black chevrolet

Well I’ve drunk to drown, on every ocean I’ve been 
Lake Tanganyika, where the crocodiles swim 
Halifax, Nova Scotia to Van Diemen’s land 
Well I drank with the Sultan, down the Suez Canal

Cause Every Dog Has Its Day 
Like every woman, she gets her own way 
And if there’s a ship that sails tonight 
I’ll captain that too, just to be there with you

- Flogging Molly

The road is a deceptive beast, it is.

I thought of the imagination-trips I made when I was a little kid, riding my gray stallion through the hills of Apache country.   I was heavily armed with a Winchester rifle and two Colt .45's, (appropriately shaped birch branches) herding cattle through the gullies to Yuma through the most dangerous country in the West. Now, packaged in a cheap Korean car listening to Latin trance to keep myself awake, I was on the blazing white rails of Highway 10, completely unarmed, just trying to get through without notice.

The slash canyons and tumbleweed rises of Geronimo's country unrolled itself to the foot of the mountains, dusky far from either side of the high freeway.  The trailers and dusty cars of Geronimo's people lay scattered amongst the hills where once brush huts and twists of smoke used to arise.  It was a sad sight, it was...the sagging Oldsmobile creeping along the road, loaded down with humanity and mattresses.  The clotheslines run from the rotting trailer roof to the scrub oak, framing a huge graffiti tag on the wall of the decrepit dwelling.  The stoic glare on the weatherbeaten face of the young man leaning against the streetsign, backpack in hand.  They know what they had and what they lost and how it was taken from them, oh they remember.  And I, the white man, leaned on the accelerator to escape the accusing stares of the broken storefronts and gaping windows.  Sounds like a war zone, you say.  Isn't it a war zone, I say.  They will never forgive us, and we have forgotten them.  We give them their casino permits and welfare, but they are irrelevant to us.  We have their land; if they don't want to partake of our culture, well that's their own foolishness, eh?