July 15-16, Fort Thompson, SD to Kyle, SD. I woke up from a deep sleep. The basement was dark and its concrete walls kept it cool. I felt like I was waking up in a cave and the dissonance of having woken up with Kate in Chicago, in Eric and Sheila's guest room, in a motel on I-35, and then in a basement in Ft. Thompson across from Lyle, disoriented me in a way I can't really describe. It wasn't that I didn't know where I was. I just didn't know what face to put on, didn't know what the days were asking me anymore. I was a little bit sore from the ride and my face radiated sunburn.

We were riding parallel to I-90, just a few miles north. My mind moved back to Kate, and I forgot about the road, and when I tuned back in, I realized that my fear was an illusion. If I relaxed, the wind would blow my bike back and forth, but it would not blow me off the road. Only fear could fool me into overreacting and hurting myself. I won't say that the remainder of the ride to Murdo was pleasant, but it was not so awful as I had thought. I was able to appreciate the futility of the big trucks hauling their cargo of the earth's shavings, shimmering in the heat as they lumbered back and forth. I came to a T and turned left and just before I reached I-90 I saw Lyle's truck in a gas station parking lot and I pulled alongside of him.

Lyle spent his early years in Wanblee. Wanbli is the Lakota word for eagle, and the town takes its name from a table butte in the badlands called Eagle Nest Butte. Lyle's Dad had been the Episcopal priest on that part of Pine Ridge. Wanblee is a small windblown town, poor even by Rez standards. It's on the side of the reservation furthest from Pine Ridge, the agency town. The people on that side of the Rez are called Kiyaksa, which means "they stay away." They were the bands that least wanted to surrender and they remain the full-bloods, the native speakers, the least assimilated members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

A mile west of Kyle we turned onto a rutted dirt road that ran north toward the Badlands. The land we were heading to belonged to a friend of ours named Ed Young Man They Are Afraid of His Horses. His name for a long time was Ed Featherman but when he cleaned up his act, he took his grandfather's name on his mother's side. It's a mouthful. Young Man Afraid was a famous leader of the Oglala and you can see him in most of the old treaty photos. Ed is the imaginary Indian, a gigantic man who wears boots, a big rodeo buckle, a beaded ballcap, turquoise rings, shell earings, and looks tough as hell. He was the hall proctor at the high school when I was there.

We stayed all afternoon, in the sun and hot wind. I felt an indescribable loneliness. I didn't belong there. I missed Kate. Two years before I'd come to Uncle John's sundance when I was in love with Gretchen. I remember sneaking away to call her from the top of the hill with a borrowed cell phone. I thought that love had been perfect and it hadn't taken long to go wrong. Why am I always trying so hard to fall in love? That year, the women in the cookshack had teased me all through the dance about the farmer's wife I was trying to run off with. She's not his wife. They'd just laugh harder. It was their way of telling me that I couldn't keep running away with women. They'd already met two of them. One came to live with me for my last few months on the Rez. They blamed her for taking me away and they blamed me for liking skinny white girls with money.