Bear's Den: "A Boys Only Game - 'Blackberry Poker'"

Mm-mm, the Blackberry Moon. This is the time that the blackberries ripen. But here in northwest Michigan, I´m a ways north of the traditional Shawnee homelands. In this colder clime, I´m still picking ripening raspberries. But black or rasp – the thorns are aplenty, on either vine. And the thing about a thorn… is that it can poke you in the paw or… right in the behind.

The other day I had to go see my Cho-beka elene (medicine man). Now, my old doc, Rich Sahloff, had the unmitigated gall to up and retire on me. But, that´s okay. A better saw bones would´a been hard to find for the 25 years that I visited him. My new guy is a mea-ne-len-eh (young man) named Kyle Pline. He´s a good doc and is pretty savvy on the natural, as well as the modern, stuff. He´s an outdoorsman, too. I was picking berries for my sister-in-law and grand niece, who like the little fruits. So, I also toted my doctor some wild raspberries when I went calling. Here on the Rez, the blackberry vines are intermeshed with the raspberry and I could see plenty of new blacks in the making. But while I was picking, and dodging thorns, I recalled a prickling time for a pal in my youth.

Back in 1966, we lived in Muskegon, Michigan. It was a factory town, then, and a port city on the great lakes. Trains were still a mainstay and we had a car ferry that would load/unload rail cars onboard and sail them across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee. Uh-huh, and I lived nearby. Now in mid-summer, one of the dumb things that some kids in our neighborhood did was hop the train as it left the lake headed for the factories and foundries downtown. Yep – I know – stupid. But it´s the general nature of a kid to be so, and we were nothing… if not common. The train would travel through some overgrown areas but mostly through suburbia and downtown. So it never got above 25 MPH. Our main reason for hopping the train, other than fun, was to ride it to where the new McDonald´s was located, some three miles away. Back in those days, Mickey-D´s, was just a walk-in and order place. No clowns, no play lands or inside seating, and no ¼ pounders, Big Mac´s or sundaes, either. But, a burger was only .18 cents, and a kid could usually scrounge that much from gathered pop-bottle deposit money, eh.

Now Kenny Botwell was a chunky, smart-alecky kid that hailed from a well-to-do family, and he never got dirty. He wasn´t a bully, but he was big enough to beat any of us up, and whenever he was around, it was like the proverbial thorn in our back sides. He was a year or two older than most of us – maybe eleven. His dad bought a new car every year and ´like father-like son´ – Kenny got a brand new Sting Ray bicycle… every year… too. Yeah – no kid´n – even if his old one was perfectly good. His cousins got the cast-offs. Mostly, he assumed that he was better than us and was always calling us creeps, dirty bums and the like. Yeah, and although he´d never admit it in a million years… he was scared of hopping the train and we all knew it. Anyway, as such, Kenny was not one of the favorites in the limited social crowd of boys that I ran with. There were no girls in this group because, at this time, they were still considered, well… if not icky… then certainly not keen. That would change for most of us in a few years, but at this point, girls held as much allure as taking a bath – something that my pals and I avoided like the plague. Sure, and one of the reasons that we didn´t cotton to Kenny was that he had a peculiar penchant for the ladies, too. This, like his attitude, name-calling and unbelievable annual new bike, set him apart from us.

Now as strange as it seems, young girls at this age did not see hopping a moving freight train as dashing and cool. Yep, odd but true. That would change for them in a few years, also, but at this time – nope – they saw it as very dangerous and downright foolhardy. But there was one girl, a fifth grader named Karen Bartel, who did think our freight-hopping was heroic. Like Kenny, she was older and was always talking about her big sisters´ boyfriends´ souped-up cars, Elvis Presley and the Beatles – those kind´a things. Kenny – for reasons only God knew – had a bad ache going for her. He said that she was beautiful and other sickening stuff like that. One day, at McGraft Park, she told Kenny that she and several other squithetnas (girls) were going to ride their bikes up to McDonalds. She batted her eyes at him and said that she would watch for him if… he happened to be riding the train when it came through at two o´clock. She smiled coyly, and Kenny just nodded… his Adam´s apple bobbing like a buoy out in the lake. We figured it would never happen, and that was fine with us.

Something must´ve bolstered Kenny´s courage, though, because he showed up in the deep weeds, later, at the spot where we hid to await the train crawling by as it left the ferry. We were surprised when he asked questions, but we explained how to grab the ladder on the last car and hang on. He tried to act cool and collected, but, as we waited for the clanking cars to rumble by, we could see that Kenny was spooked. Anyhow, the last car came up, and we all ran out and hopped onto the caboose for the ride. Kenny actually made it, and boy, was he ever exuberant! He kept screaming about how nifty this was.

And wouldn´t´ya know it; we were almost to our jump-off point when the train stopped. This happened occasionally, due to something up ahead or whatever. We all saw the brakeman hop off up ahead and casually look around. Yet, when he saw us, all calm left his features. He climbed up a ladder and began making a beeline our way on top of the cars. Yeah, and he had a real mean look on his face, too. That meant that it was time to go, and go in a hurry. The problem was that the caboose had stopped with most of the cars on the trestle spanning Ruddiman Creek. Straight down was a thick wad of greenery and nobody knew what lay beneath it – boulders, sharp pointy stakes, crocodiles – anything. The railroad ties behind were way too far apart to run on and the adult would catch us for sure. But if we worked our way backwards, just a bit, then when we jumped, we were going to hit the steep sandy bank going downward to the stream below. A guy could break a bone that way, but there wasn´t much choice. We scrambled back and made the leap. Nobody managed to break anything, but when we looked up, Kenny hadn´t moved and was still clinging to the train, fear etched on his face.

We all egged him to move back and jump as we had. The brakeman was getting closer. Kenny screamed that he wasn´t going to jump where we did because he´d break his leg. We watched in astounded awe… as he tentatively let loose and jumped, his eyes bulging with terror… right into the mass of greenery below. We heard him hit and it sounded like he´d landed on a big pile of fall leaves – soft and floofy. We yelled and he answered, saying that he was okay and nothing was broken. But, then, as the brakeman began hollering and shaking his fist at us from atop the caboose, we lit out of there, figuring that Kenny could make it on his own. But, right after we entered the concealment of deep foliage, we heard anguished cries intermixed with crying sobs from Kenny. We assumed that the brakeman had caught him and he was getting the whipping of his life. Nothing we could do anything about that, so we continued on to our destination.

We were all eating our hamburgers and sharing a milk shake on the curb outside of McDonald´s when Karen and her girlfriends rode up. She asked if Kenny was there. We pointed out that he was right over there on the grass, waiting for his mom to come and pick him up and take him to the doctor. Her eyes finally locked on him in puzzlement. When the other girls saw him, they snickered a little, because he was a peculiar sight. Kenny was laying flat on his belly because his rear-end was a torn-up mess. His mangled t-shirt looked like it had been tie-dyed in Mercurochrome, and was wrapped around his otherwise nude waist. But his shredded Bermuda shorts and newly crimson-spattered underwear were the worst, and were in a pile beside him as he whimpered. His face, arms, legs and hands looked like red and white plaid from all of the deep scratches in them, and he was soaked. The greenery had turned out to be a thick patch of blackberry brambles and Kenny had landed right in the middle of it. It broke his fall nicely, but his butt had taken a terrible swiping on his way down. And, when he tried to get out, the thorns shredded him to pieces – no matter which way he went. He was so dazed when he finally broke free; he stumbled and fell into the creek.

And so, there you go. Black or rasp – the thorns are aplenty, on either berried vine. And the thing about a thorn… is that it can poke you in the paw or… right in the behind.

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David Walks-As-Bear is an Inter-Tribal Elder and Kispoko Shawnee Indian. He works as a private game warden and detective captain, and is a novelist and syndicated newspaper columnist living in Northwest Michigan. Contact him at The White Lake Beacon: 231-894-5356 or visit his website at: www.Walks-As-Bear.com