Infinite the Dark. A spark! A bit of light for everyone. 

 

Awombed. Aloved, afloat.

 

Unalone. At home in a world where no one is excluded. 

 

Swoosh. Separation. A birth!

 

A child undone. Cast from the inner dark, through the wet muck, into the outer hell of us all.

 

Took-took? Took-took? Where’s dada’s lil took-took boy? Dere he is! Deres dada’s lil took-took boy! Widdle baby wan his widdle baba?

 

Before words. Before a measure of things. Before anything a thing good or a thing bad. All things just is-ing. Coming and coming on huge! Thrilling. Took-took here. At last! Yes! I am here! It’s I who am here! Alive-alive-Oh!

 

Rise and shine birthday boy. Come on, I let you sleep late, breakfast is on the table.

 

Let me sleep late? What does that mean? A kindness? Unlikely. Perhaps another trick of hers. 

 

The boy, five years old, rises without shining. 

 

               …………………………………………..

 

Connie and I are a couple intertwined. Two elderly intimate others, side-carred, hearts clasped, trudging a pilgrim’s path, searching for a hidden fold in the world to tuck ourselves into. 

 

I suppose I should say, my name is Bob. Bob Wilson. I met Connie in 1992 when we were both working as summer seasonal help at The Double Dog Dude Ranch in South Dakota. She was assigned to housekeeping and I was a sort of phony cowpoke. I had thrown a rope before and knew a little bit about horses, but nothing about cow poking. The weekly city guests knew no better. They were mostly there for the photo ops, pics of themselves looking ridiculous, horse mounted, wearing gift shop Cowboy or cowgirl gear and Double Dog t-shirts. Pics to take home, I suppose, to show colleagues, family, friends, to enhance the lies they’d tell about cowboy conquering that old bitch Mother Nature. See, that’s me on my steed, Starbucks, charging over the open plain like an outlaw, mastering my old Bucky boy!

 

Connie cleaned the grounds and guest’s rooms. She took the guests’ constant grief with kindness, smiles, and redoubled efforts. I recognized her at once as a person of spiritual generosity. She had one of those faces that glowed with warmth. I thought this, this is a person I’d like to get close to.

 

My third day there I ran into her as she was coming out of a guest’s “dude” quarters. She had a laundry bag under her arm and a small plastic bag which I assumed contained trash. She tossed both onto her push cart outside the door. She abruptly stopped herself and turned her attention to me, Bob, right?

Yes. Bob Wilson, I nervously admitted.

Bob, I was wondering, do you like BBQ?

Odd question. Well, yeah. 

Jesus, Bob, try to sound enthusiastic. I repeated, Sure, of course, yup, love me some BBQ! 

Great. I ask because I found an old hibachi in storage. Chef Sean said he had no idea where it came from, he had no use for it, and I was welcome to keep it if I wanted. I’m living mobile, Bob. Back pack. No room to pack a hibachi. But I took it anyhow to use while here. Do you want to join me for dinner tonight, Bob?

Be cool, Bob. I took a deep breath, my heart suddenly racing. Trying not to show excitement, Um, yeah, sure. Why not? Shit, too cool, more enthusiasm. Yes, I’d love that. When? Where?

How’s 7pm? There. She pointed to the tree line behind the cabins. I found a shaded clearing there about 40 yards in where someone cleared the ground cover down to the sandy soil. There’s evidence of past campfires. Someone dug out a fire pit and put a ring of rocks around it and strew a few saw hewn stumps for stools about. I can bring a couple of the movie night lawn chairs and my hibachi. The clearing is straight back from the tree with the orange spray-painted bottle cap nailed into it. You like grilled shrimp?

Are you kidding? My stomach did a happy flip. 

Good. I’ll speak with chef Sean about a donation. He’s a good soul. I’ll grab some veggies from the garden. She pointed to the sunny, fenced in plot full of multi-colored growths next to the crew dorms. What about sliced and grilled zucchini?

Oh, hell, yes!

Good, then it’s grilled shrimp, seasoned eggplant, sweet peppers, carrots, and zucchini. I’ll bring iced sweet tea. You can bring something alcoholic if you prefer. I don’t drink.

 

I found her in the clearing. As it was an hour before sunset I brought a kerosene lantern with the hope things would go well and late. She looked lovely dressed in a shin length pleated green and yellow sun-flowered skirt. She was wearing a beige blouse with a dusk red vest decorated with a bead-work pattern of colorful Native American signets. She had her hibachi already smoking with grilling vegetables. I spread a blanket and blew up my inflatable butt donut. Sorry I don’t have two, I’m good with the ground. I handed her the donut. She refused saying, Thanks, I hope you don’t mind, but my fat ass is already packing plenty of cushion. I smiled, she’s funny. Oh yes, I do like this gal! I sat down. 

 

Sean found us that night huddled by our campfire, star gazing. The sneaky matchmaker brought us sleeping bags, sheets, a thermos of coffee and breakfast rolls, saying, it would be a shame to waste such a star-filled night sleeping indoors. He stayed long enough to drink a couple of beers, just to be polite I think, and then he begged off. Good night, sleep well, he said in farewell.

 

We woke in the clearing the next morning stuck fast in eachothers arms. We have been together since.

 

I was grateful for the coffee the next morning. Cold as it was, it was fat with caffeine which I’m a fiend for. I raised my cup, Thank God for Sean! I asked Connie, How long have you been friends with Sean? 

 

She said, I’ve known Sean since childhood. We grew up nearby. Him on The Pine Ridge Reservation and me in its nearest town, Oelrichs. My folks owned a small general store in town there that served mostly reservation folk until a Walmart dropped like a bomb out of the sky a half mile away. The shock waves blew us out of our store and into the poorhouse. We were suddenly just like most everyone else. Poor.

 

Years later Bob and I are in a local bar, The Spouter Inn, named for Spouter, the owner.  Bob and I are both living and working on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Bob is still telling the story of how we met. 

 

Spouter is just turning up the bar room’s scrim lighting, it’s after five pm. The bar’s surfaces and glasses glint warmly as if candle lit. 

 

Bob’s going on, bragging grandly about his Connie. Buying another round for the boys, not to be generous, but to keep their audience. I’m sitting by myself nursing a tea, at a distance from Bob, because I have heard it all. 

 

He lifts his empty pint glass and nods at Spouter who’s in his sanctuary behind the bar and doesn’t notice. He’s busy pointing a fan down his bar through the haze engulfing the chain smokers that refuse his hints. Bob gives up, throws a questioning Look at me, then returns his attention to his captive audience of tipsy workers unwinding.

 

Bob loves me completely and loves to talk about me. But, he over idealizes me. If I’m even half as good as he paints me, it’s only because I had been driven to learn humility by shame’s boot rammed firmly up my ass. 

 

Back in my hippy days in New York City I felt as if had finally escaped the Dakotas and my soul had been freed. I was off the reservation! I let my freak flag fly. Before long I discovered nightlife, New York City nightlife; mirrors and neon, globes strobe lit and spinning over dance floors hopping with kaleidoscopes of jumping bean people, bars filled  with people living purposefully beyond constantly shifting margins; intellects, poets, artists, every kind of musician imaginable, saints and demons, speed queens and downer daddies, and pot smoke everywhere. I was in with the in crowd. Right where I thought I wanted to be. It was a boozy life and for me that was a good life. For a while. Soon, I needed more and more booze to keep the good feelings flowing and before I knew it, I could barely keep my head above the liquid tide. I was floundering nightly from bar to bar then, man cave to man cave. Then everything got better. I discovered drugs. I couldn’t afford these drugs, so I did what I had too with the help of more booze. I finally swam so deep I touched bottom. I couldn’t find my way back up, so I waited to die. Instead of dying I sputtered about drowning, kicking through that bottom, then kicking through another couple of levels, sinking into ever lower levels of depraved self destruction, unable surface and unable to die. I was desperate. I was desolate. I was unemployed and facing eviction and still I kept chasing my failing life down the rat hole.

 

I woke one morning in a vacant lot littered with scuttled, derailed, wheel hobbled shopping carts stuffed with rusting junk beyond use or profit, torn bags of rotting garbage, and everything else the world threw out. The lot’s grounds were carpeted with broken glass and poverty’s tossed trinkets. And there I was. In a very bad way. I was naked, come and shit smeared, my arms were grimy, bruised, cut, and bound behind my back with my pants hose. I was face down on a filthy, spring sprung, torn up mattress stinking of piss, sweat, cum, and motor oil. Something painfully huge was buried knee deep into and gaping my anus. My mouth had a gag in it that held an O-bit forcing my mouth open painfully wide. I immediately became hysterical. I could not free myself. I was a prisoner bound by my ruinous ways. I realized a crew of monsters in the night had thoroughly, and most horribly, had their way ruining me. I brayed through the bit like a saddled beast, feeling like a horrid thing for sale or rent in hell’s open flea market. I prayed, God kill me! Please, please, just kill me. Now God, please! Then some good people came. They freed me and covered me and took me to their nearby hospice. They were communal members of a non religious order. They cleaned and clothed me. They showed me the mirror. I saw myself as myself. I broke into tiny pieces. Shattered and scattered. They collected the pieces because I was to weak to and slowly, they pieced me back together and built me up. It was their way. Their healing balm was kindness, tolerance, patience, and love. If I have any goodness in me today it’s because of them. I stayed with them for three years, helping the next ones along the road. I’ve have since tried daily to practice their ways.

 

Bob does tell a good story. He tells my story better than I ever could. He knows all about my ungraceful past. He loves me the more for it. 

 

I hear him prattling on about us, our years traveling about, and I get embarrassed. I up and leave, stopping by his table to say, I’m going for tacos and ensalada de nopales for us, Bob. Back in a bit. 

 

I’ll go for cactus salad and tacos, yes, but first I’ll walk with god a bit along the flats and watch the scavenging birds dead heading into the near forest trees to nest for the night, the encroaching dusk chasing their tails. I get lost in thought and am late getting back to Bob.

 

The truth is, after the store’s closing, when my dad was sick with depression and alcoholism and after Sean’s family had left the reservation for Oelrichs, Sean would appear mornings on our front porch reading a book, waiting to walk me safely to school. He was big for his age and his family’s oldest boy. He just naturally took upon himself the role of neighborhood protector of all things small and picked on. Sean was smart and polite, formal even. His politeness was born of genuine consideration for others, especially the less fortunate. I loved that about him and worshiped him like the older brother I longed for. 

 

Through my classroom window I would watch Sean shooting hoops during eighth grade gym class on the playground. He was taller than the other boys and wide shouldered, but he had the grace of a smaller, more lithe boy, like a dancer. That made him deadly on the court. Everyone knew he was being groomed by the school for a basketball scholarship to a good high school. 

 

He did receive an all expenses paid scholarship to a private boarding high school. He never attended. His father had left two years before without a word then or since. Sean felt he had to stay home and be the man of the house. He went to the local High same as me. He was the basketball team’s star and was quite the star with the girls. By his sophomore year he was already being scouted for college. 

 

One day, in our junior year, we were at the bus stop when a pick up truck pulled up and vomited a load of white boys. One hateful eyed bullyboy jumped out, pointed his bat at Sean and said, Hey Cochise, we’re here to take you back to the res where you belong. Laughing, they clubbed him with bats until unconscious and threw him into the truck’s bed. I tried to stop them, pulling at their arms. One boy turned and round housed me. I came to in the ER. They didn’t take Sean to the res. They took him up to The Badlands and left him in vacant scrub land beaten nearly to death. Hikers found him lying unconscious upon a clump of prickly pear cactuses, his face swollen like a pumpkin and full of cacti needles, one eye was swollen up and needle spiked like a cocktail olive. He was out of school for a month and came back wearing a black eye patch on which he had painted a crude white eyeball with a blue cornea. On it were words, Beware This White Boy Don’t Play. He was on crutches with nerve damage to his legs. He never played basketball again and perhaps bitter, he never went to college. 

 

If it was bitterness that held him back from college, it didn’t hold him back from life. After graduating high school and farting around the Southwest for a year, he came home and went into a two year paramedic training program at our community college. He got certified and soon after ended somehow in the Mideast with a non-governmental, non-denominational group of international do-gooders. He employed his EMT training assisting doctors in remote villages lacking basic healthcare. He loved it, writing to me joyfully about receiving the gift of purpose. We are in almost constant, hectic motion, he wrote, No time for boredom. We travel a loose circuit, mostly in Afghanistan though we cross into border countries as needed (there really are doctors without borders! Selfless fucks!). 

 

Sean stayed for eight years in the Mideast, learning on the job and upgrading his certifications before taking a two year stint as field medic in Swaziland, S.A. After that he gave up medicine and moved to New York where I was working as a social worker. Sean put his infield culinary training to work as a chef at a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant. I returned to South Dakota in 1991 and Sean did the same in 1992. He got a chef position at The Double Dog and invited me to come and work there too. 

 

Sean quickly got bored and felt useless cooking for others and so went back to medicine and Afghanistan where he worked with an Afghani Dr, Nasrin Karzai. They fell in love and married. They worked together there for 12 years before coming to the US. She is now working as a contract travel nurse until her MD license clears. Every three months she’s able to travel to a new city for work, which they love. She last got herself assigned to the Pine Ridge Reservation Hospital. She spends her off time at the reservation home she bought with Sean or in the near woods and hills hiking with him.

 

The sun had set and I was ready for home by the time I got back to Spouter’s. Bob wanted to hear all about my walk. It was a walk and a story he knew from memory, but I told him about it anyway to make him happy. I told him how I watched the sun close it’s curtain on the day as the birds flew in, gloriously back-lit by the fading pale-purple haze of the setting sun. In from scavenging in the scrub land, regrouping in the forest’s trees, chatting about their days, racketing their good nights until all went dark and silent as a child’s bedroom after lights out. I told him Miss Longtrees pulled over to give me a lift and invited us to shuffle board on Saturday. We dined on the back steps of our house, under the stars, eating the cactus salad and our cold tacos with sour cream.

 

 

One late afternoon, A few weeks later, Sean and Nazrin joined Bob and I for tea and coffee at a sleepy roadside adobe cafe down the road from the Reservation. We sat outside, shaded under an awning of lattice and vines. The waiter, a shy girl of about eight, bashfully poured tea from a taupe glazed pot. We were there to celebrate Nasrin’s Medical license being finally approved and her being granted license to practice in the US. The same day her license came through the Reservation Counsel snatched her up as the hospitals Chief of Surgery.

 

It had been a long road for Nazrin, getting approved to do what she was trained for and excelled at. 

 

She was happy with her new position and spoke of field training in Afghanistan and meeting Sean. With a little coaxing she reminisced about growing up there. How her older brothers would take her hunting in the mountains as a child. Sleeping in the mountains under the stars, waking in the morning covered in icy dew and blanketed in fog. She described how the Afghan mountains changed color all day, starting as gray and white in the early morning, then glowing gold until pink then lavender as the daylight waned, finally melting into purple before sinking into black against black silhouettes in the night. Our mountains put on the same color show, she said. She missed her brothers.

 

Nazrin’s story got me reminiscing about myself as a child. Nazrin must have noticed a dreamy look had entered my eyes, because she asked, Connie, what was your childhood like here.

 

I told them how my father took two weeks off from the store every year to go hunting with his team of old school Sioux hunters. He always took me with. Dad carried a rifle but did not hunt. More important than a hunter, he was a tracker. Dad and daughter were a team. He trained me to track elk. We often spent the whole two weeks in the highlands above “the field of play” as Dad called it, spotting first then droving the elk into the hunter’s clutch. I learned to “sing” to the hunters with animal calls from the hill and mountain tops where my calls, because of our unobstructed height, would carry down through the valleys telling tales of elk. In time I could perfectly mimic wolves, eagles, and hawks. Per Dad’s instructions, I’d call out elk numbers and locations. 5 males, Chilitop, coming down river, one and a half miles from the greasy grass field. Clutch there. With Dad’s help I learned humorous tricks and games to play on the hunters who, I learned, had come to expect his little jokes. 

 

I spoke wistfully of how Dad and I fed ourselves in the hills, foraging for mountain mushrooms and berries, noodling stream trout, river kelp, and fresh-water periwinkles to fry. When low on fry oil I learned to skewer kelp stuffed trout on whittled and fire hardened twigs and hand twirl them above the flames of a campfire smoking with fragrant forest-floor wood chips. With needle and thread I made periwinkle necklaces to wrap around the fish. I spoke of the thrill of rotating the skewered fish over a smoking campfire and watching the periwinkles burst open with a pop, sending shell pieces flaming skyward like fireflies. And I remember the fire light! How it illuminated me and papa, casting us like outlaws in some old-timey cowboy movie screened against the dark night sky!

 

Before parting, Nazrin said the Reservation council asked her to join their team of tribal representatives in going to Washington to lobby congress for federal hospital funding long promised, but never delivered. The group was to be part of a larger national lobbing effort of tribes organized by The National Congress of American Indians.

 

Nazrin said she accepted the council’s request and Sean, a sitting council member, would be joining her in DC. She said, Connie, I asked the Council to include you as part of our team since you’re a member and such an effective advocate. They thought that was a great idea. All you have to do is say yes. And Bob, we have to insist you join us. You won’t have to do anything but grant us the pleasure of your company. I don’t think the council will pay your way, but I’ll see that Connie is given her own hotel room. She can order double meals and whatever else you need from room service. Sean and I will help cover your airfare.

 

We spoke later at home. We decided we were going to DC.

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

Tweety Bird was homeless and had nothing. Nothing but his dog, God.

Who’s a good dog? Oh, yes you are. God is a good dog! Tweety Bird rubbed God’s ears while looking slyly up and down the busy downtown street, checking the lunch hour side walk traffic, thinking as he did so often, let go and let God. He uncoupled the leash from God’s collar. Go, God, go! 

 

God took off like a guided missile and leapt upon a predetermined sidewalk cafe table, snatching a plated sandwich in his mouth. The surprised diners jumped back in their chairs, alarmed. God took off down the block, people yikes-ing and yelping, jumping out of God’s hard charging way. From his distance, Tweety watched God flying down to and around the corner, knowing God would go into their alley and lay the sandwich on the pavement and lay down next to it to wait for Tweety Bird.

 

Tweety came running down the dumpster lined, highrise shadowed alley. Panting and starting to sweat, he smiled, looking at the sandwich, Lunch boy! Such a good boy, such a good dog! God wagged his tail, looking at the sandwich, salivating. Tweety picked it up, examined the bottom where it had made contact with the filth of the alley. He wiped it on his grimy pantleg and sat himself against a wall. He tore off a quarter piece of the sandwich, here ya go boy, he opened and tossed the contents in parts before tossing the bread to God.

 

Working with relish on his share, Tweety noticed balloon boy coming towards them. God also noticed. Looking, God got up, staring, wagging his tail. Balloon boy yanked the knot of strings in his hand forming the leash on the umbrella of multi-colored balloons floating over his head. 

 

Tweety saw Balloon Boy as one of god’s unfinished, rough-edged people. Tweedy thought Balloon Boy must have been created on a day when God was short a few ingredients. He was a small man with pointy elvish ears he bashfully wiggled when asked. He had high pinched cheeks, close set eyes and almost no chin. He dressed in what Tweety called a stylishly haber-dumpster-dashery fashion. He was always cheerful. Tweedy favored him and tried to look out for him.

 

What color would you like? 

Shit, I’m sorry Balloonatic, not today. 

Spent all your money on that sandwich, huh? He stared at the sandwich with hopefully arched eyebrows.

Money, hah! That’s good.

Balloonatic squatted down and held out his hand to God. God whimpered, bowed his head and with his tail wagging, came to the balloon boy and licked his hand. 

Oh, that’s a good boy, Ballonatic said, stroking God’s head, Look what I have for you! He tore off a red balloon and tied it to God’s collar.

Say thank you, God, Tweety said. 

God stepped up onto balloonatic’s knees and licked his face, whimpering with God love.

 

Suddenly God abandoned his knee post and turned, eyes and ears pointing, hunched forward at the ready, growling low, staring at a large cardboard box across the alley. Tweety leapt up and leashed him, easy boy, easy now, good God. 

Balloon boy asked, what’s he see?

Everything, God sees everything.

Tweety walked God across the alley and allowed God to sniff the box as he looked it over. 

Tweety drummed his fingers on the top, Hello, anyone home?

He heard voices giggling inside the box. Then he heard a cartoon-like voice answer high and squeaky, Just me, Jack. Just Jack in the box. Then more giggling.

God must have appreciated the joke, his tail started wagging. 

Tweety said, Jack. You hungry?

The box’s end flap opened and an older woman’s head popped out, 

Hell yes! She said, smiling big. 

My name’s Connie and… she looked back into the box, um, somewhere in here is Bob. Just the two of us. Whatcha got to eat?

Tweety said, not much, but I can get more if you need. God provides, he said, nodding towards his dog.

Hello, God, Connie grinned at the dog, rubbing his head in welcome.

God licked her face.

 

Bob and Connie withdrew their gear from the box. They tied their sleeping bags, small gear bags, and assorted tools to their backpacks. The bags looked too new and too efficient and organized to belong to traditionally homeless people. Tweety inquired about this. 

 

They explained they weren’t really homeless. 

 

We came to D.C. as Pine Ridge Reservation representatives, Bob explained, to be a part of a United Native American Indian effort to lobby congress to fund Native American healthcare. 

Connie said, my friend Dr Nasrin Karzai was asked by the reservation council to go to the conference with council members to represent the Oglala people. I’m on the council and she asked to take me. Bob came along on his own dime but stayed with us in the hotel until the conference ended. Then Bob and I decided to stay a bit longer as tourists. We’re on the cheap and figured we’d sleep rough to save ourselves the inflated costs of the local corporate lobbyist hotels.

So Tweety, now we’re tourists! Got any tourist tips for us?

Yeah, Bob said eagerly, top five. What do you think we should see?

 

Tweety took them to a nearby park where they met a mobile homeless pantry van. The staff filled a bag with groceries for them and the driver gave them directions to an affordable hotel.

 

Hey Bob, about that hotel, Tweety asked after they left the van and sat down on an empty bench, I have nowhere to stay. Do you think you guys could give me and God some floor space for the night?

I answered, Of course. Who can say no to God?

Tweety smiled at his dog who in turn wagged his tail.

 

Connie called ahead and used her card to get us a room. We hiked to the hotel. The hotel was an older, ten storied, brown brick building in an upscale residential neighborhood of notable and important people. The hotel had a sagging marquee spanning the sidewalk, declaring, Le Clarion. 

 

The room was clean, the bed well appointed. Still, Connie rinsed and rung out the top sheet in the tub in an effort to exorcise any hidden thoracic legged, pincer clawed demons. She hung it from the shower curtain bar hoping it would dry by the time we lay down to sleep. We were exhausted and Connie climbed into bed. Tell me you’re not going to throw me out of bed, I said, as I held up a dozen snack sized packs of crackers and cheese I got from the van. Tweety and God came in just as we were settling in to sleep. We already had a space cleared for them on the floor. We put down a sleeping bag we weren’t using to make the floor a little more comfortable. God immediately forwent the floor and snuggled in between Connie and I.

 

The next morning was cool and drizzly and recently fallen leaves were wind-slapping against our rain splattered, shivering selves. A chill piled through our clothes as we walked hurriedly, following the hotel’s map, to our appointed bus stop. We took the bus to the Smithsonian. After an apple bites and potato puffs breakfast at Wendy’s with coffee mixed with protein powder from my pack, we met up with Tweety and God who breakfasted at a nearby homeless pantry. 

 

We walked to the King Memorial from the Tidal Basin side. The rain stopped and the sun came out. It had warmed, the wind let up and barely rippled the basin lake water in which we could see the reflected Statue of King rippling. It grew to his full height as we approached his form, chiseled in stone, upon which were engraved Kings own words, “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” King. A man for his times, now a man for all time. His memory forever a “Stone of Hope” for a forever divided nation. 

 

The King Memorial was very moving. But, none of us was more moved than Connie. She studied King. He was a favorite subject of hers. She even gave a lecture on King as a guest speaker at a weekly series on the reservation. I remember it well.

 

Connie was asked by a preacher friend of hers to speak about King and segregation as part of a weekly series she held at her home on the reservation. She was aware of her learning and passion and speaking skills from their many long into the night conversations. I attended. 

 

Connie called her talk, King: the man and a message of hope for Native Americans. Mostly, I remember her speaking of how King in his writing about segregation referred to the philosopher Martin Buber’s idea that we all have, by nature, a one on one, sacred and personal relationship with our god. That relationship, Buber called an “I – thou” relationship. “Thou” being God and the “I” being that which is individual and sacred in all of us. Buber and King believed it was natural, in born, and necessary for humans to have that same mutual, I–thou, holy relationship with one another. If we don’t recognize what’s holy in others, that “I” in others risks being reduced to merely “it” and relegated to the world of things and so to be treated as such. So, King believed when we see our fellows with anything less than with a sense of their sacredness, their I-thou-ness, we risk reducing them to things. Someone in the audience piped up, like Indians, you mean. She ignored that and went on, This separation of self from what is sacred in others is what King saw as the foundation of segregation. And yes, Connie said, a thank you to that person who spoke out, Reservations are the very definition of segregation. King recognized that wherever this separation exists, it creates an empty space for evil to creep into. That is the nature of segregation. Segregation breaks the natural holy bonds between humans and in separation begins sin.

 

Connie fervently believed that a faith in such an approach to life was key to living a just life. Find the love, Bob. It’s in everyone if you look for it. She had to always remind me of this as I strove to become a better person. Someone like her. 

 

I have long been attracted to people like Connie. People of a better nature.

 

I know I came into life, like everyone else, innocent and full of goodness. But, then home-schooling started. At age four, my ever contentious father tried to kill me by repeatedly smashing my head on the bathtub floor, holding me under water again and again until I could hold my breath no more. I saw the light. I witnessed my end. Then I was gone. My father must have also seen the light and relented because I came to and found myself lying on the bathroom rug, on my side, hacking up water. I was alive but forever brain damaged in a way that was measurable, functionally problematic, but mostly internal and so not readily apparent to others. My outer world became a riddle and my inner world a tossed brain salad where left became right and up became down and streets didn’t meet and I couldn’t be found. My struggles to keep up were overlooked or just ignored. School did send me to a specialist. Testing showed my brain was similar to that, the Dr. said, of someone who’d been car wrecked and that I struggled with the processing of everything. The report and it’s suggestions for special ed classes were ignored by the nuns. Special education, Sister Martin scoffed, an education doesn’t get any more special than a good Catholic education. My folks, to avoid the family’s truth, said the testing showed I was just incorrigible and lazy. At six I morphed into something altogether different. Almost over night I became a wild thing with twitching limbs, grimacing faces, animal grunts, spontaneously erupting bird like squeaks, and stacatos of stuttered whistling. This wilding beast that was me, my parents and the nuns insisted, was simply Satan pulling my strings. I had apparently invited the devil in because, they assured me, I was myself evil and hell-bound. Dousing me with holy water, the school principal, Sister Martin, shrieked, You’re possessed you wicked boy! Just look at yourself. I remember my father telling me of a town in the bible called Gehenna where they banished the wicked to live outside the walls of the city in a garbage dump. At that dump, he said, there was a “great wailing and gnashing of teeth.” He imitated me, twisting, moaning, twitching, saying, “wailing and gnashing! That’s you boy!” He continued, that dump is where the town dumped the city’s garbage with all it’s dog and human shit. The shit that the banished sifted through daily, he said, pulling out bits of what was undigested to eat. Now get out of my sight, he said, go back to your Gehenna and enjoy your meal. You’re a disgrace to the family. You’re no son of mine.

 

I felt myself a creature apart, doomed to a life beyond the walls of my others. Twenty years later I would learn when my dogged devil was not going by Satan went by the name Tourette’s Syndrome.

 

But, home wasn’t my only classroom. Once I advanced to the school of real life I had plenty of other bad teachers; child wrangling trolls with victim radar. Radar fine tuned to identify children who had no real protectors. And violent, explosive neighbors, coaches, teachers; and of course, the glad handing, danger priests, and their cousin trolls; those alley skulking, shadow-stalking, tip-a-toed, child whisperers.

 

My schooling taught me spite and anger, suspicion and self hatred. I became combative, quick to anger and even quicker with my fists. By my early teens I was incarcerated and I asked myself, how did I get here? I did an about face. Though still a minor, I left home, the neighborhood, my delinquent pals, all the bad influences. I became a road scholar crawling out of my Gehenna, a reject on the road to decency, a rough beast slouching towards humanity. I drifted cross-country seeking and spotting the good ones, glomming onto and studying them, learning wherever from whomever I could. I learned more and more about the inherent worth and kindness of others and eventually myself. It took years, but I continued matriculating, joining the human race. 

 

Still, I remained a hothead. I was reminded of that once again, when my blood lust rose to an almost uncontrollable level when Tweety was murdered and I could only think of bloody vengeance. Connie roped me in though and brought me home to myself. She saved me from myself and a bad man lived. She had that effect on everyone.

 

I’m still learning.

 

From the King Memorial we walked down the street to The Vietnam Memorial Wall. It was still novel then. It was in a large park-like mall of well trimmed grass. Everyone remembers The Wall as quite moving. The shock of 55,000 names of our fallen combatants carved into it.

 

I remember walking across the grassy mall, then down a walkway gently sloping like a runway 12 feet into the ground, into a separate space. As you descend into that sacred space, black granite walls rise up around you, obscuring the world, erasing you from DC, that surrounding city of political clang and carnage. Separated, you enter a place so quiet you hear the silence of honor. You feel a quiet grace filling a church of surrendered names. You witness the rows of surrendered names floating upon the polished black granite walls like names fingered upon a mirror fogged by the surrendered breaths, a row call of final gasps. And you see yourself also reflected in that polished granite. And you notice the names of the dead floating over yourself, rising and falling with your every step, like revenants ghost-dancing upon the lawn and sky reflected behind you.

 

I spent a couple of hours down there feeling an odd out of body sense of dissociation, as if spiritually dislocated, unsure of where I was. I tried to ground myself by focusing on my surrounding others. I watched children oddly quiet, transfixed, unsure, perhaps confused, running curious fingers tentatively over the names carved into the wall. Mothers holding children up to touch a missing loved one’s name. People holding papers to the wall and texture rubbing a slanted pencil over paper to capture the names of loved ones frozen in the forever. And so many strangers, meeting one another like friends, shaking hands, bonding, often tearfully. 

 

I walked up to the mall above. I saw Connie. She had her back to me. She was standing with a group in front of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s table, set just off the sidewalk. She had changed into her Navajo poncho, it’s clay red color off set her mid-back, gray dusted black pony tail flowing like a show horse’s tail from under her cocoa-brown stetson derby. She was reading a pamphlet and swaying from the waste up, side to side, like she does when deep in thought. I joined her at the table where volunteers were pushing the cause of the institute. Connie was waving the Institute’s brochure, saying to the woman standing behind the table, we could use a bunch of these at the council. She handed the woman with the brochures her Pine Ridge Reservation Council card and elicited an enthusiastic promise to mail them a bunch. From her handbag Connie withdrew and handed the woman a Pine Ridge Reservation Council brochure. Please, look this over. If you or anyone from your organization ever get the notion, my contact info’s on that card. Come visit us. Call the number on back and we’ll see you’re put up with one of our reservation hosts. It’s a lovely place to visit, living there can be a challenge, she smiled and tapped her finger on the brochure she set on the table. 

 

I tried to walk away, but it took a while for Connie to sign every petition as I knew she would. Aw, come on. Just one more group over there, Bob. Last one, I promise. She could never resist the entreaties of others. She was a born advocate who cared deeply about others and tirelessly lived her passion for people. 

 

We met up with Tweety and God at a bar on DuPont Circle by our hotel. We sat out doors in it’s sidewalk cafe. Tweety told us of his day at the Smithsonian while God, on the sly, made starving, poor doggy eyes at the surrounding customers with food. Tweety scolded, No, God, no begging! We assured Tweety their spot on our floor was still there. 

 

We’re going home tomorrow, Connie told him. Take my number, Tweety. She pulled out a pen and wrote on the back. That’s my home number. You really should come and live out there with us under the big sky. Get off these crowded streets. God could run wild, unleashed. I can hook you up with a social worker and get you qualified for homeless relief funds, healthcare and a monthly check. We’re living in Naz and Sean’s guest house. They’re our friends. There’s a tool shed behind us that’s empty and large enough to make into a small comfy home if you don’t mind using the mini mart bathroom down the block. Naz wouldn’t charge you much, though I really shouldn’t speak for her. Anywho. Do come out!

 

The next day, we hung around the hotel late, not having to catch our flight til mid afternoon. We ate a to-go goodbye breakfast from the corner store in our room with God and Tweety, while watching the news. All the stations were reporting a hurricane onshoring later in the day. Tweety said, I hope you guys can get out. He insisted they accompany us to the airport. We like to bark at the planes, he said. 

 

It was pouring when we left for the metro station. The street corners were already starting to flood. We high stepped through the rushing water flooding the gutters. Gale force winds were swinging charcoal black branches over our heads like baseball bats knocking leaves into a windmilling, gray-black, cloud barked sky. By the time we came to the station around noon the sky had become so dark the street lights came on. We stopped at the light across the street from the entrance. God was racing back and forth barking insanely. Connie said, screw this. She took her turned inside out umbrella and threw it like a javelin into some bushes, then she threw her pack over her shoulder and took off in a run against the light for the subway entrance. I was just a few feet behind her, Tweety was struggling with his load, shouting, Need some help here. Would you grow some damn arms already dog! God was beyond hearing, having taken the lead. He was already partially down the stairs before he turned and waited. On the street no one was driving, the strets were near empty. When we reached the underground platform I shouted over the incoming train towards Connie who was tossing coins into a troubadours plaid tartan, Nice day to be leaving.

 

We spent the next 5 years living and working on the reservation. I took a series of jobs locally. I get bored easily and love learning new skills. So, I job hop. Connie took a job putting her advocacy skills to work with a local non profit, advocating for the civil and judicial rights of the poor in general which describes most people on the res in general. 

 

After a year, Tweety and God came out to live and Tweety did such an amazing job fixing up the shed, Sean hired him to assist him with their home’s remodeling. 

 

After that he got a job at the nearby gas station and mini mart. One night an animal of a man walked in and held up the place. For no reason at all he shot Tweety Bird through the head, killing him instantly. God apparently attacked the man so ferociously and with such tenacity that when the police found the killer later in the hospital ER, the drs were attempting to save his mauled, pistol holding, right arm. Evidently, in the struggle, the man recouped his pistol with his left hand and shot God dead. 

 

I went a little crazy. I don’t drink much, but I did that night. When I heard they had the man in post op at the Hospital I showed up there drunk, raving and belligerent. I was stopped outside his room carrying a pillow. I supposedly told security I was there to congratulate my friend who had been injured taking the life of another. I was told I said, “I just want to give him a little death hug,” holding the pillow up. The tribal police refused to press charges and took me home instead. I was shamed into quietly going inside while Connie spent some time out front speaking with the police in hushed tones. 

 

I tried, but Connie was inconsolable. After four days of grieving, but first making sure I was ok, she said, I’m going on walkabout. She grabbed her pack, kissed me on the lips, said, I’m sorry. She left out the back door. I watched her cross the sparse prairie, walking through patches of scrub brush touched with Autumn’s somber colored purple heart and stygian blue blossoms until she reached the base of the wooded hills, already turning crimson in the setting sun. She disappeared into the darkening woods. I knew she would be alright. She would “travel with papa” as she called it. Traveling through the wilderness as her papa taught her, staying clear of those and that which would do her harm. 

 

Four days later I came home and found her lying on the couch, reading Berger’s “To the Wedding.” I smelled an unction of stomach stirring aromas coming from the oven, basting the walls, the room, wickering the air. She had the cold dishes of a culinary feast already spread across the dining table sitting upon her multi-colored, loom woven, moon, star, and sun spangled Native American tablecloth.

 

What’s this, I asked?

It’s a farewell dinner, she said, pointing to the table’s head, for Tweety and God. She had placed one of our over sized guest plates there on top of which she had placed a few significant items of Tweety’s along with God’s leash and collar and favorite chew toy.

And who is that, I asked, pointing to the two other empty table settings? 

Sean and Naz, Silly, Connie answered.

I told her, Stay put, read your book, I got the kitchen. 

 

I checked the pots on the stove. The vegetable and meat stuff was roasting, muddling in a bubbling rosemary, wine, and garlic au jus. A few minutes later there came a particular rhythmic knock on the door that I recognized as Naz being playful. I opened the door to find Sean with Naz who was holding a plate of cupcakes. 

I said, thank you and took the plate saying, that is so kind, closing the door.

Not a chance, said Sean as they pushed by. 

Out of our way, knuckle-head, said Naz. 

Hey Baby, Naz said to Connie who stood up to receive Sean’s hug.

 

We sat around the couch relaxing, sharing small talk while I passed drinks and hors d’oeuvres until Sean exclaimed, We have good news! Naz continued for him, we have a friend in Oglala who has a couple of friends staying with them who will be driving home soon to Blue Lake in Northern California. They have room in their van and say they can take a couple of passengers who are willing to chip in on gas. Blue lake is right by Arcata, just where you two have been talking about going. Not quite on the coast but close enough. 

 

There really isn’t a lake in or around Blue Lake. Kind of like calling the Salton Sea a sea, I guess. We stayed in Blue Lake for two weeks with the Maynards who drove us there. They were a slow moving couple who took everything, including ourselves, in stride. They had a very private guest room they offered us for as long as we wanted. Blue Lake’s more of a town than a city with a population of about 1,300. Blue lake does have a body of water, the Mad River skirting it, which we hiked and waded in. Its down mountain waters were clear and frigid. I considered buying fishing tackle but decided to wait until we got to Arcata and settled. It was a friendly, sleepy town. We shortly felt we were getting too comfortable there and so moved on towards our destination.

    

We started out one early afternoon, walking down Hatchery Road, over the Mad River, and continued walking past small farms anchored by well cared for small family houses. When we came to West End Road we turned onto it and headed towards Legget Creek. We were comforted by the increasing wilderness along the road winding up the rocky ridges. Ridges forming the burgeoning foothills of Northern California’s coastal mountains that crest and fall with the redwoods into the sea. Just after we crossed Legget Creek, I recognized an unmarked loggers road from when I was soloing by foot through the redwoods a dozen years before.

We turned on to the road continuing true West. We walked along the narrow forest crowded road, breathing in the scents of forest foliage mixed with smells of musty, moldering trees, lazily sloughing their multi-colored leaves. From above us followed the surprisingly mouse-like shrieks of a bald eagle, over-lording its kingdom. After another half hour’s walk we spotted the ridge I was searching for. We immediately left the road and quickly ascended its top. 

 

The ridge was just high enough to hide the beauty of a sprawling wooded expanse of royal redwoods marching downhill towards Arcata. From our view at the top, I imagined a home in this emerald forest of heart stealing beauty, solitude, and solace.

 

We sat on a fallen log at the top, looking at the forest and distant sea, enjoying the quiet and solitude. This, Connie said, smiling and waving her arm expansively, all this Bob! This why we came here. I’m so glad we did. Yeah, I could fall in love with all this. 

 

I told her, look down at those woods. I had already told her of the giant redwood stump homes I discovered here years ago. Redwoods shorn by quakes and lightning strikes over hundreds of years. The remaining wide stumps were hollowed out by loggers and used as forest homes. I said, this here is where we can find that fold to tuck ourselves into. 

 

Connie wasn’t so sure about “living like a nut” in a tree. But Connie, I explained, we’d be living for free! Secluded and surrounded by mother nature. We’d have time to do as we wanted, together. There’s nothing wrong with living like the tree squatters of old. We could walk daily down to Humboldt University and we could loll about, reading all day in its eclectically stocked library. You know, we should also sign up for a cheap adult continuing education class to have student access to the uni gym with its locker rooms and showers and toilets. When hungry, I told her, down road from the uni library Arcata has a wonderful co-op market where bakers of excessive talent daily replaced the local air for blocks around with the yeasty sweet scents of fresh baking bread, sweet rolls, and pastries. I told her they cut that fragrant air with smells of continually roasting and brewing, responsibly sourced coffees. It would be our kitchen away from our hideaway home in the forest. 

 

We decided not to walk back to the highway, but to walk directly through the forest. We would camp there overnight and walk into Arcata in the morning.

 

After we precariously trundled sideways a bit down the rock littered forest trail, I said, Connie, look! Wood nymphs dancing! I pointed to a clearing in the woods where a small devils wind had scooped up dozens of fallen leaves and was spinning them in its funnel like colorful playthings bobbing on a carousel. 

 

She smiled, We get a lot of devil winds in the Dakotas. When I was a child we called them “stir winds,” because like prisoners from “the stir,” the whirling desert dust gave the funnels a convict orange tint and the funnels picked up trash along the highways. 

 

I told her, for me these falling leaves bring memories of when I was a kid in the city, how my mates and I stuffed our pants and jackets with leaves, stuck carved jack-o-lanterns on our heads and looking like living scarecrows, we chased the smaller screaming children. I reminisced about sitting akimbo on the street’s curb in front of my house with my dog Lottie, patiently watching foil jacketed potatoes, stuffed with cheese and bacon, baking inside a smoking pile of raked leaves, and I remembered once lurking lonely behind a neighbors tree, unwanted, at a discrete distance, watching chimney smoke rising from a fire warmed brick house, a girl I hardly knew, inside studying at a table, barely visible in a pale halo of gold kitchen light, warm and safe behind it’s hushly lit window, beyond the hearing of the tapping outside from a small inquisitive heart pounding. 

 

Connie sighed, maybe I could learn to live like a nut in the woods.

 

I told her, we wouldn’t want to homestead too close to the U. The kids from the college had largely co-opted the giant trunk hollows as their own. 

 

During the lumber rush of the mid to late 1800s many redwood stumps had been hollowed out by core fires set by solitude seeking lumberjacks who after burning out the core would cut a side hole for entrance and fashion a roof of some sort and move in. A Uni professor and local history buff told me they remained occupied by a succession of squatters up into the early 1930s when the depression ended. Then in the 50s college kids discovered them. Today they use them as snug, semi-private hideaways, to do everything you can’t do in the dorms. Today these stump hollows look like wildly painted, psychedelic party palaces, dreamed up by demented wood elves. The kids use them for parties.

 

Sometimes we would find fliers blowing with the leaves along the campus walks advertising parties in the woods. The kids had given all the stumps names. I knew of Stumpy, Dumpy, Dopey, Goofy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezey, and Joe. The fliers announced the party locations by stump name and promised music, molly, x, lsd, and usually a beer keg or 2. They would bring or create their own music and the police  made the area a sort of dmz they didn’t enter at night. We occasionally walk the trails after dark with kerosene lanterns under a sky so crowded with branches that even moonlight struggles to illuminate it’s underworld. We nimbly step over ancient boulders, dew puddles and slicks of fairy puke, that green slime mold cover common to forest floors, we side-step down or up, plank and mud made forest stairs put in place by loggers a hundred or so years ago, we really get a kick out of laying on our backs and rolling our butts and legs, high-horse style, over logs too tall to step over. At last we’ll come upon a woodland party consisting of dozens of kids and campfires surrounding a hollowed tree, covered inside and out with spray painted psychedelia and graffiti, strung with Christmas and other lights, a camp fire inside the trunk itself with kids huddling around it, playing instruments or just group singing randy songs in lovely, youthful, angelic voices like a ribald church choir, and of course the night dark surrounding grounds are joyously littered with thrumming blankets and sleeping bags bundling youths fucking. Everyone is quite high and happy to see us as the older folk whom they can ply with beer and stories of home, siblings, friends, and mom who they dearly, drunkenly, miss with slurred and morose words of saccharine. Though we are private people we are as happy to listen as they are to talk.

 

Without my being aware of it I sided with Connie. We forgot about a home in the woods and settled for a cheap one bedroom rental with a real roof over our heads in a senior complex, nuzzled up to the Arcata Marsh and the open sea beyond that. The marsh is made of a series of unnatural marsh ponds created to organically filter the City’s sewage through a series of alternating, microbial doped, sewage cleansing ponds, until the water reaches the last pond with ocean ready, drinkable water, full of stocked fish for the taking. And taken they were, by rod and reel, mostly by old men like me from our complex, but also by the hardy boys and tomgirls of the city. The ponds were separated by flood gates and dike walls that you could walk on top of. The marsh was a favorite hike of ours. 

 

My social Security retirement kicked in and Connie got a job waitressing at a local diner. 

 

Mornings I lolled about the quiet streets considering what to make of my time, the time Connie called my “suddenly senior” years. I often sat for hours drinking coffee in the diner where Connie pulled the morning shift, reading the paper and writing in my recently acquired journal. Towards noon I’d get restless and let my legs take me where they would. Lately, they’ve been taking more often to the docks of the City marina where the commercial boats are moored. Fishing boats, seiners, trawlers, supply boats, all gearing up for the Spring run up to Alaska for the fishing and tourist seasons. Nosy as always, I would poke my nose about and I got to know some of the crews.

 

I was especially fond the people on the Fat Jack, a purse seiner. It was crewed by it’s owners, a young couple, Tom and Jinny Nash, their one year old son, Jake, and their golden lab, Durante. The couple were hard core fourth generation fisher folk. We became friends.

It got to where they’d see me walking the docks and wave, Bob, ahoy! Come. Come join us for lunch.

I’d play on the deck with the dog until called below to sit with the family at lunch like I was one of them. The little boy found me greatly amusing and would make monkey eyes and noises at me while cramming, spitting, squishing his food into his mouth, ears, the dogs maw, anything to get me laughing until throwing it at last at me while madly grinning and laughing. 

 

One night, Connie walked over to the Fat Jack with me. Jinny gave her a tour of the boat, explaining the stowed fishing gear, the navigation equipment, and the general workings of a fishing boat. Before serving us dinner in their exquisite wood worked galley, they shared photos and stories of life at sea. Stories of fishing and sheltering at night in coastal marshy nooks and crannies with other fishing boats circled like a lantern lit wagon train on a watery prairie, the crews boat hopping, drinking, playing board games or cards. It seemed someone would always be playing a musical instrument with someone or everyone joining in singing. Connie fell in love with the boat and tales of the life and arranged to come over to baby sit when needed. They became friends. 

 

We were all having coffee in lawn chairs on the aft deck one day when Tom said, We are were going to have to hire us a live aboard deck hand for the season. And our first thought was you, Bob. If you want it. I know it’s a step down from what you’re used to doing.

Oh, yeah, I laughed, like cow poking on a dude ranch?

Yeah, well. Connie, we were thinking, maybe you’d like to come too. It would free up Jinny to man the nets and hoists while you stay in comfort below with our son. We’d give you both a season guarantee and shares in the catch.

Jinny was tossing pieces of bread into the air for the hungry swooping gulls, entertaining Jake. She jumped in, think of it, Connie, of the fun, the adventure, seeing the great open ocean, the boat jumping the waves like you’re on a carnival ride. It’s so so beautiful, the endless rolling sea. Wait til you see the whales and walruses accompanying us, swimming along the side of the boat, their heads side cocked, pointing their wrinkled eyes, full of curiosity, right at up at us.

Turning to Jake bouncing on her knee, she said in a deep whale voice, Hey buddy, what are you doing in my ocean? You stay away from my fish, you hear? They’re not your fish! She made playful bites on Jake’s neck. 

Connie we’d love it if you two could summer with us, we’ll have oodles of fun.

 

We did not summer with the Nash’s. But, we did sail with them up to Alaska.

 

We left in mid March. It took ten wonder filled days at sea, sailing into the misty, salty sea wind and waves with the Nash’s, to get to Cordoba, Alaska, a picturesque coastal fishing village of 2,500, nestled within a small flatwater bay, surrounded and sheltered by snow capped mountains. We parted ways there. The only way in or out, like most of Coastal Alaska, was by boat or plane. We rented a weekly room at a bed and breakfast above a convenient store. We decided to stay a while and look for work. 

 

The following morning after coffee we went into a bank on the main street. The town was really small, with a grid of just a few streets, most dead ending before going more than a few blocks. While crossing the street, I noticed a person pull up and double park in front of the bank, hop and casually walk into the bank, stopping on the sidewalk to chat with others, all the while leaving the car running. It was part of a line of similarly doubled parked and running empty cars. Excuse me officer, I said to a passing foot cop, these cars here running with their kkeys in them, I pointed, what’s to stop someone from jumping in and taking off? He laughed. You’re new here, yes, he asked? If someone did as you say, where would they go? We have barely fifty miles of road in Cordoba and better than half of that is one old logging road that runs up into a dead end in the mountains that only sneaky kids filching mom’s booze use. No, no one steals car in Cordoba. Well, actually we do have one person, Helen. When someone comes out of wherever and finds their car missing, they never call it in, they just walk up to Helen’s and find their car in her drive with the keys left in the ignition. Everyone understands she means no harm. She has Alzheimer’s and sees a car and just assumes it’s hers. Sometimes she just sits in it waiting for her husband. He died four years ago.

 

Immediately walking into the bank we were greeted by an eight foot erect, snarl-toothed polar bear, it’s menacing arms spread wide in greeting. Connie mentioned to our teller that we were looking for work. The teller said, Hah! Don’t bother, work will find you. The season is just starting. Everyone, even the bank’s staffing up. 

 

After transferring my social security payment to Connie, I walked down Railroad Avenue to Breakwater Street where the canneries are lined up. I left Connie in front of a diner with a cashier wanted sign. She didn’t like the idea of working anything referred to as the “slime line.” I stood in front of Trident Seafood Processors, wondering whether to commit and go in. I saw a “we’re hiring” sign with a phone number. I decided I’d call first. I turned to look for a phone. Everywhere I looked I was acutely aware of the nearness of and the breath taking, dizzying, heights of the mountains surrounding us. They made me feel wonderfully alive and also very vertiginous. I walked dizzy down to a bar.

 

In the bar I asked to use a public phone. Don’t have one, said the bartender. Customers can use the one behind the bar. 

I said, well get me a coke and I’ll wait my turn. There was a man already on the phone. 

A different man sat down next to me, Hey, I saw you coming from Trident. You work there? 

Nope. Thinking about it.

Whatcha looking for?

I really don’t know. slimeline, I guess.

The man chuckled, Ever done that kind of work?

Nope.

You got any college?

Bachelors degree. English lit. 

Yeah, you don’t want to work the slimeline. Jason Jones, he held his hand out. I’m an aquatic biologist for Prince Williams Sound Aquaculture. I could use a hand. Starting today. We’ll hire and train you as a fish tech and pay you twice what Trident will.

 

An hour later I was working with him on the floor at Trident. 

We walked the length of the plant as he pointed out the various departments and their duties as we past them. At the end there was a processing area with a conveyor belt coming out of a shoot a floor above. We walked up a metal grated stairway to the upper intake room where the fish came in from the boats for processing. He then walked us out the back and down a flight of steps to the dock where two Salmon Seiners were tied up. 

Three men in boatmen’s work wear sat on a wood and lace iron bench. One stood and turned to us.

Captain Jiffe, Jason said, How you been man? He handed the captain a clip board.

Alright, not bad, Jiffe answered. You?  

Jiffe filled out the clipboard sheet and handed it back.

Jason pointed to the form and said to me, See here? See where it says fishing vessel. His vessel’s name goes there. And here, you can see he’s entered the hours of the catch. These boxes are for the co-ordinates of the area fished, Those, the total poundage of the haul. A new sheet needs to be filled out for every boat before it is offloaded. Then you go back upstairs to your station and fill the pages underneath. On those you enter each individual fish’s data in columns under the headers at top as you sample and log them, which I’m about to show how to do upstairs. Follow me.

`

Upstairs, workers wearing insulated coveralls, hairnets, and latex gloves were just stepping into their stations along each side of the conveyor belt running half way down the plant floor. The belt had already started to hum, rattle and roll, down over the belt tracks. We stepped up to the front of the line. There was a permanent aluminum tray welded there at belt line level where he placed the clipboard and a small tool box. From the box he withdrew cotton safety grip work gloves, tweezers, trays, and a small double edged knife. He showed me the rote motions of my job. How to grab an offloaded salmon every minute on the minute as they conveyored by, how to weigh and sex each, and with the knife, lop off the top of their heads, and with the tweezer withdraw the pinhead sized odiliths, wafer thin transparent bone discs, sitting on each side of the brain, unattached in cerebro fluid. I would then put them into a plastic tray of shallow divots dimpled in ten by ten rows. Then I’d toss the fish back onto the line to continue its way down the line for the gut, cut, box, and ship to market treatment. 

 

At the end of my day I would leave the plant, taking my toolbox with my tools, data sheets, and odolith samples and walk them all four blocks down the sea wracked, driftwood littered, beach to the lab, a small concrete block building with a gray steel door and a few small louvered windows around the sides. It looked like it was built to withstand sea storming. And it was. My first time there Jason came out to welcome me and introduced me to his fellow lab techs. There were six. Jason grabbed some paper work and we sat out back facing the ocean on a bench made from driftwood. 

He asked, Where are you and your wife staying? Connie you said? 

Yeah, we’re at the Toboggan Inn. 

Yes, Jock and Marie. Good people. Nice place. 

We like it. They’re really stranger helpful. We left out with a stack of maps and brochures this morning.

Well, along with your other paper work to fill out here, he handed me a pack, there’s a rent reimbursement form here. Just sign it, I’ll call Marie and fill out the amount and the rest for you.

Really! You’ll pay our rent? 

As long as your working for the Aquaculture Corporation we will. See that mess there? He pointed a bit down the beach to a trash heap of sand mixed with shredded blue cloth, metal rods, bits of cardboard, a half buried leather high top boot, a cooking pot, and other such odds and sods. That was Minka’s tent. Minka was the fish tech you replaced. She was a Berkeley college student up for the summer to work and save money for college. She figured she’d save on rent by sleeping in a tent on the beach. She was woken one night by a 400 pound bear that had crawled into bed with her and was nuzzling and grunting in her ear. She woke, jumped up shrieking and kicking, and contrary to tv bears, this real bear did what real bears do, it freaked, jumped up, clawing at the walls and bear-shrieking, trying to escape this terrifying little girl. Somehow the two of them managed to shred the tent to pieces and escape without even scratching one another. She was quite traumatized and in the morning went straight to the airport and flew out. We don’t want to risk a repeat of that, please stay with Jock and Marie on us.

 

I was fascinated by the lab. I fear I became a bit of a pest. Staying on long after my deliveries, I hung about, mesmerized by the charts and maps and graphs, asking millions of questions. I learned about the life cycles of salmon, their sea migrations from nest and back to spawn and start the cycle of life again as had been done for over a million years. I watched as the biologists compiled and extrapolated the data from the my sheets and odiliths. It was the story of the odiliths that really impressed me. Salmon are cold blooded creatures and so during the first three months of their life in the hatchery of their birth, the biologists would, daily, subject the small fry to carefully calibrated temperature changes. Say, a 40 degree water temp one day, then 3 days of 35 degrees, maybe followed by 5 days of 33 degree water. This change would make the cold blooded fish grow by different rates according to the varying temperature intervals. In turn creating growth rings of differing widths within the odoliths, much like the rings seen in tree cores. Those odolith rings can then be read under a microscope like bar codes! The striations tell the biologists, who co-ordinate with every hatchery on the West Coast to make different bar codes for every year and specific hatchery, can determine what boat caught what fish, hatched at which hatchery, etc. This way they can determine fish release and return rates, map ocean migrations, and break all that down further by sex and weight and other factors. This is the job. To further the species and contribute to the prevention of over fishing.

 

One day Jason’s Boss, Trayvon, told me, Bob, I see on your resume you once ran a diner as a lead cook and kitchen manager. How’d you like to be the cook and manage one of our hatchery kitchens for six weeks. We need someone to start next week. It would be just you feeding three squares to 20 or so college kids we hire for the duration. It’s on a remote mountain island. So quiet, peaceful. You’d have your own quarters away from the maddening racket college kids can’t help but make. You could take Connie with. 

 

We took a tiny float plane taxi to the hatchery, landing with a splash in the island’s inlet bay. The hatchery looked like any warehouse district warehouse, two stories of drab gray and windowless corrugation. The hatchery manager met us on the dock and walked us up to our cabin next to the dorm building where the kitchen and rec room also were. 

You got a specialty? Food-wise, I mean? 

What do you like?

Well, it’s not me you have to please. It’s the kids or I’ll get an earful. I don’t like my ears filled. They’re kids. Nothing fancy. No high wire. Just good old college cafeteria style cooking. 

**************

not finished something segues here…

Bob visits the Island’s squatters hideaway camp of society’s refugees from various states thrown together by chance and need and precariously living together. Carusoe living with six Fridays. Bob observes in his two hour visit all the internecine drama and politics of a big city. …

 

****************
Back in Cordoba we were put up again at the Toboggan Inn. I walked with Connie down the dimming beach. We stopped midway. I turned my face into the cold wind, salt wet with sea spray, to glory in the abundance of wildlife and ocean surrounding us. I felt myself drowning in the surrounding wild born waves of sky bound mountains climbing like rock-animate creatures, one mounting another, lumbering grotesque and beautiful out of the sea into the ice capped horizon. I felt thrilled to be alive. I turned to Connie and told her of a quote from a book I read about Alaska wherein the author describes Alaska as unique on Earth in that it is the one place that God was still working on when the Sabbath Day arrived and so he stopped his work, leaving Alaska raw and unfinished, his beautiful finger prints still all over it.

 

Bob! Hey, Bob! I heard someone shouting behind us.

I turned to find Rollo, one of the lab techs, Standing, staring at me, his mouth hanging open.

You alright, he asked?

Fine. What do you need?

You. We got a situation.

What?

At the plant. Labor crap. Boss said you used to work settling labor disputes or something.

Huh? Wha…the. Ah, yeah, yeah, no. That was Connie. Here, I pointed, my wife. 

Huh? Oh, he shrugged his shoulders looking at Connie. No, sorry, that won’t work. He turned to walk away, saying to me, Never mind.

Well ok, I said. I shrugged and turned to Connie. 

She said, go Bob. See what you can do. I’ll meet you at home.

I followed Rollo. The plant was a block away.

It seems there was a workers dispute going on concerning vague classist and racist based issues. 

 

Summer help consisted basically of two groups. One group consisted of local indigenous folk and Hawaiian Filipinos, both of whose members got along well, returning year after year, some for over 30 years, bringing with them their children and grandchildren to work together. Theirs was a hard working, harmonious, communal bunch. The other half were lower 48 junkies and assorted drifters, up for the seasonal quick buck. But they also consisted of mostly good college kids making tuition, their kind included self entitled, middle class frat boys, claiming privilege where there was none and prone to pissing where they shouldn’t. Evidently the night before, some of the frat boys returned to the dorms drunk with drunken under age indigenous girls for frat boy sexcapades. The indigenous dorm mates objected and the derelicts got angry when the frat boys wouldn’t share. There were punches thrown and knives drawn. The police were called and the girls were hurried to safety by the indigenous elders. The tension continued and erupted the next day on the plant floor.

 

When we walked up a group of about 40 workers, evenly divided, were out back in the truck loading area. Plant management was standing in between them. 

Tony the top manager was saying loudly to the frat boys, You’re all fired effective immediately. Security here will escort you to the dorms where you will have ten minutes to clear your belongings out. If you can get to the airport in time to get out you may escape prison time. The police are investigating attempted and perhaps actual charges of the statutory rape of minors as we speak. This is my property, you mother fuckers! He gestured towards the indigenous members, Our home! You may collect your checks at the front gate and will be arrested if you step foot on my property again! 

 

One of the riff raff stepped up. He was lean and mean looking, dirty and twitchy, his eyes wild and hungry fro a confrontation. What you mean rape, Snowman? Those lil faggots there never even got a chance to take what’s theirs fore your snow fucker friends took em down. 

The Filipinos and Alaskan Natives moved on the guy as a group. His white trash pals counter moved. JoJo, a burly middle aged native with a hard intelligent face, who was a defacto leader of his people, stepped in between the two groups, gesturing peacefully, speaking in a soothing way about everyone needing to cool down. One of the indigenous stepped out from behind him. He was beefy, maybe sixty, long black hair flowing from a bear cap. He was leading his woman by her hand, same aged. She seemed to be in charge, pushing him, saying, just go. Go! In his hurry to leave he brushed against the white tweaker.

Excuse the fuck out of you, Chinkey, The white man snarled with a shove. He then smacked the snow hat off the woman’s head. 

The native man spun around, shaking, clenching his metal lunch pale in his hand. He tried to speak but just stuttered with anger something about my woman…

The white man viciously tore into him, You stupid, seal stinking, blubber chewing, ice chink! Get your icicle-fucked no count ass out of my face. Take your self and your Nanooky whore back to the tundra before I gut you like a salmon. 

The native man swung his lunch bucket upward and across the mans face with such force it’s top tore off at it’s hinges, the open edge of the bucket tore the mans face off like a cleaver de-barking a gourd from just behind his right ear to his left eye, taking off his right eye, nose, part of his scalp, and half his face. The man crumpled to the ground like tossed litter. 

 

There was a frozen moment of stunned silence. The old woman stared in shock down at the bloody piece of bloody eye and scalp and face and nose on the pavement staring up at her.

 

JoJo wasted no time. He tapped a few natives and signaled them to follow his lead. He grabbed the old man and his woman and gently pushed them towards the front gate. The others formed a protective flank behind them as the trash grabbed scraps of broken pallets and rebar and grouped for an assault.

He fucked up our boy Jimbo! Lets kill the motherfucker!

 

The old couple looked dazed and walked as if entranced, the men behind, pushing, trying to hurry them.

 

JoJo had picked up a boat ratchet. A three foot long, fifty pound, length of steel bar and gears. He was twirling it Konabo style, the deadly Japanese martial art of baton use, while stepping backwards in a deliberate side step that I remembered watching New York riot police use in a group lockstep retreat during Stonewall. I ran past him to protect their front, asking JoJo as I passed, need help? He answered firmly with calm confidence, staring at the closing pursuers, No. Thank you. 

 

Four of us walked them out and up the hill, past siren screaming squad cars, up to 2nd Street, then two blocks over, ironically, to the Tundra, a bar where we could shelter them and use the phone to call an attorney. I learned they were named Rodney and Coco Helliot. 

 

Two weeks later Connie and I appeared in court to see Rodney Helliot let off with two years probation for simple assault. The white guy was named James “Jimbo” Johnson of Menominee Illinois. The prosecution knew Jimbo had a list of serious priors, most involving violence and injury. The Helliot’s had a group of kin and friends filling the court pews. They erupted with joy when the decision was read.

 

When we came out of the court house I noticed JoJo standing on the top step with his back to us, his hands clasped behind him. I was about to tap on his shoulder when he turned and spoke to us, Rodney, Coco, everything will be alright. I’m here to make sure of that, he said, opening his jacket a bit, revealing a Glock 17 in a belt holster. Look across the street, he nodded over his shoulder, without turning his head. Johnson was sitting on a bench. His face was a pus weeping bloody mess. He had a tape and gauze bandage shaped like a mask in his hand. It looked as if he had just tore it off. He stood up grinning like a one eyed, stroke-faced monster out of a horror movie. He made a pistol shape with his hand. Pointing it at Rodney, he pulled his finger back, mouthing, Pow!

 

We all went to the Tundra. JoJo’s son Wet Willy took JoJo’s pistol, jocked it, and stood guard out front. 

 

The Helliot’s group had taken over the bar with their good cheer and laughter. The Helliot’s themselves sat morose in a clamshell booth looking crushed under the weight of anxiety and depression they had been suffering since the event. I spoke with Rodney who had little to say. Connie sat next to Coco whom she had befriended, her arm around her, comforting and speaking with her. Coco spoke so quietly I couldn’t hear her. She was looking down as she spoke, her hands busy finger-weaving a scarf for her grandson. 

 

JoJo came from the bar with a beer for me and asked to sit down.

Of course, I said, scooting over. 

We had spoke many times before on the benches at the back of the plant when I was fish teching there and he was running the loading dock. We both liked to watch the fish bonanza that happened maybe twice a day when the plant opened the fish offal flood gates and all the plant’s chopped up pieces of fish waste were flushed by water pumped by giant turbines through the waste hoppers into the great pipes that ran under the plant and then under water and out into the bay where the mush was released to bubble up and surface midway between the plant and Spike Island 200 yards away. The bubbling chunky fish soup drove the ducks, gulls, and occasional eagles into a mad feeding frenzied mash of swirling birds, flapping and gobbling like grammar school kids in a cafeteria food fight.

 

JoJo took me into his confidence. He told me, I generally don’t trust white people. Natives in general don’t. You live on a reservation. I know it’s the same with Native Americans. So I know you understand and don’t take offense. 

No, I don’t.

I had been wanting to ask him about something historical that was ignored by the white world, but, I wasn’t sure how to inquire about it. I said, JoJo, tell me about your days with the Alaska Territorial Guard during World War II.

Oh, wow! He said, laughing and slapping his knees. That’s a tall order. How do you know about that?

Wet Willie told me a bit.

I don’t really like to talk about that. He stared in silence down at his beer.

Fair play. Understandable, I mumbled, feeling guilty and awkward.

 

After a minute he spoke up. I was raised to hunt. Like every native boy. I was given my first target rifle at four.  Unlike white folk, Native Alaskans never hunt for sport. We hunt to feed, clothe, and protect our people. For us soldiering was no different. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we were told we had to protect our country. Country, we wondered? Our country, Alaska, was already occupied.  We were not even citizens, we couldn’t enlist. But, fight we did. For our country. For our people.

 

The U.S. made an exception and a special unit for us non-citizens that we were happy to join. And so we fought. In fact we were the only “US Troops” to fight the Japanese on U.S. soil. We still haven’t been given recognition or proper remuneration promised for those years repelling the repeated attempts by the Japanese to establish a US beach head.  

 

He grew silent again. Brooding, he stared at some other time and place within his beer mug. A cookooo sang. I recognized it was the door chime and turned to see four young men entering dressed in army pants and camo jackets. Two had hunting rifles strapped to their shoulders. 

 

I tensed and turned to the Helliots. JoJo touched my arm, relax. Those are Rodney’s grand kids. They’re here to escort them to the safe harbor of their very small and remote village where they’ll be safe amongst their people. I have eyes and ears whispering about a group of processing plant red necks drinking in a nearby bar who were turned down yesterday trying to buy weapons. Not a one of them was able to pass a background check. Still, we can’t be sure they haven’t obtained weapons illegally. My nephew, the one who can pass as white, is down there now, drinking and playing country on the juke box, eaves dropping and reporting they’re talking ambush. My nephew reports two have already passed out and the others are too drunk and too interested in drinking and shooting pool to likely do much of anything.

 

He went back to his gloom, then he continued, We used to kayak out to our islands, hide the kayaks. Then bury the bulk of ourselves in sand and wait. They were our islands. We grew up amongst them. We knew them in our hearts. We’d watch as night shadows in the dark sea rose up out of the water. Japanese Submarines. Sometimes they’d be so close we could hear the soldiers splash as they hit the water with their loads of guns and gear to swim in. Since childhood we’d been stringing long-nets along those same islands to catch migrating salmon. We called them seal buffets because the net entangled salmon were easy ready meals for the seals. We would lie hidden in those same nooks, and when we saw the seals hitting the buffet we would pick them off. One shot. That was our way. Through the head. We did the Japanese the same as seals. They were brave, I’ll give them that. They knew they didn’t stand a chance, especially once they got snared in our underwater nets. It was terrible. 

 

Killing another man. Even in mortal defense. It’s a horror few get over. I never did. And I killed many. My besty growing up was Hard Bob. When the war started, they made us a sniper team. I remember his first kill. He changed immediately. First he became silent. A couple of killing later he started to become boisterous, loud even. Then he grew wild and wilder. At first that was fun. Then he went sideways, way sideways. He became anti-social. Violent. One night he beat a neighbor nearly dead and the council voted him our most extreme punishment: banishment. He was to spend three years away in the wilderness of the white man’s world. Not permitted to contact even his mother, who had no choice but to obey the decree or be banished herself. This separation from everyone he knew or loved proved too much for him. After having killed so many to protect his country he killed himself.

 

I told him, I’m familiar with alienation, I grew up with a sense of it. It turned me against the world that I felt excluded from. I’ve spent my life trying to find a way back in. For the longest time, whenever someone did manage to squeak in, I panicked. I fled. I never had a lasting intimate relationship until Connie who through patience and kindness broke through my seige walls and took me in.

 

The grand kids came over and helped the Helliots up. I grabbed their bags that others had brought down from where they had been staying and walked them out to the waiting van. I said my goodbyes and walked back into the bar. 

 

They’ll be fine, JoJo assured me. They’ll be taken home to their tiny village of fifty-five mountain made souls. A real slice of heaven. The village is backed up against a rock mountain cliff with a small waterfall tumbling down it, splitting the village in half, forming a small pond in the middle surrounded by houses before continuing as a river downland. People often have to leave the village for a spell to find temporary jobs elsewhere. It’s their way to leave their houses unlocked and welcoming to visitors. I try to visit twice a year and stay as a welcomed guest in a different empty homes. You and Connie must join us sometime. It’s a real paradise.

 

A month later we were in Anchorage after spending a week in Sitka and camping in the surrounding wilds. We were making our way home to Arcata. We decided to explore Anchorage for a week. What a mistake! It was like being in 1950’s Alabama. I’ve never been around such a density of ignorance and wholesale bigotry. To make things worse I saw the tweaker with the half face staggering down a downtown sidewalk. He had likely worn out his welcome in Cordoba. I turned Connie away without worrying her with why, and pointing, I pretended we were looking out at the inlet,  hoping Johnson was too drunk to recognize us.

 

The following morning Bob went out to fetch us some breakfast and never came back. He had ran into an emerging scene of unfolding violence. A crazed man was indiscriminately shooting people. It was the one-eyed man.

 

 

It’s been six years since Bob was killed. It’s taken me that long to get back to his story which I found after his passing. I knew he had taken up writing, but I had no idea what he was writing. I kept asking for a look. He just kept smirking and saying, not yet! 

 

He did a great job capturing my voice and story. What a memory he had! I will try to finish his story the best I can.

 

Bob saw the one eyed man from Cordoba straddling the fallen one, pointing his six shooter downward at the face of the shot man sprawled unconscious on the sidewalk. Bob knew he would do what he felt compelled to do, in spite of knowing better. He up and dashed from behind the mailbox he had taken shelter behind and leapt upon the pistol wielding man, knocking him forward, swinging his right arm up as he did, pulling the man’s pistol hand back and forcing it up into the air where it fired a round. As the surprised gunman stumbled back with Bob’s crashing weight, he tried to force the pistol into Bob’s face. Bob managed to wrap his left arm around the man’s head and with his right hand he gripped the pistol grip and hammer and with his thumb he managed the hammer back while slipping a finger in front of the hammer to prevent it from firing. His forward momentum and the man’s twisted feet sent them both falling to the pavement. Bob landed on top and laid his weight onto the man’s pistol gripping hand and with a slight twist got the barrel under the man’s chin, aiming it straight up into his brain. Bob knew if the man got loose and took back the advantage he would shoot Bob and then shoot the fallen man and probably anyone else nearby so he could flee to spree again another day. Bob took a farewell look into the man’s eye and saw in it an animal fear like he had never seen before. Bob suddenly felt a thing he couldn’t identify. The man’s fear wet eye spoke to him. He tried to look away from it, but it was as if the eye was screaming, Brother, brother. You are my brother. Spare me, brother. Eye to eye, Bob was torn, he looked at the man and felt Connie’s commandment to love. He deflated. He loosened his grip and the man regained the upper hand. Whoops!? He bucked Bob. Bob suddenly found himself beneath the man. The man had the gun pointed into Bob’s chest. He saw the man grin as the man’s hand seemed to remember Bob’s move and he felt the man’s thumb thrust itself under his thumb, taking back the hammer. The man’s eye lit up. Smiling triumphantly, he snapped the hammer which hit the chambered round dead on. Bob’s last thought was I hope Connie won’t be disappointed with me. He saw a million stars exploding, then a billion, then none as he felt his heart leave his body ahead of himself. He felt something drawing him beyond the city, beyond the ocean and sea born mountains, beyond Connie and everything he ever loved, pulling him way, way up, way beyond the sky and stars, pulling Lil Took-Took home to that everything before anything where no one is excluded.