Epiphany

I didn’t worry when the boy drove me past my dormitory and into the open field near the football stadium. I was a naive college freshman, innocent in the way of many small-town Catholic girls in the 1960s. He had been sweet at the kegger that night, bringing me plastic cups of beer and teasing me about being an English major. I trusted him, the way I trusted my hometown boys. I assumed we’d chat a bit, complaining about coursework or the basketball team’s losing season, or fret over earning money for tuition. Assumed he might ask me for a date, and kiss me once, maybe twice, before taking me back to the dormitory.

But this boy parked the car in a dark spot, turned off the ignition, grabbed me, and pressed me against the car door. He stared out the windshield as he fumbled with the zipper on my jeans. He didn’t kiss me; he didn’t even see me. There must have been other cars parked around us. Radios playing. Pebbles of gravel shining in the moonlight. I saw nothing. Heard nothing. I was only sensations: my arm twisted against my back; the door handle digging into my spine. I thrashed under his weight. “No, please take me home.” I didn’t mean to the dormitory. I meant to the house on the grasslands, to a time when I was a small girl lying in front of the radio listening to The Lone Ranger, to nights when my mother puttered in the kitchen and my father read in his easy chair and the breeze coming through the windows smelled of spring and new grass.

I began to sob. He let me go, turned on the ignition, and spun out of the lot, scattering gravel. I stuck my head out the window, gulped air the same way our dog Nipper hung over the side of the truck’s bed, eyes wild, panting. As we drove away from the stadium, I watched for a white beam radiating from the campanile, the iconic phallic symbol on the campus green. Senior boys joked that a brick fell from the campanile every time a freshman girl lost her virginity. If this boy had chosen to, if he had persevered, one of those bricks would have been mine. He stopped the car a block from the dorm and muttered, “Get the hell out.” I ran down the sidewalk, up three flights of steps to my room, slammed the door, and fumbled to turn the deadbolt. I curled up in the corner of the closet, trembling at the thought of what might have happened, and with shame that I was a girl who drank beer at parties; who slid into a car with a man she’d just met; a girl worth nothing more to a boy than a notch on his belt; just something to be subdued and conquered.

Every summer when I was a little girl, I donned a fringed vest and a cowboy hat and walked to the bridge that spanned the Missouri River. I sat on the abutment, waiting for a caravan of pickups to appear on the western horizon. From my perch, I looked over miles of bluffs and sky, where Arikara once built lodges and the Lakota hunted deer in the ravines; where fur trapper Hugh Glass ended his crawl at Fort Kiowa, battle-scarred but triumphant after wrestling a grizzly. On a nearby island, not far from where I sat, Lewis and Clark once camped on their journey up the river to map the territory Thomas Jefferson had purchased, a map that drew men to the Great Plains to plow virgin sod, build railroads, and drive Indians off land they had inhabited for centuries. Embedded in this landscape is the story of grittiness and conquest and violence, a place where domination defined a history and a man. It was also a place where we could trust our neighbors to show up when prairie fires swept over our pastures; to harvest crops when illness struck; to carry our caskets to the graves they had...