The whole story part IV

To see it from the beginning, scroll a few posts down and start with I. This one is kind of an overview.

We still feel a little traumatized by the whole thing. I'm traumatized because, seeing it from his point of view, I know he's traumatized. He didn't know what to make of a village of kids who all knew each other, from twelve or more years back, didn't know him, and didn't know what to make of him.

If he could have just relaxed and been himself, that would have worked; it usually does. These kids were not malicious, or hostile, at least not at first, and not even especially racist, though that came out later too and could have been part of it. None of that would have stopped him from being good friends with them.

Some he was very close friends with. These were kids who like his gaming setup and didn't mind hanging out whole weekends eating pizza and gaming. What else was there to do? Lots of the kids were going hunting or cutting firewood. He was holed up in a back room hijacking cars on the streets of San Andreas. With friends, occasionally.

We moved to Illinois because he couldn't go to school. By that point they'd told him they'd put a bullet in him if he did. They'd called him the "n" word too. That makes them look bad but in fact they were just being mean like lots of high school kids can be if they want to be. I didn't believe there was a real threat to his life. They would probably have beaten him up if it came to it though, and they'd even said that.

He was more than partly responsible for what happened. He seemed to be very interested in being cool, being tough, sneering at the world and sneering at us. That's a teen's main weapon especially when one doesn't have a lot of other skills. They saw through it and called his bluff.

As for me I can now see I was unprepared for mountain life. Unprepared to be thirty miles from town in a blizzard when cliff roads are icy. But more than that, unprepared to lead a kid through rough times when he feels isolated from his peers. I tried to get him to play basketball once, when we still lived in the village, and he wouldn't. Didn't want to be seen at the school, maybe? Didn't want to lose? I felt like something was wrong already. He'd become uncomfortable in his own skin.

So it happened naturally, developed over a couple of years, and never got any better. Now I reminisce.

Fortunately he wasn't the one who was out there shooting wild horses, when they wandered into town, or got too close by hanging out at the corner where the slash pit was. Those wild horses were all over the place, coming out from the Mescalero Reservation where they had more than enough, apparently, and doing pretty well but having to keep moving to avoid both traffic and your random teen with a hunting-rifle. I suspect it was a teen but never really knew. And I though that was sick, just putting down wild horses like they were nothing.

He got me to take him back a year or so after we'd moved. Of his best friends, none would come down off the mountain to say hello to him in Alamogordo. I thought that showed an unusual unanimity about how to treat him (poorly), or cowardice to need to be part of a group that is "better than" somebody. Who knows what it was. I may sound bitter. I don't know the whole story and, after all, they're just kids.

A large number of them are pregnant or with child already, though only a year or two out of high school. I hope they have jobs. Life will go on, and maybe the kids will share that insularity. The mountain kids are part of families that feel very much threatened by the modern world. The whole life style is threatened. Yet though people shared with me such things as how to take care of generators, I never really became integrated to the community. I suppose I could have shared that back-there, up-the-mountain, away-from-it-all kind of ethic. It could have been me. There but for the grace of God go all of us.