{one} Getting There

. . . conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving . . .

GERTRUDE STEIN, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” 1935

Let’s just say that it all began when Keith and I took a trip. Keith is Keith Bell, my companion of going on twenty years, and it’s largely thanks to his love of travel that I’ve seen a bit of the world: the wild-and-woolly moors of Yorkshire, the plains of Tanzania, the barren reaches of Peninsula Valdés in Argentina. Yet the journey I want to tell you about was not a grand excursion to some exotic, faraway destination but a trip that brought us closer home. A nothing little ramble to nowheresville.

Remember what Thoreau once said about having “traveled a good deal in Concord,” that insignificant market town in which he was born and mostly lived? In an unintended riff on this Thoreauvian concept, Keith and I find that we have traveled a good deal in and around another insignificant dot on the map, a town called Eastend in our home province of Saskatchewan.

Eastend, population six hundred, lies about a thumb’s breadth north of the Canada–U.S. border and more or less equidistant from any place you’re likely to have heard of before. It’s in the twilight zone where the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan, a territory that leaves you fumbling with highway maps. But if you piece the pages together, south to north, east to west, and scribble a rough circle around the centers of population—Great Falls, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Billings, and back to Great Falls again—you’ll find Eastend somewhere in the middle, a speck in the Big Empty of the North American outback.

To explain how and why this out-of-the-way place has become so central to our lives, I need to take you back several years, to a day in late September of 2000. Keith was just embarking on a year-long sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as an art historian at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. As for me, I was supposed to be gathering forces to meet the most daunting challenge of my writing career. Earlier that summer, I had thrown common sense to the winds and agreed to prepare a natural history of the whole broad sweep of the western plains, from the Mississippi to the Rockies and from the llanos of Texas north to the wheat fields of Canada. By rights, I should have been at my desk day and night, or in the crypts of the science library, nose to the grindstone. What greater inducement could there be for hitting the open road?

Happily for my guilty conscience, the route we had chosen for our travels that fall led directly into the heart of my research. If I were going to write with authority about grassland ecology (I told myself as I packed my holiday clothes), surely it was my duty to get up close and personal with my subject matter. I’m not entirely joking when I say that writing books is my way of getting an education.

And so off we set, Keith and I plus our three trusty canine companions—an aging retriever, a wire-haired dachshund, and a perky young schipperke—from our home in Saskatoon south under the big skies of Saskatchewan and Montana to our turnaround point, the tourist town of Cody in northwestern Wyoming. From Cody, our return journey would take us north to Eastend, where we planned a brief layover before returning to our obligations in the city.

Cody, Wyoming, is an odd little town, and I am surprised to recollect that this trip marked the second time it had figured into our travel plans. On our earlier visit in the early 1990s, we had stayed in cheap digs along the highway, first at the Western 6 Gun Motel, where neon gunfire flared into the night from a sign at the entranceway, and then at the neighboring Three Bear Motel, where a trio of pathetic stuffed beasts, their mouths set in permanent snarls, stood guard over the check-in counter. This time around, several years older and more inclined to comfort, we’d gone upmarket to a respectable, if regrettably staid, establishment with a leafy courtyard.

Funny the things you remember, the things you forget. Even now, when so much else has faded from my mind, I could take you to the exact place we stayed in Cody, show you the room where we slept. See our boxy old blue van angled up to the building, its back doors swung open as we loaded it for the journey home. Hear our voices hanging in the thin morning air.

“. . . binoculars?”

“. . . water for the dogs? They say it’s going to hit ninety.”

“Any idea what we’ve done with the maps?” (Turns out that where I was headed could not be found on a map, though I had no way of knowing that at the outset.)

Although Cody’s primary attraction for travelers is its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, an hour’s drive to the west, the town prefers to see itself as a rootin’ tootin’ gateway to the past, to a West not merely of geography but of legend. From June to September, fake gunfighters confront each other in fake gunfights in the wide avenue outside the venerable Irma Hotel (Monday to Friday evenings at six and Saturday afternoons at two). Quite by accident, we’d caught them at it one evening, running around with their popguns and braying insults across the deserted street, under the guttering standard of the Stars and Stripes.

In this, as in so much else, the town takes its inspiration from its namesake and founding father, the late William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. As anyone who stops in town quickly becomes aware, Mr. B. Bill was an arresting character. A real-life participant in the conquest of the western plains, he had earned his spurs and his sobriquet in the 1860s when, as a scout for the U.S. Army and supplier to the Kansas Pacific Railway, he is said to have killed 4,860 buffalo in just eighteen months. That works out to about a dozen carcasses every twenty-four hours, assuming that he rested his trigger finger on the Sabbath.

Today, however, Buffalo Bill is remembered not so much for his actual exploits as for his pioneering success in transmuting those deeds into entertainment. In the spring of 1872, for example, Cody led Company B of the 3rd Cavalry in an attack against a camp of Mnikhˇówožu, or Miniconjou, Lakota in Nebraska, an action for which he was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. By December of that year, Cody had temporarily abandoned the field of battle to impersonate himself on stage, in a production entitled The Scouts of the Prairies. From that day forward, Buffalo Bill Cody seems to have inhabited a borderland between history and myth, between the gore and the glory of Western conquest.

Eventually, Cody’s mastery of the facto-fictional mash-up would lead to his creation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus extravaganza in which real cowboys and real Indians engaged in mock skirmishes and a middle-aged easterner called Annie Oakley showcased the skills of a typical Western girl. This pioneering “reality show” earned Cody a place in the pantheon of American show business. But I have always been more impressed, or perhaps merely bewildered, by accounts of one of his lesser-known projects, a touring theatrical that hit the boards in the fall of 1876.

A few weeks earlier, General George Armstrong Custer had led the U.S. 7th Cavalry to a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakota, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne near the Little Bighorn, or Greasy Grass, River (not far as the crow flies from Bill Cody’s Wyoming headquarters). When word of this event reached him, he donned a black velvet costume adorned with silver buttons and lace that he wore in his stage shows and departed for the battlefield. There, he shot and scalped a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hair, to avenge General Custer’s “murder.”

Back on the theatrical circuit, Cody was soon dramatizing this triumphant exploit in a production called The Red Right Hand, or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. Although the evidence suggests that Yellow Hair was killed in a chance encounter, Cody presented the confrontation on stage as a face-to-face duel from which the better man had inevitably emerged as the victor.

On our first visit to town in the nineties, Keith and I had unexpectedly found ourselves staring at Yellow Hair’s dishonored flesh. There it lay, parched and sallow, in a shiny glass case in the gracious halls of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, still bearing the burden of Mr. Cody’s triumphant slogan. “The first scalp for Custer,” the museum tag read. This time, on our return visit, we had tiptoed through the galleries, almost afraid to look, but Yellow Hair’s scalp had thankfully been removed from public contemplation.

Looking back, it seems fitting for our first journey to Eastend to begin under the aegis of Buffalo Bill. At the time, however, with no idea of what lies ahead, Keith and I are just a couple of happy, middle-aged kids getting our own show on the road. Life rests gently on our shoulders that morning as we load humans and dogs into our old van and point it in a northerly, homeward direction. Away we go, across the Shoshone River, around the shoulders of the Beartooth range, and then, joy to me, out and into the high red-rock moonscapes of northern Wyoming and south-central Montana. At the sporty resort village of Red Lodge, we turn our backs to the mountains and swing downslope into a landscape that’s all space and sunlight and sky. My kind of country.

From Billings onward, we take the road less traveled, a narrow strip of asphalt that heads straight north through shimmering fields of stubble and herds of red-and-white cows. We stop for burgers at a town called Roundup, then sweep on through Grass Range without pause; side roads attempt to lure us off course to places named Fergus, Cat Creek, Heath.

The road and the country around it are so empty that every vehicle we meet demands comment. A red Silverado. Half an hour later, a black F-150. The drivers all boast big hats.

“I’m working on the wave,” Keith says. “Do you use one finger or take your whole hand off the wheel?” Since I grew up in small prairie towns, as he didn’t, he sometimes looks to me for advice about local etiquette. Even though he’s lived in Saskatchewan for more than half his life—he arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-1970s—he still occasionally feels like a newcomer. No wonder, since he was born in Nairobi and educated there, at a boarding school in Scotland, and at universities in England. We had met in the fall of 1991 (only a year or two before our first trip to Cody, come to think of it) when he had found himself newly single and, in those days before online dating, had dared to place an ad in the personal column of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix: “Friendly, attractive professional man, early 40s, seeks sincere, intelligent woman to enjoy adventures, travel, the arts . . .” I was then a youngish widow, with a freckle-faced daughter in tow: he had won me over at “friendly.” We met, great jubilation ensued, and here we were together, going down the road.

About an hour past Grass Range, U.S. Route 191 flows down into the broad, sculpted valley of the Missouri River—we walk the dogs to the silvery, high-pitched clatter of the cottonwood leaves—and then we are up and away again, flying past the Little Rocky Mountains, the cusps of their blue molars biting into the western sky, past, almost without noticing, the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to several hundred members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine nations. At the down-on-its-luck town of Malta, we turn west, through the not-much-luck-to-be-down-on hamlet of Chinook, and pass, again without noticing, a sign directing us to the Bear Paw battlefield, sixteen miles to the south. It was here, in the fall of 1877, that a massed force of U.S. infantry and cavalry, armed with a twelve-pound gun, surrounded, pounded, and eventually defeated a camp of Nez Perce refugees who, during the preceding months, had fought their way cross-country all the way from Oregon, in the desperate hope of finding safe haven on the other side of the international border.

At Havre, we jog north again, running for the border ourselves, and fail to notice, on the western outskirts of town, the remains of Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879 and once the grandest military establishment in Montana, with a garrison, at its peak, of more than five hundred blue-coated men. Their mission was to clear the country of “British” Indians, Cree and Métis hunters from across the line, by whatever means necessary. Voices hang in the air here, speaking of hunger, displacement, and cold, but we do not hear a word. Do you suppose it’s really true that what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

From Havre onward, the land is reduced to a kind of primal simplicity, a tawny expanse that tugs our eyes to the farthermost edges of the world. Somewhere over there, in the white haze of distance, earth and heaven collide. Although I have always thought of myself as a prairie person, I am out of place here, dazzled by these spinning horizons and this unbounded sky that bleeds off into infinity. The prairie landscapes of my childhood had been softer, more contained. If instead of stopping at Eastend, Keith and I were to continue driving northwest clear across Alberta to the edge of the plains and into the scrubby fringes of the northern forest, and if we then pushed on through swamp spruce and muskeg for half a day more, we’d eventually break into the tree-fringed grasslands of the Grande Prairie in the Peace River Country. That’s where I was born.

My parents were teachers, not farmers, so we always lived in town. But it was seldom far to the nearest pasture, where pale crocuses poked their furry snouts through the dead thatch first thing in spring and shooting stars launched their ardent magenta rockets around the margins of saline sloughs. As far as I knew, I was enjoying the total prairie package. But my mother knew differently. Her name was Edna Elizabeth Sherk, née Humphrey, and she was a true prairie girl, born to the high, wide, windswept plains of southern Alberta. She’d scarcely seen a tree in her life before coming north to the Peace River Country to teach, and at first they’d frightened her—so she told my sisters and me—looming over her in the darkness, rustling and shadowy.

She’d be in her glory here, I think, as I watch the light spin past the van. If it weren’t for the occasional farm site with a struggling stand of box elders (or Manitoba maples, as they’d be called on the Canadian side of the line) braced against the wind, there wouldn’t be a tree for fifty miles in any direction. At the international boundary, we pause momentarily for formalities, leaving behind the euphoric American promise of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” for the less stirring Canadian virtues of “Peace, Order and Good Government.” But the land flows on unmarked by national aspirations, as the road heads north and then east, on the final leg of our journey. By now, the day is fading, and we soon find ourselves tunneling through the dark. Highway signs leap into view, announcing places we have never heard of before: Consul, Robsart, Vidora. Even though we are theoretically back home, in our own country and province, the land that lies around us is enticing and unfamiliar.

We count down the miles to our destination, now so close at hand. There is nothing to be seen but liquid darkness, nothing to be heard but the gentle snoring of dogs and the hum of tires on asphalt. Then, with perhaps ten minutes to go, the headlights pick up a glimmer in the ditch, a flash of green-gold.

“Do you want to stop?”

Silly question. “Yes, of course!” We always stop.

In the wide bottom of the ditch, two coyotes are gnawing on the carcass of a road-killed deer. Caught in the flare of the headlights, their eyes glint; their muzzles are bloody; their bodies jitter in and out of the glare. There is something unexpectedly fleshy about them, something carnal and wild. We watch for a few minutes, then, with a nod of agreement, leave them to their feast. A door has opened into the darkness, giving us a privileged glimpse of the life that goes on, in secret, around us. A thrill of expectation rises in my body as we roll on toward Eastend. Whatever this place turns out to be, it’s going to be an adventure.

Eastend sits on the southeastern edge of a landform known as the Cypress Hills. From the bit of reading I’ve done before leaving home, I know that “cypress” is a bungled translation, from Michif (the Métis language), of les montagnes des cyprès, a phrase that actually means Jackpine Mountains. In Blackfoot, these uplands have been known variously as the Eastern Place Where There Are Many Pines and as the Overlapping, or Wavelike, Hills. In Assiniboine, they’re the place Where the Land Gets Broken; to some Cree speakers, the Beautiful Highlands. Like a great animal sprawled across the prairies, the hills rise in southeastern Alberta and flow eastward for more than eighty miles as a complex of broad, gradually diminishing plateaus. At the Head of the Mountain near Medicine Hat, the land stands almost 2,500 feet above the surrounding flatlands and attains a maximum altitude of nearly 5,000 feet, higher than the town of Banff—in fact, the highest elevation in Canada between the Rocky Mountain foothills and the mountains of Labrador. From this summit, a series of broken tablelands slouch downward across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border toward the Foot of the Mountain at Eastend. In all, the Cypress Hills encompass around a thousand square miles of magnificently varied terrain, a secret kingdom in the middle of a cactus plain.

Because of their abrupt rise above the surrounding prairie, the hill country experiences cooler temperatures and more precipitation than the dry lands at their base. Near the summit, conditions are ideal for conifers, including dark ranks of both jack and lodgepole pines, and for rare fescue grasslands. These isolated islands of habitat are occupied by isolated populations of birds and animals—white-throated sparrows, pine siskins, lynx, and elk—that are typically associated with the mountains and forests hundreds of miles to the west and north. At lower elevations, however, the boreal vegetation gives way to shining expanses of the ground-hugging grasses and wildflowers that are more typical of the northern plains. Wherever the land is broken, the hills have set a limit to the plow, and the wild prairie has been preserved as grazing land for cattle. As a result, the hills are an oasis of undisturbed prairie in a desert of plowed-up land and one of the most promising regions on the continent for grassland conservation.

Not surprisingly, the Cypress Hills are also celebrated across Saskatchewan as a beauty spot that everyone intends to visit, one day, soon, whenever they have a free weekend. But given the distance between this rise of land and the cities where most of us live, relatively few people actually make the trek. Before our arrival in Eastend, Keith knew the hills only as a vague presence on the horizon as he sped along the Trans-Canada toward Calgary and Banff. As for me, despite spending most of my adult life in the province (I, too, had arrived here from Alberta in the early 1970s), I had visited the area only twice before, never this far south, and never for more than two or three days at a time. But brief as those earlier visits had been, both had been riveting. Who could forget the slither of dozens of shiny garter snakes exploding out of their hillside hibernaculum on the first warm day in spring? Or, at the other end of a different year, the hard stare of a cow moose, with her calf at her side, warning off intruders at the bottom of a tobogganing slide?

Fortunately, Keith and I have booked a two-week stay in Eastend at the Wallace Stegner House: “First turn on your left when you get into town—there’s a sign, so you can’t miss it—and there’ll be a key waiting for you in the front porch.” I’d seen the place advertised in a writers’ newsletter, so we knew that it was run by the Eastend Arts Council as a retreat where writers and other artists could pursue their creative interests. In the face of these lofty intentions, I blush to admit that what the place represented to us was two weeks of affordable accommodation. The only interests we intended to pursue were indolence and sloth, with the spice of excursions into the hills for excitement.

By the time we let ourselves into the house, all we could think of was sleep. Morning’s light revealed a trim one-and-half-story structure with narrow gables, painted a soft sage green and screened from the street by a dense stand of spruce trees. Inside, past a cozy veranda furnished with armchairs and crocheted throws, lay a small but comfortable parlor, a dining room with a lovely old oak table, and a tidy kitchen stocked with a useful miscellany of dishes and gadgets. A narrow flight of wooden stairs led to a second floor that housed a bathroom, a drafty bedroom with a high metal-framed bed, and a scantily furnished space at the back that may have been intended as an office. I was relieved to discover that the table with which the room was equipped dated back to the pen-and-ink days and was too high, ergonomically speaking, for a writer with a laptop. Besides, there was no proper desk chair and no Internet service. Clearly, I could not be expected to do any serious work. Good, that was settled.

A bookcase outside the bedroom door offered an eclectic selection of reading material, including books by authors I recognized, from scanning the guest book downstairs, as previous visitors. And there were also several by the patron saint of the house, “the distinguished American writer” Wallace Stegner. I’d picked up that phrase from a plaque attached to an old water pump in the yard, which I’d had a chance to peruse when I’d gone out with the dogs. According to the engraved text, Stegner, then a small child, had lived in Eastend from 1914, the year the town was incorporated, until 1921. From 1917 onward, he and his family had lived in this very house, which had been designed and built by his father. The consummate local boy made good, Stegner had gone on to win both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his fiction and had explored his Eastend experience in three of his works, On a Darkling Plain, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.

I review this capsule biography in my mind as, one by one, I pull Stegner’s books off the shelf. The only one I’ve heard of before is Wolf Willow, which I recognize as a memoir of his Saskatchewan boyhood. Over the years, people have occasionally told me that it’s a book I “just have to read” and that I am “sure to love,” but though I’ve tried it once or twice, I’ve never made much progress with it. Opening the book now at random, I come upon Stegner’s description of the landscape that Keith and I have just been traveling through and that I have been struggling to fix into words.

“On that monotonous surface with its occasional ship-like farms, its atolls of shelter-belt trees, its level ring of horizon,” Stegner writes, “there is little to interrupt the eye. Roads run straight between parallel lines of fence until they intersect the circle of the horizon. It is a landscape of circles, radii, perspective exercises—a country of geometry.

“Across its empty miles pours the pushing and shouldering wind, a thing you tighten into as a trout tightens into fast water. It is a grassy, clean, exciting wind, with the smell of distance in it, and in its search for whatever it is looking for it turns over every wheat blade and head, every pale primrose, even the ground-hugging grass. It blows yellow-headed blackbirds and hawks and prairie sparrows around the air and ruffles the short tails of meadowlarks on fence posts. In collaboration with the light, it makes lovely and changeful what might otherwise be characterless.”

In the past, I’ve sometimes wondered if what’s kept me from reading Wolf Willow might be some subtle difference in national temperament between Yankee and Canuck, some slight shading of emotional dialect that does not translate precisely across the border. Apart from this shrine in Eastend, it is remarkable how quickly Stegner’s reputation and readership fade as you cross the line, reducing him in an instant from a lion of world literature to a regional writer and one-hit wonder. Who knows why?

But, now, face-to-face with Stegner’s lyrical sentences, I am forced to concede that at least part of my resistance is easy to grasp. I am simply blindingly jealous! That trout shouldering into the wind. The wind that tosses us into the air with the birds, our senses reeling. I place the book carefully back on the shelf, promising to return to it one day soon. For now, however, literature will have to wait: there are coyotes out there and deer and a world of wild things. It is time to load up our crew again and go exploring.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that setting out on back roads in unfamiliar country, without detailed maps, through a landscape populated mainly by wildlife and half-wild cattle, and in a vehicle that was showing its age may not have been the smartest choice anyone ever made. And it didn’t help that the weather, which had been unseasonably hot and summery all September, now blew in gray and mean. Undaunted—what did a little snow and rain mean to road warriors like us?—we decided for our maiden outing to head north and west on gravel roads, up and over the hills, to the town of Maple Creek, an hour or so distant. From there, after a bite of lunch, we would allow a paved highway to take us south and east, squaring the circle back to our starting point. Easy.

What we didn’t know is that the back roads in the Cypress Hills are, to use the geologist’s term, smectitic, a word that sounds like an expletive and that, in rough translation, means “turns to slime when wet.” At first, everything went smoothly, as we pulled out of town on a well-graveled track and almost immediately found ourselves traveling through country so lovely it made my throat ache. On both sides of the road, the land swept away from the ditches as voluptuous as skin, and tidy barns and houses lay nestled into the cleavage of the hills. We stopped to watch as a flock of late-season bluebirds flashed against the dead grass, carrying the memory of summer on their backs.

It wasn’t long, however, before our troubles began. As the road climbed gently toward the summit, conditions deteriorated apace, and soon we were viewing the scenery at odd angles, as we zigzagged from ditch to ditch. Somewhere along the way, a sign informed us, through thin drizzle, that we had attained the continental divide, whence waters flow south toward the Missouri River and the Gulf of Mexico and north to the South Saskatchewan River and the Arctic Ocean. This was an impressive kernel of information—who even knew that such a momentous height of land existed in flat old Saskatchewan?—and we would have paused to let its significance sink in if our van hadn’t already been slithering, sideways and downward, in a northerly direction.

Eventually, hours later than intended and sprayed with mud from prow to stern, we made Maple Creek and the hard top, and all was forgiven. For as G.K. Chesterton once wisely pointed out, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.” 1 And so, the very next morning, we prepared to head out again. Prudently determined to stick to the pavement this time, our plan was to drive south and then east toward Grasslands National Park, the only public lands in Canada exclusively dedicated to prairie conservation and our best hope to see burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, and the sole colony of prairie dogs north of the border. With good roads in prospect and a tail wind to help us on our way, surely everything would go perfectly. And so it did, for the first half hour or so. Then, in the middle of nowhere, without a bang or a sigh, our old van abruptly expired. No matter how often we turned the key or gazed longingly under the hood, nothing we did could persuade it to move an inch.

If you’ve never squeezed into the cab of a tow truck with three dogs, you really haven’t lived. So there we were, enveloped in clouds of warm dog breath, our vehicle dangling from a winch, forcibly returned to our starting point. Back in town, the mechanic at the gas station obligingly tweaked a thingamabob or two, replaced a widget that had blown, and expressed the hope that “she should be good to go.” Thus reassured, we set out next morning for Fort Walsh, a historic post of the fabled North-West Mounted Police, which lies in a picturesque valley just west of Maple Creek. New destination, same story. Five minutes west of Eastend, the van sputtered to the side of the road, and there we were on the end of a winch, being dragged back home.

You might think that by now we’d have received the message, but not so. It was only after our fourth outing, and our third tow back to town, that we finally gave up and submitted to the inevitable. For the time being at least, we were going nowhere. On the surface, the cause of our predicament was obvious—some intractable mechanical problem, not surprising in our old tin can, perhaps brought on by unfriendly weather and lamentable road conditions. Crazy thing, though: that wasn’t the way we felt. Instead of registering as an inconvenience, our dramatic returns to Eastend took on the aura of an intervention, as if some Power Greater Than Ourselves had resorted to the means at hand to grab hold of our attention. (Bad weather, maybe I could accept that, but did the gods really speak through clapped-out Astro vans?) It was ridiculous, we knew, but even though we laughed and shook our heads, we couldn’t quite shake the sense that we were being offered a teaching moment. “Stop,” a quiet voice kept saying. “Stay put. Pay attention to where you are.”

In the week since we’d left Wyoming, Keith and I had been in ceaseless motion, traveling across boundaries, over watersheds, through memory and forgetting, knowledge and ignorance, in the uncharted territory between history and legend. Now we stood on the divide between the mundane and the numinous, between the events of our everyday lives and the meanings that were speaking to us. “Stay put,” that still, small voice insisted. “Pay attention.”