Snipe Hunting

I am getting to feel that many of the experiences I am going to remember best of all happened outside of class. It was right after we ate dinner at Dr. Foster’s house. Travis and some of the other NSU people invited me, Walker, and Ben to go snipe hunting at a creek called “the NJ.” Walker and I rode in Travis’s pickup truck, and on the way we talked about religious beliefs, how Christianity and Cherokee religion interact, and how people who practice both view their beliefs. Travis called himself a pagan Christian. I am pretty familiar with this concept having lots of family in the Romanian countryside, where Christianity mixed with the belief systems people had prior to the introduction of Christianity. Travis also told us about Cherokee food, including a dessert made of hickory nuts that you have to know how to eat. I also learned that Cherokees cook crawdads differently than North and South Carolinians. I would love to try some of the stuff Travis told us about…

We arrived at the NJ and it was completely dark. The only light was from the stars – even the moon wasn’t out. Dalala and Travis taught Ben the “snipe calls.” Then, me, Ben, Walker, and Asa walked out ahead of the rest of the NSU people. After a few minutes we got kind of scared because we were alone, twenty miles from Tahlequah, and Travis and Dalala had driven. We turned around and eventually met back up with them. Then we found out there was no such thing as snipe hunting. We spent the rest of that night listening to Travis tell Cherokee ghost stories and messing around.

I feel that Walker has already expressed most of my view of that night, because I don’t have anything academic to say about it. On a deep level, I just felt happy and comfortable for the first time in a long while. It was the first night of this trip in which I didn’t feel like an outsider, like someone just here studying. I felt like I was living and just happened to be doing it sitting on a pickup truck with a broken passenger side door handle listening to Travis telling ghost stories. This post is shorter than my others because it’s hard to put an emotional state of mind into words, so I’ll end by saying that that night by itself made coming to Oklahoma completely worth it.