Possession
by Rebecca Lawton
We all own it: that one belonging we believe we’ll keep forever. Maybe it’s our first car, our prize guitar, a poster bought at a fabulous rock concert. Maybe it’s something that relates to an unforgettable time: the mimeographed program from the high school prom, the picture book that taught us to read. These things, with their attachment to youth and hope, are the hardest to let go in times of consolidation—at spring cleaning, say, or when we’re moving to a new home. These are the things we may no longer use but whose mere presence brings a flood of memories. Some of these objects we believe define us.
For me that defining object was my canvas Sioux tipi. Made of heavy cotton duck, sewn in a cone eighteen feet in diameter, the tipi was bought mail order for my summer residence in the late 1970s. I’d been hired to work in the wide-open spaces of Utah and wanted to live as I believed one should out there—as those who preceded us lived. When the tipi first arrived at the Moab post office I loaded it up in my brother’s Willys jeep and drove back to our river-guide headquarters to examine it at. The white canvas looked pristine spread on the red earth at my feet. It carried the powerful scent of fresh waterproofing and the immense visual impact of crisp stitching on new fabric. It owned me immediately.
In the days to come, I paid five dollars for a permit to cut tipi poles in the Uintah National Forest. With the help of a friend with a hatchet, I spent a few days in the summer mountains sizing up stands of lodgepole pines in need of thinning. The poles we selected had to be three inches in diameter at the base and two inches where they’d cross at the top of the tipi cone twenty feet up. We cut each pole long enough to extend beyond the smokeflaps to give the tipi a classic hourglass shape. We slept out under June stars and ate pans full of rainbow trout caught in a nearby stream.
We brought the poles down from the mountains to cure for a month in the arid heat. During work breaks I removed their shrinking bark with an ancient drawknife borrowed from a neighbor. Peeled, the poles were the color of dry grass and smooth as human skin. They were the most beautiful and least portable part of the tipi, which I moved more than once with the aid of anyone who owned a pickup truck.
The summers I lived in the tipi, it provided shelter in all weather. At night I’d light a campfire, and the tipi would give off a glow rivaling any good lantern. Visitors would come. Many evenings I sat across the fire from people I would otherwise never have met: alfalfa farmers, park rangers, scientists from the nearby national park. They came to see what a tipi was like inside. They came to sit and share stories. They marveled at the campfire smoke drawing perfectly through the smoke hole, past the whorl of poles, toward the sky visible up above.
I struck the tipi in autumn 1979. The poles wintered over in Utah when I did not. I lay them on a couple of four-by-fours to keep them off the ground until I could return to raise my home again.
The canvas moved back to California with me, where it sat in various garages. Each time I saw it as I came and went, I’d remember the face of a Utah farmer who’d lived all his life by the Green River or the dust devils that would blow up with a handful of rain. I’d recall the night I woke to a shrieking great-horned owl holding to a lodgepole in the wind. I’d remember rainbow trout in the summer mountains. I felt the dream had ended somehow—I knew I wouldn’t be recapturing the magic of those days, and I wouldn’t be bringing back the day of the tipi.
I’m not one who believes in the sentiment He Who Dies with The Most Toys Wins. The idea of offloading things we no longer need or use is to lighten up in a feng shui sort of way. My friends who study such principles assure me that in unburdening ourselves of belongings, we not only lighten ourselves but also those who shared the things in some way. I hadn’t had the tipi up in twenty-five years. It was time to give it away. In the end the final catalysts for divesting were spring cleaning and a move to a new home.
The lucky new owners: the Cub Scout troop whose leader lives across the street. She was eager to have the tipi as soon as I got the courage to part with it. Since the give-away, she’s come to me with questions: do you use a ladder to put it up? What did you do for a floor? Some answers I know. Some I don’t remember. With each conversation, she shows plenty of appreciation for the troop’s new, elegant possession. We agree that its beauty and facility may spark the imagination of at least one boy, maybe more. She has acknowledged a few times how difficult it must have been to part with.
Yes it was. Yes—and no.
(First published in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. San Francisco: Hearst Corporation. 2006.)
