INDIAN GIVER

British Colombians trying to drink the states dry.

We departed the raucous waters of casino parking lot life and headed for a more serene float in the nearby, surrounding desert of BLM managed lands.

The young Yuma Indian Reservation tribal officer, Thomas Owl Jr. shows me where we are, and it's NOT on Bureau of Land Management land.

We bounced over endless miles of washboard gravel roads, leaving yesterday's casino living in our rooster tail of dust. Wide open country, magnificent vistas and an endless quiet enveloped us like a welcomed Linus blanket.  We had found our new home.

We backed into a flat shallow wash, slid out our expansion slide and rolled down our sun shade....Peace!  

On the way in we saw an occasional fiberboard stick stuck in the ground noting, "entering or leaving" BLM land.  What the hell, we're so far out in the desert, only the rodents and coyotes would be paying us any mind.  Wrong!

"Hello," Officer Thomas Owl Jr. greats us, as the swirl of dust from his pickup settles in the still afternoon. "You know you are on reservation land?" He questions with an almost naive boyish authority.  "Nope,  thought it was BLM land,"  I reply in my best, gosh that's news to me expression.   Google Earth doesn't lie and I had just been working up our exact location on the computer.... 

Short story is, we pay him $20 for a 24 hour Fish and Game Permit and are escorted/relocated 12 miles southeast to an old, rusty can, sacred, tribal garbage dump, where he says, "You'll be more safe, away from the drug traffickers and cougars."  We follow him back across the jaw-jarring washboard road toward his village and then across more bumpy roads to the place he calls, "His All-American Campground,"

We arrive at our new campsite next to another man-made ditch that drains the Colorado River and floods the lettuce fields here in southern California. (This flooding salinates the land and will eventually leave it useless and dead.)

American Coot in the American Canal

Flowering Creosote Bush or High Chaparral  used by the Native Americans as a medicinal herb.

At least we're now out of the path of those hungry cougars and prowling drug traffickers.

Snug and secure on "his" sacred camping land among the Palo Verde trees, creosote bush,  and under the watchful eye of Officer Owl.  

Sacred dead Cottonwood.

Sacred Castle Rock, where, according to Officer Thomas Owl, "The elders of ancient times came to give thanks to the Great Spirit during their nomad wanderings between Picacho Mountain, Pilot Knob and Castle Rock.

February Full Moon, the moon of "Give A Little, Take A Little"

The casino gave us little and the tribe took a little back.  I guess it's only fair....Is it just.....no, but, as my dad used to say, "Small potatoes in the big scheme of things."