You don’t want to sleep because the project inhabits your dreams. You don’t want to leave because you might come upon a discovery that cries out to be made at that very second.

I have reached this point on the Joseph book. I am no longer creating it, I am discovering it. I don’t know whether what I discover will be great or mediocre, or if it will have a good and successful life. But right now I don’t care. I am watching something come alive by my efforts, and that is enough.

I mention this partly to let you know, and partly by way of justification for the paucity of my entries on this site. I have not forgotten, I’ve just been overtaken.

The responses to my requests for ideas have been fascinating. They seem to fall into three areas: Open the door wider on Native American life and belief; write a kind of spiritual “mein kampf,” explaining my own personal struggles rather than addressing broad, spiritual themes; and write another book that speaks to the spiritual dimension of the ordinary. I’m chewing on all of this, and it will bear heavily on what I propose to publishers once Joseph is complete.

For now, it’s back to the manuscript, though. I’m so curious to see what will come out of this three-plus year effort. If, as Leonardo said, the quality of the work is in direct proportion to the gestation period, this should be something. Then again, it could be “a mightly labor for the birth of a mouse.”

But we’ll never know until it is born. So, I’m back to work. Catch you all soon with, I hope, more news on the headstone. It was supposed to be installed by Memorial Day. You’ll be the first to know.

This is a bit of a whim on my part, but it makes sense. I’ve been thinking about the project that I will undertake after I finish the Joseph book. And it occurs to me that I might want to ask you, my readers, what you would like me to write about. If you have any suggestions, let me know. I can’t promise anything, obviously, but it will help guide my thinking. Send me any thoughts under the “comments” section of this entry. That way other readers will get to see them, too.

Thanks.

Well, I’ve certainly left you sitting on dead air for awhile. My apologies. There have been several reasons — none dire, but all real.

First, I’ve been waiting for definitive word on the headstone. Carrie (the woman’s name — she has allowed me to use it) has had several surgeries and has thus far not sent me the email note to all of you that I’m hoping to publish here. She has, however, purchased the headstone, and it should be installed soon. That is the point at which I am going to have to learn how to place photos on this website, because I want you all to see what you’ve helped accomplish. Despite my silence on the issue, it is truly a wonderful thing to be part of and to see coming to fruition. I’ll bring you all back in the loop as soon as I can do so in a meaningful fashion.

On the writing front, I’ve been pushing hard to finish the Joseph book. This is truly a case of wrestling an alligator — all legs and arms and sharp teeth and dangerous tails. I had to go down to Kansas and Oklahoma to do some final work on the exile period, and this was both fascinating and rewarding. There is a man in Kansas who is a living historical treasure regarding the Nez Perce exile. He is a local historian, wedded to his small home town, who has done yeoman research that not only fills in a gap the Nez Perce story, but flies in the face of the observations of the various historical big dogs who have skimmed over this period of the Nez Perce struggle. It might not seem like much to an outside observer, but to one who has committed several years of his life to this project, this man — Larry O’Neal — and his work have been stunning, even monumental, discoveries.

He and I have become friends, and he has been kind enough to let me use his voluminous research for my own book. Sadly, I won’t be able to do justice to his materials; this period deserves a book on its own. If it were my call, I would have written only about the post-surrender period of the Nez Perce struggle. But, as with most of our jobs, I serve a master, who serves another master, who serves yet another, until we arrive at the great master, PROFIT. It is a romantic misconception that authors just write what they want.

But, enough of my literary travails.

On a front that may interest you more, I stopped in Leavenworth, Kansas, and tried to bring a copy of Neither Wolf nor Dog to Leonard Peltier. It was quite an experience. The prison looks like the Supreme Court building, complete with colonnades and a white marble facade. But behind this facade is the usual walled fortress, stretching for what seems like blocks.

I drove up the long boulevard-like entry toward the colonnades and spoke into a microphone, explaining my purpose. Further passage was impossible because the road had been blocked with post-9/11 concrete berms. The voice that responded was, shall we say, less than inviting in its manner and intonation. It told me that I could not advance beyond that point. I explained my purpose and was told that I had to mail the book, and to do that I had to contact the prison. I pointed out that I was AT the prison and that this WAS my attempt to contact the prison. Said voice was decidedly lacking in a sense of humor and blurted out an address faster than I could write, then told me to move on. I felt like Dorothy and her friends asking for an audience with the wizard. Unfortunately, the great and powerful government had no intention of granting my request. I drove off unserved and unsatisfied, and not at all enchanted with the man behind the curtain. Obviously, if I want to get a book to Leonard, it will have to be done in a manner that allows the prison to parse it for metal files and anthrax and bomb plastique.

All in all, it was a very disquieting experience — unnecessarily unfriendly and brusque. And this is coming from a man who, in his younger days, played basketball in San Quentin, did work in Stillwater Penitentiary, and visited several maximum security institutions that carried the unlikely names of “vocational institutes.” Even a short stop at the dreaded Pelican Bay prison near Crescent City, California, several years ago did not have the same dark, menacing edge as this simple drive up to Leavenworth Penitentiary on a sunlit, Kansas spring day.

So now I’m back after a short interlude in Alamosa, Colorado, where I spoke to a group of students at Adams College. Joseph and the Nez Perce loom before me like ten mile high thunderheads. Each day I trudge out to my writing cabin, tank up on coffee, and try to do justice to this fascinating story. Maybe one of these days I will actually get it done and achieve my purpose of bringing more people to an awareness of this little-known part of our national history. If that happens, the project will have been worthwhile.

Until then, I keep writing. And I’ll do my best to keep on blogging, too.

Keep the faith and enjoy the springtime.