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There's absolutely no evidence that T.S. Eliot ever
lived in, or even visited, the Rocky Mountains, so his line
that April is the cruelest month
must have resulted
from poetic empathy, rather than personal experience.
One day we'll enjoy T-shirt and cut-off weather, with certain of my politically incorrect non-smoke-free red-meat-eating insensitive acquaintances staring out the north windows of the Victoria Tavern, hoping to spot the first halter-top of spring in Riverside Park.
Next day it's a South Park white-out blizzard; all travel, even down wide streets in town, is a matter of white-knuckle 20-mph prayer:
Dear God, please let me be on the road, though I
can't tell at the moment, and if I am on the road, let me
be the only one so I don't run into anybody and nobody runs
into me, except that if I do slide off the road, please let
there one other person be on the road -- a friendly rancher
with a big 4x4 pickup and a long tow chain. And I promise,
if I can just get home tonight, never again to commit the
mortal sin of trying to travel in April.
Naturally, within a week of that supplication, I was somewhere between Gardner and Westcliffe, squinting through quarter-sized snowflakes at a part of the world which makes the San Luis Valley appear rather populated, wondering whether the car and my body would be found in July of '94 or of '95.
Day after that, the sun is out to create world-class mud that extends half way to China, goo so cold that it shouldn't be viscuous, but it's as slimy as 30-weight, and it swallows boots and axles while bringing up everything your dog deposited in the yard through the winter. Throw in the horrors of Tax Season, and it's little wonder that we desperately crave some local excitement.
Our first hope was that the Benson campaign would come
through town. Really. We hardly ever get to see a stretch
limo, Lear jet or private railroad car (his advance people
haven't announced which means he will employ when he
descends to bless the proletarian rabble in this part of
the world), and so his arrival would create quite a stir as
we turned out to show our children the wonderful things
that they otherwise see only in Dallas
reruns.
Some available women were hoping to catch his eye with idea of being the next lucky winner of a $110,000 Mercedes convertible.
And the economically challenged among us were hoping
that Ed Rollins, Benson's campaign consultant, would come
with him. For some reason, they believed that Rollins would
be handing out walking around money
that would
persuade poor people to stay home on election day. If
nothing else, paying people not to vote is as good as any
rural economic improvement plan that Roy Romer has devised
since taking office.
Then there was hope that Harry and Louise might visit to convene a town meeting where they would explain how national health insurance is so much worse than no health insurance.
But instead, all we got last week was the Walk for
Justice,
several dozen Indians more or less led by
Dennis Banks.
Given the ordeal of April in the mountains, many of us hoped that the Indians had discovered a big flaw in the Brunot Treaty, and that they were coming in to take their land back and send us to our ancestral homelands; I was ready to swear that the Quillens came, not from bleak Scotland, but from Barcelona, Barbados or the French Riviera.
But no, they weren't preaching about rectifying historic injustices. As far as they were concerned, we could stay. The walking Indians were more concerned with present problems.
Joe Ragudo of Sacramento explained that their walk began Feb. 11 in San Francisco, and they hope to walk into Washington on July 15.
Along the way, they're collecting signatures on a petition that seeks executive clemency for Leonard Peltier, who's serving two life terms in Leavenworth after two FBI agents died in 1975. The details of the Peltier case would fill a couple of books, but Waco makes it clear how federal agents work -- if they can't kill you at the scene, they will try you for murder later, even if they don't know who did the shooting.
That's only part of it, though. We're also trying to
bring attention to the low life expectancy on reservations
and to the proposals to dump nuclear and toxic wastes on
our lands,
Ragudo said.
And to do a little culture swapping. We demonstrate
our dances and drumming in the towns we pass through, and
all the little towns along U.S. 50 have made us feel really
welcome. People have extended their hands to us, and we've
learned that you've got similar worries about things like
medical services and toxic wastes and your kids leaving for
the city.
Well, rural is rural, no matter whether great-granddad rode with Sitting Bull or George Custer, and that was excitement enough for one week. As it turned out, we didn't need the Benson cavalcade.
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