Having Everything Right Read Online Free PDF

taste of lightning in your teeth: Tomorrow I will be changed. Somehow, in the next passage of light, I will shed reptilian skin and feel the wind’s friction again. Sparks will fly. It’s a hope for the right kind of fear, the kind that does not turn away.
    A few miles short of Wisdom, Montana, I flipped open my sleeping bag at the top of Lost Trail Pass. Starlight prickled my shoulders with cold’s tattoo. At midnight there, August meant less than altitude. A long day’s winding drive from La Grande had left me numb with the car’s buzz, and abrupt dark silence was impossible to believe. But the tall stems of the trees made no sound. My ears were clouded with engine throb and tire whine. The whisper of stars I thought I heard wasonly a tune my head-bone played. Where I slid into the thin summer bag, I felt a bump of rock dent the small of my back. Sleep blurred my eyes, but I begged the rock to keep me wakeful. Tomorrow, I would drive down a valley that had burned my imagination, a place early trappers called The Big Hole. Tomorrow, Wisdom. The trees’ utterance was a pitchy fragrance.
    Why did I wish to stay awake? Sometimes stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation. Tomorrow, The Big Hole. And there was the battlefield that books and travelers and my mind made shine like an icon. Tomorrow, wisdom—if my hunch could be true. Where Joseph and the Nez Perce band were attacked at dawn one year after Custer died, I meant to stand apart from my own life and listen. I meant to stand apart from my century, if I could. The people who raised me would recede, and I would stand apprentice to the place itself. If wisdom could be portable from history, I might read it there in some configuration of the ground. Then sleep.
    Midmorning of the next day, I sat faint in the car parked at headquarters for the Big Hole National Battlefield. By the rearview mirror, pine-scattered hills were a blur of heat. Revelation was not going as planned. Dawn had come and gone. On my sleeping bag flung over the back seat, the dew had long dried, and sweat now trickled off my nose. Traveling alone, I had taken the exploratory vow: I will not eat until I learn from this place. I was untaught, and faint.
    The personnel at headquarters, the tan-suited rangers inside their buff museum built to suggest a Nez Perce tipi, had tried hard to prepare an experience for me. Beyond the glass-cased photographs and furs, the guns and arrows, they had ushered me into a little auditorium for my command performance of the slide show. I had sat alone among the gray folding chairs while an artist’s sketches of the battleflashed before me scene by scene, and a strident male voice on the tape loop told what the sound effects were to mean—the pulse of firing guns, a woman’s scream, hoofbeats from invisible horses—while the watercolor faces of the stern and the doomed went flickering through their show. Then suddenly the music came up and it was over. A little motor whirred, and curtains were automatically drawn aside from the windows facing west. There was the battlefield below, on a flat place by the river. Sun had bleached the replica lodgepoles gray. One cloud dragged its shadow toward Canada. On the sill of the view window, two flies had died side by side.
    Now, in the car, leaning back against the hot head-rest, I understood the chronology, and the battlefield’s topography. From my vantage point at headquarters, I had seen the signs strung out along the river where named warriors had fallen, and the pine-thicket knoll where the U.S. Army had been surrounded and pinned down when the tide of battle turned against them. I saw where they had their all-day chance to think on Custer’s fate, before the Nez Perce slipped away by night, ending their thirty-six hour siege, abandoning their joyless