Spindles, Sparrows and Drum Skins

For this Tuesday’s fire, we decided to try for a hand-drill coal using a California Mugwort stalk spindle harvested from Cloverdale Ranch. The sun was setting, the sky was dimming, the temperature dropping, humidity was climbing and it had been raining for days. In this challenging environment, we discovered that cooperative work and doug fir pitch on one’s hands can make even the most unlikely hand-drill scenario yield a coal. It was a lot of work, and by the end we all sported blisters on our palms, but we had our first ever native materials hand-drill fire.

We started the next day with a bird sit, and since I knew the day would be fairly easy, centered on crafting our drum heads, I decided to get up early. I got to my sit spot well before the dawn chorus of birds or people, with the first light just touching the eastern sky with indigo. Coyotes yammered in the distance, and a Saw-Whet Owl called nearby, but otherwise the meadow was silent.

As the east lightened, a wave of bird alarm chips moved from north to south over the slope, and then silenced. Seconds later human voices rose from Commonweal Gardens in a dawn wake-up song. Then the same sparrows that woke up chipping in alarm, voicing concentric rings of the waking camp, burst into their own dawn song. Song sparrow and human voices together filled the meadow, and then fell silent again.

For the rest of the day Native Eyes worked on our drums while RDNA worked on basketry.






We started by cutting out rawhide drum skins, using our own drums frames as the patterns and leaving a half- to one-inch margin around the outside.



Then we cut more lacing. We figured out an easy, fast, two-person method.



We cut slits in the drum skin margins, four per side. Then we started lacing the drum skins onto the frames, weaving a single long strip of hide through one hole, then across the drum to another, and then back across again, bouncing back and forth in an hourglass pattern.



When the lacing was all in place, I stretched the skin as much as I could by hand. Then I began tightening the lacings, going around one by one and pulling each tight. I did this three times, until it seemed like the straps might break if I tightened them any more.



I still had a long length of lacing, so I started binding the lacings into a central, cross-shaped handle. I started by grouping eight lacings together and binding them from the center outward, creating a flared handle of rawhide, then winding the lacing back on itself toward the center. I did the same for each group of eight lacings, finishing with a cross of rawhide bindings around the drum lacings.



I let the whole thing dry slowly, sitting on my naturalist shelf in my room. The finished drum has a resonant and pleasing voice.

The Girls Go Tracking up Old Woman Creek

We arrived down South Tuesday night to a lively potluck and talk with Paul Houghtaling, which included a great download of information on our quarry for the next day.

In the morning, we all reviewed the topo map and chose our routes according to the information Paul had given us. Our areas included a fire road on a ridge, a creekside road, and a creekside trail. The women in the group all felt pulled toward Old Woman Creek, and so we formed our own group and set out together.

Before we left, I asked if anyone had any plaster, as one of my goals is to plaster-cast a good track before some classmates and I start our summer kid’s programs with the Riekes Center. No one had any, but I figured I’d have more chances, and there wasn’t much likelihood of finding the perfect track I had in mind, anyway. I’d never encountered one before, after all.

One group took the ridge and found many deer tracks, some bobcat and fox sign, but our quarry was markedly absent.

Another group took the road by a creek. There was little immediate evidence of deer, bobcat and fox, but they very soon found some unique and distinctive sign:




Broad, deep, dark scrapes in the ground, all on the creek side of the road, under a stand of trees. One scrape even had a pile of big, fur-filled scat in it. It had rained the night before, stopping around 3 AM. Some of the scrapes didn’t look terribly rained on.

We women started up the dirt road by Old Woman Creek at a pretty fast clip. I had to lengthen my stride to keep up, and still was left slightly behind wondering how we were supposed to closely observe the landscape for track and sign if we were charging ahead so energetically. We stopped once in a while, did some more in-depth looking around, but mostly moved on.


Even at our relatively high speed, I noticed that compared to most of the creekside trails near my home, this one showed a near-total lack of deer tracks and sign. Once in a while deer trails would cross the road, but I don’t remember noting a single deer track paralleling the road. Near my house, a road like this would be a highway for deer activity along the tasty (to a ruminant) riparian zone of the creek, but here they seemed to avoid following the road. The trail intersections also lacked another sign that I’ve come to expect, as common as punctuation in a sentence for the area where I live: grey fox scat marking every intersection and landmark available. This road seemed oddly unpunctuated.

We also found this incredible tree along the road:


We stopped to look at an oddly-shaped smudge in the mud. It was fairly fresh, certainly after the last rains, and crisp. There print even held the texture of the original object. On seeing it everyone in our group sat up a bit more, and scanned the woods around. We all knew what it looked like, but we speculated anyway.



“Could it be a knee print? Someone jogging up here this morning in shorts, knelt down here for some reason?” We entertained this and other ideas, but were mostly convinced that we’d found what we were looking for. Careful inspection of the print revealed that it had come down second, on top of a similar print just ahead of it. As we circled the print and studied it closely, we even began to see toe marks.

Further along the trail, we found more marks:




As we read the marks in the mud, made our measurements and shared high-fives, I tracked the animal’s progress up the trail. In my mind’s eye, I could see the golden, sloped back flexing with the animal’s stride, the long tail held low, perhaps twitching with each new scent the animal caught, long limbs moving relaxed and easy, extending far less than their possible range. I saw the blocky head set on a short neck, turning once in a while to catch a sound or a twitch of motion, and the narrow but powerful shoulders moving with the measured rhythm of his steps. I saw him meander across the road, investigate the edge and move along on his morning patrol, padding slow and mindful of his effect on the forest.



And finally we found this, a textbook example of a big male Puma concolor track. Of course I didn’t have plaster.


It began to rain as we headed back to the cars, filling the tracks with muddy water and highlighting them beautifully in the mud of the road.

Drums

This Native Eyes we had the darndest time making a fire. We broke some bowstrings, a bow, and wore down a few spindles before finally getting a coal well after sunset, and only after we'd all decided to cooperate on one kit.

The next day we had a mobile bird sit with the ducks on the Bolinas lagoon. They are highly sensitive meters of one's concentric rings.

A sideshow for the day, but my personal favorite part, was working with traps and snares. One of the Cultural Mentors set up a deadfall and caught some atypically large prey. We should have known that baiting it with field guides was a bad idea in a crowd of naturalists.




I also learned how to set up one type of rabbit snare. In a real trap, one would of course use fine, non-orange cord or wire.

For the rest of the day we worked on making drums. The method we learned from Matt Berry uses no nails or pegs, just the tension of the drum head and lacings and frame, like a mortarless stone arch standing with it's concerted but opposing pressures.

The process starts with skin.

We'd soaked it in lye.

And removed the hair, leaving the grain layer on.

Then we rinsed them clean, and cut out drum skin forms.


The remainder of the skin we cut into 1/4 inch lacing to bind the skins to the frames.


We made the frame with wood: three feet or more of wrist-width straight-grained even-width tree limb. I used a redwood bough.

We cut them into even lengths, then split them lengthwise as evenly as possible.

Then we mitered them to 22.5 degree angles on the ends to form a trapezoid.

Most brave folks used the chop saw. I used a miter box and hand saw.

Next we glued the frames together and chinked the gaps with swdust and glue, then bound them with electrical tape to keep the pieces in tension as they dry overnight.

We started a pot of hide glue by boiling old rabbit skins, fur and all, over a nifty portable wood stove. The glue wasn't ready by the time we needed to glue our frames, though, so we used storebought wood glue.

And there the process stopped for us. RDNA continued the process and completed their drums, but Native Eyes had to leave the next day. We'll revisit drum making later on, with the addition of the skin to our drum frames.

Dark to Dawn

We started this past class with a dark-to-dawn bird sit. It was black, cold and damp, then indigo-silvery, colder and frosted, then bright and full of hubbub. The birdsong swept over the meadow with the first light, and moved seamlessly into the bustle of the morning feeding. All of RDNA, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentoring sat quiet and still in our sit spots (some of the stillness was probably accounted for by being frozen to the spot from cold) while the night world went to sleep and the daytime world woke up around us.











Later I went on a short wander around the land. I wanted to find my way up on the East Ridge, but another of my classmates had already taken the path I thought would be best, so I tried to bushwhack it. I surprised a doe and two fawns just outside the fence. They bolted a few feet then looked back, and seemed to find no reason to run. They browsed as I stalked past them trying to find my way up the ridge. Finally I had to give up, every way blocked by an impenetrable tangle of coyotebrush and poison oak. I had expected as much – many of my wanders go like this, with my initial decision to go to a landmark, and then my avoidance of the most straightforward route because it’s already taken by someone else, or is too out in the open, or for a myriad of other reasons. Finally I almost always fail to reach my chosen landmark. I think this is an interesting pattern of mine.

In any case, I chose to trail the deer instead of wrestle poison oak, and found some beautiful little sites just tucked away near the edge of the garden fence.