Keepsake
(Published in Bomb Magazine, 2003)

It was the end of my summer break from art school. I had worked for the last three months for Seismograph in what they call the high deserts of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. It was hard but fun. We worked way out, at least twelve sometimes seventeen hours a day and often as much as seventy-five miles off paved roads in Ford 4-wheel drive pick-ups. We were trying to survey straight lines across mostly closed government land, land that had very little human interaction, mostly wild horses, antelope and sage. I had found a Ford Model-T truck that apparently had fallen down and was hidden in a deep gully with a tree growing out of it. It had been there for a long time. There was a coffee cup on the dash and there was still paper in the glove box. The door laying off of it said - Trapper of Furs and Pelts. I took it. I also had an assortment of antlers and pieces of antlers, old bottles and cool rocks in the trunk of my Delta 88. I was flying home. I took the back roads, the scenic route. I was in the panhandle of Oklahoma when I stopped at a gas station. It was dusty and faded. I was filling my ‘73 Oldsmobile when I spotted a hand painted sign that said - Museum of the Plains this way. I paid for the gas and parked, then followed the arrow on the sign behind the gas station. There was a big curved Quonset hut full of old shit, coffins, old beauty parlor furniture, old cars, whiskey bottles, cow and buffalo skulls, a bunch of human skulls with holes on the top, a horse drawn hearse, old bicycles, coke machines, so much I don’t even remember, but it was full. Then came out a tall, old, white haired man with what looked like a fishing hat on. He showed me around. We talked about his collection. He said that he had lived out there all his life and this was his museum, but the state refused to condone it because the aisles were too narrow, there was no wheelchair access and not enough bathrooms. Me and the old man hit it off. I was twenty-two and he was eighty-one he said. When asked why did those skulls have holes in the top he said when he was a boy he would find them, Indians had buried the dead sitting up and left the tops of them exposed. The vermin would eat through the skull, but when he found them that way, they were old and that was a long time ago. I asked him if he wanted to see my stuff I found that summer on my job up there. We walked out to my car. I popped the trunk. his eyes lit when he saw my door and antlers and things. – Sure would like to have that door, he said. - No, I like it, and I told him how I found it. It just made him want it more. I thought it was funny how such an old man still wanted to collect stuff. So I gave him some antlers. I had plenty and they were mostly pieces anyway. We were slumped over my open trunk when I asked him – since you’re so old what are you going to do with all this stuff when you die, you got kids or something? He straightened up tall off the bumper and said in a low, serious voice – I’m going to take it to Mexico. I go, - what? What are you going to do with it in Mexico? He says - yep, I’m gonna go down there an build a cinder block building to put my things in and lock it up. I go - why Mexico, why not here? Then he says - because Mexico is the only place they let you keep your things after you die.

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