Broken: A Love Story: A Woman's Journey Toward Redemption On The Wind River Indian Reservation - Softcover

Lisa Jones

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848503326 ISBN 13: 9781848503328

Publisher: Hay House, 2011

Synopsis

Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four-day magazine assignment. She was committed to a long-term relationship, building a career and searching for something she could not name. At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them. It was said he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years. As Lisa returned to the ranch time and time again, Stanford slowly revealed his story. He'd spent his teenage years busting broncos, seducing girls and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his physical prowess and in its place left unwelcome spiritual powers - an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. Eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts. Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place over the years, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she too was broken. This is her story, intertwined with Stanford's, and it explores powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else, love.

About this title

About the Author:

Lisa Jones lives in Colorado with her husband and two cats. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, High Country News and National Public Radio. Broken is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

chapter 1

WYOMING

AUGUST 2002

It's like driving a car at night. You can never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

-- E. L. Doctorow

The wind started as I neared the border. It punched through the open car window. I licked my lips and watched Colorado's piney foothills flatten out into yellow undulations of Wyoming prairie, free of every visible life-form except sagebrush, a pair of crows cruising the air currents, and scattered antelope. Although they evolved here, antelope have always struck me as exotic, with their clean white markings and thimble hooves, their preference for rocks over vegetation, wind over shelter,Wyoming over Colorado.

I was nervous. Smithsonian magazine was sending me to the Wind River Indian Reservation to write a profile of Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho reputed to be able to talk rank beginners through the process of breaking horses. I had approached the magazine's editors with the story idea, but now that I had the assignment, I wasn't sure I could pull it off. I was terrified of horses, and worse, in seventeen years of working as a journalist in the rural West -- seventeen years spent winning the trust of police chiefs and geneticists and forest rangers and heroin addicts -- I had never won the trust or friendship of a single Native American. I had tried hard and failed completely. I tried not to take it personally.Of course they won't open up, I thought.They're supposed to hate us white people, right? I mean, who wouldn't?

I lived in the tiny town of Paonia in western Colorado. The Utes live four hours south, the Navajos three hours past that.After I'd traveled to their reservations, my drives home gave me ample time to review the interviews I'd blown.

Me: So, how did you become interested in entering the Miss Navajo Pageant?

Beauty contestant: Just decided to do it, I guess.

Me: Was it the desire to be recognized, or to promote traditional cultural values, or to buy a bunch of new dresses, or what?

Beauty contestant: I couldn't afford the dresses. I had to sew most of them.

Me: So you sew! That's great.

Beauty contestant: [Silence.]

Me: It's interesting to me that there's no bikini competition in the Miss Navajo Pageant. I mean, the Miss America pageant is all about sex.

Beauty contestant: [Silence.]

Me: It's amazing that in most beauty contests, women have been reduced into this one tiny thing, one tiny aspect of being human. But not here!

Beauty contestant: [Silence.]

Why couldn't I shut up? Why did I get so nervous and yappy? There was no doubt I carried a small pile of racial baggage. I'd spent much of my childhood in rural Scotland, which was home to five million people the color of skim milk. "Jew" was a swear word. My Scottish schoolbooks called black Africans "savages," and my image of "red Indians" wasn't much different.

When I was nine, we moved from the cloud-shrouded hills of Scotland to Colorado. The jagged, exposed landscape evoked in me an exaggerated sense of beauty and danger.When we drove southwest to where the Utes and Navajos lived, the view was thrilling and, to my mind, suitable for viewing from the safety of a car with every single window rolled up. When I saw the people riding horses or herding sheep, my mind filled with the war chants I'd seen in the movies. I stood silently behind my mother as she chatted away with the Natives. I was extremely relieved every time we left the roadside jeweler or Navajo taco vendor and got back in the car. Alive. Spared again.

But here I was, forty-two years old, driving to an Indian reservation with a name so raw it made me shiver -- the Wind River -- part of a short procession of Subarus and Toyotas ferrying half a dozen people north from Colorado.We arrived at Stanford's at about midnight under a sky littered with stars. It was much colder here than it had been at home.We rolled out our sleeping bags in a pair of teepees Stanford had had erected for us. The next morning we got up, sniffed the dry, hayscented air, and congregated around a rickety table to eat our cereal, stare at the hulking, glaciated Wind River Range, brew coffee on a Coleman stove, and wait for our teacher to emerge from his house.

Eventually, the battered front door opened and Stanford rolled out in his wheelchair. He passed beneath the front porch light dangling from a single wire and glided down the wooden ramp. He leaned back, his head resting on a padded brace, his body bouncing passively every time his chair hit a rough spot. As he got closer, my gaze skittered to the dirt beneath the wheels, to the sky above his head, to anywhere else, and irresistibly back to him. His motionless feet were covered in bright white ankle socks that had clearly never touched the ground. His legs protruded, sticklike, from nylon shorts. Acne scars dotted his shoulders. His arms tapered to long, graceful hands. His face was pockmarked and thin. A long black braid hung down his back.

I had never seen bad luck heaped so hugely upon a human body. He looked at me, his gaze mild, open, alert, and unblinking. It walloped me just the way beauty would.

Shit, I thought, blushing to the roots of my hair. It felt like he could see every little place in me that had gone hard and rigid and smiling. Shit.

My eyes searched hungrily for something else to look at and seized on the corral and the horses. Mostly young Arabians, they were rounded up just yesterday. They swooped and turned in the corral, as restive and beautiful as caged birds.

Stanford bumped off toward them and pulled up in a square of shade. The Colorado contingent followed him and started pulling up lawn chairs nearby. I followed. Stanford usually had local Arapaho kids work the horses in his corral, but this was an organized clinic for outsiders; it would last four days. I'd been told that participants took turns entering the corral with a horse rounded up fresh off the range, and -- this was the part that boggled my mind -- often within a few hours, ride it around the corral. Two of our number were bona fide horsewomen. The rest had come mostly to watch and to be around Stanford.

"I'm not here to ride," I blurted to Stanford. "I had a bad time with a pony when I was little."

"Okay," he said.

We were joined by half a dozen Arapaho kids -- boys in baggy gangsta jeans and girls in basketball shorts and white T-shirts. I thought Stanford would shoo them away, expecting he'd need everyone to be quiet while he worked. But he didn't. The kids fanned out and perched like a flock of sparrows on corral poles, watching the action. Stanford joked with them, fielded phone calls on a cordless phone, and directed the goings-on in the corral. His presence was large and still and accessible, and I was suddenly, fabulously, at ease.

Paula McCaslin, a solid woman with clear blue eyes and short black hair, stood outside the ring watching the light gray three-yearold mare inside. The mare had led her Arapaho pursuers on a thirtymile chase the day before, and her night in captivity hadn't changed her attitude much. She lunged with the flexibility and passion of a carnivore for the window of air that would lead her back to her known world, away from the two-leggeds with their strong smell and scary eyes, which, like the eyes of all predators, were located on the fronts of their faces. God only knew what would happen now that her main defense -- the ability to run fast in a straight line -- had been diminished into running in little circles within a confounding wooden structure, the faces she was trying to escape reappearing every few seconds.

Quiet and still, Paula stood next to Stanford outside the corral rails, watching the mare's antics. Paula was a forty-year-old government cartographer who had grown up with horses in suburban Denver. After attending one of Stanford's demonstrations in Boulder she had tried his technique by herself and broken her arm. This morning she had eaten her breakfast alone in her parked car, staring straight ahead while the rest of us chatted and brewed coffee.

It was time to start. Paula scootched through the corral rails, joining the mare inside.

"Make her run," said Stanford.

"Yah!" Paula hollered. "Yah!"

The mare startled and broke into a trot. After many laps she stopped, looking at Paula with her ears pricked forward.

"That's the kind of look you want," said Stanford. "When she's ready to communicate, she's going to drop her head." Sure enough, the mare's head went down. But when Paula approached, the mare turned away.

"Okay, make her run," said Stanford. As the horse swung into a trot, he said, "I'm making it so the horse can only rest when she's paying attention to Paula." He was satisfied with the mare's progress. "She's seeing that Paula's not in there to hurt her or threaten her," he said. "And she's a smart horse, too; she's in there thinking."

I looked at the mare's still brown eyes. I could see what he meant. Within an hour, Paula was stroking her. It seemed as if the horse were shedding wildness like a tight shoe she'd always wanted to take off.

Paula put a halter on the mare and secured it with a rope to an overhead pulley apparatus. The rope holding the mare had no slack; she could stand comfortably only when she was directly below it. Stanford had us all leave the corral so she wouldn't associate people with this elemental lesson: The only way to endure confinement is to accept it. Stanford called it "finding your center." After an hour of tossing her head and trotting in place with her head in all kinds of awkward positions, the mare calmed down and stood still, as serene and eager as a show horse.

That lovely girl, I thought. That angel.

Paula "tarped" the mare, tossing a strip of blue tarp tied to a pole across her hindquarters, back, neck, and head. It would get th...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hay House
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1848503326
• ISBN 13: 9781848503328
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288