White Clay Revisited

Last night Ms. Ackenbrand and I had a brief discussion of our trip to White Clay. Just a few trite remarks about lessons learned and all that sentimental crap. This inspired me to go through my notes and those of my companions. It's been five months since then but it feels like a lifetime.And in some respects it has been. I finished that semester. I drove a cab for a while. I graduate in December. By fall I hope to be in Grad school. Things around here have been shaken up a lot.While going through notes, I came across one of the best descriptions the trip inspired. "Oglala is shacks and trailers flung out in every direction on the prairie and one never really feels like being inside anything at all" (Beran, 2007). This took me back to that North Western hell. I could only remember one thing.The poverty. The crippling poverty. The overwhelming, indisputable, how-god-is-this-possible poverty. The stifling feeling that I am above this and the only reason is...luck. Where's Warren? The chief? The Randian liquor store owner? The woman chained to a slot machine?There is a very good chance more than one of those people died. Maybe a liquor hardened liver just couldn't take it anymore. A stabbing over a fifth of vodka. A suicide? These are all real and clear possibilities.I think I have blocked out chunks of our adventure. Something’s were too pitiful to recall.I do remember when I returned the chief and his friend to White Clay. I'm ashamed to admit that I prepared myself for a physical fight as we neared the destination. That was stupid of me. Those slurring drunken Indians didn't have an ounce of fight left in them. They only had blurred memories and a fragmented tradition pieced together by the white scholars who tore it apart in the first place. They babbled about how Paul and I were better than them. They told the same three jokes over and over, hoping against hope each time that we'd remember the fun, laugh and forget our abandonment mission then welcome them back to a warm room, "good" food and liquor. They promised us a banquets of food and rivers of beer at a distant relative's house. They said anything to stay off those cold, cold streets.And we left them on those streets in that ghost town, and then drove away knowing we'd never meet again. Knowing the men in my car could die and freeze before summer vacation started. Knowing if I thought too hard I'd weep. So Paul and I made light of their plight. Not because we hated them but because we hated ourselves. We hated the situation. The injustice. The reality.As I sit here and sip my coffee, preparing to go back to school, the question I pose to me is: what role will White Clay play in my life?It seems too personal to use for my writing/poetry/art. Maybe too trite. Maybe it only met anything to the four of us in the car and everyone I've told just humored me. It seems too heart wrenching to donate my time to make things better. Maybe that's selfish or cowardly, but The Ridge doesn't know creation. It only knows destruction and exploitation of that destruction. Thousands of lives are lost there everyday and I could easily be one of them. Maybe I need to look past that and fight against the odds like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Maybe it was an experience I chose subconsciously to make myself melancholy in situations like this, something to take to heart whenever I lose touch with the reality of my fortunate life. Maybe the answer to all these questions is yes.