My senior year of school I went with a small group of friends to go rock climbing in eastern Washington. I had a lot of admiration for my friend Tony who taught me to play guitar. He had a lot of interests and rock climbing was one. Thirty years pass and I can see now how much I regarded him as an older brother. The person who would appreciate our place in a small town and not fit in even though my family had been on these lands long before settlement.
He wasn’t in that group but I felt I was going there to earn his respect and learn something new.
The group went out early and I had been writing on my guitar and I went out to catch up with them. It might have only been two or three miles and I thought nothing of it because I felt good as the sun was out and I had no gear on me because the group had it ahead of me.
Ovoid in the Wind
At the time my hair was half way down my back and I was unmistakable as Native. I may have only been more so if I had eagle feathers in my hair. As I recall, I was gifted a necklace from Doug Allards auction a silver pendant that screamed Indigenous. I had no shirt on and I was wearing khaki linen shorts so when I made it maybe half way and was over the hillside I saw a camper RV and an elderly white haired woman that looked as they were about to place camp.
I was about to say hello and she looked up at me and screamed “INDIAN”!!! and she trembled so much I could see it from fifty feet away. “George, it’s an INDIAN”!!!
At that instance I went thru my mind, what can I do? I had no phone on me and nothing but my shirt out of the back pocket of my shorts and my wallet. I put my hands up to show I didn’t have anything on me but the couple ran to the RV and blazed away. A big trail of dust that followed and I laughed a little to myself how surreal the experience was.
That could have gone another entirely and I could have found my end at the hill if the inclination had been driven from fear and miscommunication but it wasn’t. I feel asleep while carving and remembered that moment. Maybe because a climbing studio is around the corner of the shop and someone tracked sand into the shop. I hear gun shots from outside this place both my grandfathers once had breakfast at Alfred’s and it was a shot that woke me from my sleep on the pole.
I walked over to my rack for the first time in many years and picked up the knife that has my great uncles name carved into it. Holding in my hand a treasure no one can take, a story that cannot be made up. The time we are living in has it’s moments within them.
Confronted by a man one day outside of my studio with his daughter as I was trying to just get in my door. He was worked up and confrontational but he stood down because as much as he wanted to judge me and insult me, curious about my ethnicity, he looked over my shoulder to see a beaded feather in my car and he became a different person in that instance.
That recollection and his gesture where he patted me on the arm, I could tell he wanted to perhaps tell me to go back to where I came from in assuming I was foreign. That day I went back to climb that weekend and look at the sun come up with a small cloud that reminded me of the time I was just carving small things on the beach when I made a small decision to put my guitar away and devote myself to carving. It never meant I would never pick up a guitar or my climbing shoes, it just meant I understood if I had pursued music my life may have not been so open to opportunity.