Puffing for Peace

It lay on the table, crudely carved and gaudily adorned, and I knew immediately that it would be mine.  If anyone knew how to make a peace pipe, I figured, it would be a prison inmate.  It was Halloween 2004 and I was at the Louisiana state penitentiary’s annual rodeo and craft show – Angola Prison Rodeo, the event was called.  The rodeo event would feature inmates riding broncos, attempting to rope cattle, and hanging out in the arena with angry bulls.  But now I was at the craft show, perusing the inmates’ handmade wares, and I had found what I had come for.

I have taken several trips with the pipe I bought at Angola, and I’ve discovered that it has certain advantages.  The Prison Pipe is three feet long and draped with various ornaments, so portability and sturdiness are not among those virtues.  You would not, for instance, tuck my pipe in your pocket when you went for a walk or cram it into your pack on a backpacking trip.  It would also be out of place in a Las Vegas casino or an oak-walled, whisky-furnished backroom where politicians and oil tycoons slapped backs and grinned.  They would think you strange if you produced a three-foot pipe with feathers dangling from it and began to puff away.  But for a truck trip in the right company, the pipe stows nicely under the back seat and makes an entertaining accessory.  When my buddy Ben and I went elk hunting in Wyoming a few years back, for instance, we took the pipe with us.  As we drove across the Midwest on the return trip to Georgia, a snowstorm of historic proportions was sweeping across the flatlands.  Snow was piled high, cars were in the ditches, and traffic was bumper to bumper along the interstates.  When traffic was stopped, Ben and I took the opportunity to fill the pipe – only with tobacco, mind you – and pass it back and forth to the varying amusement or alarm of nearby motorists.  It was then that Ben pointed out the pipe’s principal advantage: because the pipe is long, the smoke cools before it reaches your mouth.  No matter how hot the tobacco burns, you never risk burning your tongue.

The Indians, of course, smoked peace pipes, as did the trappers when in Indian company.  When not in the company of natives, the trappers often smoked their own pipes – personal pipes of the kind in common use by European cultural descendants today.  Both Indians and trappers smoked eastern tobacco when they could, which was better than the tobacco that could be acquired in the Rockies.  As a result, trappers often carried extra eastern tobacco to trade with the Indians.  But both the trappers and Indians mixed the tobacco with locally available substances.  What they mixed it with is, as yet, a mystery to me.  Sometimes, I have learned, the Indians and trappers mixed tobacco with red willow bark, which burns well but is not a hallucinogen.  I wonder if the inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains ever smoked anything more potent.  If the mountain men and Indians could have smoked something to get high, I think some members of both groups would have done it – the mountain men got famously drunk at the annual rendezvous, where whisky was available, and the Indians’ historical fondness for alcohol has been well documented, so I doubt that either group would have had any categorical scruples against getting stoned.  Peyote is an obvious guess, but peyote is a cactus native only to the southwestern deserts, and wouldn’t have been available in the Rockies.  Cannabis had not yet made its way from Asia to the Rockies.  So maybe the Indians and mountain men actually weren’t getting high.  Maybe they were non-hallucinogenic smokers, like Ben and me on the interstate.

I puffed on the Prison Pipe and practiced blowing smoke rings out of the bowl.  The tiniest puff blown into the mouthpiece produced beautiful rings.  I watched them float toward the rafters of the cabin.  It wasn’t a genuine peace pipe, but the Prison Pipe was good enough for me.  In fact, maybe it was better.  I puffed another ring.  That was a competition I’d like to see – Indians vs. Inmates: The Pipe-Building Showdown.
 

A short video about Angola Prison Rodeo.  It's worth watching.