The door opened and a woman peered at me from behind the screen door of the double-wide mobile home. She was leathery and weathered. She snarled. The two braids of her soot-colored hair resembled dangling clumps of barbed wire.

“What do you want?’

“We’re here about the ad for the bus.”

Her lips flexed into a smirk.

“Oh. You. Come on back.”

It was my junior year of high school and four friends and I were in the market for a school bus. A few of us had been passing around a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—a novel about a bus full of stick-it-to-the-man hippies who helped kick-start the counter-culture movement of the ‘60s—and we were inspired. Too apathetic for a movement, we decided to buy a bus.

We followed her to the back of her house and beheld the faded, yellow vessel. To us, the pile of rotting, hole-ridden tin was nothing less than beautiful. She took us for a drive.

“Second gear is a little tricky,” she shouted over the grumbling transmission. I stood next to her and watched the trees glide by in the reflection of her aviators. Who is this crazy hag? I thought to myself.

I felt a burst underneath me. The bus came to a jerky halt. “Shit. I hope you boys don’t mind walking,” she said without a flinch.

I learned a lot about this woman during the two-mile hike back to her house. Her name was Delores White Dog. She was a 57-year-old Navajo who made Native American crafts and jewelry. She sold her creations out of a “shack” on the outskirts of a flea market in Canton, Texas. She loved the Earth and expressed this love through her art. She was in love with a younger woman named Susan. Susan was a travel agent who had an ancient spirit.

Delores was the antithesis of everything my suburban Dallas life had taught me to believe. I was enamored.

We got back to her house and said our goodbyes. She told us to swing by her shack sometime.

A few weeks later, we finally procured ourselves a different bus (We later found out that Delores’ bus was towed back and converted into a Jerry Garcia memorial). We took out all the seats and added couches and a bed. We found some local artists to bring the bus to life with a colorful urban-psychedelic graffiti paint job. We also installed a PA system that played ice cream truck music at unbearable decibels (Unfortunately we had to cease use of this mechanism after an onslaught of disheartened children).

The only items we lacked were railing for a rooftop deck and a giant cow skull for the grill. We knew no better place to find these than a flea market in Canton, Texas.

We quickly located our first two necessities, but it took us a while to find the true incentive behind our venture. The shack was actually a miniature two-story cabin located on a wooded hill amongst other cabins and booths. The entire area looked like it belonged in a small mining town­—or at least a mining town that sold fried Twinkies. I was admiring the dream catchers and listening to a staged gunfight outside when a figure appeared in the doorway.

“Those are all real bones, you know. No one uses real bones anymore.”

I turned around to look at her. The hunched-over Navajo was wearing a flannel shirt and a red bandana headband. A hint of delight grazed her face.

“You boys should come up. Have a glass of wine.”

My fellow bus owners and I sat down on a canvas cot in the 10-square-foot room, our heads pressed against the vaulted ceiling. We all drank from her jug of cheap Rossi wine and asked her a barrage of questions—like children pestering their grandfather about his war days. She told us how she once smoked a joint backstage with Jim Morrison of the Doors and how she took acid with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. She told us how she converted her bus into a Jerry Garcia memorial. She told us about her first tattoo that said “Born to Raise Hell” and how her mom made a doctor slice off the tattooed skin and sew it back together. She told us that she had ridden with the Hells Angels.

At first, they all just seemed like stories of a delusional hippy. But then she showed us a photograph inside a 1967 issue of Look magazine. The picture showed a vicious group of Hells Angels standing around two Harley-Davidsons.

Leaning against the front tires of one of the bikes was a young lady staring at the camera with a look that said, “I don’t take shit from anybody.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Man, I didn’t take shit from anybody.”

I came back to the shack a few more times during my senior year. Each time I would bring different friends. Each time Delores would invite us up, pour a glass of wine, smoke her home-grown grass and tell me about her life and what she had learned. She always seemed to enjoy my curiosity. She told me she couldn’t imagine why anyone would give a damn.

But I did. I cherished every anecdote, every lesson. Each story was a shot to the detached bourgeois mindset that had enveloped me throughout my childhood. For the first time, I was seeing the world from outside of my jaded uptown Dallas subtopia. I wanted to see more and learn more, to find new perspectives and insight. I wanted to find stories and tell them.

The last time I saw her was in April 2004. I told her I was going to the University of Kansas to study journalism. She said she’d heard good things. She had a cousin in Kansas who she’d been meaning to visit.

I went back to the cabin two years later. I wanted to talk to her about writing her story. I found a man selling wind chimes and wood carvings. I asked if he knew where the previous tenant had gone.

He tried to sell me a whittled blue jay.