Indian Way

I think it's worth taking a short romp through part of my past so you can better understand why I appreciated a man who stayed at Sugar Loaf during the mid-70's. The time to begin is when my father returned from the 2nd World War.

Dad had experienced his Hell and now wanted to reward himself for living through it in the grandest manner possible. First, he bought a second fridge and from the moment he removed his uniform until the day he died, no substance other than quarts of beer ever took up residence in that Westinghouse. He was not an alchy or even a social drinker, he just wanted to be absolutely sure that when he wanted a beer hewouldhave it.

The other way he responded to his freedom was to surround himself with water; he bought an island in Minnesota and for three months of every year he lived with no one giving orders and no possible way to be imposed on. We had no electricity or phone or clock or radio. No midnight leapings off a cot to go on patrol across enemy lines for him again!

And the third element that he put into his summer life was that the place he reclused to was surrounded by an Indian reservation. He found himself far happier when he dealt with the easy-going Potawatomi than with hyped troops reacting to the Hitler-Rommel syndrome. And so I spent ten summers of my formative years living amidst Nature: the wind, summer storms, waves, swimming, paddling and carrying canoes, picking wild blueberries and raspberries, fishing, swooshing across bays pushed by the

wind billowing our homemade canvas sails, diving for clams, helping the Indians build docks and cabins and fireplaces, and simply being part of a natural culture far more conducive to sanity than what we had escaped from. An interesting side note is that every June my father quit his job and every September he sought new employment. The result was that employers resistant to his self-imposed three-month vacations slowly accepted his approach and hired him willingly. Perhaps what tranquillity his soul had absorbed in the North rubbed off on his employers.

With this childhood in my blood, I responded immediately when Simon Grass, a Navaho, entered the Sugar Loaf Health Center. Simon, like James Silver, had been afflicted with Polio as a child. But all similarity stopped there. Because this man, in spite of every plague God and the government could devise, never gave up. He never exploited ANY one.

It took Simon half a Juice Break just to get to the Dining Hall. But by God, he got there on his own volition and never grumbled, never asked for help, andneverasked for sympathy. It's not that he was proud. I'm convinced that it was because of the self-sufficiency instilled from his Indian heritage that got him around, the heritage that I had rubbed shoulders with as a child when vacationing.

Simon mumbled to me one day, drool blotching his stubbled chin, that when he was a kid no one paid any attention to his physical handicap. He was expected to do what everyone else did. So though he had only one good arm and had to propped up because of his gimpy legs, still he split wood. If he hadn't, he would have frozen. And if he hadn't lumbered to the river dragging a wagon in the summer and sled in the Winter, he would have gone without water. It was unlike the Navaho to tell me all this but I probed. Of course, Simon didn't say ALL this: he didn't have to. About all he said was, "I was raised the Indian Way." I'd been close enough

to the Potawatomi to know what that meant. In fact, the paradigm was struck home dramatically one summer when I was a teenager.

One morning Johnnie Buck was unceremoniously dragged out of his house in handcuffs by the State Police. Before noon, everyone in the lake country knew what had happened. His wife, Sadie, had gotten tanked and laid half the men in the nearby lumber camp. When Johnnie learned about it he pounded her stomach with his fists until she hemorrhaged and died. The man got two years. As a growing boy, this incident impressed me deeply. One thing it taught me was that the Indian Way is very simple, direct, and immediate as Nature is. So when Simon Grass said simply, "I was raised the Indian way," it spoke volumes.

At Sugar Loaf, the elder Navaho slouched around much the way Clement Park did: he never did anything but exist, though he stammered, hobbled, and drooled while his white counterpart only vegetated. Simon also rolled his own cigarettes, often forgetting where he'd left his current one only to find it had stuck to his lip and burned the flesh. Everyone's reaction to the Indian was pure neutrality. I'm convinced this was because of his innate self-sufficiency. Needing no help, asking no quarter, while never smiling himself, the old Navaho was just THERE. Few people even knew his name.

But because I had spent months working and living with the Potawatomi, I was far better qualified to deal with him than the more highly trained and degreed Staff and Administration. I went out of my way to take him on as my first Case when I became an Administrative Assistant. Everyone was happy to let me cut my teeth on him, partly because they sensed I couldn't do anything wrong with the silent one, and partly because they found no way to relate to him. Simon and I spent hours on the bench under the Maple tree just feeling the wind on our faces,

watching it create waves across the oats and barley, and listening to the grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets. It was the best therapy anyone could dream of. It was Indian therapy: no chemicals, no drugs, no elixirs or pills or hypodermics. It was Nature's remedy, Nature's suave. Those calming sessions made me feel like a child again. And made me realize that my father's war had brought me peace.