My Crow kin call me “Lucky.” It’s a relative thing.

When the Whistling Water Clan of the Crow Tribe decided to adopt me, I was honored. When a clan uncle tossed in a Crow name, I was delighted.

I was certain the name he chose would have something to do with my occupation – something like Story Teller, Scribbler or Big Chief Talking Paper.

My  mistake was thinking the Crow were impressed with my story-telling skill. They were not and are not. The Crow’s fame for oratory is matched only by their renown for stealing horses.

Whistling Waters were not awed by my writing but found my good luck most remarkable. A clan uncle christened me “Baachenaheasash.” Formally the name means “Man of many fortunes,” but my adopted kin shortened it to “Lucky.”

After all, I was the one who drove all the way home from Central America with no spare tire. On another occasion, I drove all one winter with a large paper clip holding the linkage between an old van’s transmission and the gear shift lever.

I had been in enough close scrapes to wear out several guardian angels and managed to graduate from high school after losing half my senior year to an acute case of truancy.

Lady luck rode shotgun in the ambulance that hauled my carcass to the hospital the night I collapsed at an AA meeting. One minute I was sitting there telling lies, the next minute I was flopping around on the floor like a trout out of water. Fourteen days later, a doctor asked me if I knew where I was. I didn’t.

Nor did I remember a minute of the past two weeks. Friends said I was lucky to be alive.

I was lucky to have had a painless heart attack, but it would have cost me nothing to check out. The best food, conversation, intoxication, sex and other carnal pleasures are behind me. I look back on – not forward to – seeing the Southern Cross set in the South Pacific, the Northern Lights crackling over the Shanejack River in the Arctic, and Magellanic Clouds affixed to a midnight sky over the Amazon River. I have survived bouts  of love, car crashes and canoe wrecks.

I have been hired, fired and jailed. I’ve been shot at and missed, swung at and hit.

I’ve been broke, on foot and beat bloody by three French soldiers. I have committed capitalism, learned to ride a surf board (but never very well).

It’s been a good life. I am in no hurry to leave it, but the best is south of today.

Nature has been good to me and continues to shower me with gifts. Delightful surprises include: a cloud of winter robins on Squaw Creek.  Were these northern birds fleeing a late Indian summer on the coast of British Columbia? Or were they natives re-setting their seasonal calendar in response to climate change?

A hundred sandhill cranes combined to accelerate my adrenalin near Cooney Dam. A friend and I were driving slowly west when the flock caught us from behind, flying low over my car and scattering over the meadow beyond the windshield.

Driving home from Pryor, I was arrested by a huge bristly caterpillar crossing the road in front of me. I shut the car down to discover that the wooly bear was really a litter of little skunks. They followed their mother, nose to tail, nose to tail … . Mamma skunk paused at the edge of the road, bunched her brood in front of her (as if to count them) then pushed them on toward the weeds beyond the fence.

The loss of a young son to a car-train accident taught me how strong a father-son bond might be. The scabbed-over wound still weeps.

When my remaining son was struck in the head with a pipe, the doctor said his wound was “not survivable.” The surgeon gave us better odds. He said my boy had a 20 percent chance.

After flat lining once, the patient survived hours of surgery and weeks of imposed coma. He returned from death’s verge with a report that he had seen Elvis.
“Baachenaheasash,” I thought. That’s me.