Our family is making plans for the holiday. This will be my first Thanksgiving with Neewa.
Dad wants us to visit our friends Manny and Margaret for the weekend. They live about four hours from here. I like the idea of going there for the holiday because Manny and Margaret are so much fun.
Manny is a member of the Gosh Ute Nation and he works for the government with my Dad. He and Margaret visited us a few times and stayed overnight at our house.
Manny, Margaret, Dad, Jackie and I have done all kinds of neat stuff together. We went on a roller coaster called Speed The Ride, which goes seventy miles per hour. It’s at the Nascar Café and is one of the fastest and highest roller coasters in the world.
Another time Manny took us to a water park called the Wild Island Adventure. It has water slides, wave pools, and all kinds of fun rides.
Manny likes to have fun and that’s why I like him. One time we went to this swimming club in town. Even though you had to be a member to get in, Manny got us in. We had a blast in the pools, water slides, and sprinklers.
Another time we went to a big barbeque with Manny. We played softball and met lots of people from where Dad works. He laughs all the time.
Grandma and Grandpa want us to come home to New Jersey for the holiday. But it is too far and costs too much money to go back East.
This year we will go home around New Years to see everyone, maybe. I want to go home for good. I miss everyone so much, especially my friends.
Tomorrow we will be leaving for Manny’s Thanksgiving dinner. His home is about two hundred miles from here.
Dad and I are sitting at the kitchen table. “Can you and Jackie make pumpkin pies to bring to the holiday dinner?”
“Yeah Dad, I’ll make them,” Jackie yells from the other room.
I answer, “I’ll help Jackie.”
Actually, I want to trick Jackie into making the pies, while I just hang out and watch movies on my laptop.
We all decide that making three pumpkin pies will be enough. As soon as Jackie gets started, I will slip away without anyone noticing. They will no even have a clue that I am gone.
Dad is preparing dinner.
Neewa is staying under the kitchen table watching, observing everything that is happening. Neewa likes to smell all the foods being prepared and cooked. She licks her lips and stares at us cooking as we move the stuff from the frig to stove to table. If anything drops on the floor? She is there to clean up.
I help Jackie measure out the ingredients for the pies. The pies we are bringing are made from real fresh pumpkin. Dad saves the Halloween pumpkin, doesn’t even make a Jack-o-lantern anymore, so he can use the pumpkin to make soup, bread, and especially pumpkin pie.
Each pie is made with three-quarters cup sugar, one teaspoon cinnamon, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon ginger, quarter teaspoon cloves, two eggs, two cups mashed pumpkin and one and a half cups of milk.
The first step in the process is to cook the Halloween pumpkin that we saved since October. I begin by boiling two quarts of water on the stove. After cleaning out the pumpkin seeds and innards I cut the round orangey squash into cubes. Then I boil it for thirty minutes or until it is soft. Next I let the pumpkin cool, so I can peel and mash it.
I add the other ingredients to the mashed pumpkin and put everything into a big bowl for later.
After that I begin to make the pie crust dough. The dough is easy, just three-quarters cup of shortening, half teaspoon salt, one teaspoon milk, quarter cup hot water and two cups of flour for each crust.
Mix it all together and knead the dough for five minutes. I let the dough sit in the bowl for a little while, as I get out the wax paper and prepare the surface of the counter.
Now I roll the dough out into three big flat pieces for the pie crusts.
Jackie puts each piece of dough in a nine-inch round pie plate and cuts away the excess dough at the edges.
We are almost done as I pour the filling with the mashed pumpkin and ingredients into the dough-lined pie plates.
Pinch the dough around the edges, and put the pies into the oven to bake at three hundred fifty degrees for twenty-five minutes.
It doesn’t take long for the pies to smell up the entire house. Pumpkin pie smells are everywhere. Yummy. Finally we are done.
“Whew, I’m tired, I’m going to lay down,” At last I can disappear into my room.
Those are the best smelling pumpkin pies I’ve ever made. They are made the old-fashioned way from fresh pumpkin cooked in a big pot and mashed by hand. Even the dough for the crust is homemade.
The pies look and smell so good, way better than the frozen pumpkin pies from the freezer section of the grocery store.
It sure would have been a lot easier to get the frozen ones.
Dad takes the fresh pies from the oven and places them on the counter to cool.
After dinner we all want to go shopping for additional supplies for tomorrow’s trip. Jackie and I are going to a couple of stores to pick up some things. We drive along the side streets avoiding the main highway as Dad talks about the trip.
Dad remarks, “We’re going to Manny’s house on his reserve. There are only about ninety people living on this one.”
“Christina, read me the directions.” He hands me a paper with scribbling on it.
As I’m about to read the directions he got from Manny … Dad interrupts.
“The trip is going to take all day. Manny wasn’t sure of the name of one of the roads. He said there would be a sign,” Dad recalls.
We have never made this trip before. I’m looking forward to going on a new adventure.
I also want to see my friends Manny and Margaret because I have lots of fun with them.
Dad tells me that their Indian reserve is different from the one near our home. For one thing, it’s in the middle of nowhere and far from any town. All of the land around it is government-owned, cattle ranches, or desert. The land doesn’t grow anything but sagebrush, cactus, and some desert grasses because it hardly ever rains. It’s so dry you can’t grow corn or hay or anything.
He says the land is so barren, it barely supports the cattle they raise on it. Once or twice a week the ranchers have to bring hay to the cattle so they don’t starve. Dad says one head of cattle needs five acres of desert to survive for just one year.
There are no businesses near the reserve where we are going. A combination general store and gas station is about three miles away. And there aren’t any doctors or hospitals for over a hundred miles.
The people out there have very little income. What they do make comes from ranching and government subsidies. Young families and older people are the only ones that live there anymore because most of the middle-aged people have left for better jobs in the cities.
They have a one-room schoolhouse for kindergarten to eighth grade. After that the kids go far away to high schools where you sleep there for months. I don’t ever want to do that. It's bad enough I am away from everyone back home and Mom too. At least I have Dad and Jackie.
Dad says some of the houses on the reserve are made of railroad ties and some have no electricity or even bathrooms. Those people prefer to live without that stuff cause that's the way it was when they grew up. Usually the outhouses are located about twenty feet from the homes. The Indian word for outhouse is “gwida-gahni”.
From what Dad has heard it has been a difficult year for this reserve. There were three bad accidents this past year. Two were car accidents, rollovers someone said. And the other one was a young girl drowned at the swimming hole. Dad was told that a total of three people died. Some say it was bad spirits that killed them.
My Dad shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head. “It's tragic. Something needs to be done. That’s more than three percent of the population in one year. If that continues, this reserve will be a ghost town in a few decades.”
Our town is very different from where Manny lives. We have an interstate highway and a railroad going right through the middle of our town. There are lots of stores, gas stations, and businesses.
There is an ambulance squad, hospital, lots of doctors, and even a newspaper.
Income around here is mostly from tourism, fishing, hunting, and lots of people just passing through on their way to California or East. Dad says our town makes money from hotels, casinos, and special bars like Rosie’s, Toni’s, and Sue’s.
We also have the county seat and that means lots of government offices and schools. It has the county fairgrounds, an airport, and a community college too.
On the outskirts of town there is cattle and sheep ranching, even mining.
The reserve we live near has just one home made of railroad ties. Most of the homes are newer conventional homes with three bedrooms and two baths and electricity.
Yet tragedy still strikes our reserve, too. I remember one day not too long ago a Tribal Councilman’s wife went off the road, rolled her truck, and died. Some of Dad’s friends at work whispered stories about what cause of the accident.
I remember when Dad heard about it he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Some say it is the evil spirits around here.”