Individualism
FINDING POETRY ON THE PIONEER TRAIL
A teacher and a poet
follows in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark
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Salmon, Idaho --- The poet in the bandanna-wrapped straw hat tramps along the shoulder of U.S. 93, leading a reddish-brown pack mule by a rope.
Even against the spiky backdrop of the Beaverhead Mountains rising eastward to the Continental Divide, this man with the graying beard and sun-faded red T-shirt looks out of place, like a 19th-century gold miner heading into the hills.
He smiles when strangers stop him just past the Lemhi County rodeo grounds one evening in late August, and he introduces his companion, Joe the Wandering Mule.
"I leased him in Dillon, Montana," the 50-year-old poet, Mark Hamilton, says. "I'm following the Lewis and Clark Trail."
As he walks in the nearly 200-year-old footsteps of Lewis and Clark, the college teacher from Muncie, Ind., is searching for a purer kind of gold: the poetry the famous explorers left behind in their journals.
Hamilton has been on the trail, off and on, for two years.
"To catch some glimpses of what they might have seen, to sensitize myself to the landscape and ferret out poetry from the journals," Hamilton says. He hopes to write a book, condensing the journals to poetry.
Like thousands of other Americans awaiting the historic journey's bicentennial starting in 2003, Hamilton has turned to the Lewis and Clark Trail for inspiration and connection with a history rich with culture, adventure and a wildness difficult to imagine today.
But while most people spend a few days hiking or canoeing sections of the 3,700-mile trail, Hamilton's journey spans years of study and preparation.
He moved to Missoula a decade ago to get his master's of fine arts degree from the University of Montana, a 2 and 1/2-hour drive north of this remote central Idaho town. There, he studied Native American culture and cross-cultural relations, writing, and the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06.
Then in November 1997, after taking what he wryly calls an "extended informal leave" from his job at Ball State University in Indiana, he set out on the trail.
On a two-month journey, he rowed 1,000 miles down the Ohio River in a flat-bottomed dory, following Meriwether Lewis' 1803 journey from Washington, D.C., to Louisville, Ky., where Lewis met up with Clark. Hamilton then followed the two men's path down the Ohio to Camp DuBois, near St. Louis, where Lewis and Clark wintered.
In the winter of 1998, Hamilton went back to his day job at Ball State to teach creative writing and English. Then in May 1998, following the seasonal schedule of Lewis and Clark, he spent five months paddling up the Missouri River in a sea kayak. He made his way upstream 1,350 miles, from Camp DuBois to Fort Mandan, near Washburn, N.D., where Lewis and Clark spent their second winter.
Hamilton wintered in Wyoming, where he was an artist-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation. He read and wrote at the artist's retreat on a working ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains near Clearmont, Wyo.
He wanted to experience winter on the Great Plains, says Sharon Dynak, director of the program. She said one of the foundation's jurors who selected Hamilton was "especially taken by the way Mark wrote of landscape as a means of transcendence, using landscape as character."
By slowly experiencing the trail in the same seasons Lewis and Clark traveled it, he hopes to capture the adventure of the expedition, "the heart and soul of the whole experience as they traveled the country."
He set out again on the trail in April from Washburn, N.D., paddling his sea kayak up the Missouri through Great Falls, Mont., and on up the Jefferson and the Beaverhead rivers to Dillon, just east of the Continental Divide.
In Dillon, he rested at a ranch and rented Joe, a gentle, 20-year-old mule, for $250.
In the canvas bags on Joe's back are camping gear, oatmeal, rice, a camp stove, binoculars, cameras and Hamilton's journal. He's been thankful for the kindness of people along the way, such as the couple last night who pastured Joe, let him camp in their yard and gave him fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden.
"Things like that are really phenomenal," Hamilton says.
He plans to make it to Travellers Rest by the end of this week. At the important Lewis and Clark campsite near Lolo, Mont., he'll meet with an old history professor and friend, before he continues over the Lolo Pass to Orofino, Idaho.
There, he'll leave Joe and get into his stashed kayak for the final journey down the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers.
He hopes to reach Astoria on Nov. l.
The journey won't end there. He will winter in Oregon. A boat builder and avid sailor in his youth, he may find work as a shipwright, or perhaps land another writing fellowship. Next year, he'll head back across the country, following Clark's return route along the Yellowstone, finishing up in August 2000.
He hopes to lease Joe again for the trip back over the pass.
At the end of it all, he hopes to write a book, timed to come out during the expedition's bicentennial.
On the trail, alone, surrounded by trees and animals and wildness, Hamilton said he can understand the close connection to nature expressed in Native American belief systems, that trees and animals and fish have a spirit, or soul, that must be respected. "As I come out of the catastrophe of the Ohio River Valley to frogs in the water and eagles in the air, I'm tapping into something animistic, maybe mystical.
"I feel liberated sometimes," he says, as he turns to head off to his campsite for the night. "I'm glad I took the opportunity to do it." |
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The Oregonian You can reach Courtenay Thompson at |
By COURTENAY THOMPSON
