Life Among the Winnebago

LIFE AMONG THE WINNEBAGO

John Schouten

Wooden Indians,

mechanical miners,

barkers with beards and bad teeth

bid us enter and buy,

women with legs like bread dough

and men with John Deere

caps or Epcot Center belt buckles

amble through curio shop doors

with passionless faces:

we have taken up life with the Winnebago.

 

Those of us who eschew the city bus

for the daily tournament of freeways

put a home inside a bus

and tie ourselves with black umbilici

to oases like Rec Vee Park

or Chief Hosa Campground,

everchanging landscapes

of aluminum in the pines.

 

We eat the native foods

(Coca-Cola, yuppie cheese, light beer, Twix bars)

and perform the necessary rituals

of acculturation (the symbolic bath,

a facsimile of suburban food preparation);

 

we seek artifacts by which to explain,

to understand

the structure of life in this elusive tribe,

following their movements with tangles

of microphones and videotape and Kodak

in all its forms,

tip-tapping field notes

WordPerfectly for the annals

of science that lie

in file drawers

and shoe boxes and floppy disks

and photo albums and coat pockets throughout

the land of the Winnebago.