Road Map - Greg

28 July 2007

“The map is not the destination,” the old Indian said, watching me wrestle with the large unfolded road map while the ‘78 Oldsmobile hurtled down the Arizona highway. “Do not be like the dog who stares at the finger that points to the bird.”

The map lay sprawled on my lap and the steering wheel, and the Chief settled back leisurely in the passenger seat, an amused smile on his face, the spectacular Arizona desert racing by. The windows were wide open because I had no air conditioning, and the corners of the map twittered and flipped in the turbulence while the center heaved up and down like a giant pair of lungs.

His name wasn’t really 'The Chief,' it was just a mildly racist nickname I’d given him in my mind, and then to the man himself when I asked him to wash the car windows at a gas station outside of Tucson. I’d picked him up earlier in the day, a lone Papago Indian standing at the side of the highway hitchhiking. He said he was heading up north to Yuma to visit his daughter. “Jump in,” I said.

Almost immediately the man began to annoy me the way all the Papago do. I don’t know what it is about these people, maybe their leisureliness and the way they seem to live outside of time, maybe their equanimity and acceptance of the intolerable: racism, hardship, poverty, devastation of their people and culture. If I was Caucasian, it’d probably be called White Guilt, but I was Asian, and as far as I know, no Asians ever stole Indian lands. Hell, his ancestors came from Asia. They walked across the Bering Strait 14,000 years ago. In a way, we are brothers, I said to myself through annoyance.

A gust of wind blew through the windows and yanked the map irretrievably from my hands and attention. “Listen, Chief,” another spasm of guilt--talking this way to a man 40 years my senior, “you think maybe you could navigate for me while I drive the car?”

“Can’t read maps,” he said, still calm and smiling.

“Well you think you can take the wheel while I read the map?”

“Why not pull over?”

He had a good handsome face, an Indian elder right out of central casting. I wanted jerk the door open and push him out of the moving car. Sweat poured down my frustrated face. “You’re doing, fine,” he said. “We’ll get there.”

The Oldsmobile raced across the highway. I hate this guy, I thought. But where ever he’s going, I’m taking him there.