Excavation of Ponce de León
CRISTALLE SMITH
Chittering women gather in a circle on the base floor of the hospital annex in Pocatello, Idaho. Their button-down shirts in paisleys and pastels cover up pregnant bellies. Middle-aged men grasp their palms, fingers intertwined like a twisting, three-dimensional model of a double helix.
Eight months pregnant. Heavy with thoughts of my grandmother who once lived in the Windermere Valley. Her blood running from Clan Fraser to Tecumseh, Ontario.
I’m living where the Shoshone were displaced. Convergence of the Lemhi River and the River of No Return. Potbellied stove near small, hardwood-floored rooms from the 1920s. Perhaps a miner and his family lived here once. Drifting in from Gilmore or Leesburg, places now forgotten in the Bitterroots. Sagebrush knocking against Depression-era newspaper plastered on walls. Tattered gingham curtains swaying against rigid grime in the breeze. Faded in one hundred years of sunshine.
They say Sacajawea came from this place. A carved statue of her holding her baby is all that remains, greeting Japanese tourists at the front of a nature centre with winding gravel paths that lead sanctimoniously through strange dome structures that are labelled as ‘sweat lodges.’ Red willow bends and curves near the flowing river, makes a basket out of the land.
A bronze replica of a grizzly bear paws at jumping, copper-cast salmon. Long since dead to dams.
Signage along the highway to Mud Lake reads about the mercury poisoning of Lewis and Clark. Always Sacajawea immortalized in the National Parks’ brown and yellow, pointing West. A destiny manifested.
Millions of years of Grandmothers live in my blood. They whisper when I step on the pavement. Grey skies frothing in winter depression.
Annette took me on as her apprentice. Asked me why I should be a midwife. Saw my Great Grandmother holding open her hands in Oyen, Alberta. Catching a baby, wiping off vernix. And then, gently reclaiming the suffering. Midwife, Undertaker, Mother. Her teleological job title. Even though the living were afraid to handle the new, the old, the dead.
Phone calls in the middle of the night. Most often 3 a.m. Full moons are busier.
A round of prenatal, labour, and postpartum. Weighing babies in swaddling. Cotton flannel baby scale sling.
One night Annette tells me of dreams. A full, bursting fruit, flowers budding in heavy rains.
And yet another, a woman walks clumsily along a railroad path. Dreams each night of finding a dead calf, half-removed from its amniotic sac.
This, she tells me, is a cord prolapse.
Place your hand gently on the baby’s head. Watch the posterior fontanelle. Push up to allow flow through the umbilical cord. Call 911.
We women, unafraid, stand in the pools of water that come from between our Grandmothers’ legs.