This Message is Coming to You From Another Nation

The Indians were the symbol of naturalism. 
The Indians were a people who would die for their land. 
The Indians measured everything they did to make sure they were doing the least amount of harm to the land.  Some might have noticed the use of past tense verbs in these sentences.  Well, I meant to do that.  From what we've seen, these once proud people aren't following in their ancestor's foot steps...  At all.

First of all, normally you'd see a landfill for trash.  The Indians seem to have no use for gathering their trash into one place, it's everywhere!  What they do have is landfills for cars.  Literally, dozens of "parking lots", if you can call them that, with rusty cars just sitting there - broken windows, paint peeling hoods, and little, if anything, left of the tires. 

The next thing we've noticed on every reservation that we have entered, no matter what state we are in, is plenty of dead landscape, rotting trees, and lots and lots of abandoned-looking, dilapidated houses.

Finally, we have had multiple strange, if not creepy, experiences on the reservations.  As we entered Glacier National Park we went through a reservation.  Mom decided that this would be a good place to 're-group' so we pull into a gas station to park.  Almost immediately a man came up to the car, he looks at the licenses plate then walks to mom's window and knocks.  Mom, being the kind woman that she is, complied and let down the window.  The man tells us that he has relatives in town and needs money to buy food for them, some how this all connected to MA.  Mom says that we have no money to spare, but that we do have food.  As the man continues to ask for money we gave him several Honey and Oat Bars.  The man relented and took the food.  Afterward mom said that if we had given him money it would have gone straight to alcohol and she didn't want that.  What was so creepy about it?  The man spoke hundreds of words and we understood about three (and from those three we deduced the story above).  Was is drunken slur?  English?  Native American?  Who knows! 

The other time we had an odd experience on an Indian reservation was today.  As we left the PF, as Dylan says, we stopped to get some petrified wood in a store (it's illegal to pick up you might see laying around).  As we left we decided to push our luck and stop at another store.  Well, I kind of made the executive decision, but hey, they said they gave free meteorites, and who can pass that up?  Oh, but they promised SO much and delivered only: creepiness.  As we pulled up there were manikins riding dinosaurs, manikins laying in the sun and lots of petrified wood.  Not so bad.  There was also the woman spray painting the wall, and did I mention ostriches that you could feed, and a half-woman manikin that was being eaten by a T-Rex (maybe I should have clued in - but free meteorites!). 

Then the manager pulled up.  He led us inside and started to try to barter items down so that we would buy them (at $10,000 for a petrified wood coffee table you'd better start bartering down!).  As we walked through the store it began to remind me of something I had read about.  It hit me as we left: Auntie M's Garden Gnome Emporium from Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  (Great books if you haven't read them.)  The M in the stores name stands for the creature Medusa, who turns people to stone when she looks at them.  Well, maybe this "Medusa" turned people into manikins!  Lucky mom had made a plan run for it when the manager wasn't looking, so we escaped unmanikinized.   The whole experience was a bit...well...creepy.

This blog is being written from a reservation, or maybe another nation even, you decide.

Agape, Micah