The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The Umpcrickomish live in government housing in the valley they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us in UpCreek would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the Otter Creek Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Whitehorse Mountain where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

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The Southendomish live in government housing in the fishing grounds they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us on the South End would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the South End Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Saratoga Passage where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

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