When the Actual Thing Arrives, It Usually Smells Like Food

The loudest thing in any room is fear of what hasn't happened yet. The actual event, when it arrives, is usually quieter. Usually smells like food.

Take the time the state health inspector showed up unannounced at the Lutheran church basement during the lutefisk supper. For those of you reading from places where lutefisk isn't a household word: it's a dried cod soaked in lye until it achieves a texture somewhere between jellyfish and repentance. Nobody actually enjoys it. We eat it to prove something to our dead relatives.

The inspector was a young man from Lansing with a clipboard and the expression of someone who'd been briefed on church kitchens and believed every word. Aunt Vi was on him like a duck on a June bug. Ten minutes later he was seated with cold coffee and a plate of lefse, unable to stop asking about the recipe. He found two minor violations. Vi found a grandson-in-law. The fear had filled the whole room, but the room turned out to be just a room.

It's like that with most things, I've noticed.

Last week down in New Mexico, three law students from the University of New Mexico sat under an elm tree in white hats, watching people vote at the Laguna Pueblo administrative building. They'd been sent by the Native American Rights Fund, an organization that's spent over fifty years doing the unglamorous work of making sure the legal system remembers that Native people are citizens with rights, not footnotes in somebody else's story. These students were part of a team of around 260 trained volunteers working across eight states that day.

Their job was to watch the polls. Make sure things ran according to the rules. Make sure, as one of them put it, that someone who showed up with only a tribal ID could still cast a ballot. Sounds simple. It isn't. That particular flavor of simple takes five decades and a whole nonprofit legal organization to maintain.

What the students found was people voting. Mutton stew and frybread outside the polling place. Country music. Kids showing off their stickers.

A man named Tom McDonald drove over an hour to vote in person, even though floods had damaged his usual polling site. He could've voted early. He came anyway, because he wanted to be in the room with his people on the day. I understand that in my bones. I voted absentee exactly once, in the blizzard of '94, and it felt like eating Thanksgiving dinner alone in a parking lot. Technically adequate. Spiritually malnourished.

The students found no major violations, no intimidation, no chaos. What they found instead were the quieter, structural things that make voting harder in heavily Native counties than just about anywhere else. Geographic isolation. Mail delivery that isn't reliable. Addresses that don't exist in any system the post office recognizes. Polling places miles from anywhere, open during hours that don't match when people can actually get there. Limited internet. These aren't dramatic. They don't make for good television. But they add up.

A federal judge in South Dakota ruled around that same time that a Yankton Sioux man had the right to vote while wearing a shirt that said "NATIVES Vote." The judge called it nonpartisan. I'd call it a statement of fact so obvious that penalizing someone for it suggests the penalty was the whole problem to begin with.

One of the law students, a young Hopi-Tewa man named Grant Navakuku, showed up at a chapter house on the Navajo Nation and found people suspicious of him. Rightly so, given the history of strangers appearing at polling places with clipboards. He explained himself. They understood. They invited him to eat. That's when things started making sense, the way things usually do once food gets involved.

Navakuku said something I've been turning over like a stone in my pocket. He said he understood he was part of something bigger than himself. He saw a need and thought he could lend a helping hand. That's the whole thing, isn't it? Not the legal architecture, not the federal monitoring, not the courtroom losses or the presidential claims about voting machines that nobody could ever verify. Just a young man driving to a place he'd never been, sitting under a tree, making sure people could do what they came to do. Then driving home.

Now, I realize I've essentially told you the lutefisk story twice in one column. The inspector showed up afraid, and what met him was lefse and a cold cup of coffee. Navakuku showed up uncertain, and what met him was an invitation to the table. At my age, telling the same story twice is less a flaw than a subscription service. But I think it's worth noting when two stories, sixty years apart and a thousand miles from each other, rhyme like that.

When you show up, the thing you were afraid of is almost never there. What is there is usually somebody's grandmother asking if you've eaten yet. The fear was bigger than the room. The room was just a room.

That's the thing about actually going somewhere. The noise lives in the anticipation. The event itself is quieter, and it has better food.

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