Host: Jay Allison

[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]

Jay: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show, [soft melodious music playing] and this time we're bringing you a live event held at the Elko Convention Center for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada. It was produced in partnership with the Western Folklife Center. We'll have stories of ranchers, Native Americans, and some folks from East of the Rockies, too.

Our first storyteller is Teresa Jordan, who has been involved in the gathering for a long time. She said cowboy culture is a storytelling culture. You have a lot of time on your hands and lots of material. Big animals, bad weather, odd people. You're always in a fix in one way or another. Cowboys, she told us, always say, "At least I'll get a story out of it." [cheers and applauses] Here's Teresa Jordan live at The Moth.

Teresa: [00:01:08] The year I graduated from college, my father sold the ranch in Wyoming that had been home to my family for almost 100 years. This ranch had survived the Indian wars and the Great Depression, fire and flood and drought and plagues of locusts, but it could not survive the death of my grandfather that had happened a couple of years earlier. As soon as I picked up my diploma, I headed home for what I knew would be the last time. Now, my father had seen this coming, and he'd sent me to college so I'd be prepared for a very different sort of life. But until the sale of the ranch was a reality, I really hadn't confronted the big question, which is, “Who would I be without the land and the animals to define me?”

Now, this ranch was such a beautiful place. It started about 50 miles northwest of Cheyenne, and it ran eight miles along Chugwater Creek and there were these big, broad, beautiful meadows that raised tons and tons of hay. And the cattle would winter on these meadows, and they would have their calves. And then in the spring, we would trail them up into the high country and they'd spread out over that prairie grass and they would get shiny and fat. But when I came home that summer after I graduated, the ranch didn't look like that anymore. We were in the third year of a desperate drought. There had not been a drop of rain in over 12 months. And without the rain to wash it off, there was dust on everything. It was like color-- it robbed the color from the world.

And I was so connected to this land. It was not just that I had been raised there, but generations of my family had been raised there. It was literally in my DNA. And to see the land hurting like this, it was as if my own skin were parched and cracked, and aching. And drought makes everything-- drought puts stress on everything. It weakens it. And it wasn't just that the grass was so sparse, but we had sickness in our calves. So, I came home to take up my usual job, which was to take care of the cows in the summer while the men put up hay, but it was a really different job than it had been before. I really had never dealt with sick calves. I'd have an occasional one, five, or six over the course of the summer. But that summer, I was doctoring a dozen a day and sometimes twice that many.

To doctor a calf in open country, I had to rope it. And I was not a good roper. But there was so much at stake, and I got better pretty fast. And I would throw the calf, I'd get on top of it, I'd pull the pig and string out of my back pocket and hog tie it. And then I would inject it with penicillin and give it oral antibiotic.  And then I needed to mark it. I needed to know who I had doctored and how many times. So, every day I'd have a different mark. I had these big greased crayons-- grease-paint crayons in my saddlebags. And one day I'd put a red circle around the right eye and then a yellow stripe down the nose the next day. And some of these calves I had to doctor so many times that they looked like clowns. [audience chuckle]

The other thing that I did that summer was it was my job to keep the windmills running. And in the high country, all our water came from windmills that pumped the water from the ground. And there is a great technology in Wyoming. Wyoming is, I believe, the windiest state in the Union. But that summer, nothing, there just there was not a breeze. And if you don't have wind to run the windmills, then you've got to put a pump jack on it, a gasoline powered engine. We used these little three horsepower Briggs an& Stratton miserable engines that I swear were only put on this earth to make me tear out my hair. [audience chuckles] I was not a very good roper, but I was a terrible mechanic. And that summer I didn't have a choice. I learned how to take a carburetor apart and put it back together, and sometimes if I couldn't get one of these little miserable sons of bitches working, [audience laughter] I would have to take it clear off the mill and put a new pump jack on it.

There was this one day, a really hot day, and it was in the hottest part of the day and I had this jack that I could not get running and it was up above me and I realized I was going to have to take it off. And so I'm working up above my head and it's leaking and this gasoline is running down my arm and it was hard to get the right leverage and I could not break this bolt loose. And I was pushing and pulling and grunting and cussing and this gas just kept running down my hand. And there was just a point where I was just so frustrated and I just lost it and I threw this wrench down into the dirt and I stomped down off this mill. I just went over to the pickup and I sunk down on the bumper. And I put my head in my hands and I just lost it. I just sobbed. And I remember just saying over and over, "This is too hard. This is too damn hard." Those were long days.

There were a lot of days that I would wear out two horses. And when you wear out two conditioned cow horses, I was dead tired when I would get home. And I remember this one night, I went up to take my bath and I was so tired I couldn't even get undressed. I was just sitting there with my hands on the sink and looking at myself in the mirror. I don't think I'd really seen myself all summer. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I always wear these sleeveless snap button cowboy shirts. And I was so strong. These calves by this time were 350 pounds and I had the arms of an Olympic swimmer, and it struck me that I would never be that strong again.

And then on the 22nd of July, I woke to my father shouting, "It's raining, it’s raining." And I went downstairs and I could see him out there in the yard. And he had his hands up to the sky, up into the rain. And he was saying in this sort of dry hyperbole that was his idea of a sense of humor. He was saying, "Thank you, Lord. Not for me. I've seen rain before, but for the children." [audience laughter] And I'd come out into the yard and I think he sensed.  I was there and he turned around and he saw me. My father was not a playful person, he was not a hugger. But he saw me there and he just picked me up into a bear hug and he swung me around and he was laughing and I was laughing.

And so I went out to get my horse. And all summer long I'd just gone out in the horse pasture and I'd grabbed whatever mount I wanted for the day, but that day, this rain made them just as crazy as it had made us. And the horses were just running and kicking and bucking. It took me forever to get a horse. And finally, I got a horse and I got saddled up and by this time this mist had started to come in. And then by the time I got up on top, it was fog. It was just this thick, impenetrable, pea soup fog. I really, I couldn't-- I could hardly see past my horse's ears. And it was clear to me, I couldn't see anything.

It was clear to me I wasn't going to do any good there. So, I just turn around, call it a day, and head home. And now a fog like this in open country is-- it's so mysterious. It just--. You're completely engulfed in this white cloud. You can't see anything. It's mysterious and it's wonderful. And it's also sort of terrifying because you really have no grounding. And I wasn't entirely sure where I was, but I just trusted my horse and he found the sand draw to take us down. I think I probably felt this before I heard it, but these cows start-- these running cows start coming up behind me and my horse was just wanting. He just was dancing and prancing and wanting his head. So, I just gave it to him and we took off down that sand draw at a dead run, racing and literally blind, abandoned. And I was just laughing out loud.

And that was it. The drought had broken and it rained for several days. And even before the rain stopped, the grass had started to green. And then the sun came out and the wildflowers just exploded. Then in just a few weeks, my family moved off the land forever. And that all happened 40 years ago, but it's still so alive to me. It is still so vivid. But when I go back there in memory, what I think about is that day that the rain came back. That summer had been so hard. There had been so many things that I had needed to do that I did not know how to do, but somehow, I had learned to do. And that had to bode well for whatever lay ahead. Thank you. [cheers and applause] 

Jay: [00:11:35] [melodious music playing] Teresa Jordan is an artist and author who grew up as part of the fourth generation on that isolated ranch in Wyoming. The love of storytelling she inherited from her family inspired her own writing, which includes Cowgirls, Women of the American West, and the ranch memoir, Riding the White Horse Home. Her newest book is The Year of Living Virtuously: Weekends Off. She and her husband, Hal Cannon, live in southern Utah, where they raise a small band of Navajo-Churro sheep. To see photos of the ranch, Teresa and her father, and find links to her writing, visit themoth.org. [melodious music continues] We'll have more stories from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in just a moment. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

[crowd murmuring]

This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, and we're bringing you a live show from the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The host of the evening was Dame Wilburn, [cheers and applauses] a Moth GrandSLAM champion and frequent storyteller. Here she is telling the story she brought with her to Nevada from Detroit.

Dame: [00:13:15] So I'm a strange child. I think it's-- I don't know if it's obvious to you, but I'm a strange child. Okay. So, I had, like, dual citizenship growing up. I was born in Macon, Georgia, and would spend my summers there. And then during the school year, I'd be in Detroit, Michigan. [audience laughter] Now let's establish my life for a second, right? So I went to a private German school, the Detroit Waldorf School. So, everybody in my school spoke German. The Waldorf Rudolf Steiner method of teaching is from Germany. I would come home speaking German and my own father, who was paying the bill, would call me a communist. [audience laughter] Now then I would go to Georgia and visit my grandma, who we all called Neenanny. And she had a cousin who owned a jackass that used to wear pants like a straw hat. [audience laughter] And no one seemed to notice that that's what was happening. I'm sitting there, he's got on, no one saying anything. So, I didn't say anything. And then when I leave school and come home, I was in Detroit. Like I didn't live in the outskirts like some people say. “They're from Detroit” and they're like 70 miles out.” No, I was in Detroit.

I had this kind of weird multicultural upbringing and so things never quite made sense to me. Case in point, I'm in Georgia and we lived in Macon. And Macon at the time had not zoned itself yet to exclude farm animals. Now we couldn't have large animals. We could have something small. So, my grandfather was a hog farmer, but in the city. [audience chuckles] Now I'm going to paint a picture. So, I-75 cuts through my granddaddy's backyard. I-75 South. If you happen to drive through Macon and see Mercer University Drive, there's a storage facility. There's this weird looking house that looks like somebody put it together from a kit. There's a barn that does not look like a barn, but is the color of a barn. And that is my grandfather's house. [audience chuckles] 

When I was little, I'd go down and I'd stay for the summer and my mother wanted me to have a traditional Southern upbringing. She wanted me to understand my family, my roots and where I came from. So, that meant a lot of sweet tea, a lot of “yes ma'am, no, ma'am.” Pretty much being Southern is just eating a lot of food and thanking people for it. [audience laughter] Like that's 90% of the job. That's all you do. You just go to somebody's house and they hand you a plate of something and you say, "Thank you, ma'am." And you eat it and you don't know what it is and it's best not to ask. [audience chuckles] And you, that's why that tea is so sweet. Like just eat it, slam the tea and get out. [audience laughter] And that's the job. So, my parents, we lived in a two-family flat, so I could never have a pet. And I always wanted a pet.

And the lady across the street from-- she was, I'm not getting into that, that's another story. But she raised chickens and cats together. So, she had like these gigantic chickens and these big sort of alley cats. And then she had these little chicks and little kittens and everybody got along. The cat never tried to kill a chicken. Chicken never tried to kill a cat. It was pretty good life. And I called my mother and said that the lady across the street told me I could have a kitten. And my mother was like, "No, you can't have a kitten." I said, "Well, but I want one." She's like, "I understand that, but we don't live in the kind of place where you can have a kitten." I said, “Okay.”

My grandfather is listening to this and he says, "Well, your mama won't let you have a kitten, but you could have a hog." [audience laughter] And I'm like, "Yeah, that, yeah, like a hog." So, but now all the hogs had had babies, right? So, we got the little piglets, right? And they're all, I mean--, if you've ever seen a piglet before, piglet, not two weeks in, because two weeks in they look like monsters. But like, when they're little, little little, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could move it to a two-family flat with this little pig. I never thought it was going to grow up. I thought they just had sizes. Like you get a little one and then there's a bigger one, and then there's the one, the gigantic ones that are mean. I didn't understand anything.

Now, these hogs were-- we were already in trouble because they were smarter than us. Like, every day of my grandfather's life was a battle to outwit the hog so they'd stay in the pen, [audience chuckles] and he'd win that battle about 80% of the time, but 20% of the time, usually around 3:00 in the morning, you'd be in bed and you hear, [imitates truck horn], and that lets you know the hogs are on the freeway. [audience laughter] That's how you knew. That's how you knew. So, we wouldn't even, like, we wouldn't-- there wouldn't even be a startle. There was the first time it happened. I'm a little kid. I'm like, "Oh, my God. what's going on?” And after that, you just get used to it. You're like, "Oh, the hogs got out." So, you get up and you put your clothes on that you had the day before because you keep them out because the hogs might get out.

And my grandmother would go in the kitchen and start making coffee because it was going to take a minute to get them off the freeway. And the truck drivers would come off the freeway, walk down through the holler, come up through the backyard, come sit in the kitchen and drink coffee. [audience laughter] And my grandfather would go out there and say, "Well, boss man, we got to get these hogs off this freeway. You might well go in the house and have some coffee with my wife, because it's going to be a minute."

So these guys, all the northbound, southbound traffic, some of the northbound traffic would come over, get in the kitchen, drink coffee. My grandma would start making breakfast. She just-- we always have eggs. Like, it was just that-- that was normal. And then all of us who weren't making breakfast would go out with the buckets of slop, walk through the backyard, go down the holler, get up on the freeway [audience holler] and start trying to get them to come off the freeway. Now, if I had-- I know that was good, wasn't it? [audience laughter] That's how you know this is not a lie. [audience chuckles] But it was just normal. Like, that was a normal thing and I would go to school, and when I got back home, and I'd say, "Hey, we had to get the hogs off the freeway." And my friends-- my Detroit city friends would say, "Your family is country as hell." [audience chuckle] I'm like, "Yes, I know. It's you don't have to tell me that."

But anyhow, I called my mother and I said, "Well, Granddaddy says I can have a piglet." And my mother said, "Your granddaddy's a liar." [audience laughter] And I said, "Well, he said I could bring it home." She said, "Your granddaddy's a damn liar. Put him on the phone." [audience laughter] So the two of them get into some sort of heated conversation, and I'm not even there because I'm in the backyard at the fence picking out my piglet. [audience chuckles] And granddaddy comes out. I've talked to my mother and says, "Now, your mama is right. You can't have no pig in the city. They won't let you have it. But if you leave him here with me, you can have him, but he'll still be yours. But he'll be with me." And I'm thinking, “This feels like a divorced parent thing, but it's the best I'm going to get because this is the closest thing I'm going to get to a pet.” So, he said, "Go ahead and pick him out."

So, I pick out this little piglet that's all black, and I name him Blackie because that's what you do when you're a child. Simple things. [audience chuckles] What's the name of your black pig? Blackie. Simple and easy to remember. [audience chuckles] And I stay for the rest of the summer, and Blackie's starting to get a little bigger, and I can't wait, because it's going to be about nine months, and then I'm going to come back and see Blackie. So I go to school, I tell everybody about Blackie. I'm going on about Blackie. I'm telling my mother and father about Blackie. “I saw Blackie. Blackie did this, Blackie did that.” I called my granddad. “How's Blackie?” “Blackie's doing real good.” “Okay, so tell me something else about Blackie.” “Blackie's good, and he's getting real big.” “Okay.” So that's all he keeps saying. I'm like, "Yes, Blackie's getting good. I'm going to school every day. My pig is getting big." "He's so smart." "Pigs get out and get on the freeway." "Your family's country as hell." [audience laughter] It's just this cycle just keeps happening.

So, long before anybody really trusted the post office, because there was a minute when no one trusted the post office. This is like the late '70s. You didn't mail nothing. You put stuff on them. Don't lie to me. Y'all did it. You put it on the bus. [audience chuckles] If you were sent something serious, you put it on the bus and you go down to the Greyhound station and pick it up. So, my grandfather calls and tells my mother and my father that he's sending us a package. [audience chuckle] And I am--, I know I'm in the future with you. I know. And I am-- my grandmother had crowder peas and purple hulls. And she would shuck all these peas and send us peas and okra and anything out of her garden. They would freeze it and send it to us. So, I hated peas. So, I was already uninterested in what might be coming. And we get down to the bus station, we pick up this cooler, and it's like double wrapped. There's all kinds of tape and stuff on it. So, we bring the cooler home, and my dad pulls out his pocket knife and he cuts open the cooler and he starts taking out all this stuff wrapped in butcher paper.

And it's, it's obviously meat. And I'm like, "Oh, Granddaddy sent us meat." And then my dad gets through the first layer of papers. And then as he starts pulling stuff out, each package says "Blackie." [audience awe and chuckle] Now, I'm too young to read, but the look of horror on my mother's face pretty much let me know what that said. And there's sausages and smoked pork chops and ham hocks and tons of bacon. Like, lots of bacon, because Blackie got real big. [audience chuckles] And I'm mortified. I'm at the kitchen table petting the paper. [audience laughter] Like, really in my mind, I decided my grandfather was a cannibal. Like, there's something wrong with him. My grandfather's mentally ill and I'm pet. I'm just petting this paper.

And my mother looks at me and she says, "Damie. Granddaddy doesn't really know what 'pet' means. [audience laughter] Like, if it's a dog, he thinks that's a pet. If it's a cat, he thinks that's a pet. Now, just about anything else that you can cook with a bucket of peas, he probably doesn't think is a pet." And I was done. I was a vegetarian. I'm like, "I'm done. I'm done with you savages. I'm done. I'm not eating. I'm not eating no more pig. I'm done." And I want to tell you that I held that line. I want to tell you that. My dad, in the middle of March in Michigan, dusted off the grill on the back porch of that second-story flat, and he put a couple of rounds of sausages and a couple of slabs of ribs on that grill. And by the time he brought it in the house and put some Mrs. Griffith's barbecue sauce on it, which you could only get in Macon, Georgia, my granddaddy sent along with the pig, [audience chuckles] I pretty much just said, "Well, here's to you, Blackie." And I ate everything on that plate.

[cheers and applauses] 

Jay: [00:24:38] [symphonic music playing] That was Dame Wilburn, host of this live event in Nevada. Dame is a storyteller from Detroit, Michigan. She spends her days working for the National Kidney Foundation of Michigan. You can share these stories or others from The Moth Archive and buy tickets to Moth storytelling events in your area all through our website, themoth.org. And there are Moth events year round. You can find a show near you or come out and tell a story to a SLAM. We're on Facebook and Twitter @themoth. [cheers and applauses] Our next storyteller from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is Nestor Gomez.

Nestor: [00:25:23] It's 1980. I'm about 10 years old, living in Guatemala with my siblings and my parents. But we are very poor. There are times when the only food that we can afford to buy is black beans, which is perfectly fine with me because that's my favorite food. [audience chuckles] But Guatemala is in the middle of a civil war and things are getting really bad in Guatemala. There are times where my family doesn't have any money to pay the electrical bill, the gas bill. And those times what happened is that the beans that my mother keeps in the fridge were spoilt after a couple of days without electricity.

To this day, I can clearly see my mother adding baking soda to the pot of beans to cure them so we could eat them because the baking soda will take away the bad smell and the bad taste of the beans. But things continued to get worse in Guatemala because of the civil war, and my parents had no other choice than to travel to the United States searching for jobs, leaving me and my siblings in the care of our grandparents and uncles. Now, the plan was for my parents to work for a couple of years, save money, and then go back to Guatemala. But the civil war got so bad that my mother realized that it wasn't safe for us to be in Guatemala anymore. So, she decided that she was going to bring us to the United States instead.

But she couldn't wait for visas, so she was going to bring us undocumented to the United States. And since the journey was going to be very difficult, she sent my father back to Guatemala to help us on the journey. The first thing that my father said when he arrived to Guatemala is that we were going to be reunited with our mother. The second thing that he said, is that this was not going to be a pleasant trip. We were going to travel silently across Mexico and then cross the border into the United States. This was going to be a dangerous undertaking, not only because at that time, I was only 15 years old now, but because my middle brother was five years younger than me, and my other brother was 10 years younger than me. He was just a little baby. But also because my sister and a friend of hers that were tagging along were both teenagers, and as such, they could be victims of sexual assaults along the way.

We took a bus that took us all the way to the border with Mexico, and we crossed into Mexico using tourist visas that allow us to be in Mexico only for a couple of hours and as long as we didn't travel too far into the country. But, of course, we ignored those regulations. Now, the first thing that we learned when we arrived in Mexico is that Mexicans spoke Spanish different than what Guatemalans did, the same way that somebody from England speaks English different than somebody from the United States. So, our father taught us a couple of Mexican words. Chingado, [audience chuckle] pendejo. You guys know those words? [audience chuckle] In hopes that if we got caught by the Mexican authorities, we could pretend to be Mexicans, and then we wouldn't be sent back to Guatemala. But as soon as we spoke, it was obvious that were Guatemalans. So, our father instructed us to remain silent the rest of the way. Now, every time that you think about an adventure or a journey, you think battles, noises-- exciting noises everywhere, but ours turned out to be the most quiet adventure ever. [audience chuckles] 

After many weeks of silently traveling by bus, we made it all the way to Guadalajara. And for those of you who don't know, Guadalajara is kind of like in the middle of Mexico. And a lot of people that travel undocumented, they take a train from Guadalajara all the way to Tijuana, the same thing that were going to do. But most of the people that travel undocumented don't have any money. And what they do is that they jump on the freight trains and they travel on top of the freight trains. Our mother had been working here in the United States, doing four jobs, sometimes eating nothing but beans so she could save all her money. And she had given the money to my father, so we didn't have to travel on a freight train. We were able to buy tickets and travel just as normal passengers.

But halfway to Tijuana, the train suddenly made a stop, and the Mexican immigration authorities boarded the train. They started to question everybody and we remained silent, just like our father had instructed us. Our father tried to tell them that were just shy, but of course, they did not believe him. They handcuffed him and they took him out of the train. A couple of minutes later, he came back into the train, and he told us that the Mexican authorities were going to let us go, but they had taken most of his money. Luckily for us, he had hidden some of his money in one of his shoes. When we got to Tijuana, our father contacted a coyote, which is a person that helped you cross the border. And he was going to give the coyote the rest of our money. And the coyote was going to take us to a safe house in California, where my mother was going to send more money to take us all the way to Chicago, where she lived. So, the coyote took us running as silently as possible in the middle of the night.

At first, were part of a big group of people, but as we kept running, the group got smaller and smaller. Soon enough, our group consisted only of the coyote that was running in front of us, my father who was running behind the coyote. He was carrying my youngest brother in one arm, and with the other arm, he was holding the hand of my sister's friend. Behind that coyote, me, my middle brother, and my sister ran holding hands. We continued running, and suddenly I saw a light and I heard a noise far in the distance. At first I thought, "Oh, it's going to rain. It's probably thunder." But then I realized that it wasn't thunder. Those were helicopters. Now, I was only 15 years old, and I had never seen helicopters in my life before. So, I got really excited, and I started to try to look at the helicopters, where they were coming from. And the coyote grabbed me and threw me on the floor and told me, "This is not time for sightseeing. [audience laughter] This is time for hiding." So, we hid behind some bushes.

Now, we have been praying and hoping that we're going to get some rest from all this running. But the time that we hid from the helicopters wasn't a fun time, we were afraid that were going to get caught and not be reunited with our mother. The lights of the helicopters illuminated where we were hiding, but they didn't find us. They flew away. We stayed hidden for a couple more minutes until the coyote told us that it was safe and we started to run again. Now, I cannot tell you how long we ran, how many hours we ran. I just know that we ran for a long time until we finally made it to a spot where a car was waiting for us. They put us into this car and they told us to be quiet and to hide. And that car drove us to a safe house in California where they put us into a little room and they told us to be quiet. The coyotes started to call my mother, asking her for money.

The coyotes were charging my mother an extra $100 every day for our safekeeping. She had saved some money, but she wasn't prepared to pay extra money for our safekeeping as she had not been prepared to pay for an extra person, my sister's friend, who had tagged along. But after a while, my mother was able to get enough money and send the money to the coyotes. They took us from the safe house to the airport and put us on a flight. In Chicago they had a contact that helped us get out of the airport and took us to the train station. We got to the train station and we took a train there all the way to my mother's apartment.

And as my mother opened the door, we were finally able to break out silence when we cheered and cried as we hugged our mother, who we have not seen in many, many years. After a couple of minutes, our mother asked if were hungry. We were starving. So, she took us into her apartment, into her little tiny dining room, and she served us food. As she began to say grace, I pretended to do the same. And then I opened my eyes and I looked around the room. And at that moment, as I saw myself surrounded by my siblings and my mother about to eat black beans from my mother's kitchen. At that moment, I was finally at home. Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

Jay: [00:35:33] Mr. Gomez was born in Guatemala. [mysterious music playing] He holds the record for the most Chicago Moth SLAM wins. He lives with his wife and their two pit bulls, Hope and Cosmo. Nestor told us that he feared perhaps he and Dame would not be accepted or welcomed at this gathering, not being cowboys, for one thing. Nestor said, "We soon learned that the residents of Elko are open minded, friendly and accepting kinds of folks." In a moment, we'll continue with this live evening of storytelling from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada. [music continues] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.

[crowd murmuring]

This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show, and we're bringing you a live event from the Elko Convention Center at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It was produced in partnership with the Western Folklife Center. [cheers and applauses] Our final storyteller is Bobby Wilson.

Bobby: [00:37:15] So I'm at this party back home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The evening's winding down and I'm going to try to sneak out. When this lady stops me. She just shakes my hand and introduces herself and says that my uncle told her to come talk to me. Now, this uncle is not my uncle in the sense of blood relation. He's my uncle Indian way. One of the many men who helped raise me and teach me the things that he knows. Anyways, this lady tells me that a couple friends of hers have fallen in with this older Indian man, and he's performing all these ceremonies and rituals for them, which is fine by me, but he's charging money and that is a big taboo in my community. Now, as she continues to talk, I start to realize exactly why my uncle sent her to me because this man that she's describing, this possible scam artist, is my father. [audience laughter]

When I was a kid, my dad was a very traditional Dakota man, devoted to the cultural practices of our people. But over the years, things had started to change. He was charging money for ceremonies and taking advantage of people that were just looking for something spiritual in their lives. At this point, I hadn't actually seen my father in over 10 years. And for good reason. My family had lived in fear of his violent outbursts, afraid that anything that we ever said or did would send him into this rage. So, one night, my mom, my sister, and me, we all snuck out of the house while he slept. And in this quiet, panicked rush, we grabbed what little we could. So, a garbage bag full of clothing, a half-eaten box of Twinkies, and our favorite childhood toys. My sister had always carried around this little Curious George, but I preferred the dashing ladies’ man known as Roger Rabbit. [audience chuckles] So that same uncle stood guard at the front door to make sure that we could escape quietly and safely.

But you don't just walk out on a life like that and start over fresh. It was really hard. We bounced around battered women's shelters and slept on people's floors. And as a man, I had been homeless. I couldn't pay my bills. I was really angry and I lashed out and got into trouble with the law. But with the help of my community in Minneapolis, I was able to get on my feet. After all this time went by, I had always wondered, what happened to my father after we left. Where has he been? And now suddenly this ghost is just tumbling back into my life. It was pretty surreal. And I didn't know, honestly, if this was something that I was really ready for. But I decided to call that couple who had been being taken advantage of by my father.

They live in a town called Chaska, or as those Minnesotans say, Chaska. [audience chuckles] Now, that's only about an hour drive from my apartment. So, I tell them that I think their spiritual leader is my father, who I haven't seen in over a decade and they tell me that in just a couple days, he'll be driving from his home in South Dakota all the way to their place in Minnesota. Now, bear in mind, these people think that my dad is some kind of Indian Jesus or something crazy like that. And they're talking to me like I'm royalty. They said it would be such an honor if you would allow for us to host your family reunion at our next gathering. Now, after everything that had happened, I'm afraid that my dad's going to chicken out if he knows that I'm going to come meet him. So, I asked him, you know, "I'll come through, but you have to make it a surprise for him." So, they agree.

Now, I've only got the weekend to get my head on straight, and I cannot get to sleep. I keep rehearsing all these conversations in my mind with him and I keep asking him questions. “Why? Why did you feel like you could just beat on a small child as if he was a grown man that you hated? How could you be the most terrifying presence in a family that you're supposed to protect?” So the night before our scheduled reunion, I came home to an answering machine full of messages from a family friend. He says it's urgent. So, I call him back. And he tells me that on the drive from South Dakota to Minnesota, my dad was in an accident and he was killed. My whole world just shuts down. I started yelling at that guy on the phone. I was crying. I just-- I didn't believe him. And so-- to this day, I still think that he died on purpose just to avoid having to look me in the eyes. But I have to go see him. I have to see this for myself.

So I called up my sister and I told her the news of our father's passing. And I called up that couple who had been so excited to host our family reunion and they are devastated. They say, "Please let us drive you and your sister all the way to South Dakota to retrieve your father's body." Now, I really did not want to involve these guys in our situation, but my car had just broken down. [audience chuckle] I was working a couple odd jobs just to make ends meet. So, with very little resources or options, I grudgingly accept. Now, when you spend so many years bouncing from shelter to shelter, you lose a lot of these Items that represent your personal history. Homelessness isn't a place for nostalgia and yet I had somehow managed to hold on to Roger Rabbit. Now, the Roger Rabbit you guys know is white. But my Roger Rabbit was so old and well-loved that he's a light shade of brown now, just like me. [audience chuckles] So I decided that if I'm going to be traveling back into the past that was so dark for me, that I'm going to bring this little fellow who kept babying me safe in a house full of monsters.

So my sister and I walk into this couple's house, and it's so kitschy. There were enough dream catchers on the walls to choke a buffalo. I'm not kidding. [audience laughter] And there's this huge photo of my father hanging up in the same room that it was taken. And in it, he's talking to this room full of white people, but they're all dressed like Indians. [audience chuckles] Honestly, I felt this weird mixture of disgust, but pity. My dad, he was trying to push this sense of quasi-Indianness on these unsuspecting people. But my culture, everything that I believed in, was being appropriated and packaged up into some kind of bargain bin spirituality that was just for people who were missing something in their lives.

Now, Dakota people, we believe that it takes the spirit four days to leave the body. And when we get to Spearfish, South Dakota, it's the fourth and final day since my dad's passing. That is not a coincidence to me. My sister and I decide that we're going to take turns being alone with our father to say what we need to say. And so I walked into this room. It's cold and it's quiet except for this hum of a motor that's preserving the dead. I can see my father's body across the room on this metal table. And he's so still. I had so much to say to this bastard all week, but now I'm just at a loss for words. His head was all misshapen from the accident that killed him. These black tattoos of ancient symbols all over his face were now gray and blurry. I could hardly even recognize this face that had torn my family apart. And so, I closed my eyes and I tried to remember all the terrible things that he did to us.

But when I look, and I mean really look at him, I can see that life for this man was pain and it was hardship. I can actually see the mental illness that was created by generations of trauma. And so, I leaned down and I told that man, "I'm your son." I told that pitiful man that I came here to forgive. Afterwards, I went to the car and I laughingly and embarrassingly admitted to my sister that I had brought Roger with me. And she just gets this crazy look on her face, grabs her bag, pulls out Curious George. [audience chuckles] So we decided that we're going to go to Bear Butte, which is nearby. It's a sacred site walked on by our ancestors for thousands of years.

We pull up and I told that couple to please stay in the car because this is for family. And that night is so beautiful. There are hundreds of tobacco offerings from other Dakota people tied to trees all along this two-mile hike up to the summit of the butte. Standing there, we can see these scattered lights from the town of Sturgis nearby. But right here, it's meditative, dark, and quiet. So, I light my bundle of sage and together we smoked the pipe, making our words visible to each other. And we lay our toys on the ground as an offering. And I looked at my sister and I said, "You want to light him on fire?" [audience laughter] And she said, "I was thinking the same thing." [audience chuckles] So I took that bundle of sage and I cremated our childish past. And in a lot of ways, I think that fire showed us the path to a brighter future. We didn't need protection from monsters anymore because we have each other. It takes a lifetime of work to heal a broken family. But mine is still standing. Thank you.

[cheers and applause]

Jay: [00:48:47] [Bear Butte by Hawk Hurst playing] That was Bobby Wilson of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota tribe. Bobby is a painter and also a member of a comedy group. His work is heavily influenced by his Dakota heritage combined with a lifelong city upbringing. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. To see photos of young Bobby, his sister, and his father, visit themoth.org. Bobby wrote us. "I can't wait to visit the Cowboy Poetry Gathering once more and share a meal, a story, and sip iced tea while they drink whiskey and bless one another with the stories that make us who we are." That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour from the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, where, like at The Moth, they say “We're mainly about people wanting to come together.” We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.

[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]

The stories in this live event from Nevada were directed by Maggie Cino, Kate Tellers and Kirsty Bennett. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Ly. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Stellwagen Symphonette and Hawk Hurst. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.