Thursday, December 15, 2011

Squawkin' in Wonderland



Two days after sleeping in warm dry desert he was post-holing through new snow drifts. He refused to drive the icy roads so he walked with his son to evening class in the dissipating winter storm. Like an old-time wilderness adventure, but well-lit.

The route took them across the rich, mostly white people’s college, Naturally Arrogant University, and wound up and down and through the woods. Son could honestly tell any future kids that he had to walk to school in a snowstorm, uphill both ways.

Unfortunately born to one of the cheapest dudes on earth, the son was forced to attend poor and mostly brown people’s Crappy Community College, 20 minutes further through unlit forest. His alternative was to burden his life with endless debt.

(Banks’ generosity when you are young and immortal turns to crippling servitude as soon as you graduate and feed your meat to the machine. They will hound you to the grave, they can garnish your social security if you haven’t paid them by the time you retire. Plus interest and penalties of course.)

Walking home afterwards, the main asphalt arteries were scraped fairly clear with curved metal “plows” attached to massive diesel vehicles. Cheap wondered why. Was all this frenetic commerce so important that it couldn’t stop for a few days? What a scam! Why not just shut cities down when the snow flew, everybody stay home and drink and make love or just stay in bed with blankets pulled up tight. Perpetually trying to kick nature’s butt was going to kill us all.
  



%$#@!

When the Jesuit priests followed the fur trade into the Native lands of now Canada, they wintered with the locals in their lodges. Big fire in the middle and a smoke hole on top. Bet everyone smelled like smoke. In such close quarters, the Natives surely developed a deep and abiding love and respect for the White Devils.

In nice weather, when the tribes fought among themselves, the priests would stand on the sidelines, performing last rites on the dying. Making sure they would all get to the White Devils’ heaven. Rarely were the "Christians" attacked, for that always brought vicious and overwhelming payback, not forgiveness.

Within a generation the 20,000 strong Huron tribe was converted—into corpses. Smallpox, war, every last one. Nice work! God be praised! All worth it—they got a lake named after them. And the Europeans got the furs.

Nothing’s fair in love, war, hate or peace. Kill thy neighbor.


%$#@!

Next door to his sons’ beat-up trailer lived a single Native girl, in a more beat-up trailer (four broken windows versus one.) For a long time she had a Mexican boyfriend, but he disappeared with Depression II and the angry Whites’ insistence on correct paperwork.

Yesterday the rent-to-own, pay-triple-the-price store’s truck parked there. He heard voices and felt bad she had stupidly bought something that way. When the voices became louder he realized she was learning about the program, getting something repossessed. Damn them, preying on the desperately materialistic, and her for trying to buy into it.


%$#@!

Winter wind drove reality below Fahrenheit zero. The old gas furnace ran all night though set to 58. The inside of the windows still froze. Why did we humans ever leave the tropics?


Last winter the power went out for three days. The water pipes froze too, but the gas stayed on, so sons survived by wearing all their clothes, using the bathrooms on the nearby campus, and cooking pots of beans all day. Piled blankets at night.

“Natural” gas, and the coal burning in Joseph City, is all that keeps most of Flagstaff from freezing. What will they do to keep warm in 200 years? Some of the trailers in the “park” had woodstoves; they’d be warm, even if they had to burn trash, furniture, or the neighbor’s porch.


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