Page 80 of The Lonely Road

It’s a sense of home. Being with Taya feels like home.

I’m also, underneath all of it, terrified. Because I know what I am and what I’ve done and what’s still sitting in my phone, and I know that the joy and the terror are going to have to be reckoned with, and I don’t know yet in what order.

But right now, I’m in a truck going south, and she’s driving, and the San Juan Basin is spread out to the left of us like something enormous and patient, and I am—despite everything—happy.

CHAPTER 19

mason

The Southern Ute Bear Dance grounds in Ignacio sit adjacent to the Sky Ute Resort and Casino, on the flat land between the mesa and the community center. They’re marked by a brush arbor—the traditional dance corral, a large circular enclosure of cottonwood and willow branches woven into a fence, maybe forty yards across, open to the sky.

When we arrive, mid-morning, the grounds are already full.

Families have set up chairs in the shade—folding chairs and lawn chairs and a few old wooden ones that look like they’ve been making this trip for decades. Elders sit closest to the arbor, facing inward. Children move through everything, immune to the boundaries adults observe.

The women near the arbor wear dresses in colors that don’t apologize for themselves—deep red, turquoise, the gold of mesa grass in late summer, a purple so saturated it looks painted. The fabric is often velvet or heavy cotton, the hems long, and the patterns at the borders—geometric, stepped, precise—carry the same visual language as the beadwork in Taya’s kitchen doorway.

Around their shoulders: shawls in a range of colors, some with fringe, some plain, some beaded at the edges. Their hair is braided. Their jewelry is silver, turquoise, and coral, heavy and worn with the ease of things that have been part of the body for years.

“The shawls are important,” Taya says, draping hers firmly around her shoulders. It’s cobalt blue satin, with fringe nearly fifteen inches long, embroidered with geometric patterns, the stepped diamonds her grandmother stitched by hand.

“How?”

“Women invite men to dance by flicking their shawls toward them.” She smiles and demonstrates, flicking the fringe lightly toward me. “The fringe imitates the tall desert grasses that bears move through when they emerge from hibernation.”

The men wear ribbon shirts—solid colors with ribbon trim at the collar and chest, long-sleeved despite the May warmth—and some wear vests with beadwork or quillwork, and several have feathers in their hair. The older men carry themselves with the uprightness of people who understand what they’re participating in.

I’m in dark jeans, a chambray shirt, and the cleanest boots I own. I feel like a man who has arrived at something real and is only approximately equipped for it.

The singing is loud. Taya leans toward me to explain: the men around the growler box are rubbing notched sticks in steady strokes to produce the rhythmic rasp of a waking bear.

“The moraches,” she says. “The sound they make—” she pauses, listening— “that’s the bear coming back to itself. Not smooth. Rough and gradual and irreversible.”

I listen.

She’s right. It doesn’t sound like music exactly. It sounds like something physical—wood on bone, the texture of waking. The moraches and the drums together create something that isn’t quite melody and isn’t quite rhythm. Older than both. Below the categories.

I look at the men around the growler box, each in his own time and somehow all in the same time, and I think: this is what it sounds like when winter is over.

“How long do they play?”

“Traditionally, four days.” Someone stops and says hello to Taya and then she’s back with me, bright with laughter. The Bear Dance is a celebration, and her enthusiasm is contagious. I feel it, too.

“Now, there are those who play drums and dance—but they’re at the powwow,” she says, tilting her head toward the far side of the grounds where a different sound is coming from. Bigger. Faster. More voices. “The Bear Dance and the powwow happen at the same time, same grounds, but they’re separate things.”

“What’s the difference?”

She considers. “The Bear Dance is ours. Southern Ute. It’s one of the oldest ceremonies we have—some say it came from the bears themselves, that a hunter watched a bear emerge from its den and learned the dance and the songs and brought them back to the people.” She glances toward the arbor. “The powwow is intertribal. Nations come from all over—different tribes, different traditions, all dancing together. The regalia is extraordinary. The dances are competitive, but the competition is”—she pauses, searching—“it’s an honoring. You dance your best because the dance deserves it.”

“Which do you prefer?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “The Bear Dance. The powwow is spectacular. But the Bear Dance is quieter. It asks more of you. You have to stay with it.”

“Stay with what?”

She looks at me. “The return. Winter ends, you come back. That’s the whole ceremony. You just have to be willing to be in it long enough to feel it.”

The moraches go on. The drums go on. Someone in the powwow grounds lets out a call that carries over everything—sharp and high and proud—and Taya turns toward it with a look of pure, uncomplicated delight.