Yesterday was the most amazing day I have had in a long long time.
Woke up in Holbrook, Arizona and drove about 15 miles west south west to Rock Art Ranch. I have tons of photos, but let me share a couple of the highlights of the canyon with you.
Here you can clearly see the figure usually called Kokopelli, or the Flute Player, and a big horned sheep. Poor Kokopelli. He has been co-opted and his image diminished from the majesty and magic he commands here and obviously commanded to the first peoples of this area.
Another absolutely astonishing image I encountered might at first appearance seem simple. The ranch owner told us that the simple line and arrow drawings, such as the one below, are believed by some east coast researchers to be over 9000 years old. I suspect he is getting good information from these researchers as two others he mentioned from the Arizona State Museum are researchers with whom I worked.
The petroglyph that moved me more than I can say is called “The Birthing Woman” and you will have to wait to see it as I want to write about it on The Women’s Legacy Project site, which I do not have time to do now, as I need to get on the Road and head toward Oklahoma. I am going to knock off earlier today so I have time to write about the sites and thoughts I have been fortunate enough to experience during the day and a half I have been on the road thus far.
Pink Flamingos R Us
Donald Featherstone touched lives, created a cultural icon, and made people smile. That sounds like a pretty good life and legacy to me.
I have to utter thanks one more time as he is laid to rest; he passed away a couple days ago. Pink flamingos are iconic in and of themselves. But the plastic ones are more so. He invented these.
Created at the height of the post-WWII baby boom, in 1957, the same year I was born and the same year that Sputnik launched, the pink plastic lawn ornament captures the essence of an era it helped to create. Or at least it captures one essential view of the era.
To me the prototypic 1950s image conjured up by the word retro is an image of a platinum blonde woman wearing pointy frame glasses, a wasp-waist full-skirted dress, emerging onto steps from an Airstream travel trailer onto a perfectly manicured lawn decorated with pink flamingo lawn ornaments.
Such pink flamingo lawn decorations served as trail markers for the path at the top of Mount Lemmon to Lemmon Meadow where my husband and I exchanged wedding vows in June of 1989. I wore a flamingo pink dress. We loved retro kitch! The bathroom in our first home was “the flamingo room” that iterated the theme in the shower curtain, the toilet plunger, towels, framed pictures, and just about every bath-related product that friends could find and buy for us from a Five and Dime or touristy gas station souvenir shelves with a flamingo image.
We have always had a few flamingos displayed in our home. There is a gorgeous, well-framed professional photograph of a flamingo that was a wedding gift. An Audubon print of a flamingo is in my hubby’s study.
We took a pink flamingo with us to Niagara Falls to celebrate our 25th Wedding Anniversary.
Is it accidental that Donald Featherstone had a bit of surname determinism playing out in his life? I suspect not.
Yes, this ad leads to an Amazon listing where you may purchase a Featherstone Flamingo.
I've Missed You
I miss this blog! I miss my readers. I miss my topics.
In case you don’t know, I am working on a new site called the Women’s Legacy Project. It is more focused on a certain topic and a certain demographic than this free-for-all that is my life and my quest for a fair trade cuppa.
New endeavors always present a liminally-enriched and -challenged experience (and yes liminally is a slightly invented word.) Liminal is transitional – neither one or the other and sort of an eerie feeling and state of being between. The Wikipedia entry (at least in the version I called up today) is a pretty good coverage of the concept.
I am going to have to double up on the writing to be able to do that project, which is needed and a very good thing, and still have my sanity keeping writing and commentary here.
I have to run. Off to visit my Aunt Maralee who is age 89, and the last person genetically standing in the generation above me, and my cousin Linda who lives with her and takes care of her.
I just wanted to pop in and say, “Hi!” before I check out of the Clarendon Hotel and Spa (that I will write about here or on my Hill Research Site) where I stayed for the Press Publish Conference I attended yesterday.
Cahokia. No Gesundheit Needed.
Cahokia may sound like a sound made during a sneeze but it is actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site near St. Louis.
I thought today, the autumnal equinox, would provide a great context to write about the mounds near St Louis that are evidence for the importance of seasonal reckoning and measurement to the First Peoples of America. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the location of the largest city north of Mexico until European colonization. Cahokia was a thriving urban center of a Mississippian Culture Chiefdom between AD 850 and 1300. St. Louis, whose skyline is clearly visible from the top of Monk’s Mound, was known as Mound City in the 1800s until all the mounds within the city were erased from the landscape by the 20th Century.
Today, Monday, September 22, 2014, is the first Equinox to occur since I visited Woodhenge this summer. In Tucson, where I live, the celestial equator will be crossed at 7:29 PM MST.
Woodhenge
I have driven by the signs for Cahokia every time I have driven between NE Indiana where I grew up and Southern Arizona in the last 25 years. That is quite a few times since I moved to Arizona 25 years ago. I discovered at a fairly late age that I like to drive and enjoy road tripping by myself… but I was often on a fairly tight timeline. The sign for Cahokia Mounds would appear as I drove on the interstate approaching St. Louis, it seemed that every time that I saw it I would need to get a couple more hours of driving done before stopping for the day. So I would drive by without stopping and swear that next time I would plan to stay in the area and spend a day hiking around the site.
I wanted to explore Cahokia with Hubby as we drove back to Tucson on the last half of the 25th anniversary road trip. But I rather reluctantly offered to drive the car and dog back across the country by myself so he could fly back and have a full week to prepare for the new semester, and some unanticipated professional travel the first week of classes. He accepted my offer and said this would allow me to spend more time near where I grew up and visit my brothers in a leisurely fashion than if he was there too and chomping at the bit to get back on the road.
This turned out to be a very fortuitous turn of events for non-archaeological reasons. Spending time on my brother’s land next to the farm where I grew up called up memories Dad’s stories about flaked flint and polished stone, Indian trails, and humorous “re-enactments” of key scenes from Tecumseh’s life and his brother the Prophet. His tales of our family history also included First Americans who were wives to early American fur traders and trappers.
These stories with which I grew up, and the artifacts that I played with as a child, were primarily from Eastern Woodland tribes. The Mississippian groups such as those that lived near Cahokia Mounds were culturally distinct from Woodland Cultures. Dad taught me that most of the tribal groups in Indiana were little groups pushed into the swampy, malarial and wet woodlands between the Iroquois confederacy to the east, the Cherokee to the South, and the Plains Indians to the west.
I grew up hearing my father’s stories of mound builders and handling projectile points, axes, and ceremonial lithic pieces my family found while farming Indiana land over the 19th and 20th Centuries. I heard storied of the “bird people.” In August I made sense of those memories. Having studied anthropology in college and graduate school I had better than average understanding of Woodland and Mississippian cultures. But the artifacts I knew and played with came to life when I saw them in context with entire tool assemblages.
I had not been prepared for, through studies or stories from childhood, the scale of the Cahokia Mounds site and similarities of the cultural complexities with that of other First American cultures. This Mississippian site I walked was as big as the majority of the Mayan Chichen Itza I walked in 2012.
The almost 200 mounds on the site varied in form and function. The sloping banks of Monk’s Mound, the largest mound at Cahokia, can mask the enormity of the mound until you get ready to ascend the contemporary steps that lead to the top.
Public works of this size are evidence of a complex society capable of specialization that allowed some members to specialize in non-subsistence activities.
Solstice and Equinox rituals marked the annual cycles for agricultural purposes though the activities were undoubtedly interwoven with other religious, political and economic activities and the view from the Chieftain’s house atop Monk’s Mound could observe them all.
Where Does Beautiful, Poignant Autumn Begin?
We are still in second summer here in Tucson. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I live in a fantasy land, a Shire where there are second breakfasts and such, though that would be nice. The reality of Autumn expectations rarely match up to the calendar or cultural expectations for what the harvest season should be. Seasons and seasonal observations vary greatly with place as well as with stage of life.
School Year Starts in the Summer
Students are back in school and have been for a while here in Arizona. Tucson Unified School District started classes on July 31st. Amphitheater School District started on August 7th. From what I can tell from perusing articles from news sources as well as a small statistically biased sampling of school calendars in both the eastern and western United States, most schools start during the month of August. The more wealthy the population, the later the school for an area starts, it seems. The start of school, Labor Day, and the fall are linked for most of us in the U.S., but why? Any real linkage that might have once existed has disappeared over the last few decades.
Seasons
There are many kinds of seasons including calendrical, cultural, and climatological. Solstice and equinox were up until recently my default criteria for talking about seasons, but now I tend to view the seasons as centering on these celestial linked dates and beginning and ending at times that our culture no longer recognizes but which are clearly evident in more traditional, folk, or ancient ways of knowing such as the Northern European one shown here:
We celebrate the reprieve that autumn brings here in Tucson in the way that spring is celebrated in more northern climes.
Individual Views of Seasons
I often write about fall. Poetry tends to capture most of my autumnal musings about the evocative nature of lengthened, softened slant of light that October brings but I also blog about the season with some regularity.
In the early years of my life fall was the time of harvest, the hunter’s moon, seasonal depression, the start of the time of year when Mom had time to focus on me (which often was not a good thing,) birthdays of close friends, lovers and elders. The stark, almost bleak sense of stasis or dormancy, of waiting colored the months of October and November. These months seemed something like a pencil retouched photograph from the late 1800s, all shades of black and gray with soft touches of unreal color.
But these last many years, since moving to Tucson, Fall has become Autumn. Autumn in Tucson is a time of wonder: perfect days to play hooky and warm oneself on a granite rock ledge in Sabina Canyon as hints of coming coolness whisper in the breeze, preparation for late and winter gardens, evenings spent outdoors on patios with sunsets, friends and perfect weather. Preparation for the All Souls Procession alters the angle of perspective of the season in that unique way only Tucson can.
We come out as a community to express and acknowledge, mourn, celebrate, commemorate, inspire and be inspired by transition, all that has come before, personal loss, personal growth and our connectedness to the land and blending of culture that the Goddess of this place has provided as a home to those of us fortunate enough to be allowed to live some bit of our lives here in the shadow of mountains where the rivers used to flow.
Fall was once a depressing time for me, but the perspective and rituals that celebrate the place and perspective here in southern Arizona have changed that. Beautiful and poignant, that is autumn in Tucson.
A Month of Travel, A Lifetime of Stories
This past month-long travel bout began with my trip to BlogHer in San José and ended with a 10 day solo drive (actually my 2-year-old Neapolitan Mastiff accompanied me on the drive) that differed significantly from my other travels during the past 10 years:
- when I traveled by myself, unlike this trip where I was in the company of Hubby for 3/4 of the trip,
- to and from DC to work with other women for peace and to be a voice of reason, caution, and life as our government rushed into war waged in the interest of governmentally connected corporate interests
- or to and from Indiana to see, care for, or attend a funerals for my mother and brother
I intended to change this pattern of political and end-of-life precipitated travel with a lengthy road trip taken with the Hubby in honor of our 25 years of marriage to be made in the spirit of the road trips we both took in our youth. Twenty-five years is a long time, an increment of a century – and we know that centuries are measures of history not lives; it is at these life markers where daily life begins to meet historic time. Hubby and I both, as brainiacs, wanted to acknowledge, celebrate, and find meaning in this life event. A cruise, vacation, or spa outing might have celebrated and acknowledged our anniversary, but to find meaning in what some see as an arbitrary numeric ritual, that feeds the economy more than the hearts and souls of those involved, took some work. We married in the month of June, but we both realized that this was not apt to be when we would celebrate and commemorate our years together. We knew the trick would be to find a find a time period where we both had no other commitments or could clear engagements we might have. So we settled on late July and on into August as the time. So what did we do?
Kitsch & Weird Stuff
There were pink flamingo trail markers at our wedding that took place on top of Mount Lemmon. It is no surprise that Niagara Falls figured into our 25th – flamingo included!
Cultural and Intellectual Heritage
National & State Parks and Forests & Just plain ol’ Nature
Family
We visited daughters in Wisconsin and the Hudson Valley.
Salt Lake & New York Coincidences
There were unanticipated LDS connections along the route.
Canada and Beyond
We had to part ways earlier we had planned while still in St. Catharine because life has a way of getting complicated. I drove back across country with loyal companion Buddy. This allowed Hubby to finish out his conferences and flew back to prepare for school and another trip to the east coast between teaching his first and second class sessions during the first week of school. This allowed me to see my brothers and laugh and lunch with old friends in Indiana as well as visit some prehistoric First Peoples sites, further along in the drive, that I’ve always wanted to visit while taking my own sweet time to do it. I suspect I will be writing about aspects of this trip for many years to come. It was significant, in an idea-connecting way, far beyond anything I could have imagined. We did it right. We summarized and celebrated in ways that reminded us of our life together, our individuality, our successes, and our strengths.
I have a list of topics of some of these article ideas that fills several pages of a legal pad. You will hear more about this trip.