Ah, Kah-Nee-Tah is the name of a resort and spa
The Chiloquin Casino is called Kla-Mo-Ya.
As always, I am reading myself into this place -
have found the local bookstore (100,000 books,
minus the four I bought, except he has more
in the attic, where Mary at the Curio Store, a
bit of a curio herself, masters degree in history,
wants to be interred in rocking chair, book in
hand. Her partner said, "they could change
the book out from time to time," and Mary
and I laughed together, "Yeah." I sit at a desk
in the Chiloquin Library, Bill Bryson's Dictionary
for Writers upside down over my left thigh.
Mathew Brady was a Civil War photographer-
another reason the name resonates, along with
Matthew Brady's plight, drug to death behind
that pickup. A house along my road has seven
vehicles lined up out front, three of them
pick up trucks. I'm writing this like its verse
but its prose prose, a rose by any other shape.
I also have ABSENSE AND LIGHT: Meditations
from the Klamath Marshes, by John R. Campbell
and a book called Oregon's Ghosts & Monsters
by Mike Helm. I'm thinking Halloween with
that one. Books are piling up at the cabin,
my little fortress of solitude. Here honks
the train again. These trains used to stop
here for logs, I bet. There was a mill. Is that
white building on 3rd, left side as I walk to
school where the mill was or was it beside
the river? The Sprague or Williamson.
I met Clayton Chocktoot last night. I live
at the top end of Chocktoot Ave. I'll have
to jump the row Ellie plowed with the juniors.
People said, "She's one tough cookie," and
I am definitively not tough, but I wouldn't
mind a cookie. At "The best food on 97"
they had cookies on the counter the size
of layer cake pans. I was sorely tempted.
I'd nibble daintily, take only one. Where
I'm from, the rivers have names like
Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Stillaguamish,
Skookumchuck. This was Indian land -
then the Klamath Reservation. What
were these rivers called in the old days?
I'm reading Buy the Chief a Cadillac by
Rick Steber, a fictional account of the 1961,
termination of the Klamath Reservation,
where every Indian got $43,000 cash
to sell away their million acre reservation,
the last of their birthright, to the US
government, another in a rolling tsunami
of US Government swindles. Footnote
for every - many hundreds were deemed
incompetent and did not get funds, and
children under I think fourteen were
excluded. Kids under twenty one had
trusts established, with fees paid to lawyers
and banks for administering those trusts.
How much trust do you have they
got their money? 1961, and the elders
are dying off, the young people bereft
of their wisdom though they don't yet
know it. And in 2008, those young in 1961
are elders. The elders are always dying off.