Night descended slowly upon the cities below, wrapping its coolness around the tens of millions of people who lived pressed up against the San Gabriel Mountains, quietly alleviating the intense Summer heat that had gripped all of Southern California for the past month.
For some -- those few who still lived with their eyes and minds still open to the world around them -- it was a welcome relief, yet for most, the drawing coolness was hardly even noticed, the heat of the day and the coolness of the evening were un-felt, un-noticed, a thing kept distant from the awareness of a humanity that had lost its connection to the environment, mostly, a people rootless and stupid, and unfeeling.
Among the millions of endless, monotonous, mind-numbing cookie cutter houses of the Foothill cities, porch lights uselessly came on, dinner tables were set, and the mindless robots who had toiled their youth away in the corporate cogs of America sat down to once again drown their unthinking, numbed, pointless lives in the trenchancy and foolish wastelands of television.
When the last of the pre-processed, pre-cooked, pre-tend food had been microwaved and eaten, when the last of the beer cans had been emptied and crushed to sit cluttering the arms of countless sofas across the southland, the people eventually rose from their stupor with lidded eyes, pressing the remote control button that quieted the box of lies and mindless stupidity for the night, then made their ways towards the welcome respite of sleep, turning off lights as they went, if they remembered and weren't quite too drunk to do so.
With the cities below glittering with a billion street lights and fully illuminated parking lots far below, forest creatures who had hid the day away to escape the abject, fatal lunacy of the humans who flooded the mountains during the day began to stir in their lairs, in their dens, and out from under the brush where they had managed to survive another day without being murdered casually for fun by feckless, bored asshole armed with hand guns and spray paint.
With the coming of the coolness, a gentle breeze began to blow, lifting the leaves of the spruce, the aspen, oak, and rustling pine needles which rubbed against each other in the dark, talking secret talk from tree to tree, whispering ancient stories passed down from generation to generation of trees, never-ending stories told by ancient oaks and pines to their fresh saplings.
Had there been anyone to see, within the narrow spring-fed valley of grass, oak, and pine which Native American Indians had called "mohenga 'o e ngaahi misi" in their native Tongva language (and which the white man called the "Valley of the Moon,") a faint glimmer on the ground in a patch of scrub oak appeared.
It looked like nothing more than a bit of white cloud that had some how lay hidden in the brush for a time, newly released from its rest, perhaps, with the coming of the night. It was a whiff of white mist rising up out of the ground from which the brush grew, slowly rising up to gather in to an oblong shape which, once the cloud was free of the ground, wafted East a dozen feet or so before settling once again to stand on the grassy ground.
The spirit of the Tongva Chief coalesced from the mist and solidified. Had there been anyone there to see, the spirit Chief looked solid enough; no longer was he a transparent cloud of mist. He stood there wrapped in deer skin trousers which wrapped around his skinny legs, a thin scrap of deer hide came up from his wait to cross over his left shoulder, then the strip of deer hide crossed down his muscled and sun-burned back and tied to his waist on the right.
In his left hand he held his smoking pipe, long emptied of the tobacco that was once traded to his people by the Mexicans who had invaded the lands his people had lived on since the time before time. The pipe would always be empty, he knew, the tobacco would never come again, not to him, not to his fellow dead tribes people, yet it was held gently in hand, a thing of comfort, a cherished thing he had made himself from reeds and baked mud, back two centuries ago when he had been alive.
He had died here, in what his people had called the "Bed of Dreams." Many of his people had died with him, and they had died with much anger and sorrow.
He walked up to the top of the hill, as he often did now, unseen in the night, crossing over the crisp grass and occasionally through clumps of brush, not disturbing their leaves or crushing the grass that he walked on. He hated that road that the white men had built to his right, it was an evil thing, he would not even look at it as he climbed the small hill, then he turned and looked Southward.
Far off in the distance he watched the twinkle of the millions of lights of the cities below that had grown up and surrounded the mountains, pressing in relentlessly like the cancer that the cities were.
Long after his death, he would often rise from the ground where he had fallen to the white man's bullets, rising with hatred in his heart and unheard screams of rage coming from his throat, but that was long ago. Now he merely stood and watched the lights for a time, his impotent rage long replaced by a calm pity.
As he often did now, he lifted his pipe and held it in front of him, blocking out some of the stench, the stink, the filth of the twinkling monster off in the distance, and said, in his native language, "Your time is yet before you when you shall pass away as I have."
He lowered his pipe and held it by his side. He closed his eyes and felt the cool breeze on his spirit face and lamented the fact that the wind could never move his long hair, that pleasure had been denied him ever since his death.
He opened his eyes and spoke again. "I pity that you have lost your earth, you have lost the dirt that would ground you to this world. I pity that you know nothing of the rain, of the Sun, you know nothing of the squirrel and the birds that would speak to you if only you would listen."
The Chief turned and gazed Northward, looking up in to the mountains that were mere shadows against the star-strewn night. He let out a sigh and told the darkness, "The white man can not last forever, not as they are, without roots. They will wash away like the rock and the clay as time comes and time comes and time comes, but they will never be able to join me here in my Bed of Dreams. They lack the wisdom, they lack the humanity. I pity them who will die forever because they did not, could not comprehend what life was and how to live it."
He let loose another sigh, then he began to lose shape, his form became transparent and once again what looked like a bit of ground mist in the dark, star-lit night sank in to the ground and, unseen, the Bed of Dreams was again at peace.
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