Hiawatha With a Saucepan

When I was a kid I wanted to live like an Indian. It seemed the ideal life to me. There you are in a woods bordering on a lake. Your territory has more raccoons than people. No schools of course, no traffic, only the silence of a big forest. I would have a birch bark canoe and learn to be pretty good with my bow and arrows.

Now that I am old I am reverting to that dream. It really never left me. This way of life has always been there. Talk about minimalist! The thing is, I really want a modern convenience to make life a whole lot easier, something that no Indian ever had. In my dream world I would eat Indian food, but I would cook it in a stainless steel sauce pan with a strainer lid. Imagine the old guy (probably delusional) dreaming of such a thing.

Not long ago I visited a local park about five minutes out of town. I drove along a back road and there by a little dead end drive I saw a young man and a little boy about five. They were roasting a whole deer on a spit over a huge fire. Never seen anything like it. The Hiawatha spirit was still alive.

Now here is where I would depart from Hiawatha. I would leave the deer alone. I would go on a John the Baptist diet. That's where the sauce pan would come in. A big item on the menu might be grass seed with Amaranth, cooked in my dream sauce pan.

Can you imagine an old guy, dreaming by the fire, but not of times past. He dreams of a vegetable diet, cooked in his copper clad stainless steel sauce pan with strainer lid. He will never be a Brave, but he might make it as an an Apprentice Squaw.