A Paiute Meeting in Big Pine
A legacy of lies, dust, and poisoned minds
The City of Los Angeles stole their water
Theft breeds mistrust
After 15 minutes pass, the doors to the Alan Spoonhunter Memorial Gymnasium remain closed. The crowd begins to mutter. No one has a key. Near the front of the assembly, Shannon of the Woods clears her throat.
“There’s no one here,” she announces, “and the meeting began 15 minutes ago. If no one opens these doors, we won’t be able to hold council.”
“That’s what they want!”
“Right. So we’ll hold it out here. I’ve got nowhere to be.”
A couple people glance at the sky.
“It’s supposed to rain,” croaks an old woman.
“Doesn’t look like it to me,” says Shannon.
At this moment, Jacklyn Bryan, Tribal Administrator for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of Central California — irrigators of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and cousins to the Shoshone — appears in a silk shirt embroidered with flowers. The Paiutes go silent. She looks at the doors and looks at the sky. She stares off at …
Nabokov's Butterflies
A lepidopterist’s passion for Pugs, Satyrs, and Blues
His eye for detail and towering intellect led giants in the field to crave his approval
He fell for the Magdalena Alpine, the world’s only all-black butterfly
He wrote great novels, too
At the breakfast table recently, my partner Florence was reading the parlor game known as "The Proust Questionnaire." She put one of Proust's questions to me: "What is your idea of perfect happiness?" What came to mind was Nabokov's reply to Simona Moroni in a 1972 interview in Vogue: "What is the perfect walk for you?" asked Moroni. Nabokov replied, "Any first walk in any new place — especially a place where no lepidopterist has been before me. There still exist unexplored mountains in Europe and I can still walk 20 kilometers a day. The ordinary stroller might feel on sauntering out a twinge of pleasure, but the cold of the metal netstick in my right hand magnifies the pleasure to almost intolerable bliss."
That Vladimir Nabokov was deeply enamored of butterflies and moths comes as news to almost no one who even knows his name, though many misconstrue this attraction as somehow symbolic, …
Pickers
I’m no longer legal to drive their bombs
The Judas goat state is the enemy of the poor, regardless of skin color
Soon enough, we’ll all be pickers for Amazon
We lived out in the Tules. Fifteen miles down a rutted dirt road. Long past the sewer lines. Out past the telephone lines. Closer to Three Peaks than we were to town. Papa Skinner bought flat land when flat land was cheap. Cheap, flat land with forage and a high enough water table was a good investment. You could always run cattle on it, dig a well, and grow alfalfa.
My birth certificate lists my daddy’s profession as “Pipe Fitter.” But his true vocation was PTSD from Vietnam. He wanted to become a commercial artist. That didn’t happen. In late 68, the same year M.L.K. and R.F.K. were slain in plain sight, a counselor at Harbor College miscalculated his class credits and his A1 draft notice followed. The surfer boy they deported was not the broken child soldier they shipped back.
My mama’s profession ain’t listed. Neither were her aspirations. At the time, she was a cocktail waitress using …
