Joseph Bottum - The Christmas Plains

Copyright 2012 by Joseph Bottum

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

WWW.CROWNPUBLISHING.COM

IMAGE is a registered trademark, and the I colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3766-4

Cover design by Laura Duffy
Cover photography Kendra Perry-Koski

v3.1

In memory of my father

Contents

Preface

T HIS BOOK STARTED out as a small collection of essays about the meaning of Christmas. You know the sort of thing: a kind of Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus, that marvelous piece of 1897 newspaper sentimentality, jazzed up for modern audiences.

Unfortunately, I let down my guard, early on, and my family and friends began crowding in. Old, half-remembered Christmas decorations started shouting for a place, and even those scratched red saucer sleds my sisters and I had when we were young clamored for a mention. Holiday dinners, travelogues, the lyrics of carols, all the Christmas books Ive ever readeverybody wanted in on the party. I sat down to write about how language works, and my daughter promptly marched in and refused to leave. Charles Dickens, that titan of the season, muscled his way into chapter after chapter. Even a small passage about the purpose of Advent nearly got itself trampled by recollections of childhood visits to my grandmothers. I tried to fight them off, but it wasnt much use. The intruders took over the house for their yuletide squabbles and celebrations, pretty much relegating me to the kitchen with orders to keep the food and drink coming and otherwise stay out of their way.

The result was supposed to be a set of five Christmas thoughts, interspersed with a handful of illustrative Christmas memories. Instead, it became a parade of reminiscences, broken only by the few moments when I was able to shout loudly enough above the holiday din to be heard on the meaning of it all. Id apologize, but its not really my fault. I blame the stubbornness of memories, the intemperate collection of people Ive known in my life, and the sheer insanity that belongs to the Christmas season.

I should probably also mention that the stories wandering through this book are entirely true, if a little fictitious: the names changed, the timing telescoped, complicating detail ruthlessly expurgated, characteristics blithely shifted around, but otherwise pretty much how I remember things. Along the way, however, I made the mistake of consulting my aunts and uncles and cousinsconsulting my wife and daughter, for that matterand was sternly informed by any number of them that I had misremembered, gotten things wrong, taken liberties, ignored facts, and otherwise so mangled the truth that unless I carefully specified that everything I have to say is completely inaccurate, they would disown me.

The idea was tempting: losing all my familial complications in one swell foop. If nothing else, it would cut down on the telephone bills. But I love my familyas the years have gone by, Ive even grown to like themand Id hate to lose them now. So let me simply note that, in memories as in automobiles, your mileage may vary.

The origins of mistletoe, the Christmas trees we had when I was young, the reason for the richness of yuletide food: to write about these topics has proved a strangely joyful activity, whether the thoughts and memories were bright or dark. But then, as Charles Dickens himself once observed, contemplation of Christmas is never out of season. And since Dickens dominates the writing of the holiday, its probably appropriate to let him have the last word, here in the winter cold: God bless us, every one!

The Black Hills
December 2012

Chapter 1
See Amid the Winter

I tell you what, my dear, said my aunt, one morning in the Christmas season when I left school: as this knotty point is still unsettled, and as we must not make a mistake in our decision if we can help it, I think we had better take a little breathing-time. In the meanwhile, you must try to look at it from a new point of view, and not as a schoolboy.

DAVID COPPERFIELD

I

I T WAS IN the meadows along the little lake at Cottonwood Springs, a hundred yards or so up from the dam, that I saw the fox, red-brown against the December snow. For decades after the Black Hills were named a national forest reserve in 1897, the government would exchange small pieces of land with ranchers along the edges, trading pastures for tree-grown lots. The result was a more natural, serrated line of dark spruce and ponderosa pine on the forests border, but the reduction of open spaces within the protected woodsthe loss of meadows like the one where I saw the fox this winteralso limited some of the lands support for small wildlife and the animals that hunt them.

Not that those western territories ever held a large population of predators. Cutting through the middle of the Dakotas, the Missouri River marks the boundary of the ancient glaciers that scraped out, to the east, a gentler countryside of softened plains and easy lakes. West of the river lies a different world, one that the Pleistocene ice never cleared. The Badlands and Black Hills, Bear Butte and Devils Towera rough landscape of broken prairie and high plateau that stretches five hundred miles from the Missouri to the Tetons.

And that country is just too thin, the winters too hard, to feed many hunters. A single horned owl, fluffing its feathers on a gnarled cottonwood branch, will easily dominate two hundred acres of night hunting ground. A nesting pair of red-tail hawks will control a daylight range for an entire season. Add the superior small-game hunting of the coyotes, the depredations of the occasional mink or weasel down near the creek beds, the scavenging of the omnivore skunks and raccoons, and how much life is left in a lean land, especially over the winter?

Still, there was the fox, in a South Dakota meadow this past December, clear eyed and healthy, his dark brush lightly marking his back-trail in the snow. If youve ever seen mountain lions, you know how they pace: arrogant and powerful, as though they had greased machines coiling and uncoiling just beneath their skin. Coyotes slink through the yellow grass of the prairies, rough haired, scrawny, and cautious. Raccoons scurry, skunks blunder, and minkswell, its hard to describe the behavior of minks. They seem to live a kind of vicious insanity, oddly matched with their rich fur and sweet faces. Foxes, however, are the strolling kind. Flashing white at their throats, with those black stockings around their paws, they pad through the fields like dandies ambling along the Paris pavement: inquisitive yet self-possessed, eager yet sensible, bold yet judicious.

Wed gone out to the area around the lake, my wife, Lorena, and I, with our daughter, Faith, to cut our annual Christmas tree. Lorena had stopped by the Forest Service office to pick up a harvesting permit days before, but we hadnt organized ourselves enough to accomplish our original plan of heading deep into the woods, back behind Crazy Horse or up toward Mount Rushmore. So we drove instead just a few miles west to look at a nearer place: tape measure, bow saw, and rope in hand, with Faith tugging along an old Flexible Flyer sled, its once red-painted runners tracing out their parallels in the snow behind her.