One summer when I was around eight or so, my friend Rose and I spent a week at my grandparents’ cabin on Camano Island in Puget Sound. We played at many things, but one I remember well was when we made “Indian crackers.” My father, who was part Native American and proud of his heritage, had told us stories of how the Indians fed themselves on crackers made from seaweed when there was nothing else to eat. For some reason this sounded romantic to us, so one hot sunny day we decided to make these Indian crackers for ourselves.

Washington beaches are notoriously rocky, and clinging to these rocks is an abundance of green leafy-looking seaweed. We pried an armful of seaweed off the rocks and found a big flat rock where we carefully smoothed the slick seaweed out flat, pressing our pudgy hands down on its surface until we had a large sheet of seaweed. Then we ran to Grandma and borrowed a box of salt, and sprinkled the salt lavishly over the seaweed and left it to dry in the sun.

Later that afternoon, the salt-seaweed cracker had dried completely, and we eagerly broke it in pieces and sampled it. Naturally enough, our crackers were foul, brackish, absolutely dreadful. We had to drink at least four glasses of Kool Aid to get rid of the taste, and even then it wasn’t completely gone – the next morning we both woke up with our mouths in the same state we’d later know as “hang-over” mouth.

 Our opinion of Native Americans took a nose dive. They weren’t romantic, they were crazy. No matter what my Dad said.