What Indians learn on ESPN

[Christopher Gonzales]

Ouch! Screech, crash!

As I type this, I am not wearing any shirt at all,,, On the wall above my
Macintosh, next to a tattered mall-art poster and a plaque bearing my
genius certification from the The Jim Beam and Cathode Ray Tube
MacArthy-Era Preservation Foundation, hangs a twisted loop of black
plastic.  It is a child's Hot Wheels racing set given to me by a 40-year
old man, an Inuit.  I was covering the Iditerod for ESPN.  We'd torn across
the permafrost in our Chevy Suburban when we got bogged down near a small
village.  We found the Inuit hunkered down in his Igloo playing with the
racing track, brought in by capitalists, imperialists, careless children of
tourists, who knows.  We set up our cameras and rolled tape of the car
racing action, broadcast in place of the dog race, since we'd lost track of
that anyway.  As we left he took my hand and insisted I take a delicate
whalebone sculpture as a souvenir, but I demanded the toy set.  He made
quite a fuss, stomping about and pretending to cry, but I eventually forced
it out of his hands.  Here was a meeting of might, in the world of the
flesh, of winners and losers, and I had won.  Not padding about in some
unseasonably cold office/garage, on a Saturday morning, muttering to myself
and to no one in particular, convinced I could never improve myself because
I am already great.  As it is said in the Bantu proverb, "Poison should be
tried out on a frog."


Chris