by Lisa Jones
Scribner, May 2009
Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 1416579060
Essay/Review by Elliot Jackson
“What does it matter if it hurts like hell, so long as it makes a good book?” – Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Colorado writer Lisa Jones has just finished her first book, Broken. The title is a play on words – it refers to horse breaking, hearts breaking, bodies breaking. She has subtitled it, “a love story”, and so it is – in the way that, say, the New Testament is a love story. Bear with me, here, a moment – I mean no disrespect, and certainly no blasphemy. But imagine the gospel of – let’s call her Theodora: a well-educated Greco-Roman woman who, having heard tell of a healer and holy man working in the provinces of the Empire, makes the decision to leave Rome and travel to Jerusalem to write about him. She has heard tales of miracles which she accepts skeptically but politely: she doesn’t need to believe in miracles, or this Hebrew God, to write about them – or so she thinks.
But something happens to Theodora as she meets this teacher and healer, follows him around, talks to other followers, and starts recording her experiences. She finds, first, that she cannot tell his story without telling her own; second, that she cannot tell his story without accepting his own account of how his powers work – it turns out that polite skepticism has no place in this world. There is a deep magic at work here in this shocking, exhilarating new place – and she suffers a crisis as she realizes that her attempts to deny it or explain it away have the effect of making her more vulnerable to it.
Theodora’s longing for the comforts of her little villa (not to mention Roman baths, decent wine, and above all her lover, who is traveling the other end of the world), are contrasted poignantly with her longing for the truths revealed in her new experiences, her devotion to her new teacher and companions, and her increasing discomfort with the knowledge that the privileges of her rank and Roman citizenship have come at a staggering price paid by the conquered of the Empire. She writes of watching new friends and loved ones die, and of her fears for the life of her teacher. Finally, she writes of her acceptance that the divinity she senses in him has sparked a sense of the divinity within herself. In the end, she finds that she can leave Jerusalem, knowing that she carries Jerusalem within her.
And the point of this little exercise in parable? Context. Context is all. Let us cruise back into the here and now, and for “Jerusalem” read Wyoming, for “Rome” read Colorado (specifically Paonia, on the Western Slope, which is probably more like Tivoli than Rome, but you get the point). For the rest, suffice it to say that Lisa Jones, of inarguably WASP-ish descent, has refracted through the lens of her own particular experience the story of Stanford Addison, Northern Arapaho horse gentler and medicine man: a man whose reputation for accomplishing miracles of healing and horse training are rendered even more remarkable by the fact that he has been bound to a wheelchair for thirty years – a legacy of an accident suffered during a youth wild enough to be its own ballad. As Lisa notes in her introduction, “I was there to write a book about Stanford’s evolution from what he had been, a bad-boy outlaw, into the renowned spiritual healer he had become. But I didn’t get the information I needed in the quick question-and-answer sessions that had been the staple of my work as a journalist. I learned to wait and watch. And a lot of what I ended up watching was what was going on inside of me.”
I caught up with Lisa recently for a free-wheeling phone conversation. As she explained to me, the book she ended up writing grew out the fact that her relationship with Stanford is that of a friend – not a journalist, and certainly not an anthropologist. Broken is the story of a meeting of minds – and hearts. However, it didn’t start out that way. Back in 2002, when she was shopping a magazine article, things were in a slightly different space.
“I’d heard about Stanford Addison,” Lisa said, “and I’d made three separate pitches to Outside on a story about his horse training clinics. Finally, I gave up on them and pitched the story to the Smithsonian magazine, and their reaction was: ‘Go there! Right now!’” She did, but not without some apprehension.
“I was so afraid!” she says of that first encounter. “I drove to Boulder and caravanned up with all these folks who were participating in the clinic. It was an eight-hour drive, and we arrived after midnight.”
What happened the next day, Lisa describes vividly in her first chapters. The Smithsonian article appeared, and after that, it was a good nine months between her initial encounter with Stanford at the clinic, and the idea for a book on his life. The book itself took five years to write, partly because in order to get Stanford’s story, Lisa had to relocate herself – not just physically, up to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, but mentally as well. A paradigm shift was required in order for her to truly understand Stanford’s revelations about the spiritual beliefs that guide his work.
In other words, how do you write about someone who communicates with spirits if ‘spirits’ are not part of your world view? How do you objectively take notes on a healer who tells you that he knows what cancers taste like? There were times, Lisa said, “when I actually feared for my sanity. My basic beliefs [about the nature of reality] were being rattled, or in some cases, proven wrong. It was a struggle – it was either, ‘I don’t believe,’ or ‘I DO believe …(dramatic pause)… and THAT MEANS …’”
THAT MEANS … among other things… that the contrast between Lisa’s life in idyllic Paonia, CO, and her life on the barren desert reservation in Wyoming became, essentially, the lodge poles for two parallel realities.
“To someone who lives in New York,” Lisa explained, “they (Colorado and Wyoming) seem like the same place. But Wyoming is still way wild, and Colorado by contrast seems so civilized. Paonia was a known quantity – it’s a fruit-growing area, lovely, comfortable, shady, nestled in a valley. I’m really grateful I got to start this odyssey from there.” In Wyoming, “everything is on a windy plain – there aren’t trees. Weather moves in really fast – wind, snow, sun all have their way with the place. You’re right up against the sky.” Nowhere to run to, and nowhere to hide, as the old song says. In Wyoming, Lisa couldn’t hide from the realities her new friends – Stanford, the extended Addison clan, and Moses Stark, AKA “Custer’s Ghost,” – were showing her. The Wind River Reservation is a place where the teenage adage has a twist: “live fast, die young – if you’re lucky.” Violent death is only the wrong end of a knife or a car crash away – for horses as well as for young men. To deal with this sort of reality, the Arapaho have developed a sense of humor that involves what the English refer to as “the piss-take” – the fine art of straight-faced deprecation, starting with self and turning outward to others. The “rez” is no place to be if you can’t be laughed at.
To Lisa’s credit, she opens herself up not only to being laughed at, but to other discomforts as well – sweat lodges, close encounters with ghosts, her own fear of horses, romantic confusion and other harrowing emotional experiences. “I was coveting the unknown,” she says of her time spent among the Arapaho. “I was intimidated, but at the same time, I knew it was what I wanted.” When things got too intense, she exercised her option to return home to Paonia, which in contrast to Wyoming seemed “more comforting than ever”; however, such was her determination to get Stanford’s story, and her trust in her friend’s ability to guide her safely through the psychic rapids she was traveling, that she kept going back to Wind River.
And speaking of intense … ponder the dubious pleasures and indubitable perils of writing a biography of someone who is still alive. Then add to all the complications of dealing with your usual sorts of sources … writing about your mother. Your lover. Yourself. The process of writing this sort of auto/biography – the particular kind of self-examination it requires – involves turning that habit of journalistic detachment upon oneself, and pitilessly, curiously, diagramming one’s own ego. How, I wondered aloud, did she – as well as everyone else involved – handle this process?
“It was hard,” Lisa acknowledged. “It required negotiation. Peter (Williams, Lisa’s husband) and Mom got veto power over what I wrote. So did Stanford and all the other Arapahos – I read everything to them. It was more important to me to preserve my relationships than to ‘get the facts’.”
That’s not what you learn in journalism, Lisa pointed out. Journalism is about ‘getting the facts’ and relationships with your subjects tend, in conventional wisdom, to wreak havoc with that process. But the process of writing a book is different than writing an article or conducting a newspaper interview. There is less latitude to hide one’s own agenda, one’s own needs. And, as Lisa points out in the chapter “Beauty and Ruin,” “if the book happens to concern a powerful healer with psychic powers, forget it.” Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, indeed.
Lisa documents a huge amount of change in her own life and the lives of Stanford and his family during the course of the book. What, I asked, was the biggest change of all, for her?
“It was the encounter with what the white mind would consider to be magic. Our culture does not encourage a belief in that vision beyond childhood. If it can’t be measured or proven, it doesn’t exist. But now I don’t feel like I need proof [all the time]. I let belief work inside me. Facts aren’t going to solve everything.”
The other big change, of course, was how her relationship with Stanford Addison changed her relationship with herself and her world. Watching Stanford’s tireless ministry to the people who seek him out for healing, for counsel, for help with a troublesome horse, all while grappling with the grim and humiliating realities of life in a quadriplegic body, was “incredibly inspiring” to her. Indeed, her love for Stanford and what he shows her ends up breaking her heart open in all sorts of ways: love is a double-edged sword. Several of the young men who shared Stanford’s house, whose portraits Lisa limns with grace and humor, are now dead. Stanford himself is alive today, it would seem, through sheer force of will.
At the end, the portrait of Stanford that emerges is not that of a plaster saint, although part of the process of writing this “love story” was to move from idealization to realization: at the end of the day, Lisa writes in her closing chapter, Stanford Addison wasn’t a god, or even like Christ, in that he wasn’t dead or irreproachable: “He was just out here in the most broken part of America, doing his best, rising above circumstances that were very often unbearable.” And it was at the moment of that realization “that my discipleship ended and our friendship began.”
Lisa Jones will be at the Salida Library from 2-4 pm on Tuesday, August 25 for a talk and book-signing.
Elliot Jackson, in the interest of full disclosure, now reveals that she has had the pleasure of hearing Lisa Jones read excerpts of Stanford Addison’s story since 2002.
