This all ends with myself, hallowedly stoned and hearing an endless note in the wind, and Ray Young Bear, one of our greatest poets, singing bird songs on the bank of the Iowa River.
We’re at the spot where, in 1980, a UFO attempted to abduct Ray and his wife, Stella Lasley-Young Bear. Ray had emptied his rifle into the UFO, hovering only 60 feet above their heads in the dark sky.
Let me get you there.
• • •
So, I woke up some morning with my youngest son whispering in my ear, “Daddy, wake up. Daddy, wake up. Daddy, wake up.” A fragment of a dream still played in my mind as he pulled me from bed to look out the back door with him, so he could show me what had happened while we all slept. Farm hands had worked through the night, clearing the corn and soy from the fields with combine harvesters. I looked out the back door to where the eight-foot stalks had been when I’d gone to sleep. “All gone,” my son said.
“All gone,” I agreed.
We live at the very edge of a very small town called Lone Tree. When the crops are high, the world is a bit smaller. When the crops are taken, it’s as though you can see to the other end of the state.
It was foggy that morning — everything gray and wet. I could hardly see the highway just a hundred yards from my deck. I picked my son up, our faces reflecting in the windowpane separating us from the world. All gone.
I’d packed my car by midmorning with all of my painting equipment. It was the day I would finally meet Ray Young Bear and paint his portrait. I started reading Ray’s poetry 10 years back, when I was 23, two years before his collected book of poems, MANIFESTATION WOLVERINE was published.
I stood beneath the open back hatch of my car, running my finger along the blank canvas and staring into the gray mist where I figured the horizon must be. Hundreds of grackles called from the fields where they searched for bits of corn dropped by the combines. A group of grackles is known as a plague. It’s the only time I’ve known a plague to be pleasant, and though grackles are not considered songbirds, I love their song more than any other.
• • •
When Ray and I connected over the phone back in September, he asked if I would be OK with him holding the rifle from the night with the UFO in 1980 when I painted his portrait.
“I would be cosmically depressed,” I told Ray, “if it wasn’t in the portrait.”
“What would you think about painting me where the UFO tried to take Stella and I, all those years ago?” he asked.
Christ… I hadn’t even laid eyes on Ray, but it was just one of those things — I knew I would be telling this story again and again and again when it was all said and done. You get a sense for this sort of thing when you task yourself with the obsessive need to understand story. You know from the very beginning the ones you’ll hold most dearly.
We talked for 47 minutes, mostly about UFOs — a little about poetry. At the end of the call, we said our goodbyes. Ray stopped me short of ending the call. The register of his voice had become more serious than he’d allowed throughout the entirety of our conversation.
“You should know,” he said, “some Meskwaki believe the location where you’ll paint my portrait is the entrance to the underworld.”
• • •
The fog hadn’t broken when I arrived. I parked on the road outside Ray’s house and walked up the drive. I wanted to feel the entirety of the place. Ray’s drive curves like a crow wing as you leave the highway. You can’t see the house from the road. You see shining sumac, in their red dregs of fall. It sutures the gravel drive around a bend to the house. The maple, red oak and hackberry had all but dropped their leaves, so it was just the dangling red sumac leaves, like a low forest of bloodied knives.
I heard my name called from the trees. There was Ray, walking around the curve in the drive, rifle in hand. He wore a red bandana, cyan shirt, camouflage coat. We had a nice little chitchat and decided the painting should be done in front of all those shining sumac. We stared into the red leaves the way the first men must have stared into the first flame.
“Here,” we agreed, “would be best.”
We’d get to the underworld in time.
• • •
The foggy noon hour muted dramatic shadows and light from the world. It made it so that everything wore a similar light source, which can confuse the eyes when they are looking particularly for light and shadow. I scraped globs of paint all over the canvas, long violent pulls, recreating the thin timber curving behind Ray, where he’d set up in front of the shining sumac.
I started painting 11 months ago, after eating four grams of psilocybin mushrooms and hearing an ethereal voice tell me I was to start painting. It has not even been a year since I painted my first painting.
I paced the gravel drive, side-to-side, trying to find the angle to best portray Ray. The conversation had drifted to a shared belief between the two of us: there are more ancient, more sacred things than us inhabiting these places we know, some of which have revealed themselves to the two of us, though we still, years after having experienced some of these things, do not understand them. Ray held his rifle across his lap. His right arm had drifted into the air, making a fist. He’d closed his eyes and begun to ripple his fingers as he tried to find the right words in his mind. This was it; this was the Ray I would paint.
“Animism is something I have over other poets,” Ray said, “Only because other poets don’t know what it really is. White America has been taught to discount anything that moves in the night. For us it’s the opposite; if it moves in the night, you’ve got to be careful. That’s what they teach you here.”
Ray had found his words, but his eyes remained shut. “These trees around us,” Ray continued, “I pray for these trees.”
Ray was silent for some time after this. He’d gathered inside himself. I figured he was praying just then. For the trees, for the cryptic manifestations, showing themselves in the night to the Meskwaki poet, the poet of the Red Earth, who knows of the essential life in all of this.
• • •
It was when I’d lit the last cigarette of the pack and dipped an angled brush into the spread of cadmium red to paint the hanging leaves just around Ray’s aura when he asked, “Meskwaki, do you know what it means?”
I admitted I did not.
Ray said the words slowly, “MESKWAKI — people of the red earth.”
• • •
Ray and I stood across from each other, saying farewell. The rifle leaned against my easel. Ray pulled a knife from his belt. He leaned down to the gravel and cut a map into the earth.
He tapped a place in the rock saying, “This is where we had the encounter. It’s about a mile into the floodplains. That UFO followed us for a mile. We stopped at what we call the stonehouse and turned onto the highway. That UFO went over us and aligned with the old railroad tracks. We were driving 80 miles per hour. It was traveling with us until we got to the bridge. At the bridge, Stella found one last bullet for the rifle. I got out at the end of the bridge. The UFO was above some cottonwoods here.”
Ray tapped the gravel again with his knife. “That’s when I spoke to it. I said, ‘This is the last one we have. I want you to go away.’ When I fired the last bullet into it, the UFO shot up into the sky and became like a star, instantly.”
• • •
Eighteen days later, on Ray Young Bear’s 73rd birthday, we cross the road in full sun toward our otherworldly destination on the Iowa River. The entrance to the underworld.
A 10-point buck, deep in the testosteroned fevers of the rut, runs out of the tree line in front of us, its tongue hanging out of its mouth as it smells its way on the trail of a doe. “That’s right,” Ray says as the winds carry through the golden reed grasses gathering closely over the river bottoms. “It’s hunting season. We must be careful.” Ray carries his body close to itself, a gesture filled with the serenity of 73 years.
We stare then into the still river, low from two seasons of little rain, reflecting the world back into our eyes. I pull a cigarette I’d packed with Durban Poison, an astute sativa that pulls the mind to wanderings, and shielded my lighter from the wind. So much leaves me as the smoke carries away quickly from the two of us.
“It’s right there.” Ray points his earth-toned finger to a spot on the bank. “It’s right there.”
Two-hundred yards down river, in the shallows near a bed of gravel, a group of young men, oriented in a line, pull at something I can’t see. The sun dances silver and pink over the river where they struggle. “What are they doing over there?” I ask.
“Who knows,” Ray says. “Just being men.” Then Ray begins to sing. His song is in Meskwaki, Ray’s first language. We stand there like that, the strands of grass bending to the river while ribbons of words unknown to me unfurl from Ray’s throat. The notes tumble from Ray like gentle feathers falling to the earth.
Not every doorway is framed in timber; some doors are bound by fluctuating tissues, all squeezing and letting go as they see fit, the way the iris holds the emptiness we call pupil.
I look at the place in the river he’d pointed to. It was right there. The trees are still. In the steel blue sky, a few dozen geese fly in their V formation, hoping to escape the dead winter before all this is gone.
Ray sings his song, which is, as he tells me, the song of the grackle. The black bird of the fields, covered in chatoyant rainbow spills, who gather in singing plagues. I turn from Ray Young Bear, so that he does not see the tears gathering in my eyes.
My god, I wish I could tell you how golden this world is.
Red Danielson lives in Lone Tree, Iowa. Find him and tell him about the universe: @reddanielson.art.
The essay above, titled “Constellation Winds,” is an abridged and edited version of a draft chapter from Danielson’s book in progress. It was originally published in Little Village’s December 2023 issue.
