Dawn's Time Warp

It is dawn. I don’t see dawn often. The fresh morning air smells like possibilities. The heaviness over my body from only six hours of sleep gives dawn a bit of extra appeal too—like dawn must be a magical thing to have chosen to wake for it. But, it wasn’t really a choice.

As I drove east, the sky began to fill up with pink and gold. The sun was reborn, again. An ugly car dealership blocked the better part of the view, before I parked in an uglier Walmart parking lot. I stood for a moment in a state of confusion in front of an automatic door that wasn’t automatic. A lazy eyed employee with a scraggly beard jumped forward, fixing it. Chivalry isn’t dead.

Time mixes itself up in the memory when there has been a lot of activity at once. Or maybe that is a characteristic of dawn—a foggy brain, a newborn sun, and a time warp. How did I end up standing in front of the automatic door of Walmart with scraggly-beard man at dawn?

Rewind twenty-four hours. I was walking around in the bright sunlight—the sun was still young, but past its infancy—and my mouth was on fire. It’s tradition, I do it every October, and my digestive tract pays the consequences every year.

I was there in line, waiting around with the five hundred other people with fire in their mouths, waiting for something—barbeque tinged in datil pepper, or maybe it was those innocent looking shellfish propped open atop that pepper-laced risotto, or that cheesecake with the chunks of datil mixed in? I don’t know. My sinuses were flowing freely.

“Is that hot?” The boy pointed to the food on my plate, tugging at my shirt. “I don’t think so,” I shrugged. The boy took a tentative bite, then danced around the line, spitting and yelling “It’s hot! It’s hot!” After about the third course, the tolerance increases greatly. I always forget that. I shuffled through my purse for a biscotti—a biscotti to the rescue.

Fast forward twelve hours. I’d crossed state lines. I was standing in a crowd of people. There was a dim glow in the sky to the west, turning the brilliant sky blue of the afternoon into only a faded shade from the sun’s remains. There was the sound of tires over a gravel road, and the haze of kicked up dust whited out part of the horizon. Smoke—a combination of bonfire and cigarette—was mingling in the air nearby. Then the low tones of chanting.

I knew a lady from a Native American tribe in Wisconsin. She told me they thought of the Cherokee as the white man version of natives. I doubted the Cherokee themselves would agree. I had no opinion on the matter—I was just a random white lady heavily descended from western Europeans wondering around on a Cherokee reservation at dusk.

Then the drums. Dancers filled in the open spaces around the drummers, feathers and frills bouncing around in the cooling evening air. The costumes created unusual silhouettes, especially at the level of the boy. I bent down to point to dancers, when one caught my eye. An elderly man wore the skin of an animal so that his face was entirely obscured by it and his bent posture. The animal extended down over his back, and in that bowed position looked like a four-legged creature poised to pounce. A staff was in his hand, and he shuffled it back and forth in time with his steps. An air of animalistic wisdom radiated off of him. The smoke, the drums, the dim glow and the slow, steady movements—I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. But I was just some white lady heavily descended from Europeans, so I held my ground.

Move on another twelve hours. Here I stand. Electric lights, the clang of shopping carts, and the gnarly beard of the chivalrous Walmart employee. The pink was fading from the sky, the sun would soon be up above that ugly car dealership, and the time warp was fading. I found my purpose again, and entered the consumer jungle.

I wonder if that man in the animal skin could have been the medicine man I met in the woods—no. Couldn’t be.