

Liberation's Garden

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Published without copyright 2020 by DJ Rankin. No rights reserved.

All parts of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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If you have purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that you've missed out on some heady artwork by Beth Jackson.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. That being said, most of this stuff happened, or happens on a daily basis, or will be happening in the near future. The Earth is undergoing a multi-layered crisis, it is up to us to drastically change the way we walk upon her surface, and we should do it before the companies that run our government run our children's planet into the ground. Fossil Corp may not be real, but there are some very real corporations that have prioritized profit over basically everything else in the free world. And speaking of free, this book is available for free at any retailer that will allow it, but feel free to donate as much as you like, to whichever active community is doing the work that you wish you could, or better yet, feel free to get involved with the future of our planet's history. And feel free to contact the author for further direction on how to get started, he checks his email at least twice a year, whether he needs to or not. steponesavetheworld@gmail.com

Liberation's Garden

A work of fiction

from the frontline of the

socio-ecological revolution

DJ Rankin

Also by the author:

Step One: Save the World

The Journey of a Water Protector

Uncage Eden

A Spiritual Philosophy Book about

Food, Music, and the Rewilding of Society

Also in audiobook

Both titles available for free download

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Miles likes his job. He really does. It's at least interesting enough that he can pretend to enjoy it. He gets to help people. Sorta. He's there to tell them that everything'll be okay, when to them, it seems that the whole world is rigged against them. He provides damage control for those that society spits out along its never ending quest of progressing greatness. Life seems to be getting better and better for everyone lost in their ipods as they float down the mainstream, oblivious to those whose lives were washed away with the flood, and if no one else seems to be bothered by the upcoming current's event, then why should they?

Truth is, Miles fucking hates his job. It's just papers and buttons and fake smiles, and an endless charade of convincing himself that he has the mental stability required to live within the dream, captive to the illusions of a functioning global community, and a self-inflicted prisoner of the economic sanctions of life, liberty, and the everlasting pursuit of complacency. A life's time consumed by the fair market value of the human experience.

But he's gotta work. He's gotta have things. It may not be pretty, but the world is built on the broken dreams of the slaves convinced to believe in freedom. And even if the powers-that-be control the whole thing, pulling the strings that keep our hands tied from ever making real change, what can he really do about it anyway?

He's just one dude. Nobody knows him. Nobody's listening. Nobody even knows he exists. And he's cool with that. He's happy to keep his head down and just go with the flow. Happy enough, anyway.

Besides, if he did decide to speak of his unhappiness with the way things are, voicing the opinions of his unrested monologue and putting words to his thoughts of dropping out of the game altogether, well, the system is fundamentally wired to shun all who refuse to conform to the rules of the system.

The worth of a human can be easily quantified in rational numbers, from the negotiated wage of forfeiting one's own lifetime, to the size of the mortgage acquired to prove full-blown adulthood. Money makes the world go round, and as hard as it is to convince yourself that you're alive without it, it's even harder to prove it to anyone else.

It's true, you can't survive without money, at least not in this manmade world of material girls. You gotta pay to play, you gotta pay to pray, you gotta pay for your own home and it's illegal to be homeless. You simply can't survive within this system without money, so you gotta get a job from the system to settle your debts with the system, so you gotta settle on whatever occupation you can find that vaguely resembles something that you actually care anything about.

So what's the alternative? To rebuke it all? To refuse to participate in the insanity demanded by modern society? To allow yourself to fall out of civilization's good graces and take up residence among the cracks in the sidewalk, the one that has been superimposed atop an entire world long forgotten? Nah, that's just a bunch of crazy talk.

All this and more, crossed his mind as he crossed the street to grab a coffee. He poked through the myriad of muffins and scones, compilations of homemade vegan cream pies, bluetooth headsets with their sparkle mocha lattes, venti of course, although this bookstore baristaria doesn't subscribe to the nonsensical nomenclatures of the coffee store down both sides of the street, but our bluetoothers don't seem to notice, or care, or be capable of anything other than reciting the regurgitations of the people farm.

Miles is good with drip, medium medium, thinks he's clever but knows deep down that he's just another rat in the maze. Except he at least knows that the finish line holds no escape, only a meager chunk of stale cheddar, then it's back to the monotony of the cage. A bit of banter as she fills his cup and he thinks he might have a crush on her, but what's new?

He steps out to roll one while he burns the roof of his mouth, and their eyes lock. Not the barista, it's this barefoot beauty, short dark hair, olive skin, and eyes that could tell a story, better than our author anyway. And oh yeah, a dress she'd been wearing for the better part of a week, and maybe the worst parts of it too. She could spot a mark from a mile away and her eyes started talking before he was even in earshot.

"Hey brother, if you're looking for real anarchy, you're not gonna find it in a book."

1

And with that, she turned and started walking out of his life before she had even properly entered it. Or improperly. Yet she had struck a nerve. He had tasted her discontent with the content that society was convincing everyone else to swallow, smelled her comfort of unconformity in the face of a faceless state-maintained delusion of authority, or maybe it was just the dress.

Either way, he knew that he probably wouldn't sleep soundly again until he dove head first into her slippery stream of consciousness, fully engulfing himself in her ebbs and flows, and only once he'd pried his clinging fingers from their last grasp at the straws dangled by the banks, would he be free enough to float through the treacherous waters of trepidation, and arrive at whichever oceanfront utopia this sparkling angel of anarchy had surely been crafted by the gods.

On top of the dress, or under it maybe, she wore a peculiar mystique that had driven a piton directly through the sore spot of his crumbling identity, and now as she climbed into his memories, he was frozen in a tangle of bewilderment. Her essence seemed to be a blend of extremes, a sophisticated simplicity, so stripped down that at first glance she appeared inseparable from the streets she was traversing. But a second glance revealed something much deeper, an insatiable intrigue, a complexity beyond compare with anyone who existed within the borders of our patriotic indoctrination.

She knew things, she had lived, like really lived, and her experience wasn't passed off as just another notch on her ego's bedpost, it was held close, held sacred, and anyone lucky enough to truly explore the depths of her wisdom, would certainly unlock a few mysteries of the universe along the way.

She was half a block along her own way, when she turned around and flashed a mischievous smile, "Well, are you coming or what?"

It took about a third of a second for him to rsvp and another third to catch up. He had no idea where they were going, yet he felt no hesitation, he only knew that if he let her fade away from his story, he'd feel the sting of regret with every breath left in his miserable excuse of an existence.

"Bout time, you know I was only gonna wait another third of a second or so. As much as you're meant to be there beside me, the revolution waits for no one."

"Sorry I'm late, so where's this revolution of yours happening?"

"Oh, here and there."

"Ah, and over a couple rainbows I'd imagine."

"Under them actually, but first is here."

She ducked into the corner Seven Eleven, walked past the assortment of subpar food items, that for a couple of bucks, are the only option for their povertous clientele to feign any attempt at nutritional intake, and made a beeline for the coffee station.

She circled her prey, carefully perusing the collection of caffeine, landed on a near empty carafe, half filled her worn out travel mug and exclaimed, "Oh drat, you guys are always out of the one I like, no worries though, guess I'll just walk a few blocks to the other one."

As they reentered the bustling street scene, Miles pointed out that there had been a full canister of her most desired house blend right next to the empty.

"Yeah, which means they were getting ready to dump this out, and they verify their inventory by the amount of styrofoam cups they unleash into the world, so by my account, I've done everyone involved a huge favor."

"Interesting thought process, doubt that Mr Eleven would tend to agree."

"Who? That old geezer? The one profiting off the backs of the vulnerable, as he perpetuates the illusion of convenience for the sheep? I think he'll be just fine without my half cup of sacred energy poured down his drain."

"Illusion of convenience?"

"You know it brother. It's all a charade, a sham, a scam, it's damn near a pyramid scheme, where the only way to get ahead is to push down those who society has glued to the bottom rung.

Let's take your little froufrou coffee trash to-go, certainly seems more convenient to grab a freshy everyday, than to lug around this old clunker like I do. Of course, you'll need a few hundred cups to power an entire year of spinning your wheels, and so will millions of other convenience snobs, and now we're left with an Earth cluttered by the collateral damage of the convenience war."

Miles couldn't find the words to contribute, especially as he looked down to see the steaming gun in his hands, but luckily she had a few more rattles to shake off, as she unraveled the narrative woven into the threadbare fabric of the American dream.

"Or like that shirt you're wearing, and I'm not trying to pick on you, it's most of the shirts that most people wear, you're just the only one on the fringe enough to even be able to hear me. Or want to, at least.

It's way convenient to walk into that store over there and grab some garb to freshen up your friday night attire. Much easier than the effort it took to replace an ecosystem with a poisonous cotton field, but luckily our nation's capital was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of those enslaved as prisoners of the war, which seemed rather convenient to anyone who was allowed to vote on another human's life worth.

But that's all in the history books now, which were written by the kings of convenience, and as the victors spun the white web of justification, the spinning wheel was exported to an underpaid, underprivileged, and underage workforce, who were way less American than three fifths of those sold on our own black market.

So now our shops are built on the sweat of an even more worthless breed of human being, and I'd be willing to wager that they manage to bleed and cry a bit too, but darn it if it's just not so convenient to live a comfortable life blinded to the discomfort involved in the exportation of exploitation. Convenient for us, anyway.

And so's the half-assed attempt at processing the human spirit through an over-packaged and under-nutritioned food supply. It's super convenient for the caged cattle that never have to worry about the other side of the fence. And for the caged consumer, who will undoubtedly contract one of the many diseases cultivated through agrinomics, but conveniently, the government subsidized drug cartels also own the monsanto mafia. A one stop shop of convenience alright, and the masses eat it up, as their own mass increases, because it's infinitely more convenient to sit around and watch a TV dinner, than to stand up and do a damn thing about anything.

But it is pretty convenient to lounge around the comfort of an oil powered lifestyle, beats splitting wood to warm yourself up, though now you have to drive across town to sacrifice your own energy just to keep the lights on. Gotta take your place among the traffic jam of slaves to the system, car beats bus, bus beats walking, and planes top them all, and as we top off the tank, we see that the farther you climb the corporate ladder of convenience, there's an equal and opposite depletion of life quality for those too forgotten to ever scroll across the bottom of your in-flight news programming.

Birds covered in oil, water filled with oil, reservations stolen for oil, and even some good old white folk suffer, as their family farm is now in the incineration zone of what has been conveniently labeled as natural gas.

And naturally we buy into it, because the alternative sounds like entirely too much work, so we pass the dependence on the buck down to our children, who will be the ones to face the wrath of our collapsing global equilibrium. Dirty oceans are rising and fueling unnaturally massive disasters, wet places are dry, dry places are flooded, temperature shifts are growing more sporadic, and record breaking blizzards pushed down from the high pressures of a melting arctic, are just enough proof that there's no way it'll get as hot as those silly scientists are saying.

People would much prefer to believe in the storyline that supports their convenient way of life, the one told by the political prisoners of corporately subsidized campaign finance violations, and they've made a career of telling people what they want to hear, so all those listening intently have no intent on lightening the load they impress upon our worn out planet.

Impressive indeed, that they could spin an authentically manmade yarn of human supremacy, that even as hundreds of species are becoming extinct every single day and the conditions required to sustain human life are fading from the landscape even faster, somehow they've convinced everyone that the solution to pollution is to simply add more fuel to the fire, to trust that multinational conglomerations of businessmen will discover the holy grail of convenience, and we'll be able to save the human race from self-destruction without ever having to lift a finger, except maybe to let Netflix know that we're still watching."

2

Miles was spinning as he hung onto every word. He knew all this stuff already, but he'd never heard it connected so eloquently, so ferociously unapologetic, so spot on and to the point that he couldn't even remember what it was that he thought about the world before this moment. It all seemed so obvious now, how could anyone be so oblivious to the true nature of things that they simply close their eyes and let the current push them toward certain disaster?

Convenience. It's far more convenient to jump on board with someone else's muddy flow, than to break away and carve your own path through untamed territory. Now he could see it all around him, couldn't escape it if he tried. Convenience consumed every corner of the market and littered the streets, with both plastic and the souls of those unwilling to conform to the cookie cutters of the human factory.

But the saddest part, were those who had been successfully homogenized, lost in the convenience of forgetting the world as their phones become more aware than they are. Retaining just enough sentience to sidestep the pile of people in need of basic human rights. Ignoring the plea to pay attention to what's becoming of our self-absorbed species. Escaping any personal responsibility for the future of humanity, because, "Sorry, I don't carry any cash," yet simultaneously ordering Amazon's latest acquisition before the fad fades away, and all while the actual Amazon is burning to death.

He couldn't go back to the version of the world that he had learned to halfway exist in, so his feet didn't miss a beat, though his heart may have skipped a couple. He yearned for more of her unfiltered perspective, her knowledge, her answers, her questions, her unphased ability to see the truths of the world and to somehow remain upbeat about it all. He craved to know her, and he was pretty sure it wasn't the dress this time. Well, maybe a little.

Just as he was trying not to ponder what exactly made the dingy dress sparkle in the morning sun, it whirled through the air as she spun a one eighty and stopped him dead in his tracks.

"Hey, you think I could get a little pinch of your tobacco? I musta left mine back at my place."

He reached for his pouch as he contemplated the location of her place. He hadn't even considered that she might have managed to eke out more stability than he'd been pretending to. Most folks he met on this street carried their lives on their backs, stripped down to the bare necessities of survival, which packed its own sense of freedom as their home truly was wherever their heart decided to be. All those others who fed the obsession of accumulating worthless things, were tightly tied down to the machine, as it extracted every last drop of their human sovereignty.

He already knew enough that he couldn't picture her giving up a single drop of herself, not to any machine anyway. She was so incredibly comfortable in her own skin, which looked quite comfortable from his perspective, though he couldn't imagine whatever sanctuary she must climb into each frigid night. An outsider to any conventional way of life, but seemed only a visitor to these streets that the others had escaped to. Could she be the only one?

Couldn't be. She wasn't one to run off and hide from the world in solitary confinement. She was a people person, though most of the people out here hardly saw her as a person, and she certainly had no online profile to prove it. No, she was not nearly as alone as he had felt for years, which could only mean that there was some kind of underground community of consciousness, a breeding ground for actual thoughts to come into this world, and a collection of free spirits to carry them out to it. He had to know this place. He had to know her. He had to know himself. He knew that he could no longer remain incomplete while there was a magical utopia out there waiting for him.

He tried to formulate the right words to uncover more of her mythical backstory, but before he could even decide which W to begin with, she disappeared into the shrubs bordering the sidewalk, presumably to never again be seen in this particular plane of existence.

A moment later, she emerged from her transdimensional travel with a souvenir box of perfectly chilled pepperoni and cheese, two slices, but she quickly shut the box before Miles could decline the secondhand snackatizer.

"Check it out, perfectly chilled pepperoni and cheese, just like from the fridge, but dare I say that this was far more convenient and way less toxic to the Earth?"

"Might be hard to get the inside people to sign up."

"Oh brother, you're telling me. Do you think the convenience snobs who won't eat their farm fresh favorites unless they're wrapped in plastic, are ever gonna eat something that's been in the big and scary great outdoors?

Heck no, they'd prefer to gas a greenhouse and skip to the next season, or just order-in off of some brown person's menu from a country obviously of lesser value than America, we're the greatest. We have skyscrapers filled with luxury apartments and restaurants lining the block, of course, we also have an insanely large population of the homeless and hungry. But don't worry, we'll get the cops down here and clear the sidewalk before your paying customers ever show up, they're definitely not gonna wanna have to look at this.

And so they don't. And when they end their fancy night out, all a chitter chatter and tipsy on the way to the warm car, and the warm house, and the warm bed with four thousand thread count egyptian satin sheets, they don't even think that someone here and now might appreciate their still warm styrofoam doggie bag, so they cram it into the back of the fridge for next month's episode of Food or Trash.

No, I don't think most people are prepared to do what we must in order to restore equilibrium to our species, and the rest of the living planet that we are a part of. To give up an ounce of personal privilege and share it with those less fortunate, to forget the indoctrinations of the self-served individual and remember that our most basic instinct, is that of community. But there's a change coming, and ready or not, people are going to have to learn to become human once again.

But today we're in luck, some kind soul felt it in their heart to share a little of themselves with the street, and for that, I thank you Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, I thank you for showing us that we are not alone, that there are other Earth helpers out there doing their part, that people are beginning to open their eyes and hearts and wake up to the task at hand, and please help us to be inspired by all those that we meet as we share our love with every step we take, wopila tanka, aho, Mitakuye Oyasin."

She finished that last bit up with her eyes closed, and seemed to have slipped off to another world by the end of it, or into this one. She had been praying. The pizza box was at shoulder height in one hand, the other held tightly a beaded leather pouch that hung around her neck. Miles didn't know how he hadn't noticed it before, didn't know why he felt tingles all over, didn't know the last time he'd prayed, and never to the planet itself. But he did know one thing, he was feeling pretty inspired alright, so maybe it was working already. But what was all that foreign language stuff?

Before he could gather the thought fragments she had yet to shatter, she was off again with an extra pep in her step that only pizza can provide. Or tacos. She bounced around the corner to devour the fresh kill, but when Miles caught up, he walked in on an entirely different situation.

She was kneeled down next to an old man in a wheelchair, a veteran it seemed, flying a sign that asked for pity and prayers. He heard them discussing his upcoming operation, something with his heart, and then she warmed it for him with a surprise delivery of cheesy goodness, two slices. They hugged and laughed, she motioned toward Miles and whispered something that elicited two more smiles, and then as she turned to rejoin the caravan he called out, "Thanks baby doll."

"Anytime Henry, stay warm out there, toksa ake."

And as she stepped back into stride she fired off a warning shot, "And for the record, don't ever call me baby doll. Henry's an old friend and he's in a wheelchair, and I don't punch people in wheelchairs, but don't think I won't put you in one."

"Got it," was all he could squeeze out, not out of fear of having to roll to the bathroom, but from the astonishment he felt for who had to be the most intelligent, compassionate, and spellbinding creature he had ever met. And there was no way he was ever gonna call her baby doll.

"I'm sorry, that was pretty fierce, don't worry, I'm not actually gonna beat you down. At least as long as you don't mess up." A brief chuckle crept out, and then a, "But for real tho, that's another shift that we've gotta make if we're gonna survive this. We have to once again hold the divine feminine energies of the world sacred, not as objects to be passed around to the highest bidder, and that begins with a complete upheaval of the patriarchal rhetoric handed down through centuries of colonial chauvinism."

Miles was well aware of the unfair hand that women had been dealt, sentenced to stirring the pot and folding the dirty laundry of the man show, but even though he understood this and always held the women in his life with the highest esteem, he couldn't stop the flash of guilt that crossed from his mind to his face.

"Oh don't worry bud, we don't blame you. Or I don't anyway. This has been the way of developing a world since way before we wiped out thousands of indigenous languages, along with anyone who dared to speak them, which left ample room for the white man's words to spread absurd concepts, such as the right to free speech. Or the right to private property, as if any one species could ever commit enough deplorable acts of oppression as to deserve ownership over a planet that we are an interwoven thread of, an equal partner, which didn't sit too well with the first born sons of the boys club, so they just lumped their fear of the female form in with the rest of the inventory. Women were considered the property of their husbands, even in this land of liberated statues and belles, and anyone privileged enough to learn to read the language of the kings saw it plain as day, only men are created equal.

But like I said, this has been going on a long time, a long long time, like thousands and thousands of years, ever since the first king's son set the record straight with the laws of patriarchal lineage, as it dawned on him that civilization was the key to preserving his seat on the throne.

And to this day, we hold his decrees with the highest regard, touting them as the fundamental building blocks that allowed us to climb out of the primordial swamp. The permanence of paternity could only be achieved by regulating fundamental human rights, like access to food, so they burned the forests filled with untaxable abundance and developed the first agricultural hierarchy, and of course the disease that travels hand in hand with a lower class meal ticket.

They also discovered that it was way more convenient to cage their prey instead of bothering with all that hunting mess, which freed up much more time to develop a written language worthy of writing the rules of wealth, including private property. But they had earned it, what with all that fence building and forest burning and all.

They owned the land, they owned the food, they owned the women, and soon they'd own everyone else too. With all the new work of tending fields and building castles, there was a lot to be done in this new world of convenience, so they devised a way to divide and conquer the free time of any left unenslaved.

Yeah, they invented time, or a way to capitalize on it at least. The once fluid workdays of supporting the community were replaced with a stagnant time clock of individual servitude, a human life was now quantifiable down to the second, and the second step was instituting the illusion of reciprocation, so they sold 'em on money. They needed an incentive to keep them hard at work and loyal to the king, musta run out of cages or something, but the real kicker, was that they had to give most of it back through the taxman just for the right to exist on his private property."

Miles was yet again speechless, luckily she still had plenty to say.

"So you see, the oppression of women goes back a long time, but the oppression of everybody goes back a long time. We're all in this boat together, and the ship has long sailed on escaping from the quicksands of time.

And our languages of human superiority are here to stay, written in stone even, but although we've erased countless indigenous dialects through the great American white out, there are still a few kicking around that we could learn a thing or two from, as we begin to amend a little more freedom into our speech.

Like the word property, or even mine, they simply didn't exist pre-colonial invasion. It would have been absurd to think that any one creation of the Earth herself, could ever claim ownership over the Earth herself, or any of her creatures, and that probably even included the women.

A matriarchal society wasn't about women coming first, it was about the community coming first, and that included the harmonious relationships built with the rest of the natural world. But they didn't have a word for nature either, because they weren't something separate from the wild, they were an interconnected part of it, just as important as the birds and bees, but certainly no more so.

And that all brings me back to my point. Yeah, women must once again be held sacred, it's one of the primary roots of our current crisis, but all of life must be held sacred. All of life has suffered under the oppressive thumb of those intent on progressing their power, and only once we wake up and realize that each rung on this ladder of oppression is not separate from us, but simply the fractionated pieces of our own collective authority to rise up, then, and only then, will we be able to climb to the top together and usurp the throne, as we hand the keys back to the only woman who was ever really in charge anyway, our incredible Unci Maka, or I guess you probably know her as Mother Earth."

3

Miles' mind was nearing on blown. He knew that the planet was in a whole world of hurt, but he'd been under the assumption that it had only been that way since the industrious revolutionaries opted to forfeit our future in exchange for short-term financial gains. The progress of profit. Convenience. Or maybe it had been ever since the days of freely traded slave labor, a way of life that blatantly prioritized big business over the bloodshed of America's darkest secret.

He vaguely understood that these things were all related, and that in all actuality, the systemic problems we are facing now could quite possibly be traced back to some unknown origin, even predating the founding of our foundling nation. But could it possibly have all started spiraling downhill with the founding of civilization as we know it?

That was a tough pill to swallow, but of course, so was the government mandated history curriculum that they've been shoving down our throats for years. But clocks and written language and agriculture and money? They were just tools, weren't they? And humans were humans because they used tools. And maybe in the hands of an evil doer, a tool can become a weapon, but could these integral components of life as we know it, have been corrupted since their very inception?

His mind trickled through other innovations of the inhumane, from gunpowder to TNT to nuclear fission, all designed as tools of the trade until they were traded to the war machine, and once they were responsible for millions of deaths and the hostile takeover of the planet, their inventors vehemently regretted ever developing these technologies of terror.

And of course they were all men, they were the only ones allowed to attend the schools that taught this new art of oppressionism, so they were in charge of doctoring the nation in whatever way they saw fit.

So they invented a political system that systematically empowered themselves and governed the power to the people, throttled the threat of women becoming self-aware and foolishly thinking that they should get a vote on the direction of our off course trajectory, and thus they were held in captivity along with anybody else who got in the way of this new patriarchal concept of progress. Sound familiar?

As if he'd been tuned in, a man crossed the sidewalk in front of them with a sign speaking to anyone who wasn't buried six feet deep in a cell phone. It notified them that the occurrence of sexual assault in the city had more than doubled in the last ten years.

He announced that, "Our homeless community used to be able to sleep right here in a safe public space, well lit and secured with video surveillance of any wrong doing. But the businesses and politicians got together (Miles wondered when it was that they had been separate) and decided to make it a criminal act to fall victim to the fraudulent banks and their fictitious housing crisis. There are six times the amount of empty homes than homeless people in this country, yet these folks struggling to survive have been evicted yet again, and must now seek refuge in the darkened cubbies of dangerous alleys, where unprotected women now fall vulnerable to whatever night terrors the city has to offer, including the police."

Miles could see that the seedy underside of our man's world was oozing from every worn-out seam of our tattered society, from the highest authority in the land, to those scraped up from the lowest points of inequality. It knows no boundaries, which in a country built of walls and fences seems abnormal, until you remember that the guidelines of normality are determined by the streams of corporate media propaganda, and not the overflowing river of actual human lives clogging the gutters of our daily commute.

But everyone knows that you're not a real person if you can't afford to pay rent or a mortgage, if you don't indebt your livelihood to the kings of exploitation, and spend the rest of your life working to shed your own indentured servitude. And with all that pressure to forfeit any hopes and dreams of freedom, it becomes increasingly more difficult to worry about anyone's problems other than your own, so you don't, to a point that you can walk right past a fellow human in need and pretend that they don't even exist, which only makes it that much harder for them to prove you wrong.

The man continued with, "Why, they've even made it illegal to feed those less privileged than the paying customers that share the same sidewalk. In fact, many of us have been arrested for committing the incredibly vile act of public decency."

Miles looked around and realized that our social commentator was not alone, they had walked right into a crowd of the hungry and those willing to risk their own skin in order to protect another's. Most wore insignias of the Occupy movement, a nationwide resistance to those banking on the ignorance of just how severe the situation has become. Unfortunately, most of their success at accumulating collective momentum has been long forgotten, as it was buried between headlines of horror and the upcoming fall's fashion tips.

The rebels were serving a rather delectable spread of warm breakfast items, protected by a perimeter of boxes filled with warm clothes for the upcoming fall, and every once in a while they managed to warm a heart or two of the passing pedestrians intent on remaining passersby.

Miles turned to share in the warmth with his traveling companion, but she had vanished, though he was beginning to suspect that she might be a figment of his underworked imagination. How else could he explain the surreal feeling that he was looking into his own reflection? Except that she seemed to have a better grasp of his discontented condition than even he had been aware, plus she was a lot prettier.

But alas, the glittery mirage of unbridled kindness reappeared, even if only to him, though the street folks seemed to take notice, as she made her rounds of trading morning smiles for dirty dishes. He watched her return a stack of reusable breakfastware to the buffet, it was a zero waste operation amid the littered streets of the tourist season, and somehow the disposable population of those with no income were the only ones acting with any sense of personal responsibility. Perhaps it was because this was their home.

She bounced back into his bubble and exclaimed, "Isn't this just wonderful? Really gives you hope that humanity might not be completely lost after all, just a little misled about the journey, confused about where we're headed and too caught up on getting there to realize that we already live in paradise. But these guys get it, just look at all the smiling faces and full bellies around us, and even though the hipsters can't see it, these brothers and sisters out here have sacrificed far less of their dignity by simply refusing to exchange integrity for a paycheck."

To hear her say it, made you believe that they had stumbled upon a hidden oasis of never ending abundance, and maybe they had, though he imagined that she could spin a house made of dirt into a cozy cottage getaway that no amount of wolves could ever blow down. She had a mystical way about her, a radiating vibrance that pulled you into her orbit and refused to let go until you were consumed by the gravity of her quantum entanglement.

He was getting there, as he continued to spiral out of control, anticipating the cosmic delight that no doubt coincided with a full and complete touchdown, though it seemed his landing gear had gone weak in the knees, both left wheels, and he now found himself on a collision course for unknowable adventure.

It was at this point in his descent through time and space, that he recalled his tour guide's scantily clad steps, she'd been barefoot all along this first leg of uncharted itinerary, but it somehow seemed to have slipped by the current occupation of his mind. He'd been unable to peel his eyes from the words she hung in the air, desperately clinging to each and every one, and helplessly hoping to catch just another glimpse of what it must mean to truly be alive.

As he finally let his gaze drift below the horizon to confirm her nonconformity, he concluded his research with the assumption that her treads must be far tougher than any hard times offered by the street, yet upon closer inspection, the delicacy of her toes told another story, as they seemed to effortlessly float across the crumbling of this concrete world.

Miles caught his breath and looked up just in time to catch the next train of her unrelenting brainwaves. He knew it was now or never, but that it was already too late for a premature ejection, so he'd better buckle in and prepare to be fully engulfed in the inebriation of her swirling atmosphere.

"If only there were a way to clue in the rest of the world to the great mystery that flows through each and every cell composing her symphony. To show them that they are a part of a whole, not the lost particles hurdling into oblivion that the control grid would have them believe.

The mechanics of mayhem are terrified that we'll lift ourselves out of this state of separation, as we combine forces to throw a monkey wrench into the heartless core of their machine. So they keep us at war with each other, both on the battlefield, and with every iteration of a tale as old as time, us and them. Race, religion, sex, politics, and class divisions tear us apart, and remind everyone that you have to look out for number one, before you ever consider glancing towards those who seem to have no one else looking out for them.

So anyone born into a privilege that they can't even acknowledge because it's all they have ever known, which is basically everybody, in this country at least, they're all caught up in the pursuit of increasing that privilege, as they simply try to create a better life for themselves and their families. And of course they're not privileged, they're no heir to the throne, they had to work hard for everything they've ever gotten, they grew up in the dirt and built a life out of nothing, even if the privilege was that they were allowed that opportunity to begin with.

So they work hard and save up, and genuinely think it a noble task to provide nice things for the ones they love, school clothes and TVs and central air and houses and cars and extravagant christmas lights all wrapped up in a disposable lifestyle, and then a vacation to forget it all. A life filled with the modern amenities that one can't live without, except that there are millions living without food or shelter as our own streets are filled with humans dying of hunger and hypothermia. But what could they ever do about it?

So they don't, don't even think about it really, who would want to? They've got their own problems to worry about, the bills stack up pretty quick when you live without a care of the world, so what's so wrong with letting those other people figure out their own struggle to survive for themselves? And now the victims of oppression are left with no voice, and any language that doesn't spew subservience is left untranslated, so we've essentially sentenced the vast majority of our planet's population to an eternal slide into nonexistence, but at least Junior got that new gameboy he's been begging for."

She paused her momentum to snatch a passing tumbleweed of plastic as Miles finally found a few words to contribute to the conversation.

"Okay, I get most of all that. You've connected some serious dots that I had no idea were part of this greater constellation of corruption. You broke down some preconceptions and untied whatever knots were tethering me to the weights of the world, to a point that I can't unknow what I now understand to be some pretty universal truths, but there's just one bit that I can't get behind."

She looked up from her street side scavenger hunt and focused her gaze onto his. Her eyes sparkled more than the dress, they seemed to reside just on the threshold of hazel and deep brown, gently fluctuating with the light and hinting at some ancient secret knowledge hidden even deeper beneath their cosmic web of entrapment. She seemed to be glowing even more than before, perhaps it was the satisfaction of achieving full-on engagement with yet another soul lost at sea, but he guessed that she was more excited by the prospect of a philosophical challenge.

"You see, the thing is, well, you do know that gameboys have been extinct for nearly as long as the thylacine, don't you?"

Her intense preparation of rebuttal exploded into laughter, and then melted into a string of giggles that he wished he could somehow stuff into his jacket pocket and savor for the rest of time. She recomposed herself and shot him a big smile, seemed to be satiated with the tickle of his semantics, which he imagined might have earned him at least a few points along the trail of pursuing this weaver of dreams.

"Yeah yeah, good one, I shoulda known you were a funny guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that." Another pause and a smile, "Not at all."

"And yeah, of course I know that eight bits of black and white aren't near enough to impress the current generation of impressionables. What, do you think I live on a cloud or something?"

He hadn't ruled it out.

"No, no, it'll never do. In order for the stores to sell out amid a mob of hungry consumers, to the point that their individual priorities allow good people to descend into full-blown chaos, well of course each year's innovation must exponentially up the game. Eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, PS5, and wee here we go. Now we've accelerated the level of distraction all the way to the total engrossment of a virtually bleak reality, because even the followers know that this one is falling apart.

So now they become even further lost into the tunnel vision of technology, pretending to be the hero of some made-up land of reptilian oppressors, as they try to forget about their day job of pumping shit downstream. And it seems the controllers in charge have wirelessly bred an overgrown population of docile donkey kongs, who if they truly wanted to augment their own reality, need simply to step outside and see that we are the creators of the world we live in, because we are the world we live in."

"Okay then, well I'm not that stuck in the digital dream, and I was already outside the last time I checked, so what can I do about it all?"

His question wasn't aimed as another wind-up of semasiological observation, he genuinely wanted to know what to do, needed to know, and although he'd long given up on actually being able to do anything, he knew that if anyone had the answers, it was her. So he pushed further.

"For real this time, what can I do to help? What can anyone do?

I'm so tired of being trapped in this life I don't believe in anymore. But as hard as I've tried, I've gotten nowhere in finding anything even remotely better. We're caged rats caught in this endless cycle of barely surviving the maze and settling on whatever slice of complacency the warden deems fit. And then when you do somehow become self-aware and finally claw your way out of the cage, you find yourself lost in a room full of cages, and the terror of the implication chases you into a highway of halls, as each step along the way is only another cellblock of settlement. Sure, there's a hopeful exit sign ahead, but it only leads to a darkened stairwell that endlessly spirals through floor after floor of captivity, but then again, the street outside is no place for a mouse to survive anyway.

And out there you're just unpacking the nested levels of our complex prisons of industry, blocks full of buildings, cities full of blocks, and a country full of cities that offer the mirage of something better, but when you get there and the glitz of the travel brochure fades, it turns out that they're all the same. Just subdivisions of a collapsing economic prison that has forgotten to provide the minimum requirements of sustaining life, and instead focuses on incarcerating even more inmates as the crumbling infrastructure sentences an entire planet to death.

And even if you did somehow escape all of that with a clever getaway scheme you ripped off of Ratflix, and then ran and ran until you reached the end of the developed world, you'd take one step into the wilderness and a hawk would swoop down and scoop up a tender little cage-kept snack who knew nothing of how to survive in such unfamiliar terrain.

So what can I do about it all? I'm at a loss. I've been at a loss. I'm in a losing battle with this wheel that just keeps spinning and spinning, no matter how hard I run. I try to be unconditionally compassionate, more than most it seems, and I try to be responsible with my personal impact to all of life around me. I recycle and give blood and donate to Greenpeace, but no matter how hard I try, the weight of just how astronomical this planetary crisis has become, only slams me to the ground, as it crushes any lingering hope that one person can do a damn bit of good against an entire empire of evil."

Miles had exhausted the capacity of his lungs toward the end there, his face wearing the defeat he'd resigned himself to, and with another deep breath came an expression of pure acceptance.

"So I crawl home broken, climb back into the cage, and attempt to sleep it off so I can try it all again tomorrow."

4

She didn't respond right away. He couldn't tell if she was waiting to make sure he'd expelled every last drop of himself, or if she was just looking for another shrub to disappear into as she shed the clingwrap of his codependency. Though, when he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his glistened periphery, all he saw was the empathetic gaze of someone who truly understood exactly how he was feeling, and he found it strangely comforting to know that at least one of them did.

"Oh sweetie, I understand exactly how you're feeling. It's tough, I know, and nothing out in that world makes it any easier, they only provide the illusion of convenience as a mechanism of tightening their stranglehold on humanity's future. So try try try as you might, but trying never got anything done short of a lynching, and we've now entered the age of getting shit done.

So what can you do? You can do what feels right. You can find passion and a sense of purpose among an infinite number of ways to fight on the frontlines of our socio-ecological crisis, or what one might even call, the great convenience war.

Those folks back there were doing it, risking arrest even, and sacrificing their saturday morning cartoons to feed the people they saw starving in the streets of their community. And the community saw them. Sure, most people walked right by with about as much notice as a sub-prime foreclosure, but the people that were ready to be inspired, were. Sure inspired the hell outta us, didn't it?

So find your heart, your way to fill the world with perpetual love, you just gotta find your niche. If you wanna feed the people, then feed the people. If you wanna house the people, house the people. If you wanna stop violent energy extraction on stolen indigenous lands, then by all means, get to it already. If you wanna sit on the couch and flip through channels that you don't even like, while you take pride that you sent ten bucks to Greenpeace, then at least do that. Or if you wanna take on the biggest and baddest of them all, if you wanna help topple the ivory towers and bring liberation back to the garden, then all you gotta do is start living that with every step you take, the rest will all fall into place as it's meant to.

And if you want to do all of the above, all while finding your own flavor of living in a good way, then do that. And walk the talk. And through your actions will sprout a trail of inspiration, as those who feel just as lost as you do right now, catch a glimpse of light through the darkness that's consuming the world around them.

Like this plastic I picked up. I know I'm never gonna be able to get it all, but I carry the mindset that me seeing it, is the same as me putting it there, which is easy once you've traded your individual privilege for a broader sense of personal responsibility, and my style of meandering the maze is sure to rub off on a few of the onlookers along the way. I mean, it's working on you, itn't?"

He had no argument there, and shot her a look that confirmed the accusation, so she continued.

"And it's worked on others, and then I've seen them inspire more people, and you will too, and with what started as just one person living her truth, can spread and evolve and grow into a planetful of plastic pickers learning to live in a good way.

Waking up is a process, and those first few steps out of the warm cocoon of all you've ever known can be a little scary. It seems like a cold cruel world from that shattered perspective, but with each step towards life outside the bubble, comes a greater sense of belonging there. Then as you become more comfortable with the crisp morning air, you find that your actions keep you warmer than the wool pulled over your eyes, and before you know it, the sun has risen to spread light into the shadows, and you wonder why it was that you ever hesitated in the first place.

But nobody's got it all figured out yet, and some are a little more clueless than the others, it's got nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with conditioning, so sometimes you have to take baby steps. Ease them into a new way of thinking with just a few kernels of their unpopped potential and let them bloom from there. You can't come right out of the gate with all the nonsense we've been going on about with just anybody, I knew you were down as soon as you walked up, but any normal person, no offense, would now pronounce us lunatics and have us committed for life.

Or maybe a lot of it they even agree with, but they're so far down the rabbit hole of defeatism, that they've lost any sense of personal power. See, that's what people don't get about this unwanted responsibility of helping some other person's planet, not only is it their planet too, but they also gain this incredible authority to take the reins of the world around themselves and sculpt it into a better place. They have to remember that every widespread movement of change, started as one person's narrowspread movement of change, they simply planted seeds along the way, and before they knew it, an entire forest stood tall and strong and unstoppable.

And one person can do a whole helluva lot with a little unbreakable determination, I mean, just look at Greta Thunberg."

"Who?"

"Are you kidding me? Where have you been living, under a rock?"

It had certainly felt like it at times. He used to keep current on the events of the world, chasing links of environmental collapse, reading articles of how our clothing is really made, and our food. He even tuned into the five o'clock fear factor that reliably failed to report on anything of any pertinence, except of course for the latest scandal hitting the political theater that he'd long ago suspended any belief in. Keeping up on what was going down had only driven him further into madness. So many terrible things hitting him from every angle, and no one doing anything about them, or even vaguely seeming to care, so why should he?

And as he slowly disconnected from the screen, he actually began to feel a little better about it all, none of that stuff affected the reality he was living in, and he found a taste of freedom as he unchained himself from the weights of the world news.

But then as he looked around, he realized that no matter how far from the dominant culture he tried to position himself, he was still surrounded by prisoners desperately clinging onto some fading dream, and unwilling to even acknowledge that the alarms were about to start going off. So he did the only thing he knew how to, climbed back under the rock and braced for impact.

"And here I thought I lived outside of the loop. So anyway, Greta is this Swedish sixteen-year-old phenom who has taken the world by storm. She grew up in the unchanging climate of global warming denial, or even acceptance, and became fully enraged that none of the so-called adults were doing anything about it. She started at home by insisting her parents do their own research, which resulted in the life changes that seem obvious once you understand the gravity of the situation, but she didn't stop there.

She was inspired by the student-led walkouts in Parkland concerning gun violence and school shootings, so she began her own school strike, where every single friday she ditched the classroom and posted up in front of her nation's parliament building. By herself.

She held signs pleading that lawmakers do the right thing and properly address the crisis at hand. And to the critics who felt that a child's place was locked in the halls of mandatory indoctrination, where she found that no one even mentioned what is certain to be the biggest challenge she will face in her lifetime, she simply responded that, "Since you grown-ups don't care about my future, I won't, either."

Her political opponents insisted that if she wanted to bring change, then she should return to school and become a scientist, a laughable delay tactic as ninety-nine percent of the world's scientific community is warning of imminent threat, yet the pocketed politicians claim they know better and keep rolling out the same garbage.

So anyway, here's Greta, sitting by herself on the sidewalks of the Swedish parliament, rain or shine, every friday, and then something miraculous happens. Through one person's passion for doing what is right, against all odds, for simply listening to the voice inside that spoke of personal privilege, responsibility, and power, she began to inspire more kids to play hooky and stand by her side. Her momentum kept growing, and her fanbase, and soon there was a global day of school strikes that spanned the continents with over a million premature voters demanding action now."

"I've never even heard of this."

"No, you wouldn't have noticed it here, even if you were tapped into the kool-aid, our media ain't got time for nothing that doesn't perpetuate the narratives of stagnation. There were strikes here too, a lot smaller, because we encourage our youth to keep their activity on YouTube, away from the streets until they're old enough to know better. But that's where they found videos of the growing resistance that not only welcomed their underdeveloped acceptance of a broken world, they actually needed these troubled teens to stand up and fight alongside them.

YouTube remained the only source for footage of the Youth Climate Strike in America, but Greta began to see actual results, as politicians around the map saw no choice but to finally acknowledge the power of the people, especially those who would be of voting age by the next election. Greta has been nominated for a nobel prize, you can find her face immortalized in the street art of those spreading her inspiration, and all because she lived her truth, no matter what anyone else had to say about it.

She and her family stopped eating meat and dairy once they discovered that industrial meat, and meat by-products, are nearly as responsible for greenhouse emissions as the fossils that fuel our pizza delivery.

They stopped buying new clothes, because even a single petro-free cotton top consumes over two thousand gallons of water, that's over a two year supply for some thirsty child laborer out there, plus the overstocked garment industry accounts for another ten percent of our carbon-based footprint.

They stopped flying in airplanes, which required a career shift for her mother, but it was unavoidable once they faced the facts that commercial air traffic is one of the most energy intensive elements of modern civilization, so much so, that a single cross-country flight has the negative impact equivalent of three lifetimes of not recycling. Of course, recycling's just another strawman that excuses the gross consumption of beer cans, though that's a loaded topic we'll have to reclaim on a later flight.

But Greta wanted to come to America and see the mechanisms of mind control firsthand, because she knew that the grassroots of the playground were much more resilient than anyone gave them credit for. So how did she get here then? She took a sailboat. For three weeks on the high seas, maybe a little less convenient than the red eyes of jet lag, but I'll bet it was quite an adventure.

And the adventure continues. She helped organizers with more schools strikes here and her campaign trail inspired millions to join in, plus she got to address world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, the one that our president only made a brief appearance at, since he had better things to do than to do anything about the fate of the entire world.

So you're never gonna convince me that one person can't make change, but it requires more than just tweeting the talking points of empty rhetoric, you have to go out there and do it. You have to be it. You have to live the change that you know in your heart is necessary for the good of all. You can't sit around and wait for some sign that the time is nigh, because the time is now, and the scale of action that we need right now doesn't happen all on its own, it happens on your own, so own it."

She dropped the mic in his lap and waited on his next excuse. He was out of them. It was time to do something more than wishing he was doing something more. He didn't know what yet, but he had this growing feeling that he didn't have to, and that was filling him with the confidence to get out there and figure it out. Especially if she was gonna be there.

"I'm ready. If she can do it then so can I, but I dropped out of school a long time ago, so can't really hop on board with her program, now can I?"

"Well, you could, her movement has expanded beyond juvenile delinquency and now there are strikers of all ages out there supporting the voices of the youth. Or, have you ever heard of XR? Extinction Rebellion?"

Again a no, so she faded into another montage to fill him in on the backstory.

"It started in London with some privileged white folk, they had genuine store bought educations and everything, so, like real people, scientists and shit, not just another campout full of Indians and hippies to write off as freeloaders standing in the way of progress.

They present some compelling facts about the status of our sixth great extinction event, the one we're living through now, and their demands are simple. First and foremost, the world's leaders must acknowledge that this is a crisis and declare a state of emergency, otherwise it seems unlikely to convince the government subsidized deniers that it's anything but a hoax. Only then can we even begin to come up with a plan, which they want to see include a reduction to zero carbon emissions by 2025, twenty-five years earlier than the Paris Accord targets, but only five years before the IPCC's deadline of irreversible feedback loops and runaway climate catastrophe.

They're not just sitting by the phone though, they mean business, like, big business. They've been assembling at the banks that are funding the continued construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, because why are we building more conduits of devastation when we're already burning alive, and there they've been supergluing themselves to the doors and windows into our financial futures. Another scene of child's play perhaps, but their goal is to get arrested, because that's how you sneak into the nightly news, and when it's good old decent white people, people tune in.

They're involved in tons of different actions really. They've gone global and each chapter plans its own autonomous version of resistance, with varying levels of danger and thrill, but my favorite was one of their originals.

They assembled six thousand protestors prepared to trade personal freedom for one united voice, and they occupied the five bridges that lead in and out of the city. They notified the authorities ahead of time and set it up so that emergency vehicles could still get through, but no one could commute, so they were forced to listen. They laid down in the street, or danced around, it was a scene of joyous merriment and song, and no motive to run and hide since their endgame was to get arrested, though it's quite a point of privilege to anticipate incarceration without the accompanying gunshots and teargas that the rest of us get.

But it worked, the next week London had no choice but to become the biggest city in the world to declare an official state of climate emergency."

"That's so awesome. And you say they're here too? I gotta find out more about them, but did you say, gunshots?"

"Yeah dude, activists aren't people with rights, they're even writing that into the state laws of the most controversial extraction points across the country. They can shoot us, spray us, legally run us over, they infiltrate our camps and hack into our Facebooks, well, not mine.

There is a real life convenience war going on out there, and the oppressors are the only ones with guns, and let me tell you that they are heavily armed and armored. And ruthless. But that's just because they are so terrified that we will win, because as soon as the masses begin to grasp what's really going on here, they're going to be too outnumbered to teargas us all, and then we're gonna see who's left crying."

"Holy shit just got real, unless you're just messing with me again."

"No sir, the frontlines of the pipeline fight are no joke, especially not when they spend twenty billion a year in private security contractors, and we're not talking about your local mall cops here. Tell me you at least know about Standing Rock? I don't think I have it in me to recap that whole thing."

"Yeah, that one I've heard of, and read a fair bit about, but when you only keep updated through a screen, I guess it all starts to seem like a movie after a while. Were you there?"

"Yeah, but I can't get into all that right now. Look, I gotta run, it's been real nice hanging out and offloading some of my baggage onto someone who's ready to listen, and you're ready, trust me.

You may feel like some feeble little field mouse scared to venture outside the cage, but every step of your journey is there for a reason, and each one will make you stronger, in mind, body, and spirit. Treat each setback as a chance to evolve and every unknown as a new adventure, and by the time you reach that forest at the end of the road, you'll look back and hardly recognize the version of yourself that set out to do something so long ago, and you'll then be more than ready for whatever the hawks have to throw at you next. I promise."

He couldn't register that she was leaving. This was all ending as quickly as it had begun, or maybe it was all beginning as soon as it ended, either way, he was sad and happy and mad and inspired and depressed, all at once. She couldn't leave him in this condition. She just couldn't. Though he knew that she'd done more than her fair share of on-the-job training, so he sucked it up into his big boy pants and prepared for abandonment issues.

"I don't suppose you can tell me where you're going?"

"Well that's good," she cheerily replied. "But I can tell you that there's an XR meeting here in town tomorrow night. You should check it out."

"I'd love to. Will you be there?"

"Jeez dude, that's like way too far in the future for me to even think about planning anything, I live most of my life on about a two hour notice."

Right on cue, a red pickup pulled curbside with a cinematic halt, as if she'd been standing at the edge of a cliff and secretly observing her escape route, unbeknownst to the audience. She climbed into the back and turned to him with a smile, and then a wink that lit up with an arc of electricity as the seams of her eyelids made contact, and as his angel of anarchy rolled out of town, he heard her shout one last possible outcome of cosmic coincidence.

"But maybe!"

He was glowing and fluttering and all the things, at least until he realized his biggest misstep... He hadn't even gotten her name.

5

Miles didn't sleep much that night, not that he slept all that good any other night. His head was swimming in an ocean of unshakable thought. The next synapse firing before he'd had a chance to wrap his mind around the last. Veils lifted from the hidden truths of his unclosed eyes. The curtain had been drawn back, or ripped away even, and he'd seen the clockworks of a bell that simply couldn't be unrung.

His time now felt commoditized, his flesh only a funnel to pour his soul down the drain, and any lingering drops of life were destined to fuel the gears of a diabolical war machine. She'd given him so much hope in the moment, a promise of a brighter future and a roadmap of how to get there, but now he was stuck in the mud as his wheels only spun deeper into the merciless quagmire of the unknown.

How could someone be shown the way and given the keys, yet still somehow stall out before they've even turned the ignition? He was helplessly frozen. Pathetic, really. The thought of returning to the mundane made him sick, knowing that every step taken into the concrete jungle only fed the fire that was burning him alive, but what else could he do? He was ashamed to even think these forfeited thoughts of self-defeat. What would she think if she could see him now?

Well, he thought, she'd probably understand. And then she'd give him a swift kick wherever he needed it, tell him that the time for moping around was over, and inspire him to go out and become the person that he knew he was meant to be. And she'd probably say, "Remember Greta."

Oh yeah, Greta, he'd nearly forgotten the hope he felt when he first heard of her triumph over the system. He spent half the morning digging into her story, and then Extinction Rebellion, refreshed his memory of Standing Rock, thought he might have seen his mystery woman among the frozen faces of the frontline, but then again, they were all wearing big puffy coats and scarves and stuff.

And there was an XR meeting tonight. He had a gut feeling she wouldn't be there, but he knew that he had to be. He got coffee at the same spot, in the hope that she had circled back around, except this time he brought a cup from home. He milled around as long as he could, walked up a few blocks and back, but eventually gave up on the long shot of reunion, at least for now.

The day dragged on, but this time it was slowed by the tick tock of anticipation, not the paralysis of going nowhere fast, and it did finally wind its way around the clock to seven. He found a seat near the back as the gathering stirred into action, one foot in the door and the other holding open the escape hatch, maybe next time he'd fully commit to participating in his own life. Baby steps.

The first step of the program was to move past the denial. A handful of presenters shared the latest cues of catastrophe from the scientific community. Like our displaced water cycle and it's accompanying wildfires, the rise of heatsinking ice water and oxygen-free dead zones, our chart-topping ocean acidification and poisoned aquifers full of nitrates from crop fertilization, or the crops themselves, which are failing at a record rate, and scheduled for much more devastating losses with just a couple of degrees added to our sphere.

And it's easy to not draw the conclusion when our society's erased any connection with the outside world. Unconvinced of our impact until a tidal wave wipes us away in a grand finale, or well aware, but embracing the disaster and going out with a bang. But it's not going to be some instant flash of rapture, we're going to experience a slow descent into chaos, and while the masses will still have no idea what got them there, they'll very much understand the consequences of not caring.

At the moment, they're too caught up enjoying the mildest winter they've ever known, but as calamity spreads throughout the landscape, and food scarcity spreads throughout the fields, and disease spreads throughout the population, and financial collapse spreads throughout the market, they may not realize that these are the connected results of our collective misconduct, but they'll know full well, that they were in no way prepared to deal with the wrath of our ailing planet's immune system.

So the presenters also talked about coping with grief, and how to deal with the overwhelming anxiety that comes with a realization of the upcoming ecological collapse. There's those of a generation most affected, yet told that they hold the least authority to do anything about it. And then you have the more mature perspective, of having unknowingly contributed a lifetime's worth of filth to the tattered hand-me-downs that'll reek havoc long after they're dead and gone.

It's a lot to handle, the guilt, the shame, the worry, the helplessness, the uncontrollable urge to shut it all out and spiral into a sand trap of disbelief, but pretending that nothing's wrong never did anything but make it worse. So it's okay to grieve, to take the time to acknowledge and accept the weights of the world we live in, but you can't let it tie you in knots, you've got to harness the frustrations of inaction and tighten your bootstraps for the work ahead.

And now you're a member of a worldwide support group of people just like you, like-minded folks who have managed to climb out of the chemically induced brain fog once and for all, and this common unity of change is the key to evolving the way that our species walks upon the Earth.

After the grieving phase came the action sequence, a quick montage to recap the momentum that brought the movement to the global stage, and then a focus on possible acts of civil disobedience here in the states. Those blindly obedient to civilization view such acts of resistance simply as a nuisance, or an energy wasting joke, or even as criminal, but these organized demands of change are the proven tactics of providing the civil rights that we have all come to take for granted.

It is our constitutional duty to reshape the constitution into a weapon of mass protection for all. And public displays of unrest are one of the only ways to notify the public that it's time to wake up. Or maybe we could just sit around and wait for the bureaucrats in charge to figure it out on their own, they did get us this far without adult supervision, didn't they?

And that's another demand of XR, that the government creates a citizen oversight assembly, a committee to hold our policy makers accountable to someone other than the pocket lobbies of corporate interests, like, maybe they should be interested in the well-being of the people they've sworn to protect. But alas, as we uncover a clear correlation between the rising rates of financial fraud, the bailouts of a corrupted waterbed, and the piranhas who feed off of those drowning in debt. And then as the banks offer a way out of the predatory waters, they somehow neglect to mention that they are the ones syphoning America's life savings into the fuel tanks of the energy exportation machine.

Regardless of your stance on the legitimacy of our petroleum policy, only the most indoctored can refuse to believe that there's something wrong with the endless extraction of indigenous sovereignty, as we deport our own nation's vitality to foreign lands. And now even they are being forced to face the facts, as entitled white people are finding firsthand that their inherited privilege is no match for the emanating domain of the fossils attempting to claw their way out of obsoletehood.

Pipeline companies are racing the clock as they attempt to install the next fifty years of infrastructure, during a time that the world is calling for energy reform, so they've had to privately contract bullies to violently enforce the unlawful agenda of what is obviously a mafia run organization. And all of these pipes are headed directly to the docks, as our politicians quite proudly tout the increase to the bottom line, even if these privately owned profits did come at the cost of our own citizens' livelihoods.

The future of our history is at stake, and the powers-that-be are gambling it away as they insist on chasing their losses, but all you really have to do is follow the paper trail to uncover the true source of their seemingly bottomless bankroll. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Suntrust, and a bunch of other ones, all invest billions of American made dollars into the multinational corporations responsible for selling off America to the highest bidder. So whose responsibility is it to hold these financial institutions accountable when our elected officials have elected to remain complicit? Well, it's ours.

So we can withdraw our individual incomes from these free markets of oppression, as the few conscious consumers have already done. And we can campaign for the finance reform of our municipal holdings, a fairly successful divestment strategy that has already rerouted billions of dollars from many major cities, like Seattle and New York. And even the naysayers have to pay attention, when the deep pockets of US Bank pledge to withhold future investments into pipeline projects, but perhaps it's now time for a more localized accounting of our direct actions.

There's always the old superglue on the doorknob routine. Or the demonstrators that have dressed up as our planet and sprawled on lobby floors, as their accomplices cover them in the same dirty oil that pumps through the corroded veins of capitalism. And there's probably an infinite number of artistic flairs to personalize your own frontline, but the crucial element of igniting change, is to show up en masse. Just a couple of rogue disrupters are simply silly protesters bumming around the wishing well, but a stance of unified resistance, well, that's what we like to call a revolution.

Miles was fired up and ready to burn some shit down, and he wasn't the only one. Tonight's congregation spanned the gamut of demographical analysis, old to young to black to white to men and women, and every unimaginable subgenre in-between. Even a pirate.

Well, he was really just an old school hippie, Dead family and stuff, but he did run a pirate radio station dedicated to rising wavelengths, and his gruff voice felt as if he could have just rolled up through the fog of the high seas.

"Arrg mate, this bank job sounds like the real deal, hit 'em where it hurts and all, but I think it'd be best if we thought outside of downtown's financial district."

Miles heard the man behind him as the words crept past the corners of his preoccupation, but it wasn't until the guy leaned forward with an earful of secreted whispers, that he realized who the intended target had been.

"See these banks around here? Well, they get a lot of foot traffic and all, but it's mainly just the same old players caught up in the money market machine. Plus, these central banks just aren't the most logistically sound locations to mobilize the forces. But out there in the real world, now that's where we can spread our sails and fly."

Still unsure of our mystery man's pirate status, Miles finally shared a nod and a glance, as he subtly signaled for the captain to continue.

"You see, every tour kid knows that the real action happens in the lot scene. These lobbyists on market street may be the main stage, but you can only cram so many dirty hippies into the front row before the stench of the mosh pit consumes the life of the party, believe me, but outside in the fresh air is where we can really raise a stink. You follow me?"

The blank expression on Miles' face elicited further explanation.

"Guess you're not a jam kid, that's okay though, I'll put it in layman's terms for you. Just imagine the commotion in the ocean when the entire Wells Fargo parking lot is packed with protest. Hundreds of us slowing the flow of the credit line, glued to the doors and locked down to the drive-thrus, and that big ass American flag and its patriotic duty of blinded nationalism have been flipped upside down as a symbol of a country in distress. But don't stress, we'll be grilling cheese and crunching tunes too, cause free spirits rising up still know how to throw down."

"Alright," said Miles, "I can actually see that being pretty effective. People are definitely gonna notice a flash mob of that proportion, though most of them aren't going to like it too much when they can't get through the crowd to cash their checks."

"Hell no they ain't, that's for sure, and it's kinda the point. People are scared of change, and unwilling to face the fact that in order to maintain their bubble of comfort, a much greater number of human beings must fall victim to the suffering of capitalism's damaged collateral. It's easy to ignore the blatant disregard for the rest of the planet, when everything you've ever known was designed to keep you trapped in this perpetual loop of struggling to survive, but once they're forced to understand the real cost of doing business, the good hearted flocks will have no choice but to acknowledge the urgency with which we must all help those whose survival is truly a life or death situation."

"All makes sense to me, but I live in a world where nothing else does. Still seems a tad ambitious to imagine those consumed with getting ahead, ever withdrawing from the race before they push us all off the cliff."

"Yeah man, it's heavy. There's millennia of momentum behind the opposition of freedom, but all that dead weight is only going to slow them down once we unite against the institutionalization of our species.

It's like Chris Hedges says in Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, it reads, 'I do not fight fascists because I will win, I fight fascists because they are fascists.'

So maybe we can't fix the world with one bank job, though I'd feel quite accomplished to simply sway one follower toward a path of deliverance. But even if we couldn't pull that off, I'd still be able to sleep at night knowing that I'd done everything in my power to do the right thing, and I'd much rather die trying, than to live another day among the lies of this captivated denial."

"When you put it that way, it somehow seems less overwhelming, meeting an obligation not to change history, but to simply change my story. To live my truth, and to quite possibly compel others to follow suit by choosing a life of action over the inaction of defeat."

"That's it brother. Live your truth, cause nobody's truth is to slave their life away constructing the mass incarceration of their own free will.

You know what though? That whole live your truth thing reminds me of this lass I met one time, man could she shimmy up a flagpole and flip the script in no time, would be real convenient to catch up with her before the plot thickens."

Miles knew right away who he was talking about. Had to be. The last ten minutes of conversation had been the only reprieve he'd had to think of anything else, and now she was once again embedded in every thought, he could clearly picture her atop the mast of revolution.

"You didn't happen to catch her name, did you?"

"Sure didn't partner. Why, d'ya cross paths with little miss sparkle party along yer travels too?"

"I think I might've," considered Miles, realizing that he was yet to put a name to the grizzled face of his new counterpart as well, he should really get better at this whole social anxiety thing. "Well, what about you then? You gotta name? Mine's Miles."

"Well Miles, good to meet you brother. I'm Sammy, but most folks just call me Cap."

Cap, Miles wondered. Could the nickname be a reference to the tattered fedora that topped a headful of silver dreadlocks longer than his overalled torso, or had this greybeard actually received his nom de plume by commanding a real life pirate ship, even if it had been merely a pawn in the fleet of the largest naval cartel in the world? But before he could launch a full investigation into his story's origin, he was hit with an offer that any sane person would most certainly refuse.

"Look here Miles, I know we just met and all, but I can feel your heart, and I can tell you're a pretty good dude. Anyway, I have to confess that I actually came here tonight with an ulterior motive, I'm looking to recruit a first mate for this epic journey that I'm about to embark on.

I totally get it if you feel called to stick to the bank doors and fight the good fight, lord knows I was, but now I'm refocusing my energy on building a better way to live, instead of trying to tear down the one already crumbling all around us. So, I figured where better to find a like-minded crew than a gathering of minds that I actually like."

Miles had just gotten here, he had only yesterday pried his eyes open, and barely crawled out of bed this morning, was he to possibly consider stepping back through the doorway and chasing yet another promise of escape? Though, he didn't imagine that Cap's mission would fall into any conventional classification of escape, or retreat, and definitely not defeat. But he'd only known him for ten minutes, then again, he'd been ready to follow his dream girl into oblivion after only five. And what was it that she had said? Something about giving into the journey and doing what felt right, and that if he walked with that in his heart, then the universe would line everything else up for him.

Well, he had definitely walked here with a heart intent on finding its way, and Cap had felt it as he was cosmically compelled to spark a brotherhood, one that even Miles could tell was already stronger than just friends. So, what could it hurt to at least hear about whatever uncharted cartography was unfolding itself before him?

Cap had given some space for Miles to work through all that, and he must have sensed where he landed, because he continued with the itinerary as though Miles was already boarded up.

"Dude, it's gonna be one helluvan adventure. In a nutshell, we're heading to New Mexico to build an off-grid community, and we're doing it from the ground up, for dirt cheap. Literally. We're constructing Earthbag homes, you know anything about 'em?"

"Nope."

"They're kinda like adobe, and kinda like the rammed-Earth structures whose walls have stood strong for thousands of years, this is definitely not the disposable prefabs of our modern housing crisis. And we can do it all by hand, no petroleum, no power company, no problems, but I can guarantee that it's gonna be a shit ton of work.

Basically, you shovel a mixture of wet sand and clay into these feed sacks, stack 'em up like lego, then compact the bejesus out of them until they're hard as a rock, and when it all dries out, they do essentially turn to stone. It's super cheap, ecologically responsible, tornado proof, efficient to heat and cool, plus it looks even cooler if you finish it all off with the same modern amenities of any other building style.

And then as folks come and learn the elegantly simple techniques of monolithic construction, they can carry the blueprints of their heart to whichever underhoused community pulls on their strings. You can build these anywhere out of anything, and maybe even everywhere out of nothing. And then if we just plant a few gardens and harvest the wild abundance, we've pretty much cut the banks from our bottom line without the superglue companies getting rich in the process."

Miles couldn't help but smile as the gears of his mind unpuzzled themselves, revealing a surprisingly eloquent answer to a question that he didn't even know how to ask. What in the world was he going to do? Where in the world was he going to do it? How in the world was he going to get there? And when?

Yesterday he was challenged to quit wallowing in his privilege and to share it with the world, to feed the people, or house the people, or to end the endless oppression of the people buried beneath the concrete rubble of the convenience war. And now today, with his head made up on change and his heart set out to make a difference, it just so happened that the very next person he talked to held the keys of unlocking a plan to do all three. A way to break free of the cage and a payment plan of reparations to the Earth, with the Earth, one scoop at a time.

He couldn't not go. Not if he had any chance of believing that a better world was possible. And he already knew that there was nothing left for him in the empty shell of his stuffy apartment. So why not?

"I think I'm in. Like for real. So when do we leave?"

"Sweet. I knew I properly pegged you as a risk taker, and that's good too, because I hadn't gotten to the part about traveling in a 1973 Dodge Mahal, and towing an outdated trailer with an even older pickup. It's a badass motorhome, a classic, and it's for sure gonna break down at least three point five times along the way. No worries though, I've got a box full of spare parts and a Haynes manual. Plus, if we get stranded, we'll already be parked at our own roadside motel."

Again, any sane person would have taken the out and vacated destiny's manifest, but for some reason, Miles was all about it. He'd already given himself over to the journey, committed to the ride, for the first time in his adult life he felt like a grownup, free of meaningless worry and filled with the confidence to brave the unknown. It actually excited him to think of it, and it would make for a way better story if he ever decided to write a book or something. Plus, he thought, sanity was starting to seem a tad overrated.

"So, I don't know, it takes a car a couple days to get there, so probably five for this old beast, and another two or three for repairs and such, maybe a pit stop or two along the way if we run into a side mission of misadventure, would like to get there before it gets too hot out, so I don't know, ummm, how 'bout tomorrow?"

Tomorrow? Was that even possible? He still had to deal with his apartment, and job, and pack a lifetime's worth of baggage into a knapsack or two, but then again, would he ever do it if he didn't do it right now?

And what was it she had said about her own journey? That she operated on a two hour notice, ready to float away as soon as the next call came in. He knew that his internal compass was nowhere near as dialed in as hers, if it ever could be, but he knew that this felt more right than anything ever had, so if she could be ready to hit the trail before her hat had even hit the ground, then surely he could make it happen overnight.

6

For the second night in a row, Miles didn't sleep. It took a few passes, but by sunrise, he had shed enough clutter to stuff his future into a duffle bag. He hauled a load of donations to the shelter, arranged for the single mom next door to craigslist whatever she could, stopped by his job and broke the news, then wrote an email to break his lease. He didn't want to cross a blazing bridge on his way out of town, which was tough with his overnight deadline, but he did somehow manage to ease out of his prior obligations in a good way, though he was pretty sure that there was no turning back.

With every step of letting go, he felt a wave of relief, a new sense of freedom that came with each release of worldly weight. And by noon, he left his disheveled shelter for the last time, and floated down to the antique roadshow triple parked in a loading zone.

"Game on," said Cap, as he pulled free of civilization's grasp on reality. "D'ya manage to get any sleep last night? Yeah, me neither, but over there's a jug of dangerously strong coffee, and that futon folds into a bed if ya need it."

Miles took a moment to check out his new digs. From the outside, it looked like what you'd expect a fifty year old traveler to resemble, worn and torn and a touch of rust around the edges, but as you stepped inside the cabin, you were immediately transported to some ultramodern era of bygone nostalgia.

He'd renovated it with the glitz and glamour of a '50s diner, complete with checkerboard floor and chrome trimmings, but through the retrofitted facade poked an array of LED accoutrement that hinted at some alternative timeline of future sailors. MP3 and GPS, the AM dials of his low frequency transmitter, and his initial inspection even found a built-in TV, though he'd later discover that it was exclusively used to screen reruns of Grateful Dead shows older than he was.

A kitchen of cast iron and cabinets of quinoa, the bathroom had been converted into a five gallon composting toilet, and one of the closets was devoted to being a bongo-laden jamstation full of fireside entertainment. Yep, Cap was a hippie, alright. And Miles had just hopped on a tour bus headed for the hills, to build a house out of dirt, good thing he'd given up on all that sanity mess.

Cap may have seemed a little unorthodox to the squares in the grid, but he was quickly proving to be nothing short of brilliant. Within the first hour, he'd broken down the social constructs of race, religion, gender, and marriage, and drew crazy connections between these manmade concepts and how they've been used to contain and compartmentalize the diversity of the human spirit.

"They keep us restrained to neat little boxes of black and white, where it's easier to keep a lid on any one individual voice at any given time, and it keeps the social caterpillars from ever taking flight to realize that living is meant to happen in the gray area. Nature doesn't conform to strict guidelines and stiff expectations that dictate who should do what and when and why. Life is a lot more fluid than that, the Earth is a liquid, and we are the drops that make up her being. We're not meant to be privately bottled for individual resale, we're destined to flow through eternity with an understanding that the strength of an ocean lies not in the separated components of molecular structure, but in the collective authority of the unified whole, which is indistinguishable from any particular fraction of that same body of water, no matter what kinda misprinted label you slap on it."

It was deep stuff like that for the first hundred miles of dark foggy mountain pass. They left at night to beat the traffic and the heat, but the heat caught up, as they found themselves stalled on the shoulder with an overworked carburetor.

"Told ya we'd run into something like this, kinda hoped we'd get farther along first, but it's whatever. It's this damn aluminum carb, and there's just no airflow in this style of engine compartment."

Cap cleared off the center console and lifted the green vintage carpet that concealed the motor, everything was right there between the seats, and it was a big one.

"This here's the four-thirteen, supposed to be unstoppable, at least that's what the old timers say. Of course, they told me about the whole carburetor issue too.

We should be alright though. As long as we're cruising, it'll get enough air to keep cool, especially if we ride at night. And if it overheats, it's not really that big a deal, we just gotta let it cool off for a bit, then pop off the air filter and pour some gas into the carb. I mean, it could always explode and catch on fire, but there's an extinguisher back there somewhere."

Miles knew a bit about cars from a previous life, but this was way above his pay grade, which reminded him that he was newly unemployed, and homeless, and stranded deep between civilizations, but at least there was a futon.

They chilled on the couch while the engine cooled off, a couple cigarette timers and away we go. No fireworks this time, as the drizzle of high octane primed the steaming carb. It pretended like it wasn't gonna catch until they gave it one last try, the rumble caught them off guard and excitement clouded the fumes hanging in the air, then they remembered that the rig had to get reassembled and moving fast, before it overheated again.

Cap had promised adventure, and delivered, and the gift kept on giving with an encore performance every hundred miles or so. After a night and a half of intermittent momentum, they had gotten pretty good at the open hearted pit stop, and pretty good at chilling with style when the race got delayed, down to the cooler full of ribeyes as they coasted into the rest area for barbecued brunch.

It wasn't all fun and games though, there were some actual roadside emergencies peppered into the mix, like when Miles checked the mirror to make sure that the truck was riding okay...

"Whoa man, pull over, we lost a tie-down."

Miles could see the yellow heavy duty ratchet strap dragging behind the load. It must have been rubbing against a metal burr on the trailer as they carved a path through all those foggy mountains. They had just refueled after sputtering into the station, nowhere near top speed, so as Cap pulled past the rumble strips, Miles swung open the door and checked on the cargo.

"Actually, scratch that..." Miles could only afford a split second for dramatic effect, "...we lost the truck."

"What? Are you serious? Shit man, where is it?"

"Um, it looks like it's just sitting at that stop sign back there."

Miles hopped out and tracked back as Cap worked on turning a U with his extended load, but at least it was a few thousand lighter. He arrived at the scene expecting the worst, at least a displaced headlight or something, but the pickup was somehow completely unscathed. There it sat perfectly at a stop sign, as if the invisible man were waiting for a break in traffic, and good thing he'd engaged the emergency brake, or else it would have rolled backwards into the woodline waiting downhill.

Or what if it had broken free of its bonds around one of those blind curves overlooking oblivion? Or on a busy interstate? Miles was shaken by the good luck of their misfortune, but Cap seemed as calm and collected as ever, as he reloaded the dislodged vessel.

"Yeah man, it was a lucky break down, if you wanna call it that. Just like all those perfect spots we keep coasting into. It ain't luck though, I've been doing this way too long to chock it all up to coincidence. It's because we're following the map of the universe and letting the flow guide us to the next point of interest. If we got too caught up on getting to where we think we're supposed to be, we'd miss out on the magic that happens when we give ourselves over to where we're at right now.

And yeah, we're still gonna break down and stuff, especially in this old thing, but you'd be amazed at how serendipitously it all works out, when you simply roll with whatever life's got in store for you. But on the flipside, if you try to fight the momentum of the infinite cosmos, well obviously it's an uphill battle, and it's gonna feel like the weight of the world is holding you back from ever getting anywhere.

And when you understand the intricate web of interwoven storylines, it's easy to assume that the apparent setback was actually a lifesaver, like maybe we stalled out to save us from a detour, or maybe the truck blocked the intersection just long enough to stop that teenage driver over there from pulling out in front of a speeding semi. You never know."

"Wow man, that's a pretty remarkable way of dealing with the stress and disappointment of the chaotically unexpected."

"Yep, plus the best way to eliminate disappointment is to eliminate expectations, then nothing's unexpected, or everything is, or something like that."

Cap was full of insights that he almost understood, but he wasn't full of himself about them, he'd experienced enough of the world to have lost his preconceptions of it. He knew enough to know that he didn't know it all, and he was open minded enough to consider adjusting his opinions as his thoughts were ever expanded. He genuinely wanted to hear what Miles had to say, no matter how naive or misinformed it was, and his gentle nudges of redirection felt more like concepts to explore than critical breakdowns of flawed logic.

"Plus, if we'd have gotten along our way when we first tried to, we'd have missed out on the world's best grilled cheese."

Cap motioned to the diner attached on the side of the gas station. It's oversimplified signage bore no corporate logo, it simply stated the facts in the least amount of letters, EAT. As Miles admired the cleverly crafted non-branding, his eyes drifted to the smaller red words that crowned the doorway, Home of the World's Best Grilled Cheese.

Perhaps the universe was insisting that the team slow down and find out for themselves, and Cap was definitely insisting, and treating, so Miles could find no reason not to ride the wind on this one.

They emerged from the promise of global domination with two baskets of runny egg cheesequakes and found a seat at a nearby picnic table. Before Miles could dig his way to the molten core, he noticed an eager onlooker patiently awaiting the forecasted eruption, her eyes twinkled with a glimmer of hope that debris would fill the air and she'd be called into action to assist with damage control.

"Timps, get over here, let those folks finish eating without the scrutiny of your closed circuit surveillance."

The tender voice floated through the air over Miles' shoulder, he risked a peek and got caught by the inviting smiles of neighborly charm, as they drew him in to coax an involuntary response of cheesy goodness. The pair were something out of a cartoon, Miles thought, in the best kind of way, like some kid's imaginary friends come to life and out for their own spinoff of animated whimsy.

"She's a sweetheart, this one, but she can smell a pushover from a mile away. Her name's Timpsileh, or Timps, and I'm Annie, and this over here is Spaz."

Miles connected with Spaz, both forewent any kind of vocal nicety, as simultaneous nods expressed mutual feelings of instant friendship, while also conveying mirrored mouthfuls of gooey deliciousness.

He was tall and thin, his shaggy brown hair seemed to be at the growing pain that most would consider an awkward phase, but it meshed with his entire persona seamlessly, as if he'd just awoken as a real boy, fresh off the fun factory showroom. His thoroughly broken in flannel and purple corduroys were covered with at least thirty-seven pieces of flair, buttons and patches and dangling strips of red cloth, much evidence of self-mended road scars, but not in a way that suggested hard times, rather a lifestyle of hard work and even harder play, as if anything you could throw at him would simply roll off the fringes of his rag doll motif.

Aha, that was it. Raggedy Ann and Andy, or Annie as it were, and she fit the role just as perfectly as her companion. An old band tee and a paisley skirt crept out from under an army jacket that was just one size too big, and so were the unlaced black boots that tied it all together. Her chin length waves were pulled back under an indigo bandana kinda thing, they were a deep dirty blond, almost golden, and there was a glimmer of strawberry somewhere in there, at least until the light passed by and it transformed into strawberry blond filled with sparkles of golden dirt. Her eyes were on the hypnotic cusp of blue and green, and a few light freckles hinted at a girl next door, but she had obviously been much farther from home than he could ever imagine.

Cap was finished chewing first and introduced the ranks, by the time he got done with his version of a short story, they were fascinated with the whole thing. They talked of a few off-grid communities they'd stayed with, and had even helped for a week building an Earthship, a different style of Earth building that utilizes old tires packed with dirt. Now they were hitching their way back home, or to one of them anyway, but not in any particular hurry, and the dirthouse was about halfway in the right direction, so it only took a basket of pimento cheese fries to forge an alliance, luckily they traveled light.

They each carried a bag that exuded just much character. Hers with a two foot bundle of sage wrapped in a strip of yellow cloth, and his was strapped down with a bunch of skinned sticks and, was that a boomerang?

"That thing really come back to you?" asked Cap, as Miles wondered the same thing.

"Nah man, it's a hunting boomerang, what they call a kylie, it flies long and straight, just what you want for a turkey, or a squirrel, or the occasional kangaroo."

"You any good with it?"

"Getting there. I scared this off a turkey a while back." He jiggled a brown and white feather that hung from one of the wooden dowels. "And those are arrows I'm working on, trying to anyway, just messing around really. And I carry a slingshot."

"And I've got a pretty legit crossbow," added Cap. "I've seen some deer out that way, and definitely some smaller game, and maybe a mountain lion."

Miles was beginning to feel under armed. He only had a pocketknife he'd grabbed during his last minute checkout, not that he knew how to use it for anything more than opening plastic packages that contain pocketknives.

"You boys and your toys, I'd be just as happy with a big fat cabbage steak and some homemade tempeh."

"Ah, vegetarian, are ya?"

"Hardly, though I do try to eat vegan when I'm on visitation to the inhumane world of the human farm, couldn't resist the world's best grilled cheese though. I don't like to eat animals kept in captivity, it's just not natural to have a lifetime's menu condensed to a field of barbed wire. It's not healthy for them, or us. And especially not once the hormones, and antibiotics, and all the other poisons of the industrial cornfed feedlot completely wreck the biome, of what should be an honored participant in the most sacred act of the entire circle of life, not prisoners of war to the great colonial food chain."

Spaz added that, "Plus, even if those entitled enough to own animate objects treated them as living beings, the fundamental practice of animal husbandry reeks havoc on the natural world that it has yet to swallow. The concentrated methane clusters are bad enough, but when you factor in manufacturing and distribution, along with mass deforestation, and you gotta grow all that corn, it all adds up that the living stock of your grocer's inventory is responsible for more greenhouse gas than every commuter on the planet, put together.

Now pesticides and fertilizer wash into the river, and even organic animal waste releases enough nitrogen to destroy a healthy marine habitat. And on top of that, it requires thousands of gallons of water to raise a single ribeye, a lot of which has been pumped from underground aquifers that aren't designed to replenish themselves nearly as fast as we insist on emptying them."

"And now our bellies have swollen to the point that even those supposedly free of the cage have nowhere to go. Billions of miles of fencing have divided and conquered what was once a flourishing migratory ecology, and it even had a place for humans among its waves, but that kinda life was only for the natives, who weren't real people anyway, so we simply boxed them into borders and slaughtered the free roaming food supply, which left them little choice but to become as utterly dependent on this so-called civility as the rest of us.

And don't get me started on the colonial indoctrination that we lay on thick from birth. The glorification of farm life and how incredibly happy all those docile prisoners seem to be. Of course, Nazi propaganda films touted the same thing. But then you see sweet little Bambi, and some mean old hunter out there doing the evil deed of feeding his family, so now an entire generation is morally apprehensive about eating from the wild, and scared of some kinda poison apple or something out there, so they just get in line to settle on some plastic package with a barcode that promises they did the right thing with today's meal plan.

And that's not everybody, obviously. Plenty of people from all walks of life hunt, you even hear about hunters being commended for thinning out the overpopulation of the herd. It turns out they weren't actually overpopulated though, just overly condensed into whatever tiny slivers of planet haven't been consumed by human consumption, but it's just enough evidence to prove that the deer are doing fine out there on their own.

How about we change the narrative we let wash over the young minds of tomorrow, like where's the Disney flick about the big evil farmer who sweeps in and destroys the planet, incarcerates the main characters and sentences them to death, maybe even some natives too, but we all saw that one and she lived happily ever after, right?

So anyway, yeah, I eat meat if it lived and died in a sacred way, and it's not like most of the vegetables out there aren't also destructive to cultivate in the massive scales required by our monoculture monopolies. I much prefer to eat a diet of wild foraged foods, I guess I'm what you'd call a wildatarian."

"Well then, miss wildatarian," Cap offered. "You happen to be in luck. The land we're building this dirthouse on is covered with piñon trees."

"Ooh, I tried a few of those back at camp, they're fantastic. Supposed to be a good protein source, I think."

"For sure. It's not the right season to harvest them yet, but I've got a few Earthbags full that I collected last fall. It was really easy, just picked them up off the ground. They say that an experienced harvester can get over thirty thousand calories in a day. You could also just lay out a blanket and shake the tree, but the Navajo say that'll bring an early winter, and they seem to know a thing or two about living with the wild."

"Yeah they do," seconded Spaz. "But you know, they don't actually call themselves Navajo. That's just another misinformed entitlement of the colonial invaders. Most I know, prefer to be called Diné.

And it's the same with the Sioux. Sioux is a word from the Ojibwe language that means snake, or foreigner, which is kind of an ironic exonym considering the immigrants who dubbed over their entire way of life. They'd have rather been referred to as Lakota, meaning friend, which is how they introduced themselves, but apparently the feeling wasn't mutual."

"You spend a good bit of time on the reservation, I take it?" asked Cap.

"A good bit," she confirmed. " Mainly up in the Dakotas, it's so beautiful there. Had thoughts of heading that way soonish, maybe after we eat all the piñons." She giggled out a smile of calculated innocence that warmed the driving room. "But for real tho, I'm pretty excited about them."

Miles had to know more, "How long have you been going out there?"

"Just a few years now, but we've been so warmly welcomed by so many communities that it totally feels like home."

"How'd you find yourself out there in the first place? I've always been fascinated with their traditional way of life, but it's not exactly like I can just walk up and introduce myself. Hi, I'm just another white guy trying to rip off everything you've ever known."

"You probably could with a lot of folks out there," insisted Spaz. "Sure, they may be wary of strangers, though what small community isn't. But once they see that you're there in a genuine way, people have open hearts, arms, and doors. Most don't live anything like that traditional way of life that you romanticize about though, it's a lot of poverty and depression and addiction, but also a close sense of family and a spiritually grounded community."

She added, "And you-know-who's stealing even more land to ram a big nasty pipe right through the middle of whatever existence they've managed in a country founded on their genocide."

"Ah, you guys are Water Protectors," Cap surmised.

"Yup, you caught us, not that anyone else can." He shot the same smile she had, almost identical, were these two maybe brother and sister, instead of the romantic ramblers Miles had assumed? Here's hoping.

"And you were out at Standing Rock?"

"Yeah man, all winter long."

"Long and cold," she inserted. "But we managed to keep warm out there."

"That's where we met, but it wasn't until later that we got to be as close as we are now."

Not brother and sister.

"What was it like out there?" asked Cap.

"Jeez man, that question's more loaded than the riot guns were. It was intense, and in tents, and snowy and exciting and inspiring, and a little scary, but it was so transformative to overcome it all as a family. And there were guns and teargas and stuff too, but that was whatever."

"It really stripped you down to what was truly important, what you needed to survive and who you needed to survive it with. Plus, there was magic in the air, like actual magic, you could feel it. It was like a microcosm of cosmic connections. You'd just think of something you needed, and someone would walk right up and hand you one, over and over. There was some pretty heady spiritual stuff going on, and a concentration of energy focused on the same communal objective."

"Not to be a downer or anything, and not knocking the work ya'll did, but they ended up pumping oil through it, didn't they?"

"Unfortunately so," she solemnly responded. "We could feel the drill digging on the day we were finally evicted, but anyone who was touched by their experience out there, knows that it was no failure. And now we're all weaving ourselves into the fabric of society as we spread the spark that was ignited in that Sacred Fire. And here we've met you fine folks, and together we're gonna sow some more good into the world, definitely doesn't sound like losing to me."

She finished it all off with a wink, maybe directed at Miles, maybe just out into the ether, but Miles could swear that she kept shooting him the cutie eyes, though maybe that was just her signature look.

7

The ambience of the RV had definitely shifted. The ride was full of energy, and stories, and deeper philosophical explorations than Miles could possibly have copiloted. And songs. Spaz grabbed Cap's guitar from the closet and Annie pulled a wooden flute from her knapsack, with which they proceeded to captivate the next two hours with the poetic nonsense of making the world a better place, at least until the overheated initiation of what exactly they'd gotten themselves into.

They loved it. The practiced fluidity with which the crew had fine tuned the entire procedure, the band hardly skipped a beat. They did, however, take a long overdue intermission when the headlights began to flicker across the steep grade of flimsily guarded cliffs, it seemed that the entire rig was losing power, at what would be hard to argue as the most opportune moment.

The light sputtered just long enough for Cap to find a somewhat safe place to throw it in park. He had a few ideas of connections to check, so the pit crew deployed and went to task. Spaz waved a light to warn downhill travelers of the darkened roadside hazard, it seemed Annie knew her way around the machine better than any of them, and pretty quickly she climbed into the front wheel well as the muffled shout of discovery cut through the rumble of blinded horsepower.

"I need a pair of pliers, or channel locks or something, or wire crimpers would be best, it's a loose terminal on the main power switch."

Cap was already digging for the tools, vice grips were the first to surface, and it only took a few seconds for their new chief mechanic to emerge with an, "All done."

They gathered themselves and circled the wagon, which right on cue overheated, stalled, and promptly began to roll down the curvy incline toward certain doom, with only the dog on board.

Before he could think of reacting, Miles leapt through the open door and jumped into the pilot seat, both feet jammed the pedal into the floor as the behemoth was once again brought to a full and complete stop. Before he could take a breath and fully take in how insane the last thirty seconds had been, the cabin was bombarded with fanfare and applause.

"That was freaking awesome! Just like in the movies. And to think that I had been all up in that wheel well. Musta been hanging on in reverse until she gave out, guess I'll have to thank my lucky stars for cosmic timing."

Miles stood corrected. Enough energy pumped through him to confirm that he was living, thriving actually, and fully involved in every millisecond of the moment that was now. Even Timps was cheering along.

The rest of the trip was comparatively uneventful. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, considering the substance of each mind altering conversation, and the adjacent jolt to Miles' fundamental beliefs of the world around him. They were connected to the world around him, it poured through them, some kinda spirit was alive within them that even a skeptic had to take notice. Especially once they made it to the wilderness.

The land was incredible. Breathtaking. Majestic.

"And we could throw one helluva shindig out here folks," promoted Cap. "It's this whole side of the mountain, and there's boulder formations like this all the way down it, so many good places to do stuff, and it all forms a natural amphitheater kind of effect. There's piñons all over the place, as promised, the only catch is, there's no water up here, we gotta fetch it from a hand pump down the hill. And then there's that whole other catch about figuring out how to get the RV the rest of the way up that hill back there."

They had abandoned the rig halfway up the last dirt road as they neared the very edge of the grid, after having unloaded the trailer in a nine point turnaround maneuver at the corner of second amendment street and private property avenue, after having made a wrong turn amid the dusty fingers of a GPS gray area, after having driven thirty minutes past any trace of pavement, after driving a ways out there already, after having thought that the night's shenanigans were over once they pulled off the impromptu offloading operation halfway up the steepest mountain pass. He was feeling it. Miles was riding some kinda wave of intuition, the team whipped right along because they weren't headed somewhere else, they were already there.

And now they were there, almost, and once they managed to navigate the truck around the roadblock, a specialty of Spaz' apparently, they hooked it up with a tow strap and pulled the chariot to its nest in the hills.

"Wooh, we finally made it," cheered Timps, as she took off to explore the trails of woodland creatures and the creatures that hunt them.

"Aw, she loves it out here," exclaimed Annie. "And so do I. It's right where the mountains meet the desert, and there's just so much wild to completely absorb your very essence. And all these rocks are extraordinary."

They really were. All over the place. Each outcropping provided the perfect setting for so many activities, and the first priority was to locate the perfect spot for a fire pit with built-in seating. Cap showed them around the proposed build site, the structure would sit atop a flat shelf of stone mountain, a modestly sized undertaking that Cap reckoned would only take a thousand bags or so.

"And the dirt'll all come from up here, it's pretty much the perfect ratio of sand to clay already, lucky us," he said with an expression that implied air quotes. "We just gotta mix a little water in and she's good to haul down to the bag factory."

There was, of course, a little more to it than that, which they came to realize was his customary underestimation of how much time anything would take. They normally doubled his best guess.

The top layer of soil and organic matter had to be scraped away, then the pickaxe could bust a bunch up, which doesn't begin to convey the effort involved in what is easily the most grueling task of Earthbuilding. Then they shoveled it onto a metal screen that filtered out the clumps, rocks, and roots.

"There can't be any organic matter in the bags or it'll decompose to leave empty voids."

"Now there's a metaphor about the concrete world attempting to swallow the Earth," shot Spaz.

"Good one," Annie chuckled. "How about the other day I saw this paint truck that wanted me to Cover the Earth, and then drove it home with a picture of it happening right there in front of me. It was so gross."

"I mean," said Cap. "I struggled a bit about using these poly bags, it's just more petroleum. Thought about using burlap, which can last if the bricks are the right mix, until I learned that most American burlap is loaded with chemicals. Then I got turned onto these misprinted reject bags, I feel like I'm definitely upcycling the refuse of what you call the colonial world. Plus they're dirt cheap. Well, not quite."

"Right on brother, I think you're doing a pretty good thing here."

"We're doing here," corrected Annie. "Cause we're definitely staying for a while, right bud?"

"I don't see how we couldn't. Seems to be the pretty obvious path to me, as long as we're welcome."

Cap simply gave a smile that meant it was already a given.

"Oh good," she said. "Plus there's piñons."

She had called him bud. The fact wasn't lost on our guy.

The band split up and sussed out their own personal courtyard and campsite. Miles set up an extra tent that Cap had brought along, tucked it into a cove of cornerstone, meanwhile on the other side of camp, the new recruits were posting up next to the tallest boulder on the hill.

"It's got such a great view from up there," she convinced Miles when he came over to check it out. "Perfect for morning gratitude and some meditation, or skyscraping yoga, oh this is gonna be so great."

Miles couldn't argue.

"We're not doing the whole tent thing though, just gonna sleep under this perfect little pie slice of most magnificent night sky. Should be plenty dry enough."

Spaz stepped up from a downhill walkabout, "Pretty sweet, huh dude?"

"It's so good. I like my spot, but this is something else."

"And check out over here," she motioned toward the tower's center cavity, between what was now apparently two stone giants forming a suitably flat gathering space up top. "We can totally climb in here and hang out, talk about the stars, smoke up or whatever, get romantic and stuff."

Which we exactly had she meant? The two of them? Or the two of them? The proverbial we of someone else could do it sometime if they wanted to? The royal we of all of the above?

"Ooh, it's getting dark, we should get that fire going," she derailed the speculation. "Let's get Cap."

They assembled around the most obvious location of centrally heated communion. Annie shared a few words of gratitude for the land, and for safe travels, to the ancestors of this place and to the future generations, because we are but guests within the soil of our ever-evolving mother of a planet. Real poetic stuff, but not rehearsed, then she tossed a small handful of tobacco onto the Earth as Spaz began to stack up a tipi of fallen timber.

"The fire's an important part of indigenous culture," he shared as he put one together. "Obviously. I mean, it was crucial for their survival, but there's more to it than just that. The Sacred Fire. The Peta Wakan. Through it you can build connection, and the spirits are listening, and your tobacco can carry those prayers out into the smoke screen of the universe. Each and every vibrating particle of your heartwave will have an effect on each and every vibrating particle out there, and like drops in the ocean, we are all one connected body made up of infinite individual experiences."

He lit a dry pine branch and sparks filled the air, each embarking on a unique trajectory through their limited time of existence, and all working together to construct a cohesive mosaic of warm and toasty. He put the blazing limb into the tipi and the flame hopped from twig to twig, the collective energy grew until the entire tower puffed into a burst of ignition.

"Alright, she's on. Aho, Mitakuye Oyasin."

Those words, Miles knew them, or had heard them. They were from his mystery woman, who he'd somehow not even thought about until now. He'd been too caught up on the journey to wonder if he'd ever see her again, that felt like something, but now he felt a bit guilty to have so quickly caught eyes for the next girl he met. But she was probably taken anyway, and maybe they knew her, holy cow, maybe they actually knew her.

"This other traveler I met recently used those same words, do you mind if I ask what they mean?"

"Not at all," assured Spaz. "We love to share all that we know about this kinda stuff. Mitakuye Oyasin, it means we're all related, or to all my relations. It's a core philosophy of many indigenous cultures. We're all here together, one collective organism, all colors and classes of two-leggeds, and the four-leggeds, and six and eight and a hundred and no-leggeds, the fish and winged, the trees and the grass and these stones and those mountains. We're all in this together, all helping each other to grow the best planet possible, and when that way of life and this Peta Wakan burn belief into your heart, it all seems quite achievable."

"And you start to feel such a deep appreciation for every drop of life around you, and a responsibility to care for it as you would any other relative. And you begin to feel a maternal connection with our Grandmother Earth, Unci Maka, and you feel her pain as you weep your mourning into her fractured soil. Our mother is sick and we are being called to help her, we must only listen. But for now, we could just listen to Cap play us some old Dead tunes. Whadya say?"

"You mean I gotta follow all that? No pressure or anything."

"No pressure, just that the entire fate of the world is at your fingertips, no pressure though."

"Well, if that's all."

He launched into a ten minute Sugaree, by the time he wound it back to the hook, some percussion doodads had found their way to the fire, and a harmonica. They went on for an hour, so two or three songs maybe, trading around the reins and taking the ship in new directions, though Miles mainly manned the egg shaker.

She led the most beautiful song that was easy enough to slip into. Once everyone was locked into the repeating verses, she began to intermingle the lines and coaxed out new meanings and nuances that told an even deeper story.

As it all wrapped up with a spontaneous fadeout, she shared that, "It's about the solstice, on one level at least. About the Earth's journey from the sun, and the darkness we travel through, and how the sun is just around the corner ready to wake up the world. Or it could all describe the shorter, more tangible cycle of night to day, keeping the fire burning through the coldest nights. Or on another more astrological scale, it could be about the twenty-six thousand year cycle of the Earth's wobble, and the deep sleep phase that our planet must go through, before the light once again fills every little corner with love. Or it could relate to any number of embedded life cycles in-between. Or it could just be some silly rainbow song that sounds pretty around a fire," she smiled another big one. "And with that, gentlemen, I do believe that it's come time for my own light cycle to enter its darkness phase on this darkest of new moons. I'm going to bed."

And with that, she hopped down from her perch and passed hugs all around, mumbled some nighttime something to Spaz, tossed another pinch of tobacco into the fire, and flitted across rocktops into the previously noted darkness.

She was something, alright. Confident in herself but open to the world, delicate like jasmine but tough as nails, positive through the worst of it all and excited about sharing her change with anyone she could. Her voice held notes of such sincerity, and to hear her sing, oh man. But Miles wasn't here for that anyway, he still had to find himself, so what did any of it even matter?

So then Cap rattles off with, "Well brother, she's something, alright. How long you been riding with her?"

"Oh, a pretty good while now. Been fairly inseparable for the last year or so, wandered all over the place together. She's a good one, you can believe that."

Okay, so that definitely means they're a couple, for sure, unless maybe they're just really close travel buddies. But who cares?

Again with Cap, "So, are you two romantically involved, or just really close travel buddies?"

"Um, I guess I'd say somewhere in-between."

"I don't mean to pry, just curious is all."

"No, it's totally cool man. I think we're all here to share in each other's journey, so I love to share my own. We've been what you'd call romantically involved for almost a year, but it's a little something other than that.

In a previous life, I wasn't the most respectful to the women in it, and by previous, I mean only four or five years ago. I was under the spell of colonial indoctrination, which includes a healthy dose of womanizing and objectification, with a side order of male superiority. It wasn't all the time, I could be quite sweet too, but I felt entitled to something, which went for every other aspect of my ignorance as well.

So anyway, now I've been on this life changing spiritual quest ever since camp, and part of that has included a lot of self-reflection about the negative energy I've pushed into the lives of others. Who knows how even the seemingly miniscule actions of hurt may affect another human spirit?

So then I'm out on the hill fasting and praying, and I realize that I need to take a vow of celibacy as I rewire myself, spend that time asking for healing in their lives, and working to find my own by moving on from here in a good way, hoping to share this story with other brothers who have lost what it means to hold someone truly sacred.

So then I cut all my hair off and pledged myself to myself, until I can tie it back again, and immediately I began to feel the most sincere relationships with women that I ever had, because I had no subconscious motives and I truly wanted to know their hearts. And then a few months later, me and Annie started hanging out a lot more, and sweetheart feelings swirled, but this abstinence thing was for real, which meant we couldn't get too worked up, but we've managed to find a happy medium of intimacy and space, at least until I can pull this mess out of the way.

She's my person, you know, and we've gotten so deeply connected through the experience, created so many subtle memories of our love affair before we've even ventured to another level. Why be in a rush to be somewhere else, when we're both right here now? I guess I'm what you'd call monogamously celibate."

"Monogamous celibacy, now there's a new one for me, kinda sounds like my first marriage though," laughed Cap. "A hit with all the millennials, I assume."

"I kinda doubt the kids are rapping about it these days, but it works pretty good for us. It's given us room to truly know each other, in an entirely new way that neither of us could have ever imagined. It's a pretty beautiful thing."

Miles wondered how he had not predicted the whole monogamous celibacy shtick.

"Well good on ya mate, sounds like you're right on track. And this fire's a beauty too, been looking forward to this for months, but I think I've gotta call it. Goodnight boys."

The sentiment was reflected in the road worn faces of the sleepy firetenders as the three of them smothered the dwindling blaze, but not before Miles tossed in a pinch of his own comments to the universe.

"Alright then fellas," said Cap. "Everybody have a good night of not getting any, we got a big day ahead of us tomorrow."

8

Breakfast beams urged the hillside back to life, stragglers of winter clung to the shadows, the birds sung a story as a pair of chipmunks played tag across the tops of the ancient landscape.

Miles nestled in his cocoon for as long as he could stand, he hadn't slept like that in any recallable memory and woke with an undeterrable peace washed about him, not the usual gnawing of self-depreciation, but eventually the morning sun forced him from the greenhouse and into the light.

Timpsileh swung by for a campsite inspection before inviting herself to the ongoing game of tag. Spaz looked on from the fire he had reincarnated, as a single serve wake-up call percolated back into darkness.

"Coffee?" he offered.

"That obvious, huh?"

Though Miles felt surprisingly energized as the clarity of the world ran through him. No single serve byproducts at this java shop, didn't even register as an option with the convenience of plastic world so far removed, but why was the obvious solution so unknown to the servants of civility who weren't restricted to a single back's worth of baggage?

"Lemme see your cup. Hope you like it cowboy style, strong and gritty, it's the only way this thing'll make it."

"Sounds perfect," Miles esspressed as he watched Annie pebble hop her way up the hill, pausing on a precariously wobbled rocker to wiggle out of the dreamworld and stretch her arms to the sun.

"Hihani wasté brothers, good morning to you, good morning sun, good morning trees, good morning you big beautiful boulders."

She gave Spaz a squeeze as his whisper echoed hihani, Timps insisted she was next, and Miles got his very own side hug and confirmation of warm blooded alertness.

"D'ya sleep alright out in the big bad scary wilderness all alone?"

He wondered if there were any other options available, but landed on, "So good. Like the ground hugged me in a way no sleep number could replicate. And then I woke from it with no blaring alarm clock to jerk me from tranquility. I feel like I'm still living a dream."

"Well that's 'cause you are, love. This is it. This is what it's all about. They want to try to convince you that buttons and clocks are the real world, work for the weekend and all that, but when you get to be a part of all this, who even cares what day of the week it is?"

"Plus it's scientific bro, your body acclimates to the vibration of the planet, it's like an actual frequency you can measure with buttons and clocks and stuff, down there at like eight hertz or something like that."

Annie twirled around and exclaimed, "The Earth is alive. The Earth is alive and she is singing to us. Can't you hear her?"

Miles never wanted anything more. He wanted to hear the world she belonged to. He wanted to belong to it too. He could hear the birds whistling, and the wind rolling through the trees, the crackle of the fire, but there must be something more to have enwrapped such a euphoric bubble of wonder.

"You don't even have to hear it," reassured Spaz. "It's something you can just feel, and even if you don't, it can feel you."

"And it'll fix ya right up," she promised. "But..." she dragged on. "Whadya think a girl'd have to do to for her to get one of them there fancy coopachinos off of ya?"

"Why dear," Spaz played along. "You'd simply have to pay the standard premium of any fine mountaintop establishment such as this."

Miles considered where the capitalistic satire might be heading, probably deep into the twisted tongues of all things antiestablishmentarianism.

"Anything kind sir," she acquiesced.

"You must tell us a joke. And it had better be a good one, for if you fail to satisfy the crowds with laughter, there will be mutiny."

Miles was already smiling, they all were, she was sure to make short work of the task at hand.

"Um... Okay, I got one. What did the sandwich say to the hillbilly?"

Nothing.

"Jeez man, you're as inbred as I am. Get it? In bread, 'cause he's a sandwich."

Mutiny was held off for another day.

"And I can say that, because I'm a hillbilly, used to be anyway, not really sure what they'd call me nowadays."

"They'd call a nuthouse, is who they'd call," retorted Spaz. "On all of us. They sideline anyone they don't understand, so that it's easier to pretend that they understand anything at all. You see, the key to true understanding, is to understand that you don't have to understand, then you're free to experience the great unknown without the burden of unquestioned answers. Understand?"

Miles confirmed with a chuckle and an, "Understood."

Freshly perked and ready for action, she poured out, "What a glorious day. Ooh, I love you sun. Alright then, let's do something already. Where in tarnation is Cap?"

"Alright, alright, alright," the RV grumbled, apparently within earshot of the morning coffee clutch. "I hear you out there. I'm awake. Almost. These old models are built to last, but they take a little while to warm up."

The rig bumped and moaned and rocked a bit, all from one end to the other. "Ooh, ooh, man it's chilly in here, almost ready, brrr..."

And out popped Cap from a disheveled hibernation, expecting iced coffee, but found himself enveloped by the spicy starshine of New Mexican mocha.

"Man, it feels awesome out here, gotta love the banana belt, why did I wait so long to come out here before? This weather's great. It's still cold as snowballs in the truck."

"Yep, sounds about right," Spaz noted. "When you live out with the Earth, it's only natural to wake with the sun's promise of a new beginning. But even a simple shell like you've got, starts to disconnect you from that, and that's not even counting the four rubber insulators between you and the Earth. It offers comfort and security and protection from the elements, but when you live an unsheltered way of life, those elements become a part of you, and you of them. It becomes easy to appreciate any storm as just another flavor of life, while always knowing that the dawn will come to renew your spirit once again. As long as you haven't shut it out anyway."

"That's why I can't stand it when someone says it's 'nasty' out, or the weather salesmen who predict just enough bad and terrible things to flood the doors of their corporate sponsors. The rain is amazing, and the snow, and the cold windy nights, and the mud puddles, and even the ice covered limbs hanging perilously close to the road. It's only a burden if you have to leave your nuclear powered winter warmth, to warm up your petro powered mobile warmth, to drive across town to some job you hate, so that you can pay the power bill on another week's worth of forecasted outages."

"Okay, I hear ya, maybe I'll pull my mattress out here and rough it with you guys one of these nights, but don't think I've forgotten about the winter you spent in the Dakotas. You're used to this stuff. And did I hear something about coffee?"

Spaz filled Cap's dancing bear ceramic, "That's true, but you acclimate back pretty quick. Out there we lived right in the middle of it all, ice and snow and wind, our circulation got thick with red blood cells, and by the end I wasn't even building a fire in my tipi anymore."

"You stayed in a tipi out there?" Miles asked. "Through all of that?"

"Yeah man, and some other structures too. I mean, don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy, but it built some characters, that's for sure."

"Probably coulda used a few dirthouses out there, huh?" suggested Cap.

"Like you wouldn't believe. From what I've read, I think they'd be a great fit, windproof and insulated, localized building materials, round like a tipi, probably couldn't stop the bulldozers either though."

A solemn moment passed as those two remembered the February eviction, and these two tried to imagine the unimaginable, until Cap broke the silence with, "No, but I think they might be bulletproof."

"Here's hoping we don't find out," she hopped off the rock she'd been balanced on. "But I'd be down to build one anyway, that is if you boys would be into that sort of thing."

Her motivated speech was enough to move the party to the hay bale of bags. She held one up as if suggesting the deal behind door number two, and in her best announcer voice she read the inscription off the misbranded floor model.

"Big Usty's Feed and Seed Emporium. Nourishing the world one bag at a time."

She seemed amused by the agri-marketing jargon, or perhaps it was the illustration of a happy little farm. "More like 'Fueling the destruction of nature's functioning food systems as we string everyone out on our made up Monsanto bullshit.' Oops, pardon me, I'm trying to get better about not swearing all the time. Poor vocabulary and all that."

"No worries on that one dear, you already know I have the vocabulary of a sailor," again Cap with the possible pirate backstory. "Musta said Dusty, or Rusty, or something like that."

"Or Busty," she chortled. "Welcome to Big Busty's house of substandard food particles, almost good enough to sustain life in the cage. It's got a nice ring to it, don't ya think?"

Miles suggested submitting the newly designed logo, "Might even get rich and famous from it, they'd probably only pay us in chicken scratch though."

"Oh Miles, I knew you were a keeper," as she squeezed him another side hug of moral ambiguity. "Yep, definitely gonna have to keep you around, at least until the next new moon."

She released her embrace with an extra nudge that he thought to convey something more than just friendship, but who could even interpret the nonsense language of free love celibate hippies?

Cap broke down the building procedure, which with its repetitive design was rather understandable, even to a novice layerman like Miles. They'd screen the sand and clay into a big pile of granulated Earth, though he somehow glossed over the part about all the picking and shoveling from its previously compacted form.

"Then we just gotta scoop that stuff into this here cement mixer, add a little water, and voila, one wheelbarrow load of premium dirt. Should make about three bags."

Miles did the math and calculated a grossly underestimated ton of work.

"Gotta run the generator for that thing, wish we didn't, but the solar's just not enough to turn it."

He had a big panel facing south, soaking in the energy of lengthening days, but it was only enough to power the clustered instruments of his techno-utopia.

"Gotta have tunes," he clicked the remote start of his LCD soundsystem, Terrapin Station funneled through the rooftop speakers, "It's kinda like the A-Team and Knight Rider had a baby."

Miles thought it was more Ninja Turtle van if anything, and the two of them probably thought Power Rangers, but any good Dead show should be able to bridge the generation gap.

At least they looked a few years younger than Miles, but at times seemed quite a bit older. More matured. Experienced. Worldly.

"Well, might as well get started I guess, I can show you the rest as we get to it. Unless ya'll want me to stir up sumpthin or other to chew on first."

The consensus was to hold off on breakfast, ease into a few bags and see what it was all about, they'd probably be ready for a fast break from it soon enough anyway.

"Now we just put a few coffee can scoops into a bag, and do what we in the industry call diddling, now that's an actual technical term, not a made up obscenity from some burnt out old man."

He slung the bag onto his knee and wiggled his fingers into the corners, jamming the excess baggage up into itself. "That'll make for good square corners where the bags meet, gonna be about the only square in this whole thing."

The house, we'll call it, was only going to be a hundred square feet or so, but there would hardly be a straight wall in the place. It was really more of a basic survival shelter, a first attempt at figuring it all out, a chance to work out the kinks while they stretched their backs. The flat rock floor had an abnormal kinda shape, which lent itself to an abnormally kinda shaped building. The longest wall convexed out to the southward view of a distant snow capped range, then another wall snaked its way around to the wooden form built to house the eventual doorway.

"Then we use this concrete tamper to really pack it in there." Obviously homemade, a plungerstick with a tupperware shaped mass of cement attached, nails and barbed wire poking from the top of its connective tissue, a real rat stick for sure. "And then a few more scoops and we're all done."

"Yeah, just another 999 to go," mused Spaz.

"Give or take. And then comes the actual building part."

The bags would be packed in tight, end to end, each bottom holding shut the next bag's top, from one side of the door to the other. Thirty something bags per layer, thirty something rows to the roof, one thirty-something trying to keep it up.

"And then we just tamp the piss out of 'em."

Each brick would start as a big puffy bag, eight inches thick, then they were compacted to within four inches of their life. Lots of tamping with a heavy concrete smasher. Lots. Easily the most grueling job of Earthbuilding.

By brunch they had the bags laid and by dinner it was locked in tight. They were solid slabs and would harden almost into rock as they dried, and unlike cob buildings, you don't have to let these cure before you add another layer.

"Unlike cob buildings, you don't have to let these cure before you add another layer," Cap took it from there. "Alls we gotta do is roll out two strands of barbed wire across the top of each row, they call it a velcro strip, it sandwiches in-between to tie the whole thing together. That stuff'll snag you too, gotta watch out."

Miles had already known Cap long enough to assume that it wasn't as simple as that.

"And it's as simple as that," Cap rebutted. "We're just gonna go straight up with this one, then probably some kinda metal roof or something. So it should be pretty easy. I wanna start doing what they call corbeling, you just lay a big round layer and the next row gets shifted inward a few inches, until you wind your way up to a self-supported Earthen rooftop. It makes a rounded cone rocketship kinda shape, the water and wind roll right off of it, and you can even plant grass up its slope. It'll be like an overgrown hobbit hideout or something."

Miles couldn't make himself consider the next building yet, his hands were already tingling with a tamp induced numbness that made for a clumsily loose cigarette. Spaz and Cap didn't smoke, so he and Annie got to have their own exclusive club, a social sidebar familiar to anyone who's ever stepped outside the box to light one.

"Think you could roll me one of those?" she requested.

"No promises," he held up his first attempt and wavered his hands to express the loss of feeling among his frozen phalanges.

"Ha, me too, maybe I'll try my own, see if I can manage something worse than yours." She shared an elbow and a wink, and in the time it took him to pull a paper free, she had twisted one more flawless than a tailor-made. "Nope, still got it. C'mon, let's go exploring while these squares square away some grub."

"Hey, watch it sister," Spaz fired from the makeshift kitchen. "I know you ain't calling me no square."

"No, never my love, you're the roundest little ball of happiness I've ever known."

It seemed to satisfy his artificial flavoring as he went back to the chopping block. They had a fun little back and forth, innocent jabs and made up tomfoolery, all with an undertone of deep mutual respect and love. Miles wanted that.

As they rock hopped down the hill she underbreathed, "He's such a square," and giggled the rest of the way to the most impressive stone overlook yet. They popped out of the piñon patch at the point where the hill transitioned from the gradual slope up top, to a steep drop-off into the valley floor. A large slab jutted out into the open space, revealing a much fuller view of the ridgelines all around, and a ribbon of thick fog snaking its way along the river below.

"Oh my freaking goodness," she exclaimed. "This is absolutely gorgeous, and I can hear the water down there, I can almost feel it. I think that we may have found the official meeting place of the super best friend smokers' lounge. Whadya think?"

He thought he liked the idea of having alone time with Annie, but conflicted about his sudden attachment to someone who was already attached. Could mutual celibacy possibly expand beyond the gray areas of convention?

"Sounds good to me," he finally caved. "Is there gonna be a secret handshake or something?"

"For sure, we can work on that one later though."

Miles looked forward to the day.

"I think I hear the dinner bell a calling. C'mon Timps," the big white half husky flash was already on task. "Race ya," she lured as she tore up the hill.

Timpsileh took the lead, bounding from rock to rock with Annie on her tail, she seemed to effortlessly flow through the obstacles with such finesse. He almost kept up, but without all the flash. F-plus.

"Oh you made it, good one," she poked. "And Timpsileh reigns supreme, as always."

She knelt down to give the excited pup a victory rubdown, both smiled a smile of ultimate content that made Miles want to try harder next time.

"You're such a good girl, you know that?"

"She's real chill and friendly, that one," assessed Cap. Miles nodded in agreement, though unsure of the subject. "How long you had her?"

"Um, well, she's not really ours, we've just been traveling with her for a bit."

"Oh I get it," spouted Cap. "You could never actually own another living being, she's her own free spirit and all that, fucking hippies."

"That's for sure with this one, and all the rest too, but we're just hanging out with her while our friend does some incognito water protecting. Timpsileh's got a big loving family out there, and a bunch of friends, we'll tag back up with them at some point."

"Big responsibility, traveling with a dog."

"Yep, taught us a lot, about ourselves, a lot of patience, and a sense of purpose to care for this creature caught in a mess of a world that we don't even understand. Plus, she's like so super awesome."

"Hope she likes wild caught salmon, this chanterelle quinoa thing, and piñon nut salad, cause we cooked a whole helluva lot."

"Oh Cap, you're my hero, that all sounds so delicious. And wild."

He earned himself a full-on front hug for that one.

"Eh, it was nothing special, just had this stuff lying around. Now let's eat."

"Deal, but let me and Miles dish it out, you big strong men are probably worn out from preparing such a beautiful meal."

"Be my guest, and thank you very much, my dear."

"And we'll do the dishes."

Miles knew which we she meant this time.

Spaz had gone to fetch their wooden bowls, and returned with an extra little saucer for Annie. She put a spoonful of each dish on the tiny plate, a pinch of tobacco, and woulda spilled a little coffee on it, if any had survived past dusk.

"It's a spirit plate. An offering of gratitude for such abundance in life, a gift to the Earth and the ancestors of this land we're tending. And it's a little tasty surprise for the critters on the hill, because they're just extensions of the Earth, like us. Ha, what if they like roasted piñons better, and start collecting them for us? We gotta get a chipmunk whisperer up here."

"Alright sunshine," Spaz moved things along. "You wanna sing us that pretty prayer song the little ones taught you? I bet we could pick it up."

"Oh yeah, it's so pretty, and just makes you feel nice. Thankful for food, and warmth, and life. And love." She cleared her throat and painted the sky with grace.

"May all beings be fed, nourished, whole, healthy, happy,

loved, and in love, may the whole world be in love."

Were they singing or praying? Miles didn't know how to pray, or who to, but he could sing, well enough anyway. It felt good, she was right, he felt warm and thankful for where he was right now, for this moment, and he was pretty sure it made dinner taste even better than it smelled.

9

Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.

By the half moon they had it down to a science. Geology maybe. Mornings filled the air with a dust cloud of enthusiasm, they were covered in it. Miles had never worked this hard in his life, and for so little monetary incentive, yet he felt better on every level than he'd ever known before, inside and out.

His back and arms had grown accustomed to the workout routine, the stiff neck he'd lived with for years dissipated as his core became stronger, the full days of action promised a restful recovery as any lingering insomnia was consumed by the Earth's gravitational pull. He felt nourished in a new way, by community, and purpose, by sunshine and happy thoughts and deep heartfelt conversation, he felt alive and full and healthier than ever, and each night the spirits of the hillside got a taste of whatever delicacy Cap's gourmet kitchen could stir up.

They were becoming a family. This was becoming home. The love was as thick as the coffee, and twice as energizing. They'd power through the morning chill, melted the frost from their eyes by brunch, the knee high wall showed enough signs of progress to feel good about some midday downtime. Cap's older bones were always in the mix, but the three of them became a well oiled machine, instinctively flowing through unspoken shift rotations, growing more inseparable by the bag.

He and Spaz were connecting in a big way, developing a brotherhood of mutual adoration, which only further cluttered his feelings for Annie. They'd grown far beyond coworkers as they explored the path to the best friend zone, spans of silence comforted by one another's presence, spans of intimate conversation found him opening up about things he'd long repressed, they'd formed a platonic solid that almost made it possible to not look at her in that kind of way.

The recreational use of their time kept morale in the upper register, poker for piñons and blackjack for dishes. A tennis ball challenge of most boulders bounced, Miles held the record at five, Timps was undefeated in downhill retrieval. Cap pulled out an archaic croquet set that could have been original equipment of his vehicular home inside. The once docile game of tea time, quickly evolved into an extreme sport across a wonderland of potential landslide victories.

The boys would sneak off to hone their craft of projectile hunting, casing the leftover piñons as each patron effortlessly evaded contact, and only once they'd vacated their post, would they hear the territorial cry of what had to be the mountain lion, expressing disinterest with the encroaching of two-legged competition. Unsure of a boomerang in a cat fight, they were relieved when Timps always came to the rescue, even if her primal instincts chased off any chance of a successful hunt. If they ever had one to begin with.

And eventually, she scored the first point in the hunger games anyway, she took off after a whiff of adolescent raccoon, and finished the job by the time the crew caught up. The rest of the family clung to the treetops, they'd been through enough trauma today, no further shots were slung, besides, they already had their hands full with unmasking Timps' bounty.

Spaz pulled out his fixed blade, a rather stout shine of metal with a handcrafted walnut hilt, "It's a bit big for this little fella, but I think we can get it done."

He dug into his back pocket and found a leather pouch of tobacco, a small ration, but plenty for a nonsmoker to survive on. He shared gratitude for abundance, and for this opportunity to honor the spirit of a relative in a good way, then he placed his prayer into the motionless mouth of the fallen creature and proceeded to fulfill his obligation. Miles held the tiny paws, as Spaz made the incision and began to separate the wheat from the chaff.

"You know," he said. "I'm not gonna kill anything I'm not gonna eat, it's part of my sacred pact with the wild, but dang it if Timps won't hesitate to terrorize a squirrel or a cat or a raccoon, with no intention of anything but playtime. She's got such a strong predator drive, but really only a taste for deer, which she's yet to graduate up to. It's hard to believe that her natural instincts are to seek and destroy, just to leave the remnants by the wayside.

I think she's fallen victim to the same colonial mindset as the rest of us. She eats from the spoils of human superiority, without fear of going hungry, which leaves her free to pick and choose the most desirable bits, and toss the rest out to the dogs. It's not her fault, it's the only way of life she's ever known, but we could say the same about all those poor innocent people out there trapped in a world of death and destruction."

He motioned for Miles to turn the raccoon and continued, "We can only know what we've been shown to know. And all we see, is go to work all day, get money and buy stuff, work more, get more money, buy more stuff, and bigger stuff, so much stuff that you have to work more to afford it, take out a loan for even bigger stuff, work just for the sake of work, that's what grownups are supposed to do, no worry that it's not the greatest contribution to society, or anything that you're even passionate about, which leaves us with a society of half-assed contributions and completely devoid of passion, but at least we upheld the colonial work ethic our infallible country was founded by, working for a living instead of living for a lifetime, and look at all this stuff, you're doing so good, way more stuff than you can even use, so you throw some old t-shirts in a bag, shirts from all over, shirts shipped from china to your latest vacation destination, shirts you've never even worn, or worn once as a promotional giveaway to prove how much stuff someone else had, with little thought of the global footprint it took to fill your dresser, just the extra space you need for more stuff, so you bag up a few that you can manage to survive without, and when you drop them off at Goodwill, you're reassured that you've done your part to bridge canyons of inequality, even if those lazy bums will never fully appreciate your yard sale leftovers."

Miles was beginning to feel overpacked with dirty laundry.

"And don't even get me started on the whole Goodwill sham, millionaire executives whose only good will is to hand out jobs that pay below the poverty level, forcing their clientele to start the entire viscous cycle all over again."

Spaz had successfully removed the pelt, while pushing Miles to shed another layer of worldly weights from his excess baggage. He folded it up into an origami fur ball and placed it on the rock beside him. This next part might be a little too graphic for a legitimate vegan, or for the fear factory carnivores who insist on a disconnect between farm and table, so we'll just leave it at Spaz removing a bit of unwanted interior design. He pulled a crumpled ziplock from his pocket, obviously used and reused past the manufacturers repurchase date, but plenty of life left to contain the recently deceased until tonight's cremation. He left the remnants in trail to the piñon patch, figuring that the cougar would enjoy an offering of nutrient density, Timps had no interest as she seriously considered veganism.

Spaz added a pinch of tobacco and sang a short song, a foreign language, though it was starting to ring familiar, and the finally victorious hunting party headed back to camp to celebrate their prize.

"Now we get to work the hide," explained Spaz. "We get to honor this creature's sacrifice as we pour our hearts into preparing it in a good way. And we'll forever know what it took to make our next hat, and who it took, we won't be blinded by seven degrees of separation from the destructions of mass production, and the only ones sweating in our shops will be us, which will ensure we treat each article with the respect it deserves, even patching and mending as we help it last a lifetime, because any other way, is simply wasting another's lifetime as we perpetuate the disposable nature of repeat business."

They crested the camp and held their trophy for all to see. "Got dinner," Spaz announced. "And a hat, might be a bit small on you though."

Annie squeaked with excitement, "Oh goodie, I knew you boys had it in you."

"Well, actually..." Spaz nodded toward Timpsileh.

"Oh Timps, did you show those tough guys how it's done. You're such a good girl."

"Hey now," resisted Spaz. "We did all the work, you know."

"And for that you will be rewarded handsomely. In fact, I'll even let you tamp the row me and Cap put in while you were on your little adventure. Now let me see what you've got there," she perused the treasure. "Another Raccoon, well at least she's consistent. And you got the heart?" He nodded. "And the liver?" Again. "And I'm sure you got the brain."

"You know me babe, all brains and no guts, that's the way you like 'em."

She laughed and fired back, "Think you're clever huh, I guess that means you kept the asshole too? Oops, I mean butthole, and here I was thinking you were the crude one."

"I think we all know better than that."

"Hehe, I said butt."

By the time the row was half packed, the sizzle of hot oil wafted from he fire, with every brick in the wall the aroma caught up.

"Hunters, party of three," the hostess announced. "Your table is ready, and boy are you in for a real treat. Tonight's menu includes a wholesome vegetable fried rice, a healthy dose of homemade kimchi, and our featured dish tops it all off with piñon crusted raccoon wings a l'orange. Bon appetite."

When she put it that way, it didn't sound half bad, made you think it was some kind of delicacy for the elite, like little baby cows kept in small dark boxes for the duration of their reduced sentence. And it wasn't half as bad as Miles had prepared for, quite good actually, and made with so much love and gratitude that you could almost taste it. Oh, is that what that taste was?

10

Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.

They were getting pretty good at all of it, just twenty rows to go, the end was in sight. Of course, so were the mountains they'd yet to move.

They didn't eat that much throughout the day, maybe some of Cap's coffee trail mix oatmeal, it got you an extra cup without all the hassle of having to drink it. Other than that, it was just bananas, or peanut butter, or peanut butter banana sandwiches, with honey. And then dinner would be exquisitely campstyle.

Piñon pesto pizza, with chanterelles and ramps that Annie harvested at her last unknown whereabouts. She used Cap's solar powered Vitamix to whip up some cashew-carrot cheese substitute that was actually really good. But the best bit, was that she did it on an open fire, with just a single cast iron, just the pan, no lid, it was quite mesmerizing to watch her flow through the whole technique.

"A water protecting buddy of mine showed me this, haven't actually tried it myself before, bet it'll work though."

She cleared the ashes back from a flat spot on the rock while the dough was getting crispy in the cast iron. Once it was sufficiently crusty, she grabbed it out by hand and threw it onto the clearing to sprinkle toppings like pixie dust across the surface of the moon. Then she just flipped the skillet over the creation, scooped some hot coals on top of the one dish meal and said, "Now, we wait."

Miles couldn't wait.

"It's gonna be at least a two cigarette timer on this one, you smoke one first and I'll take the second shift, then it should be about time for a checkup."

He liked her math. Her entire approach to the open kitchen was was full of improvisation and experimental culinary innovations. And a lot of piñons.

"I'd never heard of these things before camp, piñons I mean," in case Miles wasn't keeping up. "And only had a couple back then. Some Diné folks brought them I think, they're so good, even if they are a pain in the butt to crack open."

"What camp was this?" Miles asked.

"Oh, sorry bud, I mean Standing Rock. If a Water Protector refers to back at camp, they mean that one. It forever changed anyone who was there, at a fundamental level, complete life transformations were forged as we experienced the best and the worst of it all. I mean, we got to be a part of a magical utopian vision for the future, and tasked with sharing a good way of life with the rest of the world, and all at gunpoint, how cool is that?"

"Ice cold?"

"You betcha, but we had tons of gear out there, lots and lots of donations from folks that are ready to rise up, and an ice chest full of every kind of food you can imagine."

"Plus we had a pretty bangin' chef," Spaz interjected, as he walked up to the fire. "He would make up all sorts of gourmet shit."

"Oh man, my favorite was this butternut coconut curry soup he made, or the ginger honey butter drizzled over wild salmon patties and biscuits, without an oven."

"I saw him on Christmas night, grilling filet mignon in a sideways snow lightening blizzard, four foot flames, crucial."

"And he always kept such a good vibe in the kitchen, cooking with love and intent, in a tent, it was intense. He showed me this thing he does, where with each clove of garlic you peel, you think about a different person in your life, it puts you in a good way and people can taste something magic among the flavors, especially if it was them you were praying for, all eight heads worth. And he was always so humble about going all out to provide us the motivation of epic mealtime, so very humble, hashtag most humble.

Oh man, my smoke went out and I lost track of time, hope we didn't burn it. Oh well, if we did, we'll just blame it on Chef, it's his recipe."

She knocked away the embers with her hand and opened the makeshift oven to reveal a most appetizing stone fired treat, eight unburned slices of molten moonlight, it was full tonight, a far cry from the rice and beans expected by a transient fireside.

"Not bad, huh," she approved. "But hold your horses boys," she could sense her drooling entourage. "The steam gets locked in there and makes the bottom a little soggy, so I just gotta throw it from the fire to the frying pan and crisp it back up. It'll only take a minute."

She did, and it did, and once the spirits were fed, the mountainside went quiet with unanimous approval.

Cap was the first taste tester to break the silence, "Well done girlie, it was an impressive show indeed. You're something else, you know that?"

She smiled that she did.

"But..." always a critic. "But, still needs a little more raccoon for my taste."

"Timps, you're hired."

They joked and cut up and carried on all night under their first full moon together, a severely overloaded pot of popcorn erupted with laughter, there was no denying that this was the life.

Miles requested more tales of valor from back at camp, he was intrigued by the endless barrage of good times at what he had envisioned to be a pretty hostile work environment, but it wasn't all kool-aid and candy bars.

"Shit got real out there man," offered Spaz. "Surviving the cold was tough enough, but there were some pretty hairy situations out at the frontline."

"The bridge," she added. "That's where all the action was, at least by the time I got there in the winter. Tell 'em about the night Pete got arrested."

"Alright. So it was a dark and stormy night, except that these huge spotlight things were always on, they lit up all of camp and melted away any shadows we could hide in."

"We called them the DAPL lights. It was psychological warfare man, tried to screw with our sleep schedule, and then that helicopter was always flying so low over camp, it was so loud."

He continued, "So we get word that something's going down at the bridge and we all pile into our buddy's pickup. We make it up there just in time for all hell to break loose. There's a couple hundred Water Protectors packed into the front row, a big concrete barricade separated us from the arsenal of humvees and turrets and full-on domestic warfare, but that didn't stop our folks from climbing up it and trying to reach the hearts of the human beings just doing their jobs.

They're just people, you know? Just trying to feed their families by doing what is supposed to be an honorable career, putting their life on the line to protect people, just sucks that they got pulled into hurting people in the process."

"They got bought by a fucking corporation is what they did," she was getting riled up. "All of 'em, the Morton County cops, the National Guard, the governor, and most definitely the TigerSwans."

"TigerSwans?" Miles asked for more.

"Yeah, TigerSwan, private security contractors, but more like mercenaries. They're a spin-off of BlackWater if that gives you an idea. They hacked our phones, sent infiltrators into camp, ran surveillance from the helicopter and had intel on all of us. It's all been leaked, I've seen it, and they're still keeping tabs on a lot of us." She turned to look down the moonlit hill and shouted, "Good luck finding us way out here, assholes."

Spaz went on, "So anyway, tensions are getting heated out in the blizzard, the cops are getting into formation like it's about to go down. They've all got gasmasks and guns, some had huge tanks of pepper spray, and there was this big ass orange shotgun that fired so-called rubber bullets, but there was nothing playful about them, some people got pretty fucked up out there.

Then the roman legion marches one step forward, then another, then nobody could breathe. I looked off to the left and there was a twenty foot stream of chemical condiments blasting into a crowd of unarmed protectors, from behind a wall of razor wire, now how is that justified force?

And by now we could see what had us all choked up, a huge cloud of teargas had completely surrounded us. There was nothing you could do, it made your entire inside burn as it shut down your respiratory system. Nothing like I had imagined it to be. I was a tough guy who didn't cry, couldn't phase me, but I got humbled real quick when I realized that you cried because you felt like you were dying, and probably could have, if you didn't escape in time."

Annie was starting to tear up herself, Spaz had hit upon a tender subject as she relived the traumatic experience, it was about to get worse though.

"So then I look back in front of me and here they come over the wall, a barrier that they built, a line in the sand that was broken just like every other border treaty. And of course we had to retreat, we couldn't breathe, everyone except our close brother Pete."

Annie took a subtle step to the fire and tossed in some tobacco.

"He's still in front of the barricade, knelt down with his dread covered face in the snow. Praying. Singing really. He was such a passionate brother. And this first wave of like eight guys head right for him."

"He was just praying, man," Annie spoke up. "Peacefully praying. We all were, but him especially, and then these RoboCop looking mafia soldiers totally surround him, packed in tight so it was hard to see what was happening, plus the teargas fog.

Then I saw that another one of our campmates hadn't retreated and was filming another wave of battle armor coming over the wall, a bigger one this time, level two I guess. So I shout, 'Don't stop filming, they're arresting Pete over there.' Our buddy gets him in the frozen viewfinder, it was like a legit camera, professional grade kinda thing, he was helping with camp media or something, and it had a really good zoom."

"So I hear all this going on," Spaz took over. "And I see our camera guy, but his pants are caught up in a piece of razor wire and there's a thick cloud rolling over him. I take off towards him and throw off my gloves to try and unscramble the snare, I check in on Pete and they're spraying him in the face with all sorts of shit, point blank, and yelling for him to stop resisting. He was knelt down praying, not exactly the most aggravated of assaults.

By this time, the enforcements had reassembled their own frontline between us and Pete, but you could still see them throwing him around like a rag doll and dragging him back to their side for a trespassing charge."

"Fucking dicks," she looked up. "Sorry, not sorry."

"Meanwhile, I've got one razor blade free, but struggling with the other, and here come the troops, and the gunshots. They were advancing in formation and people were panicking to catch a breath, myself included, so I grab his pant leg with both frostbitten hands and yank it free of Occam's razor, just in time to escape to our new frontline of plywood shields, not that a plastic coated bullet wouldn't blow right through one of those things."

The play by play gave pause for reflection.

Cap eventually came up with, "You kids were right there in the thick of it, weren't ya? Didn't see much about all that back home."

"Nope," agreed Spaz. "You only see what they want you to see. I learned that big time out there, just how in bed the media is with the rest of the criminal empire."

"There's a couple of alright documentaries out there, but none that really focus on the prayer, or the community, that's where the real story was. The real magic. Even on that night Pete got arrested, there was magic in the air then too. They'd throw a few teargas canisters and the wind would change direction, several times that happened, and we even got a couple of the officers to pray with us before we agreed to call it a night, at a tepid two a.m.

I'm telling you, there was some real deal spiritual stuff out there keeping us alive. Alive and thriving."

"We could all feel it, whatever it was, and it changed us, me anyway. Showed me another way to live, to actually live, and sparked a belief in the good of the Earth and the plan of the cosmos that has guided me through each step ever since. Just gotta walk in prayer."

"Aho, wopila tanka, mni wiconi," she seconded. "Water is life."

Miles didn't know what he'd expected to hear. He'd seen videos of the unlicensed attack dogs and subfreezing water cannons, the girl who got her arm blown apart, but to hear it all firsthand from people he'd grown to love and admire, good people with good hearts, and with no paycheck to spin propaganda for, well, it made all of it feel a lot more real.

"How cold did it get out there?" he shifted the debriefing to a warmer subject.

"Oh man, it got so cold..." answered Spaz.

"It got so cold that cardboard wouldn't burn. It got so cold that you had to eat ice cream to warm up. It got so cold that we measured the temperature by the number of seconds an ungloved hand could still function."

"In that case," Spaz calculated. "It got down to about fourteen seconds. Negative forty. Cold."

"Water is ice," she concluded.

11

There was no song and dance routine by the firelight of the full moon, real conversation spiraled into intimate connection, which spiraled into tears and fears and dreams and regrets, they were one feather shy of a good old fashioned hippie talking circle.

Once everyone's emotions were sufficiently spent, and tobacco added to the flickering embers, the conference dismissed, only the stragglers remained for one final toke.

"Hey Miles?" her gentlest voice searched. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

Considering the last few hours of soul diving, he was a little concerned about what unexplored department of his psyche this was headed for.

"Sure."

"It's just that... well..." she held the dramatic pause in her fingertips. "I was thinking..." again with the suspense. "Race ya to the secret spot," as she disappeared down the darkened alleyway of the mooncapped mountain.

Bamboozled again.

He hopscotched down the trail as he laughed about his current predicament, layers of it, then he prayed that he wouldn't break his ankle.

"What'dya do, get lost out there?"

In fact he had, but just for a moment, took a right one piñon too early. "Hey, I'm here now, ain't I? And I heard somewhere that now is all that matters."

"Ah young grasshopper, the student surpasses the teacher, must be this moon bringing it out of you."

"Well, I'm not the one who prancercizes around like a woodland creature."

"Ooh, mister big scary werewolf, are you gonna come blow my house down?"

He wanted to.

"Well fooled you, I sleep outside. And I'm not even scared of creatures in the night, because I am the creature in the night."

She leapt at him with a roar, and while the maneuver may have landed them perilously close to the cliff's edge, it also landed her in his arms for the split second it took to land a near death kiss on his cheek.

She scuttled to her favorite seat on the rock, a rain worn contour that cupped her body as she dangled her feet into oblivion. He couldn't compute the kiss, cheeks were for friends, right? And grandmas. But what about star-crossed lovers whose paths merged at the same full moon lookout?

"Just look at her," she pointed with her eyes.

He was.

"So big and beautiful, the Worm Moon they call this one, me and her are connected in a big way."

She ever so slightly began to sing whispers of her lunar occupation.

"The moon, the moon, the moon, the moon,

she dances ov'r da sea,

she watches over us,

the moon, the moon, the moon."

"Good one," Miles said softly, a seemingly slang expression of approval he'd picked up from the travelers.

"Itn't?" she smiled. "Oh, and you said good one," she smiled harder. "Good one."

They marinated in the endorphins of the moment.

"Some really close sisters of mine wrote that one, little ones, it's way prettier when they sing it."

"I couldn't imagine that," blurted Miles, the first brave thing he'd said all night. "I mean, I thought yours was really pretty."

"My what?" she shot back. "Just kidding. Ooh, look over there, it's the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters, even if there's actually nine of them, and even if the Lakota knew it long before Hubbell was around."

He tried to find the star cluster hiding behind the moonlit sky, "Over where?"

She grabbed his hand and directed to the heavens, "Over there, that group of stars in Taurus. Just follow Orion's Belt to that big orange star, that's Aldebaran, then a bit farther and you've found your way home."

Her fingers lingered longer than was necessary for the astral navigation, her soft touch warmed the air, he wanted to connect the dots of her freckled constellations.

"You know, the ancestors of this place had such a strong relationship with the sky, they held a deep understanding of sacred star knowledge, you even hear elders talk about the Star People coming down to help along humankind."

"So... like aliens?"

"Maybe," she allowed. "Or gods. Or interdimensional energy beings. Or maybe it's about the astrological influence of their gravitational pull on our little pea brains, seems to be possible with most mythologies of celestial interference."

"Sounds kinda like the Egyptians and the Anunnaki. Big tall space gods that jumpstarted a technological revolution."

"Yeah, kinda, and there are ancient cities all over the world that fit the same mold, but most seem to be the earliest adopters of what is fundamentally broken about today's way of life."

"Like slavery, huh."

"Yep. And class divided hierarchy, and patriarchal oppression of women, and destroying a functioning ecosystem to inefficiently feed a broken one."

"And then they all eventually collapsed."

"Most, yeah, as far as we can guess anyway. But it's a mockery to assume that our narrow view of science, could ever figure out a way of life rooted in an Earth energy that we don't believe exists."

"That vibration Spaz was talking about?"

"I guess that's a part of it, a tangible energy that our machines know how to measure, but there's a lot more to it beyond our comprehension. And we're a part of it all. Maybe that's why it's hard to objectively interpret a system that we're only a miniscule fragment of. The natives seemed to have a pretty good grasp of things though."

"Like how do you mean?"

"Well, so everyone seems to know that they lived in harmony with the natural world, which suggests an alignment of vibrational resonance, but the narrative has become so skewed by the dehumanizing campaign of colonial occupation, that we only see a cartoon satire of unevolved heathens scraping by on nuts and berries. That's what you were taught, right?"

"Pretty much."

"But the reality is that indigenous food systems were highly complex. What the first European explorers described as the Garden of Eden, with its naturally manicured abundance, was no untouched wilderness. The wild was tended as it was held sacred, the continent was covered with food forests that allowed all of life to flourish.

Over a hundred million natives lived here, not the handful of strays they'd have you believe. And they maintained the garden, and ate of the abundance, and lived in large scale communities with minimal footprint. That's their proof that they were an inferior breed. When a concrete civilization looks for concrete evidence of civilization, and all they find is trees and dirt, it's easy to decide that whoever lived here was unworthy of the empire's newfound blank slate, even if they had been forward thinking caretakers who thrived for hundreds of generations."

"And it only took us a couple hundred years to destroy it all. Were there really a hundred million of them?"

"Yep. And thousands of languages. And cultures. And prayers. And then we proudly encouraged the genocide of all but two percent, who we kidnapped, abused, and whitewashed away any trace of identity."

She let the silence swell before continuing, "And then when they did eventually find the ruins of an ancient civilization, they got all that wrong too.

Chaco Canyon was a full-on city, complete with running water and depleted resources, but it didn't collapse from the subpar bureaucracy of primitive government, it was abandoned as the people came to understand that their way of life was destroying the garden.

They think that the sparse scars they've managed to uncover, somehow translate into the complete history of pre-colonial invasion, but now we're beginning to unearth evidence that humans have enhanced life on this continent for over a hundred thousand years.

So excuse me if I have a hard time buying the best guesses of anthropologists whose fundamental view of the world is based on the narrowest sliver of human existence."

"So do you think all those other civilizations were abandoned before they collapsed?"

"Some probably, but I'm sure others imploded from the exponential energy required to progress the fictitious concept of human superiority, kinda like what's happening in our own civilization now."

He pondered the correlation, "So, if all those civilizations were bad, and the alien gods all started them, then does that mean we're under the influence of malicious space entities? And is it even possible to have a healthy sustainable version of modern civilization?"

She thought for a moment, "I think that anything is possible, but it will take a thorough reimagination of what we consider civilization. We can't deconstruct a fluid ecosystem and replace it with the ivory towers of privileged permanence, the Earth is meant to flow, and us with her. We can't build to the point that our food must be outsourced, that's the fatal flaw in the whole thing, our food should be a part of our environment, the most important part.

And as far as your alien gods go, whether they gave us knowledge and we screwed it up, or if this was their gold digging plan from the start, either way, I figure that even if they manipulated our DNA to create us in the first place, I'm still a child of the Earth, a living breathing piece of a living planet, all the way down to the DNA, so I'm gonna have to stick with my mom on this one."

Miles had flown away on a carpet tour of the old world, and the outer world, and the inner world, having returned to find that the only world he cared about, was hers. His eyes shone a gaze of smittened adolescence, unless that was just the moon.

"That was beautiful." She was beautiful, he wanted to say. "I like the way you talk."

"Oh stop, I just blabber from the heart is all."

"Must be what I like about it."

She smiled, "So, do you want me to read your palm before we call it a night?"

He'd have agreed on much worse to keep it going. "Ah, fortune teller are we?" as he handed it over.

"Hardly, just a hobby, plus it's less about predicting your future than understanding the present. And your palm lines change throughout your lifetime, d'ya know that? And kinda like astrology, it's less a map of your journey and more a schematic of the ship, gives you an understanding of how this particular Earthsuit is wired to work, it's still up to you to make the best of it on your own terms."

She took his upturned hand in both of hers, her gentle touch running over the rough patches of dirt work. She carefully looked over his entire hand, front to back, separating each finger to inspect the architecture of its folds, meticulously bending each knuckle in unbent concentration, as thorough as a chipmunk examining a newly discovered nut.

"You see this one," she pointed to that one. "This is your life line, and yours sweeps wide into your palm, which reveals a life full of warmth, passion, and generosity." Her mm-hmm concurred.

"And your head line's as long and abundant as I could have already told you," her subtext predicted.

"And here's your love line," drumroll please. "Hmm, interesting..." he was interested.

"It's deep and pronounced, that's good. But it slopes down and touches your head line, that indicates a struggle between the two, like your head gets in the way of your heart sometimes," sounded about right, as his brain thought she seemed to lean in.

"Oh, and right here, this little crosshatch, that signifies that one day you'll find yourself out in the woods holding hands with a pretty girl and staring at the moon."

Her even keel confused his smile, "Oh does it now?"

"Yep," she admitted, as her mischievous grin escaped. "That's how good I am at this."

"Okay then," he asked. "What does it say I should do next?"

Her eyes glimmered with moonlight as she looked up from his good fortune. "I think you know," is all she offered, but the unspoken languages filled in the rest.

Hand in hand, they started the slow descent into madness, moonbeams fueling the way, inches from collision as they neared orbits, completely surrendered to the moment as the spin of the world was forgotten.

Then a big "Raaawwwrrr..." pierced the capsule.

The scream shook them, both from their intimate intoxication and from their stone cold seats.

"What was that?" she sweat.

"Mountain Lion," he was proud to know.

"Must be yelling at the neighborhood to go to sleep. We should go."

Nooo, he thought, we were so close. His heart raced as his breath caught up, just enough time for his conflictions to climb their way back aboard, maybe this was for the best. Maybe this was a sign from the universe. Catcall of the gods.

She tossed out some tobacco and offered an apology to the night shift, then scampered up the hill in record time, all while she hummed some kinda prayer song. Soon enough they survived the whole ordeal.

Back at the fire, or what was left of the glowing ashes, she broke the news, "Well, unfortunately, I do believe that was my signal to go to bed, it's probably late by now, but I had a really good time out there tonight."

She took his hand, "We'll have to do it again sometime. Goodnight, love."

She pecked his cheek and scurried off before he could RSVP.

12

Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.

She'd taken to delivering him coffee tentside. Shared the morning's first fresh breath of nicotine and a night's worth of dreams, hypnotically vivid dreams, like Miles had never dreamt before, it was as if having his head on the Earth was mainlining messages from the stars.

Nothing had really changed about their deal, platonically solid, though Miles was spinning with indecision. He was lost between the quickest best friend he'd ever made, who happened to be involved with the second, kinda, and this forbidden romance guided by the magic of the night sky, where he found himself savoring every drop of moonlit honey.

There hadn't been any follow up palm readings, or allusion to what could have been, but there hadn't been any stand-offs of awkward regret, either. Everything just felt easy, comfortable, Miles didn't want to jeopardize the triangle of friends, so he tamped his temptation away as he built a dirt wall around his feelings.

The house was really getting up there, almost to his chin, and each bag seemed to get heavier as it slung progressively closer to Pleiades. Somedays the flow would hit just right and they'd get two rows done, the trio had found a rhythm of momentum as they seamlessly anticipated each other's next move. They'd all mine in the morning, to mix and fill by brunch, a fireman's line fed the bags up a wobbly ladder, and all three rotated shifts between the two tampers, as the other caught their breath. Cap made brunch.

They'd been walking on the wall as they completed it early on, but it had grown above a rational fear of heights, and a fear of falling, especially on the downhill face, so they straddled the perimeter as they scooted along the high rise. Cap did help plenty, but climbing wasn't a strong suit of the hefty old-timer, if they just had a couple more sets of fresh arms, they could finish it up in a week.

"Just got a text..." announced Cap. And yes, phones worked way out there, musta been a tree disguised as a tower nearby. "...from these two fellas I talked to a while back, think they might swing by and lend us their fresh arms for a week or so. Giving them coordinates now."

"Sweet," ask and ye shall receive.

Miles always felt a tinge of anxiety whenever he had to meet somebody new, and they hadn't seen an unfamiliar face in weeks, and he was rather enjoying the secluded nature of newly opened relationships, but it sure would be nice to have a little more help out there.

The new recruits fell off the grid midafternoon, ready to jump in, but the veterans were looking forward to a relaxed evening of fellowship and banter. Annie led a tour of the construction detail, and the urban sprawl of campsites, offering up a handful of vacant locations perfect for a week's vacation in Captopia. Miles thought he saw her sweetie eyes fixate on the long blond hair of contestant number two.

Paul and Levi. Levi was the tall blond, Paul was short and stout with even shorter dark curls, the Hammock Brothers, they quickly became known as in the community's personnel directory. Not actually related, any more than the rest of us anyway, they'd been traveling together for years, living as low impact as possible in their custom fabricated hammock-tent contraptions. They spent a good bit of time out in the big bad scary wilderness, but more often found themselves guerrilla camping in the outskirts of municipal guidelines. They'd occasionally get woken up and asked to relocate, but it was more likely that they'd be up and gone without a trace.

No one questions a hammock with the disdain of the homeless. In fact, it seems quite ordinary to spend a lazy afternoon swaying in the wind, in the same park whose benches have been bumproofed. Plus, a hammock keeps you high and dry, away from the wash up of the gutters, perhaps an affordable housing option for those caught up in a flooded market.

They traveled in a work van that was equipped to hang two hammocks in the back, just in case they ran into trouble, other than that, they only carried light packs and had a few extra essentials bungeed to the ceiling.

"Gotta keep it simple when we're climbing fences," explained Levi.

"And buildings," Paul stepped it up. "We found this dope rooftop in Albuquerque a couple weeks ago, it was like we had our own private penthouse downtown."

"Oh my gosh that sounds like so much fun," Annie said a little too excitedly. Miles was jealous of her enthusiasm.

"It's not all glitz and glamour though," reassured Levi. "We've stayed in some pretty sketchy spots too. Never had much trouble, but enough to learn how to sleep on high alert."

"That's why I like it up in the trees," Paul suggested. "Like way up there. Get so far up there that no one'll ever notice you, or be able to get to you if they did, and then pull your pack up on a rope and you got everything you need."

"Pack light," Levi chanted.

"Pack light," Paul seconded the mantra.

"Pack light," Annie joined in. "Might have to try out one of your fancy hammocks sometime, though I do really adore sleeping on the ground."

Miles wondered whose she had in mind.

"There's really nothing like it," Levi chimed. "It's like you're floating on a cloud as the wind takes you in her arms."

"Oh goodness, I'm in," enlisted Annie.

"Gotta have trees though," cautioned Paul. "Or at least something to tie to. The last camp we stopped at didn't have much to speak of, so we had to post up in the van."

"Where was that?" asked Spaz.

"Over in Taos. There's a camp trying to stop water extraction from the deep well aquifers on native land. They're building one rig now, but plan on fourteen more, and instead of the standard fifty gallon flow, these are going to pump a thousand, every sixty seconds. There's no way that's not going to disrupt the underground water system, fossil water they call it, and once it's gone it's gone, and of course there's not even been a proper ecological review or anything."

"Of course not. So you guys are Water Protectors?" she gave a smile of familiarity unknown to any stranger.

"Yeah, I'd say so," affirmed Paul. "I mean, we didn't go to Standing Rock or anything, not like most of the activists in Taos, or like you all, I take it. But we've been living as lightly as possible for a long time, and in the last year or so we've been a part of a couple different camps."

"Like where?" Spaz curiously interrogated.

"We started back east," Levi began. "I'm from Virginia, where they're putting in not one, but two big fat natural gas pipelines, two different routes of incineration, to and from the same places. It's ridiculous."

Paul added, "I've heard it's so if one gets stopped, they're still in business, or they can even link two partial constructions together."

"One of 'em's almost done, the MVP, Mountain Valley Pipeline. There's some treesits and other blockades in the last few sections of pipe not completed, they've got a pretty good handle on monitoring the carnage and reporting permit violations, but it's like everywhere else, the government's in with the energy corporations and it keeps getting pushed through, even after judges order it stopped."

"They're just trying to get it slammed in there before the push to defossilize puts them out of business. If they can finish it, then not only does the lawless contractor get a government subsidized paycheck, but now this shiny new pipe has to get used to return the investments of said government and their shareholders' interests."

"Yep, Water Protectors," she decided.

Miles suddenly felt under qualified.

13

They ended up being some alright enough dudes, even if they only further stirred the muddy waters of raging celibacy. The work flew with the moon, fresh blood had rejuvenated the entire crew, there was a new vibe building on the hillside.

"That's that nomad mojo," remarked Levi. "Swirling around in the stagnation of settlement. But ya'll already know all about that."

"For sure," agreed Annie. "The ebb and flow of traveling energy is what makes a community."

"Or breaks it," contested Spaz.

"More like shakes it," she countered. "But if the core values of the group are unified, then it can handle a healthy dose of outside influence."

"It's critical, really," insisted Paul. "Especially for the spread of knowledge. It's like we're each a little synapse of a living internet or something."

"Our motherboard," she mumbled.

Paul was a tech guy, who also happened to live up a tree in a hammock. He spent his downtime working on an app to calculate a person's global footprint by analyzing their purchases. He mainly just wanted to know for himself, which was good, considering that those who need it the most, will be the least likely to download.

He was into intermittent dry-fasting, and the occasional four day stretch, it turns out that we simply don't need to buy into the bloated guidelines of the profit driven USDA. Through his giving up of excess, he could differentiate between actual hunger and the conditioned response of habitual stress-eating, he discovered a way to nourish himself from a place much deeper than his stomach.

And he powered through the pangs with a handheld solar panel, sampling the various stone desks of his wide open office space, until the light faded and the nighttime gizmo got fed and transformed. It was called a BioLite, a tiny little camp stove that you feed twigs or paper trash into, and in turn, it charges a twelve volt, and it still makes heat and light, and has a cooktop. It was the perfect blend of multifunction for today's developing off-grid app scene.

"Next I wanna make one that maps out nomad friendly communities."

"Good one," she affirmed. "That'll really help connect folks living this way."

"I think so. And as the network grows, it could help facilitate resource sharing among settlements. You could post what you have, or what you need, and travelers could be the connective tissue in-between."

"The conduits of manifestation," she cooed. "Sharing seeds and songs as they dance along the Earth."

"And arms and backs," added Miles.

"Exactly," confirmed Paul. "We found this place through a Craigslist ad looking for help on a project that we felt compelled to be a part of, so just imagine if there was a dedicated directory of similar situations across the board."

"What about resistance camps?" asked Spaz. "They're generally pretty nomad friendly."

"Yep," agreed Paul. "And this could be a good way to keep afloat on what's going on, and to keep resources flowing efficiently, almost should be it's own thing though."

"Encrypted maybe."

"Maybe so, but I've just about given up on trying to hide from the hackerswans. Probably shouldn't post sensitive information though."

"No doubt," echoed Spaz.

"Plus, we can handle a healthy dose of infiltrator influence too," she said with a wink and a smile. Nonchalant references to government funded spies weren't uncommon on the hill.

"Hey," interjected Spaz. "Infiltrator or not, if they're gonna help dig, then they're invited, we can sort all the rest of that stuff out later."

The crowd agreed with a chuckle as Levi reclaimed the thread. "So this nomad mojo is crucial for the fluid evolution of a healthy society, celebrated, yet in our dominant culture it's villainized and shunned, as your only worth to society is calculated by your debt to society. If you don't pay for a place to sleep, then you're a piece of trash blowing in the wind, and the disposable lifestyle of gross consumerism has trained them all to ignore the refuse piling up at the foot of their crumbling tower.

I mean, you can't even camp at a rest area, a government mandated place of rest for weary travelers, no tents allowed as you resign to the front seat. The world's eaten up with private property, to the point that even the public sector has been privatized, and what should be a restful oasis of orchards and seasonal abundance caretended by the flow of free spirits, has been reduced to a parking lot of pamphlets explaining how the natives used to live with the land before we laid claim to their sacred tourist attractions. Now there's an app for you," he nodded toward Paul. "Rest Area Rewilding."

"Ooh yeah," Annie could see it. "We can start with clandestine guerrilla gardens, and the app can guide you to the harvest."

"And there could be an updated checklist of gardening tasks for anyone wanting to contribute," designed Paul.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good," she continued. "And eventually we move on to phase two, a web of full-on Occupy camps, as we resist the illegalization of motion and reclaim public lands for the people."

"I like it," professed Levi. "You sure know how to turn the heat up a few notches."

Her gratuitous smile left Miles wanting for a cold front.

Levi went on, "And it'd be the perfect distribution of community strongholds, as our housing crisis spits out the next wave of foreclosure. The whole mortgage and rent system is fundamentally designed to tear apart the classes and indebt the people to a lifetime of menial labor, and as the banks funnel out progressively more privileged pockets, the entire pyramid is going to collapse on itself.

I'm ready for it, trying to usher it in actually. I've been pushing for a rent strike for years as we take back control of our own existence, but that doesn't negate the fact that the streets are already filled with the victims of capital bank's evictory lap."

"You know that in America, there's over four evictions a minute?" quizzed Paul. "Over two million a year, one every fifteen seconds, that's thirty-six evictions per drug overdose. In the wealthiest country in the world, with way more houses than people, we're supposed to be the most civilized nation, yet we ostracize millions of human beings as we sentence them to the dumpster."

"Wasn't it Ghandi..." Miles recalled, "he said something like, A nation's greatness can be measured by how it treats its weakest."

"Yeah, that sounds about right," Paul assessed. "And I'd say we're failing pretty hard by that evaluation."

"I'd say," agreed Annie. "But we're working on that one, now aren't we? Constructing houses out of nothing, planting food forests for everyone, rebuilding community and rewilding society. You know, nourishing the world one bag at a time."

14

Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.

Just a couple of rows left. Way up there. Even framed in a few windows and bagged around them. The bottom layers had turned to stone with the mass of twenty rows compacting the mix. The whole structure was becoming more than solid. It was wolf proof.

Each microscopic particle of sand is covered with jagged edges, when rammed intensely, they all puzzle piece together into a tight block, with the wet clay acting as an electrostatic glue. It was no longer a dirthouse, with each slam it slowly transformed from rubble to rock, reverse erosion.

It had taken longer to percolate than it took to integrate the expanded team. The whole system lent itself to a freeform workflow as its elegant simplicity invited uncluttered momentum.

"Man, this sure got a lot easier with a few extra hands," expressed Cap. A curious assessment thought Miles, seeing as how the old timer had a permanent residency at the mix station, regardless of the roster.

"I know that's right," she agreed.

"It's a beautiful thing, really," mused Levi. "The basic building blocks are all the same from top to bottom, so it's not intimidating to jump into the flow. I bet you could have twenty people helping out and not be in each other's way."

"That's that monolithic design," expanded Cap. "A single construction technique from start to finish."

"It's a mosaic of individuals composing the big picture," she illustrated. "Like how amino acids fit together to form the blueprint of life on Earth."

"Or how swirling gasses coalesce into the cosmos," Paul added.

"Exactly," she concurred. "Just as each thread of human experience weaves the fabric of our lives."

"I thought that was cotton," teased Miles.

"Oh hush," she fought back. "But cotton is a part of the collage too. All of life is. Each grain of sand working together to shape the story of our planet's evolution."

"Layers of nested perspective," waxed Levi.

"Ooh, I like that," she nodded. "And once you pack one up tight, you're ready to unfold another, until eventually you step back and realize the potential of your manifested reality."

"Layers of something, alright," Cap griped. "And it's getting pretty deep too. At least from my perspective."

"Ha ha, too much hippie mumbo jumbo for a boomer, I reckon."

"Touché," he ceded. "Musta forgot who I was talking to for a second."

"Also a common side effect of your generation," her deadpan delivery broke stitches among the working class.

"Hey now, I'm not too old to whip you kids at some extreme croquet," which he proceeded to do, as their philosophical survey rambled down the hillside.

"So we're all in it together as we paint the larger narrative," paraphrased Miles, as he bounced past the wicket. "But at the same time, aren't we competing for our own quality of life over that of another's? Isn't that the foundation of evolving a developed world? Even down to the wars we wage over resource management?"

"Yes and no," she allowed. "But that mindset of winning at all costs has nearly defeated the planet herself. Viewing the rest of life as an enemy has set us at war with the world, and just like any war, we're all gonna lose."

"Alright then, enlighten me to the true nature of nature, why don't you."

"Gladly. Not that I'm any kind of expert or anything, just a fangirl of Earth magic is all."

"You're overqualified by my calculations."

"Aw," she almost blushed. "Well, in that case, I shall continue," she continued. "So yeah, there's natural competition, friendly competition, but it's not rooted in the besting of an opponent as much as a cooperative push to the limits of the possible. The web of symbiosis is much thicker than the hairline fractures that separate us. We can't even begin to fathom the intricate relationships among the selfless members of the Earthling race.

Like how when a grandmother tree is cut down, and the rest of the forest redirects their energy towards keeping her stump alive, a competitor would revel in the newly freed up resources, but instead, what we see is a personal sacrifice of nutrition as a community reaches for the greater good."

"That's incredible, they really do that?"

"Oh yeah, and as you dig deeper, you find a seemingly infinite array of complex partnerships. And we used to be an integral part of a lot of them, happily contributing our own harmony to the ensemble, until the dissonance of commodity came in like a wrecking ball."

"Is that what broke everything?"

"One layer of it anyway. The myth of human superiority, and its unapologetic exploitation of anyone and everyone, including themselves. The strings are pursed to persuade us of an inherited reign over nature, simply a resource for the taking, and for resale, while the only trace of competition that remains is in the clearcut profits of an overgrown marketplace.

Our natural born inclination is to be a part of the whole, a cooperative community that flows together to make the most out of the least. This other thing, the absurdity of individual self-servings, that kind of indoctrination can only be forced into the wounds of a broken population.

They've been convinced that life's a competition. It's dog eat dog, so you best be looking out for number one, and at all costs. The itemized milestones of maturity on your credit report equate to points in the game of life, as they relieve you of any sympathy towards the less-privileged, who it turns out, are simply not as good at friendly competition as those with a head start. Be loud and proud that you're winning, flaunt your opulence as all others fall below the property line, and somehow we've managed to create a society in which individuals of every class struggle to keep up with the basics that were already inherent to the abundance of community living.

If instead, we view the Earth as a whole, all of humanity and beyond, each of us a cell of a higher power, then we can begin to understand our role among the incubator of life. So now picture our adolescent planet in its prenatal stage of embryonic development, and as that lifeform grows and starts to take shape, the individual stem cells follow natural law and compete for nutrients. They adapt themselves into the specialized members of a symbiotic system, one that would crash if any one cell took it upon themselves to compete their way out of existence, but as long as everyone adheres to the code of conduct embedded in their DNA, we end up birthing the next baby steps of evolution."

She let Miles mull it over before following up, "D'that get'ya all sorted out over there?"

Sorted out? He thought it was more like his limited understanding of the world had been shattered into a thousand puzzle pieces of what he knew to be a masterpiece, yet the only certainty he could recover were the few stray ideas that refused to become dislodged from one another. But he was beginning to see the bigger picture, see that there was one at least, and he knew that every rearrangement of preconception would bring greater clarity, as the interlocking connections of individual experience fit together to tell the greatest story of them all. The story of one.

15

Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, tamp, tamp, tamp, tamp.

Donezo. With phase one at least. Walls were up, and a two-by-twelve bond beam ran across the top to tie it all together. Still needed a roof and stucco, but Cap wanted to give it a week to let the top rows fully cure.

The unanimously celebrated stopping point gave space for reflection. Just a month ago, they were looking at a barren rock in a sea of barren rocks, the finish line impossible to fully envision. But slowly and surely, their hard work and determination paid off as they constructed a new reality, one grain of sand at a time.

The respite also afforded room for speculation, what was next for the out of work migrants? Cap would be here of course, he was just getting started with his vision of Captopia, and everyone else was welcome to stay for as long as they wanted, especially considering the ambitious size of the sophomore dormitory. The work wasn't enough to scare off the alumni, it was actually quite gratifying to witness the conversion of energy into mass, but the winds were blowing and change was coming to the hill.

The Hammock Brothers had only intended to stay the week, just a pit stop along their world tour, perhaps this had even been their vacation. The timing of everything prompted them to confirm their departure, they were headed off to a pipeline resistance camp between two and twelve hours away, and there was space in the van for anyone who wanted to tag along.

"Fossil Corp," informed Levi. "The biggest and baddest energy conglomerate of them all, not that you can hardly distinguish the individual alignments of malintent, so they might as well represent whichever path of destruction is snaking its way through your neck of the woods."

"Yep," she corroborated. "They're all the same. All in on it together. Sharing intel and lobbyists, and a twenty billion dollar security budget. A win for one is a win for all, but that also means that a single defeat is felt across the grid."

"Big time," he continued. "And they're already running scared as their stranglehold on society is losing its grip. They're vulnerable and they know it, and our movement's only getting stronger, as more and more people wake up to the crisis at hand. It's about to come crashing down in a big way, and they're scrambling to maintain the illusion that it's not, but the time for damage control is over, and we're not just here to take back our own planet, we're here to take her forward."

"They're desperate though," continued Paul. "Which means that they're more than willing to pull some shady shit. Standing Rock was a testing ground to learn how much domestic terrorism they could get away with under the noses of patriotic America, and it turns out it's quite a bit, but I doubt they have any intention on stopping there."

"You heard anything about what it's been like up there?" asked Spaz.

"Just a bit," Paul replied. "Think there's about a hundred people already at camp, and more coming, they put out another call last week for Water Protectors, wink wink."

"I'm listening," she engaged.

"There's the usual hoopla, you know, lockdowns and teargas and stuff, but it's really just getting started, on both fronts, this could end up being the next big one. And from what I can tell, the community's united in a beautiful way, people talking about the vibe and the energy of the place, maybe it's something like what you guys felt out there."

"Very interesting," she said, as she stroked the only smooth chin on the mountain. "Do tell more."

"That's about all I know really. There's a laundry list of violations and unquestionably bad ethics, but after a while, you kinda go numb to the gratuitous disregard of it all. Then there was another list of supplies they need, figure we'll load up on the way. Also they said they were looking for some people who were good at climbing, that was the post that really got me signed up, who knows what kind of adventure we're in for. I figure if we leave at sunup, we'll get there before dark tomorrow night."

"That soon?" lamented Cap. "But I was just starting to like you guys."

"Makes sense to me," consoled Annie. "It is the new moon after all."

Miles hadn't noticed, though now he could feel the tingle of her elusivity. It was nearing on dusk now, twelve hour notice, a far cry from the two of his forgotten dream girl, but last minute enough of an invitation to give him a mild heart attack, unless that was just last night's deep fried piñon falafel.

He was here to learn how to live. To learn how to listen. To find his path as it unfolded around him. He wanted to make a difference in a world he'd almost given up on, unsure of what to do and paralyzed by the unknown, but that Miles was fading quickly into the snowcapped horizon. The last month had inspired him to no end, from all sorts of angles, he had toughened up and yearned for his own experiences of impassioned heroism.

And here pops up a ride to camp, with trusted friends, at precisely the most opportune moment. Miles couldn't help but listen. It was a little uncanny when he thought about it all. So he didn't, he tried to tune into his heart, but all that got him was wondering what she was gonna do.

The air was thick with what-ifs and possible itinerary changes, even Cap was considering taking a week off, Miles was lost in thought as he retraced his steps.

"Hey bud," Spaz coaxed him back into the moment. "You still wanna go on that hunt? I'm good either way, but it's kinda the perfect time for it."

"Ooh yeah, you boys go fetch us something decadent for tonight's celebratory extravaganza."

As if Miles could refuse her while the tiniest sliver watched from the shadows of the tangerine sky. But whose transition would they be celebrating exactly?

They'd been out birdwatching a handful of times, even managed to catch a glimpse or two, but Tom had thus far evaded the sideways glance of the boomerang's scope. Spaz made another, hand-chopped it with his hatchet knife, he was still getting it dialed in, shaving the lift angles of the propeller until it flew the way he wanted, so Miles got to wield old trusty in the event of catastrophic success. Timpsileh sat this one out, they'd figured out early on that while she may be able to outhunt them, she didn't like to let anyone else take a shot.

They always started the quest with a prayer and an offering of tobacco, Miles wondered if they should be leaving more. There were a couple of favorite perches with clear lines of sight into the riverside oasis they'd discovered a few weeks back, they posted up at the closest and waited for the wind to carry a tune of white meat.

After ten or fifteen, Spaz picked the front door of Miles' brain. "So whatcha thinking about this whole Fossil Corp thing?" he whispered.

"I don't know what I'm thinking," it was the truth. "Thinking that maybe I should go. You?"

"Same. I'd really like to see the dirthouse all the way through, but at the same time, I know just how constructive the energy of resistance can be. And they are in more dire need of help than Captain Overalls up there." A term of endearment, most assuredly. "I guess we'll see how it all shakes out, sleep on it or whatever, at least it doesn't take me long to break camp."

"Pack light."

"Pack light."

Spaz suddenly grew more alert, was it a feather in the wind or just a chipmunk sneaking past?

After a moment of silence, Miles added a few cents. "It'd be kinda hard to leave this place though. I've felt more alive here than anywhere else in my life, and you all feel like family, don't know if I'm ready to walk away from that yet.

Is this what being a nomad is always like? Every time you find a place that feels like home, you have to up and leave at a moment's notice? Over and over again?"

"I mean, I guess that's one way to look at it," Spaz conceded. "But it also means that you develop relationships and places to call home all over the map. You're far less homeless than those who settled on an empty life of settling. And the more you travel, the more you start to feel at home wherever you are, you carry it with you, and you can share it with others along the way.

And yeah, you might find yourself with a last minute flight, which honestly, is harder for the family you leave behind, than for those who depart. But, it also means that you'll eventually circle back around for a supercharged scene of reunion, and when you're walking down the right road, it always seems to drop you off in the most opportune of moments."

Another unknown rustle slowed the flow, probably just a turtle running by. Spaz gave it a second before he continued.

"That's how it's been working for me at least. Ever since camp, I've been roaming around, way off-grid a lot of the time, and I've managed to coincidentally resurface just in time for two different weddings, where I got to hang out with friends I hadn't seen in a decade. And it's always a fun surprise when I pop up with more stories from the road. Or from the frontline. And it always feels like we never skipped a beat, as we pick up right where we left off.

It's been a bit tougher with my blood family. They think I've gone crazy as I abandoned the world we grew up in, why on Earth would I put myself on the line for somebody else's water a thousand miles away? And it's not something you can just tell someone about, you kinda had to be there, so I can't expect them to understand, I don't even understand it half the time, and they don't want to, not really. So because of all that, I hadn't seen my sister in over two years, or her kids. Even when I was stopping through to visit other family, she just wasn't ready to face the hurt that my disappearance had left, so it only grew.

Anyway, wasn't trying to be a debbie downer there, I was actually going somewhere miraculous with this, kinda. So two of my biggest prayers have been to reunite with my sister's family in a good way, on her terms, with patience and understanding, and that if my mom were to get sick, that I would be connected enough at the time to get word. She's always been healthy and everything, no cause for concern, but as she gets older who knows what could happen, and who knows how to get ahold of me in a mountaintop dirthouse surrounded by a sea of desert?

So last spring, I happened to be passing through the state. Just for a night, so I was only going to visit one friend, who happened to be picking up another friend from the airport close to where I grew up, so I tagged along. I checked my email from their phone on the way and then logged back out, but it must not have taken, because an hour later in the airport parking lot, they got a notification meant for me.

My mom had had a stroke. Out of the blue. I mean yeah, she eats the same sodium rich processed diet that everyone else out there does, but she was relatively active and healthy and prescription free.

So here I am, receiving this transmission without even being signed in, in a nearby city for the slimmest window, at the exact moment that my sister is driving through on her way to the hospital. She scoops me and there's no hard feelings anymore, we're united in our concern for mom, none of that other stuff matters.

"Was your mom okay?"

"I guess so, I mean she had a stroke, so that's never a good thing, but she's young and a fighter and seemed to bounce back pretty quick. She had to stay in the hospital for a week, and of course everyone else had to run off to work and stuff, everyone except the homeless crazy person whose life revolves around being where he is needed the most. It was beautiful man, I got to be there all week watching soap operas and game shows and other colonial propaganda, and there's nowhere else in the world I'd have rather been.

And then when she got paroled, we both went to live at my sister's for a couple months, and it was awesome. I got to be a part of the kids' lives in a real way, and me and my sister were as close as ever, as we came together for mom. And ever since then, we've been in this great place where I can come visit whenever I'm near, and I'm not there as a weekend tourist like I was before all this, I get to be a genuine participant in their actual lives.

Both prayers got rolled into one, a blessing in a hospital gown, and all because I listened to my internal navigation and walked in the moment.

So yeah, it can sometimes be a little unsettling as you free yourself from expectations, but who wants to settle for an expected tomorrow, when you can live in the magic of now? And once you see for yourself that our paths are interwoven, it'll be way easier to let go of yesterday's fading dream."

"Probably no coincidence that we had car trouble next to the grilled cheese spot, huh?"

Spaz nodded.

"And there's other grilled cheeses in the sea, huh?"

"Something like that," he chuckled.

"I don't know if this is helping or just making me hungry, isn't there supposed to be a sign or an omen or something?"

Spaz smiled a smile of worldly experience as it looks back upon the wide eyes of its own naivety. Miles expected a one-liner that raveled the forks into a one-way ticket, but Spaz just looked him in the eye and nodded toward the river.

Turkeys.

Five of them.

Walking in a line down the hill to the West.

Spaz nodded for Miles to take the shot. No way, he reflexively declined before he'd even calculated the pressure of extravaganza. Spaz motioned for the OG throwstick and slowly stepped from behind the boulder. Miles watched him take a deep breath as he drew back his arm, launching the whirling wheel of centrifugal force straight toward the lead bird. It flew low and silent, perfectly at neck height as it ripped through the setting sun rays, until it didn't. A burst of wind caught it and suddenly lifted its gyroscopic inertia the few inches it took to fly right over their heads.

None the wiser, the party fowls bounced along their merry little way, as Spaz reached around to the untested kylie tucked into his belt. He cocked and fired, it was a bad throw, dipped down into the slight ravine between them. But the boomerang had been unwantedly rising lately, and as it neared the edge of the recess, it rose just enough to clear the side of the bank and slam into the caboose of our fowl line. Not a neckshot, and maybe not even lethal, but she definitely wasn't gonna be moving around for a while.

Miles leapt over the blind and the two of them tore across the hill with various admittals of disbelief. The rest of the rafter took to the canopy as they alerted the forest of today's obituary. They were two thirds of the way to the scene when their tracks were stopped in dead unison.

At the edge of the ravine, the pink sky cut through the trees as it backlit the silhouette of a menacing shadow creature. Mountain lion, puma, cougar, whatever you wanna call it, either way, it stood three feet tall and twice as long, golden tan with glaring eyes, and shared little intention of giving up the high ground.

"Hey bud," Spaz calmly initiated conversation with the queen of the hill. "Don't mind us, we're just out doing a bit of bird watching is all."

The cat stared on.

"Was kinda hoping to grab that one we hit up there," he said, as he took a careful step forward. "If you don't mind that is."

She minded. A few teeth flashed and a guttural grumble reconfirmed her decision. Miles thought it might have been the echo of his own stomach turning.

"Well," Spaz persisted. "Then how 'bout the boomerangs?"

The curious kitty was through with negotiations, they were trespassing on her territory and she couldn't let that jive turkey fly. She let out a short yelp to warn off any followers and turned to take the prize in her mouth, looking back for one last gloat at the empty handed poachers, before she slinked away and relinquished their weapons.

"Holy..." Spaz trailed off.

"Did that just happen?"

"I think that just happened. That was fucking awesome."

"Yeah, except now we're eating crow for dinner."

"Yeah, I guess so, huh."

"And good thing I still pack a change of pants."

The birdless boys chased the sunset up the hill, adrenaline flooded their assent as flashbacks of valor put it all behind them, who would even believe the saga that still had Miles questioning his own perception of reality?

And had this been his sign? He asked for an omen and a second later his path was crossed, but if that had been a signal to fall in line for the water, then how on Earth was he supposed to interpret the path interference of the missing lynx?

No closer to conclusion, they crested the hilltop to find the celebration already underway, perhaps they'd be too distracted to notice the returning champions and their running up trophies, a pair of brown and white wing feathers discarded during the shakedown.

"No luck, huh?" she offered no reprieve.

Spaz looked to Miles as they both broke into satirical depreciation, "Nope," he answered. "Guess it must notta been our day."

16

Festivities abounded, merriment ensued, music and mayhem filled in the blanks of the wild turkey hangover. She'd known there was more to the story, and pried loose every detail of the only moderately embellished fishing expedition. The audience was enrapt as they tasted the drippings of exhilaration.

They still managed to eat well, as always, though their full bellies slowed the dancing and made room for a desert full of long-winded appreciation. No one knew any more about their travel plans, other than Cap leaning towards not, but there was still a bunch of hours between now and then, so they elected to wallow in the moment. The closing ceremony brought them back to the flame, tobacco in hand, a final offering of gratitude, as this could be the last fire the six of them would share, for now at least.

Those with travel confirmations were sure to sleep tight as they swayed in the wake of their contented hearts, and Cap always slept soundly, so soundly that you could hear him through the walls of the RV, but Miles doubted that he'd find himself among the hidden metaphors of tonight's downhill dreamtime.

He sat alone by the fire, talking to it, talking to himself, talking to the universe. He yearned for clarity as his path was illuminated. He landed on not landing and sprinkled one last prayer into the heat of the night.

"Oh good, I was hoping you'd still be up," her delicate voice approached through the darkness. "Couldn't sleep, or didn't want to, or wanted a smoke, or to talk or something, I don't know, this could be our last night together, you know."

"Yep, could be, what're you thinking about it all?"

"Trying not to really. I'll know when I know, I guess. Thinking that moon looks rather infatuous though."

"Mm hmm," he agreed as they stared off into space.

Consensual silence consumed the stars until she finally broke the peace.

"You know I like you, don't you Miles?"

"Yeah, me too."

"Like, really like you, like a lot."

She pulled his gaze from the moon's gravity as he looked into the twinkle of her midnight confession.

"Yeah, me too."

"Oh yeah?"

"It's not for lack of trying not to, just couldn't help it."

"Well then, what are you thinking we oughta do about it?"

Her open invitation stirred his repressed ideas on the matter.

"Oh I dunno, guess I figured I'd keep spinning my wheels and try not to get caught up in the tangled geometry of monogamous celibacy."

"Ha," she snortled. "Monogamous celibacy? I got news for ya bud, I'm far from celibate. Or monogamous. That's what had your tongue tied this whole time? No wonder I could hardly get you to flirt back with me."

His sideways stare of perplexed epiphany prompted further explanation.

"Yeah, I mean, I'm with Spaz, in a majorly deep emotional kinda way. We're bonded across dimensions it seems like sometimes, but the whole abstinence thing is a spiritual journey he's on for himself. I'm not gonna hop on the bandwagon just because that's his ride, I haven't been that codependent on anyone for a long time. And that's not to say that I won't one day do my own purging of desire, on my own terms, but believe me when I tell you that that day, is not today."

Miles hurriedly flipped back to analyze the introduction of his confliction. Spaz had said that he was MonoCel, not that both of them were, it was Miles who misextrapolated the conformity of unconvention.

"So how does Spaz feel about all that?"

"He loves me dearly, as I do him, and obviously I'm celibate when we're with each other, which has been most of the time lately, but he has no intention of stifling my journey of self-discovery. Or discovering someone else's. We both want each other to grow into the most evolved expression of ourselves possible, which sometimes means experiencing connections outside of our own, but we don't see them as stumbling blocks to pull us apart, if anything, they only enrich the magic between us."

"So you don't ever worry about one of you falling in love with someone else?"

"I used to, not with Spaz, but with this other guy I dated for a few years. I was a pretty jealous person actually, when I was younger, but he showed me that love isn't finite, it multiplies, and that it's possible to be in love with more than one person in a way that's healthy and meaningful for everyone involved.

People think that they're only supposed to have feelings for the costar of their Hallmark moment, and if you do catch feelings for another, then you better squash 'em, or else leave the wife who you also love, because people aren't allowed to love more than one person at a time.

It's only because of the jealousy, and the guilt, and the lying and hiding and sneaking around, that it's necessary to implode one relationship to start another. But once you communicate past all that stuff, you realize that the more someone loves, the more they increase their capacity of love, and the deeper your own connection becomes, which makes it all that much easier not to be jealous. It's just like when you have your second kid, it doesn't diminish your ability to love your firstborn, that's ridiculous, it expands your capability of love, as you experience a spectrum of emotion through completely unique relationships.

Plus, when you love somebody, like genuinely love them for who they are, then you want them to be as happy and healthy as possible, and as emotionally fulfilled as possible. So if they find someone who nourishes their soul in that way, why would I not want that for them?

It doesn't mean that they want you any less, it's only when you feel insufficient in your own connection, that you get jealous of whatever it is you must not be providing. But if you simply understand that we're creatures with complex emotions that weren't evolved in a Hallmark movie, able to expand our consciousness by experiencing a diverse range of human interaction, then how could you not want the richest experience possible for your partner, especially when it makes your own relationship stronger because you're both a little more complete."

"I'd imagine the defenders of monogamy would claim the same results from true love."

"Sure sure, and I'm sure there are some cosmic connections out there that perfectly align to form a mystical soul bond, but people also change as they grow towards the light. And how many true loves get divorced over adultery? Or live inside a lifeless marriage as they fill the void with work, beer and tv? And how many mighta kept the passion alive, if they hadn't put it in a cage and stuffed it into the musty basement?

And yeah, maybe Spaz meets someone who completes him on a level beyond what we have, or maybe I do, and that would be the most beautiful thing I could possibly imagine for anyone that I care that deeply for."

Miles was fascinated with infatuation, still a little confused about how he was supposed to feel, but he was pretty sure he was feeling it.

"I think you guys might be the coolest people I've ever met," he confessed.

"Aw, we both like you a whole lot too, though I'll bet you're gonna meet all sorts of rad folks on your travels, especially if you end up going to camp."

He'd nearly forgotten the upcoming deadline.

"We talk about you a lot actually," she confided. "It's been really gratifying to watch you learn how to walk in a good way, with your own sense of integrity, we feel blessed to have gotten to be a part of it with you."

"The biggest part."

"Oh no, you're the biggest part, you're doing all the work, we're just on the sidelines cheering you on. "

"Whatever you say, but I think you had a little bigger hand in it than you're taking credit for."

"You trying to say I got big hands? C'mon now, I happen to think my hands are quite delectable."

She held one up as she inspected her evaluation.

"Gimme that thing," he begged, as he took it into his. "I'd say that delectable was a pretty fair assessment.

"Oh goodie," she purred, as she squeezed back. "Because I'd have hated to have had to smack you around with it."

"That doesn't sound half bad either."

"Oh hush, you," she reprimanded, as she tapped his chest with the other. "And here I was thinking that you'd grown up, not that I'm into grownups or anything. You know, Spaz knows I like you too, we talk about it, he thinks it's cute how you get all giddy around me."

"I do not."

"Do so, at least as far as I can tell, guess I don't see you too much when I'm not around though. If it's any consolation, he said you do the same thing to me too."

"Consider me consoled."

Her precious giggle melted into another comfortable silence, fingers explored the subtleties of one another, the moon doesn't get any newer than this.

"And Spaz isn't weirded out by his buddy and his girlfriend feeling some kinda way about each other? I mean, an open relationship is one thing, but isn't it a little more complicated when we're all so close?

"Complicated, sure, but that's the fun part, itn't? And besides, I'm not into casual hookups with some stranger I don't care anything about, my sensuality is sacred, and I don't share it with another lightly. So I'm only going to become involved with someone I have intimate feelings for, which take time to develop, so of course Spaz is also gonna get close to anyone I'm hanging around that much. Plus, he'd much rather see me spending time with someone he also loves, than with some random dirtbag builder boy."

"Is that all I am to you?" he kidded. "Your little dirtbag builder boy?"

"Yep, I just like to kick back and watch you up there tamping your little heart out while I sip my lemonade, gonna get you to build me a stone bottom hot tub next."

"That could be fun, huh?"

"Uh huh," she mumbled, as her fingers worked their way up his forearm.

"One way to keep warm at least."

"Uh huh," she whispered, as her caress rose with the tension.

"Could probably come up with a couple other ways too, I guess."

"Uh huh," she exhaled as she drew closer, her nomadic fingers reaching his kitchen as the other hand pulled his to her cheek.

"This is the part where I'm supposed to kiss you, huh?"

"Uh huh."

17

Fireworks and butterflies and sparklers and rainbows and lightening bugs and cotton candy and unicorns and tiger lilies and a giant castle built of chocolate crystals with a chocolate river out front and kitties and tacos and wool socks dried on a woodstove and a bowlful of tropical skittles.

It was awe inspiring. She tasted like vanilla and brown sugar. Electricity engulfed their embrace.

It was only one kiss, it may have lasted a good ten minutes, a really good ten minutes, but it eventually cooled off enough for our young lovers to pry themselves free of the fire and retreat to camp, their respective camps, the moon had seen enough action on the quasi-celibate mountaintop.

Miles doubted it had been enough to cure his insomnia. He tried anyway. A smile glued to his face and his body primed with desire, conflict alchemized into content, the replay on repeat as he cherished every drop of forbidden chemistry. It had been something more than he ever imagined. How could he not want the rest of her?

If she was going to camp, then he had to be there, unbridled passion at gunpoint was sure to enflame the fledgling romance, plus they'd be in a position to actually do something about the deteriorating state of the union. And if she left and he didn't, he was certain that every lonely smoke break and shift of the moon would drive him further into madness, as he was left cuddling with the regret of what could have been.

But what if she stayed? That was the only scenario that left Miles unsure of his own. He felt torn between partaking in resistance firsthand, and indulging in the nectar of everything good in the world. She would tell him to follow his heart, he wanted to follow hers, but he also understood that to be the same codependency that she had long ago sworn off. He couldn't simply stowaway on her path with complete disregard for his own, especially since he had no clue which direction she'd go, it seemed that the only known constant was the pull he felt to Fossil Corp.

So that was it, huh? That's where his guides were directing him? The map had most definitely unfolded itself with a serendipitous route to predestination, he anticipated feeling the fool if he didn't answer her knock. Their threads were interwoven along this lifelong journey of discovery, the moon would pull them back together at just the right moment, he had to go for it, or else risk regressing to his past life of not going for it.

It felt right. His heart felt good about it. The more he let it settle in, the more right it felt. He was going to camp. And then he slept like a baby, for the couple of remaining hours, at least.

Sunbeams shook the tent awake, Spaz already had a thermos of coffee brewing, even Cap was up and moving as the retinue assembled by the van.

"Hell yeah," greeted Paul. "You're going with us."

The forty pound duffle bag must have tipped his hand.

"Oh yay," she bubbled. "I knew you'd figure it out, just had to get a little blood flowing was all."

The uncooled memories swirled between them.

"How about you guys?"

"We're gonna stay. For now at least. Help Cap finish this thing up, and then who knows, maybe try to get Timps home, maybe come bother you at camp, we'll see each other soon enough either way, I'm sure of it."

So was he. And he still felt solid in his own embarkment, he'd honestly figured this was how it would work out, and he couldn't wait to share his own tales of adventure when that day finally did come.

"You come bother me anytime you want," he doubled her entendre. "You too Cap, could probably use a dead air dj to motivate the troops."

Cap traded him half an Earthbag of piñons for a bear hug, "You know, I might just do that. Wonder if I can get this RV back down the mountain?"

"Good luck with that one," blurted Spaz. "I guess getting it back up here's the tricky part though. Here Miles, I made some coffee for the road, and I got something else for you."

He reached behind his back and pulled free the OG boomerang, "I want you to have this. I figure that the new one's already got a confirmed kill, or at least an assist, and what do I need to carry two around for? Maybe you'll run into a kangaroo or something while you're out there."

Miles was touched by their brotherly bond, he'd think dearly of Spaz every time he felt the slice of locust root, their hug extended beyond the gratitude of letting him make out with his girlfriend.

She waited patiently for her own farewell, or toksa as she put it, see you later, or sooner, way sweeter than any goodbye could have been. They held onto the moment as they held each other, he tried to commit her scent to memory, he felt the warmth of her lips press into his cheek, and it was over.

"I gotcha something too, bud."

She reached into her jacket pocket and revealed a pouch made from Timpsileh's raccoon. Miles had watched her work the hide, scraping it and stretching it and making a brain cocktail to soften the pelt, turns out that an animal's brain is the exact size needed to tan its own hide, how convenient.

"It's for your sacred belongings, whatever that ends up being for you. Rocks or sage or maybe your feather. I put a little note in there for ya, but I don't want you to read it until the next new moon, and know that I'll be thinking of you extra special that night. It's the same moon that we'll be watching, and she can see us both, and I'll be able to feel you wherever you are out there."

That called for another hug and an exchange of whispered recognition, fingertips the last to break connection, a quick belly rub for Timps as a thank you for the fur, and Miles hopped in the van.

18

"Squatch, this is Ripcord, what's your twenty?"

"Echo Two, what's up?"

"We got a little situation at the Birdhouse, think you could roll down here right quick?"

"On my way. Better not make me miss dinner though, Chef's making frybread pizza tonight."

"Aho, better bring Scrapyard with you too then."

"Copy that, be there in five."

"What do you think that was all about?" asked Jordan, as he lowered the volume of his walkie.

"Who the hell knows," snickered Tiana. "Probably just another four-forty-one or something."

"Or a four-twenty," he supposed.

"Maybe that too. That whole rig's a POS though, we gotta do something about it soon, before somebody gets hurt."

"Since when did you start caring about getting hurt?"

"Not me, I'd be more worried about one of these weekend warriors busting their ass and suing us for not warning them that water is wet. I got no problem getting hurt, but if I do, it's going to happen out there, not lollygagging around camp."

"I feel ya," he commiserated. "Looks like another vanful of part-timers pulling in up there, it's your turn, itn't?"

"Nice try. I did the last two, but I'll come grab a load of wood in case they give you any trouble."

"Ha, you know trouble's my middle name."

"Really? I thought it was Robert."

"You better watch it, you sass me another eight or nine times and you're gonna wish the fossils got ahold of you."

"Yeah right," she dismissed. "Who, you and the armies in your sleevies? Maybe you should go practice falling and bleeding, and I'll be out there in a little while. Or better yet, how about you go do your job before I have to write you up."

"You wouldn't dare," he challenged, as he got up from his seat by the fire of the Echo One security post.

"I did just get a new push pencil I've been itching to use," she emptily threatened, as she followed him to the gate.

"You know they make a cream for that, don't you."

"Shut up," she commanded, as she hoped to have the last laugh on the matter.

"Probably even have some down at medical, I can buzz them on the radio if you want." He shot her a self-satisfied smirk as he ignored the expression she returned, he'd definitely won that one, and without missing a beat he moved on to contestant number two. "Good evening folks, how's everybody doing tonight?"

"Good," they responded in triplicate.

"You guys haven't been here before, have you?"

"Nope, been driving all day, real excited that we finally made it though."

"And just in time for dinner, I hear we're having frybread pizza tonight."

"Sweet, that sounds amazing right about now. You got a spot we can park this thing?"

"Yeah man, just head down this road until you see two big army tents on the right. The first one's the kitchen and the other's the mess hall. You can park in that field back behind them."

"Sounds good."

"Now, I do have to let you fellas know that this camp doesn't allow alcohol, drugs or firearms. You guys aren't packing, are you?"

"No sir," they complied. "Unless a boomerang counts."

Jordan laughed, "Welcome to camp boys, now go get some dinner before it's gone, I'll be down there as soon as I get relieved."

The unmarked van creeped down main street as the night watch speculated on their backstory.

"Infiltrators?"

"Probably."

"Did you see the goob in the back?"

"I think he said something about a boomerang."

"Fucking hippies."

19

The meal tent was jammed full of chitter chatter and excited recounts of the day's close calls. Miles hopped in line for a slice of the action. His fresh face was far from lost in the sea of water protection.

"FNG, huh?" the patron saint of waiting in line turned to ask. "You just get here?"

"That obvious, is it?"

"Yep," she granted. "Nothing against you or anything, we're just a pretty tight crew and everybody knows everybody. Plus, you're not nearly beat up enough to have been here for long. I'm Selam."

"Miles."

"Good to meet you Miles. And welcome to camp, we're glad you're here."

"Thanks, good to be here, not sure what to do next though."

"Well that's easy, I'd go for a slice of pepperoni and one of those elk and broccoli ones down there, that's the chef's specialty." She grabbed a plate from the stack and filled her own duplicate order. "I'm just messing with you man, I know what you mean, I remember it being a bit overwhelming walking into a scene like this and not knowing where to fit in."

"A bit," he agreed.

"Well, do you have any special skills? Like building stuff, or working with solar panels, or cooking or anything?"

"Not particularly."

"Are you arrestable?"

"Arrestable?"

"Yeah, are you willing to get arrested at the frontline? Do you have any warrants or anything that would come back to bite you. Are you illegally in the country? Are you planning to run for president or something? Not everybody here goes out there, we still need a support team back at camp though, so the protectors that can't jeopardize a run-in with the popo, hold it down here while we're disobeying the servants of civility."

"I guess I'm arrestable, never have been before, would kinda prefer not to be though."

"Wouldn't we all. Well, I don't know, I think some of them like it, another notch on their belt of police brutality. But I'm with you, I'd rather be in and out of there before they know what hit them. But you could get locked up just for being here at camp, you know?"

"For real?"

"Oh yeah, they threaten a raid every week or so, claim we're trespassing and organizing crimes, but they're probably just trying to scare us off before we gain too much traction out there. Do you know how to do dishes?"

"Yeah, of course," he muttered, as he imagined his first night of incarcerated invasion.

"Well there you go," she settled it. "That's a great first job until you get your hands dirty and your feet wet, plus you'll be everyone's hero before they even know your name. Here, you wanna come sit with me and my crew at that end table over there? You got a lot of people to meet, so you might as well get started."

"Sure, thanks."

"No probs, just don't get discouraged if some of them take a while to warm up to you, we've already had a few infiltrators through here and we're expecting more as camp really gets rolling. You're not a spy, are you?"

"Don't think so, probably not smart enough to pull that one off anyway."

"Good, cause you have to tell me if you are, it's in the rule book. It's whatever though, we'd still give you some pizza, and we'd probably have you turned from the darkside by your second piece."

They took a seat at the last table in the row as she introduced her new recruit. It was a rowdy bunch, all frontliners he figured, and undeniably bonded in a way beyond anything he'd ever witnessed. He was warmly welcomed and passively interrogated, the Earthhouse earned him some points and a foot in the door. What kind of self-respecting DAPL-doer would spend a month playing in the dirt?

Johan was the fixer, he could get ahold of anything anywhere at anytime, he had some kind of outside support team that made him the go-to guy for special requests. Bill built stuff, around camp and out at the frontline, he was a covert ninja who could slip in and throw up a treesit right above their noses. Miles couldn't make out what it was exactly that Ambrose did, but he could tell it was something clandestine, and he appeared to know an awful lot about the machinery they were up against.

Selam was the biggest enigma, she seemed to be a leader of some sort, or at least the lead strategist, not that they delved too deeply into their top secret agenda with unvetted ears tuned in. She was Ethiopian, but was adopted into the American dream when she was five. She went from literally being a starving kid on the streets of Africa, to the only child of a fifty-something white conservative christian couple who had been out of touch with their own generation, let alone two generations deeper into the age of technology, where a black teenage orphan grew up struggling to connect with those closest to her. They'd rescued her from the dirt roads of poverty, gifted her with the excess of the middle class, she was the luckiest little African and her white saviors let her know it anytime she didn't fall in line with a way of life that she began to recognize as the very institution that destroyed her homeland in the first place. They really did mean well, in their own self-righteous kind of way, but it was only a matter of time before she broke free to join the rebel alliance.

"What about you Miles?" she asked, as she took a bite of crisp and fluffy frybread crust. "You got any daddy issues?"

He had, in fact, butted heads with his father, as he struggled to escape a similar set of conservative values. A common upbringing among the population of black sheep, whose predisposition for rebellion was fostered from an early age. He tried to wrap eighteen years of repression into a tight yarn to unravel, but the thread was cut short, as the last two members of the squad sat down at the cool kids table.

"Nice, you found us. I'm Jordan by the way."

"Miles."

"Good to know you brother. And this is Tiana."

Miles gave her a subtle wave and a "Hey," but all he got back was an unenthusiastic nod. Selam cut in before he had time to overanalyze her blasé demeanor.

"You guys'll be happy to know that Miles here has volunteered to do the dishes."

He'd almost forgotten about them.

"Good one," approved Jordan. "I knew I had a good feeling about you. Are your homies somewhere around here too?"

He'd almost forgotten about them.

"Oh, I see 'em, over there kicking it with Chef and Smokey," Jordan nodded over Miles' shoulder. "Now those guys know how to get in at camp, always be friends with the kitchen, rule number one."

"I thought rule number one was to always back in," teased Selam.

"He told me it was to always pee first," Bill jumped in line.

"Alright, alright, alright," Jordan defended himself. "You guys know I have a highly complex rule numbering system that, quite frankly, I wouldn't expect any of you to understand, so I just cap it at one, for your benefit."

"Oh, is that what it is?" deciphered Selam.

"Maybe. Plus, I also told both of you that we were best friends, now I'm gonna let you guys figure out which one I rounded up."

The table erupted, Jordan had won his second zing of the night, or so he thought.

"Nah man, Ambrose is my best friend," Bill exchanged a slap and a bump with his closest ally.

"Yeah, and my best friend is this girl I've known since I was a kid, Jenny Jenkins, real do-gooder, you'd probably like her."

"Looks like you're on your own for this one pal," Bill completed the zing reversal.

"I hate you guys," Jordan muttered, as he held his head in shame.

"Oh c'mon, that's not very nice, especially to your sixth and seventh best friends, eighth maybe, top ten for sure."

Jordan perked up as he launched an unwanted crust at Selam's forehead, which she effortlessly caught and devoured. "Thanks bud."

"Alright, alright, alright," he conceded with his hands in the air. "You win."

"As if that were ever in question."

Miles was loving it. The quick wit chemistry of the unit. And as he looked around the tent, he saw clusters of energy just like this one, and travelers buzzing around them all, sharing laughter and food and information, each person a cell in the organism of revolution. He extrapolated the web of connection to the next level, soon there would be multiple mess halls, and there are already other camps, all focused on their various flavors of resistance, but all rooted at the core. The transients in-between are the same that fill their ranks, and Miles was experiencing being the conduit of Levi's nomad mojo. Pretty cool.

He also noticed a similar vibe of style among his campmates, and maybe an actual vibe too. Everyone wore all sorts of different apparel, yet they all felt like they were part of some cohesive grand design, threads interwoven on people interweaving to create a symbiotic hive of poetry in motion.

"Well, one thing that is in question," segued Yohan. "Is what in the hell was going down on the radio earlier? I don't see any of those guys here yet."

"Yeah, I know. Squatch is gonna be mad if he doesn't get at least half a pie," estimated Ambrose. "What were they working on down there?"

"Ahem," Tiana edged in, with her first word of the conversation. Miles thought he saw her eyes cut toward him as a signal to tighten loose lips.

"Probably something ridiculous anyway," Selam deflected. "I'll go check them out in a minute, maybe even make a delivery while I'm at it. But they better tip me this time."

"Here's a tip..." Jordan's scope was set on vengeance. "...shit...I got nothing."

"Ha, two for two, and I wasn't even trying, better luck next time...bestie. Hey, you wanna get Miles here set up on dishes? Then maybe we can all get together later for a safety meeting."

"Safety first."

20

"Knock knock, anybody home?"

Miles and the Hammock Brothers stood outside of what he hoped was the recreation yurt, they'd jumped in to help him scrub down, before hanging up camp in the dark. It was a bit colder here, but nothing they couldn't handle, though the smoke billowing from the afterparty offered a rather enticing invitation.

"What's the password?" a muffled voice quizzed through the barely cracked doorway.

"Um... tacos?"

The door slammed shut as the council conferred.

"You're in," Yohan accepted as he threw the door open. "Now get in here before you guys let all the fun out."

There were ten or twelve people spread out around the central woodstove, most of them seemed to be working on some kind of project or another, carving or writing or stitching, and all appeared to have shed their outer layers of armor as they lounged in the comfort of woodfired fellowship.

"Miles! You made it," exclaimed Selam, as she patched a pair of coveralls. "Everybody, this is Miles, he's great, and he did the dishes. Why don't you come over here and sit by me."

The crowd cheered with introduction. Miles tried to commit the barrage of names as he shared his dish credits with Levi and Paul, once the formalities were completed, the boys filled in the gaps of rotation.

"Whatchya got in that bag?" she asked as he untied his boots.

"Oh yeah, I brought these from down south, a gift from the Earthhouse crew. It's a bunch of piñon nuts."

"Ooh, piñons," an unfamiliar voice approved. "They're so good."

"I've never had any," came another.

"I've never even heard of them," admitted Yohan. "And in my line of work, that's a rarity."

"They only grow down south, like New Mexico and southern Colorado," intrigued the unknown fan.

Had it been Stephanie? No, maybe Cindy?

"They're high in protein, an indigenous staple of the region, plus they're real tasty. Expensive though, fifty bucks a pound or something, that bags worth five or six hundred dollars, I'd guess."

"Oh ho, so the man in the dirthouse is secretly atop a nut empire," poked Selam.

"Better than in the nuthouse over a secret dirt empire," he poked back. "Which is probably more likely."

"Ha, I bet you're right about that one. Hey Chef, you wanna toast these things up since you seem to know so much about them?"

The unidentified piñon nut was Chef? She'd been introduced as something else, Sarah maybe, honestly Miles had expected the unseen chef to end up being Annie's pizza coach, especially considering tonight's menu.

"Sure, it's not like I spent the last six hours in the kitchen or anything," she grumbled, as she grabbed the cast iron.

"Oh you like it and you know it," Selam insisted.

"I know," she smiled back.

The crowd had picked up on something to do with an Earthhouse, which gave the trio the floor as they dug into every detail of picking and tamping, this was definitely the right party to pitch an alternative to the great pyramid scheme. Miles noticed that Ambrose and Tiana weren't in attendance, maybe not the arts and crafts type, or perhaps there was a more pressing matter of camp security to deal with.

The newbies were anxious to hear intel of how the actions had been going, wanted a heads-up on what they were getting into, before they actually got into it.

"It's been getting intense lately," warned Bill. "They've been gearing up pretty hardcore the last week or so."

"They're technically under a stop work order right now," added Selam. "A circuit court judge ruled that they can't proceed without a proper ecological review of the project, but we've all been here before, some other crony's gonna overturn it and it'll be business as usual."

"Plus, it's not like they ever even stopped," said Bill. "Me and Ambrose snuck in there a few days ago and filmed them moving right along, they just shift their focus to a less obvious section of their unmonitored destruction site."

"Can't you report that to somebody?" Miles asked. "Especially since you have it on video?"

"Like who?" challenged Bill. "The cops? The EPA? The press? The governor? The president? They're all in on it. Everyone gets their cut, so nobody's willing to rock the boat. The best we can hope for is to get it online and encourage more people to get involved with the movement. But there's just so much of it, new infractions every day, and more abuse towards us, eventually it piles up into a clusterfuck of indecency that viewers at home put on ignore."

"What kind of tactics have they been using against you guys?" inquired Levi.

"A lot of the same old stuff," Bill responded. "teargas, pepper spray, plastic coated bullets, Yohan got hit in the thigh with a high-velocity sandbag."

"Yeah, check this out dude," he pulled his under layer down enough to reveal an eight inch welt, deep purples and blacks swirled across his leg, it hurt to look at, and not just because of the tighty-whities.

"No ice cannons yet at least, maybe they learned their lesson on that one."

"Or they're only waiting for the last of the frost to melt, that way your camera just makes it look like a refreshing waterpark attraction," hypothesized Yohan.

"Or that," considered Bill. "But it's not all been defensive maneuvers, we've been hitting them pretty hard where it hurts too."

"Like how do you mean?" Levi wondered. "Locking down machinery and the like?"

"Yeah, some of that. We're slowing them down from all sorts of angles really."

"We're kind of organized into groups with different plans of attack," explained Selam. "Helps us to stay focused. And this way, even if an informant makes it into camp, they'll still be a few cards shy of a full deck."

"We still keep up with everything that's going on," Bill elaborated. "That's crucial for it all working together, otherwise we'd be stepping on each other's toes out there. And then some of the actions are about getting as many bodies in the way as possible, infiltrators or not, we need you."

The warmed up audience seemed to enjoy the blanket invitation.

"It's not the deep cover spies you gotta worry about," informed Selam. "It's the frontline agitators. Out there with the express intention of stirring up chaos, in a bad way, just trying to give the other side an excuse to shoot at us.

So this compartmentalized system keeps everyone accountable to a localized group of peers. If anything starts to get out of hand, they know how to put each other in check, and if a lone wolf shows up to cause trouble, they're easily identified and outed as an agitator."

"I say we hand them over to the other side," suggested Jordan. "That's who they work for anyway, itn't."

"Or just make them stand in front when they come at us," offered Bill. "But somehow, they always disappear right before the assault."

"Alright, enough of this infiltrator mess," swept up Selam. "We don't need to sow too much paranoia into these guys on their first night. Besides, we still don't know for sure that they're not spies themselves."

She shot a wink towards Paul and Levi as she turned to smile at Miles, the rest of the room was in tears.

"Smell their boots," someone shouted. "If they smell like oil then they're definitely DAPL."

"You mean Fossils?" another corrected.

"Nope, DAPL, every bad guy from there on out will be DAPL to me. DAPL's not a pipeline, it's a way of life, and it must be vanquished from the face of the Earth."

"Aho," agreed Bill as he turned to Levi. "We've been setting up some treesits lately too, right in the way of their proposed path."

"Not as many trees out here as back East," he observed.

"No, but enough, and we've got a standalone monopod too. Plus there's a smaller camp over in the national forest. Can you fucking believe they're trying to clearcut through a national forest? And they're doing it, and with government approval. At least that one judge thought it was a obscene as we do, we'll see how long he gets to stick around."

"The world's changing though," encouraged Selam. "People are waking up all over and demanding a better way of life. We may be behind the times here in America, still under the covers of corporate media and political ill will, but we're about to reach a turning point that no one can hold back. Countries are already defossilizing, and we'll eventually get a Green New Deal or something like it passed, even China's pushing towards solar while our president passes energy legislature without even reading it, admittedly. We'll get there though, it's already out front of our collective consciousness, we just gotta stall them until then, and maybe cost them a few billion in late fees."

"Me and Paul helped out with a treesit in Virginia last fall."

"Mountain Valley?" guessed Yohan.

"Yeah. We didn't go up or anything, just helped with the support team."

"It takes an army."

"Yuck," spewed Selam. "How about, it takes a family?"

"Yeah, that's better," agreed Yohan. "I helped get some supplies out there, a few kayaks even, they seem like they run a pretty tight ship."

"For sure, a fairly small camp though, we had to get vetted before we even found out where it was, gave references and everything."

"Well that's one way to keep down infiltration," acknowledged Bill. "Sounds about like any of our teams, you gotta earn the trust of the crew before they'll be willing to put their life in your hands."

"But you can do dishes anytime you want buddy," nudged Selam as she elbowed Miles.

"Thanks for that. Was kinda hoping to get into some real work tomorrow though."

"Hey now, dishes are as real of work as it gets," defended Chef. Was it Becca? Yeah, it was definitely Becca. Maybe. "I could use a hand in the kitchen if that's not too softcore for you."

"Shiiit," stretched Selam. "You'll have him breathing heavy by lunch."

"Shhh, don't tell him that. I've got a bunch of heavy stuff to move around," Becca turned to Miles as if the entire room hadn't heard her ulterior motives. "It's pretty easy work really, you'll be fine."

"Challenge accepted."

Miles built a house out of dirt, how hard could cutting a few onions possibly be?

"Piñons are ready," announced Becca. "Here Miles, you better grab a handful, you're gonna need the extra protein come tomorrow."

21

The nights were definitely colder here, but they'd be getting shorter and warmer, hopefully. The tent magnified bursts of sunrise from the wide open Eastern sky, the day had come, the day to actually do something. He woke to the sound of splitting wood, guess that means it's time, coffee first.

"What up bro, hihani wasté, good morning," Jordan called, as he caught up to Miles a few feet shy of the mess hall.

"What's up man, g'mornin."

"Yo, I know you're helping in the kitchen and all that, but I was kinda hoping you could go with me on an errand, shouldn't take but an hour."

"Yeah man, I don't clock in til noon. Just gotta caffeinate and I'm ready whenever."

"Word, I'll meet you right here in thirty."

"Deal."

The hour long chore included a twenty-five minute hike each way, uphill only one. Miles would be thoroughly warmed up for his first day on the job, and it gave them a lot of space to connect in the process.

Jordan had been through a lot. A lot of messed up stuff. He was native. Lakota. Full blooded, but he was adopted off the reservation and grew up with only critical views of his own culture. Then they turned out to be not the best parents of their little Indian in the cupboard, then they split up and it got worse, until he ran away from home at fifteen, nobody noticed. He lived on the streets for a while, unloaded trucks for pocket change, hunted styrofoam leftovers nestled in the bushes, survived, but it was no life.

Eventually, he caught a ride across the country to the reservation, he didn't know anybody, but he did have a family name, Blue Feather, Wiyaka To.

"And then all I found on the rez," he went on. "Was that I didn't know shit about being an Indian. Not about any of it. Not the buffalo or tipis, not the sweat lodge and spiritual side of it, not the broken down FEMA trailers with two families crammed into them, not the shitass commodities or poverty or alcohol or the meth. I didn't fit in anywhere, in the whole world, so I fell into the easiest of them, alcohol, and then meth. Fucking fucked my world up for a long time, and still something I have to deal with everyday."

"How'd you get out of it all?"

"Standing Rock, man. It saved my life. Gave me purpose. Filled the hole inside that I was only digging deeper with the drugs. Gave me a safe place to go, without temptation, and now I have a network of strong sponsors all over the place. Plus sweat lodge and prayer help a lot too. It's this viscous cycle of guilt, you're worthless so you do drugs, and more drugs only make you more worthless, which makes you want more drugs just to not feel anything, because feeling nothing is better than living with that emptiness.

But then Standing Rock totally turned it all around for me. I wasn't empty anymore, I had a reason to live, and other people needed me, and loved me. I found who I was supposed to be, and that all the hardship was only there to prepare me for this. And I haven't had as much as a drink since."

"That's amazing man, congratulations."

"Hell yeah, she saved my life for sure, so now it's dedicated to saving hers."

"Her?"

"The Earth. Unci Maka. She's who called us out there, and you here, just gotta listen."

"Yeah, I've been working on that one."

"You're getting it. And out there is where I connected with Tiana, she's my cousin, like blood cousin. Never met her til out there, but after we started talking Blue Feather, we figured out we were related. Glad I didn't try to kiss her, she'd have probably kicked my ass anyway though.

She's only half native, her mom married some guy in Utah, but she spent every summer on the rez and has a way different understanding of it all than I do. She's cool, I promise, just takes a bit to open up, especially to a honky tonk like you."

"Honky tonk, huh?"

"Just fucking with you. Alright, we're here, come check this out."

They had climbed to the top of a big hill with added vantage of the Fossil Corp construction site. Bulldozers and excavators, fifty foot sections of four foot pipe, a path of demolition as far as he could see, no armed mercenaries though.

"This is it. The frontline. Nine hundred miles of it. It's quiet right now, because of the cease and desist, normally it's hopping with the stench of an out of town workforce. The man camp is over that way somewhere, a concentrated cesspool of vulgarity with no local connections to hold them accountable. They terrorize the quiet towns they blow their steam into, meth and other drugs fueling their havoc, our young women missing, some turn up dead, some never turn up. Just doing their job they say, securing the future of energy dependence, and their extracurriculars just another notch on the scoreboard of us vs. them.

That's how they see us, not as humans, but as the villains of their struggle to make it in this broken world. They need more money, and the pipeline's got the most, so who cares what you have to do to get it, or who you have to hurt, at least your own family got everything they ever wanted. And if they didn't do it, then somebody else would, and it's all legal, itn't?

They don't want to hear it, because they don't want to have to question their own loyalties, but it's not us vs. them, they are us, we're fighting for the people, their families too, for their kids, for a planet that is as vital to their future as ours. The only them is the diabolical corporation that understands the true cost of what they're doing, who don't blink an eye when someone falls victim to the machine, even if it's one of their own, because they will never be an us. It's the planet and her people against the bottomless greed of the privatized destruction of them both, is it really that hard to figure out which side you're supposed to be on?"

"I guess it's tough when everything you know tells you that you're the good guy."

"Yeah, at least until you have to shoot at unarmed civilians in prayer."

"Where are all the cops and stuff now, during the work stoppage and all?"

"They're still here, they've got their own base camp over that hill. All you gotta do is run down there and hop on a machine and a whole squadron will rush down to greet you."

"No thanks," declined Miles.

"And that hill's sacred to my people, our ancestors are buried there. We submitted a whole binder full of documentation proving it, and the next day a bulldozer tore right through the top of it. They'd rather pay the fine of forgiveness than to stoop as low as seeking permission in a good way, not that we'd have given it to them, but we might have at least pointed them to a less controversial hilltop.

Some people think they're intentionally destroying our sacred sites, trying to break apart an energy they don't understand, but that they know can defeat them. We're the only ones that have, bested America at their unfair firefight, we beat them into the submission of treaty and they've been trying to unwrite history ever since."

"Little Big Horn, you mean?"

"Yeah, but we call it Greasy Grass, and we won that shit. They've tried everything they can think of to make us forget our strength, and succeeded in a lot of ways, but we are a force unbridled by the reign of colonial rule, especially now that we've got a bunch of honest-to-god white people helping us."

Miles blushed.

"Alright then HonkyTonk, we should probably get going, don't wanna be late on your first day, especially not if Becca's your new boss."

22

"Sorry if I'm late," Miles apologized. "Got a little waylaid out there."

"No worries brother," excused Becca. "We operate on Indian time around here, some of those conversations you'll have on the sidetrack are just as productive as the work you do in-between."

"I can already feel that," Miles said. "But I'm not sure how to feel about the word Indian. Isn't it more politically correct to say Native American?"

"Since when has politics ever gotten anything correct?"

"True."

"Hey, you wanna cut up that bag of onions over there?"

"Yep. What're we making?"

"Don't know yet," she confessed. "But I'm sure we'll need those, and a bunch of garlic. The rest'll come together from there."

Miles recognized the carefree approach to campstyle culination.

"So I've only spent time on a couple of reservations, and one other camp, and that was all in this part of the country, so I'm sure opinions differ as you travel deeper into the invasion, but I've personally seen more people offended by the term Native American, than by Indian, by far.

America is the corporation that genocided their people and eradicated their way of life, they're not native to America, they're prisoners of it. POW camps, as designated by the United States War Department and policed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, rights defended by the American Indian Movement, where we eat Indian tacos and live by Indian time. It's like anything else, we give them the short end of the stick, and they make the best of it as they flourish with culture in the face of merciless oppression. So of course we want to take that away from them too.

If anything, they're natives of Turtle Island, their name for our vast continent. They're indigenous of a place, which means that they are a living piece of it, not simply living on top of some foreign occupation.

But as far as you're concerned, just plain native seems to work for most people. You wanna pass me those onions?"

"Yeah. Thanks. Did you say something about Indian tacos?"

"Oh yeah, I guess you've never had them before, have you?"

"Nope," he admitted. "But I am partial to anything taco."

"Well that settles it, Indian tacos it is, the people will be ecstatic."

"I am."

"Great, that'll make it easy to get some good heart energy all up in there, especially while you're peeling all that garlic."

"You know, I got some friends that taught me about that, they were out at camp too, Annie and Spaz."

"Annie, with the hair and freckles?"

"That's the one."

"How cool, you're friends with Annie, I remember her, she's awesome. I was only out there for two weeks, don't know if I met Spaz, maybe. Well that definitely just earned you a little street cred. Oh man, they should come out here, that would be so cool."

"Yes it would."

It already felt as though weeks had passed since he was back on the hillside. This place was quickly becoming a second home.

"Yeah, she worked in the kitchen some when I was on dish duty, the water would start turning to ice before we finished scrubbing. The kitchen had such a good energy, and we kind of just made everything up as we went, it was all sorts of fun, and pretty soul-enriching to be putting all that love into feeding the people. Our people, our family, you know? It was something else."

"Yeah, that seems to be the sentiment I've gotten."

"No doubt, even for that short of a stay it felt like a lifetime. So you've got the garlic covered, then just dice it up and we'll let it sit for a while. Do you know about that? Letting your garlic rest so that it can achieve its maximum health benefit?"

He didn't.

"So garlic's super healthy for you, right? It treats everything from the common cold to heart disease, it's a natural antibiotic and even prevents many forms of cancer. It's best if you can just eat a couple cloves raw, but that can be a little intense for a first timer. So then you cook with it, which you were going to do anyway for the taste, but that destroys many of the health benefits, especially the anti-cancer properties. Unless you give the enzymes a few minutes to react and create our superhero compound, allicin, which can still be destroyed by overcooking, so to be safe we'll toss in a little raw root near the end, and voila, we've now preserved the actual content of our flavor profile."

"No, I've never heard about that."

"Of course not, how could they prescribe the pink stuff if our food kept us healthy? That's what it was like before, you know. Before all this. The food was alive, and so were the people who lived with it, and cared for it, and took part in the evolution of a living ecosystem. And the food took care of them, and the medicine plants, and everyone involved lived a life of peak performance.

Then we came in to plow that world away, and we cut down ancient forests to build antique furniture, but we leave a few saplings and plant some corn, so it should be good as new, right? It's still plants and trees and bugs, just reorganized into an arrangement that's more financially beneficial to the bottom line, it's still nature though, isn't it? And the result of lifetimes committed to the depletion of anything remotely natural, is that we're left stranded with a toxic food supply and poisoned soil, good thing they have a pill for that."

"Annie always said the food was healthier before domestication. I mean, I know this processed and gmo crap is no good, but was the juice actually stronger back in the wild?"

"For sure. It's like those piñons, incredible nutrient density that could single handedly get an entire tribe through winter. But if we domesticated them, we'd probably select for thinner shells and bigger nuts, with little regard for what we gave up in return, just the return on investment and the profit margarine, and so begins the backwards evolution of our food's fitness. Or we'd just cut down the native food supply to plant corn, that one kills two thunderbirds with one stone.

That's probably good on the garlic, you warmed up enough for some firekeeping?"

"My eyes are already burning."

"There's a hatchet over there, can you split up a bunch of little pieces, small enough to wrap your fingers around."

"Sure can."

"Thanks, then you can come over here and build a fire in the stove if you want. This thing's so awesome, it's from the eighteen hundreds, it just takes a little fire in this door on the side and the entire top becomes your cooking surface. I can easily fit five or six big pots on it, been cooking for a hundred all month. Then it's got this oven part too, the heat wraps around it before it leaves through the back, we've been making all kinds of bread and sensuous desserts. Takes a little finesse, a little art and a little science, gotta stoke the fire ahead of when you want the heat, and the top's kind of a fretless gradient of temperature, but I don't know if I can go back to any other way of cooking. I love this thing."

"Did you have one out at Standing Rock?"

"Nope, I wish. No, we used propane, at a pipeline fight, but what else could we do really, we were just trying to survive. This way feels so much cleaner, less hypocritical, and I'm convinced the food tastes better."

"I believe it. We've been eating off the open fire for a month."

"Oh yeah, so you know. Wait, Annie's been cooking for you out there? You lucky duck."

Or turkey.

"One day when we were in the kitchen together, we got word that the entire tent had to be packed up and relocated. Overnight. It was kind of a madhouse for a bit, stuff getting thrown every which way, people that had never set foot in the kitchen deciding the priorities of a world they knew nothing about, the worst was when the spice rack got rearranged.

The kitchen had been fluid before that, slowly adapting to the rotation of each character's influence, the most used items found their way to their most suitable home, favorite spices gathered on the favorite shelf, the whole system grew more efficient as it evolved over months of extensive taste testing.

And then it was clearcut. An era of vibrant history was erased and a pile of pieces were left to tell the story. It was regrown of course, and in a manner that was technically functional to the untrained eye, it could at least cook corn. But it had lost its mojo, its flow, its nourishing energy that can only be developed over time. It was no longer an interwoven ecosystem of organically formed partnerships, it was still plants and trees and bugs, but a truly symbiotic community is more than just the individual pieces of the puzzle."

"I see what you did there, good one. And I guess industrial agriculture rearranges the kitchen every season, scrambling the pieces so that a less suitable spatula can surface through the chaos, and then they have to poison the food with msg to make up the difference."

"That's it. You got a little out there on that one, but you get it."

23

"Ooh, it is smelling good in here sister," came a faintly familiar voice from the open tent door. "Whatcha cooking, good looking?"

"Oh, just a potful of onions so far, but you're just the woman I was hoping would stop by."

"Lemme guess," Tiana suspected, as she hunched into the kitchen. "Frybread?"

"If you have time."

"You do remember that I just did all that yesterday, don't ya?"

"Yeah... but... Indian tacos."

"Well, alright, alright, alright, why didn't you just open with that part?"

"Good, Miles over there has never had one, gonna break him in the right way tonight."

Tiana's cheer coagulated as she realized they weren't alone, a quick glare in his direction silenced her remaining body language, she was probably reconsidering her commitment. The rest of the muffled conversation was lost to the sizzle of onions, Miles assumed the worst, until she eventually bit the bullet and started gathering ingredients.

"Sup," and a nod were the only notice he got, and the only he returned. She was going to be a tough piñon to crack.

"I gotta run next door real quick," alerted Becca. "You two will be okay in here, right?" She was looking directly at Tiana.

"Yes mom," she unconvincingly assured. "Just peachy."

"Good. Lots of love remember, that's what it's all about," and as the tent doors closed behind her they heard one last reminder from the other side, "Have fun in there."

After an extended session of fun, and silent contests, she finally lost the game, like you just did. She spoke up, but the cheer he'd noticed earlier was tucked away somewhere a little more private.

"You know, it's a good thing, you being in here with Becca. It's a good place to get to know camp, a good way to pull your own weight, at least until you figure out what else you're here to do."

"Yeah, I like it in here a lot. I've already learned a bunch of invaluable stuff."

"Uh huh," she was unimpressed with his kindergarten lesson. "So what are you here to do?"

She clicked on the polygraph.

"Whatever you need I guess. Not sure what all there is. Dishes probably."

He smiled. She didn't.

"Why did you come here?"

It was going to be one of those.

He tried to think of a conscious answer to a question he'd never considered, he hadn't even known he was coming until yesterday.

"I used to live my life lost in a world I didn't believe in, long given up on being able to do anything about it, I was just biding my time until it was over. Then I met someone who inspired me to get into the world and start living my change, which led me to this off-grid place that made me feel alive like never before, which led me to here. I've met a few Water Protectors and they all have the same strength and drive to better the world, and they convinced me that it's possible, and I want that in my own life as I figure out my role in it all."

"So you're just here for yourself? To make yourself feel better?"

That's not what he meant. He thought it had sounded way better than, I dunno.

"And I want to stop the destruction of the environment," he tried again. "Climate change and all that. I know that we're at a tipping point and if we don't do something soon, it'll be too late. I know that the rest of the world seems to think that it's not their problem, as they just try to pretend it all away. And I haven't known what to do about it for a long time, I'm new to all this kind of stuff, and this is the first place that offered me a way to affect the world outside of my own little bubble."

"Better," she sounded even less impressed. "But not good enough. Some altruistic fantasy of saving the world doesn't count for much when we're in the shit. Out there, survival is what matters. Just like on the rez. And our people are struggling to survive everyday, and the white world just keeps taking and taking til we have nothing left. This battle is personal, we're defending our entire way of life from the tyranny of your government's oppression, we're putting our lives on the line in defense of our home. Sure, that includes the whole planet's worth of devastation, we're all related, but we're fighting for our actual home. Our ancestors lived and died here, their flesh and blood make up the soil we walk on, we drink the water from that river everyday, and we're the ones who will be left without a home if this pipe goes in.

So that's where I'm coming from, that's why I'm here, and I'm not gonna put my family on the frontline in the hands of anyone who's here on some kind of self-searching vacation."

What could he possibly say to that? Luckily, Becca returned to pull him from the fire.

"Girl, don't be running off my help now. Did he tell you he's friends with Annie? Annie with the hair and the freckles? Oh never mind, you were on the other side of the river, weren't you? Well anyway, Annie was cool, and so is Miles, and you think you could make me a batch of that with almond milk instead?"

"Yes mom."

"We try to have something vegan every night," Becca pushed the subject to Miles' side of the room. "I'm vegan, so I know how to switch stuff around to make it work, but of course we also have everyone's favorite dead flesh entrees."

"Does it bother you to be cooking meat? Or cutting it and stuff?"

"Not too bad. I'd prefer not to, I'll let you mess with all that stuff today, but in the end, I'm here to feed my people, and this is what they eat, I don't really have to think twice about that one. I don't taste it as I cook though, so who knows how it tastes when it's done, luckily our audience is as captive as the beef was."

"We eat meat," chanted Tiana from her dough station. "That's what my uncle always says, that's how we survived the brutal winters of the plains. Of course, he's talking about the free roaming buffalo that were part of a living landscape, not the cornfed cowshit of the agricultural prison system."

"I had a piece of wild buffalo heart at camp," bragged Becca. "Raw. The first animal I'd eaten in years, or since. It completely transformed the way I understand food. I felt pure energy flow from my mouth to the rest of my body, it was like this wave of intense clarity rolled over me or something, I think I could think faster. And it wasn't just because I was vegan, everyone else felt it too, it was the single most impactful food experience of my entire life."

"The buffalo is sacred," shared Tiana. "And the heart the most sacred. And you felt that sacred exchange of energy in a good way. Now just imagine what it was like when every bite anyone ever took was a sacred gift of the Earth."

"The food didn't just keep them alive, it made them live. At least until someone rearranged the kitchen."

"What?"

"Nothing, never mind, what were you saying?"

"Well I don't know now, you got me all thinking about kitchen renovations or whatever, oh yeah, I remember. You know, the buffalo used to migrate vast distances, and we followed them to survive. And we chased the deer along in the process, and the wolves followed the deer to survive. And they chased the rabbits along in the process, and this whole traveling ecosystem swept through the country like a weather pattern on a radar, while local ecologies depended on the caravan's arrival and renewal of life. And these kinds of low impact systems were working all over the place, interconnected as they revitalized the land, the animals were free and the people were freer."

Nomad mojo, thought Miles.

"Then America happened," said Becca.

"They witnessed it firsthand," Tiana acknowledged. "With the massive chestnut groves and the entire way of life they supported in the East. Plenty of abundance to share, which is what we tried to do, but John Smith had a more colonized concept of owning another living being. So they evicted us at gunpoint, and made it a tradition, but at least Britain's Royal Proclamation of 1763 promised not to emanate their domain beyond appalachia.

Of course that lasted about as long as any treaty does. Once the revolting Americans took over, no mans land was up for grabs, but they had a little trouble killing us off as they tried to manifest destiny. You'd think that some dirt worshipping heathens, who barely scrape by on nuts and berries, would simply starve to death once they were forced from their berry patches, but what do you know, it turns out that indigenous food systems were far more evolved than the headmasters of agricultural hierarchy.

So what other choice did they have? They burned our orchards and built chests from our nut trees, and they nearly wiped our buffalo from the face of the Earth. The government supplied free bullets to anyone slaughtering buffalo, not even for food or pelt, they just shot them from the train to let them rot. Millions of them."

"A hundred million is what they're estimating now," pointed Becca.

"Jeez. I hadn't heard that number yet," admitted Tiana. "Makes sense though. Exterminate a hundred million buffalo, to eradicate a hundred million natives, to plant a hundred million acres of what you guys call corn. All adds up, I guess. And then we still beat them at their own gunfight, even after they assassinated our war chiefs during a white flag parlay, sure showed old Custer that we don't fuck around though, hey.

So America was forced to surrender its flag of white pride, their farm raised flesh just wasn't as fit to survive as our Earth tones were, and we just wanted the violence to stop, so when they offered us a few concessions to stand down, we took the deal. A continent's worth of sustenance had been vaporized, coulda been plenty to sustain both our populations, but that's not how a civilized society capitalizes on feeding its people, so we settled for the same commoditization of life as the rest of the trading slaves.

Flour, oil, milk, and of course sugar and rum, they're the most classic components of colonial takeover. But for some reason, the troops who were ordered to hand over the goods were still a little butthurt, about us kicking their ass and all, so they didn't comply. And we continued to starve. Until eventually, when someone must have remembered that American treaties are supposed to be the supreme law of the land, and you can't argue with that kind of rational explanation, so they had no choice but to grudgingly hold up their end of the bargain. Of course, it was the same pile of shit that had been hanging around the fort for months, spoiled milk, putrid flour, rancid oil, here you filthy savages, good luck with dinner."

"It's obscene," cringed Becca. "The way we treated fellow human beings. And for what? Because they wanted to exist? Because we couldn't be happy with getting to live in such a magnificently vast garden, we had to own it, every single little piece. We had to be in charge, and we couldn't possibly share with the folks that were here first, so we killed and tortured and maimed and molested. And worse."

"And it's still going on today around the world," sighed Tiana. "They take what they want, they leave a trail of tears wherever they go, and the colonists at home eat it up, because gas is cheap and bananas are good. And just like the majority of settlers who never shot an Indian but still ate from the spoils, today's average consumer has about zero personal responsibility for the casualties of the American lifestyle."

"Ain't that right sister."

"That's right. But we're putting an end to that blinded way of life, and out of the ashes will rise a new way to live, a community conscious of their surroundings, a culture of understanding. And just like how my ancestors learned to take those rotten ingredients and transmute them into a delicate staple of our ever-evolving vibrance, the Earth will be reborn and life will be renewed. Because tonight..." Tiana closed her sermon. "...we eat frybread."

"Aho. And if you thought you got props for washing dishes," Becca warned. "Just wait til you carry this in there."

"Do I smell frybread?"

"And tacos?"

"And Indians?"

"Indian tacos?"

"Indian tacos!"

The menu received critical acclaim, Miles scooped meat or tempeh onto each passenger's tostada as the assembly line chugged through a hundred cars, chefs rode the caboose, it was more than worth the wait in gold.

"Yo," Jordan caught his attention from the door. "Crushed it on the tacos. When you get done here, you wanna kick it up at security for a while? I'm heading there now to work the overnight shift."

"I'm down. Guess I'm ready now too," Miles looked to Becca. "If you're done with me, that is."

"By all means, stay in the now. Go protect that fire and it'll protect you. You did good today, you know."

"Thanks."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yeah."

24

"Yo, you wanna throw another log on?" nudged Jordan.

"Yeah man," said Miles, as he reached into the stack behind him.

"You know, this fire is special. It's sacred. The Peta Wakan, the Sacred Fire, it's our connection to the Earth, and to the stars, and to our ancestors. It carries our prayers out into the world, and it grows stronger as it burns, and this one's been going since the first day of camp a couple months ago."

"And it's never gone out?"

"Nope. Never. It's the heart of the village, keeps us alive in more ways than one, it's probably charged up with thousands of prayers by now. I put my heart into it with every chunk of wood," he motioned to the split piece of pine in Miles' hand. "I place it with intent, instead of just tossing it wherever, and I pray a few words of whatever rises to the surface of my deepest intentions."

Miles accepted the invitation, carefully nestling the log into the perfect spot, closing his eyes to silently share his thankfulness of being at camp, escaping the heat just in time to feel the warmth of gratitude pour over him.

"And you can do the same with your tobacco, you know."

"Yeah, I've been trying to do that lately."

"It carries the energy from your heart and gives it to the world, or you can give it directly to someone when you offer them a gift of tobacco, even just a cigarette. It's the intent you put into it that matters, the tobacco's simply a vessel of unseen energy, the real power comes from in here," Jordan tapped his chest. "Now let me ask you something serious..."

"Shoot."

"You think I could bum a smoke off ya?"

"Good one," laughed Miles, as he handed his pouch over.

"Thanks brother, pila. Oh man, you only got a couple left, I can't take your last bit of crumbs."

"Eh, it's cool, smoke 'em if you got 'em, right? Consider it a gift from my heart to yours."

"You catch on quick," he applauded.

"Better save me enough to roll one though."

"Dang, you catch on real quick, hey."

"Aho," came a shout from the approaching darkness. "I come bearing treasures from the great beyond."

"Ambrose!" cheered Jordan. "I'd recognize that delivery through a tee-ex-eleven-twelve-fourteen voice scrambler all day long."

"It's TX-1020C, jackass. Now do you want this shit, or should I run it over to the fossil camp real quick?"

"I'd hate for you to get caught up in another piece of razor wire out there, we'd better just take that stuff off your hands and save us all the trouble."

"Ass."

"I try. Now whatcha got there for us?"

"Well, for Miles, I have four grilled double cheeses with tomato, a thermos of Ziggy's special recipe, some Funyuns and hard candy in case you get bored, and a brand new pack of Spirit, courtesy of a first night camper who wanted to grease the security wheel. Probably an infiltrator."

"Probably. But, hey, Miles just put in an order for those, like thirty seconds ago."

"Aw sweet, that's how it goes out here."

"So what d'ya got for me?"

"Oh yeah, I brought you one of these," offered Ambrose, as he pulled a circle from his pocket.

"Damn it. You get me every time with that."

"Just smarter, I guess."

"Lucky."

"Well, maybe if you're lucky, Miles will share some of his reward with you, I wouldn't though."

"You see, that's the difference between you and Miles here, he's a fine upstanding young man, and you're just standing there."

"You shoulda just quit when you were ahead."

"When was that?"

"Oh yeah, huh?"

"Thanks for the provisions," Miles dove in to pull Jordan's head above water. "Exactly what we needed, on all three counts."

"No worries, you're out here doing all the hard work."

"Doesn't feel too much like work."

"All the best jobs don't."

"I know that's right," mumbled Jordan through a mouthful of molten muenster. "When you're working from the heart, all the hassles of life just kinda fade away."

"Jeez dude," coughed Ambrose. "They're turning you into a real life hippie out here, aren't they?"

"Wait a second," Jordan protested. "This better be soy cheese on sprouted grains, and organic, I have an allergy."

"Hey now, organic's where it's at, anything else is full of poison and hardly passable as food."

"Welcome to the rez."

After a moment of settling in, Miles hesitantly asked a question he thought he should already know the answer to, "Are we on the reservation now?"

"This guy," teased Jordan. "Doesn't even know if he's on the rez or not. It's not your fault though, most Americans have a hard time remembering where the border's supposed to be."

"Burn," diagnosed Ambrose.

"What're you taking about? You're American too. Ain'tcha?"

"Fraid not, I'm Canadian, brother."

"No way. Well no wonder, now it all makes sense, you're beady little eyes and flapping head, but you ain't got no accent."

"Musta loost it when I was oot and aboot, I'll try to find you a coffee crisp next time I bring you a double double, eh?"

"That's better. Fucking Canadian, who'd have thunk it. You come all the way down here just for this?"

"Yes sir."

"And you get deported if you get busted, yeah?"

"Yes sir."

"And you're willing to risk all that to help us defend our water?"

"Well, it's all of our water. And it's all connected, even if we are upstream from you, but this pipe is devastating my hometown just like yours. It's all coming from the tarsands. They've already wrecked an area of land the size of Delaware, over a million acres, and the last spill was a million and a half gallons, and nobody blinks an eye. I figure wherever we can stop it, gets us the same result."

"There's some First Nations up there putting up resistance, itn't?"

"Yeah, there's a few camps, I'd imagine I'll check them out when I get tossed out of this place."

"Sounds like a plan to me. Well good on ya for being here, even if you are Canadian."

"Probably shoulda kept that to myself, huh?"

"Yep. Ay."

The next week was more of the same. Jokes and prayers, frybread and tobacco, Miles worked in the kitchen by day and laid his heart by the fire every night. The conversations weren't always easy, generational heartaches had to be worked through, there is much healing to be done among the self-inflicted wounds of the two-legged race.

Miles dug deeper into what his heart had to say, opened doors he thought he'd bricked over lifetimes ago, tears fueled the flicker of his prayers, he was starting to feel something. Unless that was just the frybread.

It turned out that camp was not on the rez. At least not on today's rendition of where America thinks the line should be. The reservations are constantly shrinking, sometimes just a mile at a time, as we set up liquor shops next door for our captive clientele of birthwritten addicts. The maps of treaty land and the current occupation bear no resemblance, the once connected reservations have been whittled down to a fragmented existence on toxic soil, while family fortunes built on dollar-an-acre Indian land claim no responsibility for their inherited privilege.

The more Miles learned about the true American history, the more he felt the guilt bubbling in his gut, that definitely coulda been the frybread though.

Ancestral guilt. It's passed down through the DNA, through the last seven generations, and we carry the traumas of our ancestors as well, some of us more than others. But that can all be healed. Must be healed. The work to be done can be difficult, on both ends, but through patience, humility, and understanding, it is more than possible to reunite the colors of the medicine wheel, it's written in the stars.

25

"Miles, pack your shit and get the hell out of here," barked Jordan.

"I'm going, I'm going."

"And don't come back until you learn how to talk to the food."

"Alright, I'm really going now."

"Miles, are you in there?"

"I'm coming."

"You're late."

"Indian time."

"Good one," Jordan whispered across the yurt. "See you soon roomie, toksa ake."

"Toksa," he replied. "I'm coming, I promise, just one last... alright, I'm ready."

"No big deal," reassured Bill as Miles fell into the daylight. "It's not as if the fate of the entire free world is in our hands or anything, better tie your boots though."

"I'll be alright. How far is this place anyway?"

"Few hours, and four of us crammed onto a bench seat. Wonder if you'll be early enough to call shotgun?"

"Hey now, gimme a break, at least til I've had some coffee."

"Morning sunshine," greeted Selam as she joined the entourage. "Coffee?"

"Please."

"He was still sleeping," Bill informed. "What? you've got your coffee now."

"Thanks buddy."

"Anytime."

"It's all good," relieved Selam. "I had to grab some of Yohan's sea salt anyway, wheels up in one."

"You're late," chastised Tiana from the hood of the truck.

"Indian time?"

"Try again."

"He was still in bed."

"Figures."

"Alright boys and girls," rallied Selam. "Let's do the thing."

"Shotgun," fired Tiana, as she welcomed all challengers. No takers.

"You got any tapes in here?" Bill foraged.

"Yeah, up under the seat," said Selam.

"Word, what kind of music do you like Miles?"

"Everything really. Been listening to a lot of jam lately, before here anyway. I like fusion a lot, and funk, bluegrass even, anything with some actual instruments and more than three chords, maybe even a key change or two. Like, real music, that takes you somewhere, you know."

"Jeez. That's a pretty colonized thing to say," criticized Tiana. "And does a buffalo drum count as an actual instrument? Or the twelve singers sitting around it pouring their hearts into our sacred songs? Sorry if there's not enough key changes for you mister music master man, guess our ancestors musta forgot those as they were handing down these original teachings over millennia, promise we'll try harder next time sir."

"Well you just can't win for losing, can you bud?" prodded Bill.

"Isn't that why most people don't win?" Selam jabbed.

"I guess you have a point there. Steve Miller it is."

"I didn't mean for it to sound like that, you know?" Miles dug in. "I just meant that a lot of mainstream music is garbage, completely devoid any kind of depth, it's got no soul. Native songs are on the other end of that spectrum though, they nourish the soul, even I feel it, they're way more music than any of that top 440 crap out there."

"Nice try," she didn't try to sound nice. "But just sounds like more colonized jibber jabber to me. It's whatever, I mean, we're used to the rhetoric of colonial indoctrination by now."

"When I go home and start talking about colonization, my parents can't even register what in the world I'm talking about," laughed Selam. "Or if I say colonial, they think it's a compliment about a quaint piece of proud history from the 1700s. I think they're pretty clueless as to what exactly we're doing out here."

"When you grow up in the colonies, it's all you've ever known, so it all seems as normal as it ever was. Mindless expansion and spreading destruction is just the way it is.

But when your perspective is from outside that way of life, you can see clearly that colonization is still in full swing. It encroaches into every nook and cranny of undeveloped potential. You can feel the noose tightening as the borders shrink around you. Colonization is all about converting people with inherent freedom into taxpaying slaves, and you've probably got seven generations of that shit slowing you down, so I won't hold it against you, HonkyTonk."

"Oh what? Now you too?" he was just happy to hear her break character.

"Jordan told me that shit," as the remainder of her serious face faded away. "Now that's funny, man. That one's gonna stick around for a while."

"Great."

"Breaker one-nine," interrupted Selam. "This is Big HonkyTonk, over."

"Wiki wiki, DJ HonkyTonk on the ones and twos," scratched Bill.

"Fantastic."

"Well lookie there pal," said Selam. "Got your first codename, first field trip, who knows what else could happen while we're out here?"

Miles thought he picked up on some hidden undertone that only he was kept privy from. He knew a bit about their mission, but not much. The ride didn't offer a lot in the way of explanation, but the conversation did lighten for the rest of the trip.

He knew they were going on a supply run, food mainly, there was a farm run by sympathizers of the cause, at least until an overdose of black tar infiltrates their headwaters of fertility.

"At first they wanted the pipe to come right through here," explained Doodle, the farm manager. "Tried to offer us bottom dollar for the half-acre strip that would divide the farm in two, right through that field over there, across the creek, and then up that hill beside the orchard. Tried to promise us that they'd be as light on the land as a tractor, we'd never even know they were here. It was like they thought they could fast talk some simple country bumpkins before we knew what hit us, as if we'd never heard of the internet out here in rural Americana.

We talked to some folks east of here that fell for the con, and for a month, they sat and watched their topsoil terrorized by a crew that somehow missed the details of the negotiation table. The bait had been switched, but the check had been signed, and another fractured family farm was forced to sell their depreciated livelihood to some bottom feeder for chicken scratch.

The land can never be the same as it was, it's in the contract, they poison the path before it even leaks, because they can't afford our traditional roots disrupting their line of credit.

And when they clearcut up a hill like that one, they have to disperse these little chemical erosion control pellets, which is no good for an organic farmer. Especially when they're always dumping them on the wrong farms. They're like these little rocks that have been hitting kids in the head, and even if they tried to follow the law this one time, the wind carries the toxic cropdust with little regard for engineered drawings."

"So what happened when you told them no?" asked Miles.

"At first they tried to offer us more money, pennies on the dollar for decades worth of heirlooms, and when that didn't work, we started getting anonymous threats on the landline, so we had it disconnected.

"Jeez," sighed Miles.

"Then came the eminent domain notices. They were going to take it anyway, seize the land out from under us for the good of the common man, the gas guzzling voters who think that increasing our energy export is somehow beneficial to our own domesticated breed of dependence.

But that fuel was a little too rich, even for the conservative estimates of middle America, so it backfired on them when the community reliant on our vitality, came together to defend their sacred rights of private property."

"That's a little different angle than we've been focused on at camp," Miles pointed out.

"I know, and land ownership isn't really my thing either, we think of ourselves more as caretakers of the garden, not oligarchs of an empire, but we were grateful for any help we could get"

"So what happened?"

"We won, technically. Scared 'em off of going toe-to-toe with our pitchfork posse, it might even make it into the news now that some loyal consumers were outraged. So they changed the route."

"That's great," congratulated Miles as he felt rushed to judgement. "Itn't?"

"For us I guess, kept them from tearing up our topsoil at least, and now the pipe's in place about fifty yards upstream of the title line. Right over there somewhere. And that creek didn't used to be all blown out and brown like it is, that's just an unforeseen byproduct of replacing a marine habitat with the four foot cashflow of dirty money. There's no oil or anything in it yet, thanks to you guys, but just the installation has been devastating to our entire county.

Back when we had all them floods last spring, they were ordered by DEQ to halt construction until it dried up, but they claimed that it would be more destructive to leave the pipe halfway in, and that they should at least be permitted to cover their tracks. The governor agreed, surprise surprise, and he granted a reprieve to secure the last few sections of unsettled pipe. Then the next day we see them clearcutting another hill, in the middle of the most erosive flood we've seen in a century. And once it's cut, there's no longer a debate of whether or not to cut it, just a fee for stream mitigation when a fifty foot section of pipe slipped loose and ended up way down there by the apple barn."

"You're kidding me?"

"No sir, the snowmelt carried it clear across the farm. Then a bunch of cops and bulldozers pushed their way in to drag the damaged collateral across our plates after all."

"That's too much, man."

"You're telling me. And they all think they're doing God's work in the process. Self-righteous pricks who claim allegiance to the highest authority, but Benjamin Franklin ain't gonna be there when that tower comes crashing down, I can guarantee you that."

"No doubt about that one."

"Not at all. Listen Miles, it's been good chatting with you, we should pick it back up later on, but I gotta run up the hill and finish packing some crates for you guys. If you'd be into it, I bet my niece Annie could use a hand down there in the lower garden, she's the one with the real green thumb around here."

Annie? Couldn't be his Annie. Could it? He'd experienced coincidence beyond reasonable doubt, he now believed that anything was possible, but this level of cosmic inclination was just too much to fathom. She had mentioned something about a farm, and an uncle, and through the squint of his sunblurred vision he thought he might have seen that hair glimmering in the wind. He tried to subdue his hastened approach, her anonymity guarded by a row of early broccoli, what were the odds of there being two Annies in the same book?

"Annie?" he timidly searched, as butterflies flew past his vocal cords.

"Oh hey, so you must be the new guy, good to meet you, I'm Annie."

"Miles," he introduced himself to the newly revealed stranger. "But my friends call me HonkyTonk."

"I like Miles. You wanna help me plant some sweet potatoes?"

"Sure do," he signed in, his head still swimming with the near collision of missed connection.

"Good, I'll poke the holes with this stick, you follow behind and push a start down into each one."

"Got it."

"So how long you been out there at camp?"

"Just a couple of weeks, it's already hard to imagine life before it though." He thought his response cluttered, considering his preoccupation of unrealized romance.

"That's how it goes," she empathized. "Same thing happens out here, being so disconnected from civilization and surrounded by all this glorious vegetation. Everything we need comes off the land here, except for salt of course, but I'll bet Selam took care of that one for us."

He looked up as more pieces fell into place, "I was wondering what that was for."

"It's not a trade really," she expounded. "We'd be giving you all this stuff anyway, we're just answering a call we feel in our hearts, and the salt's simply an unexpected gift from yours. It's kind of magic how it all seems to come together."

"I've been seeing that for myself here lately," Miles recounted his blessings. "What all do you grow out here?"

"Oh, a little bit of everything, I guess. This garden rotates with the trinity, and a few other peppers and melons and stuff, first time trying sweet potatoes down here. Then we got leafy greens up top, onions and garlic, a greenhouse full of tomatoes and some more broccoli, basil and rosemary, every kind of nut tree you can imagine, fruit out the wazoo, berries everywhere, and that field across the creek will be full of golden wheat come harvest time."

"You even grow your own wheat?"

"Yeah buddy, it's the only way to get an unpoisoned loaf these days, and just wait til you try a slice of Doodle's world famous skillet bread."

Miles' mouth watered faster than the overgrown creekbed.

"There's a chicken coop behind the barn, for eggs mainly, except this one time a black snake picked a fight it couldn't swallow, and we had to finish the job. Poor little Clementine, tasted like chicken," she somehow said with a straight face.

"We get milk from our neighbor, still warm and creamy, I don't do dairy, but it sure looks yummy. We eat a lot of fish from the pond, used to before all this started anyway, other than that we don't eat too much meat around here. He used to keep sheep for wool and flesh, but then I showed up and relentlessly objected to the itemization of another animal's existence. He won on the chickens, but at least they can come and go as they please."

"You really do have it all, huh?"

"Oh honey," she stirred his pot a bit. "I nearly forgot about the bees. Took me a while to be alright with boxing them in like that, but now we've got a pretty solid relationship with each other, and they're the keystone to making this whole valley bloom."

"Well aren't you just a regular old Bingo Pajama?"

"Nice, I love Tom Robbins, now there's an author that can really take the woes of the world and weave them into a fun read."

"Most agreed, he's one of my favorites."

"Well gold star for the new guy, maybe if you're lucky we'll brew up some jitterbug perfume later tonight."

Miles jittered.

"Oh yeah, and we have beets. Speaking of, we should probably beat it up the hill and see if they need help with dinner. You game?"

"Am I ever."

26

The farmhouse was rustic and spacious, the others were already hard at work with various tasks of food preparation, this was the most streamlined farm-to-table operation in existence. Sitting along the wall was a stove identical to the one at camp, turns out they'd donated their backup to the cause. And because Miles had recently begun honing his own grilling chops, he was volunteered to put on the chef's hat and give their hosts a night off.

It was just the two of them out here, for now. Travelers came and went by the season, sneaking in chocolate and wild caught meat, leaving with packs full of dried fruit and dirty fingernails. It was a constantly evolving hub of transient energy, which powered the entire growing season, each visitor paying forward the abundance as they tended to some future meal on the farm.

"It's way too much land for just us," calculated Doodle, over the runny flavors of this beet and egg creation that Miles made up, which was fantastic by the way. "It wants to nourish so many more, plus it's a lot of work. But we have fifty or sixty travelers come through here every year, at least, sometimes for months, once we even had thirty-three people out here at the same time.

Sure makes the harvest a lot easier, and helps us to share our bounty with the rest of the Earth. And getting to share it with you guys just means the world to us, it really does. Out there putting your ass on the line so that people like us can continue to exist, I can't thank you folks enough for everything you're doing."

"Well I can try," offered Annie. "May I present the one and only Butternut Breadpie Delicioso."

"Consider us thanked," accepted Selam

"It smells like a dream," Tiana hummed. "When could you have possibly had time to make that?"

"Oh, you know," she flexed her nonchalance. "Somewhere between spreading manure and washing my hands."

"I knew I recognized that taste," Doodle played along. "Must be from old Sweet Pea next door."

"Only the best for such a noble gathering of heroics," she applauded.

"Still tastes like Tiana's dream, as far as I can tell," said Bill.

"What does that even mean?" Tiana demanded.

"I don't know, you tell me, you're the one dreaming about a bunch of bullshit."

"Oh suck an egg. And I'd go get you one myself if I wasn't glued to this pie thing. This is so delicious Annie."

"Isn't it? This other Water Protector that stayed here for a while made it up. We got him to invent a new butternut dish every night for a month, he was a pretty cool guy, huh Doodoo?"

"Doodoo?!" cried Selam. "That's so great."

"Miles has a new nickname too," outed Tiana.

"What?" led Annie. "Captain Sweet Potato and the Honky Tonk Parade?"

"Yes, that's a keeper," collected Bill.

"Ooh, can I keep him?" she asked with a hint of sincerity.

"Hands off sister," defended Selam. "We got big plans for this one."

Miles was intrigued.

"Well, then can I at least take him on a moonlit parade through the orchard?"

Still intrigued.

"I'll permit it this time," allowed Selam. "Just as long as there's no honky tonky out there."

"Full circle with this one, huh?" grumbled Miles.

"Oh, this one's not going anywhere," Selam broke the news. "At least not until you earn another one."

"I'll pass."

"The HonkyTonk Kid it is."

"C'mon HonkyDory, let's blow this squash stand, we got some perfume to make. Later suckers."

"Later suckers," Miles concluded with the satisfaction of the last laugh.

"They only mess with you because they love you, you know?"

"I know, and I only pretend to let it bother me because I love them."

"Aha, so you are a secret agent underneath all those layers, I knew it."

"That obvious, huh?"

"Yep. Wonder what I'd find if I kept peeling?"

"Probably a clove of garlic breath."

"Ooh, my favorite. May need some of that for our perfume later. Do you know how to climb a tree?"

"It's been a while, bout like riding a bike though, itn't?"

"Same. Same."

"Good, just tell me when to start peddling."

"And you're a comic as well," she shed another layer. "See if you can get up to that big limb, it's got a perfect view of that beautiful full moon. If you can't make it, I'll just yell down to you about how pretty it is up there."

"I'll be there to see for myself," committed Miles, as he pondered the significance of yet another moon with Annie. It's complicated.

"We use the moon to know when to plant everything around here. Like the sweet potatoes, the ground is most receptive to root veggies when she's big and full like this one. And then other stuff wants to get started when she's new."

Miles knew all about that one.

"Farmers still know how to follow the natural cycles of the Earth, but they're completely clueless of how food is really supposed to work. It's all about the efficiency of stripping the most resource from the land possible, when it should be about sowing yourself into the soil and creating a tightly woven network of nutrition.

Like the corn, beans and squash down there. The farm store tells them to plant individual rows with plenty of room for a tractor, and to add nitrogen to the corn, and to string up the beans, and gonna need tons of sprinklers to overcome evaporation, and definitely pour on some poison, and to shop local. But we do it just like the natives did before all that stuff.

The Three Sisters want to live together, they thrive off of each other's company. Sounds like a bunch of gibberish if you're not an Indian or a hippie, but like with most ancient indigenous knowledge, science is finally catching up to realize that they don't know what the hell they're doing. In our community garden, the corn provides support for the beans, the beans pour nitrogen back into the soil, and then the squash provide ground cover, which inhibits weed growth and evaporation, now ain't that some kind of cosmic coincidence?"

Miles remembered the cooperation of competitive sports.

"You could never reap it all by machine, but I believe in singing with my seeds and handpicking my harvest anyway, it just feels better that way, and the food can feel it too, and then you get to feel it all over again when you eat."

"So do you have a bunch of permaculture going on here?"

"Well look at you mister permaculture, so you do know a thing or two about regenerative agriculture."

"Just learned about it actually."

"You still get another gold star in my book."

"How many do I need to cash 'em in?"

"I'd say three's probably a good start. Yeah, we've got a bunch of self-sustained systems that will keep functioning even without our guidance. And without a yearly investment, the food forest here will continue to bloom long after the collapse shuts down the grocery."

"Which collapse was this?"

"Either one of them," she spoke as if the date were already saved. "Ecological catastrophe, economic crash, disease outbreak, water scarcity, failing electric grid, EMPs, alien invasion, zombies. They're all related, symptoms of a sick and swollen population, and we're only tipping the iceberg. It's all part of the same consequence of the mainstream way of life, the one where the world insists on consuming itself as they pretend that everything's gonna be just fine."

"This does seem like the perfect place to survive any of those scenarios."

"Isn't it?" she agreed. "Sure hope it happens while we have a whole farm full, or they at least know to come here afterwards, it does tend to get a little lonely out here sometimes."

Miles wondered if he detected some kind of something, or maybe it was just the butternuts.

"I mean, I love what we have going on here, the swirl of energies that come together to create such an incredible celebration of life, and I'm talking about some of the most amazing people, like you guys, you know? And there's always lots to keep us busy, but sometimes we go a month without seeing anyone but ourselves, which is rewarding in its own right, but once you've felt the magic of community, it's hard to really compare.

And even within that, everybody's so spectacular, but you only end up really connecting on like a chemistry kinda level with the occasional passerby, and it's magical, but it was never meant to last. So it's totally refreshing when someone cool comes along to talk about books, and climb trees, and fall in love and stuff."

Miles nearly slipped off the branch.

"I don't mean you fella," she relieved. "I just mean in general, two out of three ain't bad though. I've had my share of heartbreaks out here, they don't mean for it to hurt, but you get attached and it sucks when it's time to leave. And I can't go with, because I need to help Doodle. He'd tell me to follow my heart, but he's getting too old to do it all by himself, plus my heart's right here anyway.

My dream though, is to have a more permanent community, still the flow of travelers, but with a stable base of core family members out here year round. Then I can fall in love with whoever I want, and if we want to leave, I'll know that the farm is in good hands."

"That sounds like the right idea," lifted Miles, as he found himself captivated by the glimmer of the moon. "You know, I spent a bit of time off-grid with some really cool folks, building this Earthbag house, the first of many out there, and hopefully a community will blossom there like what you're talking about. Then I go to camp, where that community is already happening, and it shows me that there truly is a better way to live than out in that other world.

And now I'm here, yet another element of that utopian vision, each stop showing me a glimpse of paradise and inspiring me to keep collecting the pieces. Just imagine a dirthouse village of Water Protectors tending your food forest, I can see it all when I close my eyes, and it feels that if I try hard enough, I can almost dream it into existence.

And I've been learning about that love stuff too, a little bit anyway. About how to really appreciate someone without expectation, about how your capacity for love grows the more you use it, how those heart connections aren't restricted to the space between you, and how the heart is capable of many emotions at once, not limited to one contractually obligated partner.

So with all that in mind, I'd try not to focus on the heartache side of it all. A love was created in you both, yours didn't leave you just because they did, and they're out there sharing that beautiful gift with the world, and through love we're gonna heal the Earth, so how can you really be sad about all that other stuff?

I've been lonely before too, big time, it sucks, but I'm starting to think that maybe we meet the people we're supposed to meet when we do, because maybe we're not ready to meet those next people yet. So I'd be willing to bet that once you're ready to meet that person, you will.

And I learned about really being with someone, not in another world dreaming of some other Annie, but really there in a heart kinda way. No push for more, no worry of some future time, just how to really relish every drop of each moment together, as you unwrap each little page of the present"

"Um..." she whispered with enamored approval. "I think you just earned that last gold star."

27

"Wake and bake."

"I'm up. Do I smell cinnamon rolls with fresh ground wheat? And home churned butter?"

"That you do, must be that big honker of yours," Selam started in. "But no coffee. And farm chores wait for no one. C'mon, let's go knock them out and we'll get on the road to caffeinate. D'ya have fun last night?"

"He was out there howling at the moon all night long," came a muffled review from Bill's sleeping bag. "Hooowwwl."

"Was not," followed by a pillow should shut him up.

"Whatever man, but I'm gonna walk by and see how many peaches you shook loose."

"Boys!" cautioned Selam.

"It wasn't me," Miles reminded, as he gathered his wit about him, just one.

Chores done by eight, truck loaded by nine, another Annie in the rearview by ten.

"I'll see you soon Miles," she had said, with no expectation but a certainty that it was true. "You take care of that big beautiful heart of yours, it's gonna do some great things out there, I can feel it. And you come build me a dirthouse anytime you want," her smiled betrayed her melancholy. "I want you to carry these seeds with you, I know you might not be in a place to grow this yourself, but you'll get these to their home, you'll know it when it finds you. So good to know you brother, thank you for everything, for listening, for caring, for just getting the hell out of here so we can talk about all this next time."

"Whatcha got there?" asked Bill, the other middle sardine.

Really, she got shotgun both ways?

"Some seeds Annie gave me," shared Miles as he was pulled out of the flashback.

"Customary gift to and from any respectable traveler," gauged Bill. "Which sounds like... the friend zone."

"Those are tobacco seeds, itn't?" confirmed Tiana. "Those are sacred. All seeds are, but tobacco is one of our most sacred medicines, and those seeds have all that power wrapped up inside them. Big responsibility to be accountable for those, so you better not fuck it up, Honk Williams Jr."

"Good one. Or how about the Incredible Honk?"

"Or maybe Honky Kong? Is that? Yep, I think it is. That's a good one."

"Alright guys, cool it, let's leave old HonkyTonk Badonkadonk alone for bit."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys are so clever. But one day it's gonna backfire on you, you'll need something sometime, like maybe dinner, and when you come honking around for me like a bunch of geese, I'll be nowhere to find, I'll have escaped this assault and floated downstream to greener pastures, and all you'll have left is a fading memory of what coulda been, which you should cherish and share with your grandchildren, at bedtime maybe, just tell 'em it's the adventures of Honkleberry Finn."

"Now that's funny," squeezed Bill through a fog of laughter.

"Wait," insisted Miles. "Was that a...? Yep, I think it was. That was a good one."

"Good one."

"Good work Miles," Selam approved, as she took the next exit. "Congratulations, you've completed your first challenge."

"What? Not punching Bill in the face?"

"I'd have liked it anyway," blocked Bill.

"No," denied Selam. "I'm being serious here, not about all the HonkyTonks, but we really do have another challenge for you, a task that only you can do for the team.

Miles smelled a setup as he glanced around the truck for a hint of insincerity.

"We want you to climb up on the roof of that farm store over there," briefed Tiana. "And we want you to flip that big American flag upside down."

"Ha ha, good one," deflected Miles, as he realized that no one else was laughing.

"Playtime's over," Tiana told him. "This is for real."

Miles looked to Selam for a lifeboat, but only found a nod of agreement.

"The country's in distress, you know," said Tiana. "Enemies foreign and domestic. A government corrupted by corporate interests while its citizens struggle to survive. Priorities of profit over the destruction of the free world. It's a country founded on genocide, but they didn't stop with us, it continues today right in front of us all. And we are the citizens of this monstrosity, we have a duty to stand up for what is right when our government has failed us, otherwise it's as if we sentenced the victims of violent oppression ourselves. When you flip a flag, it alerts the followers that something is wrong.

People may not get it at first, some will be angry at the disrespect we show their superior patriotism, but as the unrest continues to build, flags will be flipped in solidarity, and those sitting on the sidelines will know that it is time to stand up. And if not them, then us. If not us, then you. If not you, then who?"

"And you're sure you're not messing with me?"

"We're not fucking with you Miles," promised Selam. "This is your initiation into 1491. We've all done it. We all like you a lot, even T, and we want you to be a full-fledged member of our crew, but we gotta know how down for the cause you are, before we can show you what's behind the curtain."

"It's easy man," assured Bill. "I already scoped it out. You can use the dumpster to reach the lower level, should be able to parkour up to the top, and once you're there, it's just like in boy scouts. Some flags aren't accessible without special tools, but that one's just got normal old snap hooks. Just reel it down, switch the clasps, and pull it back up there. And then get out of there as fast as you can and hope we haven't left you."

"Great, any other advice?" Miles stalled, as he realized this was for real.

"Here's a red polo," offered Selam. "Makes you look like an employee, just in case anybody sees you up there."

"Even better," said Miles.

"Oh, and I guess it goes without saying, but if you're compromised, of course we will have to disavow all knowledge of your mission. It's strictly off the books."

"Seriously?"

"No, I'm just fucking with you. We'll be right here the whole time. In and out and we'll keep the engine running. But if you do good, I'll see about getting you a proper nickname."

"No more HonkyTonk?"

"No more HonkyTonk."

"I'm in," he felt the release of liquid courage as he hopped out.

Bill was right, the roof access was straight forward, the flag slid down without a snag. He'd forgotten, however, to mention how difficult it is to work a snap hook with trembling fidgets, especially as a patrol car pulls up to the stoplight out front. He successfully switched one, but struggled with the other, it didn't help when he saw the officer turn left into the parking lot.

Do it like you mean it, thought Miles, like you own it, like the fate of the free world is in your hands, just do what you gotta do and get it done. And he did. The clasp latched, he flew it up the pole, then he got out of there as fast as he could. He emerged from behind the building ready to make a break for the truck, until...

"Excuse me," came a voice from the perimeter of his tunnel vision. He redirected his focus and found himself face to face with the looming foreshadow of law enforcement.

"I was just driving by a second ago..."

Miles prepared for the least desirable pat down of his story.

"And when I looked over here I saw something I found rather curious..."

Eagles spread and cavities filled.

"So tell me something, will you?"

What about the right to remain silent?

"Is that two for one deal good on goat pellets too, or is it just for horse feed?"

Miles glanced down to register his uniformity.

"Well sir, you happen to be in luck. You see, we fight for the little guys around here, and we all gotta stick together. It's the only way to ever get ahead of those big corporate operations. So yeah, that sale price should be good for anything you can build a fence around, low prices are all that matters in today's agriconomy, we're just trying to nourish the world sir, one bag at a time."

"Thanks buddy," said another satisfied consumer. "You new here?"

"Yes sir, just finished my orientation as a matter of fact, now I better get back to it, before you have to bust me for being homeless. You have a good day now."

"Will do. You keep it up son, you hear. I think you'll do just fine around here."

"Me too."

Miles gathered the rest of his wits and tried not to flee in a panic, act casual he thought, own it, and as he climbed into the shotgun, he was the least chalant of the cool kids.

"Holy shit," cried Bill. "That was epic."

"What did you say to him?" Selam debriefed her disbelief.

"Oh, you know, just the truth. Heard somewhere that it would set me free.

"Epic," Bill reaffirmed.

"You got moxy, kid," approved Tiana. "I'll give you that."

"I'll take it, so am I in?"

"Oh, you're in," Selam confirmed. "You're definitely in."

"Welcome to 1491, Goose," announced Bill.

"Goose, huh?"

"Yeah," offered Selam. "You know, the most majestic of all the tonky honkers"

"Flying high above the chaos," pitched Bill.

"Part of a team," Tiana sold it.

"I'm in," accepted Miles. "Am I supposed to give a speech or something?"

"Oh hell no," refused Tiana. "Turn that radio up, even Steve Miller is better than listening to Honky McTonkerson over here."

"Good one."

28

"Goose, come in... Goose, you got your ears on?... Goose, where the hell are you?"

"I'm here, this is Goose, sorry, got caught up in a 10-2."

"Switch to bravo."

"Okay, I'm here."

"It's time."

"Copy that, give me three, over."

"You get all your business handled?" asked Bill, as Miles walked into the workshop.

"Yep, did it like the mathematician."

"What does that mean?"

"Worked it out with a pencil."

"Gross dude, you know I chew on those."

"Tastes like chicken."

"Alright master chef, let's do this already. Everything's in those two bags by the door, just gotta grab all the hardware and we're set."

"Is Paul coming?"

"Yeah, he's going to meet us up top. Load these up and I'll make sure we aren't forgetting anything."

"You mean like our safety net?"

"Yeah, like that."

The infiltrators slipped in undetected. Word was, that the construction would be gearing back up soon. It was now or never. The plan had been rehearsed in triplicate, radios were darker than the waning moon, the rest would be hidden under the cover of silence.

Each climbed a tree of the triangle, a strap locking in their progress as towlines brought up the tail. Once their tie-downs were in position, they pulled up the high-tensile canvas platform and clipped it into Bill's custom designed spring anchors. It was essentially a triangular trampoline, each connection offering flexibility as the trees sway in the wind, forty feet up.

Next came the lightweight pyramid that some tipi-making friends of Yohan stitched to spec, it was tied independently of the floor by ropes that hung from above, stout enough to clip into, just in case. Three bags of supplies hanging in the trees, razor wire wrapped around the stairwells, a bunch of other tactical amenities were in place, but we gotta suspend some disbelief for later.

Bill had been working on SkyFortress for a month, it was his baby, so he needed to be there for the technical difficulty of her maiden voyage. Paul was recruited for his complete fearlessness of heights, he wasn't a 1491er, he'd jumped in with the CatBirds, but we're all in this together. Miles however, was not, he was only here for the art installation, and once it was complete, he hugged his brothers and climbed the rope ladder to the ground.

When you put up a treesit, it's not always surrounded by the fuzz right away, sometimes you'll go months with clear enough access to switch out your roster and deliver food, but eventually the moment will come when whoever's up there, stays up there. They had enough MREs to last a couple weeks of isolation, the tent was designed to catch rainwater to replenish their six gallon, a BioLite to burn coffee, and plenty of books to keep from going completely crazy.

Paul was livestreaming every morning, as much to keep himself busy, as to keep everyone else afloat of the suspended progress. There was no heavy equipment in sight, but you could hear it in the distance, especially from the trees, it'd be a good vantage point once it was time for all that. The little patch of woods was on the side of a hill that ran along the next waterway to be crossed. It was the perfect spot for the sit, because a cherry picker couldn't get enough footing to extract them, they would have to come up the trees.

This was neither reservation nor national forest, it was what the colonists refer to as private property. A family ranch, had been for generations, and when they refused to trade their way of life for money, a judge approved its seizure through eminent domain. But how could this be? They were good hearted white Americans, not the dirty Indians whose family was on the original deed. Not quite ready to bend over for the pipe layers, they agreed to let a camp full of natives defend their property rights, talk about complicated.

This was obviously a point of conversation around camp, and contention for some, but most believed that stopping the pipeline, was stopping the pipeline, regardless of how it happened. Plus, it granted them a legal land to stand on, literally. The confiscated easement was only a hundred and fifty yards wide, so with the permission of entitlement, the cops couldn't stop the support team from standing by, not legally anyway.

It was a hike from camp, but Miles made it twice a day, as much for moral support as food distribution. He had to be on high alert as he clipped the picnic basket to the towline, he was trespassing on stolen territory and Ranger Smith could pop out from a bush at any time. Lots of protectors made it out to cheer for the home team, it was a festive gathering most of the time, music, jokes, and radio games occupied the airwaves of cabin fever. Miles also moonlit as the postmaster, delivering fanmail and gifts to and from the sky, he became the guy to see if you needed to speak with the other side.

The spirits seemed to be high up there, they had cards and chess and snacks, and frybread. The weather was optimal, there was a ukulele and a kazoo, it was a slumber party on a trampoline, everything was smooth, except where was the action?

The expected reinstatement had been authorized, they were clear to cut, but no movement had happened on any of the monitored worksites. It was in the pipeline's best interest to cross the water before the next stoppage, but some campers theorized a countertactic of waiting out the treesitters as resources were diverted from more pressing actions.

There were more theories and rumors than there were protectors, it could be a little much to put it all together, but within each team was a solid foundation of intelligent design, one that enabled clear and concise strategic planning. Each group had what you could think of as a leader, someone responsible for keeping the instrument in tune, but decisions were made by consensus. Selam's more immediate duty was to attend the daily meeting of other trusted representatives, to share and discuss intel, and actions, and then to brief her crew with the most up to date rumors available.

Some of the misinformation was simply the gossip of uninformed idiots, but there was also the undertone of possible infiltration. Sowing distrust and discrediting the truth had been top priorities of the counterintelligence at Standing Rock, no reason to assume it would be any less here, probably more.

Camp had grown a bit since Miles arrived, some curious faces had joined the foxhole, a few seemed to be asking a lot of questions that any normal person would have answered before they came out. Like, the very most basic details of camp, and of the pipe's progress, and past actions, and other interrogations that even Miles had known from a hilltop dirthouse, like they were compiling a dossier or something.

Plus, they dressed too... too much like squares pretending to fit in with an eclectic blend of dirt hippies and tree ninjas, like how their matching jackets were brand new from L.L. Bean, not pieced together layers of thrift shop donations.

They seemed like cops, even though they were younger than Miles, and eventually they mentioned having been in the navy. So that explains the authoritarian bravado, except there were other vets at camp, and across the board they were here to defend against threats foreign and domestic, they'd lost faith in America after everything they'd seen abroad, and they were not willing to let multinational corporations take over their homeland.

So these folks were nothing like that, still gung-ho Americans as a flag hung flipped in the mess hall, still capitalist and colonial minded, still had faith that the government and oil companies would work something out and do the right thing, and that they probably weren't that bad after all. The more they talked, the sketchier they seemed. When asked why they were here, the response held no water, though Miles remembered his own ill received answer to the same question.

There was no real policy for handling infiltrators, the consensus was to let them stay and help out, but be mindful of sensitive information. They were outsiders, at a camp full of outsiders, and while the average Water Protector shared a particular vibe that could not be counterfeited, even Miles, they couldn't discount the fact that the resistance is going to attract all walks of black sheep, as those who don't fit in anywhere within the system, look for a home outside of it.

Ambrose wanted to send them up a tree, they couldn't be too sneaky from up there, and they would be just as unproductive as any vetted climber, at least until the standoff began. It was a fun idea, but SkyFortress was its own top secret, Paul had only received clearance through his connection with Miles, and still wasn't hip to to all the bells and whistles.

Bill had carefully crafted every aspect of the sit, planned for most feasible scenarios, his sleeve of tricks wasn't even fully known to all of 1491. Miles had been helping him in the workshop, testing the components of the rig, and then everything that went into installation, he was by far the second most informed of its operation. He was Bill's ground guy, and for more than just food, he maintained radio contact and was at the ready to institute additional defensive protocols from Bill's grab bag of good times. Like when Bill paged Miles for assistance after a week of being up, there was a situation.

29

All Miles could get out of him was that it was a personal problem, or coulda just been gas, but Bill needed to come down. Which meant that Miles had to go up, at least for a day or two. Miles knew that this was always the plan, he'd signed up for it, but that didn't stop everything from suddenly becoming a little more real. He packed a bag of basics and let his crew know the deal, even Tiana was unbashingly supportive while he gathered himself, but as last minute as it all was, nothing had ever felt more right.

He started up the ladder as he pulled it behind him, now was not the time for letting guards down, except for Bill. The treetop reunion was short lived, Bill was excited to see a face other than Paul's, but whatever it was, had him on a collision course for getting the hell out of there. He rappelled down and Miles pulled back the rope, he was officially subletting SkyFortress for an undetermined amount of time, game on.

The sway of the trees took some getting used to, and remembering not to look down, but all was put at ease when Tiana delivered a basketful of Indian tacos. She'd gotten easier on Miles, not that she was more nice, but more like she was less not nice. Miles would take what he could get. And now that he was a bonafide Water Protector floating high above the riverbed, he almost thought he saw a smile seep out down below, unless that was just the Indian tacos.

Paul, however, was more than ecstatic to be shacked up with his old dirthouse buddy. They'd been on two very different adventures since they first arrived, but it had all circled back as fate reconnected their journey. Paul showed him the ropes, get it, and by the end of the day, Miles was in full swing.

There was plenty of time to think. About all sorts of stuff. About the seemingly global conspiracies unraveled around him, and his firsthand experience of this one. One that the followers from home were sure to consider fake news, if it ever made it into the media's propaganda to begin with, which only made Miles reconsider the fringe theorists, now that he knew not to trust anything he'd ever been told.

He spent a bit of time daydreaming about Annie. And Annie. And the mystery girl from his prologue, still unsure if she had ever really been real, or simply a Tyler Durden of internal motivation. Either way, he'd grown unrecognizable from the trapped mouse he'd once been. He had a hard time even remembering what it was that had him so paralyzed, and from his heightened perspective above the cage, he saw clearly the mechanisms that continued to enslave the prisoners of self-preservation.

It all seemed to come down to the same bottom line. Money. Those with the least, are left scraping change to avoid eviction, desperate to get ahead of the escalator to nowhere, and certainly no time left to stand up for those most affected by the socio-ecological crisis. And the university graduates brimming with inspiration to change the world, swallowed by student loans and sentenced to a mortgage, conditioned to believe that increasing one's debt limit equates to more accumulated adulthood, which requires the grownup decision of foregoing the most impactful career in favor of the job that pays the bills, no matter how underutilized their passion becomes, but only for the next thirty years or so.

Jobs they don't love. Jobs they hate. Jobs created just for the sake of creating jobs, the pointless monotony of clockwatching busywork, zero chance of fulfillment as their time is occupied with wasting their life away. Jobs that destroy the health and vitality of the world around them. Or themselves. Jobs with commutes, and traffic, and demanding bosses that pressure the help into working for the weekend and living for retirement. And their children taught that school is their job, as they're indoctrinated into a society of weekend warriors who exchange hours of freedom for credits on a slip of paper, plus a half hour lunch break.

But if they don't play along with the colonial workload, then they'll have no chance of ever demonstrating value, forced instead to resort to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And just how many channels of the current crime syndication can be traced back to the same root of evil?

Gangster rap sheets, for one, which clears up a good bit of the youth pushed into violence and the drug trade. But without a way to capitalize on the import of the substances destroying our population, it seems there would be little motivation for all that hard work in the first place, or for the rug required to clean up the drug deal gone bad. In fact, lots of murder weapons can be traced back to the same underlying motive, and pretty much all larcenies, as well as the whites collared for blackmail and extortion, and defrauding their bankrupt clients, who then spiral into depression and the aforementioned drug addiction, sparking a new crime wave to feed bad habits, until they either illegally take their own life away from the pain, or find themselves kicked to the streets as the victims of their own vagrancy violation. And then it gets really bad.

For what incentive other than money, and therefore basic survival, would a person be willing to sacrifice their own skin to the filthy world of the sex trade? Prostitution and all that comes with it, both legal and not, both consensual and non, all of it seems a tad implausible without a forced indenturement to the dollar bill. What else could possibly push a teenage girl into taking her clothes off for a stranger, or fuel someone else into selling her off to a worldwide network of sex trafficking? And more importantly, what kind of society allows the pursuit of paper products to supersede any concern for its disposable innocence?

It's the same one that sends its boys off to die in the name of resource management, which inspires a return flight of terror as our victims beg us to just leave them alone, which only justifies our own increased spending as we pad the pockets of the privately owned war machine.

And the same privatized penny pinchers profit from the overcrowded cells of their excel spreadsheet. Without a just cause to break their convictions, just how many of their returning customers would lock in a deal of crime just for the fun of it? Some, maybe, though the roots of evil run deeper than the eye can see, but crimes of passion could still be a thing in a moneyless society. So at least our warden has job security, and maybe now he can prioritize quality over quantity when it's another human being's life in the commissary line.

Of course, that could also be said of the prisoners to capitalism, forced to exchange a life of premium ingredients for whatever cut-rate substitutes fall within their dwindling budget. How could the wealthiest country in the world feed its people so poorly, ignore its homeless so overtly, extort its sick so despicably, treat its hardworking immigrants like thieves, its veterans like trash, its women like slaves, and all while incarcerating the most nonviolent inmates in the world? Money.

Miles hadn't really thought about it much. Hadn't exchanged an hour of his life to pay for the right to live. Hadn't had to prioritize the basic fundamentals of existence according to a price tag. Hadn't had to consider some unspeakable act in order to feed his family. He hadn't even had to feed his own dependence on tobacco.

He'd worked harder than the rest of his life combined. But without some bossman to own his time, he was able to live his own life while he did it. Didn't even feel like work really, except for the pickaxe maybe, it was just a group of friends creating something beautiful from their collective energy. Which was how this place felt in an even bigger way. And here he was, putting his neck on the line in a way you couldn't have paid him enough to do two months ago.

Everything he needed to survive had been built into his journey, and every step he followed his heart, not his wallet, and he'd discovered an abundance of life that is simply unachievable from within the confines of consumer spending.

He understood that money had been spent in his honor. Cap had been buying food for him to eat, Levi had paid for gas on the trip, the gifts of Spirit were coming from somewhere. So he was still contributing to the delinquent fees by proxy, not completely free of the dollar's grasp, but he felt it release its hold over him, as it no longer had to be a primary component of his own psyche. It held no influence in any decision, big or small. He was free to do whatever felt right in each moment, without concern for some manmade concept of limitation. And nothing but brilliance had blossomed into his life ever since.

Plus, there was that whole exploration of love's boundaries and moonlit romance that didn't cost a dime, and it taught him how to follow his heart, and it doesn't take an economist to know the difference between love when you follow your heart, and love when you follow the money. He'd never experienced anything even remotely as rich as the life he found himself waking into, it was as if this was who he was all along.

30

Dear sweet Miles,

I hope this letter finds you in a good way. I'd be willing to bet you're doing big things up there, maybe even saved the world by now, just remember to save a little fun for me too.

And would you look at that moon. She's watching us both at this very instant, connecting our dreams, and our hearts, and that kiss was something else, huh? I'm still tingling from it all, of course it was just ten minutes ago as I write this, but I'd guess that neither of us will have forgotten that moment as we sit here staring at our moon together.

I'm so excited to hear of your adventure, and so very proud of the Earth helper I've watched you become, I can't begin to imagine the person you'll have evolved into by the next time we touch each other. You're gonna do such great work along your path of discovery, you're gonna save lives out there, maybe even your own.

I'll very much be looking forward to our next moon together, to catching up on old times, and making a couple new ones. We're connected, me and you, in a way beyond any words I could possibly write, and we're gonna share in the glamour of so many future memories, I know it. It's getting me all flustered just thinking about it, thinking about you, thinking that if I don't wrap this up soon I may end up sneaking back over to your tent, thinking that wouldn't be so bad, but knowing that I have to let you go on your way in order for the sizzle between us to bloom into something extraordinary.

So you take care of yourself out there, and take care of others, and take care of our mom, and just keep being so sweet and real and full of life, and one day soon we'll see each other again, and it'll feel like we were never really apart as we pick back up right where we left off. Mmm...

So much love and light from me to you,

-Annie

He read it twice by the candlelight of a hidden moon, and again as he woke from a dream of similar content. Her words urging him into action, her tone inviting him to linger in the warmth for another moment, her love invigorating his passion for life as he felt his heart swaying in the wind.

He'd only been up for two days, but already felt a welcomed part of the living canopy, a nuthatch stopped in with a basket of cookies. His roommate knew a million card games, and even more philosophical conundrums, like, "In a riddle whose only answer is chess, what is the only word that is prohibited?"

Ground support launched a barrage of encouragement, Bill reemerged from crisis, the countdown to reprieve left Miles longing for an extension as he escaped the gravity of environmental collapse. He'd never felt so accomplished with such little effort, maybe he could change the world without standing up after all, just another day or two and he'd have himself figured out as well.

"Base camp to SkyFortress, come in SkyFortress."

Here they were, his marching orders of retreat, a beckoning down to Earth as his head was pulled from the clouds. He could always just not respond.

"SkyFortress, pick up, this is no time to screen calls."

Busted.

"What? I mean, SkyFortress here, how may I direct your call?"

"Goose," addressed Bill with his serious ears on. "They're coming."

There was only one they in the community of we. Miles could hear the whine of security jobs approaching in the distance, the proverbial day had arrived to draw the lines, Miles made a note to be careful what he wished for.

"Xerox that, just hope you catch me on the flipside."

"We'll keep the frybread warm for you."

With the hatches battened and shoestrings hanging by a double knot, Miles zipped away a third wall of the plotted device for his own binocular pat down, and confirmation that this wasn't a drill.

No drill, but a fleet of caterpillars climbed over the hill, chewing near enough that their engines could be felt through the trees, the dozing bulls were tired of sleeping through dinner. They weren't coming to extract the drops in the bucket that dangled in front of them, not yet anyway, but who knew when Paul Bunyan would show up to celebrate America's rich history of selling out its future.

The demolition derby circled the wagons a few hundred yards from the woodline, they weren't here for Miles, but they were here to let him know that regardless of his suspended sentence, business went on as usual. The ground troops knew this was coming, an arsenal of delay tactics waited in the wings, the balcony was at capacity as they watched tensions thicken from the best seats in the treehouse.

The offense of authority was unseen, but presumably lied in formation just over the hill, whatever defensive play was in the works would have to move quickly if it were to complete the interception. A hundred protectors collected themselves, from the eye in the sky they appeared as one cohesive organism, the Earth was frothing with antibodies as she fought off her own demise.

"SkyFortress, what's your twenty?"

Only a seasoned Water Protector could partake in radio humor at a time like this.

"We ran to the store, be back in a few."

"You got eyes on the action?"

"Affirmative."

"Any reinforcements on the way?"

"Negative, unless they're listening in now."

"Copy, hang tight."

It was assumed that radio chatter was monitored, Bill wouldn't have risked interference unless it was too late to be stopped, Miles could feel the mounting energy reach its tipping point. A shout of "Mni Wiconi" must have been the signal. Eight part harmony swarmed the tanks with choreographed precision, each team took control of the wheel as they evicted the previous tenants from their imminent domain.

It's remarkably easy to talk the labor union into taking the rest of the day off. No loaded weapons or empty threats necessary, just a kind hearted explanation that we'll be taking over now, and a reminder that they're not paid near enough to deal with this kind of hassle. They don't care to run over civilians, nor do they care to sit around and listen to them complain. They don't even care about the pipeline really, this is just their job, be it one that they need to support their out of state family, since no locals would take the gig. But once it's apparent that the people have reinstated the work stoppage, it's really quite pointless to resist the temptation of an afternoon nap.

They took along the keys, so there was no honky tonk parade for the police to escort, but this one wasn't about theft or vandalism charges, it was going to be a daily grind of lockdowns and local motives. Each crew slid their custom fabricated apparatus through the hydraulic components of their respective Earth mover, Miles reported another movement crawling over the hill. The action was swift, arrestables handcuffed themselves into the reinforcements as they sacrificed freedom for liberty, the accessories retreated as the calvary mobilized against revolution. Paul livestreamed the whole thing from the only angle they couldn't suppress.

It would take hours to cut through each restraint, Miles only counted two saws, it was gonna be dark before either side could clockdown for the night. Another day of demolition averted, just gotta keep this up until somebody at home decides to do something, could be you.

The boys dug out some snacks as they mystery-scienced the theater below. Paul's phone was filming from a treepod, but not close enough to pick up what the noise was all about. Some of the restrained were streaming audio of their incapacitation, most were well-spoken, and finding ample downtime to share their worldly wisdom with the earplugged hearts of the humans on the other side. The high wire couldn't hear any of that though, Paul could sync them in post, even from the stand, but for now, some bad lipreading and leftover frybread would have to entertain them.

By midafternoon, half of the prisoners were uncuffed and free to be incarcerated, the workday was shot, but no guns were. The cops padded their quota without seriously harming anyone, not that they were particularly gentle on the disarmed impediments, but only one work crew could legitimately claim the day as progress.

A line of riot gear pushed the innocent bystanders to their limit, a military truck and fencing unit deployed a razor wire perimeter along the easement, and then another to restrict the footprint of the most exclusive party in town. No more up and down, no more frybread, no more reasons not to crack into the MREs. There were two ten-foot barriers between Miles and escape, yet he still felt freer than the caged rat of his past, plus Bill was probably down there digging a tunnel to somewhere or another.

A megaphone offered one last chance to surrender the high ground before Good Cop went on vacation.

"You know you're trespassing, don't you?"

Miles wanted to yell down something about obstructing for justice, or that they had the landowner's permission to protest the illegal use of eminent domain for privately exported profits, or that there was a treaty that superseded even that authority. Wanted to impress upon the ears of someone who wasn't ready to listen, but who would be attempting to identify the sitters through facial and voice recognition, plus infiltrator intel, at which point their threats would gain enough leverage to pry any sane person out of a forty foot trampoline treehouse.

He saved his voice and let his fans speak for him from the sidelines. Radio transmissions would be kept to a minimum. Paul posted directly to his Facebook because, well, he said that he didn't give a flying fuck who knew how dedicated he was to defending the planet and her people.

The night ran long. It's a little strange to celebrate the arrest of eight friends, but the day had been a success. The adrenaline pumping through camp would not disperse with the crowd, afterparties could be heard throughout the night, recounts of the event were exaggerated only marginally. Miles and Paul sat in silence as they stared down at the abandoned crime scene, all gassed up and ready to try again tomorrow.

Miles wondered if it could have all been a setup. If the other side knew what was in store and let it happen, assessing the competition and confiscating eight warriors, and maybe even flushing two tree rats from their nest in the process. And now they had barricades in place, no more rushing offsides to delay the game, and how long could they last up there without food anyway?

Two weeks.

Better try to get some sleep.

31

The rumble in the jungle bounced the boys to life, machines tore through the soil unencumbered by the friction of flesh, lost time was recovered as the planet was unearthed. It wasn't nearly as fun to watch as the keystone kops had been, but still Paul filmed, and still a fenceline of protest condemned the building, but no one boosted the riot over the razor wire, so the law was left with no citizens to protect.

"SkyFortress, this is Curly Sue, do not respond, I repeat, do not respond."

A curious Miles did not as he was told, Selam was his boss, after all, kinda.

"14-C-Apple, I repeat, 14-C-Apple. Click the call button twice if you copy."

Beep beep.

"Love you guys, you're doing great, over."

Beep beep.

Miles knew what 14 meant, it was actually gonna be pretty intense, but he had to check the key to decode the time it would go down, three am, good thing he got that hour of sleep.

The day dragged along with the excavator, most of the mob returned to camp under the limbo stick of planned inaction, a divised recovery from yesterday's losses as guards let down their hair. Only the council knew the whole plan, and trusted conspirators had a good idea, but the schleprocks and incognito mosquitos were left thinking that maybe the fight was over.

And hopefully that was the word that leaked out, subdued for now at least, it was a swing and a hit but they'd brought a bat to a gunfight, and now they'd been pushed off the field entirely. You Fossil cops might as well take the rest of the night off.

At two-thirty the yard was silent, the air was still, no sign of red alertness on the hill, but rest assured that a lookout was searching for midnight oil. Miles and Paul each climbed a tree past any reasonable zone of comfort, in the dark, and all while pulling up between them the ends of a length of paracord. The watchtowers were synchronized by ten of, positioned on the dark side of the moon's subtle nuance. At five til, Miles gave the string a tug.

He clicked on his flashlight and twirled it around without illuminating his own position, a little extra attention focused towards the hill, then he cut it off. Sixty seconds later, Paul mirrored the unidentifiable lights in the sky. Then Miles again, followed by Paul, and as the back and forth continued, the flicker grew more frequent. After a quarter hour, the lights were synced by the on switch, both jostling around without apparent rhyme or reason, enough of a quandary to captivate the scouts on the hill who theorized some kind of treefort tomfoolery, at least until the orbs started floating across the sky.

The flashlights were clipped to pulleys that rode along the slackline, their eerie pace throttled by a spool of fishing line, which explains the repeated rendezvous of open air conspiracies that had the fossils freaked the F out.

After a half hour, the mysterious lights disappeared, another half to let the heat cool off, a cautious descent home and their shift was over. Maybe they'd spooked the few who believed in ghosts, or aliens, or not to go digging up ancient Indian burial grounds, but this hadn't been a cheap rip off of a Betelgeuse disguise, their primary objective was realer than real, and it had worked like a lucky charm, if you believe in that kind of stuff.

32

"Do you see them up there?" he whispered from the shadow.

"No, d'you?"

"Nope. What time's he supposed to do it?"

"Five til, itn't?"

"Well then he's got thirty seconds to figure it out."

"He'll be there," she assured.

The subterfuge kicked the party off on schedule, and once the two under cover were adequately mesmerized by the light show, they figured the opposition would be too.

"Told you he could do it," she reminded.

"Yeah yeah, save it for the jury."

"You ready for this?"

"Not really."

"Alright, s'go den."

Silhouettes crept from the trees to the fence, the giant spotlights had yet to be moved to the newest dig site, the infant moon kept their secret. There was probably night vision on the hill, hopefully not thermal, but this was a safe gated community and there was an alien invasion underway, should work, right?

He clipped the chain link and they slipped through, breadcrumb trail back to their only escape hatch, knowing that this was their one shot, with tomorrow bringing reinforcement of both barrier and patrol.

The first rig was parked at an angle that provided its own cover. She started picking the lock on the fuel door as he climbed aboard with a wad of epoxy putty. If these had been a few years newer, then everything would have been keyless, but he'd done his research and knew that a stuck ignition would really piss some people off. She'd been a locksmith in a previous lifetime, and still wouldn't know how to get the hard-as-steel blob out of the keyhole, probably have to replace it, her forgotten skillset made short work of the gas tank though.

She thought it had been an alright job, as far as jobs go. No office hours, though she was always on call, but she was free to live her life how she pleased, with the occasional side mission across town of breaking into someone else's bad day. It was kinda like she existed inside a game of GTA, plus she figured it was a good talent to have for the apocalypse, and now like most Water Protector backstories, hers seemed to have perfectly prepared her for active duty as an ecological terra-ist.

She was already pouring in the fuel additive when he ducked beside her, made sure to add enough for a heavy load, replaced the cap and they were ready to move on. The whole procedure took less than three minutes, on the easiest one at least, the rest would be a little more exposed to the elements, hope Miles can keep it up.

He could see the slightest hint of movement down below, but only because he knew to look, it was darker than the inside of a buffalo, but their double tapped red light signaled Miles to land the UFOs, his job was done for tonight.

33

Paul's camera was in place and set to record at sunrise, maybe the lack of commotion would permit the boys to sleep in. It seemed like people weren't the happiest down there, and a tad confused as to how a camp full of slackers had outsmarted a private security firm armed with razor wire and night vision. Should be a fun debriefing with last night's paranormal investigator.

It looked like they were trying to dig into the rock hard congestion, they might be able to scrape out a chunk of it, but he jammed it deep into the inner workings of the machine. An adolescent prank at best, half a day lost, but a boxful of new switches arrived after lunch, nobody can stop the progress of destruction.

The cops tried to question the treesit, but no answers led to the threat of accomplisment, which started to sound like a farce as they were accused of somehow directing the spooky orbs through the open air of a creeped out mercenary hit squad.

The ordeal was almost over, ignitions almost installed, the guards smug enough to convince themselves that this was somehow a victory, of course they also claim a win after a shift of shooting at unarmed citizens in prayer, so whatevs.

Another moral reprimand to the trees, why don't you guys just grow up and focus on what's important in life? Get a job and a house and meet a nice girl, do you think any kind of self-respecting woman is going to want a man who sits around and wastes everyone's time like this? Miles could think of a few.

He also thought that not everyone's time was wasted. Sure, all those here for a cancelled paycheck had lost a day, but they already lost that when they took a job they didn't care about three states away. And the cops, well they're the ones who actually had to get off their ass and do their job during a shutdown, so what do they have to complain about? They might even get to shoot somebody.

Miles considered his own situation, and that this was the most utilized his time had been in his whole life. Before all this, he sold most of it off to the highest bidder, as he wore himself down from doing anything useful with the rest. But now he was in a different boat than that guy, he wasn't foregoing his actual life to be here, he wasn't biding the time until he could go back to living, this was his life, and every moment was filled with passion, and excitement, and a fulfillment unknown to the Miles of yesterday. He might be stalling the engine, but he wasn't wasting time, he was making up for the years he wasted trying to convince himself that everything was okay in babylon.

The spectators of the halftime show got their own talking to, a colonial critique of their priorities, and threats of investigation for a crime that most had yet to even identify, plus a harsh reminder that the fence was five feet inside of the easement, so back off or else.

A row of heavily armored egos reinforced the guidelines. No one would be getting over on their corporate account today. Progress would prevail.

Switches switched and the motorpool revved to life, in your face you stupid water protectors, and ten minutes later the valves were so clean that white smoke billowed across the horizon. The crowds went wild.

Man were they pissed. Like, so pissed. Like, FBI task force pissed. Of course, that could backfire on the unlicensed security firm illegally enforcing their own agenda, except that it never has in the past. This was most definitely a step beyond passive defiance, though still arguably a nonviolent direct action, either way, the ante had just been raised against the biggest bankroll in existence. Things would be a lot more real from this point forward, the stakes were for keeps, the charges were federal, the ammunition was live.

The cops were as overheated as the motors, tensions fumed as the sideline soirée rubbed their face in it, back away from the fence or we'll be forced to use excessive brute. A second humvee parked with their turret aimed to please, a line of gasmasks emerged with a chemical cocktail mislabeled by Mrs. Dash, they still seemed a little salty for Miles' taste.

Paul focused his attention on capturing the subordinance, a few strays rattled the cage as they aggravated an assault, a command to fall back was answered by the protectors of unity, the rebels resisted.

Everyone that Miles recognized had moved outside the five foot perimeter, the unknown assailants were encouraged to join the compliance before they were caught in an onslaught. Nobody had to get hurt today, there was no point to it, construction was already in a deadlock and they weren't prepared to rush the frontline, any further instigation would only add bleach to the firing squad. A few more fell into line as the line fell back another five, the three rogue instigators got nasty with the brigade, in a personal kinda way, not cool with the movement of peace, love, and understanding.

Nobody'd ever seen them around camp. There were a lot more people here now, the reinstated work order had enlisted those on standby, but Becca knew everybody and those three had never eaten her dinner. Maybe they were ultravegans.

The rabble roused one last strand of obscenity, the disciplinarians gave one last warning, the community offered one last chance, then backpedaled another ten and sat down in a unison show of cooperation.

Could two dozen soldiers really feel threatened enough to unload on three rogue civilians through a ten foot razor wire fence? Well, sure, that happens all the time. Even if the perps are infiltrating fossils? Well, how do these guys know that, they're just the pawns up front, and so were the agitators who were paid to incite the riot. And even if it means overspraying on a field full of innocent bystanders acting in good faith? Well, maybe.

"They're coming around the fence," radioed Paul from the crows nest. "Six on each side."

The mosh pit turned to confirm the message, quickly realizing that more than a few paces lie between them and blending in with the seated audience. A look of hysteria washed across their faces, calculations that they would soon be the primary victims of their own demise. The stormtroopers moved with vigor as they closed in on the unallied rebels, it was too late for them to infiltrate the peace party, so they just ran.

The six of one side pursued the perps across the imaginary border, the half dozen of the other formed a pretty mean red rover lineup between the sit-in and the inaction. Gruff attitudes and gratitudes blended as they thanked the docile disruptors for complying in a uniform way, they also let everyone know who wore the guns in the relationship. They were not being detained, as was cleared up on forty or fifty livefeeds, but they weren't exactly free to celebrate either.

The public speakers of the stationary movement calmly took turns sharing words of understanding with those who were simply following orders. Doing their duty. Their jobs. Feeding their families. Protecting their communities. And they shared compelling explanations that they were doing the same. That communities ravaged by pipelines were inevitable. And their water. And their food. And the food they supply other communities. Maybe even your community. And there's only one water. And there's only one humanity. And yeah, you're just doing what you gotta do to survive in this system we've been thrown into, you don't really care about oil, you just know it fuels the economy as it brings power to the people. But did you know it's totally wrecking any chance your kids will have at a normal kind of life?

Ninety-nine percent of the world's scientists agree that we have to do something soon or it will be too late. We've got until 2030 to completely decarbonize in order to avoid irreversible catastrophe, and maybe even a couple of you actually believe in this liberal propaganda, but what could any of us possibly do anyway? So they keep us compartmentalized and at odds, labor divided and exported to the next man's backyard, strung out by a paycheck and doing what you have to do to get by. But we're not just meant to get by. And we're not meant to be at war with each other.

But we're not meant to put in the next fifty years of biggest ever pipeline infrastructure either. We have to make a change, and fast, and we understand that everybody's not gonna get a tipi and a bicycle, we have to find a solution that preserves enough comfort for normal people, and the only way to do that is to unite and pressure the energy industry to reform, as we hold our government accountable for the catastrophic mess they've gotten us into.

We can come together and make a difference. It will take a WWII style rallying of our resources, for a much more existential threat, but just think of all the hardworking American jobs it'll create, as we transition from destroying the planet to healing her. The change is already coming to the Earth, she's waking up all around us. Fires and floods and epidemics are just phase one of the sixth great extinction event, and the financial world's gonna come crumbling down alongside her, but it's not too late for us to mitigate the damage and give our children's generation a fighting chance.

In a not too distant future of poisoned water and toxic air, do you really want to tell your grandkids that you sat by and did nothing, as everything good in the world was traded away for money? Or that you held a gun against the few people that were trying to do something? Wouldn't it be way nicer to be able to say that you gave everything you had to protect their future? We don't do this because it's the easy way out, we don't do it because we think we can topple an empire, we damn sure don't do it for a paycheck. We do it because it's the right thing to do, and we would rather die trying something, than live in a world devoid of anything.

A couple of them heard it, maybe some others would later, reimagining the way the world works and your place in it, is a process. Indian time.

An elder negotiated for the community, they'd return to camp for the night and let everyone rest, if the half dozen would join them in a prayer for the healing of the Earth and the health of her children. There were a few half hearts out there, but two halves make a whole, and there was a whole lotta love in the air for fellow members of the same human experience.

Miles was pretty touched, even from his elevated state. He also thought he saw the escapees make it to the highway, where they all climbed into the same white pickup, coulda just been the glare of sunset though.

34

The next two weeks saw an influx of reinforcements on both sides. The fence had become a full-on border wall, the patrol had evolved into an army, the motionless movement had inspired hundreds more to join the resistance. Massive floodlights made night and day indistinguishable, security cameras made anonymity implausible, the action sequence was inevitable. Threats to the treehouse accelerated as the food supply dwindled, a new wave of interrogation promised results, the pipeline had reached the woodline and it was time to get serious.

And serious time was what was under the table, the felonious monks sat in silence, prayer, and hunger, as their accessories were charged with lighting the campfire. Miles didn't particularly want to do seven to ten, nor did he want to starve to death, but surrender at this point would render the entire operation futile. Up til now they'd been patiently waiting their turn in the frontline, and they knew the risks of facing off with big oil, the pressure was on and it was time to turn up the heat, let's just hope that Bill knew what he was doing down there.

The full moon lit the way as an unlit school bus backed up to the wall, a rug rolled over the razor wire, a jungle gym slide breached the barrier. Before the parade of humvees was halfway down the hill, there were over a hundred trespassers occupying the playground. The gate was padlocked from the inside, the wall was built to withstand forced entry, they had a little time to relax, but arrest was inescapable from the cage.

A runner called up for the towline, Miles threw it past the blockade and reeled in a basketful of next week's rations, the loft had been renewed for another quarter moon. The frybread was still warm.

A teargas canister spewed over the wall, followed by four more, the glove-clad rebound team returned the serve. The air was thick with chemical burn, some protectors wore gasmasks, most didn't. Miles lost his appetite for frybread as the noxious cloud wafted through the trees. There were no words to describe the torment of chemically induced respiratory failure. Even with the stories he'd heard, Miles simply had no idea.

There must have been at least fifty lockdowns on site, the elves had been busy in the workshop, the visitors settled in for the long con. It looked like four points of contact on most of the excavators, entwined in the hydraulics, around the roll bars, and some even went through the roof. Tandem restraints slid into nooks and crannies that would stump even the most accomplished lockdown cutter, the equipment would have to be disassembled to even get close, they'd get a two for one on the arrest record, but at least the one armed bandits could still thumb their noses.

Elbows locked around the trunks below, three per tree, patterned in such a manner that a body would be in the way, no matter where they tried to cut. It was a madhouse of organized chaos, a scramble of choreography that began to stabilize, contestants were on their marks and ready to go nowhere.

More teargas poured in along with the first wave of gasproof retaliation, the quarterbacks couldn't keep up, the incapacitated would be lucky to survive the fumigation. And then just like in a novel, the cloud suddenly shifted north, the toxic winds forcing the unmasked members of the battalion back into their vehicles. From Miles' perspective, it looked as though a giant hand had effortlessly swatted away the storm.

The gate was cut open and the dam released, the bulls flooded the corral, they were ready for non-complied vengeance, but the seventy untethered protectors simply laid on their stomachs with hands behind their backs, you'll find no resistance here.

It took a couple of hours just to process the loose change, and another to get the cut team roused, double the saws this time, and six times the lockdowns, but at least they got an early start.

This was going to take days, but the defense had their work cut out for them. Now that they were in custody, the cops were legally required to provide food and water, but now sure would be a funny time to start following the rules. The camp caught a poisoned wind of the clandestine maneuver, hundreds more gathered along the wall to bear witness as they cheered on their comrades, a megaphone spoke up as prayers pushed away any lingering smoke screen.

The guards couldn't get their hands on the intended victims, so they turned their attention to the fan club, whose only crime was that of unscheduled visitation. Teargas topped the wall to clear way for more cannoneers, a platoon of twenty filled the five foot corridor as they demanded further retreat, the mob grew brazen as they defended the property's rights.

Go back to camp for your own safety, else we will be forced to act. We can't have you threatening our livelihood, even if you are unarmed and we're armored to to the gill, and even if we're the ones who walked around a perfectly good security protocol. You all are the bad guys because of your stance, not where you're standing.

So they soaked the crowd with twenty foot streams of pepper spray.

It's worse than the teargas. It burns every orifice inside and out, gets in your hair, and your clothes, it takes a week to get it out of everywhere, and who even knows the long term effects. A few medics filtered through the trauma, flushing eyes with Maalox to neutralize the carnage, it wasn't a milk bath, it was a massacre. Those with gasmasks held the line, the injured fell back as the back row stepped up, they weren't going to make this easy, the enforcers would have to earn each and every civilian casualty.

That was fine with them though, they hadn't had much else to do lately, and this seemed as good a time as any to try out their new riot gun. Sure, maybe there was no actual riot going on, or even a crime being committed, it was really just a peaceful assembly of rights being exercised, but those little liberal jerkoffs were asking for it.

Shots fired as the frontline fell, plywood shields worked their way through the crowd, a plastic coated bullet blew a hole right through one.

"What have we done wrong?" the assembly demanded to know.

"You're disobeying our direct orders," was the response.

Orders to what? To not stand in a spot that we have legal permission to occupy? To cower at the threat of overcompensation? To vacate the witness stand for whatever comes next? No, you'll not be strong-arming us from our place in the world, and look, you're on candid camera, next week set the table for a thousand.

Miles couldn't register what he was seeing as reality, it looked like a movie from some other era, a time when governments simply exterminated anyone who got in their way.

Or maybe a film of aliens colonizing the Earth, terraforming her to their own benefit, as the lowlife inhabitants struggle to catch a breath. The heavily armed thought themselves the flamethrowing protagonists as they secure the planet, but the deeper interpretation was a critique of our own intolerant history of violent colonization, and the space race to be the first destroyer of worlds as well.

Paul streamed the early morning matinee, viewers at home were enraged, an agitator picking a fight could stir controversy, but this blatant disregard for human rights would ignite a stampede. Or so Miles assumed anyway. Had to. People wouldn't put up with this kind of malpractice. Would they?

He had to admit to himself, that they already had. Time and time again. From our involvement in foreign affairs, to our dog cages for stolen children at that other border wall, to stuff worse than this place at Standing Rock, where ten thousand called for help, but it was just easier to change the channel. It's probably like writing a book to inspire revolution, the only ones reading are already on the path, while those who need it the most, don't have time for any of that hippy dippy nonsense.

Armaments unfurled throughout the day and into the night, waves of the injured sought refuge only long enough to recover before returning to the slaughter, battalions rotated so that every assault weapon got a turn. By nightfall, a third of the hostages were released, more saws arrived to cut through the line, could you guys keep it down, we're trying to sleep up here.

The blades were still spinning at dawn when the recently retired protectors returned for another shift. The cops stayed inside the fence this time, probably a little butthurt from the reaming they got last night, and no one on the outside crossed the line with anything but positive reinforcement.

There would be no pipeline installation today. Or yesterday. And with all those trees in the way, there might not be tomorrow.

We know that this is a monster of the magnitude that we have no reasonable chance of destroying, no human can stop the oil machine from devouring the Earth, it's simply too big. But that's no reason to give up before you've even begun, it's a reason to fight harder, with everything that you have, as if your life depends on it, as if billions of lives depend on it, and maybe if enough people see you committing your life to the protection of theirs, a couple of them might even want to do something about it.

Change begins from within. And as you embody your truth, it will spread to those who don't quite know what to make of you, but they know that something about you is different, and that it resonates with them, and that maybe they should look into this whole saving the world thing. One person may not be able to save the world, but they can invite everyone they meet along their journey to join them, and through the interwoven paths of the human experience, will be born a revolution. Remember Greta.

35

"SkyFortress, they're coming up."

It'd been a week since that last skirmish, maybe more, could it have already been two? Time blurred the longer Miles was up, especially with a lull in the commotion, was it, tuesday maybe? Oh yeah, the moon, it was new. Of course it was.

You missed the whole slingshot shenanigan. Bill modified a water balloon launcher to deliver big bags of trail mix, one side of the pyramid was opened to create a sizable goal and he let 'em rip over the fences. Musta practiced a bit back at camp, he was five for five. It hadn't rained much, but enough for the tent to catch sufficient water to survive, no more coffee though.

It had been a different scene once they cleared the lot, a row of enforcers now stood guard day and night, regardless of any activism underway, a flagrant misuse of natural resources if you ask me. The work crew had finished up what they could, but they hit a wall, the woods were in the way. Bill had tied-in nearby trees with throwlines, if cut down they would rip the sit to the ground. This kind of setup deters most lumberjacks, but I guess you never really know about that one, until you do.

New agencies surfaced to negotiate surrender, there was nowhere to run and less places to hide, might as well give up now and maybe we'll take it easy on you. They still didn't know Miles from Adam, but Paul was on their radar and they were throwing every book they had, and good thing, because they'd run out of reading material a week ago.

His Facebook was hacked, a bunch of phony messages fished for dirt from his contacts, his YouTube channel mysteriously disappeared, they let him know that they had his parents address, and his sister reported that she'd received a threatening phone call promising some form of legal action against anyone who financially supported his stand, which she'd done openly.

It was getting personal, but all's fair in love and oil, and it was crunch time for the pipe dreamers who needed a win. Every minute that the machines sat idle, was a punch in the purse for the ones pulling the strings, and for their investors, who had a contractual right to divest if construction was delayed past the new year. It wasn't good for business to have a few treehuggers outrigging a billion dollar project, or for their egos, or for the poor American people who really need more oil exports, something had to be done to show these hooligans who was boss.

Miles looked over the edge to see arbor patrol climbing the westmost trunk, he knew what to do and found himself acting without time for hesitation. He checked in on the visitor, who had become entangled in a razor wire jumble, oh yeah, you're gonna wanna watch out for that stuff, it's brutal. He probably had the tools to cut himself free, if he could get to them, let us know if you get hungry down there, we have trail mix.

Miles detached the supply bag from the invaded tree, and attached a month's worth of fecal sawdust in five gallon buckets, well, it had to go somewhere. He pulled the backup safety latch that was intended to catch them in the event of cataclysmic spring failure, rolled the tent up in the corner, threw on a harness and clipped into the overhead lines, got comfortable on one of the other trees, and enjoyed the show.

Razor wire's no joke, it digs in and quickly weaves itself into the fabric of your life. This guy wore a lot of leather, which is a bit more resistant, but he'd have to cut through each loop in order to infiltrate the protective gear. He'd almost punched through it all when the punchline hit him in the nose, movements composted in sawdust are actually quite odor free, but the olfactory workers did their best to top 'em off, and just the thought of wasted space is enough to curl a few toes.

The trooper was a trooper and meticulously evaded evacuation, he was just a foot from the platform's edge when the radio squelched a single command, "Now."

Miles crossed a finger and said a prayer, then he yanked the emergency paracord and its quick release pin. The western corner of the floor disconnected from its anchor and fell out of reach, the boys were left stranded as the trampoline flapped in the wind, but the exacerbated expression they caught was well worth it.

The stain remover hung perplexed by the unraveled plot, there was no way to get over to the other corners, he would have to retreat and start all over again on another tree. He left the mess for someone in a hazmat suit, tried to remove the spring anchor, but it was what all the fuss was clipped into, so he fled the scene empty handed as he concluded that he didn't get paid enough for this shit.

Once he was almost to the ground floor, Miles authorized phase two. The safety lines hung high above in each tree, he reached up to release his tether from the two uncompromised positions, and perilously swung over the heads of the baffled battalion, stuck the landing with a thud, clipped himself into the tree, and pulled the towline affixed to the loose corner of the penthouse. He reconnected the anchor and replaced the safety pin, the treefort was as good as new, even if waste management had forgotten this month's pickup.

The tension below hadn't dissipated nearly as fast as a canister of teargas, they would have to rethink their hostile extraction technique. They only had one climber, and the acrobats could probably repeat their resist stunts as they saw fit, the only viable option was to wait on two more arbortrators and ascend all three trees at once. Nowhere to hide, remember?

The collapsable contraption bought them at least another day, and at a bazillion dollars per, it was quite a steal. It might be tough to get a good night's rest, what with the lights and the crowds and the threat of having to let another guard down, but they had eyes on the ground and Paul could sleep with one open, so Miles took the first shift, he was far too amped up to turn down now.

Everything was happening so fast as it all came to a head. A month of slacklining slowed the spin of the world, they'd exercised and stretched like any confined astronaut in defiance of gravity, but Miles still felt a little soft around the edges, it was time to remember why he was here. They couldn't hold the sit forever, they'd be lucky to last a few more days. Regardless of Miles' fate, the trees would eventually come down, and the pipe would snake its way through the waterbed. They'd slowed its flow a bit, a pretty good bit actually, and more to come, plus they helped inspire over a thousand new faces that Miles had yet to meet. He wondered if he'd even recognize camp, or if he'd get a chance to find out.

He understood that two guys sitting in a tree wasn't going to defeat the petroleum industry, but he also understood that he was only a small piece of an elaborate puzzle, and he knew in his heart that he was here for something bigger than himself. He felt unfettered relief that he was actually doing something for a change.

36

Theme music ripped over the airwaves. The fossils were busy all night stepping on the camp's channel, so Bill just jammed it with who else but Steve Miller.

"It's time to fly like an eagle, baby," interrupted the dj.

They weren't even gonna wait long enough to setup a chapter, sunup was the signal, but our boys were ready. Each tree had a two foot platform above the anchor point, just enough room to get comfortable, which was important, for Miles at least. They shared a quick, but heart rocking hug, and clipped their carabiners into the secondary anchor straps, just a few wraps of webbing with a water knot, it'll hold. With uncounted unison, they pulled the ripcord on their quick releases, and their home fell toward the debarbed poo pole.

They were on their own from this point, the climbers were halfway through the razor wire already, they'd come prepared for nonsense. Miles pulled his lockdown pipe from the gear bag, and the refitted motorcycle helmet, and a red bandana, and a pair of aviators, helluva disguise. He masked up and locked the reinforced strap tight against his chin, slid the restraint through the tree's fork, and waited for the calvary.

He took a moment to check in on Paul's progress, he was way up there, had to be another forty feet, at least. Paul said that he actually was afraid of heights, terrified really, but that's why it was so fun, the rush of the thrill, and the accomplishment of conquering personal barriers. Somehow he managed to string his hammock up between two skinny skyward branches, and then wiggled into it. Fucking nuts, man.

He clipped into his hammock, but he was tied in from the inside, so there was no way to know. Even once someone made it up that far, it would take a delicate operation to extract him safely. Maybe some of the ground troops wouldn't mind so much if he bumped his head, on the ground, but this wasn't TreeForce's fight, they were more in the business of saving cats and stuff, they'd want to deliver the prize in one piece.

How would they even do it? Couldn't really get to his body without cutting through the hammock, and that doesn't sound like a very good idea. Couldn't lower one side before the other, else the burrito's filling would splatter on the floor. Couldn't really get under him close enough to do anything, and these twigs were paper thin. The guess was that two lightweight pole climbers would risk limb and slowly lower both ends in tandem. I told you, fucking nuts.

He had a few reserve provisions they'd managed to intentionally forget, plus a bag of that trail mix and a CamelBak of water, and he knew he was good to dry fast for at least four days, maybe more. But what about the other end of it?

No time to ponder that one, Miles had company. He looked like he mighta been the same guy from yesterday, probably just glad we quit talking about compostables. You could tell he was a little different than the infantry, he did spend his days in the trees, more search and rescue than search and destroy, but he was still on the team of trickle down authoritarianism. He was there for a paycheck, not conviction, and in some twisted reality that somehow made him the more responsible one.

There wasn't really much he could do, Miles couldn't stop resisting until a tree climbing steel sawyer showed up, the two skill sets often attract opposite statures, but a machine elf was on the way.

The guy was nice enough, especially to a thorn, and he actually seemed to acknowledge what Miles had to say. The faceshield of the helmet was glued shut to prevent a premature unveiling, but there were holes drilled through it for a breath of fresh repartee.

"So why you doing all this, man? I mean, you have pulled out some stops, it's been quite a show to tell you the truth, but why put yourself through all this trouble? And get yourself into trouble? There's some pretty upset people down there, you know, and they're not laughing like you guys, and holy cow your buddy is way up there! Good luck getting that guy down."

Miles thought it through as he tried not to squander the moment, "You know, I've actually had a lot of time to think about that lately, like a lot, and I keep coming back to the same thing. For a long time, I was lost in a world I'd lost belief in. I think most of us can agree that everything's falling apart out there, even if we disagree on the specifics, and really there's just so much that it gets too overwhelming to even think about. Crippling. A runaway train beyond anything anyone could do. So I did nothing, just gave up, didn't even try to live my own life according to what I felt best for the world, because what was the point, nobody else was.

I used to have a real job out there, for my whole life until a few months ago, and it was even a job where I could help people, and see results sometimes. But I used to go home at night defeated by the grind of bureaucracy. I'd fall asleep wishing there was more I could do, even though society said that as long as I voted, I had done my part. And I'm sure plenty of others feel the same, would love to follow a passion and make the world beautiful, but it's a struggle to survive out there, food and a roof don't come cheap, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

But I knew there had to be more to life than struggling to live. I felt in my heart that we were here for a purpose, that I was here for a purpose, and that purpose couldn't be to sit around and wallow in the woes of a lost cause. We were meant to do, but I hadn't done, which only made the self-depreciation worse.

Then I met someone who inspired me to embody the change I felt inside, convinced me that one person can impact the world, and ever since then, I've slept like a baby. Even up here with all that racket and the lights, I still rest soundly knowing that I've given everything I have to making the world a better place. We may not stop this pipeline, but we'll know that we did all we could to defend our beliefs, not some CEO's pension fund."

"And you really think that oil is gonna destroy the world? You probably had to burn some to get here, didn't you?"

"I believe it's a part of it, yeah, but I think we have to change our entire way of life. I think we have to shed this assumed privilege that the world owes us something, and realize that we owe everything to the world. In this country, we swim in excess at the expense of those we exploit, and yet we want more, and we want it easy, and we want it now. It's more important to us that we can flip a switch and watch TV on our fridge, than it is for two billion humans to have access to clean drinking water.

So yeah, oil is bad, it is responsible for all sorts of vile and nasty stuff, but nuclear is bad, coal is bad, natural gas is bad, child labor is bad, conflict powered cell phones are bad, extracting another country's vitality so we can have strawberries in December is bad, and genocidal takeovers of preclaimed territory are bad too. It's us that have to change, we're the only ones that can prioritize the good of the world over what's most convenient for ourselves, we're the demand that the system is rigged to supply at all costs, and we're the ones with the power to change the lightbulb.

And yeah, we used gas to get here, even if it was the only petroleum I've consumed in three months. But it's not only about you driving your car less, it's about all of us demanding that those driving our country, look out for the cliff ahead. We have technologies already available to reduce or eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels, they'll say that they're not financially feasible to implement, but then turn around and subsidize an extinct industry hundreds of billions. We have hybrid and electric cars already out there that get superior fuel efficiency, yet for some reason, the fuel companies think it more efficient to deregulate the assembly lines and keep on truckin.

But honestly, electric cars charged by a steam engine are no solution. And neither is the industrial manufacturing of solar panels, or mountaintop removal for wind farms, or clearcutting forests to burn biomass. Or any of the other workarounds, that require just as much devastation, in order to preserve the overconsumption of convenience that we simply can't live without.

And most of this fracked tarsand oil is too dirty for cars anyway, it's getting shipped to China to manufacture one time use plastics, disposable forks for a fast-food privilege that were made in a country known for its starving children. That's what's wrong with us, it's just not the greedy corporations and their corrupted governments, we're the ones that pay them, and we're the ones that must decide that the fate of life on Earth is more important than the first-world problems of our Facebook feeds.

So to answer your first question, that's why I'm here. I've been working on this three layered approach to activism, to being active in what I believe, which just sounds like common sense to anyone not brainwashed into believing that their actions don't count.

The first step is on a personal level, shaping my own life from the ideals within it, it doesn't matter what anybody else does, how can I expect to change anything else about the world until I've got my own path lined up? The next layer is something bigger than myself, a sacrifice of myself even, a focus of my energy onto a localized element of the greater scheme. And once I'm done here, maybe I'll be ready to tackle phase three, the big picture, how can I affect the world in a big way? I know it's possible, even for a teenager. Maybe I design an alternative dwelling that revolutionizes vagrancy, maybe I develop a system to provide an abundant food supply to the hungry, maybe I write a book about both.

And it's not a task meant for completion. On all three fronts, the work to be done will require constant attention, but I think this is how I can give the most of myself back to the Earth. And her people. And the future of her children. My journey is one of learning to live in a good way as I stand up for all of humanity and the living planet we are a part of, which gives me the ultimate assurance that I am in the exact right place at the exact right time for this very moment, which only leaves me wondering about one thing.

Why are you here?"

Miles meant no offense, and none was taken, just a pause for reflection and a genuine response.

"Yeah, it's like you say, we gotta work to provide for our families. And I want to work, want to contribute to society, and most of the time this job sends me home with the feeling that I helped better the world in some way. That's why I got into it, at least.

And I want my kids to have a comfortable life, more than I did growing up, not to want for anything, though sometimes it would be nice if I got to spend more time with them. But that's what being a provider is about, sacrificing some of myself for the benefit of my family, and I guess maybe that's what you're doing up here, huh?

So yeah, I'm here for the money, but that's only because I'm here for my family. Honestly, I'd rather be fly fishing for their dinner, but you gotta do what you gotta do, and if I wasn't doing it, then someone else would, so I figure it might as well be me."

"Yeah, I get it," empathized Miles. "What other choice have they left us in today's working environment? You gotta fend for yourself, because no one else is fending for you, even if that means taking your share at the expense of another. And my parents did the same for me, made sure I had what I wanted, which never really made me content, just made me want more, and now I can see the back of the coin as there are human children who simply want for food and water, even in the wealthiest country in the world.

But what could anyone expect us to do about that? So you take care of your own, because they mean more to you than anything in the world, they mean more to you than the world itself. And with that line of reasoning, it now seems more than fair to sacrifice the health of an entire planet, for the love of your most precious family.

And I used to fall back on the whole, If I didn't do it then somebody else would argument, especially in a world where it seems anybody will do anything for money. But now I understand that we all carry a personal responsibility to live for the greater good that is already alive in each of us, regardless of what anyone else is doing out there.

They've convinced us all to chase the right to exist. That basic survival is the end all, be all, of everything that is. But existence is meant to be a given, it's meant to be free, and it's meant to be a launching point to aim for the stars as humanity blooms into its greatest potential.

You're different than a lot of the others though, I can tell, even sitting here talking to me takes a special kind of open mind. You at least understand how the system works, even if it's still got a grip on your livelihood, and I'll bet that as you keep figuring it all out, you'll fall into that role that you were always kinda meant for.

And it'll probably work out that you do get to spend more time with your kids, a life of passion is far more congruent with family life than some nine to five across town. And at least when they ask you about your day, you won't have to tell them that you climbed a tree to forcibly remove a volunteer who was standing up for all of life on Earth, including theirs."

"I did always want to open up a fishing camp for kids, get them hooked early and teach them how to eat what they catch."

"And you didn't because there's no money in it."

"Exactly."

"And you could have spent everyday with your kids, doing what you love most."

"Well, yeah."

"And you'd have no doubt that you were making the world a better place, by following the passion in your heart, regardless of what anyone else had to say about it."

"I guess so."

"That's a beautiful thing man, and I could even hear a change in your voice when you spoke from that place inside, and that's where we're meant to live from all the time, not just on the weekend as we save the rest for retirement. And listening to that call inside is what brought me here, and every minute has felt like that dream of yours, and no matter what happens next, I'll know that I lived my life to its absolute fullest potential."

"So what do you think is gonna happen next?"

"Well, I was kinda hoping you'd climb back down and tell them I decided to stay."

"They'd love that one, huh?"

"I'd like to think so."

"So what's your backup plan? I know you got one floating around in that helmet of yours."

"You know, I used to believe in a Plan B. Hell, we're taught to put more energy into the preparation for failure, than it would have taken to succeed in whatever we were driven to do in the first place. Gotta make sure you have a solid fallback to make money, in case making a difference doesn't work out. But how could you ever give anything your all, if you hedge half your life away for tomorrow? So screw Plan B, I'd rather focus on Plan A, and if it doesn't work out how I imagined, then I'll just get a new Plan A."

"Well, you might better start working on that one, here comes Plan C."

The cradle rocked as the industrial saw bobbed its way up the tree. This guy had less finesse to his ascent, but more personal pleasure in cutting loose the dead weight of society. He wanted to cut through Miles' skin tight chin strap and pull a Scooby Doo, but bipartisan protest convinced him that removing a detainee's safety equipment under such perilous conditions might void the warrantee, even if it was just some worthless scumbag. No matter though, he'd be on the ground and in a new set of cuffs soon enough.

He had to climb up above them to access the restraint, fiery sparks would be pouring from the incision, so he covered Miles with a flameproof welding blanket, turns out he was a humanitarian after all. Our first responder repositioned himself out of the golden shower and prepared to assist in the procedure, Miles was securely clipped in and armcuffed with nowhere to go, he was one parachute shy of a flight risk.

This part was actually not all that much fun. The giant saw shook the tree as it rattled every socket in Miles' body, and it got hot, and it was too loud to even consider thinking about any bright ideas, let alone to share them.

He'd been cutting on it for an hour already, musta been, unless time was trickling as he approached a breakthrough. He pulled back the curtain to resituate the situation, looked like he'd done what he could on the top third without amputation, he wanted Miles to shift his stance.

If you thought yesterday's trapeze act had drawn an enthusiastic crowd, you'd be quite astonished by the sea of support that echoed through the trees. The morning had roused the rebels with high wire exhilaration, then came a lull in the action as the plot thickened, but now act three had everyone on the edge of their platforms.

Miles found Bill in the commotion, but only because he knew where to look. He was at the base of his own tree, slowly lowering one of the tie lines to Paul's. Miles took a motivated breath, and carefully slid his left hand out of the loop of aircraft cable that Bill had substituted for lock and key. He'd never even been locked down, but they had no way of knowing that, except maybe to tickle him.

He was concealed by the shroud, and should have enough window before the next reframing, just had to remain calm and deliberate, and hold the constraint steady as he made a break for it. With a few hundred CCs of epinephrine pulsing through his fingers.

He gently unclipped his safety strap from the tree, the saw overpowered the aluminum click of freefall and the thud of his amplified heartbeat, but forty feet and a razor wire landing almost overpowered Miles' desire to walk away.

Paul's tree was basically due north of Miles', just three feet off, which put the loosened tie line a foot behind Miles' head, and hopefully no more than two above. Miles couldn't turn to check, but Bill put a red bandana across his face, which meant that he was ready. Was Miles?

He'd been tightly tethered against the tree, but the newly freed carabiner was also connected to a five foot piece of double dot webbing, a rabbit ear, and all he had to do was covertly pull his other hand free, throw off the blanket, share one last epic catch phrase, and take a one-eighty leap of faith that Bill's zipline would clear the outer fence without a nose first finish. That's all.

It had been fun and games as they'd been planning the hypothetical escape, and hypothetically it was gonna be Bill up here anyway, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Miles wondered if Bill was as nervous as he was, he hoped not.

It was now or now. He tried to free his right hand from its strap, couldn't, the angle shift had put his wrist in a jam. The restraint was clamped to the tree, no way to spin it, but also meant it wouldn't fall on anyone's head.

"Hey, stop moving around down there."

"Sorry."

He took the interruption to reposition himself, gave it a minute to breathe, worked his fingers from their clutch and threw the blanket up and over the saw.

It took the adults a second to register what this idiot was doing next. First a disgusted glare of elementary stall tactics, then a look of mild terror as they realized he was going to jump, followed closely by the realization that he was going to successfully escape the impossible. Maybe. And they were tied in up above, too far out of reach to catch him. Miles was certain he saw the edge of a smile cross his new friend's face.

"Toksa brother, til next time," Miles hung his parting words as he reached for the finish line. "Good luck to you on your journey, it's been good to know you, I'll see you around," as he clipped into his exit strategy. His kola returned a subtle nod of secret approval, as Miles convinced himself that it was his cue. He hesitantly moved to the edge as he shot our tough guy an unsolicited wave, and with no further delay, the treesit extraction was complete with a freefall farewell of, "Laatteerrr Suucckkeerrrrs!"

The ground troops only had a ten second notice that something was up, and before they knew it, he was down, just over their heads as they tried to understand what was happening. There were a couple dozen already across the barrier, only thirty feet from the wool blanket landing pad, but a wall of interlocked defenders stood strong against their fumble recovery. Threats and strong arms and eventually teargas cleared the air, the brigade broke through to the other side, ready to dogpile on the red flannelled motorcyclist.

There he was. No, there he was. WTF? They'd stumbled into a lumberjack biker convention of seventy choreographed costumes. He had to be here somewhere, but how could they identify the latest victim of mass identity theft? They'd have to detain them all and figure it out on the back end, but certainly they could force a confession from somebody, at least until they realized that all seventy were alibied by their own arrest record of peaceful surrender.

Miles knelt behind the doppelgangers. Bill unlocked his helmet and pulled the velcro free of his tear-away disguise. He dropped his harness and blended into the sidelines, still wary of a last minute informant, but as soon as the teargas exploded and sparked a stampede, Ambrose grabbed his arm and pulled him through the government subsidized smoke screen.

"C'mon brother, let's get you the fuck outta here."

37

"Wake up Zipline, we're almost there."

Camp had been nuts. The helicopter was extra low as it swept through the overgrown population, there were four kitchens now, and neighborhoods, and some kinda unmarked gray plane circling the frontline. And lots of drones.

But who could they even be looking for? Hopefully they had no idea, for now at least, probably just gathering evidence as they tried to intimidate the witnesses. There had already been a single lane roadblock on the one route into camp, just keeping out the riffraff, but now they'd be scrutinizing every suspect. Forty cars left in the first hour, they were still being examined when Jordan pulled out after two. They wanted to give them enough time to get bored of the obstructed justice, but not enough to realize they'd lost him, at which point they would distribute copies of Treeguy's recording device for vocal recognition.

Infiltrators were still a concern, Ambrose had secreted Miles away in a tarpee with a goodie bag from Becca, but someone could have seen an undocumented face in tow and now be documenting the getaway plan. They knew Bill was being monitored, Ambrose had been mainly undercover, and Jordan had kept it lower than low, but those honky tonk cops think all Indians look alike anyway.

As they pulled into the search station, Miles realized that his Treeguy had been transplanted to the exit poll, they didn't have a recording, they had an earwitness. The trunk was popped as the vehicle was exited, Miles had undergone a long overdue wardrobe change, but his body type had remained the same.

In an unrelated coincidence, an even longer line of scene fleers had by chance decided to leave at the same time, this was going to take all night, so much traffic that a horn could be heard from the back, and then another.

Treeguy walks over, the front cars start to join in with a parade of celebrating honky tonks, the cops are about to lose it. Treeguy asks Miles a question, but unfortunately Miles can't hear a thing over all that ruckus. The cops are pissed, and tell Jordan to get the fuck out of the way, just move it along, so Miles turns to Treeguy and says, "Toksa brother," hops in the car, and watches Treeguy stand bewildered in the rearview.

"Wake up Zipline, we're almost there."

"Where's there?"

"My Grandma's house. Welcome to the rez, son."

"This is the rez?"

"Yeah, what'd you expect, tipis and arrows and shit? You been watching too much Dr. Quinn, HonkyTonk."

"Hey, it's Goose now. And Mister Goose to you."

"Was. Your Goose got burned up in the trees though. I like Zipline, but that's even more suspicious. I think HonkyTonk will have to do."

"How about Miles?"

"Whatever you say, buddy"

Jordan's Grandma, his Unci, she was as much a sweet little old lady as Miles' Grandma, and wore just as many color coordinated accessories. She wasted no time showing off her shoeboxes of intricate beadwork, and showing Miles what frybread was really about, and showing Jordan the list of chores to be done. Miles knew that Jordan had returned to the rez with only a last name, it was possible he'd tracked down his roots, but Miles imagined it more likely that she was his Grandma regardless of blood type.

That's how native communities seemed to work, everybody had a handful of grandmas and grandpas, elders that held the community together, and there were more uncles and aunties than frybread recipes. That's how a healthy society raises their kids, not bottled up in single serving solitude, mom and dad have stuff to do sometimes, and they don't know everything anyway. It takes a village.

"I got this thing over here if you wanna set it up," Unci motioned to a rolled up pile of canvas in the corner.

"Poles?" inventoried Jordan.

"Nope. I let the neighbors cut them up for firewood when it got way down there."

"Dang Unci. That's good you did that I guess, got cold, huh?"

"Jeez did it, d'ya see the ceiling?" She pointed up to the popcorn panels of her five year old FEMA trailer, a temporary emergency shelter so janky that the fridge is the immovable support for the cabinets. And probably meant for tropical hurricane relief, not forty below snow dust blizzards, with winds strong enough to flood the attic vents as the rafters fill with thousands of pounds of snow.

"It was crazy," she recalled. "I was sitting right over there having my coffee, and all of a sudden that whole side collapsed, snow was piled up everywhere. That's something, itn't?"

Half the ceiling was missing, the entire length of the trailer on the south wind side, clear plastic had been stapled up as a temporary fix.

"Ronnie came over here and did that for me, sweet kid, stuffed a bunch of his old t-shirts where it was coming in, and he had to get so much snow out of here, oh my gosh."

"Jeez Grandma, looks like we showed up just in time."

"Always do. I saw a bunch of pines down by the creek if you boys wanna make some new poles. I figure your kola would like staying in a tipi, it'd be good for you too, Takoja."

"Good news HonkyTonk, you might get to see a real life Indian tipi after all."

"Don't call him that," she turned to Miles. "You know, for the first two months Jordan was out here, everybody called him Buttercup, and he hated it, so just keep that one in your pocket and he shouldn't be giving you anymore trouble."

"Thanks a lot Grandma. C'mon Miles, we got some bark to bite."

Lodge Pole Pines followed the straight and narrow as they wound around the bent creek, Jordan found his first recruit and offered a gift of tobacco. Tipi poles are a sacred part of a traditional way of life, a living piece of the Earth, meant to be honored as they provide shelter for the thin skinned two-leggeds, and in turn, it is our responsibility to look after the rest of their family.

We're not in charge of the forest. Just because we developed a tool that could take another's life, it doesn't give us the right to indiscriminately mow down an entire population, it gives us a duty to protect the natural cycles of a world that we are an embedded participant in, Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related.

Jordan brought down the house one leg at a time, he sang a gratitude song in one of the least foreign languages still in existence, once he was a dozen deep, it was time to start the actual work. There are many ways to skin a tipi pole, Miles found it hypnotically therapeutic as he methodically scraped away the flesh with an eight inch fixed blade, each swipe offering an opportunity to think of his loved ones and to pray for their well-being. He was still figuring out the whole prayer thing, but thinking happy thoughts for those he cared about came as natural as climbing a tree.

Each pole was charged with positive intention. When you hold something in a sacred way, an exchange of energy is facilitated, like with tobacco, and fire, and even food. The trees are transformed into a power structure designed to funnel the warmth of intention to the heavens. They offer protection from outside forces, while those inside bask in the feng shui of spiraling resonance. Earthly energies are amplified through the conical megaphone, while no corners are capable of trapping the flow of life. Plus tipis are cool.

Miles had a lot to be grateful for, and that wasn't even counting his Ninja Warrior audition tape. He'd gotten so close to so many people, he'd learned so much about the world he was growing into, he'd met himself. And he prayed for Paul, hopefully still swinging free in the treetops, but destined to pipe up to the lords of the land below. The month alone with Paul forged a brotherhood as it solidified Miles' connection with his own spirit, then the last two days rattled that cage. It had been severe, he needed to recover a bit from the stress of trauma, the cathartic repetition of peeling prayers was good medicine.

They unwrapped up by the creek and carried the poles to the top of the hill, the plains rolled in every direction, the wide open sky was on fire with the dust of dusk. Jordan lashed three poles together and stood the tripod, eight more locked into place with some sort of sacred geometry, hemp jute wrapped their union four times, clockwise. They tied the top of the rolled up canvas to the twelfth pole and leaned it up on the west side of the skeleton, each uncurled a side and met above the east facing doorway, wooden pegs fastened the seam. There were still stakes to drive and a couple more poles to control the smoke flaps, but before he knew it, Miles was closed in with the first open fire he'd seen in a month.

Tobacco fueled the flame, the flame fueled the prayer, the prayer rolled a cigarette. He still didn't really understand the whole tobacco deal, he'd been offering it to the fire and to the Earth before camp, and then to the wind when he wasn't near the other two, he knew it made him feel good to be focusing his attention on intention, but he was pretty sure there was something to it of which he wasn't yet aware.

"Sage is the same way," explained Jordan. "Spirit medicine. It's like they can exist in both this material plane and the spirit world at the same time. A plant based portal to your ancestors. To the stars. To God.

You know, we pray to Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, the creator of it all and the infinite embodiment of its own creation, but it's the same God anyone else prays to. There's a million ways to get there, as diverse as fingerprints on a snowflake, but they all end up at the same place, the creative energy of the cosmos is more than capable of merging lanes.

And prayers come true. When you put your heart into the fire, it's heard on the other side, it may take some time, and might not work out exactly how you imagined, but there's some real power inside there. And it takes some work on yourself. When you pray for things, they're not just handed out like candy, they're lessons you'll be given to grow through as you build that power within. So be careful what you ask for, share gratitude over desire, and remember to pray for the cooks, hey. Now c'mon, let's go see what kinda trouble Unci's stirring up for us."

38

"Hihani wasté. Good morning relatives," a man's voice cut through the canvas with the sun.

"Uncle Robert?" asked Jordan.

"The one and only. Hope you boys are ready to sweat today."

Miles was ready for anything. The errands yesterday reminded his arms that he hadn't done too much work since the dirthouse. The night by the fire recharged his spirit with passion for life. Still needed coffee though.

Uncle Robert was a character, as most literary costars tend to be, his sharp wit and dull delivery left you unsure of what his temper meant. He used to ride rodeo, the tri-state bareback champion for most of his twenties, then he fought wildfires on the west coast with a thirty pound chainsaw and twice that in gear, now his days were filled by checkers and chess with his grandkids, and holding ceremony for his people.

"We only need half that pile for the lodge," he figured. "Might as well split it all up while we're at it though. I'll let you young bucks get started and I'll join in when you're almost through, or if Ma comes down here."

"We gotcha old man, just let me know if I need to walk you to the bathroom or anything," teased Jordan.

"A piece of frybread would be nice."

"Yeah, that does sound good. I'll tell you what, since you're not doing anything, you mind running and grabbing us a few pieces?"

"I'll go grab a switch is what I'll grab."

"Easy now, don't get all worked up on my account, I'd like to see you catch me anyway. Why don't you just tell Miles some stories from the good old days instead."

"Boy, I'd have you caught and tied before you could say Billy Mills. But, to save Miles from having to watch his buddy humiliated like that, maybe I can remember a thing or two about growing up around here."

His deliberate cadence left space for his words to sink in.

"It was a lot different back then, when I was a kid, it was a lot wilder, a lot more free. Of course, I still had a POW number. 3441562U." He pulled up his sleeve to share his tattooed identification. "Got a social security number to pay taxes, and this number to remind me that I was a prisoner. It wasn't safe to leave here anyway though, not that it is now, but back then you could kill an Indian on sight and nobody'd say nothing.

There wasn't none of this meth shit floating around, but there was plenty of alcohol, I've seen a lot of relatives get sucked down that hole and never climb out. The white man loves his bottle, and loves to push it on anyone he's trying to take advantage of, every one of our treaties were signed through an alcohol poisoned haze, but they broke all them anyway, so I guess it never really mattered. Sugar's the other one, alcohol and sugar, they bring them into some new region that's ripe for the picking, and they leave with whatever they want, only a trail of alcoholism and diabetes remain in the strung out community.

Our water was a lot cleaner then too, now the river's got uranium in it, the aquifer's full of fracking waste and almost run dry from all the farms, and this tap water's got some kind of chemical soap taste to it. And the food too, we used to eat more from the land, not whatever all that stuff they got at the store now is. And I've been off the rez where they have real food, I know the difference, but we're locked in a prison camp and lucky to get anything.

And all this trash, it's too much. We used to live with no waste, not even a bone to pick up. Then America happened, and there was all these boxes and bags, but we could just throw all that in the fire, so it was only the tin cans left rolling around. Now it's all this plastic and styrofoam, can't burn that mess, I tried once, but you could smell just how horrible that stuff is, and not to mention the people who drive onto the rez just to toss their trash by the road.

And back in the day, the natives who hung around the fort got the spoils of war, as long as they started living like the white man, so that's who they put in charge of the rest of us. And still today, the councils are corrupted by the wasicu. Even our police, they may be Indians, but they answer to the Department of Interior, and I was thirty before it was even legal for us to pray in our way.

I remember as a kid, sneaking out to the caves with my parents to put on secret sweat lodges. And we couldn't Sun Dance, so at powwows we'd do a few Sun Dance rounds and nobody was the wiser. So to me, powwow celebrations are sacred, nowadays it's a bunch of other stuff too, but they keep our culture alive with the little ones who are all caught up on their phones most of the time.

Our ceremonies are coming back though, every year I see more and more young people returning to our traditional ways. And the Lakota sweat lodge has spread around the world, adopted by the earliest victims of forced assimilation, those whose own language and prayer were beaten out of them over centuries of colonization. 'Kill the Indian, save the man.' That was America's justification to strip away everything that made us who we were, and before that it had been, 'The only good Indian, is a dead Indian.'

It was safer for half-breeds to pretend they weren't Indian, to be ashamed of their native roots and never pass them down to their kids, which fell right in line with the American policy of 'Killing Indians on paper,' which would facilitate the dismantlement of our sovereign nations, as full-blooded enrollment bred itself out of existence. The US government set it up so that a tribe was only recognized through its membership based on the blood quantum that they determined, so if they just let us fizzle out into their population, then soon enough we'd no longer be a threat.

But we knew that even a single drop of indigenous blood connected our children to our ancestors, and that blood has spread all around Turtle Island, and now it's nudging the seventh generation awake as the time for the big change draws near. There's even a prophecy about it, about all the white kids growing out their hair and running off to join us, leaving their parents confused as a new way of life is ushered into existence.

You got any native blood in you, Miles?"

"Yeah actually, a little bit, I've got a great great grandparent on either side that was Cherokee. Never heard anything about it really, it's only recently been something I even thought about, to tell you the truth."

"Sounds about right. I've heard in the East that just about everyone claims a drop of Cherokee. And considering the history of first contact and five hundred years of acculturation, it makes sense, and so does the whitewashing of anything to do with a people destined for extinction. But it's still alive inside you, and it's brought you here to a land where your people are still connected to the Earth. And long ago the Tetuwan people, or what nowadays they just call Lakota, we actually spread out all the way to the east, so who knows, maybe we are related."

"We're all related," corrected Miles.

"Aho, I guess we might make an Indian out of you yet Miles, that is if you don't melt in the lodge first."

Once the wood was split, Jordan led the way as they built the fire. Two bigger pieces ran east to west, channeling the energy from the fire to the lodge. Then seven pieces sat atop the two, creating a platform to hold thirteen big lava rocks, leaving enough space underneath to burn the fire from both ends. Robert prayed with the stones as they went on, turning to the four directions, to the sky, and to the Earth.

"These are our relatives too, you know? Our grandfathers. They've been on this Earth a lot longer than any of us, even me, and they hold an energy inside that can reconnect us to the womb of Unci Maka. This Sacred Fire will charge them up, the Peta Wakan, and then the water will release that energy as it carries our united prayers in every direction. I'm not gonna lie to you, it's going to be hot, really hot, you might even think you're dying at some point, but that's the moment that your heart's being opened with a new connection as your ego melts out of its way.

That world you're from is all about the ego, and its self-preservation of me and my, it keeps everyone locked in a cycle of individual desires amid a world of dwindling scarcity. But once you shed that illusion of being something separate from the rest of the world, you become free to once again experience a life of ultimate abundance. That's how it's meant to be, and it makes it that much easier to give yourself to the world, which only makes the abundance of life spread further, as you learn to share your heart as you walk in a good way.

The whole planet's been eaten up with private property and personal interests, and you can see where that's gotten us, but as we all start to give the Earth back to herself, we'll find that we're the ones who benefit the most from our own selflessness. And if we don't manage to figure it out soon, she's going to take it all back on her own anyway, and only those of us who hold our connection with her sacred will stand a chance of surviving the changes she has planned.

Unci Maka is alive. And she birthed us for a reason. Just how your sentient body creates whatever cells you need at any given time. She's an incubator for her own evolution, and the transition is not a disintegration into chaos, it is a new beginning of something more beautiful than before. She's our nurturing cocoon as we prepare to take flight into a new dimension. And the caterpillar doesn't really know what's going on as its cells melt into turmoil, it would be easy to assume that their entire world was coming to an end, but as if by the design of a scale unknowable by the goop, the goop begins to come together to emerge with a new way of life unimaginable to the caterpillar of limited dimension.

All this bad stuff happening around us seems catastrophic from a person's eye view, from a single cell of an astronomically larger being, but we are not a single celled organism. We are but a piece of a design far grander than we will ever understand, and perhaps all this destruction is simply a catalyst for change, as those who give themselves to tomorrow wake up in a creation beyond their wildest dreams, while the fractured shell of our toxic chrysalis gently fades into the mythologies of our children's ancestors."

Uncle Robert had been right about at least one thing, the lodge was hot. The rocks were glowing red as Jordan passed them in with a pitchfork, another placed them in the center with a pair of deer antlers, Unci sprinkled cedar needles onto each one as the purifying aroma filled the dome, and that was all before the door was shut to concentrate steam and darkness in equal proportion. A few other people had shown up to the four rounds of song and prayer, Miles was the only one with his face in the dirt by the end. He begged for his life as he felt a door open, his prayers poured out from a place in his heart he didn't know existed.

His whole body tingled as he lay by the fire recovering from his near-life experience, his mind was still, but something else inside stirred the embers of unknowable belief. He understood that he'd not been ready for this moment until he was, it had taken an open-hearted path of hard work and sacrifice to prepare him for the transformation ahead, and he had an unshakable feeling that this was just the beginning of a never ending journey into himself.

He slept like a newborn fresh from the womb of incinerated hesitation, his dreams took him to a place outside the boundaries of cerebral make believe, he woke with a new sense of self and a spark of connection to the greatest mysteries of the universe.

"You ready to go save the world, champ?" coaxed Jordan.

"Yep. Whadja have in mind?"

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Figured we'd start with weatherproofing Unci's glass ceiling."

"Now that sounds like a good idea. What are we going to do for materials?"

"This is the rez, man. And the phrase Indian rigging didn't come from nowhere. We'll find whatever we need, just gotta be ready to improvise a bit."

Jordan wasn't kidding, they found most of their supplies at the same dumpster in town. Someone must have been building a six foot wall somewhere, because there was a stack of two foot drywall scraps that looked like plenty to raise the roof, a bunch of busted up ceiling tiles for harvesting insulation, and an old pool liner that could be cut into strips to seal the snow vents. The only thing they lacked was nails, but Robert invited them to swing by and dig through his toolshed, as long as Miles could beat him in a game of chess.

"I love playing with the takojas," he confided. "But it's refreshing to play with someone who at least understands how the pieces move. Of course, it's about like any other toy used to normalize civilization's grip on reality, and this one is specifically a war game of competing races, royalty surrounded by the church as they hide behind the sacrifice of the commoners, but at least they got one thing right, the queen is far more powerful than any king has ever been.

Our people used to live in a matriarchal society, which isn't to say that they walked all over us the way the man's world does to them, it meant we were equal, equal but different, and those differences are what made our society a whole. Women lead through their intuition and compassion for life, they're more capable of seeing the bigger picture as they listen to the little people, while men tend to micromanage the rational explanations of territorial war. Women are physiologically connected to the water, and us to the fire, both vital elements of survival, but they must be kept in balance, or else you end up with an overheated planet and oceans of sickness.

Our women are sacred, and should be treated that way. We should look up to them for their more evolved emotional processing, it's what gives them the capacity to do what feels right, even if it doesn't make sense on paper.

But none of that works for the patriarchal takeover of the natural world, no colonizing general would stand a chance toe-to-toe with Ma. So when they wrote the rules in a language we didn't understand, they made sure to put the now alcoholic men in charge. It took three quarters of the enrolled men to vote on whatever bum deal the government offered us, but it doesn't really matter who they tell us to be, ain't nobody gonna tell me that Jordan's unci isn't calling the shots, and she answers to the greatest unci of them all anyway.

Checkmate."

"Good one."

Miles may have lost the match, but he gained more through every conversation with Uncle Robert than words alone can convey, plus he still let them dig some nails out of the shed.

"Alright then, you boys have fun over there, maybe I'll come supervise later, and just let me know when you're ready to sweat again."

Miles was still picking up the pieces from yesterday, he might need a little time to sort through them all, though he imagined that might be what the ceremony was all about. He'd return to the inipi, that was a given, but he could also still feel the lodge working through him as he felt himself walking in prayer. A prayer he believed in, not the awkward recital of uncertainty, he could feel the intentions of his heart building with every step. It had already given his life new meaning, which was saying a lot considering the past months of new meanings, but this was something else entirely. Something from deep inside, something that was always there waiting to be unlocked, and now he held the keys to navigating the great unknown. It felt fucking amazing.

Fixing Unci's ceiling felt pretty good too.

39

The rez was not whatever it was Miles was expecting. He knew it wasn't a romanticized cartoon, the one that made white people feel good about reserving some of their private property as a thank you gift for helping with thanksgiving. But how could anyone ever imagine what it's like to live in a world outside of anything they've ever known, especially when all they know is the self-proclaimed greatest way of life in existence? And they're not even outside it, they're right here in the middle of everything, and still under the constrictive oppression of colonial rule.

It's a hard place to grow up, you do it quickly. The culture's fractured and the people are traumatized by generations of handed down pain, many have lost their prayer as they fill the hole with a bottle, they exist as outsiders locked in a country that is built atop the extermination of their families. We ripped out their way of life and pushed them to become reliant on the dollar for survival, they went from being the richest culture our continent's ever known, to some of the most impoverished communities in the country. We set up liquor stands at the border and drop off meth at the schools, and then our prisons profit from it all, as families are torn apart and unable to stand up to the gross exploitation of a forgotten people.

We slaughtered the buffalo and sold off their land for a dollar an acre. We pushed them into ranching and forced them into ninety-nine year leases, for as low as three cents an acre. Banking empires were built off the raw deal, while today's native families are displaced, with two households sharing the same decrepit FEMA trailer. We control their police, we shadow their government, they still have to follow our laws while we break their treaties, we never stopped stealing land for minerals, we give them access to only the shittest food, poison their water, kidnap their women, and create the conditions for the highest suicide rates in the country.

This is no fairy tale, this is the rez, and through this despicable mistreatment of human beings, has arisen the unbreakable spirit of the most vibrant people you could ever imagine. Their humor and positive attitude is across the board as it brightens every interaction, their love pours out to even the whitest of strangers who are there in a good way, their arts are intricately exquisite, their athletes are champions, their dance is absolutely mesmerizing, and their songs, in the most literal sense of the phrase, speak to your soul. No matter how much hate we build up around their borders, they are undefeatable, and they will be the key to surviving our own metamorphosis through the coming adversity.

Miles and Jordan rolled into town to trade some sage bundles for tobacco money, an exchange that would be perfectly plausible without the dollar, except for the two way taxation that the federation reserves for skimming the vig.

Downtown, we'll call it, was a few brick buildings for tribal affairs, a school, and a gas station with several aisles of generic groceries. They had frybread though. Some teenagers were playing basketball with the first white person Miles had seen, he already knew she was a Water Protector before Jordan rushed in for the signature hug.

"Kola, how you been?" she most sincerely requested.

"Lila wasté. Here, I want you to meet Miles, he's one of us."

"Howdy friend, I'm Wendy, good to know you."

"Yeah, you too. Water Protector, huh?"

"You know it. Haven't been to camp lately, been busy here trying to keep up with all these youngsters, mainly just providing a safe space for them to figure out life and stuff."

"How long have you been here doing that?"

"Oh golly, I guess nearly two years now. I didn't have a clue about any of this before Standing Rock, then my eyes got slammed open to the reality of life out here. I got close to a lot of folks from this rez back at camp, so I came to visit, and my heart hasn't let me leave since. There's so much rigged against these girls, and not many places to be a teenager, not without drugs and alcohol at least, so I'm really just a friend they can count on to be sober and ready for whatever adventure awaits. This is my home now. Well, over there's my home, but she stays parked on the rez nowadays."

Her mobile abode was a retired school bus turned hostel. She lived alone, but could sleep six of anyone who needed to crash, and could feed them with the constant pot of soup she had on. The bus had it all, arts and crafts and games and snacks, even a kitchen sink. The boys boarded for a cup of coffee and a fresh scrambled brownie.

"I don't have an oven in here, but it's all good, back at camp we were making everything you could think of without an oven, just gotta learn how to wing it. You kinda remind me of our chef actually, me and him got real close. I guess all of us got close though, but you already know, huh?"

He did. Jordan recounted his version of Miles' camp story. It was surreal to hear it all through another's perspective, especially with Jordan pitching him as nothing short of a super hero.

"Good one. Sounds like you're on one heck of a journey, friend."

"It's been unreal, and so real, and then a few days ago I sweat for the first time, and it's like it opened up this whole other route that wasn't even on the map before."

"Yep, that'll do it. Don't start thinking it's a shortcut though, it's actually the long way, but it gets you way deeper into the game than just sticking to the yellow brick road. Want another scoop of brownie?"

"They're just not the same without the little yellow clumps of frozen eggs in there," Jordan critically reminisced.

"I know," agreed Wendy. "But no freezer, sorry. Come back in six months and I'll set you up right. You wanna take some back for Unci? And send her my love, will ya?"

"Yeah, sure, I'll give her whatever's left by the time we get back. Me and Miles fixed her ceiling up and patched over the vents that let all that snow in."

"Heck yeah. That's awesome. She said she was just sitting there and watched the whole thing cave in under an avalanche of snow. Crazy. But you know, there's a lot of other roofs doing the same thing, they just weren't designed to withstand the type of conditions we get out here, maybe we should team up and fix 'em before it gets cold again. I could get the girls to help too, be something different to do at least, and it would nourish their soul to be giving themselves to the people like that."

"Let's do it," cheered Miles before his brain even had to weigh in.

"I'm in," agreed Jordan.

"Great, I'll get it set up with the folks and let you know. I got a little bit of funds for materials too, might not be able to dumpster dive ten houses worth. Maybe though. I love it when a plan comes together out of thin air like that, just reminds me that I'm in the right place, you know?

It's ridiculous really, that people have been scraping by in these shoddy emergency shelters for years, they're pieces of crap really, a big step below your already substandard single wide. But the project houses around here are falling apart too, especially with sometimes ten or fourteen people crammed into them, but what can you do when you gotta drive thirty miles away for the nearest hardware store that you can't afford anyway?

The tribe actually has a program to help with stuff like that, or to help pay past due heating bills, and they even have a program to get people into these new construction projects they're slowly building. Like Bria over there, her family's on the waiting list, number seven in line to get their own home, and they've been on the list for two years while four people sleep in her uncle's spare room.

Makes you sad to see the conditions people are forced into out here, but you can't exactly show up as another colonist trying to shape their world as you see fit. So I just show up, and do whatever I can for whoever I meet, but always being mindful that I'm a guest in a world that I will never fully understand.

And everybody back at my other home think we're out here riding buffalo and sending smoke signals, they imagine tipis lining the river, unwilling to listen when I try to break down reality for them. I talk about housing issues and they hardly sympathize, because they think we like camping out in a blizzard, which I kinda do, but their dominating culture has destroyed the feasibility of a tipi way of life.

For one, that river is toxic, so where are you going to pitch camp without access to clean water? Or food? We killed all the buffalo and poisoned the harvest, so now you have to have a car, and gas money, to go hunting for anything healthy to eat. And the buffalo was what tipis were made of, so now that's off the table. Then they grew hemp for canvas, until we sprayed their fields with agent orange. So how could a tipi way of life even get pitched if we destroyed all of their materials? They can save up and order one online from some business person for a couple thousand dollars, but how is that the most appropriate kinda culture?

And then they'll ask, 'Why don't they just leave if it's so bad?' Leave to where? To a civilization built on destroying their way of life? To a society that treats them as subhumans and is rigged against them in every way? Cut off their hair and join the white man's world, where even white people are struggling, let alone some pesky foreign natives?

It's just not safe out there, especially for these girls. Indigenous females make up less than a percent of our population, but account for a quarter of the missing persons and unsolved murders plaguing the women of our country, cause nobody's trying to solve them, and every man has dreamt of capturing their own Indian princess since they were a kid.

It's not even safe here, where predators have to commute to find their next victim, so now you want them to go post up right in their backyard, with little means to get by other than answering the flash of cash from the settler descended recipients of stolen privilege?

It's all messed up. I like to think that people just don't know, that if they understood then they'd do something, but I know that's just some kind of peace pipe dream at best. People all over the world are suffering at our hands around the clock, in the name of preserving the sacred American Way of Life, and nobody thinks twice unless they water down some hollywood satire of what it's like to live in the other ninety-six percent of humanity, and those normally only further promote colonization as some white savior swoops in to save the world.

I wish I had the answers, says yet another white person on a mission to save the Indians, but it's just too much. And I think their strength probably has to grow from within their own community, so I'm just trying to even the playing field in whichever ways present themselves, and looks like this week's menu is rooftops and rainbows all around."

"You ever hear of Earthbag houses?" asked Miles.

He filled her in on his own experience, the details of the low cost construction using on site materials, the built-in resistance to the specific natural obstacles that this particular region faces, and his growing vision of an entire community coming together to make short work of the elbow grease involved. There's no snow or high speed winds creeping in through a foot of sandstone. The thermal mass keeps them way warmer than a bunch of t-shirts jammed into the attic. And once you realize that it's not just some shack made out of dirt, that it's a fully furnished custom design rivaling any cookie cutter palace in the colonies, well, it becomes real easy to make one of these houses a home.

Miles understood that his journey here hadn't been by coincidence, that he'd picked up skills and wisdom at the exact moments he was ready to learn them, he knew he couldn't just show up on the rez and in a week reverse hundreds of years of systemic oppression, he still didn't even know the tenth of it, but somewhere in there was an idea brewing that could end up changing at least a few lives, and possibly even provide a blueprint for the people to rebuild the community on their own.

It all seemed a task too great for one person, but Miles now knew that he was far from alone in this world, and that as long as he gave everything he had to healing the planet, the rest would all sort of fall into place. He believed.

40

They fixed seven roofs in seven days, and still managed to sweat a couple times. They were met with the deepest of gratitude, and fed the heartiest of rewards, but it wasn't the buffalo stew that Miles could feel feeding his soul. The elders they were helping welcomed him into their families, treated him as one of their own, and shared personal insights into the perpetual enlightenment of his waking spirit.

It was suggested repeatedly to learn some Lakota, at least to pray in an indigenous language, and to sing it. Most Lakota don't even speak Lakota, it was one of the first things to be stripped away and punished by death, and that's because the invaders could see that there was some kind of power in the words of an Earthborn dialect.

The language connected them to the land and the stories held metaphors that guided them through living in a good way. None of that translates into the victory speech of colonial enterprise. Concepts like Mitakuye Oyasin don't mean anything to the phonetic interpreter, just as property, mine, and a separation of humans, nature and spirit, didn't make sense to those who could feel all three alive inside themselves. The Earth speaks to us through her web of life, and a language evolved within that web sings the same harmony, but a philosophy of superiority to all will never be able to resonate with the living world in the same way. God's certainly multilingual, pray in whichever way your heart can express itself, but what could it hurt to put a little effort into learning the native language of your so-called homeland?

"Hihani wasté. Wakhalyapi na chanli, pilamaya yelo, atanikili."

"Don't worry about it champ," welcomed Jordan. "You've earned it. Also been thinking you're ready to tend the fire and carry the stones in, if you're up for it."

"I'd be honored man, thank you."

"Good, cause I'm already worn out and those rocks get heavy. You'll be fine."

They had the wood split and fire set before Uncle Robert arrived, it would just be the three of them today, an intimate sweat with family was sure to dislodge the deepest of the dark from the furthest corners of their hearts. He's learned to offer a gift of tobacco to whoever was pouring, an exchange of gratitude for holding ceremony, and of course another pinch for the Peta Wakan.

They'd been out digging echinacea root the day before, where they also gathered enough sage for the inipi, and for Miles to tie up his own bundle of prayers. They offered tobacco to the Earth before they collected the plants, and sang as they cut each stem a few inches above the ground, leaving any that had already gone to seed. The patch grew thicker every year through the mindful harvest of a living medicine.

They started each day in the tipi with a burning ball of sage leaves, smudging the energy cleansing smoke over their heads and bodies, it calmed the mind and tuned the heart, plus it smelled way better than a couple of sweaty ceiling protectors.

The fire released the energy of the pine, exploding into the universe as it carried the vibration of the prayer waves with it, and charging up some tobacco to sweeten the pot added another boost of intent to the whole deal.

They're like actual waves, invisible waves flying around through the sky making magic happen, created by an energy of a particular wavelength and quite capable of affecting the world around them in unique ways. You know, like sound, and radio, and micro, and radioactive gamma, and heartwaves and brainwaves and how dare there be a more powerful wave than our infant species, of a medium-sized planet, around a small star, off to the side of the middle of nowhere, is capable of developing a device to measure and harness for profit. I mean, it's not like it's a frequency stronger than the very light we're made of, or anything.

Every particle in the universe is vibrating at its tiniest core, science. Every drop of energy you release into the world goes somewhere, science, and the butterfly effect. Water conducts energy, science. Every organism on Earth is primarily water, including us and everything we eat, at the exact ratio as the planet we are obviously a component of, science. We are the conductors of the greatest symphony in existence, our energies create the world we live in, we may have fallen out of tune a bit, but if we just listen to the rest of the orchestra, we'll slip back into harmony in no time.

Too heady for you? More science? How about the Schumann Resonance? That's the Earthly vibration Spaz was talking about. It's 7.83 hertz. 7.83 waveform cycles per second. That's super slow and low, we can only hear down to 20Hz and up to 20,000Hz, and the spinning revolution of our massive planet creates 7.83Hz.

It's the root note of the Earth. The basis for all scales of harmony with our creator. You can't hear it directly, but it resonates your spirit. So much so, that astronauts get sick without it when they break off contact with the band, for real, they have to take along an oscillator that emits a steady 7.83Hz to survive in space. We are connected to the Earth, science.

And coincidentally, the frequency becomes immeasurable the deeper you travel into civilization. Cities built of energy dampening concrete, in grids that diffuse energy waves, congested by chaos, and overstimulated by the concentrated and out of tune energy of the human population.

In the lodge, the songs sync your heart to something bigger than yourself. The heat pushes your ego out of the way, it purifies your dissonance to the world, your prayers are combined as the glowing steam carries them beyond. And our ancestors like to sweat too, as their spirits are felt and heard around the circle. And sometimes seen.

Jordan and Uncle crawled in as Miles dug out the stones, or grandfathers, our oldest relatives, Mitakuye Oyasin. It was a little tricky balancing the red hot lava rocks on the pitchfork tines, don't drop them, he was thoroughly humbled before he even got to his knees. He could mumble along to a few songs, like the one with all the heys and hos, but when it came time for him to pray, his tongue was untied.

The first lodge, he didn't know how. The next few, he rehearsed something that sounded like the right thing to say. But by now, he had discovered that it's not about any words you can practice, it's about uncorking your heart and letting whatever's in there come gushing out. The universe listens to the emotional content of your prayer, a silence of sincerity is far more powerful than some empty promise of scripted belief, no matter what language it's in.

He shared prayers for his relatives, back home, and all the homes he'd made along the way. Prayers of gratitude for the abundance of life he'd experienced. Prayers of protection from hot pursuit and the elements of surprise. Prayers for patience, humility, and understanding, and prayers that the lessons to be learned are not met with struggle, but with grace.

Prayers for a great love, but also prayers to help him shed the colonial indoctrinations of how to view and treat women, how to be present in the most genuine way, without expectation, or hesitation, and prayers of healing for the trail of pain he'd left through the justification of casual heartlessness.

Prayers to help him walk in prayer, to help him be here in a good way, wherever here may be. Prayers to keep him in the moment, not caught up yearning for the greener grass.

Prayers for his brother beside him in the lodge, prayers for the man pouring the water, and for all those holding ceremony across the globe, restoring the energy balance as we wake from our spiritless nightmare.

Prayers for the water, all of the water, the one water. Prayers for the food, and prayers for the chef.

Prayers for guidance along the journey, prayers that the path unfolds before him, and that his heart recognizes the symbols of the map.

Prayers for his dreams, prayers for unlocked understanding, prayers that his vision of a better world continued to grow, prayers to bring that fruition to life.

Prayers for the words to share the contents of his heart in an impactful way, prayers for the ears of those ready to listen, prayers that he could make a difference.

"Até Wakan Tanka, wopila, onsimala yo, wani waciyelo, omakiyayo, makakijelo, aho, Mitakuye Oyasin."

His face was in the dirt again, but not from the collapse of defeated ego. He lay with the Earth, empowered by the strength of connection. Tears melted into her flesh, his soul poured out to the stars, he returned to the lodge expecting to be lost in the heat of the darkness, but instead found the full moon illuminating the way.

He shouldn't be able to see the moon, unless he wasn't in the inipi. He looked around to realize that he wasn't even in the plains, he was atop a mountain that lifted him above the fray and halfway to heaven. Was this a dream? Had he left the lodge with a night's worth of messages to interpret? Was he still in the lodge? Had he never even been in the lodge? Had his prayers begun on the hill or taken him there? What was in that tea?

He was not perched under a midnight moon, he could feel the dawn approaching. As her light spilled over the ridge, he was overcome with life, the rays flowed through his body as his spirit was awakened. The entire hillside underwent the same transformation. In an instant, the silent shadows filled with the commotion of vibrant community.

He could hear it. He could hear the Earth. He could hear the tiniest details of intricate composition. He could feel the magic of the ensemble. As he shifted his focus, he found his intention affecting the world around him, he was an active participant in the song of Unci Maka.

He understood the frequency of the dawn, he understood it to be synonymous with the wake from winter, he understood the bigger picture as spirit reemerges to shake humanity from its slumber. No one can hold back the dawn, the overwhelming power of light is ferocious, the destiny of sunrise is inevitable.

Wide eyes watered from the intensity of momentum, his attention was lowered as tears returned to the Earth, he noticed a beaded leather medicine pouch dangling from his neck. It was packed with sage. A ball of the fragrant leaves ignited in his hand. Blue and white luminescent smoke brightly spiraled around his arm and spread into the atmosphere. He could feel it. He felt the smoke purify his energy. He felt it connect him to the spirit world. He felt the magic inside himself.

The epiphanous revelation didn't exactly stall the momentum, he was once again overcome with life, and the deepest gratitude for another opened doorway. There was something in his other hand. Tobacco. He held it tight and felt his heart filling it with love. Mitakuye Oyasin. And as he made contact with the ground, the gift exploded with red sparks that climbed his arm and clouded his vision.

The energy pulsed through him. He felt the Earth grow stronger from the offering. He felt his spirit flash with illumination. He could feel his prayer as it bloomed into the world.

Sparks faded, glimmer melting into existence. The wave of emotion washed away the illusion of material, leaving only the realization of its own creative force.

Miles was no longer atop the mountain, the landscape had transformed, as he looked around he saw that he was in a vast forest. An orchard. A garden. Food hung from the trees and grew from the Earth, the deeper he focused, the more delicate he knew their relationships to be. As he thought of the feast, it blossomed before his eyes. The instant he forewent wonder and attempted to analyze the ration, its sparkle dulled and life grew stagnant, the magic faded as reason was introduced.

No, he needed to know that place, it didn't matter how it worked, he believed. As he gave himself over to the vision, he was swept through a vibrant community amongst the harvest, the hustle and bustle of a million moments woven into a living breathing organism, the people were alive. He saw tipis on the horizon and hammocks in the trees, and as he turned to take it in, he caught a glimpse of a dirthouse neighborhood surrounded by piñons.

This was the place. The place he'd been dreaming of. Not nighttime fantasy, but the place he knew in his heart was possible, a better way to live, and he could feel himself manifesting it into existence. The people were a part of the world, and the world was a part of the people. Life was sacred and flourished around every bend. And then it was over.

41

"Miles...? Miles...? Miles, are you in there? Miles, wake up, we got company."

He pried his eyes from the dreamworld, still unsure of his last known whereabouts, no time to deliberate the irrational, it was all he could do to squint through the blinding sunshine.

"Look, over there, coming down the hill, there's like six or seven horses headed right for us. You see 'em?"

He did. And it certainly appeared that the posse was on a mission. They were approaching fast, calvary perhaps, which on the rez doesn't insinuate reinforcements, it alludes to the ruthless gunslingers pillaging their eminent domain.

And while we're at it, mission is not exactly a term of endearment either, it was the God fearing missionaries who beat the spiritual connection out of anyone left unmassacred. They ripped children away from their families and locked them into boarding schools, cut their hair, changed their names, forbid their language, and songs, and prayer.

Plus, like any good catholic authoritarianship, there was an unfair share of abuse and molestation, to boot. It turns out that for some reason, the clerics on the rez were the least scrutinized of the clergy, the least subject to papal reprimand, and therefore it was the obvious place to send the pedos with a history of getting caught. Don't want to undermine the sanctity of the church with scandal, so they just redirected the atrocity to a people uncared for, I mean, they pray to the dirt, for God's sake.

But, no need for modern day church folk to get all in a tizzy, that was all in the past, long long time ago, even if that had been Unci's fate just within the last century. But that's all over now, there's no way in today's politically correct climate that the priests would be allowed to molest children, as we separate them from their parents, and lock them in cages because of their skin color. Oh yeah, huh?

The team corralled at Unci's, the lead investigator went in for a consult, the boys debated fight or flight, until the captain emerged and tore up the hill at full gallop.

"Hihani cousin," greeted the interrogation. "Hey Miles," she said with an authentically pleasant tone.

"Tiana!" exclaimed Jordan. "I was wondering if you were ever gonna show up. We were just about to come down there with our boomerangs and chase of a bunch of horse bandits."

"I bet. Listen, I'm not here on vacation, there's some serious shit going down, we gotta get you guys outta here."

"For real?" doubted Jordan, as Miles noticed his own comfort with the expedition.

"Yeah for real. They're looking for you, like, here on the rez."

"Who?"

"Fuck, I don't know, FBI maybe, TigerDucks, what difference does it make, they all want to stick you in the same place."

"How do they even know we're here?" Jordan grilled.

"Or who we are?" subtracted Miles.

"Good news, they don't really know who you are, not names anyway. Just Goose and Dingle Bat, guess it's back to HonkyTonk, huh?"

"Zipline."

"Uh huh, bet they'll never figure that one out. Anyway, they do have pictures of you, kind of. They've got one from the helicopter of Jordan, so it's kind of hard to really see you, but somebody around here might pick you out for a little mazaska.

And Miles, it's actually kinda funny, they've got this sketch that's supposed to be you, I guess from what the tree cop could see, or from the roadblock or something. Just looks like another white dude to me. But, a strange white guy shows up here around the time they start looking, on top of Jordan always being suspicious, I just don't really think it's a good idea to wait and see."

"How do they know I was with him?"

"Infiltrator maybe, maybe someone saw you leaving together, noticed that you weren't around anymore. I mean, they already know what groups we hang out in, I bet they know a lot more about us than we even get paranoid about. That's probably why they think you may be here, and how long before they link you to Unci?"

"Copy that. What's it been like back at camp?"

"Crazy. In every way. They raided camp fishing for anyone with warrants, took a few, we figure it was just an excuse to bust in looking for you, that was the day after you left. Frontline's been hectic, there's a lot more people, I left a week ago and my estimate was two thousand. It's evolved into a whole new thing, and a lot of that credit goes to you Miles, people watched from home and got inspired into action."

"Wasn't me."

"Right."

"What about Paul?"

"That mother fucker was still up there when I left. I don't think they know how to get him down. I don't even know if he knows how to get down. Like I said, I left a week ago, when he'd been up there for six days, but he still had water and food and good spirits. That dude is nuts, in the best kinda way."

"Wait," Jordan jumped in. "Are we riding horses out of here on the run from the FBI? Badass."

"Calm down Buttercup, how long do you need to be ready?"

"Thirty?"

"How 'bout fifteen?"

Fifteen minutes, nearly a hundredth of Miles' first overnight packing job, take that Miss Two Hours. They were packed in five, the tipi could stay where it was at, just had to get Unci's hugs on board with an early departure.

"Oh Miles, I'm going to miss you sweetheart. You come back anytime you want now, you don't even have to bring that fool with you."

"I'm right here," the fool protested.

"Oh hush, you can come back too," she said with a wink. "As long as you bring Miles."

"I'll miss this place a lot too," he preminisced. "Already feels like home in a big way."

"It'll do that, the land is alive in God's country, and you're a part of it now."

He felt that somehow she was well aware of his recent rendezvous with the Earth.

"I got something I want to give you, as a wopila for fixing my roof, you take care of it and it'll take care of you."

She unfolded a thick red wool blanket with a captivating pattern of geometric arrowheads, blankets are sacred gifts between natives, hold the smallpox.

"A Pendleton?" cried Jordan. "You know I helped too, don't you?"

Of course Takoja. So Miles, if it gets real cold out there, you should let Jordan curl up under this thing with you. See, I didn't forget about you, my little Buttercup."

"Love you too, Grandma."

Miles wished he had something to show his appreciation in return, something sacred of his own.

Raccoon fur? No.

Turkey feather? No.

Oh yeah.

"I've got something in my pack for you too, hang on, where is it, here we go. I think these have probably been yours all along, I was just carrying them for a while."

He handed her the packet of tobacco seeds, the energy exchanged was of another level, his heart was in the seeds and she would feel it with every toke. A hug to seal the deal and he hopped on the white horse. I assume it goes without saying that he doesn't know anything about horses, but that's a tail for another chapter.

They rode southwest until the most spectacular sunset finished melting the clouds into night. Could be checkpoints on the roads, so they'd stick to game trails, it was a little bumpy. Miles felt something on his chest, not his heart, on top of his chest, under his shirt, he let go of the reins and pulled it out.

It was a blue and white beaded leather medicine pouch.

42

Taté Ská (Ta-Tay Shka), White Wind, but half the time Miles called her Bud, and she seemed to respond just fine. She took care of him, as if she knew that he was inexperienced in the horse trade. She made him feel welcome, and that he was in charge of the situation, even if he knew that she was really the one holding the reins.

They escaped the rez with little incident, one little incident, a helicopter was cruising the border, but our team was able to take cover along the river until it passed. Other than that, Miles was just a little butthurt about the whole ordeal.

"That'll pass," promised Rowan. "Just a little sore in the saddle is all, give it a week and you'll be as hard-assed as the rest of us."

"Great, just what I always wanted," he less than cheered, as he passed the pot of campfire beans. "Where we going, anyway?"

"It's less about where we're going on this journey, and more about where we're at."

"We're headed south for the most part," added Brooke. "But we're stopping along the way to reseed food forests and restore the natural balance to the land."

"Trying to make it possible to be a nomad again," Rowan rolled on. "The Earth is designed to take care of us as we travel freely across her surface, it's only because of our negligence that she ever stopped. So we're on a quest to rekindle healthy relationships as we open pathways through the abyss."

"Some of us are on the way to Mexico, to the border, to help with the relief efforts for all those waylaid travelers stuck on the other side," informed Brooke.

"And maybe to put up a little resistance of our own," nudged Tiana.

"Better get your zipline ready," Jordan warned.

"It's pretty atrocious how they're treating people down there," said Brooke. "People that are just trying to survive. Escaping whichever harsh reality has been inflicted onto their homeland, and most of it was by our society's meddling in the first place. And it's not going to slow down. The countries we've impoverished are the most affected by the ecological hardships we've created, we're entering an era of widespread climate migration, and it's our responsibility as humans to welcome the refugees with open arms and open borders, not heavily armed soldiers defending their exclusive right to American privilege."

"When in our world's history has a border wall ever been good for anybody?" wondered Tiana. "We used to fight wars to topple the tyrants who divided the people, now we sit back and relax as it's happening in our own backyard."

"But that's all in the past," Jordan devilishly advocated. "And everybody knows that we never learn anything from the past, especially not from the rest of the world's history. America is the world, as far as we're concerned anyway, and we already have a rich history of yesterday's immigrants fighting the future immigration of job-theiving criminals, those with the malicious intent of diluting the authentic American way of life. And besides, we have to keep the drug dealers out somehow."

"Oh yeah, right, forgot about them," recalled Tiana. "Like the meth plaguing our most vulnerable people, no, wait, that's made here in the US. And weed's legal, basically. And the government's the biggest importer of heroin, I personally know vets who have stood guard at the poppy fields we commandeered. Big pharmaceutical, now there's a drug dealer worth mobilizing against, they kill way more people than the rest of them combined, oh never mind, they're as above the medical board as it gets. So I guess that just leaves coke, not the high fructose poison that attributes to a quarter million deaths a year, they're talking about the one that lands a thousand kilos per trip in Miami, not smuggled a balloon at a time inside a migrant already carrying everything they own. Haven't they ever seen Scarface?"

"And ninety percent of the drugs that do travel across the border, come through legal ports of entry," said Rowan. "And you know, they don't even search every car that comes through there, only one out of seven. You'd think that if any of this had to do with the import of anything other than brown people, that maybe they'd thoroughly inspect the most convenient way of crossing the border first."

"Well, they can just apply legally if they want to live here so bad," egged Jordan. "Easy peasy. There are proper legal channels to becoming a citizen, just gotta fill out some paperwork or something."

"Oh yeah, just fax it in and you should be good," Tiana encouraged. "Except that the same people building the wall are tightening restrictions on immigration, slowing the process, and reducing the amount of applications seen. But anybody that's for the wall, seems to be for the general reduction of mexicans anyway, so who really cares about the horrid conditions we're creating on the edge of our neighbor's yard, can't be any worse than a day at the DMV."

"Which form was I supposed to fill out again?" asked Jordan. "The one where my immigrant grandparents worked hard so I wouldn't have to? Or is it the older version, where I just have to exterminate anyone that's already living there? And is the back copy mine?"

"It's just another cage," said Rowan, as he relieved the dark comedy routine. "A fence, a prison, a lock and key to capture and contain, both ways, this gravy train ain't gonna last forever. It's not just a few stray nomads meant to be flowing freely, it's all of life, the Earth is a liquid, and through those swirls of energy we should find abundance sprouting from every trail.

But then you fence off something that can never be owned, and it dies. There may still be some life surviving the isolation, but that ecosystem will only ever be a fraction of the puzzle piece it once was. And then another fence, and then another, and just wait til we ride through Nebraska, fences and cornrows for days.

90 million acres for corn, 650 million for cows, 25 million of concrete, 4 million miles of roads, which are really just as bad as fences, and even more destructive to the migration of the microscope.

The compartmentalization of life, an inventory of taxable existence, fences, prisons, reservations, cubicles, apartments, children in cages at a privatized border wall. They're all layers of the same machine, and everyone's too captivated with securing their own little neighborhood of oppression, the one that's not so bad if you just work overtime and ignore the pleas of those caught up in the gears, they're too consumed with being a loyal consumer to see that their exemplary inmate privileges come at a cost to another, and that they're the only ones who can use that privilege to free those locked in the cells beneath them."

"They've got their own problems," suggested Brooke. "They don't have time to worry about someone else's struggle a thousand miles away. They'll just have to figure it out for themselves, I guess.

Our country may have been built with slavery, but that was before our time, so it doesn't count, ever since some proud Americans traveled a thousand miles to protect the freedoms of fellow human beings, those whose lives were the cost of their privilege. Whew, good thing we don't have their sense of moral authority.

Or hey holocaust victims, sorry chaps, we gotta stay home and catch up on SportsCenter, maybe next time. And I know that the whole holocaust thing is a touchy subject and beyond parallel, even if those who get offended by the comparison and not the current events, were probably unlikely to have stepped in back then either. And even if we have to remember that the holocaust was not the beginning of the terror, but the end, and that it very much started by detaining an 'infestation' of minorities into interment camps, as the government funded the dehumanization of those whose survival was made illegal by the state.

But it gets harder for me not to draw connections when we talk about the American genocide of 98 million humans over race, spiritual beliefs, and land dispute. Far less survivors of a much larger genocide, albeit a more archaic version of evil, but the victims of this one are still concentrated into camps and showered with oppression, and they're not on the other side of the world, and it's not something from a time long forgotten, and maybe those who are so gung-ho about defending the American way of life, should consider taking responsibility for it."

"But no," said Tiana. "They'll just send all the foreigners back to where they belong, anywhere but here, it's the only way to preserve English as their country's native language. Maybe if our people had been a little stricter on immigration, we wouldn't have all this confusion over homeland security."

"Think it's too late to deport them?" wondered Jordan. "No offense."

"As long as you guys show official tribal documentation you can pass, better keep it on you at all times though," warned Tiana. "Yeah right, that's totally different, this place was won fair and square in the heat of battle."

"I thought we won that one?"

"Sure, we may have defeated the army, repeatedly enough that they still use our strategies to train today's forces. And yeah, maybe we signed a treaty to spare their lives for a few concessions that they never had any intention of providing. And okay, so there may have been a few Geneva violations of biological warfare and flat out massacre. But hey, all's fair in love and war, and America won that shit, otherwise we'd all be wearing loincloths and howling at the moon."

Proud to be an American? Which part? Was it the founded on genocide or the built on slavery? Oh yeah, that's all in the past, proud to be an American right now. Oh, so the border cages, gotcha. No? Not so proud of the unsavory reality required to facilitate the American dream of freedom? Just proud to be on the winning team?

"Or how about the people who are part of the lands we're invading right now," asked Rowan. "I'd imagine they'll just have to figure it out on their own too, huh? When the most developed war machine in the world blows through their neighborhood, and all they want is for us to stay at home like we love to do, and somehow we're surprised when they figure it out on their own and seek vengeance against the great nation that devastated their homeland, with no visible signs of remorse among its citizenship.

But no, why on Earth would any of us be responsible for the actions of our government, that's somebody else's problem, we're just the innocent bystanders that consume the spoils of war, as we spill more privilege on the floor than most people in the world will ever even know exists."

"Except of course for the undocumented housekeepers and their stolen American jobs," added Brooke. "As the prisoners of privilege shame the victims of the same master that enslaves their own livelihood. We're the ones that wrecked Mexico's economy, policies like NAFTA destroyed their agricultural income, as our techno-corn claimed supremacy over family farms trapped in the maize. Entire communities left without sustenance, Monsanto consuming the last heirlooms of tradition, and millions of unemployed locals drowning in the fields, as John Deere diesels deport the workforce and strip any remaining culture from agribusiness."

"That's a story as old as the timeclock though," countered Rowan. "Technological advances that streamline the inefficiencies of handcrafted quality. People have been losing jobs to machines for a long time, all the way back to the plow, but the future they were promised through the rise of job termination, has been buried deep below the unemployment line.

In the thirties, and then again in the sixties, we were told that by the early two-thousands, we'd have the machines selflessly handling all of our dirty work. We would live in a time of leisure, where children wouldn't believe stories of anyone ever having worked more than fifteen hours a week.

Sounds like a dream, and it was. If we were all in this together, then it would be more than possible to sit back and relax as the techno-utopia took out the trash, who cares about jobs, why would we want one of those when Rosie works for us?

But that's not how the title holders who own our time wanted to run the show, why share in the wealth and extend vacations, when we can simply extract even more money from the lifetimes of the working class? And we don't even have to chain them up like that last batch of imported field hands, they'll come begging to us for cheap labor, it'll become their biggest priority as they vote to expand our market above any of those worthless human rights. If jobs are what they want, then that's what we'll give them, who cares if today's occupation is devoid of anything meaningful. The only thing that matters is a population traded for a paycheck, and we've got a machine that prints those, so we're golden."

"So yeah," concluded Brooke. "That's why we're headed down that way, because it's our duty to stand up for those knocked down by our empirical measures. We may not be chasing some paycheck that promises an endless pursuit of unhappiness, but this work we're doing is rewarding in all the ways that a job is intrinsically designed to drain you of."

Miles was ready to fill out an application.

43

The next few days delivered the promised land of corn mazes. Miles was starting to see what they meant, how could anything ever escape the labyrinth, a deer hung limp having underestimated the leap to freedom.

Still fresh, caught in the crossfire of the convenience war, a sacred creation tossed away with the husk, but it wasn't too late to honor its life in a good way. A little tobacco, a par of wire cutters, seven prayers, fourteen hands, a week's worth of venison jerky, but where were they going to find a place to camp?

"It's kinda off track," redirected Brooke. "But we're not that far from Elmer's, we could be there by dark and have space to work on this guy. And probably dinner in the meantime. The turn's just ahead I think, kinda convenient spot for this to happen really, I'm thinking we're probably supposed to ride over and check him out."

Elmer was a farmer like everyone else around here, a corn farmer, a GMO corn farmer. He'd made the unlikely acquaintance of the traveling foodies on a previous migration, a wintertime icecapade, and when a blizzard rolled up the map, he opened his doors, they opened his mind.

"We used to grow everything around here when I was a kid, tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, now it's just corn, corn, corn, as far as the eye can see. Most of us can't even feed ourselves from our own farms, still gotta buy groceries from town, every square inch of viable land is committed to barely turning a profit. Hell, I don't even like corn, never did, and especially not now, but it's the only thing that pays the bills. Almost.

And it's not like everybody's rushing out to buy all this stuff, I only make any money because the government subsidizes it. They set a price, I sell it for whatever I can get, and they make up the rest as they supply the demands of the big agriculture lobbies. It seems like they're trying to help us farmers, but all it's done is destroy a state's worth of farmland, and now we're broker every year and still have nothing to eat. And ever since these guys taught me about just how bad this GMO corn is, there's no way I'm going to eat it now.

I still grow it of course, have to. Gotta buy sterile Monsanto seeds every year, with pesticides already built into the DNA, but if I don't, then my yield suffers, and I'm already on a shoestring. Plus, nobody cares if it's organic or not, all the corn around here gets mixed together and shipped off to food factories. It's in everything nowadays. A piece of it here, an extract of it there, they even somehow invented a sugar that's worse for you than sugar, now that's doing something.

Pushed us into destroying ninety million acres of actual food for Americans and replacing it with processed corn puffs, it's sick, and the folks around here that eat it get sick, could be pellagra making a comeback. And the cows they feed it to get sick, 'cause cows don't eat corn, not supposed to, no wonder it gets them all bloated and hooked on antibiotics, and then the cattle give us shits like E. Coli.

I'm not that convinced we're even supposed to eat it, not what it's become anyway. Corn is a grass, a grain, and once Monsanto got ahold of it, over two thousand varieties of heirloom maize disappeared as this pumped up impostor took over the show. It's only number one in the market because it yields the most energy per acre, nothing else matters, not health or taste or poisoned parts per million, it's just a part number on an assembly line. They say that three fifths of the corn isn't even for food, it's industrial grade for energy and manufacturing, which means we've traded away a country's worth of nutrition for a microwave.

But what can I do? I'm a slave to the bank. And the bank tells me that growing corn is the only way to keep the farm. So I grow corn."

Miles could tell that Elmer felt as trapped as the deer, defeated and depressed and sadly resigned to feeding a machine he'd lost faith in. But he had let the travelers take down his fence, they'd inspired him to believe that he could still offer something to a planet he felt responsible for tearing apart, and the scrap metal alone made up for the few missing ears of whatever stray deer made it this deep into the wire-rimmed jungle. They'd forged a real friendship, an understanding of each other's very different ways of life, they'd found common ground amid their bipartisan distrust of an agricultural empire.

They could stay as long as they wanted, there was even an old smokehouse they could use to cure the deer's ailments, beds inside if they wanted, but he knew that this crew was going to sleep with the horses. They stayed up smoking and carrying on all night, snacking on fire roasted niblets and stretching the hide for tanning, a bit more of an undertaking than the raccoon. Dawn brought an early morning as Elmer was relieved to have help, and company, he threatened to close up shop and join them. He was welcome.

Brooke came bouncing off the porch with a basket of supplies, "Hey, ya'll wanna go on an adventure?"

Has anyone ever answered no?

Miles and Jordan were in, obviously, Tiana close behind, but then Jordan remembered some mysterious phone call he had to make from Elmer's landline, Miles would have to hold it down for the both of them. They walked past more rows of corn than bags in a dirthouse, finally reaching the runoff rich creekside.

"We're gonna plant a bunch of Indian Grass all through here," said Brooke. "It's one of the strongest plants of phytoremediation, which is just what it sounds like, using flora to decontaminate our most polluted ecosystems. And not only is this wonderful purifier specifically geared for transmuting agrochemicals, like pesticides and herbicides, but it's also native to this region, what a beautiful coincidence."

"Ooh, and are we gonna transplant this Wah'pe Was'temna too?" smiled Tiana."

"You know it. I gave Elmer a bunch of seeds last year and he had these starts up and going, like he knew we'd be swinging through or something. Miles, you probably know this one from the rez, these are just babies, but you'd recognize their purple coneflower that smells like a taste of heaven."

"Oh yeah," he recalled. "What's the other name for it, the one I might know? Bergamot, right?"

"Yep," nodded Tiana. "Or Sweet Leaf. Or Wah'pe Was'temna. Another sacred one."

"Yeah, we took it in the lodge once, smelled way better than we did."

"I bet," wagered Brooke. "And it's good medicine in the other way too. You can make a tea that helps with digestion and headaches, and cough and cold and influenza and all that stuff, plus it makes a perfect aluminum-free deodorant, but the best part is that it's highly tolerant of manmade pollution."

Miles was digging it. Planting medicines for the Earth. Healing our footprints and regrowing a natural world. And Brooke wanted to hear all about his own rewilding, about the dirthouse, and the piñons, and eventually the vine worked its way forty feet up a tree.

"You should have seen it Brooke," insisted Tiana." It was incredible. Miles was incredible. He was bobbing and weaving all over the place, they couldn't touch him, and just when they thought they had, he pulls a Tango and Cash and slips right past them. Incredible."

And Miles thought that Jordan's retelling made him blush.

"I would have loved to have seen that," roused Brooke, with eyes as wide as the sky. "You've got some stories in there, don't you Miles? May have to pry a few out later. Ooh, look at all this Ghost Pipe over here."

"Oh yeah, it's all over the place," codiscovered Tiana as she turned to enlighten Miles. "It's a super medicine. It looks like it might be a fungus since it's white like that, but it's a non-photosynthetic flower, that's why it does good in the shade under these trees. You can treat so much stuff with it, like heavy kinda stuff, like epilepsy and PTSD, and neck pain and pinched nerves. I think it can even be a non-habit forming opium substitute, but where's the money in that?"

"It can also be used as a hypnotic and a gonorrhea treatment," Brooke prescribed with a chuckle. "Even in this sea of yellow, there's still pockets of nourishment creeping out of the cracks. Anybody else would call these weeds, especially the farmers who poison entire fields of natural medicines that treat the side effects of improper nutrition. But there's no such thing as weeds, unless maybe you mean the cornstalks, invaders of a soil that they'd have no chance of surviving unless the biodiverse population is genocided with the rest of the native species.

You know it already from the plains, the grasslands are completely made up of strong medicines, and I'm sure it was the same here before all of this. Even people's yards at home are full of medicine, and food, but the FDA doesn't have a tax code for consuming the free and natural abundance that sustained people for tens of thousands years, so it's way safer to buy Frosted Flakes and insulin from Walmart."

"Yep, that's the classic trademark of a capital lifestyle," recognized Tiana. "Where we never had need of a word for weeds, or vermin for that matter, they were just plants and animals, our brothers and sisters, and any concept of not sharing the natural abundance seemed preposterous to our common minds of simple sense. They're just more constructs of agricultural scarcity, further philosophies of us vs. them, as the invasive species insists on overexerting themselves to prove their own superiority over nature.

The limitations of excess demand a larger workforce, to provide enough farmhands to cultivate all the food they need to feed them all, and to fill all the pockets of generational wealth as they pass down an empire, while of course passing the buck up the chains of the interlocked church and state, who encourage extending families as they simultaneously raise money and soldiers. And like with any farm, each head of cattle has a dollar value, so they expand inventory beyond maximum capacity, until the only logical option is the expand the farm, and then they wonder how they find themselves in an overpopulation of underachievers."

"Except that nobody wonders about that kind of stuff," said Brooke. "It's just another obvious truth to deny, as they recite whatever they've been told to believe. All the humans on Earth could fit into Texas, so we're nowhere near overpopulated, and just think of all that wide open Indian land we haven't seized yet, never mind that our footprint is much wider than our political stance. And yeah, our physical footprint only accounts for four percent of our land use, but there's a lot more at play, like how cow hooves take up over forty percent of our country.

They measure it in global hectares, it's the amount of available biocapacity that each human in the world demands of the Earth. If we broke it down to every person's fair share, then we'd each have to sustain ourselves on 1.7 hectares of land, which is around four acres, seems pretty doable to anyone not consumed with their inflated ego.

Americans, of course, inherited the privilege of ignoring what the rest of the world thinks of us, so we have no problem with our average consumption of over eight global hectares per person. That's over twenty acres each, and that includes a lot of factors other than just food production, like waste and carbon and all that kinda stuff, and if everyone in the world lived like us, it would take over four Earths to keep up with the Kardashians.

And a big chunk of our wasted products are the gross overproduction required to facilitate the inefficiencies of convenience. Like the wheat they use to Roundup pennies to the dollar, that average American consumes 180 pounds a year of gluttonous gluten, yet we grow 500 pounds per person, as Amber waves all that fertile farmland goodbye."

"And that surplus of scarcity fills the shelves with a fear of our own expiration date," expanded Tiana. "So we hoard so much food that we each throw away twenty-four pounds a month of wasted potential, and that's not even counting the dumpsters of day old bread that we have to lock up, or else the lawbreakers of competition might find the treasure of feeding their family among the refuse of society's leftovers.

Scarcity is a disease that has infected a world of abundance, and the zombies insist on sentencing every last one of us to a less than meager existence. It's a mindset that the Earth is a finite resource meant to be picked apart, which only pits us against each other in a race to consume the entire planet before it's all gone. And with billions of us sprinting toward the finish line, the prophecy becomes self-fulfilled as we topple our way to catastrophic failure."

"Or maybe cropastratic failure," offered Miles with a grin.

"Now we definitely didn't need a word for that in Lakota"

"But wasn't it a lot more feasible to live with the land back then?" wondered Miles. "I mean, wouldn't this inflated population problem put us in the pickle of having no room left for cucumbers?"

"That's certainly what they want us to believe," Tiana broke it down. "That life is scarce, so we better hoard our personal space and let the economists figure out how to feed us. But amid all this confusion of limited understanding, what do you think the most irrigated crop in America is?"

"I'm pretty sure that would have to be corn, obviously?"

"Nope. Guess again."

"Really? Then I guess I'm yet again clueless."

"The most watered down plant in this country..." she dot dot dotted. "... is lawn grass. We spend more time, money, energy, and resources, to maintain an invasive species that we don't even eat, or want anyone else to eat, so we spend our precious weekend cutting back our excess, instead of just letting life take over the planet."

"All those weeds with pretty flowers are just growing too tall and healthy to see the property line," mocked Brooke. "And the grass in the flowerbed crossed the border, so we kill the flowers in the grass and the grass in the flowers, when they obviously enjoy each other's company. And now we're too busy keeping the land from escaping, to realize than it would have taken a lot less effort to just grow the plants that we spend the rest of our life working at the power plant to put on the table."

"I don't know if we have a word for convenient," admitted Tiana. "But I'll bet it would more accurately describe a yard full of local produce, than all the energy expended to stock the shelves of the local convenience store. And if the whole neighborhood was your grocery, it'd be a lot easier to let a stranger step on your grass as community bloomed into abundance."

Once all the rest of the bones were thoroughly picked over, they raced back to the barn, Miles lost, but he felt like a winner. He felt like he'd done something. He was riding a horse across the prairie on a prayer, forging tales of revolution, and rewilding the water with two pretty girls, and one of them might actually like him.

How could he possibly have found this fortune under the cushion of his apartment?

44

Flames flickered to sleep as they picked off the farmhands. Miles considered the tenacity of the ancestral firetenders, who couldn't simply flick a Bic every time they needed a light. They followed the herd and carried their embers, keeping the heart of the community alive with every transplant, of course fire was sacred.

And even once you learn to rub your drumsticks together, it's not as easy as 1-2-3-4, you have to nurse the tiniest spark into combustion, and during the moments in-between, that fragment of ignition is the most precious thing in your universe. It heats you, feeds you, and lights you through the valley of shadows, it's the core of the village and a hub of connection, the fire is sacred.

And nowadays, we just carry that magic in our pockets, with little to no thought about anything other than our next smoke break. It's infinitely more convenient, even I carry one, but it almost seems as if there's a direct correlation between the rise of convenience and the disappearance of the sacred.

When you hike through a blizzard just to stoke the Sacred Fire, each piece is a prayer that warms you in every way. When you carry that fire to the tipi, you're still connected, and as long as you take care of it in a good way, it'll take care of you.

Then you hide it away in a cast iron cage, and it suddenly becomes a chore, not an honor.

And once you've mastered your command of the element, reducing the heat to a number on a dial, you've now progressed your spiritual amnesia to just another bill you pretend doesn't exist.

And it's the same with food. We used to pray with the seeds, sow them by hand, and by song. Our fingers were in the Earth, there was no shortcut of convenience, only intention of the heart. The harvest was welcomed with ceremony, the bounty prepared with love, the spirits ate first and every morsel was felt in your soul.

Then farming became a job. And food a commodity. You could buy exploits from around the world at your neighborhood grocer. Yet the only prayers on the prairie, were to be spared another agriculturally induced dust bowl.

Now we can order a number seven from our phones, genetically tampered and machine planted, picked before it's ripe and trucked across the ocean, scattered, smothered, covered, hydrogenated, saturated, mechanically separated, fresh frozen flash fried and delivered to your window, don't get up, no time for real food, and certainly no time for grace.

The deer is sacred and its energy is a gift from the Earth, but it takes a lot of yourself to honor each part of its life in a good way. The living stock of our Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are prisoners, and inventory, and the sacred can simply not be quantified in a convenient excel spreadsheet.

Traveling across the land used to be sacred as you savored every step. Walking in prayer. Then the Sunka Wakan joined the caravan, the horse, Wakan is right there in the name, sacred. For some it was more convenient to break their property into submission, but others held that relationship sacred, a relative, and their spirits were one as they journeyed the Earth as a team.

Then we hop aboard the clickety-clack of the coal fired buffalo slaughter, cars only bring us traffic jams and a road raged with commuters, and the only thing sacred about jet fuel propulsion is when a cloud of turbulence brings out the believer in those otherwise occupied by the in-flight magazine. Ooh, look at that travel pillow, should be able to sleep though a train wreck with that thing.

Trees were sacred, not measured by the board foot. Plants were sacred, not another weed to poison. Clothes were sacred, not products of slave labor. Language was sacred, not a class to fail. Songs were sacred, not autotuned. Names were sacred, not picked from a book. Children were sacred, not just another phone on a family plan. Elders were sacred, not locked away in early retirement. Women were sacred, not thumbnails to swipe right. Relationships were sacred, not purchased with jewelry. Homes were sacred, not prefabbed and foreclosed. The Earth was sacred, not the inventory of some property manager.

Perhaps there's no direct correlation, simply a coincidence of substandard consciousness, it's perfectly possible to pray with your Big Mac and sing to your radiator. Convenience doesn't necessitate that you stop holding life sacred, but it sure makes it easier not to.

Miles was deep in the coals when Jordan snuck up on him, but he's native, so it couldn't have been that hard.

"Aho kola," he spoke softly, as he took the next seat.

He tossed some tobacco in and watched it sizzle into the stars. They sat in silence for a while, contemplation, prayer, until eventually Jordan was ready to share his heart.

"We've been on a good run brother. And on the run. I feel like a different man than when I met you, I can't imagine how you feel. Glad we got to kick ass together, and pray together, and grow as people through all those moments we shared. You're family, man, I mean it, my brother, we're gonna be connected for a long time, no matter where our paths lead us. And...

...and I think tomorrow my path's leading me out of here. West. I talked to a few Water Protectors today, and they're heading to Oregon to fight the LNG, and they're just a couple hundred miles east of here now. It's falling into place too easy to not be what I'm supposed to do, feels right in my heart, you know? I know I should be laying low, but those idiots can't tell one Indian from another, and what do they really have on me anyway?

There's an extra seat if you want it, would love to take my favorite tipimate with me, but I get it if it's not your path. What we've got going on here is a good thing, I hate to leave it really, but I have to, and I know that even these few days of riding together will carry me through the travels ahead. You inspire me dude, and these horses inspire me, and that deer inspired me, and I think it's time for me to do something with all of it, plus I hear there's some really tall trees out there."

Miles was surprised, but not shocked. As his own comfort with last minute travel grew, so did his understanding of interwoven trajectories, and his appreciation that in order to see someone soon, they have to go somewhere first. If they didn't follow their own compass, then they'd miss those magical connections, and that would be way sadder than any toksa.

Miles stayed up for a bit after the bromantic moment, he needed to share some tobacco as its fireflies lit the way. Both paths felt viable, both fit for the next chapter, it was down to heads and tails.

And after a conversation with Bud, there was no way Miles was ready to climb into the safety restraint of a four wheeled death machine. He was staying. Well, he was leaving, they all were, first thing in the morning, and he would make sure to live a story worth telling the next time their paths were crossed.

The sun stirred the horses, the horses stirred the people, the people stirred the coffee, the coffee stirred the rest of it to life.

Elmer and Jordan stood by as the menagerie prepared for takeoff, they had an empty horse now, just in case Elmer was serious. The boys traded one last toksa, for now, and a seven second oxytocin releasing hug, and in the secret pockets of their hidden handshake were exchanged the most sacred of items, but that's sacred, and no words in a book can ever compare to the sacred, so I'm not even gonna worry about it.

It wasn't the same without the incessant hijinks of his running mate, but he was in community, with family, and it opened up space for Brooke to dig into his backstory. She was interested, and interesting, as he imagined most horseback nomads would prove to be. She knew a lot about plants, and food, and she navigated the whole trip by the starlight of memory, and she was nice, and fun, and funny. But she didn't make him tingle the way Annie had. And that was okay. Their relationship needn't be centered around a desire to objectify. They could be good friends, not just friends, and he could be present in every sacred moment, regardless of where they were headed.

The groove of the ride had changed. Miles no longer had a tether, so he bounced throughout the pack and deepened his connections as he tightened threads, though he still found himself turning to share the underbreath commentary with his bff. The days were long, the deer was dry, the saddle was still sore, but eventually they posted camp and Miles had a moment in his tent. Not a boohoo sob story moment, like a magical moment. It was pretty neat, really.

He had already offered tobacco to the land before he set up the tent, a yellow prayer tie staked next to his east facing door, new beginnings of the rising sun and safe travels into the night. He burned a ball of sage, smudged himself and his home, and left it smoldering in an abalone shell as he unpacked his most sacred bedroll.

The blanket was beautiful, cherished, and being the nicest thing in his cache, he felt obliged to protect it from the dusty road. He kept it wrapped in his other blanket, and stuffed into an oversized dry sack, and as he pulled it free to make his bed, it shimmered in the moonlight. His fingers excited sparks of current as he smoothed its wrinkles, static had been building up in the woolen coil, charging its spirit with every step of the way. It was rather fantastic.

"Hey dude, come check this out," he called to the tent next door before he remembered the vacancy.

"What is it, dude?" intercepted Tiana as she loomed over the doorway, caught him off guard, he wasn't expecting company.

"I meant that other dude, been talking to him all day out of habit, at least it's been quieter though."

"Aw, you boys are so sweet. So what was it you wanted to show him? Unless I don't want to see whatever weird shit you guys were into."

"It's all PG, it's pretty trippy though."

"Whoa, nice Pendleton, where'd you get that from?"

"Unci. For working on her ceiling."

"Dang. Good one. Take care of it."

"And it'll take care of me, I know. But rub your hand across it."

"Is this a trick?"

"No trick."

"Oh well, but I guess I'll try it anyway."

She knelt down and slid her palm over the wool as sparklers ignited in every direction, her glance chased electricity from head to toe.

"Wow. This is so cool. Electric blanket. Should keep you warm enough, it's only like a hundred degrees out here. Sorry your bedfellow's not here to see it."

She exhausted the pent up energy and turned to take a seat beside him on the blanket.

"I'll miss that kid too, but we'll see him again soon enough. I'm glad you stayed though."

"Yeah, me too," accepted Miles, as he tried not to peruse her laidback sentiment. "Just kinda felt right."

"Yeah," she knew the feeling. "And looks like you're getting along with Brooke pretty good too, huh?"

"She's cool, everybody is, even you."

"Punk," she bit back as she punched his arm. "You know what I mean. You like her."

"I like her just fine. Just getting to know her really. I'm not trying to jump to conclusions with anybody until we know each other in a real way, not now that I understand what real connection is like. Plus, I'm just now figuring out how to listen to my own heart."

"Good answer. So what's it been saying?"

"It's saying that I'm pretty much in love with Bud, I mean Taté Ska, and the whole horseback way of life. It's been pretty adamant that I'm meant to live by the fire. And to eat from the Earth. And it's saying that Brooke is..." he teased a confession, "...a good friend."

She smiled at his playful prodding, "And what's it tell you about me, mister heart whisperer?"

Oh jeez, Miles finally had a friendly conversation going with Tiana, and now she was setting him up to implode, there was about a ninety-four percent chance he'd say something wrong and spark a lecture of colonial misappropriation. Luckily, when you speak from the heart, it's harder for your head to screw everything up.

"Let's see," he tuned in, as his hand covered his heart with genuine insincerity. "What's that?" he whispered through the aorta. "Oh. Uh huh. You don't say. No, she's cool, cool enough anyway. Alright then, thanks."

He looked up from the one way conversation, she was still there, eagerly awaiting his interpretation. "It said... well, are you sure you wanna hear this? He's sometimes not the most tactful with his feelings, I'd hate for him to hurt yours."

"Good luck with that one tough guy, you better tell me or I'm gonna punch you again."

"Well, it's just that... you see, what had happened was... it thinks that your nose is a nice average size, not too big, not too small, pretty much like the goldilocks of all noses."

She liked that one.

"And it thinks that you're brilliant, and incredibly driven, and fearless, and good at frybread, and pretty much a badass."

Now that was a good answer.

"It said all that in thirty seconds?"

"Oh no, we talk about you all the time, mainly making fun of you, but every once in a while something nice will stick."

"All the time, huh? And what else do you sit around here whispering about? Nothing romantic, I hope."

"No, I think I got the memo on that one. Didn't think that kind of energy would have been welcome at our table."

"Good call, it wouldn't have."

"Plus, I'm not trying to get caught up in fantasy land. I'm trying to live in each moment, and trying to forget everything that other world taught me about women, as I hold everyone I meet in a sacred way."

"Yeah, you were still pretty colonized when you got to camp, except for the boomerang," she elbowed. "It was nothing against you, how I may have acted at first, I'm just so tired of having to decolonize every guy that comes creeping around the tipi. I know it's important to do, and those who get deprogrammed can spread out to help others, but it's exhausting. It's an entire understanding of the world that has to be rewired, and I just can't be someone's tutor through that whole process again.

Plus, it's better to slowly unravel it through a range of eye-opening relationships, and to experience it firsthand, and you definitely signed up for the accelerated deprogram at camp. It changed you, all of it, all of you, camp, the kitchen, the farm, the flag, and most of all the trees.

I heard everything you said to that tree cop, it was powerful stuff, it touched a lot of us."

"Wait, you guys could hear all that? How?"

"Bill wired the tree walkies with remote activation, you didn't know that? He flipped a switch as the action got going, as much for tactical safety as good old fashioned eavesdropping. It's probably good you didn't know, you were able to let that heart of yours do the talking, and a lot of ours were hanging by a limb."

"Jeez, I'm glad I didn't say all that bad stuff about you."

"Shut it," she warned. "And then you went to the rez, got to live at the edge of colonization and witness its stranglehold on life, and you even got to do a little something about it as you became a part of the family. And you sweat, and prayed, and tended the fire. I don't know exactly how deep into the rabbithole you leveled up, but there's something different about you, about your energy, there's something growing in there and it's lighting up everything about you in a big way."

She lit up as she described the transformation he'd been unable to wrap words around.

"It's been a beautiful thing to watch, to be a part of, we're all proud of the human you've become Miles, proud to call you a friend."

He'd never felt more content to find himself in the friend zone.

"You're a different man than you were, a more evolved version of yourself, and I'm thinking that I wouldn't be all that opposed to getting to know this new guy a little better."

She looked through his eyes as her fingers found a home next to his, "That is, if you're not still hung up on Brooke."

His heart murmured as his fingers welcomed the company, "Brooke who?"

"Good answer."

45

So that changed the whole dynamic of the journey. In the best kinda way imaginable. They stayed up til dawn that first night, sharing themselves through a language of emotion, there was too much intrigue in the words for their fingers to stray beyond their warm-blooded origami. Not even a kiss.

Miles didn't find himself yearning for more. He spoke a truth unknown to even himself. He was quite content with the sincerity of connection. There was no urge to derail the train into full-on collision.

She was traditional in her approach to romance, no interest in a casual form of intimacy, she wanted to find the warmth of his heart before she got lost in the heat of the moment. She'd been hurt before, a few times, it was hard to let her guard down, hard to open up those wounds again. If he was genuinely interested in becoming her person, then it was gonna take some time, a slow process of mingling trust and emotion. And if it was meant to be what both of them imagined it could, then there was no hurry to rush through these earliest moments of enchantment anyway.

"I used to focus so hard on where I wanted to be, that I lost sight of where I already was," she looked back. "Not just relationships, with pretty much everything. Like learning songs. I studied some tapes our medicine man had recorded, tried to memorize every word, kicked myself when I messed one up, and totally forgot that the songs were prayers, not a homework assignment.

Then one day we were sitting there watching Ancient Aliens and he felt compelled to share his own path with me. There's so many songs out there that you could never learn them all, some handed down from the ancestors, others that have come to medicine people on the hill, but it's not about memorizing the words, it's about feeling them in your heart. He said that some people would find their way to ceremony and try to learn them all in a month, and most of those people didn't make it back the next year. They were intent on experiencing everything at once, making the most out of their visit to ceremony, because they only had a small window available along their itinerary of spiritual tourism.

But our leader, Harvey, he knew that this wasn't a passing fad for him, he was committed to our ways, so he had plenty of time to connect with the songs in a good way. What's the hurry if you've got your whole life to discover the nuances that would otherwise be lost in translation? That resonated with me a lot. Made me less anxious to take it all in at once. And made the songs that I did carry, mean that much more to me.

And we could see the same mechanism with spirituality in general. It's a long red road, not an overnight flight. If you're committed to this path, then be ready for a lifetime of hard earned lessons, but you have a lifetime to learn them.

Those tourists show up though, and want instant enlightenment, they want a medicine man to bless their journey so they can be on their way, or want to eat a cactus and unlock the universe in one night. And you'll see some get into the Sun Dance arbor their first year, before they even know what it's about, before they could ever fully understand their role in our sacred ritual. Out there with no clue what they're doing, or why they're doing it, and that's enough for them, and they never come back, having already experienced everything Sun Dance has to offer, and they've got the selfie to prove it.

If this way to pray is for you, then you've got all the time in the world to let it build inside you. It would be way too much for everything to hit you all at once, there's a great mystery out there, infinite, and every time you think you almost have it all figured out, you simply open another door to an even bigger mystery. Even Harvey's still opening doors, otherwise he'd be bored to death by now, while those who framed their ticket stubs only walked up to the gate and turned around, convinced that they already knew how this one ended.

So ever since that day, I hold my baby steps in a sacred way, appreciating each delicate moment and not getting caught up on what might be next. And I can see how this same principle has parallels all over the place, especially with relationships.

If you've got no intention of being with someone beyond the surface, then it only makes sense to rush through the subtleties of love as you look for another challenge to conquer. You shortchange yourself on the most magic of memories, in fact, all you can remember is the pursuit of completion, which means that it's over, because how can you keep the magic alive when it was never really there in the first place?

But if you're really present, with genuine desire for a connection outside of physical obsession, then you'd feel foolish rushing past the butterflies to get to the flower. You'd want to savor every drop of fragrant nectar that brought you to the field in the first place, not cut through the chase as you add another notch to your lifeless bouquet of carnal collection."

She had him at the butterflies, and so began his own foray into the cozy corners of monogamous celibacy. She wasn't into the whole open relationship thing. For this to work, it would be a commitment of sacred union, a commitment to their time together, but no expectation of eternal bliss, just a day at a time as they explored the depths of one another. She admitted to being the slightest bit jealous of his chemistry with Brooke, perhaps that had been what prompted her into making moves, but she knew the difference between a healthy dose of envy and the distrust of a partner.

She didn't want to stifle his growth as a person by restricting the things that made him who he was, that was who she caught feelings for, it wouldn't make sense to capture his essence and lock it away in a cage. She wanted him to keep blooming, and she wanted to be a part of it, but she knew that everyone else would be a part of it too, even other women. And it was even possible that he'd fall for someone else, and that would be okay, it would be a beautiful thing for someone she cared so much about, but she wasn't going to settle for less than all of him.

It was a tad different than the third wheel of a new moon, and he was into it, way into it, their connection grew by the moment as passion peeked around the corner. No frisky business, but the slightest touch set them on fire, intimate whispers caressed their desires, the deepest of conversations held no pretense of expectation, only a deeper appreciation for what they both knew was brewing.

Miles still bounced around the caravan as he infiltrated the horseback montage, but they often found themselves bringing up the rear together, sidetracked by private jokes and nearly falling off the map.

"Alright you two," scolded Brooke. Who, by the way, was over the moon about the budding romance. "Ya'll ready to do some sketchy shit?"

"Born ready sister," affirmed Tiana.

"I wasn't," confessed Miles. "But I am now. Whatcha thinking?"

The women looked to each other and glanced at Miles, he smelled another setup, but he was still in.

"Just a chapter meeting of the Turtle Island Fence Cutters Guild, is all," alerted Brooke.

"And another initiation for you, sweets," promised Tiana.

They deployed camp and doubled back after nightfall, the target had been acquired a few klicks behind them, it was about time Miles got a little action.

Lookouts posted up a half mile in either direction of the lonesome straightaway. Brooke and Tiana grabbed a set of gear, Rowan and Miles took the other, game on.

He understood the animosity towards fences. After days of nowhere to go, he sympathized with the nomads of nature, it might behoove them to not unleash a highway of roaming cattle, but where could all this corn runoff to?

Barbed wire lined both sides of the highway for as far as you could see, which in the prairie is a long way, or at least it had been during the day. The moon was nearing on new, starlight covered their tracks, it was probably even too dark to contract tetanus.

Each team picked a side and slid off the corridor. Rowan held each strand of private perimeter near the post, as Miles clipped through them with a beat up pair of side cutters. They got through the three wires of the first bay, neatly piling the refused rubble along the fenceline, hopefully disregarding notice until further delay. They hiked south a quarter mile as the lookouts repositioned, they'd hit four locations along the stretch, should be enough emergency exits to meet code.

The veterans could identify the natural migration routes from the layout of the land, a patch of trees to the west was a good start, and the stream to the east made for an obvious commute.

In America, you can't actually own the water, which seems like the first thing they've gotten right so far, but they'll still let you hold title to the banks and the bed and the bridge. The water flows free, but there are no rules about simply boxing in every point of public beach access. It's actually been publicly addressed by Nestle that water is not a fundamental human right, so forget about the corn thieving deer.

In a world of commoditized living, it seems unlikely that they simply forgot to ring up the water, though at this rate of climactic contamination, it won't be long before we're willing to give Nestle a third leg for a sip. And of course they flood the market, because water is free.

In Michigan, they pay two hundred dollars a year for a permit to pump 210 million gallons out of White Pine Springs, and that's not a typo, it costs them less than a dollar per million gallons of stolen livelihood. Stolen with government approval of course, like most enguzzlement schemes, from the citizens of Flint who live a hundred miles away and are still plagued by lead poisoned pipes, also government funded. For the last six years they've had to brush their teeth from a bottle, and now they have to pay for it out of pocket, into Nestle's.

Those blinded to anyone else's struggle suggest that they simply move if it's so bad, it's just another person's problem that they'll have to deal with on their own, even if those who have tried to sell their handed down homes are met with mere pennies on the dollar, since no living creature in their right mind would want to live in a world without water.

And they do despicable stuff like this all over the globe, cutting deals with corrupt leaders to extract the land's vitality, puts some coin in the purse, but nothing will ever grow there again.

Or speaking of the insanity required to live without water, how is cramming four million people into a desert and celebrating it as a city of angels, anything less than the most idiotic thing ever, unless that's simply a prediction of the upcoming drought.

Oh, but they've been in a drought for a decade and seem to be doing just fine, just gotta suck and steal to get by, that's LA baby, syphon the Colorado and bankrupt communities to the north, but that's all just a drop in the bucket compared to the eighty percent of California's water crisis that's committed to their booming agriculture industry, in a desert.

Everybody's heard the hubbub around the water hungry almond orchards. How it takes a gallon of water to make a single almond, nearly four hundred gallons for a gallon of their juice, and how the permanence of trees that have to be watered year round leave the farms unable to be fluid during a lifelong drought.

Of course, for all I know, those facts were pumped out by the California dairy industry, who require a thousand gallons per gallon, and the steaks increase, as beef requires nearly two thousand per pound. But that probably counts all the alfalfa they eat, it's California's most irrigated commodity, a hundred billion gallons of which we export across an ocean that somehow seems to be overstocked, as the cost of living rises with the tide.

But it's not just the creamy crops that suck down the most vital component of producing life, the one that somehow doesn't exist anywhere near the region that we celebrate as the most premiere farmland in the world, where they still manage to spend three gallons per tomato, over five for a head of broccoli, and every single walnut somehow takes five times the water as the almond that started this whole rant in the first place.

And that's really why water is free, before it's already spoken for by the agriculture industry that owns the entire social hierarchy it creates. They account for seventy percent of our national water usage, draining the aquifers that take thousands of years to replenish, leaving wells and whistles dry, as another sacred element of the Earth is rushed through before you've even had a chance to wet down your lawn.

By the time the whole water speech was over, the vandals had unworked their way to the last crime scene, two wires down and the walkie squelched with headlights. They crawled through the deconstruction and took cover among the stalks. Probably just another wayward traveler, but in the event of buckshot backup, they'd make like grits and stick to the south. The truck passed, but another was on the way, hold your positions, but this time they stopped short of the commotion by a few hundred yards.

The unmenders were braced for escape. No word from the recon. Considering all he'd been through, Miles couldn't believe that this snag would be his downfall.

"Dome lights are on."

Get ready.

"Pulling something out of the glovebox."

Get set.

"They're turning around, repeat, they're leaving. Think they were just lost or something. Should we go help them with direction?"

And go.

They clipped the last few barbs and broke back to camp, another action sequence for the film adaptation, but if only there was a way to utilize the scrap wire to build a freer future.

Excitement was roaring back at the fire, adrenal glands pumped the celebration, the electrified embrace was overdue and before either knew what was happening, the world melted away as their lips completed the circuit.

46

The weeks passed, but the feelings did not. It was still a slow road to somewhere, still taking their time exploring every fold on the map, still lost in the space that dwindled between them. Still sleeping in separate tents, but not before she stopped in for an excruciatingly pleasant goodnight kiss.

They'd ridden beyond the border walls of the corn kingdom, somewhere in southeast Colorado by now, Miles felt at home in the saddle as the world spun underhoof. He felt a new sense of control over his life path, a sense of direction that somehow increased as he let go of the reins. He and Bud had become one, their communication nonverbal, the more he released his grip, the smoother he found the ride.

The horse was their heart, their intuition, their connection to the Earth, the one most equipped to navigate the bumps in the road.

Miles considered himself the brains of the outfit, though that was probably just his ego talking. He led with an elevated perspective and an understanding of the manmade constructs they were traversing. He was further from the ground, but had a more detailed concept of the road ahead.

And the gear between them was the connective tissue of their body. Through the nuance of touch and feel, they spoke to one another, and only by properly caring for the leather could the unit adequately function.

They were at their strongest as a team. Miles could have insisted that he was in charge, relinquished little control as he convinced himself that his mind was all that mattered, but it would have been a rocky road of getting nowhere fast as he oafishly stumbled to his preconceived destination.

Or he could let Bud run wild, there would be certain adventure down that unmarked trail, but they would eventually get hung up in a fenceline that couldn't be avoided without prior knowledge of the empire.

Together they were unstoppable. The ebb and flow of head and heart. A mind capable of overcoming nature, but the wisdom to know better. Once they found that perfect balance of yin and yang, they were able to travel the red road unencumbered by the ravines on either side. And only then, were they capable of taking direction from their guides, those who had already seen the entire map and lit the way through the darkness ahead.

The traveling agents sowed new relationships with the Earth and harvested the bounty of old ones, each night dealt a new delicacy as chefs rotated shifts, Miles noticed that no two firetenders stacked the sparks in the same formation.

"There are many ways to build a fire," agreed Rowan. "And they all get you there, unless they don't. There's no right or wrong technique, just different paths to the same light. There are well worn methods handed down through time, like the colonial log cabin or the smokeless tobacco burner of the tipi, but there are also an infinite array of unique personal styles and conglomerations in-between. The common thread is that they all start with the tenderest fragments of ignition and gradually work their way towards dinner, except of course for the in-patients of convenience, who prefer to douse the logs with accelerant and wonder why everything tastes like chicken.

It's the same way with spirituality too. There's no one right way to get there, there's a globe full of roads that climb that same mountain, but it's the same peak that has us all striving for ascension. There are well defined routes with maps and guidebooks, but you can also venture off on your own and blaze a new trail. Might be a tougher hike, and it's easy to get lost, but as long as you focus on one step at a time, you'll eventually look back and realize just how far you've climbed. You'll see all those paths that seemed so opposed from a lower plane, and you'll be able to easily understand how the diversity of the journey doesn't weaken the summit, it only makes the mountain that much more majestic as it glows with infinite dimension.

There are eight billion ways to pray, at least. Vastly different in their approach, but intimately familiar, as they all start with the same spark, they all demand the same constant attention, and they all build that same fire inside. So you just gotta find the way that works for you, maybe it's the Sun Dance way, maybe it's the Jesus way, maybe it's bits and pieces from a personal journey of living in a good way. You shouldn't try to race up it or you might burn yourself out, you shouldn't seek the easy route because you'll never fully appreciate the view, and you shouldn't presume that your path is the one and only way to get there, because then you'll just sound ridiculous."

"What're you boys going on about?" probed Tiana, as she snuggled into the fireside enlightenment.

"Oh, you know, just a little uplifting conversation is all," understated Miles.

"I bet," she said, knowing full well the typical topics of flame broiled fraternity. "So you think I could maybe talk you into coming over to my place for a bit, so we can talk about tomorrow and stuff?"

"And stuff?" decoded Rowan. "Heck yeah, let's go."

"Hold your ponies, horseman. My tent's only big enough for two, and I already gave this one my promise ring. Better luck next time."

"Man, I never get to have any fun."

"We let you play in the fire, don't we?"

"Fine, I'll stay here and keep the camp alive, you guys go snugglebunch and plan the revolution or whatever."

"Deal."

If Miles thought he left the resistance when he left fossil camp, he now knew that the resistance isn't a place, it's inside, and it would be a lot harder to shake than the FBI.

The route they were on was no randomly generated anomaly, just a mile through the woods sat a Dinofuel terminal, a subsidiary of Fossil Corp, it was like a filling station for tanker trucks. Nine thousand gallons a pop and over a million through their gate every day, destined for the commutes of average people just doing their jobs, they might get perturbed if they had to cross the street to Exxon because of technical difficulties, but Mr. Fossil himself is who would feel it where it hurts. And yeah, it's going to be a lot more impactful once there's a few thousand of us obstructing the flow, but for now, we'll have to work with what we've got.

Only four of the crew were hardcore Water Protectors, the other two would keep the horses ready, not that it would help them that much to accessorize. For some reason, Miles had been deemed the most fit to free climb a tree outside of the razor fence, lookout, hypothetically the least dangerous position, which was easy to say from the ground. The rest would come together like a split screen heist movie, no crown jewels, just black gold, and lots of it. The only part that wasn't worked out yet was the getaway plan, an equinimous caravan of long haired hippies traveling twenty-five miles a day might not be the same great escape it was in the wild west. They'd have a little bit of a head start, hopefully, but they needed some deeper cover.

"So we got the horse trailers," updated Tiana. "Two of 'em, it'll be tight, but we can make it work. A water buddy from Colonized Springs got us set up, he said his guy can take us a hundred miles or so. So now we just gotta find a place to hide out six people, seven horses, and a whole helluvalotta collusion, and hopefully off-grid."

"You say a hundred miles?"

"Uh huh."

"You gotta map?"

Miles only knew of one off the grid hideaway with enough grazable land nearby, and it was just across the border, about two inches away, eighty-seven miles. He'd not even considered the possible layover, but now the coincidental cartography seemed all but destined. Who knew what it was like by now, or who was still there, but there was always a chance that Tiana would get to meet Annie, awkward. She knew all about Annie, she was very intrigued by the whole arrangement, even if it wasn't her cup of chaga. It would be fine, wouldn't it? It's not like the new moon was this week or anything...

"Squirrelmaster in position."

It was a few hours past dusk, the previous night's recon revealed two overnight security guards, could always be a battalion waiting inside, but this wasn't the frontline, not yet anyway. The distraction walked right up to the front gate, where tractor trailers pull in, her car had broken down a mile or so back and she was desperate for help. This was the most vulnerable position, her face would be on camera, but fortunately for our readers, the local Capital-Mart stocks for halloween two months early and the haunted corn maze was a local legend.

"Oh, thank goodness someone's here, I'm just trying to get home from rehearsals so I can get this mess off, but my damn car up and quit on me, lights just faded and it was dead. And so's my phone."

"Sounds like the alternator to me," diagnosed guard number one. "I can't leave this place, but you can come use the phone if you want."

"Oh that would be great, you're a lifesaver. Trick or treat."

They walked to the office where she promptly forgot about her urgency and fell into the most engaging conversation she'd ever had.

"All clear," from the tree.

Miles could see the pair below as they slid from the woodline to the back gate, it was only secured with a big chain and a padlock, which was picked free in thirty seconds flat. God she was hot. They slipped into phase two, it was pretty well lit, so hopefully Elphaba had everyone thoroughly under her spell.

It was just like a gas station, only way bigger, six inch hoses and lots of safety protocols. Without each latch and button in the proper position, the rack was worthless, and profitless, at least until the Maytag repairman made it out.

The movement musta bought stock in JB Weld, this was another job for their SteelStik epoxy putty, as well as a few other various expanding foams and super glues. They mashed the putty into every moving part they could, engaged emergency cutoffs and glued them down, filled the hoses with foam and nonviolently activated as much havoc as they could muster.

Back in the office, the holiday party was well underway, tales of valor from the oil fields filled the water cooler, who wouldn't be interested in the life of petroleum's private security?

"Hey Bob, something tripped the motion detector in zone two, you wanna go check it out?"

"Oh my, I never made my phone call, think you could set that up for me real quick, Bob?"

"Sure darling, it's probably just a raccoon or something. Happens all the time."

"It's gonna be in the report, man. We better check it out."

"Well then go check it out."

"I'm supposed to stay here and watch the cameras."

"And do you see anything on the camera?"

"Uh... No, not really."

"Alright then, so we're all good. Now here you go sweetheart, just gotta dial nine to get out."

Conveniently her brother was already in the area and saw her car, he was halfway done fixing it up, but needed a hand. No, don't worry about her, she'd be okay walking back, who was gonna mess with someone dressed like this. But he could walk her to the gate if he wanted, that way he could check on the raccoon.

47

They rode through the night and rendezvoused at dawn, if all went according to plan then they'd only now be exposed, but you know the fastest way to make God laugh.

"And you know that God is ice cream, don't you?" quizzed Rowan, as they crossed into New Mexico. "Well, God is good, right? And ice cream is good, isn't it? So according to the transitive property, God is a great big scoop of mint chocolate chip."

"Are we there yet?" grumbled Tiana.

"Not too far," assured Miles. "At least to where we're unloading, still got a day's ride after we leave the grid."

"I'm excited to see your dirthouse," she chirped. "And for the private tour."

"Shouldn't take long, it's only one room."

"Might take longer than you think, I'm still pretty amped up from last night."

"Are we there yet?" grumbled Rowan.

Miles hadn't called ahead. Cap's number was in the phone that had been MIA longer than him, long gone enough that the phantom vibrations that used to keep him constantly in his pocket, had vanished. A wiretap in your pocket isn't exactly the most revolutionary of ideas, and the conflict minerals of the slave trade put a damper on renewing his contract, but mainly, his life was just way more gratifying without the constant buzz of instant distractification.

It was late afternoon before they topped the hill, the horses hung back as Miles and Tiana walked in for the soft entrance, it was already a much different scene than he left it. Looked like at least three more buildings, a few cars parked and several tents littered the hillside, and was that a greenhouse? He saw a couple strays he didn't know and introduced his alumni status, Timps verified his credentials and told him that Cap was in the RV, he looked around for his kolas but no luck, tapped on the door and thoroughly surprised his most elated host.

"Of course you can stay, anytime you want, no call necessary, you've got sweat equity in this place."

"Cool, um, there's actually six of us..."

"No problem."

"...and seven horses."

"Damn brother, you have been on an adventure. Should be alright, I've made friends with my neighbor, and he's got a big fenced-in field where I bet they can stay."

"Hooray fences," cheered Miles. "Cool man, let me go tell the others, you're gonna dig them."

"I bet I will, especially if they feel up to tamping."

Miles popped out of the RV as Annie was popping in, shock and awe set the tone.

"Holy shit! Miles! Oh my fucking God! No fucking way! How in the world?"

"I see that no swearing thing's working out for you."

The hug was well beyond oxytocin release, and the cheek kiss didn't help, nor the whispers of tonight's new moon. Tiana was cool, she understood the moment, but she certainly noticed its intensity.

"So anyway," deflected Miles. "I want you to meet Tiana, she's a Water Protector too, and... my girlfriend, like, my monogamous girlfriend."

There had been no need for labels on the trail, it just was what it was, and that was all good, but they figured it would be easier to integrate if they made it official, which made them both feel pretty good about it all.

"Oh, that's so great for you Miles. Hey, I'm Annie, so good to meet you."

Their hug seemed even more intimate than the one Miles had gotten.

"And Spaz is around here somewhere. Ooh, I have to show you around, so much has changed, we've been busy."

"I can tell."

"A bunch of new projects going, gearing up for winter and all. And oh, the one we built is sitting empty for now, waiting on a woodstove to turn it into a cannery. You guys can sleep in there if you want, might be cool to complete your circle."

"Well, actually we're still..."

"We'll take it," Tiana jumped in. "It sounds perfect."

The guided tour kicked off at the fully furnished honeymoon suite, which considering its size, only required a rustic table-bed and some solar mood lighting, and a rather fabulous stucco job that tanned the entire motif together. No stove yet, but the thermal insulation was sure to captivate every drop of body heat. Standing inside the full completion filled Miles with a grandiose sense of accomplishment, he'd achieved so much since those days, but this stone floor had been the foundation of it all.

"We've got a really good group of folks out here now, apparently the interweb is crawling with the frontline of unemployment. I think there's eleven of us now, plus your six, dang, we've got ourselves a regular old hootenanny, and more hands makes the work go so much faster. There's two more small ones completely finished, our first attempt at a corbelled roof is getting there, and we're just getting started on my baby, a big ol' community lodge with an indoor cob kitchen. Guessing it'll only take ten thousand bags."

"Only."

"Yep. And you can stand on this rock and see our meandering pockets of luscious gardenscape. It's so magical how all the tasty colors are sprawling throughout the boulder patches, there's so much abundance even with our late start, and the hoop house should extend our season well into fall."

"What are you doing for water?" wondered Tiana.

We still haul a bunch from the bottom, but we dug some gravity fed channels to utilize what precipitation we do get, and all three metal roofs will catch and funnel it into a cistern over there, should be collecting a good bit of snowmelt pretty soon."

"Wait a second," jumped Miles. "What's that out there on the flat one? Is that a piano?"

"Yeah buddy, that's Crocodile Rock. We found it in town for free, just had to move it. It was a little tricky getting it way out there like that, but many hands make light work. It's dry enough here that we figure it'll hold up okay under a tarp, probably have to retune it with the temperature fluctuation, but the best part, is that right now it's set to 432. And just wait til you hear the jams we've been kicking out on open mic night."

The rest of the horse drawn hodgepodge was on their own walkabout as paths merged into one, they were thoroughly impressed by the caliber of Miles' all inclusive hideout on the hill, this place would do just fine. Dinner conversation filled the hunger of tales from the road, piñon pastries filled in the blanks that were classified, the promised jam session filled the valley with crunchy tunes and sweet melody.

Miles and Annie stepped aside for the full story of redacted intel, she was dazzled to say the least, she knew she'd been right about the Water Protector resting below the surface.

"So..." Tiana speculated, as she snuck into the private party. "Am I gonna get to see this moonlit sanctum, or is that still your little secret?"

"Well, that depends," revealed Annie. "Just gotta fill out a questionnaire first. Do you smoke?"

"I'm Indian, ain't I?"

"Are you scared of heights, falling, or the sudden stop at the bottom?"

"I'm no sugar glider like this guy, but I don't back away from a cliff either."

"And just one last thing, do you have any deep seated disposition against experiencing the most exhilarating thrill ride you could possibly imagine?"

"Definitely not," she assured, as she squeezed Miles' hand in eager anticipation.

"Good news, you're approved," smiled Annie. "As long as we can manage to tiptoe out of here with no one noticing."

"Now, that one, I've got on lock, my dear."

The legend of the fog failed to disappoint, breaths were taken and memories were shared, it was way more comfortable than Miles could have possibly foreseen in the stars.

"It's been great around here with all this new energy," updated Annie. "But there was definitely something special when it was just the four of us figuring it out as we went."

"Yeah, that's how it was at camp too," Tiana compared. "When he got there it was just a handful of us, relatively speaking, and now there's thousands. It's awesome for the movement, and still satisfies that itch for conscious community, but there was something deeply fulfilling back when we knew everyone's name."

"Oh I do miss camp," reminisced Annie. "But this place feels so right in a whole other way. It's like we're building a better way to live, instead of fighting against the old broken one."

"For sure, and I think both are important. You can't convince someone to abandon everything they've known, unless you can show them that there's another way. But at the same time, if we all just hole up in our hobbit huts and forget the woes of the world, then we're leaving it up to the lost souls to find their own way to freedom, and if they don't, then the destruction will find us, no matter how far removed we dig in."

"Exactly. Damn sister, here I was thinking I had to let you know how good of a catch you snagged, but I think I may have gotten it backwards."

"Hey now," objected Miles.

"Oh hush, you," chided Annie. "This is girl talk. You've had plenty of time to demonstrate value to both of us."

"I can still leave, you know?" he offered, as he shot a playful glance to Tiana. "Maybe Brooke would be interested in a little further demonstration."

"You better watch it buddy," warned Tiana. "You're this close to getting me alone in your dirthouse, I'd hate for you to fuck it up now."

"Ooh, you could always come stay at our camp, if he runs you off. Or better yet, we can stick him with Spaz and make a girl's night of it."

"Either way works for me, I'll let Captain Champion here figure it out, but I think I am going to mosey up that way and get settled in. You kids have fun down here, but don't stay out too late sweets, don't want me falling asleep on you or anything."

"I could think of worse things. But don't worry, I'll be right behind you."

A "goodnight love" and a hug capped her evening out, but all Miles got was a lingering touch of subtle enticement, how had it worked out that he was the jealous one?

"So she's pretty much awesome," regarded Annie. "I'd have had a hard time letting you run off with the wrong woman, but I think she's about as perfect for you as it gets."

"I think so too. Feeling pretty lucky, that's for sure."

"Oh, so you still believe in luck, huh? Interesting."

"You know what I mean. And no, I guess I don't anymore, there's just too much at play to chock it all up to coincidence."

"That a boy. You just had to settle into who you really were, before the universe opened up your next chapter. Could you imagine if you'd have met her before you found yourself? I bet you wouldn't even have gotten the time of day."

"I hardly did as it was," he confessed. "It's been a slow road of getting to know ourselves, but it's been amazing, every little touch of our hearts has connected us in the most intimate kinda way."

"I'm so happy for you Miles. For both of you. And not to go digging into bygone moons or anything, but could you feel me thinking of you when ours was up there?"

"You know I did, especially those first few. And I was up in the tree when I read your letter, it really reminded me why I was there, and pushed me to make you proud."

"That you did Miles, I'm so proud to have you as a friend. Maybe a little disappointed that's all I get to taste, but even she can't take away my fondest memories of our magic together."

The seduction of the moon hung thick in the air, the tenderness of the moment kissed the edge of innocence, one last peck of the cheek would have to tide them through the receding current.

Annie returned to the melding of minds, a five piece offered a rambunctious rendition of Ramble on Rose, a fire full of congregation wove their yarns into tapestry, outcroppings in the shadows leaked only hints of touchier subjects. The hill had become a beautiful place. It always was, but with the energy of a rewilded society, it had come to life in a new way, or maybe an old way, either way, its cycles were complete as the Earth sang her deepest serenade.

The wild was tended, the Earth was nurtured, and the vibrance that poured from her pores was nothing short of exotic. Miles fought the slightest urge to join the local motions, but there would be plenty of time for all that, he needed to hold his sacred close.

"Oh, hey there," she warmly welcomed from her preheated cocoon.

"Darn, I thought you'd be asleep by now."

"Uh huh. Turns out I'm not that tired for some reason."

"Must be all that music out there."

"Probably so. Doubt they could hear a thing over all that fun they're having."

"Oh yeah?"

"Guess it would depend on how rowdy it got on this side of camp."

"You're snoring, you mean?"

"I do not snore," she insisted. "Do I?"

"I don't know, I'm always too hung up on the perfume you hang in my tent before you leave me to my own aromas."

"What's it smell like?"

"Frybread."

"Mmm, keep talking."

"And honeysuckles."

"Oh baby."

"And pickles."

"Pickles! Now I know you're wanting to set up your tent. I do not smell like pickles."

"Maybe I should take a closer whiff."

"Sweet pickles, I hope."

"The sweetest."

"Mm hmm. You know, all your dumb shit aside, I think this place is pretty spectacular. I know a lot of it's new to you too, but you had a big part in the foundation of the energy here, that's something to be really proud of. And I love Annie. I can totally see how she pulled you into her comfort zone, and I understand that there's always going to be a strong connection between you two. I hope you didn't dump out all of that pent up moon magic though, cause I'm kinda thinking I might be in love with you too.

48

I know what you're thinking, cause only a gutter punk would be reading this kind of filth, and I'll have you know that Miles was a perfect gentleman. The walls may have shaken a little dirt loose, but that night was not the one you've been hungrily turning pages for, guess you'll just have to wait for dessert like the rest of us.

There was a lot of smashing and grabbing, and a fair amount of diddling, but the most impressive part, was how the seventeen member gang banged out a row's worth of picking and tamping in less time than a steamy cup of percolation.

It was a lot bigger, this one, maybe thirty feet across, an undertaking, but the bag to person ratio was well below the national average. It would be able to serve the whole community if shit hit the fan, a woodfired kitchen attached to one end, a cast iron stove on the other, and the entire backside was dug into the hill, the thermal mass of the fallout shelter would surely defend against a nuclear winter.

Just as Levi has speculated, the workflow of Earthbagging was seamless as more hands plugged in, everyone found their niche and the creation evolved, their finesse was refined and by the half moon they were neck deep in it.

Spaz squared off the love triangle, they became the tightest knit of best friend couples, rocking the Earthhouse with heated rounds of euchre and p'shaw. They'd officially entered harvest season, and there was plenty of ground scores for anyone interested enough to pick a peck of piñons.

"Such an incredible abundance," squealed Annie.

"I know," chimed Spaz. "It's like you find a tree that looks like it's about to pop, and then you look at the ground and there's a good bit, but then as you zoom in, you realize that each little spot is completely saturated with life. That's not just boring old dirt we're seeing, it's a patchwork of full blooded piñons."

"It's about like any other fractal of nature," Tiana correlated. "From one perspective, there are a bunch of singleminded components of life, then you stand up and find an expansive sea of interactivity, and once you decide to look above you, you understand the common unity of their ancestral roots."

"And if you can manage to climb to the top," realized Miles. "You'd discover that each tree is just a little piece of a greater composition."

"And on and on and on, into the deepest reaches of the universe," nodded Tiana.

"And we're the nuts," drew Annie.

"I'd say," Spaz agreed.

"We're all unique in our individual patterns," she continued with a convincing ignorance to his irrelevance. "All on a different trajectory, with different environmental conditions depending on where we land, each playing our personalized part in the kaleidoscope of life, but at the same time, we're all so drastically similar because we are one and the same."

"Our destinies may take us in every direction," Tiana picked up. "Packed with everything we need to succeed on our own, but we should never forget that the fate of our source is the most vital concern, as it links us to every future generation of our brothers and sisters."

"You mean we shouldn't cut down the tree to build a tribute to the most popular piñon?" asked Spaz.

"Probably not," laughed Tiana. "Nor should we poison her, as we extract every drop of sap because we want to drive around town in our fancy piñon costumes."

"Or even worse," Annie topped it off. "Because we want to hoard as many scraps of paper as we can, rubbish that has no actual cash value, and it's only because everyone else is doing it, that we're willing to sacrifice our own mother in the name of growing up."

"Are we still talking about piñons?" doubted Spaz.

"I think we may have wandered a bit," deciphered Miles.

"Because I was just thinking about how I bet if you looked inside each one, deep down there's probably an equally complex arrangement of single-celled particles swimming around together."

"And within that one there's another, and another," Tiana dove in. "It goes in both directions for as far as we could split hairs, these few levels of it that seem to us to be all there is to life, well that's just the range of the spectrum that our piñon brains are capable of perceiving."

"Then we invent some gadgets to expand our perspective," Annie put together. "Now we must be able to detect everything there is, we can even see far beyond our limited understanding of the universe."

"And the thing is," unfolded Tiana. "When we put it all in a story about the piñons inspecting their surroundings with instruments made of those surroundings, it sounds ridiculous to think that they'd ever be able to understand the true gravity that holds everything together, no matter how many papers they published on the topic.

But we're the piñons, and we exist in a material world that we can only monitor from the inside, as we predict patterns that convince us of our own importance. But how small-minded of us, to assume that we have any clue what's truly possible outside the scope of a science designed to make sense of the smallest fraction of existence, but it's the only one we can prove exists, so that must be all there is to life, because that's science."

"Okay you silly little piñons," belittled Annie. "I think snack time might be over, sounds like dinner's ready up the hill. And it smells like tacos."

The open fire kitchen sitch had grown into a beast of its own, it was almost a novelty when it was a four top stir-frying pizza, but now it had to sustain a wheelbarrow load of hardworking dirthands. They had a big grate that could hold several pots, a wooden prep table with lots of veggies, the real trick though, was stoking the fire at the right time in the right place to burn everything to perfection. It was an art, a science, and a prayer, some might add a dash of luck for good measure, but Miles was seasoned beyond all that mess.

The new kitchen was going to be a game changer. Annie tapped Miles' newly developed culinary expertise for the design team, they had a miniature clay mock-up and everything. The lodge would be a huge dome, a common area worthy of their uncommon denomination, with an internal archway that opened into the smaller kitchen space.

They stacked the ground up along the entire perimeter, but the corbelled kitchen roof came together long before the vaulted ceiling in the living room. At this point, there was really no good reason not to go ahead and piece in the appliances, and about ten thousand reasons it was more exciting than mixing dirt. It still took some bags to rough it out, but soon they'd be to the point of cobbing-in more salvaged amenities than your average tree fort, it was going to be revolutionary.

Miles felt complete on every level he knew of, every avenue of life had merged into one mountain pass, he didn't need to know where he was going to know that he was already there.

He thought back to his three levels of being active. On the personal front, he knew that he was living in the best way he'd ever known, and could feel the Earth nourishing him in return. His local activism ranged from the aggressively passive to literally building community. And as consciousness streamed through their creative juices, he was inspired to share the latest model of home and hearth with the world, if it could work way out here, why couldn't it work way out there?

And of course his romantic endeavors were filling another chamber of his being. And she prayed with him. The whole mountain was full of meshing spiritual philosophies that enriched every heart-opening conversation.

The fire brought warmth to the first shivers of fall, there would be snow within the month, the blaze of a full moon lit the match as nomads prepared to sow change.

"Horse meeting," announced Rowan. "You settlers are welcome too, we just gotta sort out a few things."

It was getting cooler out, it would never get below sixty seconds here, camp would be survivable even without a woodstove, but the road could be a little harsher on the cold bones. You never know, they could end up staying, and horses are a lot more convenient than the black ice of rubber, so they wouldn't get snowed in. But they were nomads with a cause, and a path, and this place had certainly fallen within their committee guidelines, but if they were going to hit the trail, they might should do it soon.

They'd nearly completed the rotunda and there were enough hands to finish it up, planted plenty of apple seeds, discovered a reuse for salvaged barbed wire, met a ton of good folk and earned a standing rock residency at Captopia. Some were good either way, but the rest were feeling the call of motion.

Miles had nearly forgotten he was a horse person. He'd hung out with Bud a lot, every day at least, and their foursome had ventured off on a questrian adventure or two, but Miles still considered himself a dirt person deep down.

He didn't want to leave. He had everything he'd ever wanted right here. Everything he'd never known he wanted. Why would anyone want to leave this place? Why couldn't everything just stay the same for a while? Why was the nomad mojo tearing apart his utopia?

He could stay, of course, if he wanted. He could keep at it with the dirt kitchen, bring the vision to life and actually be a part of building a complete house. How was he supposed to share them with the world, if he'd never even been around to see one finished?

And there was prayer and food and camaraderie, the best of friends, but both paths had all that stuff. Only one would have Tiana though.

During the meeting, she was definitely a horse person, though she also had no problem with lingering around the fire a little longer. If she was set to leave, what could he do? He had to follow her, right? The brightest love he'd known was beckoning him to something further, standing right in front of him and opening her life to his, what kind of a moron would pick a bunch of shoveling over wild unadulterated passion?

But he thought he might. His heart wanted to go, but his heart said to stay, it was easy to follow the no-brainers, but no one told him about such confusing forks in the road. He wanted her to stay. To stay in this dream for as long as they could. How could she not want that too?

"Sweets, why are you sitting over here in the dark all alone?" she gently asked, perching on the boulder beside him. "Don't you wanna come enjoy the fire with us? Everybody's out there."

"Just thinking."

"I know. It was just starting to feel like we were always a part of this place, and you kinda were, it's not always easy to ride that wave when it means parting ways with your family. But we know that those connections will pull us all back together as we tighten the threads of the star quilt."

"I know."

"And you know how to listen to yourself."

"Yeah."

"Miles, it's gonna be okay, we're still gonna have this thing between us."

"Tiana, I think I have to stay."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Yeah sweets, I've see what this place does for you, and I can see that you're not done here."

"But you're gonna go?"

"I have to."

"Why?"

"It's the same reason you have to stay, Miles. I have work to do out there."

"So then what happens to us?"

"I'm not sure, baby. I guess it means we're gong to be apart for a while."

"And you're okay with that?"

"I mean, it sucks, a lot, but we always knew it could work out like this. It doesn't mean I'm not going to miss you, and be sad, and cry, and lie alone in my tent secretly wishing I'd have stayed, but it will be twice as bad if I betray the call of my heart."

"Cause your heart doesn't want to stay here with me at all?"

"Baby, of course it does, I love you so much Miles. Our time has been so incredibly magical, but it's not going to fade away, and this is not the end of our story."

"Could be."

"Don't say that, sweets."

"Well it could. Or one of us could meet someone else, and then what happens?"

"Then we can still be a part of each other's lives. Each other's journeys. You met someone else, yet you and Annie are still best buds."

"I don't want to be your best bud."

"I know baby, I cherish what we have too. But it's not built on frivolous physicality, we are deeply connected in a spiritual kind of way, and that foundation's not going to go anywhere for a long time."

"How do you know? Have you ever been in love like this before?"

"You know I haven't, nothing like this, but yeah, I've been deep in it before."

"Well I haven't, and I'm not ready to let it ride off into the sunset overnight."

"Then come with us."

"I can't."

"I know."

"Then why do you have to?"

"Miles honey, we've already talked about this. It's just the way our paths are pulling right now, it doesn't mean that it's forever. I could be back here in a month or two, or you could finish the lodge and come meet me, or there will be so many other camps in our future, but we'll never get there if we're too busy clinging to the past."

"How can following our hearts rip us apart like this?"

"It doesn't have to rip us apart, if you don't let it. But you know that we're not clued into everything out there, maybe we need the space to grow into whatever that next stage of life is going to be for us."

"I thought I'd be doing that with you though. People give up lifetimes for a love like this, and we're just going to throw it away?"

"Miles stop it. I'm not throwing anything away. Everything we've been to each other is still right there inside of us, and I'm not going to let you guilt me into throwing my lifetime away and ruining the dearest romance I've ever known."

Miles was kind of upset.

So was she.

"Look baby, I'm gonna go back to the fire and visit with everyone who's happy for our forward momentum. I guess maybe you should sit over here sulking for a while, until you're ready to be with me in a good way. It's okay to be sad, but that doesn't mean you can't be happy too, excited for me maybe, and it doesn't give you the right to bring me down with you, and I don't think I can really talk about it anymore until you've made peace with your own path. I love you sweets, and this is going to be our last night for a while, so let's try to make it special, not senseless."

She left and so did Miles, kicking needles all the way down to the secret spot, it only intensified his loneliness to sit in the fading moonshine by himself. Well, that didn't go how he had hoped. What did he expect, that she'd profess her addiction to him and give up her life for his? That doesn't sound like the love he knew.

He spoke to the moon for a bit, and himself, and once he'd run through all the small talk, he remembered to pray. A little tobacco for the valley, a little smudge for the fog, already he felt better, but this one wasn't just going to wipe away.

Maybe he was supposed to go. Maybe this was his heart yelling at him to pay attention. But he knew exactly how she felt about leaving, because staying was just something he had to do. He couldn't put aside the path that had unfolded before him, that would never bring him around to the cosmic conclusion. He'd seen it before, the festering resentment of unfulfilled potential, so how in God's name was he willing to make the greatest love of his life feel bad for doing the exact same thing he had to?

And after she'd been nothing but understanding of his own struggle. He was the one jumping off at the station, getting sucked into another world while she stayed on track, how dare he pitch a fit as the train simply carried on? And now he'd dampened their last night together. What had she said? Ruined their romance. It wasn't bad enough that they were going to be apart, but now the last memory she'd have would be of him acting like a jerk, and it would be his last memory too.

Alright, well he couldn't let that happen. One way or another, he had to be okay with tomorrow, because he couldn't lose tonight. He prayed for clarity, and understanding, and something to somehow make him feel better about the tension of transition. He knew he was staying, he knew she was leaving, and he knew that he loved her more than anything, so that's all he had to know, he just hoped it wasn't too late to reclaim the moment.

He stopped by the fire but she had gone to bed, it was late. He lingered for a smoke with a couple of the newer dirt hippies before crawling into the cannery with prayers of conciliation. She was asleep and to the wall, he'd squandered all of the moments, his heart sank as his legs folded on the floor. He'd let her go to sleep alone and upset on their last night. How could he go on from here in a good way, with this looming over their memories?

"I love you so much Tiana," he whispered, to himself maybe, maybe to her nocturnal transmissions. "And I am so happy for you and all that you're going to do for the world. I just got caught up in feeling sorry for myself and didn't know how to handle it, and I messed it all up, but I do know that we are a part of each other's lives no matter where we are. And I know that the instant we see each other again, the magic will be right there with us.

I know we have to do what feels right, even if it hurts, but now I really understand just how right it all is. I was just at the fire with Luis and Mark, and I think they're gonna go with you tomorrow. They felt a call, and they're ready to take the next step towards defending the sacred, which is our ultimate goal, right? To inspire the folks we cross paths with to find their own way? But the thing is, we only have one extra horse... unless I stay. So you see, if I fought my own path, then I'd be standing in the way of theirs, and that's all the sign I need to know that we're doing the right thing, even if it hurts a little bit in the moment.

I love you sweets, and nothing's ever going to change that, and I just want you to know that I feel like the luckiest man alive to have gotten to experience you in the way I have."

"Miles, baby?"

"Hey, you're awake?"

"Mm hmm."

"And you heard all that?"

"Mm hmm."

"And you'll forgive me for wasting away our last night together?"

"Baby, you haven't wasted anything away, there's still seven hours of night left for us to reconvene, and I'm thinking it's about time you get up here and show me what all the fuss was about."

49

Now see what you made me go and do? You just had to keep turning those pages, impatiently pushing what could have dragged on at least another chapter or two, and now it's backfired and our wonderboy as left standing in her dust. Thanks a lot. I guess we'll just have to riff on the dirthouse for another week or two, oh boy.

It was starting to look pretty cool, and there was a twelve percent chance it would all work according to plan. The lodge itself was done, no stucco yet, but the roof was all in place and locking itself together nicely. Thousands of bags working as one to construct a self-supported infrastructure, each bag alone just a sack of loose particles, but once it takes its place among the composite, strengthening its own resolve through the adversity of external forces, well, if you removed just a single participant of its grand design, the whole thing would come crumbling down. Each bag is critical, each bag serves a purpose, each bag is here for a reason.

There was a double door to the south, with windows on either side to collect some of that big beautiful sunshine, and upcycled blue glass bottles created an alluring skylight into the loft. The whole backside dug into the hill, so once construction was done and a moisture barrier in place, the crevice was backfilled and the structure had achieved thermal mass.

The crust of the Earth stays a steady fifty-five degrees or so, not exactly t-shirt weather, but it provides a constant livable temperature throughout the harshest of seasonal allergies. And the walls have a similar thing going on. As long as they're at least twelve inches thick, ours are fourteen, then it takes twelve hours for the thermal flywheel effect to allow the outside influences to seep their way into the living quarters. So by the time the sun's heat has penetrated the outer layer, it's nighttime and no one really minds, and sunrise arrives just in time to shake off the morning chill. And then when you add a woodstove to the floor plan, you've got an entire house made of heat sinks that store that energy instead of burning midnight oil.

And the only oil the kitchen would use, would be for Miles' coveted frybread recipe, he was gifted the eyeball formula under the veil of a new moon, couldn't let those pesky infiltrators smuggle our secret weapon into the fossil record. The kitchen layout, however, was public domain, especially the dish station.

The curved backline was cobbed together into one continuous culinary gadget. The central heat of it all was an inset slab of cast iron, a flat top grill not unlike the temperature surface at Doodle's, and underneath was a salvaged woodstove door and a compartment to build the fire anyway you like. A chimney spread even more warmth into the sleeping loft that was working its way up above, it was wrapped with copper tubing that forced hot water toward the sinks on the right, and the rest of the residual heat transferred to the oven on its left. The leftover BTUs might not bake a piñon pie, but would make a perfect warming chamber for second shift, and they'd preheat the pizza parlor for the real action. The oven had it's own firebox and should easily hit the five hundred mark of crispy crust, which in turn, heated a bench that ran along the entire back curve of the big room, a buried line of copper ensured the warmest of buns all winter long.

Miles moved on from the imbedded memories of the cannery, the gossip of the walls was muffled by the dry mouths of dehydration, and the original dirt mine had screamed itself into a root cellar full of shelf-preservation.

Of course he was sad sometimes. He never regretted answering the call, it was obvious that this place filled him with life, but how could he not lose himself to the happenstance of his wandering heart? He often found his melancholy expressed through the gray areas of the black and white. He'd taken piano lessons as a kid, but back then it had only felt like another solitary confinement of his free time. He picked it back up as he scraped himself from the rocks, exploring the energetic unions of his emotional content, and slowly started to realize just how universally the relationships of individual vibrations weave together the collage of grandeur.

Each key produces a cyclical spiral of audible energy, each note a unique frequency of motion. Some combine to imply the angst of disorder, but when you find two that fit together in just the right way, it's like they were always meant to be together as their energy swells into its own sensual sensation. Those same keys hold sacred relationships with others along the spectrum, each composing their own flavor of emotional connection, any one's not better than the others, they're simply the pallet of colors with which to paint your story.

You could always play it safe and restrict your listening experience to the happy tunes, pretend the darker keys don't exist and rely on major chords to express your elementary understanding of string theory, but you'd be selling yourself out if you thought three chord pop was all you had to offer the world.

When your heart's in the music, it's the ups and downs that give it depth, that evolve the character of the composition, that unlock a bigger picture one key at a time. From within the bars of dissonance, it can feel like the notation is falling apart as it leads to nowhere, but it's only through that fog that the melody breathes to life as it blooms into an otherwise unattainable resolve.

Your life is a symphony, each moment is instrumental to the development of your harmonic content, each player that contributes to the story is vital to the growth of the narrative, and only once you step back and take the mosaic in as a whole, are you able to hear the subtleties that were always leading you to your furthest potential.

And just like with everything else, the scales extend far beyond your own set of headphones. Notes of parts of sections of ensembles, and all culminating in the most epic love song the world has ever heard, the power ballad of Unci Maka. Every drop of life a thread of vibration, every sacred species an integral component of symbiotic collaboration, and as the illusion of a solo performance fades away, you find yourself amid the most dynamic orchestra of all time.

And what do you suppose happens if one of those horns slips out of tune? Becomes disharmonious to the rest of the combo as they become lost in their own cacophony? Convinced that there's nothing wrong with their own ear, because they're the greatest musician that's ever existed, in fact, maybe it's time to break up the rest of the band as they rise to stardom all by themselves.

They've got computers to quantize their missteps and autotune to cover their tracks, but no digital recreation of creation is ever going to compare to the aural complexities of real music. Trapped in an echo chamber of their own reverberations, they'd soon come to believe that their limited genre was all that ever mattered, and without the outside influence of the vast catalogues that speak to a greater mystery, how could they ever realize that their flattened waveforms had crashed the entire music industry?

But it's actually quite simple to realign yourself to the harmonies of life, one must only step away from the bubble of self-importance as they allow the rhythms of nature to saturate their soul. It may seem a peculiar approach to those following the misprinted chord charts, but as more members become aware of their surroundings and retune to the root note, it becomes that much easier for those lost in the chaos to recognize the melody, as the dissonance resolves into the reprise of the greatest show on Earth.

The winter played on as heartache melted into the fondest of recollection, clouds of fire ribboned across the cobalt skies, the first starlight glistened the snow covered mountains, it was all rather patriotic. Heated games of snowquet kept icicles on their toes, the closeness of the lodge evaporated any lingering numbness from the outside world, and either the food had gotten better with age, or a lower temperature of expectation made room for off-menu surprise.

Miles and Timpsileh went for a daily census of winter's citizenship. She'd quickly capitalized on his sudden free time and didn't shy away from heavy petting, it was nice to have a close companion who didn't mind listening to the same old sob story. Annie and Spaz were never far, their card sharking took over the frostbite of February's indoor voices, and the boys even managed to outsmart the mountain lion a time or two, as their brotherhood grew to whatever the next thing is called.

Annie and Miles were close, cooking together most days and planning their future renovations, still sneaking off to their moonage daydream, but there wasn't enough space in the universe for him to unhang his preconceived desire. She got it, and she tenderly navigated the blurred lines of their friendship, standing by with a shoulder as he worked through his growing pains. Even if she was eager to move on, she had no real interest until she had his full intention.

They were planning a vacation together, all four of them, back to Timpsileh's home for a long awaited reunion with the rest of her family. They'd never meant to be away for this long, they were just going to be on the road for a couple months of adventure and eventually cross paths with her people, but that's how it goes when you open yourself up to the great beyond. They'd been here nearly a year, jeez, and Timps loved it, and they'd checked in with her folks through a pigeon blowing smoke signals, but she had a lot of kids back home who dearly needed to rub her belly.

Miles was stoked, excited to be back on the road with his homies, and this place they were going sounded mythical, the LG, and apparently it had been a big inspiration toward Annie's vision of the hillside. They'd leave tomorrow, Cap was gonna drop them off on the town run, they had a rideshare lined up for the first leg and the rest they'd figure out on the fly, hitchhike or whatever.

The night never ended as the celebration ordered another round, Cap would be the only founding member on the hill, Annie wasn't sure who would be in charge. Toasts and jams were delivered, gifts exchanged, Miles handed out echinacea root and opened an Earthbag of piñons, over a thousand bucks worth, but they were way more valuable than that.

"Thanks Brother, you know we're hitchhiking though, right?"

"Eh, you'll be fine, you've been pulling half my weight for months. I'm gonna miss you kids, you know? Miles, my boy, you've been with me since before the beginning, you may have ventured out on your own for a while, but you never really left the hilltop. And Spaz, I don't know how in the hell I'm gonna do much of anything without you. And Annie, oh my dear sweet Annie, you have brought so much passion to this place, and to my heart, you've properly inspired me to get up everyday and be the best version of myself I can be."

"Oh jeez," muttered Spaz. "That was the best version?"

"Hell, I'm going to be sleeping til noon from now on. But for real you guys, nobody's ever gonna tell me that if we didn't make people get jobs, then they'd just sit around all day being lazy, you're the hardest working people I've ever met."

"It's cuz we're doing what we love," bubbled Annie.

"And without that dollar looming over us, we've been able to give ourselves to something we care about," offered Spaz. "And we've been able to help the Earth in the process."

"Without having to worry about putting food on the table or a roof over our heads," she added. "We've done both for a bunch more people than ourselves, and had plenty of time for horseplay on the side."

"When the fundamentals of life are included with life, it opens you up to live in a way that's fundamental for life."

"Or even if they kept the whole dollar sign," negotiated Cap. "But simply gave every citizen a minimum living wage, or vouchers for the essentials, regardless of employment. The financial world would scream of a handout to the homeless, but we live in the richest country with the richest people and the most excess and the most inequality, where our brothers and sisters die from starvation and hypothermia. I think it's our duty as halfway decent humans to hand out the minimum requirements for life, otherwise we might as well pull the trigger ourselves."

"And people could still work their shit job if they wanted," allowed Spaz. "Which is really why they want to drag everyone else down with them, if I have to work then so do you, but expendable income could still be a thing. You get your basic wage for your basics, and if you wanna devote your life to chasing capital, then you'll be able to get a bigger TV and a smaller cell phone. But if you're a person of inspiration who just wants to spread good into the world, it'll be a lot harder for your penny pinching parents to talk you out of a moneyless career of passion as they enroll you in business school, and just imagine how beautiful the world would become with color and song sprouting up between all the boulders."

"Could you imagine if we were a hive of bees?" proposed Annie. "Or even if we were just observing the hive. How inhumane would we think them, if they only fed the workers with enough grains of sand in their pockets, not sand they needed for anything, just a mechanism to weigh them down from ever taking off? Or if a bumblebee stood guard and only let the sand dollars into the castle for the cold night of frozen wings, too bad for everyone else, survival of the fattest is all that matters."

"But they don't, of course," said Spaz. "Everyone is family, and there's plenty of honey and toilet paper to go around, and it's because of that mindset that it's true. If each bee hoarded their share away, the abundance would dwindle, the hive would begin to fear the scarcity, and the entire community would crumble into pieces."

"That's how it happened here," shared Miles. "The natives lived that way before we taught them just how sparse we could make their lives. It was a cornucopia blooming from the Earth, the earliest settler accounts make it sound like Willy Wonka designed the place, and they didn't think twice about scooping us out of the snow and welcoming us into their way of life.

But that's not how we operate, because that way's no good for the king, and even with exponentially more than they had a week ago, it just wasn't a comfortable enough cushion to share the Earth with the Earthlings, so we didn't.

Then once we got them locked up, we imprisoned the next race of the circuit, who eventually earned the freedom to slave their life away for a dollar, which enraged the working-class whites, who were now at risk of losing their most sacred American job to some outsider accustomed to working for table scraps. We didn't hate them because of their color, that's ridiculous. We were taught to hate because if we didn't, then they would take what was rightfully ours, and everyone knows that there's not near enough to go around, so grab what you can and hide it away, we'll just hang the rest out to dry.

And that's all happening again now, if it ever even stopped. The American dream is so limited, that we're willing to use walls and cages to preserve our inherited right to work in factories and mines, and the ones who sign the checks let us know which enemies to hate, and they're the boss, so what they say goes."

"You know," said Cap. "I've been thinking about the word colonization a lot differently ever since you brought your new perspective back from the trail. And I think about our newest missions of planetary takeover on the final frontier, and say we do encounter sentient life out there, you'd like to think the entire universe would be big enough to share, but we've all seen enough hollywood propaganda to know how that's all gonna work out.

Or say they come to visit us, in peace of course, but here we are oblivious to the double standard of just wanting the foreigners to go back to where they came from."

"Or what if another sentient species of Earthling emerges through the coming change," Miles supposed. "What would it take for us to not reflexively eradicate that which we don't understand?"

"You're right," thought Spaz. "Our indoctrinated instinct is a fierce competition for survival, and anything another has, is less for your own, so it's your duty to vanquish the liberated leeches, else they'll suck the wells dry before we have the chance."

"I'll tell you what it will take," dropped Annie. "Obviously we'd have to shed the illusion of scarcity, relearn that a symbiotic existence breeds abundance, and with plenty to go around, you'd think we'd be capable of sharing. I understand that's a tall order with little modern precedent, so it would also take an evolution of equality.

The first plan of action within the dominant culture, assuming they've really moved past genocide and slavery like they all claim, the first thing I imagine is the establishment of superiority. We were here first, we did all this work, this world is ours and you're lucky to get whatever we give you. And that only creates an actual plague of scarcity for those actually struggling to survive, even if they are technically free to exist on the outskirts of excess.

It would take us welcoming them as equals, as relatives, with no preconception of prior possession, we'd have to forget the fallacy that we're competing to survive, and remember that we're all collaborators of creating abundant life. We'd have to understand that allowing another to exist, doesn't take away from our own privilege, it enriches it, and that goes for another species, for immigrants, for natives, for nomads, and even for aliens. Our merging energies swirl as they empower us all with culture, and wisdom, and new perspectives on an old way of life. And could you imagine the campstyle fusions we'd be cooking up together?"

"And this place has been a perfect example of that, for me anyway. If I had moved out here with a trailer full of food, and locked my doors because of some privately issued entitlement, sure, I'd have been the king of the hill, but it would be a grim existence of working too hard and eating too little, while I withered away from loneliness.

But instead, I welcomed anyone willing to join our community, I didn't even require that they helped with construction, and through this extraordinary blending of human spirits, we've truly created a vast abundance out of nothing. It's changed my life, how I view the world, I came out here to escape society, now I want nothing more but to foster it.

You've woken up my own passion for living, and I've felt a switch flip inside from defending the scarce, to sharing the wealth. I've come to learn that abundance is something that lives inside all of us, and it's yours to hoard or to give away, and sharing abundance creates abundance, so the only one you're limiting by restricting that flow of energy, is yourself, and through that epiphany I've discovered the most fulfilling way of life I've ever known. And for that, I can never thank you kids enough."

"You already have."

50

They popped out of the truck in the first downtown Miles had seen in a year. The concrete cage sprawled in every direction as its corners diffused the freshest of natural vibration, traffic littered the streets, sirens pollute the air, the stench of indoor plumbing seeped from below. Branded billboards promised luxury over the heads of the homeless, property managers advertised vacancy with signs of no trespass, dollar menus offered meal substitutes made of plastic.

It was all making Miles sick, like actually sick, his head pounded and his heart raced, his stomach turned the corner, he'd just been pulled from a year's worth of fine tuning and thrown back into the chaos he'd narrowly escaped. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't even pray, this place was devoid of all that stuff as it actively sought to drain any remaining life from its inmates.

Spaz and Annie knew the feeling, returning to babylon after growing sensitive to the world, it was overwhelming, for sure, but it would get easier to navigate the disarray. Miles didn't want it to get easier to acclimate to this broken way of life, he didn't want to desensitize, he just wanted to disappear back into the woods.

"But that's not how it works," explained Annie. "If we only ever focus on our own alternative lifestyle, then we've only helped ourselves and left the rest with no alternative. Out here's where we're needed the most, to spread the energy we've built out there, and the only effective way to connect the spirit and the material is to keep a foot in both worlds at once."

So of course the next logical step was to stop by the library and check out the computer world. Miles reluctantly logged onto Facebook, not the mindsucking feed, just the messages, and apparently he'd fallen off the face of the Earth, though he felt he'd fallen onto it. Friends from the road we're requesting to make it official, they would transform his timeline into an actual source of information, but something felt dirty about reducing the cosmic web of connection to a thumbnail.

Spaz climbed out of the rabbit hole with an even more disturbed reaction. Just three hours prior to his yearly review, he'd received word of pressing family matters, there would be two bus tickets at will call within the hour. He wasn't a worrier, and his open window mapquest made the detour a non-issue, but not only did this mean they'd have to abandon Miles on his weak knees, it meant Timps couldn't tag along, it turns out that Greyhound is simply another misappropriated nomenclature.

Tending to a dog is a big responsibility, traveling with one is a greater challenge, Timps and Miles were close, but he didn't even know where he was sleeping tonight.

"We'll be fine brother," reassured Miles. "We got this. I've got everything I need to camp wherever, she's got enough food for a few days, and I've got piñons if nothing else manifests for me, plus it should be easier to catch a ride with just the two of us. You go be where you need to and don't worry a thing about us, we'll see you soon, just one thing though, I have no idea where we're going."

"I guess you might need to know that, huh? It should be easy enough, I can get you most of the way on a napkin, and Timps will know the rest from there. You'll be fine. Just don't lose her."

"I'm sure she'd lose me first. Just kidding, nobody's losing anybody, are we girl, and I bet we'll have a bunch of good stories by the next time we see you. Toksa relatives."

They chilled out front of the bus depot for a while, it's one place in town where a traveler with his life in a bag doesn't look out of place, just another low class bus person, is all. Miles was down to one set of layers and he wore them all, Earth was woven into the fabric, barbs were patched with corduroy. To any inside person, he belonged to the streets, even some of the street people were convinced.

A native woman knew the cut of his jib, he recognized the weave of her wool, she took great care of her single possession, and it would take care of her. Turns out she was from the same rez he'd visited, they'd almost even crossed paths, and now they had. She'd only gone back for ceremony, she lived here, she found the freedom of the street preferable to the cage of the prison camp. They exchanged enough Lakota to make them both feel at home in the abyss, she gave him some medicine, he gave her half his tobacco, but she had to get going before the shelter's curfew, it was gonna be a cold one tonight.

Wow, what a small world. They'd known a few of the same people, she'd even slept under a roof he had patched, the energy he'd sown into the universe was weaving its way back into his path.

They chilled for a while longer, until it started to get cold, he gave it another smoke for manifest station to deliver, and as he pushed the butt into his back pocket, his tour guide arrived.

"Hey, you wanna hear this beat I've been working?"

"Sure, what else have I got to do?"

"Oh, pretty dog, can I pet her?"

"You'll have to ask her about that one."

On cue, she rolled her belly into position, her soft fur could open a door faster than Tiana. He pulled out a small speaker and hooked it to his phone, it produced a few pretty good tracks without a plan, he'd steal some wifi tomorrow to give them freely to the people. He carried only an Eastpack, his priorities were streamlined, music was his life.

"I could tell you were a music person," he appraised. "Are you part of some traveling group of hippies or something?"

"Uh, yeah, kinda, something like that."

"I could tell, you got a different energy about you than most of the people out here. You wanna walk around for a bit? Maybe score something to eat?"

"For sure. I was just sitting here waiting for you."

"Right on," he never missed a beat. "I'm Tony."

"Miles."

"Word. Let's go kick it on the strip, there's always a lot of action down that way."

"I could be into some action."

Tony was more than interested in Miles' journey, especially the dirthouse, he knew of Earthbags and had been wanting to escape the city to some off-grid sanctuary, it refreshed him to know that they actually existed. He wasn't on the street out of pure necessity, he had folks he could stay with a few states away, he was fit enough for a real job, but smart enough to see that it was all a sham.

"I knew when I was a kid that oil wasn't the solution, as soon as they told us in school that it would run out someday but no one seemed to be worried about it. And then you grow up and discover that bombs and bloodshed aren't a video game, they're the reality of what it takes to ease the fear of running out of American privilege. Even if we already have the most, it's never enough, so we take what we want from anyone too underdeveloped to stand up to our bullying, and then when they do work up the courage to organize resistance, and nationalize the resources that no one but us could somehow consider our god-blessed birthright, well, we have no choice but to blow them to smithereens, that's what they get for ever thinking that they deserve an equal opportunity of minimal existence.

This dependence on scarcity is what creates conflict, and money, but they're just two sides of the same coin. And then our rich history of a world at war since the beginning of the king's official decree has created a six thousand year lineage of generational PTSD. The sacrifices that must be made in the name of expanding borders weigh on the walled-off hearts of returning soldiers, gotta be a tough guy because boys don't cry, and all the women gotta suck it up and cheer on the assault because it's their duty to support the troops, even if it means developing a culture of dominance built on paternal disconnection and patriarchal patriotism.

And the men did all the work while the single moms just sat at home and played house, so the general's institution of establishment gave them the power to shape society however they saw fit, and with the Howard Sterns of the world manning the helm, we've devolved a way of life based on whatever crude act people are willing to do to survive a cash poor existence of voluntary exploitation.

And of course there's no sympathy for the victims of domestication, as long as they got paid for their time, then who cares what they had to sacrifice in order to eat. And there's even less consideration of the collateral damaged in the foreign lands we force into compliance, that's just the cost of keeping our gas prices low. And naturally the orphans we create will want revenge, that's the American way, which only means that we blow up even more people who are mad at us for blowing their people up. So how could any of this ever end?

Not that I agree with their tactics, because I don't, but at least the terrorists have a cause, they're standing up for themselves and what they believe in, their whole world has been decimated and they've found the only message that anyone seems to listen to.

And how many innocents have we massacred along the way?

And for what cause?

To defend America's freedom? By slaughtering anyone with grievances.

To defend the American way of life? By pushing McDonald's into the countries we drain resources from.

To defend America's supremacy? Because we're the greatest thing ever, which means that anyone who's not us, is expendable, and we have no problem reminding them of that, because the rest of the world just loves us.

Yeah right. We're a laughing stock to some and genocidal maniacs to the others, and the idea of the American way of life being a compliment, is a joke. We brag about our superiority to the world we've stolen to make it possible, pouring salt into the wounds of the spice trade, we're every bit the greedy capitalist pigs they see us as, but we're too caught up picking out blinds at Ikea to see the suffering we unleash in the name of..."

"Convenience," finished Miles.

"Yeah, convenience, exactly. At all costs. Mass produced murder and mayhem, but it's all good, as long as we can crack a beer and watch TV fiction about America being the good guys."

Tony was not some scatterbrained street kid with no drive to succeed, he just knew that driving his life away for a paycheck wasn't the answer. In fact, pretty much everyone they talked to that night, seemed to have a better grasp on reality than the passersby who tried to pretend they didn't exist. They walked through the menu of styrofoam sustenance, the collision of aroma stirred their stomachs, but some people would rather trash their scraps than feed the animals.

It was all good, Miles had fasted a few times with Paul, he could go at least a day or two, he was only visiting the street, but this was Tony's home.

They walked another block as the strangest thing came into focus. There was a piano right there in the middle of the pedestrian corridor, no shit, it was a little beat up, all the black keys were depressed below the whites, typical, but most of them even worked. This was awesome, he didn't need food, or even a place to sleep, he'd be happy just hanging out here as he shared his vibration with the world.

He sat down and started riffing in C minor, Tony tapped out a beat with a pen, people started stopping to enjoy the show and Timps got her fill of rubdowns. And then the next thing they know, and I shit you not, this actually happened, the next thing they know, people start tipping them with tacos. The piano was covered with a mexican buffet, soft shell, hard shell, nachos bellgrande, they'd freely given their energy to the universe without expectation, and those who felt the music in their hearts, felt compelled to share a bit of their privilege with another.

Sure, there was a Taco Bell on the same block, and yeah, it was just the remnants of oversized portions, but Miles was feeling some kind of way as he manifested abundance in the middle of desolation row. Or maybe that was just the tacos.

Miles ate more than his fill of the lowest quality tacos he'd had all year, but he prayed with them really good. Timps wolfed her two, she normally ate as clean as everyone else, but this was cheat day, so Tony traded his for some meth and shot it into his toe.

"This shit's no good man, I know it, but after you're out here long enough, it just grabs ahold of you and won't let go. You'll be just trying to survive the subzero night, you're so cold, and hungry, and you feel like a worthless piece of shit because that's how everyone treats you, and just a little bit of this stuff makes all three disappear. I've never had to steal for it or anything, you saw how easy it was to get, especially out here.

I need to quit, I know. I pretend it only hurts me, but I know that's not true. My family wants to help, but they can't understand what it's like, they have no clue, they think it's just a simple decision to be sober and I must not love them enough to care. They don't know how it eats at you, and even if they did, they didn't understand me before all this anyway. Why I couldn't be a part of that fucked up world that's got them so wrapped up in themselves. Why I've always felt like I didn't belong. And the street may not be the easiest place to survive, but at least the people out here get me, they don't look down on me with judgement and disappointment, they accept me for me, and it's the only place that I can accept myself.

They think I spiraled away because I smoked pot when I was a teenager, the gateway drug to hell, they're so oblivious to how anything works out here that they'll believe anything they hear on Fox News. They say that the majority of drug addicts started with weed, so that must be the culprit of it all, couldn't possibly be the less than pleasant childhood or anything. Sure, a lot of junkies smoke pot, but even more drink alcohol, but the government says that one's just fine and dandy, along with every network drama that glorifies the big three; cops, doctors, and celebrating the saviors with a drink to forget the world.

Plus my folks drink, and they never needed anything stronger to fill the hole, so why should I? But how many people that smoke herb also don't grow up to be me? And how many meth heads tried caffeine before that, and aspirin before that, and every little kid knows that if they want to feel better, there's a drug for that. How are any of those any less of a gateway to addiction than the clinically non-addictive devil's grass?

And you can't say because it's illegal, because it's not anymore, not here anyway. It was when I was a teenager, that's when it was dangerous, when I had to go to the black market for a joint, and that same sketchy dealer had the hard stuff, but I managed not to get mixed up in it back then. And back then, they told us that pot was as bad as meth, it's not by the way, but wherever it's illegal it's in the same schedule as heroin, so when a young dumb teen smokes a blunt and nothing bad happens, well, they might as well get smacked up next.

But now we know more about it, some of us anyway, and it's treated with respect, researched, regulated, and you can walk into a well lit secure location to score, so the only danger left is a Funyun overload.

You wanna know how many people have died from a pot overdose? None. That's less than caffeine. And aspirin. And how about alcohol? Or Fentanyl and the rest of the pharmaceutical catalogue? But there's big money in all that stuff, for the big companies that own us and our big government, and everybody knows that gateway drugs don't come with a prescription.

I didn't start shooting meth because I smoked pot, anymore than a serial killer murders because they ate meat, it sounds like a joke, but if vegans had the same propaganda as the Reagan administration, we'd all be eating tofurky tacos for dinner.

Caution, side effects may include happiness, kindness, compassion, euphoria, self-awareness, increased creativity, and in some cases it's been found to make patients funnier, at least they think so.

No, I didn't get hooked on crystal because of pot. And I'm not on the street because I smoke crystal. I'm strung out on this shit, because I've never felt any kind of connection to that world they told me I was supposed to belong to, and as far as I can tell, all those that claim to fit into that way of life are even more lost than I was. I know the way I'm living isn't healthy for me, but the way they're living is a disease to our entire planet, and as sick as I feel out here, there's no way I can be a part of that out there."

Tony was glad to have someone actually listening to his unfiltered struggle, someone who saw him as a human being, someone who understood that they couldn't understand, someone who was grateful to have found his own way outside the cage that was killing his brother.

"Listen man, I think I'm gonna go somewhere safe to finish the rest of this off, but I know this sweet rooftop spot that'll be perfect for both of you. There's like this little garden thing up there, some small trees and stuff, right there in the corner, it'll be like a little slice of nature right here in the middle of downtown. Should be pretty dope."

Miles looked for Tony the next day, didn't see him, prayed for him though.

51

Ride offered:

Motorhome traveling westnortheast in a couple days, got an extra seat if you're headed that way. No gas money needed, but offering this as a work trade. I need an extra set of hands to finish my off-grid tiny house and in exchange can drop you off anywhere along the way. Should be pretty easy, the end is in sight. I'll also provide food and we'll eat like kings. Pets welcome.

The unmissed connection of Craigslist strikes again, sounded right up Miles' alley and more sustainable than his rooftop. He evacuated the city with the longest two hour notice yet.

The alternative dwelling used conventional construction, wood and screws and squares and angle brackets. The end was in sight, but only because start and finish could fit into the same viewfinder. The site was most remindedly his property, he bought a paper that said he was in charge, and it was about as off the grid as it gets, excluding of course the triweekly three hour trip to town for propane, gas, and food.

The average workday began at three in the afternoon with a gas-powered grinder to generate caffeine, and this was the least wasteful use of time and energy about the whole thing. Miles was up by ten with plenty of space for prayer and Timpsileh, bored by noon as he cranked the genny with hopes of a tool-powered alarm clock, but the unanswered wake-up call was ineffective at motivating the owner into building his own future.

Once he was finally up and ready, they geared up for the two hours of remaining daylight. Miles should go ahead and get started, turns out he wasn't ready after all, and once he was, the union required them to take five every fifteen. He was no slave driver, Miles could also slow his momentum just as he was getting into the flow, but he definitely had no problem sitting down as he watched Miles handle the least favorite of tasks.

Conveniently, Miles was better at most of the hard stuff, so it would be more convenient for the other guy to just organize screws or something. Or set up the gas-powered video games. Or just lay on the couch. Two person jobs were left up to one, one person jobs required a second set of hands to make up for the most asinine approach to getting out of work, and the late start demanded a dedicated flashlight holder until it was simply too cold to want to work.

Progress was put on hold as labor intensity was outsourced by the purchase of an easier way, because most people live off-grid for the convenience of a store bought existence. But no worries, there were plenty of unrelated chores that Miles could do in the downtime, nothing that propelled him to the agreed upon tradeoff, but that didn't matter to the self-appointed king, because he owned the time of the peasants he was supporting, and what could it possibly matter to the working class what they do for a living, as long as there was food on the table.

The king's mandates prioritized the dollar over ecological impact, we can always buy more wood as we cut trees out of the view, and any focus on the future revolved around money to be made.

And getting chicks. That's what all the money was for. And for going to the bar. To get chicks. Drunk chicks, because those are the easy ones, but you gotta have some cash to flash, I never meet anybody cool around here though, just a bunch of alcoholics and party kids, hey you wanna go grab a drink, what, you told me five times already that you don't drink, how do you ever meet chicks dude, oh you're not interested in barflies anymore, but those are the easy ones. And a bunch of other womanizing shit like that.

And just derogatory speak in general. A cynical negativity about any case his mind had already closed. The weather was terrible and he couldn't wait to wish away enough time for the miserable winter to be over. The best he could hope for was not too bad.

And the swearing. I thought this book had been bad. His had an expletive in every sentence, every part of speech, so ingrained into his rhetoric that there wasn't even an emphasis of purpose. He used it once and it felt good, used it a bunch more because his friends did, but his intolerance to anyone else had devolved into a constant stream of profanity just to feel normal.

And exploding F-bombs assaulted the victims of his spacial unawareness. Often frustrated by his own lack of mindfulness, he was always shouting and cussing at the stupid Chinisium bullshit, because it couldn't be his fault. It wasn't his fault about all the pollutions in the world either, what could his own contributions really matter, and what does it even matter if we try to change America's way of life from the inside, China's the biggest polluter of them all, and they're not stopping anytime soon, which is good, because I gotta order some more of those discount widgets, the last ones they sent me were pieces of junk.

He was just a loud person in general, hard of listening and liked to hear himself talk. It's hard to engage in conversation with someone who already knows the answer, often giving it to you before they have any idea what you're talking about, and they never do, because there was no conversation. He talked at you, not with you, and once it's obvious that zero attention is spent on actually listening to you, just enough to turn the pages to their side of the story, it seems pointless to put yourself out there and far more gratifying to just write it in a book somewhere.

Then you could sell it, make a bunch of money, compensate your time, everything has a dollar value, and I bought yours with food and tobacco, but I'm gonna have to get you the cheapest smokes, money's getting tight, sure, I'm still gonna smoke an eight dollar pack of Spirit everyday, but your twelve dollar rollies that last a week and a half are breaking the bank, money doesn't grow on trees, it grows out of humans, and my concerns come first because, well, hell you're doing most of the work for a few dollars a day, how important to the world could you possibly be?

Every one-sided talking-to crawled through money, about this or that, but it always came down to brass tax, his idea of minimalism was buying the lowest quality of life possible. It weighed on every decision, or fantasy, when asked what he'd do with unlimited funds, his answer was to buy a private island and build a castle, just for himself, then he could decide who was allowed to be there and he could charge them all a cover, it's just human nature to want more than everyone else.

It was pretty much the same as Miles' answer, took place on an island at least. Miles had a lot bigger island, public though, lots of little houses, and free food, and anybody was welcome, but Miles never was good at managing personal interest.

And Miles not ever having been the king of the castle, he must have misread his indenturement contract, because what kind of royalty eat Walmart tube beef and other so-called poverty meals? It was all cool, Miles had cut as much machined meat from his diet as he could, but as he traveled, he knew he would have to eat from wherever the universe made reservations. So he gave an extra prayer for the prisoners of the inventory sheet, and to those who are involved with their torture, and a prayer that the two-leggeds begin to feel a true relationship with the living lives of our brothers and sisters.

But it would be nice to have at least some vegetables, but fresh vegetables are too expensive, cucumbers went from fifty cents to fifty-eight, let's get four meats instead, and a bunch of cheese and eggs and milk, ooh and cookies, you wanna pick out your own pack since I always eat two-thirds of every dessert while you're still out there doing three-quarters of the work, but I bought them, so they're really mine anyway. I'm the breadwinner here, so I should get special concessions, not the slacker who's essentially donating their time to my retirement.

Oh, no cookies? You'd rather get three heads of broccoli for the same price, ugh, fine, get your stupid vegetables. But save me some of that pie, I'm gonna eat the other half in bed before I wake up tomorrow, but by dusk I'll make us breakfast, and I know I told you the first meal of the day would be ready in an hour, over an hour ago, but I'm just not feeling hungry for some reason, oh yeah, I've been laying on the couch and ate a whole jar of queso, oh well, shouldn't you get to work, only got ten minutes of daylight left?

A neighbor must have tuned into Miles' prayer for our foods to be sacred, he brought a few packs of ground venison, a gift of his heart from the natural bounty of the Earth. And the deer burger was really good, the first night, but apparently not everyone in the community held the kitchen sacred. A few days later, there it was, warm and juicy all over the counter, under some mysterious mess that kept accumulating out of someone's excess baggage.

Oh man, deer went bad, don't know whose fault it was, I wanted it just as bad as you did, I mean yeah, I was the one cooking it, and yeah, I put the groceries up that day and another since, but you're the one who expected me to give a shit about the only meat you actually looked forward to eating and a gift you held sacred, but no biggie, just throw it out to the dog, we've got plenty of tube beef to last us, that stuff's hella cheap.

And he did buy Timps a bag of food with only minimal price gouging, she was eating more natural than they were, too bad he couldn't put her to work.

Walmart tube meat meant that Miles was going to Walmart, ugh. He hardly engaged with his surroundings, just enough to sneak a single vegetable under the calculating eye of carnal thirst, aisle after aisle of plastic packed logos and imported exploits, consumers clogging arteries until they were ready to checkout, and when Miles tried to consolidate bags to reduce pollution, he was laughed at for giving a shit about waste.

And then we gotta get gas, and a coffee, and a four dollar combo. What's that, you don't need a to-go cup, you've been carrying your own around since I met you, oh well, I got you one anyway, I'll just drink it too, and oh man, somebody needs to clean this truck out, there's like fifteen disposable cups rolling around in here, and they're all on your side, have fun.

Oh, and can you do the dishes tonight, I know you always use the same cup, I don't know why there's always a sink full of them everyday, but I've got an on-demand hot water heater, just have to run five gallons through the lines first, and when I do them, I just fill up the sink and let them soak in filthy dishwater, gives me time to take five, plus it makes it easier for me to talk you into wanting to do them the right way.

Oh, and next time you pray for your food, can you pray that I make some money?

I got to get some more propane. We use a little bit to cook, but the furnace is what really drains it, and we have to have heat or we'll freeze to death, priority number two after prerolls, it's just a simple necessity of life off-grid, being free of the man comes at a cost.

Sure, you've been sleeping outside in a tent the whole time, and yeah, it's way warmer here than most places, and okay, if the propane runs out I can just plug a heater into the generator and keep it by my bed, and if I need something, I'll get you to leave your air cooled insulation on the couch, because I'm just too cozy. But nah, a woodstove's just way too much work, even if it would be cheaper, all that sweating we'd have to do to provide heat, and time is scarce, only two hours in a workday, plus we'd have no excuse to ditch the job and hit the town.

But we should probably make a another run soon, burn a little daylight to refill the gas it takes, because we're gonna want to run the genny to watch movies on the big screen, as we fully immerse ourselves in the mainstream glorification of colonizing war culture, but I'll probably talk over them anyway and let you know they're garbage, which in my doublespeak means that they're not so bad.

But I'll be nice to you, I'll even do this weird thing where when you're just notifying me of something matter of fact, like, "Hey, I put the screws over there," or "Oh man, I dropped my glove," or "I'm gonna go eat a banana," I'll make sure to let you know that it's okay, that I approve of the thing that you were in no way seeking permission for, but I feel like I owe you that kindness, since I'm in charge of your time and all.

Finally, after several weeks of one more days, Miles was done with the most houselike construction of his journey, but the least like a home. He just needed to vent some of the gas fumes and point out that this chapter was completely devoid of meaningful dialog, not a coincidence.

52

Miles couldn't help but wonder if he'd made some kind of mistake. Taken a misstep as he navigated his path. But it had all felt so right at the time. So maybe it wasn't that he was in the wrong place, maybe he just hadn't learned the lessons he was here for yet. He had slipped from being present to distancing himself, forgot to pray for his own acceptance and hoped another would change, lost focus of his three levels of activism. It was easy to slip on a personal level when you're still the most conscious for miles, and he'd given up on trying to contribute an element of change to the financial blueprint of his local chapter, and what was he possibly doing for the world through his grievance? He couldn't wait for this lesson of patience to be over.

But during one morning's five hour delay, he got deep into prayer as he soaked in the sun. He saw that the real work to be done was within. He had to become content with the moment. He had to reclaim his abundance amid a constant barrage of scarcity. He had to live his truth, regardless if anyone else saw him. He had to take initiative to just do things the right way, he was doing most of the work anyway, so who could really stop him? And he started thinking of his bigger picture, he had been through some experiences, evolved from a lost soul to a weathered journeyman, maybe others could benefit from his long line of lessons, so he wrote a few down.

He was good, felt good, he'd capitalized on the free time and found a way to be productive with his passion, everything was as it should be. He wasn't ready to settle though, so it unsettled him when the contract was up and the trip had been pushed back another two weeks, or maybe a month, we'll get there when we get there, we've got so much more busywork to get done while there's cheap help available.

It was time to move on, even Timps knew it. Miles had three hundred minutes to pack, he did it in ten. Nestled his bag inconspicuously behind the seat, and flipped the downhill neighbor's public display of nationalism, as their anthem crept past an apple pie in the window. He arranged a gift basket of echinacea and piñons, suggested that Timps ride along, and when they rolled into town, he casually offloaded his baggage as he escaped from the dismay of his disgruntled employer.

"Toksa brother."

Now that felt gratifying.

They found a coffee shop patio that didn't mind such a pretty dog loitering for a while, and since he had his own cup, he got a free refill before they poured it out, it was after four already. So here he is, minding his own business like your average American, when this lady moves to the table next to him, and once again Miles was reminded that humanity is quite capable of being personal.

"Excuse me," she said. "I hope I'm not intruding, it's just that, well, where are you from?"

Miles chuckled as he assessed his appearance, broken-in layers of browns and greens, a bag with a boomerang, no, he wasn't from this world anymore, he was from the Earth. She recognized his vibe, she also felt out of place in this place, she'd moved here for work and it had been sucking her soul dry. She'd been reading and researching and trying to find a way to get out into the world, a way to help a planet full of people and hopefully lose the anxiety of helplessness, she knew that this stagnation was killing her.

They talked for an hour, she was enthralled with every facet of Miles' story, and in tears of inspiration as he reinstilled her thirst for more, assured her that there are others like us out there doing big things, and gave her such hope as he remained incessantly upbeat about some of the heaviest issues on the market.

It inspired Miles even more though. This was what it was all about. Connecting with those who've woken up but were still lost in the jungle, showing another way through his own actions and sharing the words of his heart. As she walked away, they both tingled from the intensity of genuine connection, and he was once again certain that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Before she left, she passed him a flyer from the bulletin board, there was a concert tonight, a local legend who was an outspoken advocate of change, and he was a Water Protector, maybe Miles should go check it out.

Ziggy Zag tickled his banjo as he delivered a humorous blend of social commentary and soul searching motivation, anecdotes of the front row lifted Miles back to the trees, the song of Unci Maka had found a conduit through the craft of her loyal fanbase. Miles snagged his attention after the set, they were brothers long before the introduction of pleasantry, the tributaries of water protection ran deep as he dove into the fringe benefits of their common unity.

"I imagine it'll come as no surprise," assumed Ziggy. "But I'm actually headed that way tomorrow on a little mini-tour. I'd love to have some good company for the drive and I can drop you off wherever you want, it's always an honor to tighten the threads of our family and help manifest the journey of a relative.

You guys can sleep in my van tonight too if you want, but not before we hit the town and spread a little decolonization of our own."

He'd been living in his van for years, all year long, but those who felt sorry on the longest nights of the year had no concept of the temperature tolerance held by the survivors of Standing Rock. The street was his home, not a last resort, and he'd made it his life's work to humanize the castaways of colonialism. He also took it upon himself to challenge the enforcers who metered his lack of domestication, one quarter at a time.

"And these things are a total racket, just another way to bleed the lower class under the ruse of equal opportunity taxation. But how many bureaucrats are out there feeding the meter while their constituents are struggling to feed their families? And how many times have you ever voted to install new meters? And can you see your city council running down a few flights of stairs to move the car down a block before the street sweeper sticks them with an eighty dollar ticket?

But that's not even the messed up part. You wanna know what the majority of our parking tax goes toward? It's to pay for parking enforcement. What kind of ludicrous ponzi scheme have they got us all wrapped up in? Hundreds of attendants and those little dreaded three wheelers and everybody's gotta have a boss, and it's all a scam to make more work for those who technically did vote for more American jobs.

And the system doesn't even sustain itself on parking fees alone. The whole point of it all, is that they plan on you violating the rules that are only in place so that you'll violate them. In this city, we bring in nearly twenty million through the meters and parking passes, but it takes fifty million to facilitate the infrastructure, so it's only through the 5000% fines that they can even afford to pay the people whose job it is to hand out fines.

And they do end up making some excess money through the struggle of the working class, which pretty much never goes to road upkeep, or to building a free parking garage, it's pretty much exclusively used for projects that promote further tourism and shopping, which only congest our pathways even more as our own citizens pay the price.

And our whole tourism industry's backwards too. Our hotel tax doesn't go to any of the municipal allocations that an influx of visitors would drain, it goes to televising commercials in other cities as we lure more tourists to our decrepit streets. And we demolish local landmarks to throw up these stupid looking hotels, destroying the culture that was what made our city worth visiting in the first place.

And now there's all this Air B&B madness, which sounds like a great alternative to funding the tourism board. Except that most of them are being managed by real estate developers, who buy up the dwindling affordable housing market, splash some paint and opulence for those privileged enough to take a vacation from their lives, and now half the people I help out here are working full time jobs, but there's simply no houses available within their tax bracket.

This whole system we live inside of is built to keep us bent over and progressing the privilege of our masters. It's all so complex and multifaceted that it's overwhelming to even think about how to start fixing it, especially when those most depressed by it, are the ones who are barely surviving. Rent's designed to tear apart the lower class. Mortgages are meant to constrict those in the middle as they become chained to funneling down the oppression. And in a country with way more empty houses than homeless people, where we're completely overstocked yet destroying the Earth to build more and more, we still find the need to evict human beings to the street as we ignore the most vulnerable throughout this pandemic of inequality, and somehow they're the ones being looked down upon.

So I know that whatever little bits of resistance I'm offering up here and there, may not be breaking the bank, but I've seen them cause some pause for contemplation, and once we're ready to band together and topple the tower, I know for a fact that there's a deluxe apartment up there with my name on it."

As they walked along the sidewalk of dropboxes, he slyly slipped a can of Great Stuff expanding foam from his Moog hoodie and disabled each coin slot mechanism, if the tax collector was out of order, then the whole block could stay for free. The grassroots rent strike was underway.

Miles dug into his bag and offered half a tube of epoxy putty, Ziggy was over the moon and called for a little midnight mayhem. The foam could eventually be melted free with solvent, but the rock hard glob was designed for engine repair and held a kindred spirit of resistance to petroleum. The newspaper had once run a story on the vandalous act of defiance, city officials and meter maids were outraged at the blatant disregard for bending over and taking it, but the commoners applauded their hero and hailed him as Robin Hood of the Parking Lot. Ziggy even wrote a tribute for him.

In the morning, they stopped into the cheers of coffee shops, everyone knew Ziggy's name all over town, and within the first cup, Miles had been unhesitantly accepted into the fold of friends. The coffee was free, and the breakfast sandwich, but not because he was in the presence of a celebrity, it was this way for everyone.

It was a pay it forward business model. Your order was at no charge, it had already been covered by a previous patron, and if you felt compelled to share a few cents worth of your privilege with another, you could trickle down a sliding scale donation to ensure that someone in need had access to the most basic fundamental human right, coffee.

A financial advisor educated in the market of scarcity would insist that it would never succeed. If you don't force people to pay, then they won't. If you don't force people to work, then they won't. Nobody's ever going to feel so inspired by your low cost impact on the world, that they toss in a twenty for their half-caf vanilla latte. But they did, and it enriched their own life as they were directly connected to the stomachs they were filling, instead of just padding another CEO's pocket.

"It's a beautiful thing they do here," admired Ziggy. "And it works. And it just goes to show you that given the opportunity, people want to do good in the world, even for a complete stranger.

And it tells me that there are ways within the money system, to dismantle the money system. It would be too much of a shock to society to just crash the market, but if we simply begin investing our inherent wealth into the fundamentals of another's survival, freeing them from the downhill spiral that limits their own contributions to the world and pushes them into whichever illicit lifestyle society deems a menace, if people just had everything they needed to live, then the world would come alive.

Obviously it's more complicated than that, the people pulling the strings have everyone's hands tied, and they make their living by restricting the vitality of the population. It's economics 101, find a product no one can live without, corner the market by eliminating competition, raise the cost of living. They're not going to change their business plan, they're sitting on a gold mine, which is why we're the only ones who can do anything about it.

We live in a country of excess; food, water, housing, and the most advanced healthcare in the west, but our people die everyday from things we know how to fix, they just didn't have the money for it.

And then when someone does suggest something crazy like Medicare for All, an already established public healthcare system that works within the money world, well the money world says it's just a pipe dream, how could we ever afford to care for all those we've sworn to protect? And you never hear someone suggest to breakup the pharmaceutical monopolies that push addiction into our communities, or that once everyone's on Medicare we'll have the ultimate negotiation leverage, they're all too worried about extended wait times and choosing their own physicians.

Well I got news for you, if everyone's on Medicare, then most doctors will be accepting it. And if your privilege is simply too proud to share a waiting room with the millions of citizens in need of care, you don't have to sentence them to death just so you can be in and out, I'm sure your privileged pockets can still afford the private practice of equal inequality. I mean, it's like refusing food to the starving because you don't want to wait in the checkout line, be a human for God's sake.

And what they really don't want us talking about, is how for the majority of this country's noble history, we took care of our people by taxing the top one percent of our wealth at a ninety percent rate. Oh my, that sounds terrifying, what if one day I get to be the richest man in the world and they want to take it all away to feed people, ruthless scoundrels, that would leave me financially destitute with only forty-eight thousand million left to my name.

That's the way it was for a long time, but don't start collecting donations to feed the wealthy, the marginal tax rate didn't kick in until the first several hundred thousand was already in the bank. And this was just back in the fifties, and then seventy percent by the eighties, and then Reaganomics cut taxes on the most privileged and raised them on those struggling to meet ends, as we were promised that the upper class would trickle down all over the rest of us.

And the income tax has only even been a thing for a hundred years, and back then it was only for the highest earners. It wasn't until the wartime repatriation of Pearl Harbor, that we convinced the middle-class to chip in a third of their livelihood with the rest of their civil rights, but you gotta do what you gotta do in times of crisis, and gotta keep that war machine rolling in the dough long after the internment camps are closed, and only a fool would expect the IRS to offer any kind of return on investment.

And they're just a collection agency for the Fed anyway, a privately controlled institution that's whole purpose is to syphon the interest on the paper products it loans the government, a government whose constitution states that it should be responsible for its own money printing, not some subsidiary of the Bank of England. Plenty of presidents even agreed with the constitution on this one, but they were all assassinated, and now they just buy them off in a world where every human life has a dollar value.

But we are the ones with the authority to set things right, ninety-nine percent of three hundred and fifty million is way too many voices to suppress into submission, we just have to prioritize taking care of our own over this stupid illusion of what's rightfully mine. I'll tell you what's rightfully yours, water and food and health and a place to exist, that's your God given right, it's all of ours, and it's about time we stood up for what is right."

Ziggy took him to the edge of civilization as he broke down the cage that contains it, the rest of the napkin would guide his two day trek through the woods, as long as he didn't lose it at the halfway point, a landmark aptly titled Secret Waterfall.

The pen-scratched diagram was actually quite accurate, Spaz had made this journey more than once, and Timps had obviously been here before. The river gushed over a twenty-foot cataract and reconvened in the most glamorous pool below, which then flowed through another twenty-foot drop. It was a double waterfall with an oasis halfway down, deep enough to cliff dive into, it was still a bit cold out, but once Miles had a fire going, neither one of them could resist.

They roasted some piñons, plus Ziggy had packed them both a lunch, but Timps was ready to eat big, now that she'd developed a taste for small game. This one was bigger than the last, which probably made Miles' work cut out for him a little easier, he was glad he'd paid attention and sharpened his edge. And as the sun set on Secret Waterfall, the pair dined by firelight on rocky raccoon kebobs.

Timpsileh licked him awake and announced that she was packed and ready to go home. He filled their water bottles from the falls, gifted some tobacco to the flow, and the two set out for the rest of their lives.

The hike gave plenty of time for reflection, he looked in the mirror at the person he'd been before, defeated and helpless, beyond hope, and he imagined what that guy would think if he could see himself now. He had passion, and drive, and a deep-seated belief that he could make a difference, that he was making a difference, and that there were many others out there doing the same. He had words now, and actions, and love, and a dog.

He hadn't had a dog since he was a kid, it was hard enough to navigate the concrete world for himself, how could he sentence an animal to the cage? Now he was responsible for another's life, in a society run by a species who don't even understand it for themselves, how could she ever make sense of the insanity? But out here she was in her element, they were partners, equals, she brought home the bacon and he cooked it.

This is how it's supposed to be, we're all related, and we all have purpose, it's just that we think ours is to be in charge. It's a God given right to some of us, and just common sense to others, if we're capable of taking over, then why shouldn't we, and if anybody's got a problem with human supremacy then they should speak up. In english please.

He didn't need to talk to her to know they were close, she jumped up to kiss him and took off once he was beyond getting lost. A few hundred yards deeper into seemingly nowhere, he walked through a tall stone arch, there was no fence, but this was the south gate, and just to make sure they had the right place, he checked the inscription overhead.

He'd officially arrived at Liberation's Garden.

53

"Timpsileh! You're home," cried the echoes up ahead. "And you must be Miles, welcome to the LG. We've been expecting you."

"Got held up in traffic."

"It'll do that. We've got a tipi for you, and once you get settled in, I can show you around if you want. I'm Rex, by the way."

As they entered the outskirts of community, they never left the forest, the living environment was seamlessly woven into the living environment. A few tipis nestled between trees, a bell tent over there, a geodesic dome over here, and then all of a sudden they'd left the suburbs as Miles discovered a full-on ecocity.

Hustle and bustle and work and play and laughter throughout it all, children swarmed the new guy as Timps made introductions, colors floated through the air as the earliest harvest sprouted between their toes. He saw no allocated garden space, no big field of rows somewhere off to the side, instead, they seemed to be tending the abundance from within.

The walkways were lined with nutrition, every structure was surrounded by patches of food, or currently being resown with the next wave of tomorrow's dinner. You didn't leave home to work the fields, they were in your backyard, they were your backyard. It wasn't a chore to spend time in the garden, it was just something you did when you saw it needed doing, and it only took a moment because everybody was doing it. There was no need for a fence, with the vines woven into the scent of human society, their territory was claimed without excessive force. And there was no mine among the people, only ours.

Miles was invited to pick a snack on the way to his new abode, everyone they passed was eager to welcome him home, community frothed from the Earth, not on top of it. Hammocks swung among the cucumbers, custom canvas peeked between the peas, there was even an adult-friendly treehouse in the air, and was that a... was that a zipline?

"There's three camps here," Rex laid out. "This is our base camp, Erenbrook, it's hopping all the time, and where pretty much everyone holes up for the winter. It's a lot easier to get through the season with a tight knit support team, we eat together, collect firewood together, and the more the merrier when it comes to heating a tipi.

A lot of folks stay down here year round, but it can get a little rowdy as the spring wakes us all up. It's a lot chiller up top in the orchard, Chippendale, it's a lot like down here, people and plants living as one, and you get to wake up to apples and peaches on your front porch. They get a lot more sun up there, but its elevation keeps a cool breeze flowing, and as the bounty ripens, they load it into the fruit basket and zip it on down to the rest of us."

"Is that off of an old hot air balloon?"

"Yep, good eye. We've used a lot of salvaged materials to build this place, and we make our own tipis and hammocks. There's only a few permanent structures, like the treehouse, we like to keep things mobile and shake them up sometimes, keeps the energy fresh and gives the Earth a chance to recover from our footprints. It's really cool how we never have to cut trails, they just kind of organically appear as our paths naturally intertwine.

As long as we don't bite off more of the Earth than we can chew, she happily provides everything we could ever need. It's only when our eyes get bigger than our stomachs, that we find ourselves struggling to ever have enough. We're physically capable of expanding our domain beyond our reach, but the effort involved grows exponentially the farther we stretch ourselves out.

If we claimed a distant land as human nature, we'd be forced to fence it off and guard against the wild reclaiming its freedom. The roads to nowhere would be less traveled and would require constant cutting back. And if the grass were greener outside of our laid back soccer matches, then somebody would have to chop it down to size before the land escaped our overgrown footprint.

But here, we live within our means, and our way of living automatically renews our lease on life. As long as we don't insist on taking more than our fair share, we find ourselves sharing in more than plenty.

And the village doesn't extend past the river to the west, it's the closest thing to a border wall we have around here. It delivers crystal clear water to all three camps, and when you haul it by hand, you develop a deeper appreciation for conservation. We certainly utilize its flow for many facets of life, it's the most critical component of our existence, and that's precisely why we understand how vital it is to share the fountain with everyone else.

So we get our fill from the east shore, and as many trout as we can stomach, but we reserve the other side as public access for the other ninety-nine percent of life. That's not to say that we never venture over there, there's quite a bit of edible arrangements that thrive without our thumbs, and because no man's land is off limits for development, it's teeming with wildlife, which makes it wildly efficient as our primary hunting grounds."

"I guess that means we eat meat around here?"

"For sure. A lot of us do anyway, only what we can catch with tools crafted by hand though. There's no captivity or anything like that, and of course there are some straight up vegans, but most people's beef with the meat industry is the industry bit of it, not the sacred sacrifice of the life cycle.

If you're into it, I can drop you off at the kitchen on my way to work, it's the heart of the camp and a good place to get acquainted with the community, plus you always want to be friends with the chef."

Miles knew full well the benefits of a kitchen friendship, and the open door recruitment policy, upon his first appearance he was picked for the lineup of tonight's mystery menu.

"You wanna chop some garlic?" requested the chef.

"My specialty."

"Cool, I'd say four heads should do us, gotta watch what we eat until this year's harvest is ready, plus I've got a bunch of the dry stuff if we end up needing a touch more. I'm not actually ready for it yet, but we should chop it early and let it sit for a while. So you know Annie, huh?"

"'I do."

"So you probably treat your garlic in a special way then?"

"Yep, and I worked with another chef that did that too, Becca was her name."

"Oh wow, yeah I know Becca, we cooked together a while back. Cool deal, how's she doing?"

"Really good. She taught me most of what I know about feeding a big crew with whatever's lying around, we were prepping for about a hundred back there. How many folks eat out of here?"

"It varies by the season. Our population comes and goes, and when fresh food is plentiful in every neighborhood, a lot of people cook at home, or break off into more personal potlucks. But I'd say that in the thick of stew season, we max out at around ten heads of garlic, which roughly equates to two hundred mouths to feed."

"And this place stays put all year long?"

"Yes sir, it's one of the few worksites that doesn't rotate shifts. You can see how we're cooking, it's all cob and other built-in appliances, plus we like to serve in the center of town, so it just makes sense to let the kitchen keep its flavors simmering as it evolves into the perfect recipe. This old tent's seen better days though, thinking we're probably due for a renovation once the leftovers warm up a bit.

Say, I gotta run to the pantry for a minute, if you want, I could take you on a quick tour of downtown."

The dining hall next door was a massive eight panel octagon, the sides were removable once the summer called for more of a gazebo, but in the meantime, two opposing woodstoves ensured a warm retreat for anyone whose fire fizzled out at home. A long shelf of cubbies lined the wall by the front entrance, each held a wooden bowl, all unique, and some with quite a bit of artistic flair, but all bore the same essence that Miles found subtly familiar.

"We make all those here," pointed the chef. "There's a convivial wood shop down the way. We've got a pedal powered lathe and everything. A lot of folks made their own, others have been turned into gifts, either way, there's something special about eating your heart out of a labor of love. It makes you want to wash your own dish, and put it away. It's a sacred piece of the Earth, and you can almost taste it's influence in your food, could just be the garlic though.

There's also something deeply therapeutic about turning a raw piece of wood into a well done work of art. You start with this rough blank of infinite potential, and as you chisel away through its revolutions, it starts to speak to you, it starts to guide you through uncovering the gem that was always hidden beneath the surface. Plus the same thing happens to the wood.

And next door to that place, is our stitchery, that's where we made this octagon, and tipis and hammocks, and that old kitchen rag, got two treadle Singers down there, most of us make and repair our own clothes too. A while back we even designed a custom treepee for this other camp, it was really more of a pyramid though.

Listen, I gotta get back over there and stir the pot a bit, I don't even know what I'm making yet, maybe pizza sauce. I'd say you should come with me, but I see a couple folks you oughta meet, stop by whenever you want though."

June and Thomas were the founders of the LG, along with some other folks back in the day, but it had been their vision and drive that brought it to life.

"It was just after we had our first child together," recounted June. "And we knew that we didn't want to raise our family in the conventional way of TV babysitters and public miseducation."

"And that was even before the reality of child rearing today," added Thomas. "Where three-year-olds have cell phones and snapchats."

"Plus the food out there was not what we wanted to nourish our traditions with, which has also gotten exceedingly worse over the last few decades."

"So we decided to disappear into the woods and do a Swiss Family Robinson," he flashed back. "It wasn't easy though, not at first anyway. But we knew that we weren't doing it for convenience, we were doing it for quality of life, and those two don't generally mesh that well together."

"We met these two other families that wanted to create community, so we did, and it was pretty magical those first couple years. A lot smaller obviously, and just the basics of survival as we got the food situation figured out, but we finally found a rhythm that just felt natural."

"Then slowly more people started trickling in. Some we met on our various travels, others we'd known in our previous lives, seems that there's a lot of folks out there fed up with life in the colonies. Eventually, both of the other original families moved on, in a good way of course, one to an eco-village in Puerto Rico, and the other's traveling the country in a school bus. But anyway, once they left and started crossing paths with like-minded folks, well, we started feeling the growing pains of a family campout turned festival."

"Everybody was here in a good way," assured June." It's just that we didn't really have any focus. We were just surviving, but with the swell of communal energy, we knew that we had a responsibility to harness it and pour good back into the world."

"So we had talking circles with everyone and fleshed out what was really important to us all. Food was certainly a common denominator across the board, as well as developing a way of life in harmony with the Earth, not against the laws of nature"

"And that's what we like to think we've done here. And it's constantly evolving. We've raised six of our own, and been a part of countless other lives that have grown into some of the most phenomenal people you could ever imagine. Some have stayed to start their own families, others have ventured into civilization to share our energy with the world, and a few have even founded their own spin-offs out there in other pockets of Turtle Island."

"But it's really been in the last couple years, that most of what you see now has bloomed from the seeds we planted so long ago," expounded Thomas. "A lot of us went to Standing Rock and met so many of the most amazing people you could ever meet."

"Yeah," said Miles. "I've met quite a few myself."

"So then you know," continued Thomas. "And when that was all over out there, a lot of them had nowhere to go. Camp felt like home in a way that many of them had never felt, and the thought of returning to a world they no longer believed in was simply not an option, so of course we invited them to help us evolve this place into its next iteration of liberation."

"Everybody that showed up after camp was so innovative, and inspired to live their change, and this place was the perfect breeding ground for the solution that we all fell responsible for bringing to life. It's just been incredible, the stuff that some of these kids came up with, we've even got a bicycle powered projector for our weekly movie night, family friendly of course."

"Well isn't that convenient," rated Miles. "This place is something else, alright."

He gave them the highlights of his own journey here, and of his vision on the rez, and how uncannily similar this place was to the trip into space that he'd been convinced was only a dream.

"It was so vividly like this place, I think it was this place, all except for the piñons and Earthhouses."

"And you brought both of those with you, didn't ya?"

"I guess so, huh?"

"And you don't still believe in coincidence, do you?"

"No, I dropped that one from my vocabulary a while back."

"Well then there you go, who cares if it was a dream or something more, either way, you've followed your heart and it's led you to ours, and now I'm thinking that maybe our new kitchen should be a project you head up."

54

Miles spent that first night by the Sacred Fire, it tended to him as he watched over the chemistry of change, his feet joined the Earth as they traded gifts of sage, cedar, and cigarettes. The unmentioned camp was dedicated to intention, there were many paths to find it, but they all found their way to the same hub of illumination.

To the north, there was a labyrinth for walking in prayer, on the east side stood a yoga platform with a thatched reciprocal roof, a southbound meditation garden, and a westward inipi. This was a quiet camp, reserved for calming the mind and listening to the heart, and the fire spoke to his soul as it welcomed him home.

He'd known deep down that this place had to exist, every leg of his journey bringing him one step closer to understanding what truly mattered, and only once he was ready, did the napkin unfold him to the gates of the garden. He had to shed his grief with the world before he could defend her. He had to build his own inspiration before he could spread it to others. He had to learn to love himself, before he could pour his heart into the fire.

They sweat with the moon, and sweat by the sun, the dirthouse kitchen was so much fun. He'd wondered how many would come out to earn their tamp stamp, the first day of orientation brought over fifty eager volunteers, and the ensuing wheelbarrow loads of work didn't shy them away, it only recruited more hands to pass the time.

The flow worked just as smoothly with four, seventeen, or fifty-plus, though people had plenty of other living to occupy their life. There would maybe be a constant crew of twenty or so, but the straight forward momentum allowed anyone passing by to easily jump in for a bag or two. It was no hinderance of production to catch a newbie up to speed, and no limitation of age, as the youngest bagout checker was only four. Just ten minutes of tamping adds up when every diner wants their own brick in the wall.

Miles worked with the projectionist to retrofit a bicycle geared mixer, and as the summer worked its way to harvest, he'd grown close to so many other people living their change, as several more Earthbag structures blossomed to life. They used old untreated burlap sacks instead of polypropylene, they'd eventually decompose, leaving the sand and clay to hold its own. But even if a few years down the road brought crumbs to the kitchen, it would be okay, this was an unstructured community of established impermanence. They'd be happy to give the Earth back to herself, and by then, they'd be able to throw another up faster than a tipi.

Miles found plenty of free time for other work. Only here, work wasn't some chore you put off until tomorrow, it was the exciting exclamation of "What do we get to to today?" He made a bowl out of oak and flour out of acorns, forged foraged tin cans into arrowheads, sinew stitched a pair of moccasins, cooked his own watercolor ink from black walnuts and recycled scrap paper into his story.

When you make paper, you simply break down the particles of its prior form in a slurry of water, then you spread it thin to solidify, as you apply enough pressure to create an untearable bond. It's the same exact particles from the earlier creation, the exact same elements in a new configuration, and before all of this, they were trees, and the Earth, and the stars.

All of the particles that exist now, have always existed, they're simply unfolding their own paths as they work together to create the universe. They can all be poked and prodded and analyzed under a scientifiscope, labeled and named by whichever microscopic species discovers the stuff that's been here all along, every component catalogued as your body of work is broken down into scientific proof that science is all that exists, but how could the parts breakdown possibly explain all that there is to life?

Is the value of a car simply that of its scrap metal? Is a piece of art only worth its weight in walnuts? Can a book's contribution to the world be measured by the density of the subject's matter? You can count up all the parts and think that means you know everything, but how could a science of counting parts possibly interpret a language beyond the grasp of material composition?

The answer is, it can't, and it's ridiculous to think that an accounting of the material world will ever reveal the true intentions of the author. You can go on believing that belief in anything other than science is a fantasy, but you don't have to stop believing in science to turn the pages of your own understanding, and believe me, there's far more to you than a few boxes of the periodic table.

The individual instruments of the ensemble created incalculable music to the ears, the intricate choreography of the dance floor spun a tale that only a free spirit could fully appreciate, Miles gave himself to the moment as his left feet became one with the rhythms of life. He'd figured out a lot of himself, and of the world he was a part of, he'd unlocked secrets of the universe as he opened doorways to something bigger, and just when he thought he was nearing the ultimate understanding of what life was all about, he was quickly reminded that this was just a taste of the greatest mystery of all.

"Hey stranger, mind if I cut in?" interrupted Annie, with a smile beyond any friendship Miles had ever known.

Her yellow dress twirled and swirled as she admitted to having no idea that he was this much fun. She was thrilled by the dirtwork on her walk to the pavilion, even if it had been a rip-off of her own design. They caught each other's hands as they got caught up on each other, the magic was still there, but somehow stronger than before, they'd each built their own fire and together it burned into the night.

Miles eventually retired to his tipi, a more tangible fire kept him in denial of the fading summer, a deer hide rugged the floor as he nestled into the final chapters of his notation. A muffled knock shook the canvas door, the yellow dress crept into the refuge, the firelight flickered across her face and lit the temptation of desire. She stood silent as her eyes spoke volumes, his invited her to stay, the seduction of the flame between them beckoned as she slipped from the dress into the night.

55

"Holy shit, that was a long time coming," she finally broke the curse of their speechless entanglement, somehow nuzzling even closer. "And worth the wait."

They lingered in the warmth of the moment as their fingers continued the conversation, they were connected beyond anything words had to offer, their hearts dripped sweet somethings into the depths of syncopation.

"I missed this before I even knew what it was all about," she whispered, as enchantment soaked into her goosebumps. "I mean, I knew what it was about, I just didn't know what it was about, you know? And I don't think it would have been half of what it was, if we'd have fallen in a year ago. Whew, good one."

He managed to agree without a word.

"So many moons since back then, and you know I was here with you for all of them. Thought about you and Timps a lot over these last few months, me and Spaz talked about both of you all the time, we're pretty sure at least one of you's our best friend."

"I'll settle for top four," Miles leaned in.

"Seven, for sure," she pushed back. "Did you see his hair? It's getting so long, just a few pieces in the front that can't pull back, so...

Well, me and him are gonna have a lot of catching up to do, and I wanna give him my full intention while we explore this new dimension of our relationship, so...

I'm just saying it might be a little while before I sneak back over here, as lovely as it was and all, and there's gonna be plenty of moons ahead of us, and also...

I was thinking that technically...

Well, this moon's not officially done being new until sometime in the morning. Just saying..."

Sometime in the morning arrived entirely too soon, the tipi stirred into action as emotions mixed the batter, Miles hoped it wasn't a recipe for disaster. He loved Annie, and she loved him, and she loved Spaz, and Spaz loved her, and Spaz loved Miles, and Miles loved Spaz, it was complicated. There were no deep dark secrets among their private affairs, no hidden animosity harbored by the entitlement of personal possession, their communication was honest and open, and without all the lying around of awkward silence, they got to bake their cake and eat it too.

All that excitement pushed residual feelings for Tiana to the surface. Not during, Miles was fully invested in every drop of sacred union, believe me, but as he lie alone collecting the pieces scattered about the room, he found the unfaded flavor of incomparable compatibility.

He loved them each in unique ways, one didn't nullify the other, if anything, they expanded his capacity for both. An energy had been built between them, a swelling of heartsongs coalesced into symphony, the chords were not competing for space and time, they fit together to form a more dynamic listening experience for all involved. Each love was its own thing, its own harmonic series of connection, and without the guilt of betraying trust, they were free to develop each motif into its greatest potential.

Miles was new to the whole love game in general, and he'd somehow found himself lucky enough to ride along with two magnificent co-conductors, both influencing his own understanding of what it's all about, though the situational complexity forced a confession of needing some time to put it all together. And what better time than now?

He felt relieved by the footloose focus of his own feet on the ground, loving another had been ultimately rewarding, but this space for himself would solidify his internal affairs, and in turn, create an even larger canvas for whatever designs the future had in store. He wasn't ready to commit to a haircut, he'd ease into pulling out with a few baby steps, three moons felt like the right amount of self-indulgence, and it would make it that much easier to relish in the romance of his best friends.

He moved on from the tipi with a new sense of freedom, a freedom to be himself, for himself, no pretext of playing his cards right, the only one you can cheat in solitaire is yourself, and he looked forward to the alone time with his own reflection.

The birds and bees sang a love song as he was reborn into the world, the vibrance of community filled his uncluttered heart, he was at home with himself as he felt a belonging beyond compare. The dawn of new beginning had woken his dreams, by nightfall he'd settled into his new disposition, the universe approved and invited him to dinner.

"Welcome Miles," embraced June. "Come in, come in, have a seat, we're just about ready to dish it out. Pass me your bowl if you would, guests eat first around here, hope you like tacos."

"Of course he likes tacos," squeaked the littlest voice of reason. "Who doesn't like tacos, mom?"

"In fact," confessed Miles in a playful aside. "They're actually my very most favorite."

"Me too," she giggled. "See mom, I told you so."

"You're right sweetie, I must have forgotten about the universal language of taco tuesday."

"Is it tuesday out there somewhere?" wondered Miles.

"Oh, I don't know, who cares? When you live by the sun and moon, all those clocks and calendars just feel like an arbitrary waste of time."

"I know that's right," agreed Miles. "I've felt such freedom to live ever since I escaped the compartmentalization of life."

"The commoditization of the human experience," rephrased Thomas. "The factor of factories and the harvest of the people farm. If they've got you biding your time for something better, how can you ever fully appreciate the now?"

"Not when you count every second that slips into the pastime of counting seconds," said Miles. "And then you look back at a lifetime of wishing your life away, and all you can wish for is that you'd have lived a little."

"The days pass you by and you're left wondering where all that time flew off to," June noted. "And all that remains are those last few grains of sand, as you count down all the things you forgot to do, and all you can do about it then, is hope to remember to pay attention the next time around."

"A life's worth of next times and not right nows," rattled Thomas. "And as you recount the money you've wagered on a fortune devoid of any richness, you realize that you're a day late, as the dollar shorted you out of enjoying all those small things that are what life is really about."

"Hey, I'm a small thing, ain't I mama?"

"You sure are, my little bit. But you're gonna do big things out there."

"Like liberty?"

"Yeah baby. Speaking of liberty, it's getting to be about that time, itn't?"

"Time shmime, haven't you been listening to a word I've said?"

"Oh honey, you know I learned to zone out your nonsense a long time ago, how else do you think I manage to find you so interesting?"

"Don't listen to her Miles, she's just caught up on pretending it's not my boyish good looks she's after."

"You got me, just waiting for the rest of that scraggly beard to fill in."

"Easy now," he protested. "It'll be coming in any day now, see, it's already started up at my ears, can't be too much longer before it works its way down."

Miles soaked in the well-tended love of a lifetime. What else could he hope to aspire to in life? To impart such an impact on the world, providing a profound quality of life to all those you encounter, and to yourself, as you experience every moment that living has to offer you and all those you love the most. And tacos.

"Do I smell tacos?" came an outside voice that rang with a modicum of familiarity. "Oh Timps, my love, hey girl. I've missed you so much. Have you been on an adventure, huh? I wanna hear all about it later, okay? Love you baby."

"Liberty!" squealed the pippest of squeaks as she jumped up to open the tipi door.

The road worn visitor made her rounds as reunion lit up the room, she wore the unmistakable ambience of a Water Protector. She flowed around the circle until Miles caught a glimpse from those big brown eyes, or were they hazel? Either way, her hair held a year and a half of adventure since her cameo disappearance into the mythologies of Miles' origin story.

"Oh, hey you," she smiled, as chance encounter cracked open a fortune cookie. "I was wondering when you were gonna show up."

"Oh good," June marveled. "You two already know each other."

"Yeah, we go way back," said Miles. "Like, since the beginning."

"And you know we're her parents?"

"It's all clicking into place, as we speak."

"Yeah, she's our oldest, and the least tame. Liberty, as in Liberation's Garden, she was the inspiration for this whole crazy journey we've been on."

"I know the feeling."

56

"So, you and Timps, huh?" asked Liberty, as she slipped into the rope swing gauntlet long abandoned by bedtime.

"Me and Timps," he confirmed. "She's a good one."

"You got that right," she agreed. "One of the best. And she seems to be quite taken with you too, so you can't be all that bad."

"Unless she's just covering for me because I cook for her."

"True. Plus there's the part about her getting along with pretty much everyone, but I'll keep that one to myself and let you keep on keeping on."

"Thanks for that."

"She grew up here, for the most part, like me. And in a setting without the scarcity of us and them, she never developed a concept of anything other than family, and she carries that relation with the world wherever she goes."

"Sounds like this other woman I met one time, sort of, I'd almost convinced myself she was nothing more than mirage."

"Maybe she still is," hinted Liberty. "Maybe she popped into your bubble just when you needed her nudge the most, the instant you were ready to listen, and what's it matter anyway, the person you've spiraled into all on your own seems more than real to me."

"I was far from on my own," he confided. "I'm here because of community. Sacred relationships with incredible people. A sacred relationship with the Earth. So I wanna hear more about what it was like to grow up with that all along, before you go fading away on me again."

"It was unbelievably magical," she couldn't help but understate. "But you had no reason not to believe, because everything you experienced only solidified the magic, and it never faded away.

There's a reason kids believe in magic, it's because it's real, and they're still connected to that original understanding of a world beyond explanation. Growing up doesn't mean forgetting where you came from, doesn't have to anyway, it's only through the indoctrination of disbelief that we force feed the next generation of jaded existence. When everything you're told contradicts what you already know inside, eventually it wears you down and convinces you that it was all a daydream, that there's nothing more to life than falling in line, and if all the grownups seem to be okay with a meaningless life of mediocrity, then maybe they're right.

But here, it was different, the magic was sacred, it was nurtured into abundance. You didn't sit around wondering if there was more to life, you already knew there was, and every moment inspired you to go out and grab it by the reins. And you learned to appreciate that abundance, to hold it close as you share it with the world, you understood that the gifts of the Earth were not to be squandered, as that sacred relationship only sprouted further abundance. So how could you not believe?

I wasn't taught to trim away the crust as I kept only the choicest bits. We didn't cut down nature to construct more convenient access to her. Besides, our concept of convenience hadn't been corrupted by a complete lack of participation. Our whole world was at our fingertips, everything we needed was right here, and everything she needed was within our grasp. All of life was convenient, because convenience didn't mean zero effort, it meant walking outside and finding just what you were looking for, because it was all right there in front of us. There was no want for an easier way to skip through life, because who in their right mind would want to skip all of this?

If I got a piece of crust stuck in my teeth, I just picked up a splinter and pried it out, how could it get more convenient than that? Then I discovered how that other world defines their dependence on the dollar bill. The toothpick factories and forests, the oil burned to minimize wages, trucks and transit and little plastic packages, and just how large a footprint could one little sliver of convenience be worth?

It didn't sound like convenience at all, it sounded like an awful lot of work, and waste, and destruction, but then I realized that the convenience was that all of that was somebody else's problem.

They'd all bought into the myth that money creates wealth out of nothing, because they'd been removed from the living world that was paying the price. But from my perspective, it was clear that money was merely a tool of limitation, I could see it drying up the abundance as they all chased it into their own little individual hidey holes. They were lost in a living of hiding from life, scared to exist beyond the comfort of denial, to the point that somehow it felt more convenient for them to burn away a lifetime, rather than step outside and experience any of it.

It made me sad, you know? Sad for the people lost in the world, and sad for the Earth they'd forgotten they were a part of. It's like it's some kind of sickness that's infected us, a post traumatic amnesia that we've spread into the veins of our mother. And my prognosis of progress, was that we had to do something soon, before she fell too ill to support us.

But I knew better. I'd known better. I was a child of the Earth and I could feel her pouring through me. I could manifest abundance as long as I held it in my heart. And I knew then, that my path was one of sharing that energy with the world, as I do everything in my power to heal the fractures that imprison her.

So anyway, that's what it was like, for me anyway. And now to have a sanctuary like this to come home to, gives me the strength to give everything I have, to out there. And no matter how far I stretch myself, I know that this place will pull me back to my Earthly center as it recharges me for whatever's next. And now it's your home too, and you'll feel the overflow of abundance filling you up, and as long as you hold it tight and give it away with every opportunity, it doesn't run out like some limited resource, it multiplies like love, and gushes light into the darkest corners of this delusion of scarcity.

Can you feel it?"

"I can. I felt it the whole way here. Most of the way, at least. I felt it pulling me through the shadows as I already had everything I needed to find my way home. On a deserted mountainside as I shoveled dirt all day long, I felt it. In a camp under constant threat of gunfire, I felt it. Up a tree surrounded by razor wire, I felt it. In a poverty stricken FEMA trailer, I felt it. Restricted by only what my horse could carry, I felt it. During the shortest days of a white out winter, I felt it. Staying on the streets with those who live there, I felt it. Alone in the woods with Timps and a waterfall, I felt it more than ever.

In fact, the only time I felt lost as that essence drained from my spirit, was my slightest foray into conventional wisdom. And like you say, every little angle was poisoned by scarcity, and therefore the dollar, because without a substrate to contain the overflow of life, no one would ever forego living as they resign themselves to merely doing what they have to do.

I've felt the ultimate freedom of knowing that regardless of where I am, as long as I'm with my heart, I'll always have everything I need. And that knowing, has brought a depth of fulfillment that the me you first met, would have sworn was nothing more than a fairy tale. But it's real, maybe the only thing that ever was, and now that it's inside me, I couldn't imagine ever being willing to give it up."

"And you shouldn't, it looks good on you. And you're right about being a different person than that tender snack I scraped up off the sidewalk. Sick of the cage and terrified to take those first few steps away from it, but by the time you worked your way through the adversity of escape, you transformed into a creature of creation who was ready for anything. You weren't ready for the LG back then, you could never have fully absorbed this energy until you unblocked the pathways in-between. The journey was your destination, and because of that, you found your way home.

You weren't ready for me back then either, just a five minute taste took you over a year to process, but you stayed committed to the cause and evolved into someone I feel like I've known the whole time. There's something deep inside you that I can feel exploding into the world, it's not unlike the thing I feel inside myself, and it's pretty pleasant when I just give myself over to the crashing waves of energies becoming one.

Anyway, I have to confess that this wasn't entirely a social call. I'm here for a reason, a rendezvous of resistance, we're only in town for a night of gathering ourselves and tomorrow we return to the front row. There's an extra ticket if you want it, I can't promise punch and pie, but I can guarantee there's no convenience surcharge, and you already know the adventure that's out there waiting to be unearthed.

Besides, it might give us a chance to discuss the finer details of your purity pledge."

* * * * * * *

The world circled on her never ending path of revolution, a web of life connected the synchronicity of her grand design, Miles looked down to find his feet firmly planted back at square one. His bag was alive with seed and root, his hair grown full of Earthly experience, his threads looked like they'd seen the better part of a year, and maybe the less than better parts too. He caught his reflection in the window, the last time he stood here he'd been too paralyzed to pay attention, stuck in the fray of a crumbling existence. But the person standing here now had put miles behind him, the grip of civilization no longer held dominion, he was just one person living his change.

The camera panned up on a pair of approaching chucks, there was something in the stride that felt familiar, Miles recognized the blank stare of unexpressed potential.

"Hey brother, if you're looking for real anarchy, you're not gonna find it in a book.
