Sunset in the House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday: Remembering the author who remembered the Earth
I never met the man, never spoke to him, saw him lecture, or wrote him a letter. I have no evidence that he ever visited the Apostle Islands or even knew that they existed.
It might seem strange then that, in those hours that hover in that unexplored territory between darkness and daylight, his name has so often come to mind. I have thought of him as I anchor the Little Dipper in some unnamed cove and slip over the side to swim into a shadow-black cave to wait for sunrise. And when it finally comes, pulling itself from the water dripping with color to paint the cave, that architecture of rock and light with morning sun, in that moment, I have often whispered to myself his most famous line and smiled: “House made of dawn.”
(photograph by John Motyka)
N. Scott Momaday died recently at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Born into the Kiowa tribe, Momaday was a poet and novelist whose first book House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. His stories, poems, and novels in such works as The Way to Rainy Mountain and In the Presence of the Sun and The Man Made of Words, as well as others, explored eloquently the themes of self-identity, the power and importance of the oral tradition, the edge between self and community, and the human connection to the land.
For Momaday, that was no casual connection. It was an embodiment. “I am a feather on the bright sky … I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water … I am the long track of the moon in a lake” he writes, almost sings, in his poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee.” Woven tightly in those words is not the “longing” found in way too many Romantic poets, but the “belonging” of someone whose whole identity is rooted in nature.
The landscape that Momaday’s work and identity was centered in is a land of red rock, deep canyons echoing with the calls of the raven, the swirl of dust devils and an endless sky of blue. It is a place of heat and dust and light. It could not be much farther from, or much more different than, the wave-tipped, green-backed Apostle Islands. Yet, like all great works of literature, Momaday’s words went beyond boundaries and touched on something universal: the human need for a sense of place. Few words sparked more deeply in me that desire to find my place somewhere on earth than those of his poem “The Earth”:
The Earth
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon
it.
He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.
— N. Scott Momaday
I first read those words decades ago in the dusty stacks of the Helen C. White Library on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so young I had not yet had any earth to “remember.” Since then, I have traveled to six continents, rappelled into smoking volcanoes, skied across glaciers, bushwhacked through the jungles of the Amazon, river rafted in China and even hiked the echo-filled canyons of the lands Momaday’s words were so firmly rooted in.
But my own “remembered earth” and the landscape I endeavor now to look at from as many angles as I can, is this constellation of islands set in the blue-black waters of Lake Superior. Here, it is the white pine, not the bristlecone, whose roots cling to the sandstone. It is here that I go into the land “in every season” and listen for the sounds of gulls and creaking ice and the wind strumming the pine needles like harp strings. It is this place I think of when I am far away and return to, the reason I rise so early and stay out so late seeking “the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.”
That is the power of stories, of words woven by a master storyteller like N. Scott Momaday. A story well-told is timeless and reaches beyond the boundaries of the page and the setting to speak to universal truths. We are indeed “held by more than the force of gravity to the earth” as the poet says. We are held by the force of stories, the force of love for each other and the land. In that way, it matters less what landscape we choose to pay attention to than the very fact that we choose.
N. Scott Momaday won many prizes throughout his long and prolific career, including the National Medal of the Arts given to him by President George W. Bush in 2007. Still, I like to think that even more than accolades and awards, he would have truly understood the feeling of belonging that washes over me these mornings aboard the Little Dipper. Even from afar, he would have known the power of that human quest for belonging more fully to a landscape, any landscape. Momaday’s work will ring true anywhere the sun rises, giving its light freely, an invitation to all of us to open our eyes and our hearts and be grateful for whatever part of the earth we know, that we remember, to be at home in our own chosen “House Made of Dawn.”
N. Scott Momaday was 89 years old.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photos by the author unless otherwise noted)
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