Cracker box homes and linoleum floors

Monday, October 28, 2019

By James Giago Davies

Native Sun News Today Contributing Editor

Looking west from the Sheep Mountain overlook, the vista is relatively pristine, preserved from the encroachment of civilization by a world war. Much of this land was seized by the government, as a weapons testing range, and a hundred Lakota families were relocated.

A Hollywood movie could be filmed here with little evidence that it wasn’t the 19th Century. There is one old Gunsmoke episode, where far in the background, ahead of a dust plume, on a backroad, you can see a pickup bounding along. But looking down from Sheep Mountain, there doesn’t even appear to be any backroads, nothing to dispel the illusion that any person has ever laid eyes on this vista, before you.

What we fail to do, far too often, is understand that what we look at is akin to tiny windows, covered with dirt, and we can rub ourselves a little peephole, to peer out into a larger perspective. Enough time has passed that there are now layers of civilization over the ancient world. Our eyes can be conditioned to seeing only surface details, but if we look beneath them, broaden that peephole, with some degree of foreknowledge, we can still see striking evidence of the reality our parents lived in, and then beneath that, the reality our grandparents lived in.

Near every highway is evidence of an earlier highway, or a rail bed. Apply a little imagination, get the right vantage point, and the past can reveal itself to the present.

These peepholes exist indoors as well, and sometimes they are not a peephole, but a revealed alteration that speaks not only to the past, but to the mentality of the present. When I was small, linoleum was all the rage. And people thought they needed to cover everything with it, just like they thought automobiles should have gigantic whale shark fins jutting up from the back.

Years later, people would buy an old home and renovate it. They would tear up the linoleum, thinking what awful flooring it must be for this awful linoleum to be seen as an improvement. But, more often than not, underneath that linoleum, was a wooden floor, that just required some love and attention to bring it back to life.