Thanksgiving without fear, and bathed in the waters

Native Americans were visiting this part of Arkansas thousands of years ago. An old Indian legend says that those who traveled to this valley would bring back stories of a cave in a mountain where an evil spirit resided. In the mornings you could see the smoke from the fire the evil spirit would breath. It would billow up from the mountains all around. They prayed for the Great Spirit to defeat the evil spirit, and it did so, turning the evil spirit to scalding hot water which poured forth from the rocks in the mountain. From then on, the legend goes, all tribes were welcome in this "Valley of the Vapors," and could bathe in the hot water together. This would be a peaceful valley. Before stepping in the water, all quarrel was to be left ashore.

They say the first white man to see the hot springs was Hernando DeSoto during his expedition west of the Mississippi River in 1541. This legend has DeSoto finding the springs and his party taking respite here together with a number of Native Americans from different tribes. One likely surviving account of this expedition describes their discovery.

So came we to a valley that lay between great green hills. And there was water of exceeding hotness, so that we were afrighted, bethinking ourselves of death and the nearness of the fires of Hell. Anon there came dark red men and their women down the valley, and trod the strange grey rocks without fear, and bathed in the waters, laughing and making great joy. Then we were no longer afraid, but knew it was a warm Well of Life.

This past Thursday Americans celebrated Thanksgiving. The holiday is supposed to commemorate a feast by early European settlers in America where they sat and broke bread with Natives. The holiday is about much more than just giving thanks for God's blessings. It is also a celebration of laying down differences and grievances and coming together, if only for a single meal.

My family celebrated Thanksgiving in this big old house up on the hill in Hot Springs. I foolishly volunteered our temporary home to my mother who was stressing out about hosting Thanksgiving while her own home was in a state of flux. The house my mother lives in now was the house she grew up in, and the house where my mother's family has celebrated Thanksgiving for probably every year of the last half century or more. I was surprised when she took me up on my suggestion. My wife was distraught. In that moment she went from stranger in a strange land to matriarchal host for my side of the family's Thanksgiving. It was a lot to ask of her. She bit through her nails but in the end we pulled it off and hosted twenty people here in someone else's home.

Twenty people may sound like a lot, and I suppose it is, but my family has really weathered a lot in my lifetime. Aside from being in a different house, this Thanksgiving felt different from past Thanksgivings in many ways. There are a number of people in my family who have died in my lifetime - some through the natural course of things, some unexpected and far too soon. Some people have left the fold because they've moved away from Arkansas, in search of better jobs and opportunities elsewhere, or like me they followed the family of a mate to another state. Some no longer wish to join us at our table, carrying grudges and grievances too great to set aside even for a single meal. Some are no longer welcome. Some just simply disappeared or drifted away.

My mother and her cousins all grew up together on the same block. They spent holidays together in a large, tight-knit family lead by a string of powerful matriarchs who drug kids to church and insisted on a certain decorum in the home. My generation is spread out across the country. Those who are left from my mother's generation and mine that still gather together in Hot Springs are no Norman Rockwell painting. We are poor, multi-racial, secular and unsentimental. Nothing is sacred, aside from the fact that nothing is sacred. We show love for each other through telling stories and making each other laugh.

My wife has always expressed surprise at two things about my family at holidays. There is no ritual to it like there is in her family. When people show up they are ready to eat. When they finish eating they are ready to go. Her family's holidays are long, drawn out affairs where people mill around the house for many hours, sitting and taking each course together at the table on a strict schedule. She's also always been surprised at the way my family tells stories. Her family meals are free-for-alls where people chat with those sitting closest to them, with multiple conversations going at once. My mother's family meals feature people taking turns telling stories to the entire table, with each person waiting patiently for a story to end before telling their own.

Though my mother's family are all gifted storytellers, I suppose they are relieved I'm not writing this book about them. Their family stories have been crafted and honed over years of collective work. At any story told at my family's table, you might find the storyteller being interrupted several times by people correcting them. Or perhaps they will ask someone to jog their memory. Over the years each story eventually settles in to an accepted version, and a certain family member as the designated teller of that story. I've watched my cousin Jeff teach each of his kids this skill, handing off different stories to each of them over the years, calling on them to tell one story or another as people think of them. Getting the story right is important, although "right" doesn't necessarily mean true. It means telling it in the most entertaining way, truth be damned.

Sometimes an obfuscation of the truth is called for to protect someone's feelings, or to hide an unpleasant fact that may take away from the levity of the story. Even as I write this letter to you, I worry about how much of what is going on in my family to reveal to you strangers knowing that other members of my family will read this. It is one thing to tell an embarrassing story about someone making a fool of themselves or failing spectacularly at something important to them. If the story is funny, it's ok. But when you tell a serious story about someone in real trouble with addiction, or the law, or a gut-wrenching betrayal and heartbreak, that's too far. If it isn't making anyone laugh, it's probably not ok to tell. It's a weird paradigm, but it's the way things seem to go.

In my interviews with people for my book I've found both of these things to be true. People love to tell stories, especially funny ones, but are reluctant to share painful memories, even when those stories are the ones people connect most powerfully with. There isn't any recognition that the things in our families that are painful are also the things we share in common with most people. We think the things we share in common are the superficial normalities, and the rough stuff is supposed to be secreted away to make us seem more like everyone else.

The other thing I'm discovering is how difficult it is to get at the truth. The stories people tell me for this book, they are sometimes unreliable memories. At their worst they are the recounting of another person's unreliable memories told second hand. They are family lore told hundreds of times across dinner tables, carefully worked into an accepted version of the truth over time. Already I've heard the same story from multiple witnesses in totally contradictory accounts. Ultimately it will be my job to decide which version of the truth to lay before my readers, and they'll have to trust me that I did the best I could.

It's now widely accepted that Hernando DeSoto never came to Hot Springs. Much of the legend of his time spent here in the water with the Indians was the creation of a local businessman, John Fordyce, who was appointed to a Congressional committee to investigate the DeSoto expedition into Arkansas. We can only speculate whether he was blinded by a desire to put his hometown and business on the map, or just lead in the wrong direction by confusing modern place names with their original counterparts. But Fordyce and many others in Hot Springs went to great lengths to capitalize on the myth of DeSoto in Hot Springs. A grand statue of DeSoto receiving the gift of water from a kneeling Native American woman stands in the middle of a fountain in the old Fordyce Bathhouse, now the National Park's visitor center. Many businesses in Hot Springs were named after DeSoto. The legend featured prominently in promotional materials for the resort for much of the twentieth century. But historians now agree that there is no archaeological evidence linking DeSoto or the Spanish expedition to Hot Springs. There is little in the written accounts that could be interpreted as an excursion to this area. The notion of Hot Springs as a sanctuary where warring Native tribes and European explorers could all relax in a hot bath and lay aside their differences was good for business, but was likely untrue. Sadly, much of DeSoto's expedition through Arkansas was no different than the rest of European people's excursions through this country over the next three centuries - his interaction with Native people mostly lead to violence.

Even the story of the original Thanksgiving is up for debate among historians, from the actual place and date to whether or not the event whitewashes the genocide of Native Americans at the hands of the colonists. The truth is always a hard thing to get at, but is especially difficult when we are taking great pains to tell a pleasant story. What gets hidden is the painful, difficult truth. Though usually what we actually need in order to understand who we truly are, where we come from, and how we move forward is more than a pleasant story; we need that difficult truth laid bare. A happy story can make us no longer afrighted, but it doesn't make the water any less hot. And down here, let me tell you, the water is hotter than hell. What we do in Hot Springs is get in it. What we do in Hot Springs is take a bath.

I'm thankful this year for everyone who has been brave enough to tell me their difficult truth for my book.

And I'm most of all thankful for my tremendous, indomitable partner, love of my life, who hosted Thanksgiving for a wild Arkansas family in a big old house on a hill one year - a story I'm sure we will all tell again and again and again.

With thanks,

David

P.S.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving I'd like to take a minute to plead with you, dear reader, on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. Since April of this year they have been protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil pipeline that threatens to damage the tribe's only source of water. Those protests have grown to include over 400 Federally recognized Native American Tribes and there are now thousands of people camping at Standing Rock in defiance of the Army Corps of Engineers to block the pipeline. These protesters have been met with unthinkable violence from police and private citizens alike - water hoses, German Shepherds, rubber bullets, gas, concussion grenades. Already one protester has had her arm amputated after being hit by a concussion grenade fired by police.

We can support these brave activists as they continue their stand against the pipeline, which they've vowed to continue until the project is halted and the effects on their water supply can be studied. Winter is coming, and the camp has an Amazon Wish List that they continually update with supplies that they need to maintain the camp and protests through the coming months. If you can't afford anything on their wish list, you can donate any amount of money through Paypal at this link. Let's do what we can this Thanksgiving to help our Native brothers and sisters stand up for sovereignty, ecology, and humanity. It's truly the least we can do.

P.P.S.

I was invited to write something about Hot Springs for this weekend's New York Times Magazine. I may say more about this in another letter, but wanted to mention it here in case anyone wanted to go out and buy the magazine today.