Kathleen Is Back From the Dakotas

I've been to the Dakotas twice in two weeks, and, man, that's a long drive. We usually go home where the Eagles roam (i.e., Standing Rock Reservation) for Memorial Day, but having made the trip a week early for Clyde's oldest sister's birthday, we weren't planning another trip so soon. But we got the call to attend to some horse business. Immediately. So off we went.

We just got back, and it's late, but I've been thinking about my Friday blog on the long drive. And I have a couple of pictures from the trip, so here we go. First off, a question for any horse lovers or Horse Bowl champs out here--and we do have a championship coach in our midst--regarding our two yearlings.
Can you tell from the picture whether they're Medicine Hat Paints? Okay, I just wanted to show off a horse picture, but 7 hours in a pickup will lead to the occasional disagreement, and one of us says they are, one says not. Anyone know what makes a Medicine Hat?






Enough horsing around. So we ended up going to the Dakotas for Memorial Day after all. Clyde says it always rains on Memorial Day, and it seems to be true. It rained like crazy the whole 3 days we were there.

Here's what an Indian cemetary looks like after the veterans have put up the Memorial Day flags. There aren't many headstones here. Lots of wooden crosses and other smaller markers on a windswept hill. It's an old graveyard--late 19th century graves there, including Gall (of Little Big Horn fame), but it's where the Eagles tend to land. Ordinarily you'd drive right past, hardly notice what it was. But the flags makes such a stirring sight! Oh, the people are proud of their warriors, let me tell you. And this military brat loves all the ceremony--especially when it's combined with singers around a traditional drum.

Moving on, has anyone seen Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee yet? We watched it the first night. It focuses on a very small part of the book, but I like the way they chose three people whose stories, taken together, offer a range of insight. They are Sen. Dawes, the white man who "knows what's best" and probably really wanted to save the people from extinction; Sitting Bull, who stood his ground; Charles Eastman, a man caught between two worlds.

Any story--fact or fiction--is all about characters, and figuring out how to tell a story about Wounded Knee without sending your reader/audience after the bottle of anti-depressants is a challenge. So often I hear people recite the list of topics they don't want to read about/watch on the screen in their "leisure" time. Children dying is a big one. Animals dying might even be bigger. Infidelity is a common taboo among women. War and gore and the list goes on. But, hey, we're romance writers. We can stay away from the icky stuff, can't we?

Maybe. But sometimes we don't. (And some of us take a broader view of Romance than others do.) I've touched on the history of the Wounded Knee massacre in two of my books: Reason To Believe (contemporary) and Fire and Rain (sort of a historical-contemporary hybrid). Both stories have hopeful, uplifting endings--what I consider to be the real hallmark of a Romance--and I think you can only achieve that through the characters. Let's face it, is there anything darker than human nature? But, oh, that individual good-hearted soul, that shining moment, that selfless deed! How do the rest of you deal with potentially dark or disturbing aspects of your stories?

I do think the HBO movie is worth watching, but they gave short shrift to the climax, blending two events that happened miles and weeks apart into what almost appeared to be one incident. I've heard that a multi-part series was condensed into two hours, and that would explain the montage effect at the end. Read the book. When it came out it opened a lot of middle-American eyes. Anybody see it yet? Comments?