Pinch Hitter For Augustine

Augie always wanted to hear noise. People noise. He wanted to hear the cheers of the fans, the excitement of a ball game and he left Jamestown that day because the stadium was so quiet. So empty! No players and no crowd! “Nothing to see,” he complained. I’ll never forget that afternoon we sat in the empty stadium, just the two of us, Augie and me alone, way up on the top of those faded green-painted bleachers with the splintery pine seats. A day late. We had missed the game! We missed Satchel! Neither of us had ever imagined that an empty stadium could be so quiet. Augie walked down the steps, out to the pitcher’s mound and just looked around for a long time. He finally turned up to me and yelled, “I’m gonna go home.”

The elk carried me out of the fog as we reached the summit of Medicine Wheel Mountain. The top was a plateau and had been made into a giant baseball park. I realized then that this wasn’t real; I was somehow in the middle of Augie’s dream. The elk brought me to a rock cairn that he called home plate. I could see the stars of the night sky rotate around me as if the axis of the earth came down through the very middle of that pile of rocks. I recognized some of the constellations and regretted that I could not remember the stories that early viewers attached to each figure. There was the great hunter Orion, Taurus the bull and Bootes the herdsman. The great scorpion crawled across the southern sky and the birds Cygnus and Aquila flew along the Milky Way. Above me, the Big Dipper circled around Polaris with dizzying speed. I looked to the horizon and could see the faint outline of mountains in every direction—mountains of bleachers and box seats, press boxes and concession stands—so many spaces for fans to sit that no one would ever be turned away because of a full house. The infield had 28 bases arranged around the pitcher’s mound with a base path to each marked with broken pieces of limestone. I saw five players standing in a semicircle around the pitcher’s mound and they had little flames burning on top of their brimmed hats. I remembered a painting in the Lutheran church basement back home in Minnesota that had old guys in robes and with tongues of fire burning on top of their heads and the Minister said the flames were the “Holy Spirit” and Augie and me thought the whole thing had to be made-up. The ball players carried baseball gloves and the leather glowed with the golden color of an eclipsed moon when it hides in the shadow of the earth. Their metal spikes glowed red and sparked on the ground with every step. The pitcher was a tall black right-hander, but I could never clearly make out his face, could not make his features come into clear focus. They played catch and made plays but they played so fast that I never once saw the ball. They scooped and threw and pivoted and I never saw the ball. They ran hard and slid into the bases and all the while they jabbered in a language that I could not understand. The elk called it “shadow ball!”

Comment: This is a picture of my cousin Stephen and me in front of the Medicine Wheel. We called this our “revenge trip,” a journey that we missed out on back in our college years.

We backtrack to highway #14 after a pleasant evening in Sheridan. Today we will climb the east side of the Big Horn Mountains and drive Alt #14 to the Medicine Wheel. The Medicine Wheel is not visible from the highway. It is located behind alarge silver-colored ball on top of the nearby cliff. We spy the small brown sign pointing right and climb a primitive road that has been carved into the hill-side. We maneuver through the protruding rocks covering the surface while paying close attention to the open drop-off on the left. A small sign and a faint trail lead sharply uphill to the large ball, a radar installation. The parking lot has been expanded since my first visit nine years ago. A small shelter along with an outhouse has been installed next to a wooden gate that marks the beginning of the mile and a half trail up-hill to the Medicine Wheel. A sign on the gate to the road up to the Medicine Wheel reads, “No Cars Allowed.” We readied a backpack and headed up the trail.