Safe Among the Indians

When I was a boy my father read to me at night from a curious history called Among the Shoshones. Elijah Wilson was a Mormon settler who, as a young boy, found himself adopted into an Indian tribe for many years. I don't even remember how. Not only did he survive, but he thrived. How cool was that! They didn't scalp him; they taught him and trained him up and adventure ensued. In one episode, he rode himself raw on a horse, and the Shoshones had him soak himself in the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake to heal him up. I'd tasted the water of the Great Salt Lake. I bet that stung.

You can "go native" as a reader, inhabiting the life of someone else. I've done it many times. Reading is an act of sympathy that takes you to the alien world that is someone else's experience. It doesn't have to be Indians or a wilderness frontier -- any imagined world makes you a foreigner, and a book gives you a travel visa. That can be dangerous. I still shake when thinking about that criminal autobiography I took off the shelf at Whitmore Library in Salt Lake City in which a murder was described. I wished I never read that.

Overall, I feel pretty safe about traveling the literary wilderness -- not because I'm an adult or any other reason. My safe travel through imagined worlds I credit to my father. I can still see his fingers smoothing the pages, inserting a bookmark after tucking me in, pulling up the green quilt my mother had tied in wooden frames set up in our living room. It's okay to go among the Indians when your father takes you on the journey.