The Way to Rainy Mountain1. In many ways, Momaday is writing .docx

The Way to Rainy Mountain
1. In many ways, Momaday is writing a memoir of a
people, the Kiowas, not just himself or his grandmother. How
does he use events from his own life and his grandmother’s life
as a lens through which he can talk about the Kiowas?
2. This memoir is filled with visual imagery. Find five
places where Momaday uses detail, to heighten the reader’s
experience with the text. Then find one place each in which he
uses sound, touch, smell, and taste to describe the world he is
remembering.
3. Nature itself is a character in this memoir. Where in this
memoir does nature seem to be taking on a living role? In what
ways does Momaday use nature to move the story in this
memoir forward?
The College Hazing That Changed My Life
1. An effective memoir usually starts fast with a “lead”
that draws the reader in and hints at the memoir’s overall
meaning or “theme.” Sometimes, as in this case, it takes the
reader right into heart of the main action before backing up and
providing background. How effectively does this strategy work
in this memoir?
2. Rogers sets the scene with rich and vivid details. He
moves from various scenes, painting brief but compelling
portraits of key people, from family members to his athletic
team members. He also fills scenes with sensory details (sight,
touch, sound, and smell). Find specific places where this variety
and richness in detail make the memoir more powerful.

3. At the heart of any memoir (or story) is a complication
that the author grapples with and needs to resolve. In this
memoir, what is the conflict that draws readers in and makes
this more than just a personal story? How does he resolve that
conflict, and how would you describe his new understanding?
4. Memoirs usually conclude with a point or “implied
thesis.” How would you describe the author’s new
understanding? What general point (or points) does the author
make?
The College Hazing That Changed My Life
I had no idea college was going to be so much like a gay porn
movie. That’s what I kept thinking as I stood in the middle of a
sun-dappled backyard, dressed in nothing but a spandex unitard
and running shoes, preparing to have oil poured over my body.
For the last two hours, 10 other young rowers and I had been
undergoing “initiation” to my university’s varsity crew team.
After two weeks of tryouts, we had finally made the grade, and
this was our reward: An afternoon of embarrassing hazing
activities, followed by a homoerotic climax that seemed to have
come straight out of my 17-year-old gay subconscious.
Our team captain, a 200-pound hulk of a man, was walking from
freshman to freshman with a large vat of vegetable oil, and
letting it cascade all over them one by one. “Be prepared to
have the worst acne of your lives over the next week,” he
warned us. A tarp nearby had also been covered in oil, and other
members of the team were streaming into the backyard with
bottles of beer to watch what was about to happen. When my
turn came, I closed my eyes. As I felt the liquid drip into my
shoes, he leaned over and said, “Get ready to wrestle.”
College is a strange time. As soon as our parents drive away
from our dorms, and leave us alone with our boxes of books and
Ikea corkboard, we’re free to make an extraordinary number of

mistakes and end up in situations that may not teach us much
about organic chemistry or Emily Dickinson, but let us figure
out who we are and who we want to be. In my case, that
situation involved man-on-man oil wrestling.
I had always been my family’s black sheep when it came to
sports. For as long as I could remember, my mom had been an
obsessive long-distance runner. She logged about 50 miles per
week, and when her friends ran half-marathons on weekends,
she would run along, just to give them “emotional support.” My
dad, a tall, thin doctor, had competed in triathlons around
Western Canada for a large portion of his adult life. And my
older sister was a star. Ever since I was a young kid, she had
always been an exceptionally talented athlete — a runner,
swimmer, biker and rower. By the time I was graduating high
school, she had worked her way to the top echelons of Canada’s
rowing community and was even considering trying out for the
Olympic team. I, on the other hand, was what some of my
disappointed sports coaches had consistently described as
“physically awkward.” Whereas my sister had inherited all of
my parents’ athletic genes, I had inherited all of their gangliest.
I was tall and shaped like a stretched piece of Play-Doh with
twigs stuck into it. My limbs had a tendency to do things that I
didn’t want them to do, like make me fall over boxes and down
stairs. And, to make things worse, I was pathetically,
pathologically shy. For most of my childhood, I was the
wallflower who stood in the corner while the other kids threw
balls at each other’s faces (apparently I hung out with some
pretty violent kids).
On top of that, I’d known I was gay since I was 8. While that
discovery didn’t send me into paroxysms of panic, it also made
me want to keep to myself pretty much all of the time. I spent
most of my early teens reading books and listening to a lot of
Nine Inch Nails and ABBA. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a
jock like the rest of my family — in fact, I was envious of my
sister’s talents — it’s just that I was usually pretty mediocre at
the sports I was enrolled in, and practice cut into time spent

alone with my Walkman. And then, I discovered rowing.
As far as sports go, rowing is a remarkably bizarre and all-
consuming one. You have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to sit
in a very skinny boat facing backward and row around in a loop
until you get very tired. You have to wear some very revealing
spandex outfits. Given that our rowing club was located on a
river near farmland, you also have to dodge rocks and tree
stumps and the occasional bloated dead cow. And yet there was
something magical about it. Every morning, I would get to see
the sunrise before I went to school, and I loved the feeling of
exhaustion I felt after every practice. In high school, I took the
sport more and more seriously until something weird happened:
I became sort of good.
Not only did becoming a jock boost my self-confidence, it was
an antidote to my anxieties about my burgeoning
homosexuality, about the girlish lilt that could emerge in my
voice or my occasional extravagant hand motions. I had always
been pretty comfortable with the idea that I was gay, but I was
still struggling with the implication that it meant being less
manly than the other boys. But jocks were manly. They were
self-confident, and cool, and, somehow, better than people who
weren’t jocks. And if I became one, especially at college, I
would be like that too.
When I arrived at tryouts, I discovered these people were much
larger, more serious and gregarious than me. Everybody seemed
to have gone to a private school with a fancy rowing team. One
of the older guys, always surrounded by groups of women, kept
referring to something called “The Raft,” which turned out to be
a large bed he used for group sex. Another, an enormous man
who went by the nickname “Ice” (apparently he had just
discovered “Top Gun”), claimed to be a former Abercrombie
and Fitch model and the son of a Dutch ambassador. He would
put rubbing alcohol on his blisters to show people how manly he
was, and about one week into the tryouts, he told me to get him
a sandwich because “there was a hierarchy on the team,” and he
was at the top and I was at the bottom. (This comment raised my

eyebrows for multiple reasons.)
As different from me as they were, these were precisely the cool
jocks I had always dreamed of being. These guys were self-
confident, manly and attractive — and nobody seemed to
question their abrasiveness. As Ice was fond of saying, while
eating large amounts of tuna in the dorm cafeteria, the men on
the rowing team could “bring it — athletically, academically
and socially.” Maybe their chutzpah would rub off on me. One
week later, when I finally made the team — as a “bow seat” in
the lightweight eight — I felt so much better about myself.
Even if it did mean being surrounded by guys I was starting to
feel iffy about.
A few days after they announced the lineup, we had to show up
at one of our teammates’ houses dressed in our unisuits and
running shoes. I figured we were in for hazing, but I had hoped
it would be more demure, like those trust games where people
wear blindfolds and stand on crates and catch each other.
Instead, we had to run around campus holding a boat on our
shoulders singing “Row, row, row your boat” (unfortunately,
this coincided with my university’s annual medieval fair). We
had to flex in front of the cafeteria during lunch time, and jump
in the lake, and perform embarrassing skits in front of the
dorms.
Then came the oil wrestling.
When I stepped onto that oil-covered tarp to face off against my
opponent, I wasn’t preoccupied by the insane homoeroticism of
the moment. Instead, I was thinking about how this entire
display was predicated on the fact that gay sexuality was
laughable and gross. They had clearly chosen it as a hazing
activity because the idea of man-on-man contact would make us
as uncomfortable as possible. And the more I thought about it,
the more I did feel dirty — and resentful.
It was with a tremendous amount of apprehension that I began
to grapple with the opponent, a similarly skinny freshman
named Kieran. As the crowd began to yell, “wrestle, wrestle,
wrestle,” we pushed each other over onto our backs, and tried to

edge each other to the end of the tarp. Oil wrestling (who
knew!) really is quite slippery. So we rolled around and spent a
lot of time accidentally elbowing each other in the stomach. By
this point, a bunch of twigs had already fallen into the oil, and
kept jabbing me in the ribs, and the liquid got into my eyes.
Clearly I wasn’t putting up much of a show. I heard somebody
nearby yell out, “Well, this is lame!”
But by the time Kieran pushed me off the tarp and onto the
grass, I had the first great revelation of my freshman year:
Being a jock was bullshit. If this was the kind of macho,
homophobic stuff I had to tolerate to be on a sports team, there
was no point in even trying. If that meant admitting I was a
mediocre athlete, that was fine with me. I had to come to terms
with the fact that my gayness made me less butch than Ice, and
that was better than being a douchebag. When the rowing season
ended, I left the sport and turned instead toward outcasts like
me — bookish kids, drama nerds and other queer kids. I never
turned back.
Now, with some perspective, I can see I discovered something
else in that moment, much bigger than my failure to be an all-
star jock. I saw that I was never going to be normal. And it was
time to stop being embarrassed by that — and start being
excited about it.
A decade later, I still am.
http://www.redwoods.edu/Instruct/CGullick/rainymountain.htm
1
The Way to Rainy Mountain

by N. Scott Momaday
Prologue
A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and
west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an
old
landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The
hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards,
hot tornadic
winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's
edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath
your
feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear
groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a
distance in
July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in
fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the
tall
grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises
crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the ple nty of
time.
Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are
isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill
or one
tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early
morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of

proportion. Your
imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation
was begun.
I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died
in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had lived to
be very
old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her
when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of
a child.
I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas
were living the last great moment of their history. For more
than a
hundred years they had controlled the open range from the
Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the
Canadian to the
fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with the
Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains.
War was their
sacred business, and they were among the finest horsemen the
world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was
preeminentl y a
matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never
understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry.
When at
last, divided and illprovisioned, they were driven onto the
Staked Plains in the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic.
In Palo Duro

Canyon they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had
nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves, they
surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in
the old stone corral that now stands as a military museum. My
grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray
walls by eight or ten years, but she must have known from birth
the
affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.
Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to
evolve in North America. Her forebears came down from the
high country
in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a
mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language
has never
been positively classified in any major group. In the late
seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south
and east. It was
a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the
way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows, who gave them
the
culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses, and
their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. T
hey
acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment
the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the
divinity of

the sun. Not least, they acquired the sense of destiny, therefore
courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains
they
had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple
necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dangerous societ y
of
fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According
to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow
log. From
one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old
prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow
of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental
interior
lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows,
whom she had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had
never
been. I wanted to see in reality what she had seen more
perfectly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles
to begin my
pilgrimage.
Yellowstone, it seemed to me, was the top of the world, a region
of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But,
beautiful
as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there. The
skyline in all directions is close at hand, the high wall of the

woods and
deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect freedom in the
mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger
and the bear.
The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could
see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.
Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to
the plain. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is luxuriant
with flax
and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth unfolds and
the limit of the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and animals
grazing far
2
in the distance, cause the vision to reach away and wonder to
build upon the mind. The sun follows a longer course in the
day, and the
sky is immense beyond all comparison. The great billowing
clouds that sail upon it are shadows that move upon the grain
like water,
dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and
Blackfeet, the plain is yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the
hills and bends

upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the Kiowas paused
on their way; they had come to the place where they must
change their
lives. The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it
have the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas came to
the land
of the Crows, they could see the darklees of the hills at dawn
across the Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain
shelves, the
oldest deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they veer
southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must
wean
their blood from the northern winter and hold the mountains a
while longer in their view. They bore Tai-me in procession to
the east.
A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron.
At the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust
against
the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had
broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun.
There
are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of
man; Devil's Tower is one of them. Two centuries ago, because
they
could not do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of
the rock. My grandmother said:
Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their

brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and
began to run
upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body
was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy
had
been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after
them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke
to them. It
bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into
the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond
its
reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around
with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and
they
became the stars of the Big Dipper.
From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas
have kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the
mountains,
they could be no more. However tenuous their well-being,
however much they had suffered and would suffer again, they
had found a
way out of the wilderness.
My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that
now is all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in
her, and
an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, but she

had come a long way about, and she never forgot her birthright.
As a
child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had taken part in
those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration
of her
people in the presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the
last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River
above
Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to
consummate the ancient sacrifice--to impale the head of a
buffalo bull
upon the medicine tree--a delegation of old men journeyed into
Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight
herd.
She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as
a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they
had to
hang an old hide from the sacred tree. Before the dance could
begin, a company of soldiers rode out from Fort Sill under orde
rs to
disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause the essential act of
their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot
upon
the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine
tree. That was July 20, 1890, at the great bend of the Washita.
My
grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as

she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.
Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother
in the several postures that were peculiar to her: standing at the
wood
stove on a winter morning and turning meat in a great iron
skillet; sitting at the south window, bent above her beadwork,
and
afterwards, when her vision failed, looking down for a long
time into the fold of her hands; going out upon a cane, very
slowly as she
did when the weight of age came upon her; praying. I remember
her most often at prayer. She made long, rambling prayers out
of
suffering and hope, having seen many things. I was never sure
that I had the right to hear, so exclusive were they of all mere
custom
and company. The last time I saw her she prayed standing by
the side of her bed at night, naked to the waist, the light of a
kerosene
lamp moving upon her dark skin. Her long, black hair, always
drawn and braided in the day, lay upon her shoulders and
against her
breasts like a shawl. I do not speak Kiowa, and I never
understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad
in the sound,
some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. She began
in a high and descending pitch, exhausting her breath to silence;

then
again and again--and always the same intensity of effort, of
something that is, and is not, like urgency in the human voice.
Transported
so in the dancing light among the shadows of her room, she
seemed beyond the reach of time. But that was illusion; I think I
knew
then that I should not see her again.
Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the
weather watch. There, in a very little while, wood takes on the
appearance of
great age. All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and
then the wood is burned gray and the grain appears and the nails
turn
red with rust. The windowpanes are black and opaque; you
imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many
ghosts, bones
given up to the land. They stand here and there against the sky,
and you approach them for a longer time than you expect . They
belong
in the distance; it is their domain.
http://students.english.ilstu.edu/rctrava/momadaywebsite/illustr
ations/brotherbear.html

3
Once there was a lot of sound in my grandmother's house, a lot
of coming and going, feasting and talk. The summers there were
full of
excitement and reunion. The Kiowas are a summer people; they
abide the cold and keep to themselves, but when the season
turns and
the land becomes warm and vital they cannot hold still; an old
love of going returns upon them. The aged visitors who came to
my
grandmother's house when I was a child were made of lean and
leather, and they bore themselves upright. They wore great
black hats
and bright ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat
upon their hair and wound their braids with strips of colored
cloth.
Some of them painted their faces and carried the scars of old
and cherished enmities. They were an old council of warlords,
come to
remind and be reminded of who they were. Their wives and
daughters served them well. The women might indulge
themselves; gossip
was at once the mark and compensation of their servitude. They
made loud and elaborate talk among themselves, full of jest and
gesture, fright and false alarm. They went abroad in fringed and
flowered shawls, bright beadwork and German silver. They were

at
home in the kitchen, and they prepared meals that were
banquets.
There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts.
When I was a child I played with my cousins outside, where the
lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people
rose up around us and carried away into the darkness. There
were a
lot of good things to eat, a lot of laughter and surprise. And
afterwards, when the quiet returned, I lay down with my
grandmother and
could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of the
air.
Now there is a funeral silence in the rooms, the endless wake of
some final word. The walls have closed in upon my
grandmother's
house. When I returned to it in mourning, I saw for the first
time in my life how small it was. It was late at night, and there
was a white
moon, nearly full. I sat for a long time on the stone steps by the
kitchen door. From there I could see out across the land; I could
see
the long row of trees by the creek, the low light upon the rolling
plains, and the stars of the Big Dipper. Once I looked at the
moon and
caught sight of a strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the

handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision
was such
that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there,
I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small
definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and
purled like the longing within me.
The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on the dirt road
to Rainy Mountain. It was already hot, and the grasshoppers
began to
fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning, and the birds sang
out of the shadows. The long yellow grass on the mountain
shone in
the bright light, and a scissortail hied above the land. There,
where it ought to be, at the end of a long and legendary way,
was my
grandmother's grave. Here and there on the dark stones were
ancestral names. Looking back once, I saw the mountain and
came a way.
ations/cricket.html
ations/cricket.html

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