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.

Frazier on McMurtry; McMurtry on Frazier

Reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful review of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia: A Texas Trilogy (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), I was reminded of McMurtry’s equally wonderful review of Frazier’s On the Rez (The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2000). On the Rez is one of my all-time favorite books. It tells about Frazier’s experiences among the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. McMurtry’s piece, titled “Lighting Out for the Territory,” is an excellent appreciation of it. He calls it “a complex follow-up” to Frazier’s superb Great Plains. He says of Le War Lance, one of On the Rez’s central characters,

Ian Frazier and Le War Lance begin as strangers, become friends, and end as brothers. The brotherhood they achieve is a high estate but not an easy estate. The spiritual travel involved was mainly Mr. Frazier’s; this book is the story of that pilgrimage, that is, of his effort to live up to what is best in the Sioux. And what is best in the Sioux, as he already knows from his attachment to Crazy Horse, is very good indeed. Living up to it involves a good deal of struggle and a lot of tension, as Mr. Frazier grapples with the uncertainties, inconsistencies, and inscrutabilities of life on the rez.

Frazier, in his piece, has some memorable things to say about McMurtry’s work, too. I particularly like this one: “The books in this trilogy are like songs for acoustic guitar, with maybe some chase-scene banjo thrown in.”

Frazier and McMurtry – two great writers in love with the Great Plains.

Eagle Feather

This morning, cycling from Brackley Beach to Covehead Harbour, in Prince Edward Island National Park, I found an eagle feather in the grass on the edge of the trail. My wife spotted it, and I went back and picked it up. It’s a wing feather, dark gray, with a tiny patch of white at the base. I treasure it. It brings to mind the scene in Ian Frazier’s great On the Rez (2000), in which Le War Lance, one of my favorite characters in all of literature, gives Frazier an eagle feather:

He was wearing a gray felt cowboy hat with a tall, uncreased crown and an eagle feather hanging from the back on a buckskin thong. He took off the hat and untied the eagle feather and handed it to me. He said it was a present for my son, then only a month or two old. We shook hands, and I wished him luck. He said as soon as he had gotten himself some Chinese food he would catch the next bus home. On the subway back to Brooklyn, three people asked me about the eagle feather. A black man in an Indian-style choker necklace made of pipe beads asked if I would be interested in selling it. I smiled and said no.