COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, September 23, 2007 7:00 pm
WHITECLAY — Kids gather on a gravel road this hot August morning.
They form a circle. It leads from the gravel to the grass to a white wooden cross decorated with flowers and an angel.
Three girls stand in the middle, crying. They wear blue T-shirts bearing the image of a pretty girl smiling.
An elder prays.
For the wind, which carves the Badlands … For the sun, which gives us life … For the earth on which we walk …
The kids will walk the earth this morning in memory of 15-year-old Sara Boltz, one of two kids killed on their way home from a road party. They will walk west on this gravel road, turn north along the pavement of Nebraska 87. They will walk through this Nebraska town where older friends bought the beer that night.
Then they will walk two miles home to Pine Ridge, S.D. — finishing the trip Sara and the 20-year-old driver, a skateboarder named Toby Ray Eagle Bull, did not complete that night.
“We Lakota always believe in circles,” says the elder, Tony Ten Fingers, a counselor in Pine Ridge who stands inside the circle, too, with Sara’s sisters.
“We know Sara’s the one making the circle complete. She’s why we’re all here today.”
Except for the wind, kicking up dust from the fields and the road, there is a long silence.
Then a woman speaks.
“Please be careful out there tonight,” says Lynda Rodriguez, the organizer of this annual walk.
“Seems like every year at powwow time we lose someone to alcohol.”
Tonight is the first night of powwow, she reminds them, just like it was that night two years ago.
The kids in the car had just left a popular party spot down this gravel road. A spot called The U because the road forms a U-shape beginning and ending at Nebraska 87.
“Let your parents know where you’re at. We love you. We don’t want to see you like this.
“We want to see you grow old.”
Lynda looks at one of the girls in the circle, a survivor of the crash who’s barely spoken a word about it these past two years.
Her 16-year-old daughter, Julie Vocu.
v v v
Julie, just 5 feet tall, climbs behind the steering wheel of her mom’s white pickup. She drives slowly down the gravel road, leading the pack of walkers.
She tries to think of something else. But can’t.
Want to go to the party?
She and Sara, her best friend since kindergarten, and Sara’s little sister Tara were walking around Pine Ridge, giggling and having fun that night. She and Sara had finished eighth grade a few months before.
This summer, they told each other, was the best of their lives.
Julie remembers how they already were drunk by the time Toby’s blue Ford Contour pulled up beside them in the parking lot of Big Bat’s convenience store.
They drove through the powwow grounds before heading to The U.
After leaving the party, they were giggling and talking in the car.
Julie sat on the plastic console between the front seats. Like the other kids, she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She looked out the window and saw the earth moving by fast in the darkness. Too fast.
Then down at the speedometer. 80 … 85 … 90 …
She heard gravel hitting the car. Then her own scared voice and other scared voices.
Slow down.
Yeah, Toby. Slow down. You’re going too fast.
Shut up, you guys. I know how to drive.
The car fishtailed. The kids screamed. Then the earth spun upside-down.
v v v
They walk through Whiteclay.
Julie, looking out the windshield of the pickup, tries not to think of this place where many of her friends get their beer.
She feels a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes.
She still drinks. But she won’t drink and drive. She’ll take the car keys from friends who do.
She checks the mirror. She wants to make sure she’s going the right speed for the marchers.
She remembers looking in a mirror at the hospital after the crash.
There was dried blood on her face from a gash in her scalp. Her tongue had a hole where she had bitten through. The right side of her face was swollen.
She started crying.
Mom, I look ugly!
No, honey, you’re not ugly.
The crash threw Julie into the back seat, to the place Sara had been sitting. It threw Sara out to the road.
Like a bad dream, Julie remembers walking away from the scene that night, toward the lights of Whiteclay.
v v v
The walk ends at the main intersection in Pine Ridge, near the Billy Mills community center and Big Bat’s, the store where the girls got in the blue car that summer night.
Full circle.
This August afternoon, on concrete just north of the powwow grounds, there’s going to be a skateboarding contest in Toby’s honor.
His brother, “Little Larry” Eagle Bull, helped build the plywood ramps. Toby lived to skateboard, his family says.
They put a skateboard in his casket.
Sara, a tall girl, loved basketball. There’s a tournament in her honor each winter. Julie’s mom is organizing that, too.
Julie has talked about that night with Tara, Sara’s little sister. She was there. She understands. But hardly anyone else. Not even her parents.
The day after the crash, Julie’s dad drove her back out to the scene. He pointed out the shattered glass and the scars in the grass where the car flipped.
He wanted her to remember.
They always told Julie not to get in cars with kids who’ve been drinking. Lynda wonders what else they could have done to keep her from going down the black road that night.
“She’s real angry now,” Lynda says. “She’s not the same kid anymore.”