About once a year or two, why, I try to leave again, and when I do, it’s catastrophic the things that happen.

— Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder, 1975

In the summer of 1968, on the Nevada stretch of I-80 East, Frank Van Zant flicked his eyes back and forth between the truck’s temperature gauge and his wife, huddled under his camouflage coat in the passenger seat. Driving east, the miles retreated. At 150, the thermometer edged to red. At 148, the engine rattled like a chest cold. By 147, it was smoking—an acrid rustle to a paper dry wind. A few clicks past 145, Van Zant pulled off the freeway. The ’46 Chevy pickup sputtered, turned over, and went still.

Van Zant and his third wife, Ahtram, were only three hundred and fifty miles free of San Francisco, but the high desert of Nevada, scrubbed and washed by moonlight, seemed as removed from the Golden Gate as Mars. They made camp in the sagebrush. In darkness unblemished by street-lamp or security light, the Milky Way shone like a rib, curved as an Easter basket. Van Zant dreamt that night like he hadn’t dreamt since childhood: in his dream, a pair of hands reached across the Rockies, the Pacific, the western hemisphere and heaven, grabbed hold, and lifted him up.

Van Zant was, in 1968, well past the middle of his life. He was both a widower and a newlywed. He was a farmer, a discharged soldier, a defector from the church and a dropout from the force. He was familiar with disillusionment and practiced at reinvention. He was almost four hundred miles into yet another exit strategy that began in southern California and bore east. The westward expansion in reverse, Van Zant was, when the pickup died, unwinding the route the nation took to become what it is.

On that night, already tinged with morning, he looked out over an acre of off-the-freeway desert as if he were peering over the edge of the continent. A lighthouse, a way station, a port, a vision—what did he see?

He didn’t see a mountain, but he saw land enough to build one of his own.

Frank Van Zant stopped answering to his “Christian” name on the morning after the Chevy broke down, his life more than half over. Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder, once arrived, never lived anywhere else. 

Fifty years later, Thunder Mountain Monument remains unfinished. And very few of the tourists who pull off the highway to take a closer look at the Chief’s concrete sculptures know that this strip of land was once its maker’s concrete paradise—before it doubled as his grave.

🩸

Thunder Mountain Monument isn’t beautiful. Not all at once.

From afar, it suffers from the same problem of scale that plagues all structures assuming postures of grandeur in the desert; rising from the same red & indigo plane which raises the Rockies to the east and the Sierras to the west, Thunder Mountain Monument is framed from both cardinal directions by the actual mountains of the American West—which testify, in themselves, to the magnitude of geologic time. In the Nevada basin, a manmade mountain struggles to convince. From afar, you might mistake the Chief’s monument for a child’s jungle gym; up close, you see both the sculpture’s age and what you might call its incoherence. A chicken wire and aluminum fence. Cement homages to Chief Crazy Horse and Sarah Winnemucca. The skins of Goodyear tires doubling as the scales of a submerged dragon. Plastic baby dolls hanging from non-native trees. A structure that looks like a doll’s dream house with walls as thick as a bunker.

But beauty, in the Monument’s case, hardly seems to be the point.

Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder (alias Frank Van Zant) declared, once he got building, that he was making a monument to the West’s earliest peoples. He sought to dedicate his mountain to “the plight of the American Indian,” but he got his building materials from what he could repurpose, scavenge, or steal off of the shoulders of I-80, so the monument also reflects the post-industrial American West, fashioned, as it is, from its wastes—or as Chief liked to say, the “White man’s trash.” And like America, the monument is only beautiful in pieces.

Piece 1: Shelter

In 1979, the Chief was interviewed for a 16mm documentary film. They asked him, “What’s a house?” And the Chief, before he answered, took a drag on a Marlboro Gold. He held in his smoke for the duration of a passing semi-truck, lest his voice be drowned out or drug off the way of the oversized load. When the highway had quieted to its usual babble, he said “Shelter,” and looked up.

This, of course, was not inherited wisdom. Rather, it was a lesson the Chief had learned, hardscrabble, from the land, for the Chief was a self-taught artist and a self-proclaimed Chief.  When he arrived at the site of his vision, one hundred and forty miles east of Reno, it was May, too late in the season for snow and yet snow fell and kept falling—neither vertical nor powdery, not a blanket that quiets the world, but an assault launched from a 90-degree angle to wound the spirit, if not cripple the man. His wife, Ahtram, and the baby growing inside her, was curled like a coyote pup, and lay huddled in the cabin of the broken-down truck while just beyond the quarter inch seal of shatter proof glass, the blizzard brayed, I-80 moaned, and mortar set. 

When Van Zant began building his monument, he was not a young a man—a veteran in more ways than one—but yet, reborn as the Chief, he felt like an infant, a sentiment reinforced by the fact that, when it came to the skills necessary for monument building, he was maddeningly green. He still considered, in the early days, each foraged rock as an artist would—an object of its own accord. But the mason, as the Chief would learn slowly, sees only in relation; he’s not interested in detail, but in form—the face mined from the canyon, the mountain curled in the hand. A landscape made real by shadow and distance is returned by the mason to the abstract, scrubbed of its depth; the spirit of the country is reduced, by the Stoneman, to pure shape. This is how a wall that will last the ages is made. 

The Chief, in those first weeks, believed he would be lucky if the home he was building lasted the night. Thunder sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of his creation and listened to a chinook wind panting through the cracks of the paltry walls he was already calling his house. 

The Chief went on: “Well, first you need shelter from the elements. Then you need shelter from all the other things that can occur out in life. I think a home should be a complete and total universe just as every individual is a complete and total universe never to be repeated.”

Then, the interviewer asked him: “And are you like your house?”

Piece 2: Blood 

“I’m a castaway,” said the Chief, “and I’ve sculpted a castaway thing.” 

Before the Chief became the Chief, he was only sporadically recorded. For a collector, he didn’t amass much evidence of his own past. It is difficult, in any case, in the Nevada basin, where the North-Easterlies blow as high as seventy-five miles per hour, to leave a trail one can easily follow back. 

He was born in Okulmeegee, Oklahoma, sometime in the first or second decade of the 20^th century, but he, or so legend has it, became a child of the highway at age twelve. Unlike, however, the hitchhikers and wayward youths who occasionally sought refuge at the monument in the seventies, Frank Van Zant didn’t see himself as a runaway. Displacement was a fact of his blood and a feature of his birth, born one generation removed, or so he often repeated, from the Indian Removal Act. 

In 1975, the Chief was asked, point blank, about his blood:

Interviewer: And you say you’re a full Indian?

Chief: Well, I’m as full as I suppose you could be … In my nation there were only ninety bloods when they were moved from the Creek nation in Georgia to Oklahoma. And my father was one of the bloods. In fact, he was part of the Snake Rebellion, because he didn’t want the Creek nation to give up its sovereign power.

The Snake Rebellion marked a division amongst the Creek Nation that emblematized a larger division in and amongst the “American Indian” in the West: sovereignty or assimilation. It was, as the Buck’s County Historical Society put it, “An attempt by some Indians in Oklahoma to continue living according to the old communal ways, even after their lands had been divided up into individual allotments by the U.S. Government.”

After the “Indian Removal Act” of 1830, the Creek nation was “relocated” west, from Georgia to Oklahoma—the Mississippi River a new boundary between the “Indian” and the ever-expanding American frontier. “[The Creek] were told that the new land would be their new country,” but the American West disagreed. The West was fitted to the American imagination, not the US constitution, and it soon overtook itself. At the end of the 19^th century, “The U.S. Government started to break apart and reassign [Creek] lands to individuals;” instead of a collective  nation, each individual Creek could accept an American yard. “The Creek Nation was divided between those willing to accept individual allotments and those clinging to the old beliefs.” Frank’s father, Sydney Van Zant, was one of those who refused to assimilate. 

Instead, Sydney Van Zant saddled a horse, and joined the Snake Rebellion by whipping his next-door neighbor for accepting an allotment from the Fed. The whip was an act of insistence, a motion repeated, a scar made as it was re-opened; Sydney’s gesture said something like this: I am a living American Indian, not a static monument to a romantic past.

But Sydney Van Zant died before he could tell his son this story in full detail, leaving behind his story’s outline, its shape. He died before his eldest son could finish becoming a man. When Frank’s mother, Ruth, remarried, Frank took it hard. Another assimilation. Frank remembered, at his mother’s wedding, the words that Sydney once uttered on the subject of allotment: “A hundred sixty acres [is] big enough for a jackrabbit, but not big enough for a man,” and so, at twelve years old, he left Oklahoma in search of enough space to become. 

Piece 3: Salvage

Typewriter ribbon. Railroad tie. Wagon axle. Rubber.

Gemstone. Beer bottle. Pig skin. Bone.

Frank Van Zant went by many titles before he named himself the Chief—but in every version of himself, he worships at the altar of things. 

He may have become interested in “Indian artifacts” when he worked as an archeologist for a California state park. Long before he struck ground on the Monument, it is said he curated the “Ishi-Yahi Indian Museum” for “Pre-Historical Archaeology” out of the trunk of a car. Or he may have become interested in digging through strangers’ trash when he moonlighted, in the ’50s, as a private eye.

In any case, the menagerie of discarded junk, after ten years of building, rose relief-like out of the monument’s impermeable husk. Chief’s house—at its highest, three stories tall—was insulated by an exterior wall at least twelve inches thick. Seventeen sacks of cement were sunk into the staircase that led from the kitchen to the library, alone. Another thirteen went into the steps connecting the garden to the back porch, a leisure spot, good for reading, shaded by a lone pear tree. The fruit, an American import from Vietnam, struck the eye grown accustomed to the basin, as impossibly lush.

All told, it was enough concrete to remake the Statue of Liberty three times over, or so the Chief would have you believe, but when the house he lived in, as heavy as it sat, was ever held against his inner vision, the “mountain” still seemed but a shade of its future self. Even after a decade of work, the Chief might have said he was “ten percent finished.” 

A decade in, and he was closer to seventy than to sixty. His youngest child sang into his beard, white at the tips, but had not yet begun to speak. How old is the man who is ten percent finished? Gone were the manic summers, sculpting from first to last light—a day in the desert not like a day anywhere else. If he was tired or in pain, as he must have been (for he was, when not dreaming, just a man), these meager, human feelings were not made of material durable enough to outlive him. Not like the Warrior Chief —a favorite sculpture of the Chief’s, molded with rebar and cement—who would still guard the monument’s chicken wire and aluminum fence long after Thunder’s youngest child had gone on, a grandmother herself. 

Ten years in, and Chief’s new life was still adolescent; but the body, unlike the tree, does not continue to thicken beyond a certain year. In this way, a man is more like a mountain than a tree. And, like the mountain, Chief’s history grew as he aged, ever more visible between the cracks.

Piece 4: The Beginning

Frank Sydney Van Zant was born on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1911. Ruth Van Zant’s water broke in an empty house on an unseasonably warm morning—what the locals call an “Indian Summer.” She was sweating, a kitchen window propped open to a landscape that seemed to hang, wheat stubble suspended as far as the eye could reach, when the first pass of contractions sunk Ruth to her knees.

Twelve hours later, Frank Van Zant was plunged feet first into a shallow bath of well water to test his lungs against a scream. 

Between first light and last call on the day of Frank Van Zant’s birth, the temperature in Oklahoma City spiked and then dropped, a difference of more than sixty degrees. A Chicago man died of heat stroke in the morning, and a Chicago man froze to death that night. In the upper atmosphere, above the private dramas and tinny lives contained in clapboard houses across the southern planes, two winds—one warm and one cold, one old and one new—joined in passive catastrophe and went their separate ways. Tornadoes dropped down from gray clouds with green centers and cut a path east, from Sioux City to Grand Rapids, leveling barns, shredding silos, and cleaving households in two, cutting happy marriages clean in half, burying one ranch hand beneath a spread of his earthly possessions but sparing another who’d been blessed with more, yet had worked for it far less. Sandstorms on Friday night turned into blizzards Saturday morning. Ask a weatherman, and he’d call it a fluke or a phenomenon, but in the Southern Planes, they call it Revelations. And here was Frank Van Zant, born in the dead center of things, in the heartland of America, in the eye of a once-in-a-century-storm, either evidence for God’s indifference or a metaphor for the end of the world. All of which you can still see if you happen to pull off the highway, 140 miles east of Reno, sticking out like shrapnel from the walls of Chief’s home.

Piece 5: The End

He might have come up with the idea for a monument to the disappearing West when, as a much younger man, he took his first wife out in Death Valley for an unusual date. According to legend, the newlyweds climbed to a lookout tower to watch the DOD’s Atomic Tests. He may have thought, for the first time, “The world is ending,” in the after-image of that pillar of light, when he believed, for half a breath, that he could see through her skin. Or he may have thought “the world is ending” years later when she contracted leukemia, and he nursed her to death.

The Chief said it differently to different askers, depending on his mood and the time of day. Sometimes it was a medicine woman resembling his grandmother who came to him in a dream (or was she an Eagle?) and entreated him in a televangelists’ baritone to make preparations for the end; “Apocalypse,” said the voice, which was sometimes his own. 

Doomsday was accumulating just on the other side of Thunder Canyon, pressing, like the slow rise of billboards for Pilot and Walmart from Reno to the east and Elko to the west. Chief didn’t need the gift of sight. He could point to the ravages as they were ferried from one end of I-80 to the other in 8000 pound increments—Marathon & Exxon, beams and scaffolds, gasoline, plastic, and oil, the marrow of the earth converted into hazardous materials—a few hundred feet from his cement and windshield fortress, from his daughters swaddled in sheepskins, warming their hocks by the wood stove. The prophecy wasn’t speculative; he could see what was coming as it streamed beyond the edge of his front yard.

“When I take a handful of mud and make a face out of it,” said Chief three years before he died, “I brought the face out that was already there.”

Piece 6: The Handle

The monument’s highest point is its most fragile. What appears, on the approach, to be a spindling arch, white and unadorned, is, upon closer inspection, a handle. Chief said that when the end finished passing him by at seventy-five-miles an hour, when apocalypse finally trickled down to settle in the Basin along with everything else, the Great Spirit would reach down, grab hold of the sum of Chief’s creation, and lift. 

And so, there is evidence built into the monument from the very beginning, that the house whose frame was salvaged from the bed and trailer of the ‘46 Chevy that left him there would one day be, itself, repurposed as a gateway to the afterlife. In other words, he may have always meant for the monument to double as a tomb. 

Piece 7: Myths

Of the monument’s dozens of statues and tableaus, most are named for the heroes, martyrs, and myths of the West’s “earliest peoples”—Crazy Horse, Jeronimo, and Sarah Winnemucca—but they are modeled after the faces Chief had on hand. He preserved his third wife, Ahtram—a natural blonde—in cement over and over again, perhaps most memorably as the “Earth Mother,” and in this form—naked and raven haired, arms stretched wide to welcome the world’s children—she remains to this day (though the school she once presided over has long since burnt to the ground, ash turned to dust, and dust blown off the way of the oversized load). 

There is only one figure that isn’t transmuted into something else, that purports to be a sculpture of exactly what it is: the Chief’s son from a previous marriage, who, as a sculpture, towers over his father at more than seven and a half feet.

Sydney, named after the Chief’s father, was sculpted in effigy after his son’s untimely death. As the Chief once explained: “He was coming up here in the spring of 1969 to help me build the mountain … But he was killed on April one of that year.” 

When the Chief heard the news, he made his preparations. He packed the newly repaired ‘46 Chevy. He didn’t know when he would be coming back, if ever.

“I boarded up the house, buried all our nonperishable Indian Artifacts, and left the mountain.” 

But he only got as far as Carson City before the throttle gave out. The Chief turned back, and to his astonishment, the ‘46 Chevy ran back, the way it had come, like a dream.

When the Chief came back on the mountain, hazy with grief, the rancher who owned the piece of “off the shoulder” desert the Chief had been squatting on for the better part of a year was waiting for him with a proposition. The rancher didn’t call the police, and instead offered to sell those seven hectares of Nevada desert for cheap. The Chief could even forgo the money down and pay in monthly installments; it would take another lifetime to pay off his debts, but time moves strangely in the desert. The Chief said yes.

Over the thirty-odd years that the Chief called the mountain home, he told the monument’s origin story innumerable times: to passing tourists, to folks staying at his roadside commune for a few weeks or a handful of nights, to his wife, and to his children, who he sang or storied to sleep. Even if he wanted to leave, or so the story ran, the mountain wouldn’t slacken its hold. He was bound to remain: “About once a year or two, why, I try to leave again, and when I do, it’s catastrophic the things that happen.”

In every version of the Monument’s origin story, the chance to own the land is coupled with the revelation that the land owns the Chief instead. The failing engine declares that the Chief is no master of his own fate, just an actor, an object washed up on this shore—like the bicycle chain, driftwood, or the right wing of a two-seater plane he would one day convert into building material and embed into the walls of his home.

But only rarely in the telling is Chief’s son, Sydney, also named or placed into the frame of Thunder’s origin story. In fact, there is only one recording of the Chief, in 1983, in which the Chief mentions the catastrophe that precipitated his first attempt to leave. In this recording, the Chief introduces his son as an artifact, heavy in concrete, but doesn’t say anything whatsoever about the boy beneath. He doesn’t mention that his son’s “killer” was suicide. Instead, he merely comments on the sculpture’s size. The sculpture of Sydney Jr., the Chief insisted, is built true to life. “Most of my sons didn’t get bigger than me, but this one did.”

And then he said: “I wonder how much bigger if he hadn’t’ve been killed.”

Or he said: “I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t’ve been killed.” 

But the wind picks up, or traffic is passing, so on first listen, it sounds like he’s saying the former, but on second listen, it sounds like the latter. 

What one does hear with perfect clarity is what the Chief says with respect to the monument. 

“It’s designed to keep the outside out and the inside in.” 

And if you take Chief at his word, he never left home again.

Piece 8: Scavenge

But insides and outsides, mine and yours, are not categories that easily retain their bounds in the medium of found art. For Chief, among other things, was a scavenger. And as such, he also once claimed that the nature of the land didn’t matter. Droughted or morphed, fruitful or barren, any junkyard, any wasteland, any spread of raw material worked as well as any other when it came to interpreting the spirit of the divine, to making a mountain, to shaving a summit down to a point fine enough to story from. It could have been mile marker 146 and it could have been mile marker 147. 

But Chief, unable to venture further than twenty miles past the monument in either direction, determined that every piece of scrap metal, boulder, or Heineken bottle that went into the mountain would be locally sourced. So, the monument is also the story of America, collected from the shoulder of its longest continuous road.

Though the Chief was a Creek “Indian” by birth, the parcel of land off I-80 was a no man’s land of castaway things. The mountain was built in the image of no nation and he pledged allegiance to no tribe. 

I don’t belong to any Indian Nation. I don’t belong to any white group. I don’t belong to any church group. I don’t belong to anything.

He didn’t belong to anything, and so he built the monument to double as a waystation: 

“Being an outcast and a reject, you spend a lot of time on the road. And back then there was no place to be. So, I’d always wanted to build something along a major artery where people could camp for free.” 

Or he didn’t belong to anything, so he built the monument to double as a trap: “hoping to catch some of these disillusioned, disenchanted, unhappy people that were heading west during the ’60s.” 

Chief shifted a bit every time he talked, as if under the influence of a particularly head-strong wind. He wanted to build a mountain that was also a net, wide enough to cast across six lanes of traffic to catch the next generation before they did something they couldn’t take back. 

He believed the end was in sight. He often said that an arrow had been shot into the heart of the Great Spirit—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; Kent State and Mai Lai—but he also believed that poverty could be abolished, the hungry fed from the fruit tree he and Ahtram had planted on seven hectares of Nevada desert. He was well into his seventies and still making babies. When snow fell on the monument it could look like a child’s birthday cake, a princess’ castle. He wanted folks to pull over for the mountain on their way to climates more changeable than the one he controlled, and he wanted, upon their arrival, their engines to turn over and die so he could take those engines apart and fit them into his chicken wire and aluminum fence. In other words, he wanted the mountain to be for others something it could not be for him: a place to stop accelerating to wherever the country ends and be at rest.

In the early seventies, when the Back to the Land movement was at its peak, it’s possible the Chief’s land housed a couple dozen others—drifters, rejects, and misfit toys. But unlike other communes of the same era, the Chief’s “roadside attraction” catered to passers-through, those who had their sights trained on California, on golden lands and greener pastures, on gardens that bore perennial fruits. As the seventies edged toward the eighties, the monument became increasingly conspicuous to its surrounding neighbors, and the people who pulled off the side of the road were less inclined to stay and garden and more inclined to gawk. Or, it is also possible, that this is the Chief’s paranoia talking. It is possible that, beneath the eye of the Great Spirit, he always felt himself watched. 

Near the end of the decade, Chief asked himself a question, something like: where does the cement go once it’s poured? Sack after sack seemed to vanish, like magic, into the walls of his home. The mountain wasn’t growing, and yet he continued to build. 

In fact, the walls were closing in. 

Piece 9: Ahtram

If it’s difficult to determine the Chief’s history before he washed ashore on the banks of the mountain, it is even more difficult to know what life was like for his family inside its walls. 

Ahtram was pregnant with their first daughter, Obsidian-Lightning, when the Chevy broke down in 1968, and later gave birth on the mountain. Five or six or seven children followed—nearly all as blonde as their mother. The records of these children and their births are few and far between. They are the children of runaways and dropouts. Their faces, in the crumbling cement, repeat.

Ahtram in 1983 said of her husband and his work: “If something isn’t the way he likes it, then he’ll take it all apart and start all over until he gets it to where it looks, you know, like a real thing.” She’s reminding you—the viewers, the tourists, the passers-through—that every new work is, in fact, a repetition. She’s reminding you that the highest art is in the edit. She’s reminding you of the spare parts, the remainders. She’s reminding you of what it costs to make something that convinces the viewer of its reality, that looks, when it’s over, like a real thing. 

Allie Light, a documentarian, visited the Chief with a small film crew in 1983 after the Chief was named Nevada’s artist of the year. The Chief was not home when Allie arrived. Instead, she was greeted by five blonde haired, blue-eyed children. When Allie and her crew returned, days later, prepared to shoot, the children had been made, by the Chief, “camera ready:” Obsidian-Lightning now boasted dark hair rank with shoe polish, made over in the likeness of the Earth Mother, arms spread wide in welcome, palms turned up toward the sky. 

In the final cut of the documentary Allie Light produced, Ahtram shoulders a baby. She mixes cement. When asked what it’s like to live in the monument, she says this: “Living inside the sculpture is like living inside a dream.” And like all dreams which are grafted onto the land, in order to keep living it, there are pieces of her reality she keeps out of frame. 

She does not mention, for instance, that when the Chevy broke down between mile markers 145 and 146, she and the Chief were on the run—not only from the end of the country, but from one of the Chief’s previous incarnations. 

Ahtram was the Chief’s third wife. His second wife was Ahtram’s mother. Somewhere between San Francisco and Reno on Interstate 80, Ahtram’s stepfather, Frank Van Zandt, became Rolling Mountain Thunder, her Chief who was also her lover, and the girl, who had been called Martha, turned her life and her name inside out. 

Ahtram was still a teenager when the Chief began building his dream-monument, which was also her house, and she became a mother inside this dream which, as houses go, seemed more porous than most. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and in every season, infested with rats. Not even the dream could keep a family of seven fed off a lone pear tree in the middle of the Nevada basin, so Ahtram learned a lesson from the Chief and began to scavenge the white man’s trash. 

In the 1983 documentary, she is thirty years his junior, at least—he at one end of life, she at the other. They are together for a time in the middle of nowhere, in the basin, where extremes in the weather can and often do meet. But when this happens in the weather, it’s a sign to batten down the hatches, to head for the cellar or the bunker, to shelter in place.

Piece 10: Discrepancies

Interviewer: How do they find this place? Do they read about you?

Chief: No, most of them just fall in off the road. There hasn’t been much written about me that I know of.

In fact, much has been written, but little repeats. Or, there are plenty of repetitions, but every time a traveler writes an account of the monument, they leave something of themselves behind. Discrepancies accumulate. The monument is either terrible or wonderful. Chief is a visionary or a mad man. The monument is an eyesore or an artwork. And so on. There is also the obvious fact that Chief is a self-made character, and so, an unreliable narrator of his own life. In his own words, the uncertainty of memory tends to read more like the certainty of myth. But there is also the question of structure—a confusion in the order of events—and like anyone who works with stone will tell you, this is a problem not so easily fixed. 

In 1962, six years before the Chief’s Chevy broke down, Frank Van Zant wrote a letter to the Buck County Historical society inquiring about his ancestry. As a result of the exchange, he learned that Sydney Van Zandt, his father, the child of Dutch immigrants, was born in 1899 in Prentiss, Mississippi. 

But if you recall, in 1901 Sydney Van Zandt was a full-blooded Creek man who saddled a horse in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and, from the saddle, whipped a neighbor for agreeing to sell sovereign Creek land to the federal government.

Or he watched, from his kitchen window, a braver man than he undertake the whipping.

Or he was the man who was whipped, and found the lashes an effective recruitment strategy. 

In this way, Sydney Van Zandt became a veteran of the Snake Rebellion sometime before his third birthday. 

Frank Van Zant was born on November 11^th, 1911, in the middle of a Blue Northern, a once in a century storm. He was born ten years later on November 11^th, 1921, to a mild wind, blowing south east. He was drafted by and then honorably discharged from the army when a tank he was manning took the brunt of a German Bazooka. He volunteered as a fighter pilot, but couldn’t fly due to crippling motion sickness. He was a decorated war hero. He was a conscientious objector. He had two wives. He had three wives. He fathered 8, 11, or 16 children. He was a savior. He was a predator. He was whatever it took to escape.

He first discovered the land that would become the monument in 1968 when he broke down on the side of the highway. He first scouted the land that would become the monument in 1960, but it took him eight years to find it again. He was driven to live off the land after a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. He was driven by the whim of the Great Spirit. He was driven to this mile marker and no other by the sheer force of chance. He was bid to remain here by Tony Shearer after the former radio personality quit an illustrious career of broadcasting to “become an Indian.” Actually, that’s a good story:

Shearer stopped off the freeway in 1972 or ‘73 or ‘74 and was struck dumb by what he interpreted as the Feathered Spirit of the Mesoamerican Aztecs in a roadside sculpture just north of Imlay, Nevada. Tony Shearer, who had just published a book on the subject, declared in his broadcaster’s voice—which despite falling into disuse, retained some of its old power: 

This is The Place. This is where it all started, and this is where it’s coming back to. That which was out there before everything went ‘zap’ is now returning here. This is the Thunder Mountain of the legend. In the final days, why, the only survivors shall be at the place that will rise up in the final days. There shall rise up a place called Thunder Mountain in the final days, and the only survivors will be at Thunder Mountain!

It could have been anywhere. It had to be here. 

He was a white man. He was a monster. He was a liar. He was a full-blooded Creek. He was a “real American Indian.”

Piece 11: The End Part II

Cement doesn’t last. At least, not in the desert. The relentless sun turns it back into the sand from which it was shaped. The monument, which was only a decade and a half old, by the end of the eighties already began to resemble, from certain angles, Pompei. Ahtram started commuting to Reno to work in the casinos. The times were slowing and speeding in both directions at once. At her most desperate, she cooked and fed the children a deep freezer full of spoiled meat. Hunger gnawed; mortar set. The Chief had not slowed with age. When she was gone for more than twenty-four hours at a time, he raged. Perhaps he wondered what of the out there she brought with her when she returned. He began to work on a second monument, a secret mountain, this one deeper in the canyon, this one hidden from the road. The first was not the Place the Great Spirit had marked for ascension after all, but only the façade (the real Thunder Mountain was yet to be unearthed). One day, Ahtram returned from work to find him vanished—all the children gone. The monument, which may have seemed to the passing tourist to be a relic of antiquity, a century old at least, made her feel, to look at it, like she was already a ghost.

Piece 12: Ghosts

Time travel isn’t so unusual in the West. In fact, rendering a living man a historical subject is how every monument in America gets built. 

In 1906, Chitto Harjo (aka Crazy Snake of the Snake Rebellion) tried to warn the United States Government that allotment, the erasure of his people, if carried out, foretold the End. Harjo cited centuries of treaties and promises when he said: “He [the white man] promised that as long as the sun rises [our agreement] shall last; as long as the waters run it shall last … We [the red men] have kept every term of that agreement. The grass is growing, the sun shines, the light is with us, and the agreement is with us yet, for the God that is above us all witnessed it.” 

In Harjo’s words was a promise which time has turned into a threat—if the agreement is stopped or broken, what of the rest? The growing grass, the running water, the sun that both rises and sets? But the senate investigating committee to whom Harjo spoke did not hear what Harjo said, because Harjo was a full-blooded Creek man standing in the United States at the dawn of the 20^th century, and seemed to them already a voiceless monument, a mute artifact, a strange anomaly of the West.

Chitto Harjo, who would disappear without a trace when the rebellion was thwarted by the national guard in 1911, was, to the gathered senators, already frozen in cement.

The white man, as Chief might have said, has made a Hell of a lot of trash since then.

Piece 13: Ascend

In 1983 Ahtram was asked a question, and answered:

“Living inside the sculpture is like living inside a dream.” 

But she was speaking figuratively. The real dream wouldn’t begin until she packed up the children and left the Chief who could not leave the mountain but was bound to remain. 

How she convinced him or threatened him, how she recovered the children, how she escaped, how she unearthed the ‘46 Chevy, which had for the better part of the seventies, fortified Thunder’s stone wall, I do not know. These facts seem as unearthly and unlikely as the wings of the Great Spirit carrying her off. 

But when the Chief went the way of the son he’d named after his father, when he took his own life out there on the mountain he named after himself, Ahtram and the children were long gone. In 1989, the Chief left the monument to his eldest in a suicide note which doubled as a will, and the monument stopped being anyone’s home and became a monument in the truest sense: a testament to what had been. 

This was when the world ended, ten years or so before the twenty-first century began. 

We have been dreaming ever since. 

Being born too late to live in the world, and just early enough to tour it, I didn’t always know the difference. The first time I discovered the mountain and pulled off the interstate between mile marker 145 or 146, the handle was what caught my eye, driving east. The old house is still standing, made of durable stuff, but you can’t get close enough to touch it. You can walk on the desert floor where the communal hostel once was, and the school, and the underground bunker before it collapsed. Chief once imagined the monument as an oasis in the desert—someone is still tending to that vision, has planted a few saplings that couldn’t survive  in the basin without human intervention. I toured it like you’d tour any number of roadside attractions—The Statue of Liberty, The Lincoln Memorial, The Museum of the American Indian—a monument to a vision of American promises that Americans remember, in memoriam, while they are still living.  

And I felt what you feel in those places. Then I got back in my car, pulled back onto I-80, and merged. 

Epilogue: Remainder

When you bring about an ending there are always remainders. That’s the stuff Chief collected from the interstate’s shoulders and repurposed as building materials. The white man’s trash. Beer bottles, pen caps, cigarette butts, plastics, coal ash, radioactive material. What’s left of our country after everything softer than cement and steel has burned and become dust, as it must, if the dream of America is to linger once the sun has stopped rising and the water no longer runs? 

When I first toured the monument, I was struck by a sculpture that seemed unlike the rest: a woman, too lifelike for comfort, arms thrown up in agony, hands raised to shield her face, as if from a blast. She looked like he’d been caught by a mudslide, a nuclear event, by the flash of a photograph.

She looked like she was still under there somewhere, the face in the cement, just waiting to be unearthed, to emerge from the rubble a real thing. It wasn’t until I went home and found images of what the monument used to look like that I understood. When the Chief first made her, she had been a dancing figure, her arms thrown up in celebration, another Ahtram and Earth Mother, praising the West. But time tends its own vision. Even those who make monuments don’t get to choose what lasts.

Works Referenced

Below is a list of sources whose accounts I drew from when compiling the facts, myths, and speculations from which A Castaway Thing is formed. I am most indebted to Allie Light who directed and produced The Monument of Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder when Van Zant was named Nevada’s Artist of the Year in 1983. In October of this year, she graciously allowed me to interview her about the time she spent filming and interviewing the Chief, and the time she spent both on and off camera with his wife, Ahtram.

• Chief Rolling Thunder in the Mountains and His House.
  Directed by Trent Harris, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, May 1978.

• Hernandez, Jo Farb. “Thunder Mountain Monument.” Spaces Archives, Kohler Foundation, 2014, www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/thunder-mountain-monument/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

• Light, Allie. Personal Interview. 24 Oct. 2024.

• Littlefield, Daniel F., and Lonnie E. Underhill. “The ‘Crazy Snake Uprising’ of 1909: A Red, Black, or White Affair?” Arizona and the West, vol. 20, no. 4, 1978, pp. 307–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168759. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

• Mendiez, Richard. “A Roadside Chat with Chief Thunder.” Salt Flat News, May 1975.

• Ohlson, Kristin. “The Story of Thunder Mountain Monument.” Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 Apr. 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-story-of-thunder-mountain-monument-12997050/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

• The Monument of Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder. Directed by Allie Light and Irving Saraf, Light-Saraf Films, 1983.

• Van Sant, Laurie. “Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder.” Bucks County Historical Society, 2007.

• Van Zant, Dan, and Bernie Granados. “Thunder Mountain Monument, a Monument to the Native American People.” Thundermountainmonument.com, El Studio Granados, thundermountainmonument.com/index.htm. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.