I’m talking about us, son. I’m talking about the stories of the lives of a people. Doesn’t have to be a nation. Can be a family or a town, a valley like this or a broken-down old truck like that old girl out there. A dream wheel is the sum total of a peoples’ story. All its dreams, all its visions, all its experiences gathered together. Looped together. Woven together in a big wheel of dreaming.
I’ve read quite a lot of Richard Wagamese and I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer his nonfiction: Wagamese was a deep thinker, a powerful storyteller, and generous in his love for humanity and willingness to share his hard-won wisdom. I connect deeply with his wit and wisdom when he’s flat out telling me about his life and lessons learned, but I don’t connect so completely with his fictional style; and I can admit that that comes down to personal taste. Dream Wheels is basically the story of two young(ish) men: Joe Willie Wolfchild (the best rodeo cowboy on the circuit, about to win the coveted World Champion title at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas in the novel’s first pages, but a massive bull named See Four has other plans for Joe Willie) and Aiden Hartley (disaffected teenaged son of an African-American single mom, Aiden makes bad choices that seem to doom him to a life of criminality). The storyline rotates between these two men — with Joe Willie recovering from his injuries at his family’s working ranch (and being encouraged to restore the old jalopy of a truck that drove generations of his family around the rodeo circuit; a truck ironically referred to as “Dream Wheels”) — and with Aiden doing a stretch in juvenile lockup and being trained as a mechanic, there’s nothing very surprising about the plotlines eventually converging, with two bitter young men, each trapped in a kind of mental hopelessness, and eventually seeing that they each had much to teach and learn from the other. At the ranch, the Wolfchild family recognises that city slicker Aiden is a once-in-a-generation natural bull rider (because, of course), and like any great sports story, the most exciting writing comes when Aiden is training and competing. Along the way, Wagamese writes beautifully of the rugged landscape, shares deep and universal truths about humanity, and peoples his rough-and-tumble masculine story of cowboys and prison with wise female characters who remind everyone that what’s most important in life is community, connection, and tradition. All this to say: the plot and its execution didn’t wow me here, but I love Wagamese’s sentences and thought that he was a wonderful teacher; another reader might connect with this more completely.
He’d always been strong and tough, but Johanna had found a way to make him graceful. Graceful. You didn’t learn to cowboy by being graceful but you learned to be a man that way. First thing you had to learn in order to cowboy well was how to fall. First thing you had to learn to be a man was how to stand up, dust yourself off and move on. The grace was in the dusting off.
Grit and gumption and grace, being both talented and lucky: that’s what takes you to the top of the rodeo circuit, and Joe Willie was fortunate to have been born into a family that both taught and lived these virtues. On the other hand, and this made me a bit uncomfortable, Aiden's mother, Claire, provided no stability for her son; hopping from weak white man to bad white man; none of them as interested in being a father figure to Aiden as bedding his beautiful Black mother. I don’t know if I bought the scenario that put Aiden in lockup : Okay, Aiden did come up with a plan for a heist, bought a gun, and hid it at his friend, Cort’s, house, but when Cort decided to pull the stickup on his own — and actually shot at police officers while it went down — Cort was able to get a reduced sentence of a few months by blaming everything on Aiden? Yes, Aiden gave Cort a beating for being a rat when he eventually got sent to juvie to do his own time, but even if this was meant to demonstrate that Black youth get harsher sentences than white, it still didn’t follow to me that a fifteen-year-old with no prior record would get years for “conspiracy” while another kid actually shot at police officers and could get a plea deal by blaming everything on someone who wasn’t even there. That’s too convoluted for me to just accept, and ultimately, I don’t know if Wagamese should have brought in African American characters to this novel to use in this way. And I don’t know if I bought how the convict and the cowboys came together: I don’t understand why the detective, Golec, based on available information, would have wanted to take a chance on Aiden and arrange to send him, and his mother, off to his old friends’ ranch to work on their demons. By the time Aiden was released — now seventeen, hardened in jailhouse attitude, and with a violent attack on his record — Golec hadn’t seen him in years; knew nothing of his character, but somehow intuited it would all work out. Also: we learn that Claire has sworn off men, has a good job (maybe as a counsellor; it’s not clear), and an apartment she had spent two years setting up for the return of her son, and she’s just going off to the ranch for an open-ended stay? There’s no mention of a leave of absence from her job, no mention if it’s hard to keep paying rent on the apartment — is she contributing to their keep at the Wolfchilds’? — without working, and although it was telegraphed along the way, I don’t know if I liked that the author chose to have this “confirmed celibate” start a romance with broken Joe Willie (whose age I couldn’t get a hold on). But if I didn’t buy the plot, I did appreciate the lessons it was teaching:
That’s what everyone thinks, son. That it’s too late now. But we’re all tribal people. Every last one of us living and breathing right now started out as the same kind of people. People who lived in community and together on the land. All the things we call Indian were the same for everybody at one time. The reason we get so far away from each other is because we’ve learned to think we’re different. But we’re not. Take anybody and put them in the middle of something as beautiful as that alpine lake up in the pass over there and they’re going to be touched by it, feel something move inside themselves. Hear that old voice that tells them they remember. It takes time and commitment to remember how to really hear it, but anyone can do it.
Sitting by a fire and talking into the night, working our bodies to healthy exhaustion, communing with nature and recognising our places within it: these are our common heritage and the medicine that can heal individuals and society. In a nice bit of symmetry, these are exactly the lessons laid out in the nonfiction work, Challenge to Civilization that I recently read by another Indigenous writer, Blair Stonechild; confirming that if I’m having trouble buying an author’s fictional plot, I’d rather have his lessons laid out in plain language; a personal preference that’s not necessarily universal. There is much to admire and enjoy in Dream Wheels, and as it was the only book* given to me for Christmas of ‘23, I am grateful for this gift and what it taught me.
* Mallory got this for me and it was the perfect gift: She apparently googled for books similar to Cormac McCarthy, cross-referenced those against their ratings on Goodreads, and then looked for those books that it didn't appear I had read before (taking the chance that I hadn't read this one before joining Goodreads in 2013). There is so much effort and thoughtfulness in that process — I have had people tell me that they would buy me books if they had any idea what I liked and what I've already read; this does prove it's possible to figure those things out — and the book didn't need to be a perfect read to be a perfect gift: much thanks to my wonderful child. As for the Cormac McCarthy vibes, this opens exactly to my taste, with Joe Willie in the chute atop old See Four:
The Old Ones say that fate has a smell, a presence, a tactile heft in the air. Animals know it. It's what brings hunter and prey together. They recognize the ancient call and there's a quickening in the blood that drives the senses into edginess, readiness: the wild spawned in the scent. It's why a wolf pack will halt their dash across a white tumble of snow to look at a man. Stand there in the sudden timeless quiet and gaze at him, solemn amber eyes dilating, the threat leaned forward before whirling as one dark body to disappear into the trees. They do that to return to the wild, to make all things even once again: to restore proper knowledge. The Old Ones say animals bless a man with these moments by returning him to the senses he surrendered when he claimed language, knowledge and invention as power.The great bull sensed it and shivered...
Perfection.
