Didn’t see that one coming, did ya? Yeah, neither did we.
Holy shit Ziggy was a good one. The best of the best, in all the ways. And somehow I got to be blessed to know him on such an incredibly deep level, and I got to spend months with him during a year that no one got to see anybody, and I got to be there next to him next to the end. Say what you will about a lifestyle of riding the wind, but I wouldn’t trade away a minute of the miracles it’s blown into my life.
He didn’t dig any dirt but he’s been out here with us the whole time, I can feel him nearby and I am always talking to him, especially when he’s playing pranks to keep me up on my toes. Then we randomly show up in Colorado on the one year anniversary and get to share some Sun Dance stories with all of his besties, and then here we are broken down in need of a mechanic and rental, so one swift kick from Zig lines up a free ride all the way with the added bonus of knocking some sense into me, not a drop of whiplash though.
Helped my grieving process tremendously to have gotten to spend those few hours with him, how lucky am I to get to be there in that way, helped me to have the words to share as our water buddies go through their own struggle with losing him.
So many communities poured out love from decades of hearts he’d touched, long before he walked this road he was already walking in a good way. No matter how much time anyone got to spend with him it could never be enough, and even in the less than forty years he got to spend with us he impacted more people than anyone could hope for in a lifetime.
I got my drum that year too. Spiff is a little out there but connected enough to relay to me that Zig got it for me from the other side of the hide, such a good singer and it keeps me going to know that he’s backing me up as I muddle my way through the most sacred way to keep in touch. And that lodge down the
hill from Harvey’s, me and Zig built it that year, so every sweat in that one keeps us extra connected and reminds me to send my love and light to wherever he’s at on his spirit walk.
He’s not at the end of his journey, just finished a chapter quicker than expected and flipped out to another nested level of perception. From beyond the harsh confines of our current three dimensional reality there is a new veil pulled back from the cosmic lens of projection, only through this filter can we feel every up and down as we surf the wave that is the time of our life, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no fun to be had over there either.
Each story has a beauty all of its own, from here we get to know it from inside out, we experience every ring of the tree’s wisdom, we touch the unending grains of its depth and flavor, tasting every unique subtlety of difference that some may call defects but any artist knows as the true epitome of developed character.
To conceptualize a plane of perspective higher than our own we simply have to look back at a dimension with less, well, dimension. If your life right now is a three dimensional book, printed material bound by a single thread of spinal cord, then obviously the second dimension would be represented by an individual leaf of paper. It is easy to take in the entirety of a flat sheet from an angle outside of length and width, we can completely understand the scope of the canvas in an instant while an ant walking between the lines feels lost in eternity as they wander aimlessly to the edge of existence and back. We are up above their page of reality, we can conceive a seemingly infinite grasp on all of their everything, with easy access to the entire catalog of all the other pages stacked on top of that one.
So now we extrapolate that understanding in the opposite direction, caught up in a seemingly infinite universe of eternal lostness while we trickle through life one day at a time, but if time is simply our word for the next dimension of our mind’s expansion then we should assume that a fourth dimensional being could probably take in a life’s time with a single glimpse, a perspective giving context to all those ups and downs while
also suggesting an ability to thumb through the pages of their own collective narration.
Every narrator will have told many stories throughout the eons as they integrate the sparkly jewels of wisdom from each and evolve themselves into a more completed version of their fullest potential, eventually accumulating enough heightened perspective so as to find themselves roaming the halls of a vast library full of every other author’s complete bibliography, one day maybe even reading them all, now qualified for an entry level position as a local librarian. Custodian of the framework in which all individual stories filter through, a keeper of the conduit who more deeply than ever knows a good book when they see one, until they step outside to see the building itself a construct housing every dimension they have ever known in a neat little box, or a hexagon, or whatever depth of perspective we’ve made it out to by this point.
A legendary map revealed to delineate libraries of books of pages and points all across the globe, a cosmic cartographer capable of creating entire universes of experience, or maybe a universal network of interconnectedness composed of every bit of anything anyone ever wanted to know, and also a bunch of stuff they probably didn’t, but an infinite expanse of all that could ever be. And once an interdimensional being becomes so fully aware that they could soak in all of what YouTube has to offer there would be no alternative but to return to the solid state of the all seeing iTune.
A single speck of somethingness.
All that good stuff concentrated into one drop.
A dot on the I of I am.
But now I want to know what it means to be me, no one knows how it feels but I want to, it feels like nothing to feel it all at once, both ends of the wave collapsed without a breath in between, opposites attracted to their ultimate conclusion.
Welcome to the ballad of one direction.
Time for something different, but what could you get the cosmic entity who already has it all? A pair of brand new poles perhaps? A tiniest touch of duality to shed light on which way is up, with poles we can spin, spin rolls us from A to B, or not
to B, and the ballpoint pens that original word of the original page of the original book that eventually meanders a way back into being the all-inclusive author who set out to save a world, but this time with far more life experience than before.
One could assume a final read through will tie loose ends and reveal secrets obscured by the infallible author’s broken english, there must be a point perceptible to put us all through this madness, conclusions drawn into a knotted mandala able to urge even Escher to pause for reflection. A sigh of relief as the breath held life in limbo, a day of rest well deserved but a timeless nature so baron that it cannot even grow old, that last round nearly took forever to get through but now that it’s on the shelf it is easy to yearn for yet another, the next volume of what it all might mean to mean something, more questions to answers unasked and no idea how to tell what can’t be told.
But a creator can’t help but create, even if they’re also the only reader, which is totally fine by them considering that the process itself is where the true transformation exists, while all the rest of this space junk can float around in the empty heads of the great minds uncluttered enough to sign up for a sequel, which turns out to be a lot of them once they realize who has been writing their lines all along.”
*******
Holy geez Louise Catman, that monologue took so long that even the narrator packed his shit and hit the trail, cried around for a while about a sore ego but my hernia’s got more giddyup than that country-fried science boy. Then it took DJ
another half a day to figure out if he’d tell this one from inside or out of me, obviously inside would provide a warmer climax and we need all the body heat we can get once somebody had the bright idea of staying the winter in the earthhouse.
I only packed a week’s worth of myself for some reason, he and I both knew that I wouldn’t be able to leave, but fuck I wish I had all that chili. As with any of our great ideas we just started joking around about sticking it out to put this baby to the test, which in all seriousness needed to be done before we
start another one, these things are tried and true in the heat of the Southwest but a Dakota winter is a whole other beast that will take some tweaking to adapt to, the house I mean, but the crew might take some getting used to too.
There’s gonna be some changes around here, nothing bad but we gotta transition this place from a construction site into a home. Built a second loft halfway up on the left, opened a cot underneath it on the ground floor and sealed off a penthouse apartment below the steps, so that makes us four fairly private bedrooms, a kitchenette to the right and a genuine Standing Rock issued woodstove that Harvey had stashed under his porch. Still time to crunch our dwindling numbers as we race the calendar to throw up the last few clumps of cob and get the whole house plastered with lime by the time we get snowed in, should have this thing finished by week’s end.
With our sushi chef gone we’ll have to fend for ourselves, we have got a decent stack of commods and canned goods, no chili, but there is that donation spot that randomly spits out a past due jackpot. And then there’s the non-profit lady who has been trying to make our wonderboy accept a company check for rational improvisions, but you already know that’s turned into a whole thing. He’s got zero problem accepting free meals, they’re one of his staples as a matter of fact, and he’d certainly never scoff at an American pie walking through the front door, but the instant you put a Washington in his hand and he starts going a little crazy.
He lives in complete abundance wherever he goes, never once going hungry and treated to the most gratuitous gourmet cuisine he could never imagine, his life of giving everything away affords him an annual rainfall of way more manna than a career ever could. But if the energy of the gift is a catalyst of abundance, then money is the energetic conduit of scarcity.
Instantaneous limitations upon sustenance, essentials deemed unnecessary unless maybe they go on sale next week, to pick and choose an empty basketful only dries up the waterfall of Willy Wonka’s wonderland.
But DJ is the shepherd of this entire volunteer project, and generous supporters want to support the only way some of
them know how, he delegates the treasurer position when he can but somehow he’s the most stable member of the cast and never tempts a taste of his own supply. So he keeps it tucked away tight, wrapped up in some type of protective layer that way he doesn’t have to use soap after he’s finished, and in general just tries to get rid of it as fast as possible so that he can climb back up to his priceless perch on broke mountain.
And now here she’s trying to push his boundaries a touch further, he’s down with open borders and most comfortable in the gray area, and always willing to expand an understanding of his own philosophy, but she’s wanting him to fill out a W-9
tax form and I will tell you right now that ain’t never gonna happen.
Aw c’mon guy, do it for the people, except we’re with him on this one, it all sounds ridiculous and why not just give us a gift card like the last time? So eventually she does and Deeg blows the whole wad in one stop at the dollar shop while he’s in town scooping the new recruit.
*******
“You shoulda seen us Rocksy,” perks DJ as they pack in a C-note’s worth of junk food, “Just like kids in a coffee store.”
“You mean candy store?” his cohort coerces.
“Um, I don’t think so, pretty sure it’s coffee store. Oh yeah, hey Rocksy, this is Wolf, he’s a good kola and Sun Dance relative. Grab whatever bunk you want brother, except hers of course, she might bite but it doesn’t feel too bad actually.”
“This place is fucking awesome! Way different than last time I was here. It was them last three rows of bags up there we did in one day, what’n it?”
“Yep. And heaved up that heavy-ass skylight, bulletproof glass from a broken bank, finally something useful out of the institution to perfectly compliment our bomb-resistant wall.”
“Digging in for the nuclear winter, huh?”
“Looks like it’s shaping up that way, and you know how I love shapes. How long you thinking to stay?”
“Shaping up to be the winter, I reckon.”
“Right on,” I pipe into the rotation, “DJ’s already heard all of my stories and it’s about time we had some fresh meat around here.”
“Oh yeah,” DJ rings a bell, “Deer steaks are on the grill if you’re hungry, unless you’ve done gone soft on us.”
“He doesn’t look too soft to me boss, but I’ll give him a full inspection later if you like.”
“Simmer down now girl, at least let him get settled in for a bit first.”
“God I’ve missed the rez.”
“Always.” I have to agree, “Until it wears the hell out of me. It’s a tough life out here but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Makes you appreciate the little things, like a toilet, and puts life into perspective when you realize how rough people have to live out here in order for us to squander all the costs of convenience back in colonization.”
“The most stepped-on rung of the inequality ladder,” says DJ, “But so far removed from anything most are even capable of beginning to understand, lost in the cost of a gallon of gas when generations of the most oppressed are written-off and forced to pay the price of America’s freedom.”
“Alright you guys,” Wolf slows the pace of the runaway conversation, “You know I am with you on all that, but I just got here and I’m trying to chill for a bit before we have to start deconstructing the whole grid.”
“Heard. But there is no time to chill, we gotta finish this cob by the end of the week, you ready to get to it Rocksy?”
“Hang on now, he didn’t mean it, we can keep on with another page of witty repartee if you like. At least give me long enough for another cup and a chun, a meet and greet of the minds maybe, so Wolf, what’s your story?”
*******
Hope you enjoyed the light reading portion of today’s program, turns out Wolf didn’t grow up in a den of fun and games, he didn’t even know how to play Yahtzee until we got ahold of him. Lakota born but adopted out to one of the
whitest last names we had ever heard, adoption for profit preying on the vulnerable strands of tradition that somehow managed to survive every other onslaught of cultural genocide.
He grew up with no knowledge of his roots, except maybe to be ashamed of them, just a poor little Indian kid who better be grateful for every shred of decency they spare him, and every rod they beat him with, he was their property and they could do whatever they wanted, even had the receipt to prove it.
He ran away from home at fourteen, lived on the streets climbing into dumpsters and diving into a bottle, worked his way through institutions and addictions, prescribed extended stints in the system and sentenced to a pharmaceutic docility with a swift kickback to the streets. A vicious cycle swirled him around the drain into his twenties until a chance encounter circled him back home to the Sun Dance way of life. He found an ancestral connection to the drum somewhere deep in his blood, his bones made of the land that his feet finally stepped foot on, the fire burned away all that other stuff that somehow didn’t seem to matter anymore.
It’s easy to stay sober when every day is a walk in prayer, when there is important work to be done, work for the people, for Harvey, and with a whole support team of relatives who have been through it and come out alright on the other side.
He helped DJ keep the fire that year and hung around the cookshack deep into the fall, felt the best he ever had and well prepared to venture out to that other world...
Didn’t take but a week for the shadows to creep back in and persuade him that one little sip never hurt anybody, fell off hard but this time he felt the Earth when he landed, he knew exactly where he needed to be and as soon as he set that intention she picked him up and got him back here.
*******
“But enough about me,” Wolf segued as he handed off a top shelf bucket of mud, “I can’t help but notice a spare bunk and I know you all are way to efficient to leave empty space
lying around to clog up the works of another team building exercise.”
“And the montage continues,” confirmed DJ, his barefoot blender set to a relaxing pace, “There actually is something big I’ve been working on for a while and it’s about time to have a family meeting about it.”
“Dang it Wolf, I was just starting to like you and now you had to go and poke the bear, since when has a family meeting ever been about something good?”
“It’s about like opening with ‘ No offense, ’ I can guarantee you’re about to be offended with that one. But this ain’t even that bad, I think it’s gonna be pretty awesome really.”
“Let’s hear it then Squirrelly McGirlpants.”
“Well, long story still pretty long, I think I’m about to be taking legal guardianship of my teenage sister.”
“Holaaay whack-a-molaaay.” I belted out as I tightened up a notch on my parental guidelines, “Deeg has done gone full-blown adult on us.”
“Nearly,” he acquiesced, “I have been trying to make this happen since the spring, ever since I heard what she has been going through.”
“Must not be that good if a dirthouse in the middle of a hayfield, in the middle of the reservation, in the middle of the open plains, in the middle of winter, is a better option.”
“Well Middle Earth has been booked up for centuries,” he lightheartedly set the tone for a serious discussion. “But yeah, she’s had a rough go at it out in the colonized world and I am more than convinced that this is where she needs to be, for all the reasons.
She was born in Ethiopia and adopted by my dad when she was three, before that she went through some tough stuff over there, may have locked most of it away but that doesn’t mean that it is not in there somewhere trying to bubble out.
Then when she got here things weren’t as easy peasy as some fairytale ending in the land of war and bucks, my dad is an overbearing hardcore conservative who was out of touch with his own generation, let alone mine, and I can not imagine how clueless he is with a gen-z black teenage girl with PTSD and
vapes and a digital superstation in her pocket, but somehow he’s been the most compassionate adult she’s ever had to rely on.
She didn’t have my mom to balance him out, and then his second wife went batshit or something, dumping more abuse and abandonment onto my sister’s plate, alcohol, depression, self-harm, institutions, pharmaceutical zombification plus all the normalized addictives pushed through endless screentime of absentee ballots. He is lost on what to do next, but I’ve seen our way of life heal so many people that have been through those same kind of things.”
“It saved me,” said Wolf, “Sounds a lot like my story and sounds like this is probably the best place for her.”
“That’s what I think. I mean, that is kinda what this place is all about, the eventual community will be a place of healing and resource for families recovering from their children being torn out of a traditional connection with the land, but also the camp energy we have created for this phase has been just as transformational for everyone involved. Disconnecting from the world of concrete and computers, digging your toes and fingers into the Earth as her negative ions flow through you, grounding you to her calming energy in scientifically spiritual ways, plus the work itself creates space for working through a lot of the stuff that constantly weighs us down.”
“And it gives you a sense of purpose that has been lost for those lost in that made-up world of pretending to live,” I said as I reflected on seeing this same type of healing at Standing Rock. “An ability to take care of yourself while serving a whole community, a reclaiming of one’s own agency as they develop a toolbox of survival and learn to thrive in the face of adversity, and we are really gonna see what we’re made of once it starts getting cold.”
“Hope you’re ready again Rocks,” teased DJ as he knew full well that I only packed for a week of warm weather. “It’s definitely gonna get cold as hell, but that was one of the most empowering things about NoDAPL camp, learning what was really important in life and what you don’t actually need to survive, if it wasn’t in your pocket then you didn’t need it. Left
me free to give all of my stuff away when I got back and keep my heart open as I catch the abundance I’ve found in its place, still gotta give most of it away anyway though, you know these little pockets can’t hang on to hardly nothing at all.”
“Nope, yet they sure can run a threadbare joke three feet into the ground. But you can’t get much more grounded than out here, living in the Earth and huddled around the fire, and the calibre of conversations we have in genuine moments of humanity are unmatched by any therapist’s office. We break down walls and fences alike, we hold space for the toughest topics and we are right in the heart of the most traumatized people with the highest rates of teenage suicide, and teenage suicide survivors. Everybody’s got a story out here and they’ve all endured so much, and they are always down for sharing whichever piece of the puzzle they have figured out along the way.”
“True,” spouted Wolf, his own deeply rooted catchphrase.
“Plus I bet that drum’s gonna speak to her. If she was in Africa those first few years then I know she was connected through a drum early on, it may have been different, but our Lakota way of indigenous spirituality has got to be closer to her own than whatever white-washed script of recited submission your dad had her listening to, no offense.”
“Shit, DJ ain’t white,” I chuckled, “He’s more native than half the natives I know, and darker than most of them too, though I reckon that will fade now that it’s not gonna be so sunny out.”
“True. But for real though, the drum, the sweat lodge, the tree and prayer ties and the songs, and you know them all and we’re always singing them here, I will tell you that it’s been a lifesaver for me and keeps me tethered to an understanding of what’s really important.”
“And being there for her is important to me, it rang true in my heart the moment I realized that it was the right thing, and now I’ve got my dad convinced and it sounds like ya’ll are on board too. It’s not gonna be easy all the time, and I can’t do it without you guys, and I wouldn’t want to put it on you if it wasn’t something that spoke to your hearts as well, but I also
know that we’ve all been called here at this very moment for a reason and I couldn’t think of a crew more qualified to go on this crazy adventure with.”
“Well I’m in.”
“Yep, me too.”
“Good one. Meeting adjourned.”
“True.”
*******
And that was that. A whole new trajectory of staying put.
DJ’s dad drove her out a couple of days later and stayed all of two hours before abandoning the most sacred of his hair brained schemes, but truly he had no clue what to do for her and it must have taken quite a bit of his own humility to go ahead with the handoff, especially considering their opposing views of the world and the immediate decolonization process that comes with our sovereign territory. DJ and his dad might be polar opposites in many regards, but most things in life are a spectrum and often shaped like a horseshoe, so if you go far enough in either direction you’ll find yourself floating in the gray area for a parlay with the least expected of compadres.
He was a prepper, eagerly awaiting the collapse of critical infrastructure brought on by all of the bleeding heart liberals, stockpiles of guns, and ammo, and canned goods, and freeze dried everything, and more guns, and powdered water and the best chance of survival that money could buy, sure hope the zombies accept Visa. Vastly different approaches though both preparing for the quickly approaching whatever-it’s-gonna-be, probably civil war since all that climate stuff is a hoax and the lower class has really gotten out of hand lately, and as long as he can hold the fort of his suburban home then he should be able to reconstitute America into being great again.
Might not be his cup of coffee but he still sees the value in DJ’s method of madness too, freshly foraged salads and plant medicines, skillsets of hand-drawn menus, blueprints of big sandcastles and memorized maps of off-grid retreats across the country, but most importantly a solid network of the most
incredible relationships anyone can imagine and a continuous devotion to tightening the threads on the tapestry that is his journey through life. Plus there’s all that spiritual stuff too.
And amen for Dr Dry Ice, he bought along a truckload of supplies for us including three totes of freeze-dried delectables, he has his own machines and everything, so we are talking all kinds of off-the-menu experimentations, meats, fruits, veggies, pasta, leftover takeout, ice cream, calzones, chicken wings and moldy cheese and yet again DJ has manifested a completely ridiculous feast out of thin airtight packaging.
Genetically an engineer at heart, another hand-me-down for DJ to wear but pops popped up with a bunch of gear we’d never have crafted out of the dirt mine, even custom built me a press for making composite paper firelogs. I taught DJ about them last year, you just soak old newspaper in water until it turns into a mush, press it into a brick, dry it in the sun and you end up with a fuel that burns hotter and longer than wood, it’s a third the weight so elders have an easier time packing it inside, plus you’re recycling trash in the process, and not to mention we live in a hayfield with approximately zero trees.
One hell of a culture shock considering the small stature of the solar panel we trickle the shrinking days into, a world outside the margins of those fictional freedoms found in her approved reading list, adults insist on just how lucky she is for going on such a unique adventure but try convincing a teenage girl that she doesn’t need a cell phone.
It’s easy to see how she could get lost in her own extreme poles of duality, fully engulfed by middle-class white privilege, but none of that transfers once she’s outside the county line.
Taught to walk right up to the police squad and expect a fair handshake, while every black parent know there’s a different protocol required to survive a simple speeding ticket, a biased instillment of political values that only oppress people of color while propping up a narrative that anyone who works equally hard has an equal opportunity for success. A life sheltered from so many truths of the world and considerations for how the majority of the planet lives, a complete convincing that a
life of disposable convenience and financial security are a God given right, but at the same time a far deeper understanding of trauma and pain than most adults, especially those in her life that deny its impact as they have no clue what it’s like to walk in a pair of broken down shoes.
With sincere intentions they did the best they knew how, perhaps their biggest mistake was thinking they always knew best, but say whatever you will about a backwards blindness to reality as they did manage to open her eyes to the importance of survival. She loves to hunt and fish, and to split wood, and slowly but surely she’s opening up to a plethora of alternative living tactics as we prepare her for her introduction to the real world. Still don’t think she’s sold on the pee sock though.
*******
“Pee sock?!” exclaimed the four of us as we all sat up from slumber in equal parts intrigue and disgust.
“Sure,” insisted the only passing-through houseguest that may just have out-hippied the shaggy showman himself. “You know, for when you finish up and there’s that last little dribble left, beats letting it run down your leg and what else is there to do with all those unmatched socks.”
Yep, he may have met his match with this one, though he did seem further down the intrigue end of the spectrum than the rest of us, but what was she using the missing socks for?
“You guys are a fucking riot,” spewed Crayon. Oh yeah, Crayon showed up sometime after Sherry Lewis headed out, one of his intermittent wipes through the rez and a chance to drop another verse on our very own theme song. “EarthHouse 55, there is no significance to that number. EarthHouse 55...”
“There is no significance to that number.”
“Knobs to the cob and a cob of the glob, gobbing on the cob with the cob knob slobs, slob of a clob of a gob of a cob, cob to the nod of a cob knob bob.”
“Mix it, mash it, squish it, smash it, toss it up and keep right at it, stick your fingers in the mud, don’t stop til we see more blood.”
“And step on into my gnome dome home, built from the sweat of our flesh and bones, should keep us warm as we bitch and moan, would call home but ain’t got no phone.”
“Geez you guys,” DJ protested, “You make it sound like a torture camp or something, and here I was thinking we were having a pretty awesome time.”
“Oh you know we love it,” assured Crayon, “We just love giving you shit more.”
“Just wait til I write another book, then we’ll see who gets the last laugh.”
“Now that’s funny, like anyone’s ever laughed at one of those things.”
“True.”
*******
And we carried on like that until well into the early onset of our winter wonderland. Sister adapted quickly to our ever changing pace and really took to the sweat lodge and singing and shooting the shit with Harvey, and so many strong Lakota women took to her and shared their own stories of surviving a world designed to tear them apart.
It wasn’t all frybread and wojapi though, there were tense moments as DJ discovered what gray hairs were all about, for someone who loves erasing boundaries he sure doesn’t like his buttons being pushed. So plenty of prayers for patience and humility and understanding, and now throws in compassion and unconditional love too, and tries to remember that he’s in the same dilemma as his dad of not really knowing what she’s going through but he has the perspective to see that he cannot, and that maybe his heavy-handed-down style of stubbornness is not the best way to break though her defensive line.
We taught her about smudging with sage and a few other calming medicine plants, had her completely weaned off of a pharmacological cocktail before the first snowfall and almost forgetting to charge her phone by the time the blizzards shut down all communications. Earthwork was the best medicine though, it’s a real science thing with electrons and waves or
whatever, agates of course, but mainly just going to the clay pit and pouring your heart into a shovel, a serene scenery and monotonous meditation, or you can really tear into it with a steam-powered pickaxe if something’s eating your insides up.
And of course we ate good, though it took peeling a few layers off an onion before she developed a taste for our refined style of camp cuisine. She said before this she’d never eaten a generic food in her life, but you freeze your peas out here with us long enough and you’ll be more than happy to scavenge the pallets of day-old dairy, and eventually it will be your idea to check out the dumpster around back. Boy did we score big, all we could carry of eggnog and chocolate milk and frozen yogurt and non-milk milks, and once we had enough snow on the ground there was plenty of freezer space to keep us stopped up all season, it was just like back at camp, except this time the snow wasn’t poisoned.
It’s a good thing too, because we were totally out of water a few times and left melting and chipping out our first cup of coffee. No reason for panic or anything, me and Deeg knew what was what, but also knew the importance of the other two learning firsthand an awareness of resource conservation.
And remember we were still making mud through all this, mining frozen sand and clay and letting it acclimate to room temperature, which was always pretty toasty, then melt some snow or old dishwater or wring out our pee socks, just kidding.
We had a kiddie pool in the living room for Mixmaster Mike to spit out a hot batch of wax, and it was kinda like in those Lego movies, where whatever little problem we had there was a way to cob up a solution.
Our internal conflict resolution was a little trickier. Wolf and Sister were a lot alike, and had been through a lot of the same unfortunate series of events, which made them powerful allies, but also left little headspace to keep them from butting into one another. Both needed to have the last word and both knew where to dig it, either could have been the bigger man but only one of them was. They’ll figure it out, and we like to err on the side of leaving space for them to figure it out on their
own, but there’s only so much incessant back and forth I can stand if I’m ever gonna get a chance to talk.
So we taught them how to pass the feather and it changed the game. Talking circle with a totem to signify the recipient of everyone’s undivided attention, a skill accumulated over time when communing with native elders but using a feather makes it easier to keep track of whose line it is anyway. Eagle feather, super sacred, if you believe in these ways then you’ll not carry anger with the same hand as the wanbli wiyaka, no option of raising one’s voice, and no need to since you have the entire world as a stage. We calmly discussed some heavy issues that weighed us down, every time the tensions melted away, and then for at least a few days we were one gigglebox of a happy family. Deeg still about lost his shit over the peanut butter though.
*******
“What the fuuuuccck!” he vented through the portholes once he was back inside our one-walled echo chamber. “All I wanted was some peanut butter and saltines, and I didn’t even want them, they were for Rocksy anyway. She brings us a million pies, and always apple, we still have two sitting on the shelf that we haven’t touched and here’s more pies, and who’s ever complained about too much pie? I love pie, I mean it’s not my favorite, and I do always tell her that I prefer cookies which also keep way better, but of course I’m still gonna eat pie.
But then she wants to go through this whole thing about making me take money, then once we finally have it sorted out that she’ll just bring groceries instead she pins me down and makes me give her a list of what we want, but only fourteen dollars left, so I have to put on my consumer spending pants and how about just some peanut butter and saltines? Cheap, healthyish, sweet and savory, we all like it, and mainly it’s Rocksy’s favorite for when she can’t eat our spicy creations, and now she’s brought us this comically small dollar-store peanut butter that won’t even make a single sandwich and acting like she’s done me such a huge favor.
I live in complete abundance everywhere I go, no money or any thought of it, and I eat extravagantly, never missing a meal and never wanting for anything more, perfectly content with life and manifesting more than I could ever imagine. But then setting the smallest expectation of the meagerest meal owed to me builds this overwhelming feeling of not enough, of needing more, of scarcity. I am not used to feeling this way, I know this is how most people live everyday and no wonder they’re all going nuts out there.”
*******
It was all pretty funny. It really was the smallest peanut butter jar I’ve ever seen, and he sure was on one for that rant but he really does think the world of her, and it is a beautiful symbiosis they have developed as this project takes its baby steps. This is just the first test dome to refine our technique for this climate, he’s got a whole layout of where a bunch more houses could go, and a huge community garden in the middle, and walipini underground greenhouses to extend the growing season, and community kitchens and workshops and it really is an incredible vision they’re working towards, assuming we survive the winter.
It’s been a wonderful thing to watch come together out of nothing, but if it’s going to grow into more then it is gonna take a village, and he trusts that if he builds it they will come. It could only have worked just the way it has, a small rotating crew of the best at work and play, any bigger and there’d be all kinds of growing pains of camplife security and we’d hate for DJ to get evicted. But the non-profit is all elders with no social media clout, and DJ is just as lost on that front and far from the radio voice of the Lakota people. He thinks they need a younger community outreach liaison to do interviews and get the local college involved and share it to the next level, and probably a foreman in-training as he ain’t gonna be able to keep up this pace forever, maybe both from the nearby college as interns or something. Who knows how it all goes, all he can
do is keep with what feels right and maybe write his prayers into manifestation. And maybe a garden guru while we’re at it.
A root cellar of stock images would be nice about now. We did score a stack of carrots and sweet potatoes and if we can convince Wolf to stop wolfing down the dehydrated meat then we might be able to brave the impending blizzard of record portion sizes. But we’re not about to start advocating for food hoarding, eat ‘em if you got ‘em, there will be more tomorrow.
Even the goodest of good books would suggest not to consider tomorrow’s food or clothes, the birds don’t and they are ok, just live today and trust that the rest will work out, though I’m sure he’s gonna be wearing the same thing tomorrow anyway.
(Matt. 6:26)
But buckle up your snowpants boys, it is about to get insanely cold, and windy, like wind chills below negative fifty, and an outhouse that got insulated with old earthbags but the few unplugged gaps flood the captain’s seat with freezer burn.
You can do all you want to get ready, but nothing will really prepare you for this level of ridiculous, three feet of snow in a couple of days and hope you didn’t need any of the supplies under those tarps outside, like the firewood.
*******
“Eeeyah it’s cold out there.”
“True.”
“I found the woodpile though, dug out as much snow as I could until I came in to warm up earlier, then when I went back out it was all filled in like I’d never even touched it.”
“Geez.”
“So this time I just kept digging through the burn and finally got the edge of the tarp uncovered enough to stick my head under and recover, then it got all foggy and couldn’t see anything and realized that I’d better hurry or ya’ll were gonna have to come pull some Deegcicles out of the freezer.”
“Yum. You ready for Florida yet boss? There’s still plenty of hurricane work calling before the next wave of blizzard hits us.”
“You kidding? I’m just getting warmed up.”
“Figured as much, and it actually is pretty darn toasty in here anyway.”
“Yep, even when the stove burns out at night all of that thermal mass around it holds so much heat that we’re still barefoot and in shorts.”
“See, we’re already dressed for a beach and everything.”
“Yeah, so what more do you want? Although I did see that my buddy Cowboy is down there working already...”
“Dang it, I have to pee again. Why do ya’ll make me drink so much damn coffee?”
“What else is there to do?”
“Could try choking down a few more cigs instead.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been out of papers for days, it’s just like back at camp, scrounging through the dregs of whatever we can make work, but unrolling that sucker stick was a stroke of genius.”
“Shit, now I have to pee too, and last time I went it was blowing in two directions at the same time.”
“Hell, I got some in my eyebrow.”
“Holaaay. So we could always start using a bucket inside.”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Well then I think there’s only one other option.”
“I’ll try anything at this point.”
“Here, you can borrow my sock.”
*******
I told you we were on another level of ridiculous. We were a family bonded forever as we forged through the storm, petty personal issues between us melted away as survival instinct reminded us of what was really important in life. Those might have been fine days to die but at least one of us had to live to tell about it, though as far as you know it could have just been me, whichever me is writing this anyway.
And we didn’t just survive, we thrived, and probably in the warmest house on the rez, certainly the most equipped to endure a week long power outage with undrivable whiteout conditions. A lot of people died during that one, frozen in cars, and in houses, trapped down impassable roads without their insulin, and who even knows how the unsheltered weathered the storm.
Makes you feel real blessed for the basics, and blessed to be a small part of a movement working towards a way forward, these unpredictably extreme climate changes aren’t gonna be easing up anytime soon. Hot and cold and wet and dry and fire and ice and get ready for any and all of it, at the same time, we are well into this phase of ecological transition and there ain’t gonna be no holding back the rebirth of our Mama Earth.
There’s no sense clinging to a mindset of fighting the elements, that’s as dumb as an upstream battle with Niagara Falls, the only way to keep from capsizing is to follow her lead and go with the flow.
The four of us are a few notches further on our own paths of figuring it out, broken down to fundamentals of necessity, mainly coffee and chuns, also a much needed dose of humility to remind us that we are not the ones in charge of this thing.
Even our shepherd’s capable of getting lost sometimes.
He wanted a chance to test the limits of 55 and he sure got it, and all in all she passed with flying penguins though the next wings of construction could use some adjustment before takeoff. Our stove worked for us, but half of that was residual Standing Rock juju and the other half was straight up miracle, so moving forward will take a little tune-up. It was hot as hell by the burner but noticeably cooler in the opposite corner of the circle, we had some retired sweat rocks warmed up to distribute the comfort but the bigger houses will benefit from a radiant heating system that uses hot water and convection to circulate warmth through the floor and around the wall, but the biggest takeaway is the stove itself.
Our house is buried three feet deep in the ground, three incredibly airtight feet in the ground, it made for a more stable baseline of thermal equilibrium but it also meant there was a
nonexistent draft to keep the smoke inside limited to things we were smoking. We got good at building the fire just right and opening the encrypted combination of vents in the correct order, and once it was going it was good, but it was often a struggle that put our teamwork to the test and not a situation we’d expect a normal person to overcome with such panache.
But no biggie, we’re not the first idiots to think they know it all, it is good we learned our weaknesses and now we know that a stove with a dedicated air inlet will work better, and a reconfiguration of our exhausted systems, and for now we can walk to town and grab a draft-inducing stovepipe cap, better hurry because the second blizzard of the week is gonna be rolling in any minute.
*******
“I can’t see a fucking thing.”
Neither could DJ, at least that’s how the story was told once they flashed back to the present tension.
“Geez that was a close one, it wasn’t too bad on the way down there but as soon as we started back the wind was in our face and the sting of ice was relentless, his eyes were frozen open and my glasses needed a zamboni, but they’re already half blurry even on a good day. We could kinda tell where the road was plowed yesterday, two thin little tire tracks of packed down slippery ice but then you’d lose it and all of a sudden fall off the side into three feet of snow ditch, then we’d try to help get the other one unstuck without both of us sinking into the quicksand. I was already figuring out the best way to burrow in and cuddle through the night if we had to.”
“I bet you were.”
“Hey, I bet we’d have kept warm one way or another. And I had the box with the part in it, so I couldn’t use my little pockets, but I could use the box to block some of the ice from pelting my face and still catch glimpses of the road here and there, it kinda helped until my wrist got uncovered and started frosting over.”
“So then DJ said ‘Walk backwards,’ which really fucking worked, felt way better on my eyes plus I couldn’t see where I was going anyway, at least until I tripped over a snowdrift on the edge.”
“So I just start singing, as well as I could between frozen breaths anyway, and we took turns walking backwards so one of us could kinda see what was going on and could hear each other mumbling our way through the heys and hos, and you could almost see the tops of the fenceline on either side but there was only a few feet of visibility before it turned to white static.”
“A few times we thought we were at our turn-off but saw flashes of landmarks that set us straight, and then we made it, to the hard part. There was a snowbank there so we sat down and blocked each other’s wind while we caught our breath and worked up another cup of slushpuppy power, and all the while convincing ourselves that ya’ll had a big roaring fire and hot coffee waiting for us.”
“Always. We were starting to get worried though, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Well so then we took off through the field and holy shit it was sketchy, like just a blank white canvas in either direction, we were pretty sure we knew about which way to go, and the hill was starting to slope so we knew we had to be on the right half of the field, but there was a real chance that we’d freeze to death walking in circles around our own front yard.”
“And there was already a couple feet of fresh powder we were plowing through, on top of the three feet from last week, but then the old stuff had mostly hardened up except for all the knee-deep footprints from us walking in and out, so we’d be almost starting to get into a good rhythm and then a foot would slip through a sideways deathtrap and nearly rip your ankle in half.”
“It was fucking treacherous. Then we’d fall down and try everything we could do to land facing the right direction, or at least take turns falling while the other one kept track of our whereabouts, made it to the fencepost out in the middle of the
field and knew we might just be able to make it, and then the storm picked up even more.”
“And I didn’t wear near enough layers because I’m never cold with my thick Lakota blood, but I was cold and numb and worn out from struggling with heavy snow and on the verge of losing steam and letting Deeg cuddle puddle me or whatever, so then he starts singing that one song of Harvey’s and it picks me back up and just a few steps later we can see the silhouette of this glorious dome home.”
“That must have been about the same time I went outside with the drum, it was snowing like crazy from every direction and I couldn’t see two feet in front of me, and ya’ll had been gone forever, so I went outside and started hitting it as loud as I could, figured you might hear it if you were lost out in the field somewhere.”
“Good one. I didn’t hear it but some part of me must have, I bet we were somehow synced up with each other too.”
“Heartbeat of the Earth.”
“Somebody should probably write this shit down.”
“I would but my fingers are still numb, I’ll take that coffee and chun of your hands though.”
*******
And here I was thinking that this was gonna be a vacation, yeah right. Managed to get several holidays off, without pay of course, but at least we got to shatter a few hopes and dreams as we decolonized the reason for the season. Sister had arrived just in time for Halloween, we didn’t even notice it pass us by and PinkPants McGee already dresses like a cartoon character everyday, so no biggie.
Thanksgiving was one that got her a bit homesick though, as you could imagine we had some unsettled opinions to share on the topic, the only probable cause for the first celebration being the massacre of seven hundred Pequot natives. We see this as a day of mourning as indigenous people gather around the country to speak out against the mindless display of gross overconsumption, and DJ normally fasts through the feast in
his own personal protest, but somehow breaking bread with his family of natives in their homeland made it feel just fine to chow down.
Most will often argue that they don’t support the roots of Mashed Potato Day either, that it’s mainly just about reunion with family and a chance to share in gratitude for life’s grand abundance, which is what we did too. But we took and honest look at the prices paid for that very privilege of abundance, we acknowledged the original peoples of the land that our dinner table sat upon, we had a non-accusational conversation about the reality of that day and everyday since, we openly discussed with our youth the mistakes of the past and how we’re finding ways to walk forward from this point in a mindful manner, as opposed to just pretending to forget as we get lost in the chaos of black Friday sales.
No, it’s not an easy thing to talk about. Not a handprint turkey or a football game to help you misplace the woes of the world, it might turn a small portion of your decadence into a sad moment of reflection of what a settler-descended holiday really means to you, it might even spur a moment of mourning, which really seems like the least you could do in your pregame ritual considering the Chiefs will probably win the Super Bowl this year.
The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas though, in fact he even pulled a rabbit out of his ass and really did one up for the book.
I got a LifeStraw water purifier and a smoky quartz while Wolf opened a tiny belt pack loaded with blizzard survival gear and sinew in all four medicine colors. And Sister really racked up with a fishing rod and flies, plus tons of other good stuff, even a sacred Ethiopian prayer rattle that Santa somehow scored a year before this house even existed. All of it wrapped up in old sketches of circles and domes quite reminiscent of DJ’s busted notebook doodles, but he musta been a bad boy or something because he didn’t get a damn thing, though I think he already has a lot of this same stuff anyway.
Then we feasted on a stack of eggnog pancakes taller than the earthhouse, sweet enough for me while our stockings were notably short on chocolate, that is until Santa himself trudged
back through the snowblown hayfield with a sack full of Milk Duds and Marlboros. Funny thing is that Santa looks an awful lot like a certain character of colorful collusions.
*******
“And a happy new year!” cheers Crayon, yet another week into the present and traipsing through the tundra with only five minutes to spare.
“Aho relative,” greets DJ as he pulls the hot cast iron off the stove, a dutch oven broiler preheated with lava rocks and a promise of delicious concoction inside. "I told you guys, if we bake it they will come, it'll take a lot more than six feet of snow to slow the tasteballs of my best buds."
“Still don't know how you even made dessert, we’ve been out of sugar for days and you’re the only mudslinger rugged enough to choke down a cup of that french sludge without it.”
“Makes traveling light a lot easier if you tune your tongue to the dark side, but this cake thing I made is going to knock your socks off with diabetic coma.”
“Fooled you, I've been out of socks for weeks.”
“Gross.”
“I’m just kidding, and we all know I've been using Wolf’s extras this whole time.”
“True. Wait… What?”
“Anyhow, back to a recipe of deconstruction. Last week's care package was a box of our favorite cereal, so I crunched it up with some pancake mix and stir-fried it around a bit before topping it with a pen stroke of pure madness. We had all that heavy cream from donations and some leftover Milk Duds from Santa, melted it all into an ooey gooey glaze that seeped into every crack of cinnamon toasted tastiness, and what you have before you is the perfect slice of molten mayhem for our midnight viewing of snow-glistened fireworks over the town.”
“Epic Deeg. Your entire life is so epic,” scribbles Crayon.
“What a grandest finale of flavored explosions to wrap up your photo album of grateful hits. And this, ladies and gentlemen, drum roll please…Has been the rock opera of Earthhouse 55.”
*******
Woah Nessie, hold your seahorses there space cowboy, do you think the cosmic comic would give us the ability to birth a crossword as confounded as this and just let the ending sizzle out so dramatically mellow?
Better button your britches for another twisted turn of the page, not that writing out an endless stream of consciousness is ever going to capture the true essence of an endless stream of consciousness, entire water cycles of flowing consciousness, rivers and lakes and waterfalls to get used to before we dive in to underground movements and vast catalogs in the cloud and everybody in the world has their very own waterworks to work through and no amount of words is ever going to come close to saying anything at all.
Millennia of manuscripts and mystic texts can only hint at something beyond the page, allegory and symbolism allude to an image elusive to most who seek it, the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, our language at best can only ever be a pointer to deepest understandings of the Great Mystery. The only way to catch a glimpse of the garden is to live the life you want to be reading, the book itself only a clumsy placeholder meant to conjure a moment of magic that turns out to have been within you the whole time.
Words are worthless without experience to ground them in, especially a language derived of pure intellect as is English, not that this particular piece has been all that intellectual, or even proper English for that matter. Rooted dialects born of the Earth are grown to mean something more and vibrate in harmony with a natural world they live among, and we're not just talking Indian hippie hoodoo here, even the first Hebrew Bible left out the vowels as it allowed the reader's breath to fill in the blanks of their own enlightenment. YHWH of course the name of God, or Yahweh as she later became known as, an enunciation of the in and out of breath personified. Yah, Weh, Yah, Weh, in, out, Yah, Weh. Each breath a gift of life as spirit flows through this grand experience, every breath a prayer, all
the way up to the very last one, which it turns out might be a lot sooner than any of us had thought.
*******
“Do you smell that?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You're giving me a headache.”
“You too? Hmmm… Earthquake.”
“Who?”
“Ringing in your ears? Fuzzy brain?”
“Huh?”
“Good thing this shack is earthquake-proof.”
“Geez, good thing.”
“At least we are in the middle of a hayfield with nothing around us but society to collapse.”
“Oh shit! We got all them heavy tools and nails up top in the loft.”
*******
We were just starting to feel prepared to tackle anything, back-to-back blizzards for breakfast and freeze-dried stew for brunch, topping it all off with a tremor-filled Tuesday was the only logical conclusion to ice the cake and leave him satisfied that he'd lived a life worth writing a bunch of nonsense. He'd even cracked his notebook over the winter vacation, picked up the page and reread that first one he'd written two years ago.
Could it have been he himself mistaken for human penned to the margin of something larger than life? Never know, and he probably never will, either way it seemed a peculiar timing to choose this moment to psychoanalyze his favorite protagonist.
*******
“Fuck. It's not. It's the stove. Carbon monoxide.”
“Oh geez, you're right.”
“Everybody get dressed. As many layers as you can.”
“The warm stuff. No time to be fashionably late.”
“But if we're going to die then I'd rather do it in style.”
“Nobody's dying today.”
“Well, at least one of us has to live long enough to write home about it.”
*******
The stove was tricky, but we had figured out most of the tricks. Plus all of the bags that built-it-in would charge up and release their sweet heat all night long, so if nobody was up to tend the fire then we just let it burn out and tomorrow's fuel would finish drying just in time for morning coffee. But not every houseguest catches the drift of the draft and a wet hot log smolders unbeknownst to the knowers of stuff, the caravan dodged the excitement and took Wolf along for a ride, just the three of us left to draw straws on who gets to be me.
*******
“I think I'm going to pass out,” I say.
“I'm kinda light-headed myself,” I say.
“No, I said that,” I say.
*******
No you didn't, I said that. The I that is I. The I right here inside of me. Wait, where am I? Wasn't I in there a minute ago? Has this place been out here the whole time? Is this what you idiots have been going on and on about?
*******
“Wake the fuck up Sister!” they shout and yank my purple coat up the steps and out the front door, “Quick, throw me her boots.”
*******
Holy shit, they are fucking freaking out down there. This is hilarious. It's only a little carbon monoxide poisoning under a seven foot snowstorm. And it's not even storming right now, nice and warm at just two below and a gentle fluff falling for another few inches, really is the nicest day imaginable for this.
*******
“Let's hike to the neighbor, you take her other arm and I'll grab the sled just in case.”
*******
Man alive are they pouring their hearts out trying to keep that poor girl from dying. Singing and praying and crying and wheezing and keeping her feet moving to the heartbeat of the Earth. And boy does it look cold down there.
*******
“Hell yeah it's cold, and I didn't even grab my gloves.”
“It's fine guys, just leave me, I'll be fine out here, I'm nice and warm you guys, promise…”
“Nope. Keep moving. We didn't wade this deep through the nonsense to lose track of the plot now.”
“Yeah right, wait, do you mean there was actually a plot to this thing?”
“You know what, maybe I will leave you. Rocksy, are you okay?”
“I'm stuck, just go on with her and I'll catch up, we're almost there.”
*******
We weren't almost there, but we were past the point of turning back. My left foot was stuck in one of those prehistoric footprints from two blizzards ago, this wasn't my first rodeo though, or ice age, it was gonna take a lot more than this to get me in a tizzy, but Squirrel Master Splinter up there was about to lose his shit. Not that it wasn't for no good reason, he seems perfectly fine with his own foray into whatever happens next, but now he had his sister to keep alive at all costs, and you know he don't have no money so no wonder he was out there negotiating with every song he could think of. They scooted on along until she hit a soft spot and sunk in, he couldn't pull her out as he fell to his knees and pulled over the wheelbarrow sled he'd been dragging and with all his dwindling might he managed to roll her in just as I caught up.
*******
“I can't pull it, the snow's too sticky.”
“Try again, I can push.”
“Still nothing.”
“You run ahead and get help, I will stay here and keep her warm.”
“Okay, but I think we should go to Florida after this.”
*******
It really wasn't that much farther this time, but who knew if anyone was even home or what they could do as the flurries started coming down thicker and colder. I had wanted to stick around long enough to put our masterpiece to the test and this sure as shit felt like some kind of final boss level extravaganza.
I pushed through the snow with my last ounce of life and as I collapsed on their doorstep I remember thinking this moment right here would make a pretty epic ending for the book…..
A stranger mistook me for human,
nearly convinced me I was.
Crawling from the underneath of a world they’ve forgotten to know.
Grime of a time lost in tomorrow’s memory.
At home inside an echo of the hidden.
Freedom rings the shadows.
Faint comfort beyond the outcast of light.
A life obscured by the margins of some other person’s story.
He finds these footnotes scribbled into the border of his latest hand-me-down. He finds them with a depth below the words deemed fit for consumer appreciation. He finds them eerily poignant considering their captive audience.
Three days ago they found him between the entrance of East and West. A cardboard plea held him above the median.
Caught a ride within the hour. Downtown. Uber-friendly and suggested he stay the week. Two colds, a hot and a cot, but not without a thirty-six hour dip in the tank. Concrete bed, toilet paper pillow, wall to wall with detox and broken wills, though somehow a liberty ungoverned by the loom of authoritarian’s wool.
Seems that he’s the only new client. Business model built for frequent flyers. Factory farm including an airtight contract that is tougher to get out of than a McDonald’s drive thru line.
The lone escape thus far has been a few tattered pages of utter nonsense, loosest binding in the house. Found and lost again amid a has-been bin of religious propaganda and fluff pieces preaching the almighty glory of law. Decent work of literature seems to be the only substance he can’t get in this place...