Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

In Ian Frazier’s great On the Rez (2000), there’s a chapter on Indian bars. And in that chapter, there’s a sentence: “I walked around Buffalo Gap’s red dirt and gravel streets one summer afternoon awhile ago.” And that sentences leads to this description: 

The grain elevators by the railroad tracks were still active, with sparrows eating spills of grain on the ground nearby. Against the side of a building behind the elevator an assortment of galvanized-metal tanks of various sizes leaned on their sides, the ten-foot ones inside the twenty-foot ones inside the thirty-footers, like a set of nesting cups.

And that right there is why I love this book so much. Nosing around the little town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, Frazier is like an inspired street photographer – Eugène Atget, say, or Garry Winogrand – only instead of a camera, he uses a notebook. Anthony Lane said of Atget, “He stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice” (“A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 15, 1994). The same applies to Frazier. He’s a connoisseur of the overlooked and disregarded. He visits Buffalo Gap to check out a bar called the Stockman, where a twenty-two-year-old Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull was fatally stabbed in 1973. But Frazier is always looking for things to notice. The grain elevators catch his eye. Poking around them, he spies the galvanized-metal tanks, noting the way they’re put inside each other resembles a “set of nesting cups.” It’s the sort of incidental detail I relish.

Here’s another example from the same book. This time, Frazier is on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, visiting his friend Le War Lance. Frazier writes: 

On Sunday morning, I got up in my motel room at 4:30 and drove to Le’s to go hunting. I took the back road from Chadron and saw one other car in thirty-eight miles. I was aware of the dusty smell of the car heater, the staticky uselessness of the radio, and the veering of the headlights back and forth across the darkness as the car swerved through the windings of the road. When I pulled into Le’s driveway, I turned off the engine and the lights and stood for a while in the darkness beside the car and looked at the stars. One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot.

That image of Frazier standing in the darkness beside his car, observing the stars, is marvelously fine. The ending – “The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot” – is like an epiphany.

One more example of Frazier’s superb noticing, this from On the Rez’s chapter 15, in which Frazier again visits Le War Lance on Pine Ridge Reservation:

At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it, but it was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

How I love that passage! The bit about Le’s oily thumbprints on the sandwich makes me smile every time I read it. On the Rez abounds with such passages. Like James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it’s an “effort in human actuality” (Agee’s words). It’s also a brilliant evocation of the Pine Ridge Reservation. I treasure it.