10
Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.
They were getting pretty good at all of it, just twenty rows to go, the end was in sight. Of course, so were the mountains they’d yet to move.
They didn’t eat that much throughout the day, maybe some of Cap’s coffee trail mix oatmeal, it got you an extra cup without all the hassle of having to drink it. Other than that, it was just bananas, or peanut butter, or peanut butter banana sandwiches, with honey. And then dinner would be exquisitely campstyle.
Piñon pesto pizza, with chanterelles and ramps that Annie harvested at her last unknown whereabouts. She used Cap’s solar powered Vitamix to whip up some cashew-carrot cheese substitute that was actually really good. But the best bit, was that she did it on an open fire, with just a single cast iron, just the pan, no lid, it was quite mesmerizing to watch her flow through the whole technique.
“A water protecting buddy of mine showed me this, haven’t actually tried it myself before, bet it’ll work though.”
She cleared the ashes back from a flat spot on the rock while the dough was getting crispy in the cast iron. Once it was sufficiently crusty, she grabbed it out by hand and threw it onto the clearing to sprinkle toppings like pixie dust across the surface of the moon. Then she just flipped the skillet over the creation, scooped some hot coals on top of the one dish meal and said, “Now, we wait.”
Miles couldn’t wait.
“It’s gonna be at least a two cigarette timer on this one, you smoke one first and I’ll take the second shift, then it should be about time for a checkup.”
He liked her math. Her entire approach to the open kitchen was was full of improvisation and experimental culinary innovations. And a lot of piñons.
“I’d never heard of these things before camp, piñons I mean,” in case Miles wasn’t keeping up. “And only had a couple back then. Some Diné folks brought them I think, they’re so good, even if they are a pain in the butt to crack open.”
“What camp was this?” Miles asked.
“Oh, sorry bud, I mean Standing Rock. If a Water Protector refers to back at camp, they mean that one. It forever changed anyone who was there, at a fundamental level, complete life transformations were forged as we experienced the best and the worst of it all. I mean, we got to be a part of a magical utopian vision for the future, and tasked with sharing a good way of life with the rest of the world, and all at gunpoint, how cool is that?”
“Ice cold?”
“You betcha, but we had tons of gear out there, lots and lots of donations from folks that are ready to rise up, and an ice chest full of every kind of food you can imagine.”
“Plus we had a pretty bangin’ chef,” Spaz interjected, as he walked up to the fire. “He would make up all sorts of gourmet shit.”
“Oh man, my favorite was this butternut coconut curry soup he made, or the ginger honey butter drizzled over wild salmon patties and biscuits, without an oven.”
“I saw him on Christmas night, grilling filet mignon in a sideways snow lightening blizzard, four foot flames, crucial.”
“And he always kept such a good vibe in the kitchen, cooking with love and intent, in a tent, it was intense. He showed me this thing he does, where with each clove of garlic you peel, you think about a different person in your life, it puts you in a good way and people can taste something magic among the flavors, especially if it was them you were praying for, all eight heads worth. And he was always so humble about going all out to provide us the motivation of epic mealtime, so very humble, hashtag most humble.
Oh man, my smoke went out and I lost track of time, hope we didn’t burn it. Oh well, if we did, we’ll just blame it on Chef, it’s his recipe.”
She knocked away the embers with her hand and opened the makeshift oven to reveal a most appetizing stone fired treat, eight unburned slices of molten moonlight, it was full tonight, a far cry from the rice and beans expected by a transient fireside.
“Not bad, huh,” she approved. “But hold your horses boys,” she could sense her drooling entourage. “The steam gets locked in there and makes the bottom a little soggy, so I just gotta throw it from the fire to the frying pan and crisp it back up. It’ll only take a minute.”
She did, and it did, and once the spirits were fed, the mountainside went quiet with unanimous approval.
Cap was the first taste tester to break the silence, “Well done girlie, it was an impressive show indeed. You’re something else, you know that?”
She smiled that she did.
“But...” always a critic. “But, still needs a little more raccoon for my taste.”
“Timps, you’re hired.”
They joked and cut up and carried on all night under their first full moon together, a severely overloaded pot of popcorn erupted with laughter, there was no denying that this was the life.
Miles requested more tales of valor from back at camp, he was intrigued by the endless barrage of good times at what he had envisioned to be a pretty hostile work environment, but it wasn’t all kool-aid and candy bars.
“Shit got real out there man,” offered Spaz. “Surviving the cold was tough enough, but there were some pretty hairy situations out at the frontline.”
“The bridge,” she added. “That’s where all the action was, at least by the time I got there in the winter. Tell ‘em about the night Pete got arrested.”
“Alright. So it was a dark and stormy night, except that these huge spotlight things were always on, they lit up all of camp and melted away any shadows we could hide in.”
“We called them the DAPL lights. It was psychological warfare man, tried to screw with our sleep schedule, and then that helicopter was always flying so low over camp, it was so loud.”
He continued, ”So we get word that something’s going down at the bridge and we all pile into our buddy’s pickup. We make it up there just in time for all hell to break loose. There’s a couple hundred Water Protectors packed into the front row, a big concrete barricade separated us from the arsenal of humvees and turrets and full-on domestic warfare, but that didn’t stop our folks from climbing up it and trying to reach the hearts of the human beings just doing their jobs.
They’re just people, you know? Just trying to feed their families by doing what is supposed to be an honorable career, putting their life on the line to protect people, just sucks that they got pulled into hurting people in the process.”
“They got bought by a fucking corporation is what they did,” she was getting riled up. “All of ‘em, the Morton County cops, the National Guard, the governor, and most definitely the TigerSwans.”
“TigerSwans?” Miles asked for more.
“Yeah, TigerSwan, private security contractors, but more like mercenaries. They’re a spin-off of BlackWater if that gives you an idea. They hacked our phones, sent infiltrators into camp, ran surveillance from the helicopter and had intel on all of us. It’s all been leaked, I’ve seen it, and they’re still keeping tabs on a lot of us.” She turned to look down the moonlit hill and shouted, “Good luck finding us way out here, assholes.”
Spaz went on, “So anyway, tensions are getting heated out in the blizzard, the cops are getting into formation like it’s about to go down. They’ve all got gasmasks and guns, some had huge tanks of pepper spray, and there was this big ass orange shotgun that fired so-called rubber bullets, but there was nothing playful about them, some people got pretty fucked up out there.
Then the roman legion marches one step forward, then another, then nobody could breathe. I looked off to the left and there was a twenty foot stream of chemical condiments blasting into a crowd of unarmed protectors, from behind a wall of razor wire, now how is that justified force?
And by now we could see what had us all choked up, a huge cloud of teargas had completely surrounded us. There was nothing you could do, it made your entire inside burn as it shut down your respiratory system. Nothing like I had imagined it to be. I was a tough guy who didn’t cry, couldn’t phase me, but I got humbled real quick when I realized that you cried because you felt like you were dying, and probably could have, if you didn’t escape in time.”
Annie was starting to tear up herself, Spaz had hit upon a tender subject as she relived the traumatic experience, it was about to get worse though.
“So then I look back in front of me and here they come over the wall, a barrier that they built, a line in the sand that was broken just like every other border treaty. And of course we had to retreat, we couldn’t breathe, everyone except our close brother Pete.”
Annie took a subtle step to the fire and tossed in some tobacco.
“He’s still in front of the barricade, knelt down with his dread covered face in the snow. Praying. Singing really. He was such a passionate brother. And this first wave of like eight guys head right for him.”
“He was just praying, man,” Annie spoke up. “Peacefully praying. We all were, but him especially, and then these RoboCop looking mafia soldiers totally surround him, packed in tight so it was hard to see what was happening, plus the teargas fog.
Then I saw that another one of our campmates hadn’t retreated and was filming another wave of battle armor coming over the wall, a bigger one this time, level two I guess. So I shout, ‘Don’t stop filming, they’re arresting Pete over there.’ Our buddy gets him in the frozen viewfinder, it was like a legit camera, professional grade kinda thing, he was helping with camp media or something, and it had a really good zoom.”
“So I hear all this going on,” Spaz took over. “And I see our camera guy, but his pants are caught up in a piece of razor wire and there’s a thick cloud rolling over him. I take off towards him and throw off my gloves to try and unscramble the snare, I check in on Pete and they’re spraying him in the face with all sorts of shit, point blank, and yelling for him to stop resisting. He was knelt down praying, not exactly the most aggravated of assaults.
By this time, the enforcements had reassembled their own frontline between us and Pete, but you could still see them throwing him around like a rag doll and dragging him back to their side for a trespassing charge.”
“Fucking dicks,” she looked up. “Sorry, not sorry.”
“Meanwhile, I’ve got one razor blade free, but struggling with the other, and here come the troops, and the gunshots. They were advancing in formation and people were panicking to catch a breath, myself included, so I grab his pant leg with both frostbitten hands and yank it free of Occam’s razor, just in time to escape to our new frontline of plywood shields, not that a plastic coated bullet wouldn’t blow right through one of those things.”
The play by play gave pause for reflection.
Cap eventually came up with, “You kids were right there in the thick of it, weren’t ya? Didn’t see much about all that back home.”
“Nope,” agreed Spaz. “You only see what they want you to see. I learned that big time out there, just how in bed the media is with the rest of the criminal empire.”
“There’s a couple of alright documentaries out there, but none that really focus on the prayer, or the community, that’s where the real story was. The real magic. Even on that night Pete got arrested, there was magic in the air then too. They’d throw a few teargas canisters and the wind would change direction, several times that happened, and we even got a couple of the officers to pray with us before we agreed to call it a night, at a tepid two a.m.
I’m telling you, there was some real deal spiritual stuff out there keeping us alive. Alive and thriving.”
“We could all feel it, whatever it was, and it changed us, me anyway. Showed me another way to live, to actually live, and sparked a belief in the good of the Earth and the plan of the cosmos that has guided me through each step ever since. Just gotta walk in prayer.”
“Aho, wopila tanka, mni wiconi,” she seconded. “Water is life.”
Miles didn’t know what he’d expected to hear. He’d seen videos of the unlicensed attack dogs and subfreezing water cannons, the girl who got her arm blown apart, but to hear it all firsthand from people he’d grown to love and admire, good people with good hearts, and with no paycheck to spin propaganda for, well, it made all of it feel a lot more real.
“How cold did it get out there?” he shifted the debriefing to a warmer subject.
“Oh man, it got so cold...” answered Spaz.
“It got so cold that cardboard wouldn’t burn. It got so cold that you had to eat ice cream to warm up. It got so cold that we measured the temperature by the number of seconds an ungloved hand could still function.”
“In that case,” Spaz calculated. “It got down to about fourteen seconds. Negative forty. Cold.”
“Water is ice,” she concluded.