tell me your fears… am i in them

At the first holiday party me and B hit, at some point between “breakbeats,” rum & Tings (believe THAT) and fake-cheeze soy crisps (yum), me and Dave T broke down the fearsome geographies of our rural youths, reminiscing on the places we visited when we wanted to scare the shit out of ourselves. His were in the wooded Carolinas and sounded vaguely Blair Witch Project, as they involved disappearing slaughtered deer and like, a lodge. But that’s his story to tell. My story is that I had two. The first was a cemetery, of course, 15 minutes outside of Cheyenne, WY where I grew up, which was supposedly built in the 19th Century atop a “Plains Indians Burial Ground.” Western Expansion remains a prominent theme in Cheyenne, moreso in other places I’ve been in the west (but then I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting Montana). “Indians” tend to motif and mascot all schools, hotels and whatever-whatever, and yet Native Americans are scarce outside the rez on Ft Washakie, about a 12 hour drive NE of Cheyenne (the 2003 census says there were 6460 native americans living in Wyoming at the time, in a total state population of around 500,000 – and Cheyenne has been a city of cowboys, Mexicans and military since the turn of the last century). The idea of “Native American Burial Ground,” as a sacred and vengeful place (i.e. Pet Sematary), is a fear partly predicated on guilt and reciprocation, because it presumes the knowledge, and cognizance, of a great injustice — the desecration of a people, one so profound that even the resting ground of its dead is summarily annexed. Also, I bet some people perpetuated the curse idea in order to stop the conquistadors from fucking up sacred ground.
Surely there’s an essay about this somewhere. I can’t think of any parallels where a cultural fear has manifested itself in pop culture in the same way — all the typical horror tropes that come to mind are built on good old fashioned protestant moral-building, i.e. “screwing teenagers always get axed first.”
So in high school we’d drive up there to scare ourselves. Even without the “indian burial ground” concept. flat plains are inherently eerie, Wyoming nights are terribly dark, its lack of populace is isolating. The people who do live there will exercise the second amendment.
The other fearsome /fear-building place of my youth: abandoned nuclear missile silos in a crater in the country, unguarded enough that we Boones-thirsty teenagers threw parties there. They were large concrete structures with rotund steel girders pointing 45 degrees into the sky, which had clearly once cradled huge missiles, ready to pop off at Reagan’s first Xanax stupor. These were the years Doug Coupland was bonerizing the radioactive flash of the final countdown (in the Clinton administration no less, finally free to work out his cold war anxiety). Me and my friends ate up all Coupland’s anomic Gen-X books, but like, our teen apocalypse fears felt a little more, how you say, tactile.
Because when your hometown displays lifesize replicas of “peacekeeper” nuclear-missiles as proudly as it displays its statue-homage to “first woman governor” Esther Hobart Morris, nuclear fear is not so far-flung. ERRRY DAY I LIVED IT. During the Cold War, before I was even a tween, my bully of a cousin (now Mormon) tortured me by saying, “You know Julianne, if the Russians attack, Cheyenne will be the first place to go.” In retrospect, he was probably wrong, although one arrogance of the US military is that it likes to floss. And considering the prominent monument to our phallic stockpile that still flanks the entrance of FE Warren Airforce Base, they might well have faxed Gorbachev with the exact coordinates.
Also PS. Special to Dick Cheney, ’90s style: EET FUK
Party-hopping: After the rum ‘n’ Tings, delicioso to the max, B and I stood on the corner of Lenox in the cold, waiting for a cabbie that would take us from up in Harlem down to Carroll Gardens for holiday party #2. A man in a gypsy cab recognized our frozen desperation and was willing to negotiate a price. $40 and 40 minutes later, we were sipping wine from glasses with stems, missing the Knicks fight, discussing our moms.