The Blackfeet have a legend about a sun god, or a god that came from the sun, anyway. He came down from a towering flat-topped mountain and taught the first of their people to hunt and fish. He went back to the sun, but his face is still outlined below the summit of the mountain, pointy nose and long chin, filled in by snow slowly melting away in the sun.
If any of us should be taken away by the sun god, my first thought would be of Evony. In fact, it often seemed that she had already been taken away. Evony, a third-generation German whose skin deepened to bronze in the summer, seemed to always live half on earth and half above the clouds where a young Christian would look for heaven. She often wondered if the image she frequently revisited of a room made of clouds was one she had dreamed to help herself sleep or if she had read it in a book a few years ago about gods who walked among men. It was always dark in that room, which told you more about her than most people knew.
As I manned the steering wheel of the dark grey van on a straight-as-an-arrow freeway to the green mountains of our next stop and Evony stared up from her creased paperback, I wondered what in her head would keep her so ensnared from the world around her. She both read quietly and looked out the window absently, but each could only hold her attention in shifts and I had never seen someone read a book like that.
This road trip was carefully planned in shifts and rotations: Evony, navigating for me, would drive next with Davynn by her side. Davynn and Evony were best friends in a way that no one else could imagine being friends. Their friendship, surrounded in movie-like perfection, was characterized by similarity and self-sacrificing loyalty. They had once laughingly told me, years after the fact, that they had both been in love with me in junior high, but Davynn had never said anything because Evony admitted to it first. I tried to ignore the sting I felt when they told me because their telling me meant that the love they felt had passed.
Davynn herself seemed to have her feet planted firmly on the ground, but Evony, and Evony only, knew the the worlds her mind leaped into when she was alone, or felt alone grouped in a gathering of loud strangers. So if Evony had been asked to guess which of the eight travelers would be taken against their will to the sun god, she would consider Davynn, even though all others thought her to be unyieldingly logical. When Evony carefully introduced us carefully, two strangers who knew each other’s names, Davynn’s clipped words and internal silences lead me to think that she had seen something she did not like, but I was assured later by her friends and nervous approaches that she found in me a rare and unassuming friendliness. What Evony understood was that Davynn felt such depth of emotion that she could chose to siphon herself off from the world or to let it overwhelm her.
But neither Evony nor Davynn, the two inseparable friends, would be taken away by the restless sun god, and I would let the road pass to the next gas station without asking the brown-haired German-American what weighed down her mind.
Nihilistic Porcupine 