Return from Sun Dance

We are back from a very successful Sun Dance, very glad we went.

It all started with a 4 day, Thursday through Sunday, vacation request. The traditional Sun Dance is 12 days long - 4 days of preparation (including Tree Day on the 4th day), 4 days of ceremony, and 4 days of rest after the ceremony. It was very important for us to get to this Sun Dance for a number of reasons - we knew this had been a hard year for most of the dancers; our friend L, whom we had just visited in Italy, was bringing his family over for his 4th and final dance; and we were hoping to visit a friend of ours who was having a particularly difficult year. We thought it was most important for us to get there for the 4 days of ceremony, which we could do by working an early shift on Wednesday (ending at 2:30) and a late shift on Monday (starting at 2:30). The work schedules run Thursday through Wednesday, so I was surprised to get see on my work schedule preceding our vacation that I had my regular days off - Tuesday and Wednesday. I talked with my managers who had no problem with me taking a total of 6 days. Once Alex reviewed the arrangements with his managers, we were ready to take off 2 days earlier that we'd thought we'd get to leave!

We wisely decided to leave early Tuesday morning, leaving time for us to wrap up packing up the truck Monday evening and giving us a chance to make stops in Livingston and Billings, MT on Tuesday during the day. (Sorry, D, we never did make it to your softball game.) We have happily discovered a couple of natural foods stores in Montana - the Bozeman Food Co-op and Montana Harvest, so we wanted to check out the latter in Bozeman for beet pills for Alex's gall bladder. While they were out of stock of the beet pills, we walked away with a bottle of green food, high fructose corn syrup free yogurt, orange and crunchy carrots, and super yummy frozen coconut bars. We had to eat all 4 of them right away as they wouldn't have stayed frozen in our little red cooler - darn. :-)

When we were planning our 11 hour drive from Mammoth Hot Springs to Cherry Creek, SD, we agreed that we would pull over and camp when we started to get tired rather than arrive at the Sun Dance site after dark. Looking at our map, we planned to pull over at the Indian holy site of Bear Butte State Park, just outside of the motorcycle town of Sturgis, SD. Sturgis was still in the guise as a sleepy little town as the rally doesn't start until August 9th, so the campground below Bear Butte was deserted when we pulled in. A clean pit toilet, pristine lake complete with swans, and a flat site to park the truck made for camping paradise. A thunderstorm rolled in while we were dining on sausage and fruit and continued through the evening, but we made ourselves cozy in the back of the truck and fell asleep to the sound of the pouring rain and the bright flashes of lightening. Alas, another car had pulled in, interrupting our solitude, but the downpour constructed a privacy curtain between us. We awoke to a glorious morning of sunshine and breakfast by the lake and met our temporary neighbors. They were a retired couple from Canada travelling around on holiday who often chose camp sites over the added expense of staying in hotels that lacked the benefit of waking up to a beautiful sunny, outdoor morning. Ironically, I had just wondered the evening before when we would be too old to continue our travel method of camping out of the back of the pickup and would conform to the societal norm of staying in hotel rooms. This lovely couple, who had fashioned a sleeping area on the floor of their mini-van with a storage area above (vs our truck where we have the storage below and the sleeping platform above), confirmed with me that we would be too old to camp out of the truck when we are no longer able to climb in back to go to bed! Fortunately, our new friends left just as we were finishing breakfast as I was keen on taking a quick bath (sans soap) in the lake. Refreshed and in clean clothes (we now have a clothes rod across the rear passenger seat of the truck left from our move to Yellowstone, making travelling with clothes infinitely easier), we took off for our drive into the heart of South Dakota, knowing that we would still arrive early enough to participate in the tree ceremony.

Driving down the dirt roads that serve as the country highways on the reservation and over the rolling hills of the grasslands of the South Dakota prairie, I am fixated on my newly acquired knowledge that there were once 40 to 60 million bison roaming the prairies. Decimated by the hunt for buffalo robes and the effort to exterminate the Indian tribes, the bison are now limited to a handful of free roaming herds in the US and Canada and roughly 500,000 (per Wikipedia) being raised for meat production. Despite the fenced in prairie land throughout our drive, indicating the presence of cattle industry ranches, I am still hopeful that one of the ancient bison herds will rise out of the prairie and rumble past us on their summer trek across the grasslands.

On our way to the Sun Dance grounds, we switch to "Indian time" - a place where time by a clock has no meaning, cell phones don't work, where time is measured by fits of activity, periods of resting, and meaning is given only by the passage of the sun overhead and the fullness of the evening moon. Looking at the grounds, I am reminded of why the traditional Sun Dance starts 4 days before the ceremony - the circle isn't set up, the food shack has been devastated by horses trying to gain shelter from winter and spring storms and won't be rebuilt this year, and the fire pit is full of water from last night's thunderstorm. We speculate that "someday" we will be able to arrive 4 days before ceremony and do something extraordinary on the Sun Dance grounds - build a pit toilet or rebuild the food shack, perhaps. But, we are, gratefully, on Indian time, so we are all able to take our time as we prepare the Sun Dance circle and arbors, empty the fire pit, and welcome other participants as they arrive. It's a time to greet our friends from last year and begin conversations with people we are meeting for the first time. Towards evening, it's time to go get the tree.

On that note, I'm going to suspend my discourse about Sun Dance as it is time for me to get ready to go to work. The weather has been an adventure here, with rain in the morning, thunderstorms in the evening, and sun and warmth through the middle of the day.