Daily Orange: By Matthew Guitierrez
As steam formed inside a rusty oil tank, Alfie Jacques crafted wooden lacrosse sticks at a barn down a dirt driveway on the Onondaga Nation reservation a few miles south of Syracuse University.
The tank in question measures a few feet wide and about 8 feet long. Its temperature was set so high that steam shot out of the 1,000-liter drum filled with water. Jacques, 69, stuck a piece of wood into the tank, pulled it out and bent it.
“This boil starts steaming like hell,” he said. “The wood doesn’t just bend. You have to muscle it.”