THE HARD WORLD: BALCH CAMP REVISITED PART TWO
It was Thursday evening. Four kids sat on a temporary bench built from two cinderblocks and a eat. One played electric guitar from an amplifier, an extension string snaking down the street and through the front door of one of the dozen or so doublewides crowded on a surround.
“Watch for Pepper, he’ll nip ya’,” L said as he led me into his shelter.
The stout speckled black and creamy dog eyed me suspiciously.
I put down my bags beside the loveseat. The cushions smelled of brute, no particular animal, and not urine, but of an anonymous musk. I was sleeping here tonight. We were leaving anciently the following morning for Balch Camp.
L, his dad, and I watched a movie. I was distracted by a jointly-woven basket the size of a tractor debilitate on the coffee table (inset with anthropomorphic designs), the many obsidian clubs hanging from the walls, and the eagle rump feathers hanged from the edges of pictures frames, to be exhausted on one’s back during traditional dances at pow wows.
Division photographs too, like those on the walls in the firm I grew up in, but bookended by these artifacts, both decorative and utilitarian. L slapped a stout piece of wood with a railroad pin driven through its head on his hand.
“These are the clubs we use. That’s an old railroad block. Use this when I’m huntin’, save the bullet,” L said, miming the crack-up of club to the head of a downed deer.
Looking again at the descent photographs, what I saw initially as normalcy was re-contextualized. This was something very unconnected to me and the model of an American family couldn’t be wonderful-imposed over this one.
I asked L about the regalia he would be wearing at the pow wow that weekend and he excitedly rushed to his office. He returned promptly with a great company ringed with bald eagle posteriors feathers, all rising at a perfect thirty position angle. He showed me his hand-beaded headband and mocassins; both...