04 – Aaryn Lavole

After delivering the wampum shells to the museum/library/cultural center at Akwesasne, and having had a very nice conversation with a woman who works there, vacations once a year on the Cape, and is very involved in a language immersion school and the Mohawk powwow on Cornwall Island, I intentionally took a “wrong” turn away from the border to smoke the last of my Vermont grown marijuana and not cross the border with any cannabis.
I then turned the car around onto the side of a very remote road to face downhill, and got out of the car to do the pipe ceremony, when coming down the road was a woman in a wheelchair.
“Not something you see everyday,” I said, and thereupon met Aaryn. Aaryn pronounces Akwesasne completely differently than I do and laughs when I say it. After about an hour together I consider her one of my closest friends and this magnificent human being is but what cold my attention to her was that she was in a wheelchair and was rolling down the hill in her wheelchair. In the middle of fucking nowhere. I’ll tell you the rest of the story later Uh Oh.