by Noe Alvarez
From that moment on my father tuned into the network of the people, Radio KDNA, before leaving the house.
My father lived on alert in a crowded house with Gonzalo, his wife, and my mother near Kiwanis Park pond where, when my siblings and I were kids, we returned to feed the ducks.
Over the years, at my mother’s behest, he worked toward achieving his citizenship after having had us kids—my older sister, younger brother, and me. And only after my mother secured hers first, a year before him. “I’m very grateful to your mom,” he said to me. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have pursued carpentry”—a training program for immigrants. She encouraged him to become the person he wanted to be. “I really wanted to get out of the fields.”
14
An X-Man
June 22. Eugene, Oregon. Roughly 1,170 miles. Amazon Community Recreation Center.
We continue to slip in and out of society like ghosts in the night, connecting our hearts and minds with the land and the many tribal peoples who cross our paths every single day, carrying the heavy thread of the prayers of hundreds of individuals. We run through landscapes that are referred to by their original Native names. Reinvoking the power of a name. Landscapes that start to take the form of our traumas and offer some healing. My body is weary and time and place become one big blur on the run.
Some of us are growing closer every day, becoming great friends. Zyanya Lonewolf tells me more about her life. At thirteen years old, she experienced her own spiritual stitchwork. She thought it was all over then, had fallen into a deep depression and had taken to swallowing pills and cutting herself. “I’m a suicide survivor,” she tells me. When she was growing up, everyone around her seemed at the mercy of drugs and alcohol, and she had turned to drinking heavily after her assault at her grandmother’s house. “My grandma’s house was open to everyone and everybody,” she says. “That’s where it happened to me.” She sighs. “I felt worthless as a kid and my grandma helped me get through it. And even though she never spoke much English, she always listened to me.” Her grandmother reintroduced her to culture and took her to potlatches. “You’re valuable. You’re worth it. You have the right to live and be happy, I told myself,” Zyanya Lonewolf says. “Life is a gift. I always thought I was a mistake because I didn’t have anything growing up. People tell you you’re nothing and after a while you start believing it.”
One night, shortly after Closing Ceremony, after the feathered staffs and conch have been laid to rest among blankets, and each runner has gone their way for leisure time, there is a confrontation.
“Man, what are you doing?” Cheeto shouts, pulling away his sleeping bag from Marx, who heaves thick spit onto it. Marx, looking angry, shoves him aside and returns to his corner to huddle laughing with Tlaloc, Crow, Chenoa, and others.
“You all right, man?” I check in.
“Yeah. Them Hollywood runners are just clowning around,” he says, with enough emphasis for Marx to hear. Hollywood meaning: some runners choose only to run areas with the most media exposure.
“Whatdyousay, motherfucker?” Marx lashes back at Cheeto.
“Nothing, man, I didn’t say nothing.”
I pop a can of tuna and join Trigger in his van to try to bond. I learn that, like many of us, Trigger is a person driven by a call to return to the land. But he embraces an older, more antiquated version of order and custom than most others on the run. He is as if in perpetual training to return by force to a simpler way of life in nature—a process accomplished only through pain and suffering and that he embarked on years before I met him. Today he fights to discard himself of “the stupid times,” he says. The times he used to be associated with gangs in East L.A.
“Nowadays the elite don’t shoot us directly, but hand us the guns and we kill ourselves.”
There’s sadness in his eyes. His hands were once well acquainted with guns. He tells me of the friends he lost on the streets to gang violence.
“When I have kids, they will be born in the manner of the old way,” he asserts. In a forest, under a tree, on a mountain somewhere.
I listen to him with the same desire to be reconnected with that eternal pulse reverberating in the land. His voice carries the weight of wisdom covered under a layer of broken glass. A wisdom that draws blood. I too desired to retrace my origin story to a specific spot on this earth, a specific soil from which my people’s spirit first sprouted its first words. To know where exactly, in what house and village, my people first yearned for freedom.
“All things require hard work,” he says as my desire to believe in something spiritual grows stronger every day for me, especially as I begin to understand the power of the Native American imagination—that a person can be who he imagines himself to be, and that if he fails to imagine, he fails also to exist. So, when an elderly man of African American descent by the name of Exzelian approaches me, on roller skates, after Closing Ceremony in Eugene, Oregon, to foretell my future, he says, I am ready to listen.
“I’d been observing your ceremony,” he tells me. His leashed black dog sits obediently beside him. “Where y’all from?”
“From everywhere,” I tell him. “Alaska. Canada. The States. Mexico.”
He refers to himself as “X-man” from the planet Jupiter—a strange man offering to reveal his “powers of prophecy” to me. I squat down to pet his dog.
“My dog reigns on the planet Saturn,” he says.
A few runners gather around. Trigger steps forward and volunteers his palm, listening to Exzelian make general predictions about love, money, and happiness. Things that could be said about anyone, I imagine. Nothing too impressive. He pulls Trigger close and whispers something into his ear, prompting him to pull back in shock. With Cheeto he reveals embarrassing facts about his love life, and Cheeto too pulls his hand away.
Hesitantly, I offer my palm. Like any other fortune-teller, I imagine, Exzelian makes generalizations about me and my future.
While tracing the grooves of my palm with his finger, he tells me something to the effect of, “Good prophets read into the future, but the best ones read into the past.”
He hits on something, and his brows furrow. “You were drowned in a previous life,” he tells me, “at the hands of the god Poseidon.” His mind keeps mulling. “You will marry twice,” and he proceeds to reveal my economic future and also alerts me to some epic flood.
“Drowned?”
“Yes. Be careful around water. The god Poseidon is after you.”
Then, pulling me close for only me to hear, he whispers into my ear a secret known only to me at the time. I’m in shock. I don’t know what to believe. He grabs my hand firmly, preventing me from pulling away, and reveals to me something else—the age at which I will die. He releases me and rolls away on his skates, calling to everyone, “Have a nice forever!”
That evening we lay to rest inside the Amazon Community Center where I bond further with Cheeto, who tells me that a couple of days before my arrival, there was a death on the run.
“When you arrived, it was like a breath of fresh air for me,” he says. He tells me that after the participant died, there was a feud between Trigger and Andrec in how the run ought to be organized, but Trigger had more pull and authority over the others. But he was a reckless leader and driver and endangered others’ safety. In his opinion, Andrec was more reliable and worked hard at establishing safer running routes. Trigger cut corners, didn’t appear to care if runners suffered, and he considered pain part of prayer.
I hand-wash and wring dirt from my clothing in the bathroom before retreating to my sleeping corner of the gym to flip through elusive words in my dictionary that I weave into dreams and where I also have some money taped away between its pages.
15
Apache Medicine
Between the years of 1997 and 2003, Andrec helped teach the foundations of sweat lodge to prisoners at Avenal and California State Prison at Corcoran—a facility that housed high-profile inmates like Charles Mans
on.
“Twice a year we’d accompany a Native elder who worked at the prison. We would sing to them. We’d instruct them on how to build a lodge within themselves. What it means to handle the fire.” Two times a year the prison grounds would reverberate with drum circle. “Our elder would help prisoners with things like getting the gangster mentality out of them. ‘Have you made peace?’ ‘Are you making amends with your families? Or are you repeating the cycle?’ These are some of the things that he would say to them.” They helped make songs with the prisoners.
Andrec’s singing, when he gifts it to the run, is beautiful. He doesn’t share it often with the group, keeping it close, but when he does, it stirs up something inside of me and mixes into my blood.
“What do you sing about?” I finally ask him, afraid that an explanation will dissipate his magic.
“I sing traditional songs. I sing eagle, bear, deer songs. Round-dance songs to remind me of the romantic person I want to be.”
Song is his prayer, he tells me. “Prayer is about who you are. When I’m out there, I think about humor. When I think about humor, I think about my mom—quick-witted, serious, and also very funny. Laughter is what keeps us strong. I sing about the nature of growing up in a harsh world. The world can be harsh. That’s why we must sing the pain away.”
Later in the day, Zyanya Lonewolf calls a meeting—Circle, to discuss and quell the problem of bullying on the run. A whirlwind of hateful words rises out of us all. Others bring up issues of theft, sex, and drug use. Pacquiao outlines the rules of Circle and takes a neutral role in mediating the conflict. Peace and dignity is a group effort.
“The run has begun to lose meaning for me. It’s losing its direction,” Zyanya Lonewolf finally musters. She studies the conch between her hands. “We started one way in Canada, but have become something else entirely.” She raises her eyes. “Some of us should not be here. They derail our energy, our cause.” Guilt shows on everyone’s faces, including mine. “You know who you all are. You bully, you divide. Our ancestors would be ashamed of what we’ve become.” She surrenders the conch. Silence. The whirlwind subsided.
“It’s true,” Andrec adds. “The run loses direction every day and the aim of some has turned toxic. How do we intend to heal when there’s a lot of hate between us right now?”
“PDJ is for the strong. If you can’t handle a little joking, then go home,” Tlaloc adds, gripping the conch like a football. “We are not in some fantasy land. The suffering is real. The people we meet have real problems, and we need the strongest runners to carry their prayers. Some of you—and you know who you are—are holding the run back. You eat what little food we have, drink up our supplies, and drag the run down. Some of you should have quit the run a long time ago. If anyone has a problem, maybe they should go home.”
There are arguments about what it means to lead, to run, to be a true Indigenous warrior. There’s no consensus.
“We could do better,” Andrec adds. “I have a lot of elders who taught me right, taught me how to be a warrior. Like Daren William and David Alvarez—a Yaqui. Both of whom fought in Vietnam. They knew that to be a warrior was not about carrying guns or violence. It was not about tearing people down like some of us are doing here on the run.” Andrec’s words carry a lot of respect, but they are, I can see, grating on Tlaloc and Trigger. “To be a warrior is to know how structures of power work,” Andrec continues. “It is to sacrifice and dedicate one’s life and energy to something bigger and greater than oneself. I’m trying to do that here on the run, to move in a way that lets younger people take over.”
Circle closes without resolution, leaving us to our old patterns. Trigger tends to the van, Andrec to his map, Cheeto to his headphones, Chenoa to her beadwork, Refugio to his smudging of the feathered staffs, me to my journal writing, and Zyanya Lonewolf to her Native stitchwork.
16
Cougar Country
Reedsport, Oregon. Roughly 1,260 real miles and 1 million imaginative miles. It feels like forever on the run.
The van stops and the boil of the gravel road silences.
Trigger peers through the windshield. “No roads up that way,” he says. He looks up at the mountain range. “Someone’s gonna have to run it alone.”
Andrec, Cheeto, Zyanya Lonewolf, and the rest of us put our faces to the glass and try sizing up the mountain. Nothing but silence. Our bodies ache. A mountain is not something anyone’s willing to take on this early in the morning.
“Noé,” Trigger calls out.
I look up and see Trigger’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“You’re up.”
I don’t want to be the guy who holds the run back. But, fuck. A mountain? The moment to prove myself is now. It arises quicker than I expected.
“Van will meet you on the other side,” he tells me. “Take that path there.”
An entire mountain all by myself? It’ll take hours. But putting our bodies through hell is the norm around here.
“Good luck, bro,” Zyanya Lonewolf tells me. My heart races.
I jump out of the van and into the cold air, a shock like arctic water, I imagine. I stare up at the ripple of forest, the scars of earth that my feet will help heal with prayer. No one knows how long the stretch will be, only that I should stick to the main trail.
“Hold my staff?” I ask Andrec while I do a quick stretch. It’s better to keep the legs moving and circulating than to keep them crammed in the vans. He hands it back to me. I drink from a water bottle then throw it back into the van. Water drenches my face and chest. The runners look at me. To them, I’m still the new guy. My legs are still fresh but I have a long way to go before earning my place among them. I pocket some salmon jerky.
“You got this. See you on the other side,” Andrec says, and slides the door closed.
Like many times before, the van drives off into the distance without me. It’s an image I never get used to. I can never quite trust that the runners will come back for me, but I have to trust in the process. I take a breath of fresh air and shoot forward toward the mandibles of a mountain and into a tangle of dirt trails.
The path winds forever between tall, unrelenting cedars. Grasses shudder against a light wind. Lances of light spear through the canopy of trees and impale my eyes. The warbling sounds of birds play tricks on my mind. Deeper in I go, and steeper I climb. On inclines, I lean my head forward for support. Trees thick with moss crowd around me, studying me studying them. Deer droppings spot the area.
The quick transitions through sun and shade warms my face and cools my body.
I take off my drenched shirt in hot flashes of open land and wrap it around my head. I dodge, hop, and zigzag along the jagged earth, like a deer, and plunge into darkness. My toes dig into my worn soles. But too soon I’m out of breath and I doubt if I can make it to the end. But everyone is counting on me, expecting me on the other side.
I finally tear free from the long stretch of dark forest pressing up against my chest and into a greener, kinder world where long braids of verdant hair curl down from the green skies. Thick tendrils brush up against my shoulders and usher me over the earth like a puppet. The mossy green earth softens the impact on my knees as I struggle to run.
Suddenly, near the crest, I come to an abrupt stop. Maybe one hundred feet from me, in the middle of the path, is a mountain lion whose home I have disturbed. It lets out a low snarl that plants me on the spot, and my body goes numb.
Frozen, my eyes keep with the lion’s. Controlled breaths keep me alive. It whips its tail, ready to lasso me in. Monstrous paws move massive muscle. Sharp shoulder blades click into position. Its black mouth and white mustache widen—tasting the air and aura around me. Judging my worth. Nostrils wrinkling, whiskers bristling.
Its eyes are almost human, large, almond-shaped. Sad, almost. Like me. It hisses. As if to say, “Hear me.” My heart muscle tenses, and I clench my fists around my staff and tighten my stomach. Rigor-mortis tense.
It postu
res lower to the ground.
This is it. It’s time to be tumbled and eviscerated from this path like a mudslide, relinquished from this world by the mouth of a beautiful lion.
We are alone in a forest, encroached upon on all sides by a tumultuous life, and compelled forward by survival. But I project.
I then remember Refugio’s advice for surviving animal encounters: “Thank the animal.” It snarls again, and lowers its tail. It moves toward me. I step back. Again it moves. I step back. I turn my head behind me and think about running. As if I could I outrun it.
Trembling, I raise my arms slowly toward the sky, and shout as loudly as I can, “Thank you.”
It doesn’t appear to hear me.
“Thank you!” I say louder and louder until it moves away. I tear up. “Thank you!” I shout, as if speaking first words to my father and mother, whom I never thanked. The cougar seems to register this and runs up the hillside, behind a boulder, and for the first time in a long time I cry.
When my father was an orphan in Mexico, three stray dogs befriended and bore the weight with him. His mother had died in an accident—falling from the back of a crowded truck on the highway—and my father, barely fifteen years old, grieved among the three dogs who coaxed the kid out of him when he was forced to grow up too soon. They shook him from his depression, nudged him to press on, and defined what was a short-lived childhood. They gave him warmth at night, and helped him track and retrieve food when he shot lizards from trees.
After some time, his father made contact from Los Angeles and made arrangements for my father and his two sisters to move in with one of his mistresses, in the neighboring state of Tecomán, Colima, until he could get them to the U.S.
It didn’t work out and my father became a beggar in the streets of Tecomán until he secured a job, which he kept for nearly a year, on a pig farm near El Tecuanillo, Colima, feeding, castrating, and preparing pigs for slaughter, he would tell me.