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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