Lakota Woman Paper I

    It was daylight when I woke up.  My head, rested on a pile of hay, was pounding with the memories (and alcoholic endeavors) of the night before.  I was sore and confused and overwhelmingly grateful to be a human being on the planet known as Earth. 

See, I was sleeping in a barn on a farm in Beaverton.  My girlfriend and I had somehow crammed ourselves into one sleeping bag, keeping our heads around 30°F while our necks down remained closer to the temperature of the sun.  Jesus Himself was literally sleeping within ten feet of us.  Things hadn’t been this laid back these past twenty-four hours, but they had certainly been as capricious.

          This Saturday morning was, in Portland, to be Christmas, Easter, Chanukah and Thanksgiving all wrapped into one for the cobbing community.  Cobbing is the ancient art of natural and sustainable building.  Cobbers get together and use rocks, sand, straw, and clay to make entire structurally sound buildings.  My girlfriend Hannah and I had three cobbing sites to go to that day.

          The first was on 33^rd and Yamhill, only three blocks from my parent’s pad, where we had slept the night before, so we trotted over there.  A bench was being built in the shape of tobacco leaves.  It was made of a clay-y sand mixture.   Immediately we got assigned my favorite task in the whole world, stomping barefoot in the sandy-clay mixture to keep it mixed.  It was so fun to feel the soft squishy goop between my toes.  We were able to stay there and converse with our friends for about 45 minutes, and then we bicycled with a few others to the next cobbing site.

          At this next site, we were building a community cobb oven for neighborhood picnics.  We worked with members of the community to build an igloo shape out of sand, and then covered it first with a thermal layer of sandy-clay, then a middle layer of clay-y straw, then an outer layer of clay-y sand and etched into it a brick-like outline which made it closely resemble an igloo.  We were there about an hour and a half, before we hopped onto our bicycles and fluttered like faeries down to “People’s Food Co-op”, a community-owned store in Portland, specializing in organic foods.

Once we arrived at “People’s Food Co-op”, the real fun began.  There was a square-dance going on in the middle of the street, block party style.  Free vegan hot-dogs were being passed around, and there was even vegan-ice-cream-eating contests.  We hung out there with around 500 of Portland’s finest cobbers.  We worked on the cobbing project at hand for a little while, but mostly slacked off.  It was, after all, an unofficial national holiday for cobbers.  We spent the day dancing in the street, and when nighttime fell, many of our adult friends (the child-cobbers and their parents had all left) got into cars and onto bicycles and started making their way to the Beaverton residence for crusty-punks, lifestyle anarchists, and cobbers known as “the farm”.

As it was growing late and the day’s events had left us far too tired to bicycle, my girlfriend Hannah, our friend Klayr, and I decided to acquire a ride from our friend Maya’s dad.  It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to drive from southeast Portland to “The Farm” and when we got there, things were already in full swing.  It was about 9:00pm, and there was a massive bonfire with a bunch of hippies sitting around it playing bongo drums.  It was some of the most beautiful music I had ever heard.  People were beating drums to what is called an anarchic beat: one where each person beats at a steady rhythm decided only by themselves, and together it forms beautiful music.  Upon sitting down around the bonfire, toward the front so I could warm up, I was immediately passed a large bottle of wine and a bongo drum by someone I had known from cobbing in months past.  “Thanks”, I said, taking a drink from the wine and passing it on.  I sat by the fire playing the bongo with my eyes closed.  I could feel the loving warmth of the campfire on my face while I kept the same steady beat over and over again.  It merged with the beats of others, forming a medley reflected into the soul of each person there.  Klayr and Hannah had gotten bored and gone into the woods to scope out a place to sleep that night, but I was entranced.  I only stopped when my throat became extremely dry and I reached for one of the many nearby wine-bottles and took a huge gulp.  I kept my rhythm going for over an hour, having an unmistakably spiritual experience.  After what must’ve been two hours or more, the drumming slowed to a stop and we all held hands for a Wiccan prayer to the earth goddess to protect this land from those who want to use it for residential development (apartments).  While I am not Wiccan, I participated in this prayer, wanting to be respectful of their culture and feeling that overall, it is a worthy goal. 

After the Wiccan prayer and the shouting (so the goddess can hear you)that Wiccan prayers often entail, the group started singing Bob Marley songs.  I got up and sauntered into the woods to look for Hannah and Klayr.  I found them walking back from the direction of the barn with our friend Jesus.  Jesus had shown them that the barn would make an excellent place to sleep so we wouldn’t have to set up our tent in the field.

          At that point Klayr got a call on her cell phone.  It was her mom and she was worried about her.  She had to come home with someone.  Luckily, the people who weren’t spending the night were already heading out, so she left after saying lengthy goodbyes (I was a little drunk and thus, had a desire to express how I feel about her). 

          Hannah and I went into the barn and spent the better part of an hour trying to fit two people in one sleeping bag.  A half hour or so later, our good friend Jesus stumbled into the barn and fell asleep next to us.  The next morning, Jesus and I conversed about how incredible the night before had gone, and we went to the outdoor cobb kitchen to get some breakfast.  Scrambled tofu was being served and it was delicious.  It was around 11am, so we had already missed a good portion of the rides back into Portland, but we found one that was leaving around 1pm, which left us plenty of time to work on the cobb sauna being built at the farm.  It took us a while to get back into Portland, but the time flew by as I couldn’t get over what a magical 24 hours it had been.

          It’s times like those that I know my culture is the most kick-assinist culture around.