Listening. I’m listening to the voices of the trees this morning. The wind is flowing through the tops of the tallest ones around my cabin, a surf flowing across an endless shore. And every tree has its own sound. The pines a swooshing sifting song. The birches a soft rattle like the sound of small river stones inside a sleeve of elm bark. The maples fluttering like the wings of countless butterflies. The poplars clattering as their leaves twist and flash back the light of the sun shining down from a sky that was blotched by cloud before this cleansing wind began washing its face. And playing this breathless symphony. Listen. That’s what Swift Eagle said to me thirty-five years ago as we stood together on the porch of a rented cabin next to Paradox Lake, not far from his home in Schroon Lake. He was standing next to a small birch that leaned over the porch, one ear cupped. “Listen to what?” “To the leaves,” he said. Shhh. There was a little smile on his face. As so often was the case when he wanted to teach me something, he was being mystical, whimsical, over-dramatic, and absolutely serious at one and the same time. A mixture of a sage and a Hollywood Indian. Which was only natural considering where he came from. Santo Domingo Pueblo on one side of his family and Jicarilla Apache on the other, he’d been taken in chains to Indian Boarding School after the army was sent into the hills to find where he was being hidden by his Apache grandfather. “I spent twelve years in kindergarten,” he said. And learned to love the music of John Phillip Suzie. Then my elders at Santo Domingo sent me out to be an ambassador for my people.” Which led him to Hollywood where he worked as an extra in movies—sometimes playing a Mexican because, as he put it, he didn’t look Italian enough to play an Indian. And from there to New York and the job he held for decades in a place called Frontier Town where he and his wife Chi-chi and their children danced and sang and told stories for tourists next to the archery range by the bear cages just down the hill from Fort Custer. I’d first met Swifty, as all his friends called him, when I was a little kid with a Roy Rogers capgun going to Frontier Town with my parents. I’d been reintroduced to him after returning home from three years of teaching in West Africa. His son Powhatan had a shop in Saratoga where he did silverwork and after we’d known each other for a while Pow had looked me up and down and said, “You need to meet my pop.” So there I was with my own ear cupped, my face next to his on that porch near Paradox Lake, my wife inside with Chi-chi making lunch, my two sons playing on the beach below. Just standing there, trying to listen to those dang leaves. Finally, I’d had it. “I don’t hear anything,” I said. And Swifty nodded. “Of course you don’t.”
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 17:20:55 +0000
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