- ON THIS DAY -

On May 8, 1973, militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrendered.


Once, in another life (a teenage life) I spent some time in Wounded Knee. Hamlet is a good word for it. I remember a hill with a cemetery on it, a handful of trees mixed with a few old buildings, a couple Winnebagos, and a horse corral with a guy in a cowboy hat training horses. Mostly I remember a lot of space and the feeling you get, on the west side of the flat middle bit of the US, that the sky and the earth have not only gotten bigger, but also closer together, leaving less room for all the stuff that people do. More space and less room … It's a feeling I don’t find often in Hanoi!

There is one spot here which always looks very secluded to me, somehow. Every day on the way to work I go through a big intersection, usually sitting at the light amid the crowd of jostling motorbikes and sundry wheeled paraphernalia, and I see a tower on the corner of one building. It’s not really that high, but it is two or three stories higher than all the surrounding buildings. Just a square, concrete tower not any larger than it would have to be to put a stairway inside it. The top is a jumbled mess of green-ness, plants spilling down the sides and pushing up and out like bean sprouts bending toward the sun. Ten square meters of somebody’s private wilderness, spurting above the middle of Hanoi, it’s a personal version of more space created around less room.