After we buried my father mother moved us off the reservation, taking us west to live with her relatives on the Pacific coast in northern California. We drove father’s old pick up truck fifteen hundred miles stopping every hour to jack up the back end hammering the rear axle back into place with a heavy piece of pipe so the wheel didn’t come off and letting the engine blue with heat cool down enough to go a little farther. To start the truck we all had to get out and push since the starter had given out long ago. My father never replaced it. He always parked the truck for the evening on a hillside, letting it roll down in the morning, putting it in gear and popping the clutch to engage the engine. Most of the places we stopped were flat until we reached the Rockies. Navigating those steep mountains and hairpin curves with no brakes was a bold act of the desperation we all felt.
Half way through the trip we ran out of money. Mother pitched the tent in a hidden hollow leaving us kids there while she drove into town. The next morning she came back for us and we resumed our journey. It never occurred to me to ask how or where she got the money but my sisters whispered secrets among themselves making like they were kissing and stroking each other in the back seat out of mother’s view. She was a handsome woman. I suspect I know now how she got the money we needed but I don’t like to think about it. We were on the road for a month getting to our destination and it took us three days of looking to find where mother’s relatives lived. That was the hardest part of the entire journey—knowing we were almost there but unable to find directions to the ranch where we wanted to go. Our tempers frayed. We became cross with each other and our bellies rumbled from not having eaten. We had just about given up when my mother recognized a lady she knew shopping at a general store where we had stopped to put water into the radiator. It seemed a miracle at the time. I often think of what would have become of us if we hadn’t have stopped when and where we did. “Monica… is that you?” my mother asked a woman as she was coming out of the store. I could tell by my mother’s voice that she wasn’t sure. I wondered how my mother could know this woman. She was Indian like us but she dressed like the whites and she wore her graying hair short. “Jesse! You made it!” the woman answered as mother and the woman hugged each other. She looked at me sitting in the truck. “And this must be Tommy.” I waved at her. “And you must be Raven,” she said to my oldest sister. “And you’re Feather,” the woman said, speaking to the younger of my older sisters. “It’s so nice to see you two again. And it’s wonderful to finally meet you, Tommy. Come on and follow me.” Mother had shut off the truck to let it cool down and the woman watched in amazement as we kids piled out while my mother climbed behind the wheel. The three of us pushed. All of a sudden the woman was there pushing right along beside us. Mother popped the clutch and the truck roared to life. The woman went over to her own car out of breath and pulled away, motioning for us to follow her. Along the way mother told us about this woman. Her name was Monica Stonehouse. She had grown up on the reservation but as a young woman she had gone away to college. She had come back to teach school and that’s where she met and married my mother’s brother. He died in a car accident before I was born. “You didn’t know him, Tom,” mother said. “But Kangee probably remembers Uncle Andrew… don’t you?” My sister Raven nodded her head. Mother always called Raven and Feather by their Lakota names. Once I wondered why I didn’t have a Lakota name too. She said when I became a man I could pick my own name. “I do too,” Feather announced. “I remember him too.” “You were too young, Niyaha,” mother said. “He was my oldest brother,” mother went on. “You would have liked him, Tom. He was always laughing and playing practical jokes. After he died, Monica didn’t think the reservation offered much in the way of opportunity for her children… your cousins. You’ll meet them soon. So she moved away just like we’re doing. The last I heard she teaches school here in California.” We followed Monica down a long stretch of gravel with scrub brush and pines on each side of the road finally turning onto a dirt path cobbled in stone that ended up in the middle of a little oasis with a ranch house built of logs huddled among majestic Sycamore trees. “No wonder we had trouble finding this place,” mother remarked as we pulled up behind Monica shutting off the engine. A quiet descended upon us reminding me of our old home back in the Badlands. We all sat there a moment. Perhaps we were all thinking of home. Or maybe my mother and sisters were just tired. On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Jan-Anders Andersson <[email protected]> wrote: > All > > I live at the end of a long down running road. Kids are skating down in the > summer and in the winter they have all sorts of things to ride down it. Today > I saw a little boy sitting on his skateboard crying outside my kitchen > window. He was crying because of the slope was over and he was exhausted and > didn't have the energy to climb up to the top again. > It reminded me of that the oil age which have let people slide by the oil > fired energy for about a century. The oil age is soon at its end and without > the energy from the oil we will be back again at this way of life that Tom > described so well. Keeping all the knowledge from the time before the oil > will be crucial for the survival of the humans regardless of the color of the > skin or to what tribe they belong. > > The depletion of the old oil fields are accelerating and new finds can't > compensate for the decreasing extraction. Every day about 90 million barrels > of oil are burned around the world. That is 33 billion barrels annually. 2/3 > of that energy is for food production, tractors, fermentation, packaging and > distribution etc. People worry about gas prices that threats their car > driving habits. Not many are observing that oil depletion affects our food > production many times worse. Oil energy is consumed at 51.3 thousand TWh per > year. All the 440 nuclear plants on our planet are producing about 5 thousand > TWh, less than 10% of the oil energy. > About 2016 it will be clear that the majority of the oil fields are running > out and there is not any possibility to compensate for this enormous loss of > energy extraction. A decrease of 10% of the oil is equal to all the existing > nuclear plants in the whole world. There is no possibility to double the > number of nuclear plants in 5 years, not even in 15 or 30 years. Uranium and > Plutonium aren't growing on threes either. There is no possibiltiy to build > alternative energy production at the scale of the oil. There is no > possibility to build windmills, nuclear plants, gas and coal fired plants at > that scale to compensate for the oil energy that are disappearing from the > market in this short time. > The oil that will be left will be confiscated by the military forces because > without oil they will be nothing. Countries that have oil reserves will keep > the oil in the ground as security for their national debt. Oil will be so > expensive so regular people will not have a chance to buy it. The price of > all other kinds of energy, gas, coal and sun etc will rise and follow the > price of oil due to regular market economic forces. > > If you care about dynamic quality life then take some lesson from Tom Three > Deer and his mother. > > deep regards > > Jan-Anders > > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
