Imagine:
You are hiking alone in the Rocky mountains near the border with Canada. It’s Autumn and the days are still warm and green. Forests open into vast canyons where the hoots of marmots echo above the trees. In the darkness before sleep, in the embrace of your own home planet, you gaze up at the wheel of the Milky Way.
Deer and mountain goats live here with you. Grizzly bears too. To warn them of your presence you occasionally play a bit of “Wildwood Flower” on your harmonica as loud as you can. Here in the wild, you come to a road. Parked right in the middle of the road is an old Chevrolet sedan, all four doors wide open, not a soul in sight. You pause, shrug, play a few bars on the harmonica and stride into the trees on the other side of the road.
Four braves sit in a clearing, sharing a smoke. “We knew you would show up. We heard your mouth harp aways away. Don’t worry, we’re not grizzlies.”
You sit with them for awhile. “Do you guys live here?” They laugh. “We live on the rez. Our folks only come up here to the mountains to pray.”
We talk about the names of things. “You know the lake on the West side of Glacier, McDonald Lake? The white folks named it after some pioneer. Or after a hamburger.” We all laugh.
“What did your folks call it?”
“Sacred Dancing Lake.”
A friend told me this story the last time I was in Montana, many autumns ago. I remembered it when driving back home from a recent book signing in Oregon. A magnificent snow-peaked mountain named Shasta welcomed me. Above it, wheel-shaped clouds, named “lenticular” clouds, spiraled, inverted cones of energy. I named the vision “Sacred Dancing Mountains.”