When i was a kid i told my dad I wanted to be an Indian. He thought i was crazy. He would say ‘you’d hate not having electricity, you’d hate not having tv’, etc. That was his idea of what American Indians were all about, or at least it seemed that way to me. He wasn’t born here, so he probably didn’t have enough information about them. And sure, my idea was similar at the time, but I was just a kid. Anyway, similar, but not the same. I understood about taking what you needed, but no more. Preserving things you didn’t need, the balance of nature, the cycle of things.
Anyway, as a little kid i really believed i could grow up and be a ‘for-real Indian’. So it’s not really a surprise that one of my most lasting memories of our trip across the US is Mesa Verde National Park. The home of the Anasazi. There are brick homes built into cliffs by the Anasazi that date back to 600 AD. It’s really an amazing sight, and I got such a strong vibe when I was there. A different sense of the far-away past. Tough to explain, but it was like a spiritual feeling, and somehow different than that. Just different than i’d ever felt. I hope to get back there some day, and highly recommend visiting.