The Stillaguamish River Festival and Pow Wow sizzled in unseasonal 90-degree heat. We were in western Washington State under a burning blue sky. The m.c. cracked old timey jokes about horny guys and sharp-tongued women. Two young Grass Dancers no older than eight or nine moved out into the field in which the pow wow would take place. Their job was an ancient one. They were to dance the grass flat so the other dancers would not stumble or fall.
The drums began. I stood in the flickering shade of a young tree and watched. I was drenched with sweat. The kids wore full regalia: beaded leggings, robes, moccasins and feather head-dresses. I couldn't imagine how they felt in the searing heat as they spun and stomped their way around the dance circle. Their faces were calm and intent.
The grass was prepared. The Eagle Chief stepped out for Grand Entry. My friend and the other bird-carriers followed him, my friend carrying Hanble, the eagle, the others carrying eagles and hawks. They crossed the dance ground and began to circle sunwise: Eagle Chief, birds, then war veterans, elders and the pow wow dancers. The old women and men danced slowly in front of me, their steps firm on the flattened grass. A silver-haired woman in a red and dark blue blanket robe moved in careful circles. By the time everyone had entered the circle and prayers had been offered, I was shaky with the heat. I waited till the opening ceremony concluded and walked slowly back to the Sarvey Wildlife Care Center tent in which the birds and their humans were sheltered.
I settled into a camp chair behind the eagle demonstration tent. A Sarvey volunteer was giving a talk to the public. She held a Golden Eagle on her arm, a rescue bird allowed to live at the Sarvey Center as an education eagle. I couldn't hear the volunteer's voice, but I saw how she turned often to the eagle with a soft smile. She held a dead quail up for the bird. The bird dipped its head and ate. Most of the watching crowd flinched. The, people began to come forward. I assumed they would talk with the woman, maybe move in a little closer to the eagle. I was wrong.
Each person approached with a camera pressed to one of their eyes. Most of them stopped only long enough to take a picture, turning away without taking the camera or cell phone away from their eye. Almost no one came up without a black box held between them and the eagle. A man, a teen-ager, an old woman, a couple - each took a minute to take a video. I saw lips move, understood they were saying "Thank you." Out of an audience of forty or fifty people, only a child and a young Native American dancer stood in front of the teacher and eagle with no lens between them. I remembered a park ranger telling me that the average visit to the rim of the Grand Canyon is five minutes.
I watched till my heart hurt. I thought about our desperate need to capture things - for it is in capturing an eagle in a photo without allowing ourselves to simply be in the presence of the eagle that we reduce the wild creature to a thing. Friends had told me that they had yet to download hundreds of pictures from two years' vacations into their computer. Hundreds and thousands of "things" held in limbo. It is one action to take a photograph to remember beauty; it is another to take a photograph rather than taking the time to be in the living presence of that beauty. I found myself wondering: Are we losing the ability to store information in our minds, much less our hearts?
I walked away from the education tent. It was too hot to move quickly. It felt good to go slow. It was easier to see, to hear, the breathe in the scent of fry bread and barbecued salmon. The crowd moved from food tent to dance circle to trinket vendors. I stepped away from the main path into the trees. I could hear the river near-by. There was a tent under a few tall cedars. In it were a speakers' table and rows of chairs. I stepped into the cool light of the tent and sat. A bright-eyed man in a brilliantly flowered ribbon shirt stood in front of the speakers' table. He was middle-aged. The lines in his face held laughter and more.
"My name is Johnny Moses," he said. "I am Tulalip and I have a few stories for you."
There were a couple dozen people in the tent, mostly adults, maybe nine kids. Two pre-teen girls sat next to me. They each had a beaded bracelet around a wrist. Every now and then, each girl looked down at the bracelet with clear affection. They looked up as Johnny Moses spoke.
"I wonder," he said, "did you hear family stories as a child? Please raise your hand if you did." One girl raised her hand, the other shook her head. Nine other people raised their hands. "And stories from a book," Johnny Moses said, "do you read stories from a book?" Everyone in the audience raised their hand.
"Well," Johnny Moses said, "today you are going to hear stories. We'll start with that mischief maker, Raven." When he finished the Raven story, he told us the origin of the terrible smell in Tacoma. It was both scandalous and belly-laugh funny.
Then Johnny Moses said, "Here is a story about a grand-mother and her grand-son. I tell it as an offering of gratitude. I have had cancer. So, this is my thanks to be here today."
The story was about a grand-mother cedar tree, her grand-son, lineage and love. Johnny didn't just use words. He made the sound of the grand-mother cedar's branches whooshing in the wind as she comforted her grand-son. My sadness began to lift. I remembered that there are story-tellers moving through the great human crowd. The stories have not been captured. Stories are always free. They are heard, taken in and sometimes re-told. The threads of the stories move out on our breath. We are comforted by them, just as the grand-son cedar tree was comforted by his grand-mother.
At the end of Johnny Moses gratitude story, the grand-mother has grown so old that she can no longer comfort herself. She asks her grand-son for comfort. His great branches move in the wind. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Johnny invited us to make the sound. Some of us did. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. The huge whisper of gratitude. The sound of something going on.
Join the story. You can find Johnny Moses at http://www.johnnymoses.com/
And for those of you mystified by "Basement Medicine", here's Bob Dylan, in Subterranean Homesick Blues: Johnny’s in the basement / Mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement / Thinking about the government... That's a story in itself. Pass it on.
