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.

Two Weeks

For the last two weeks I’ve basically had no time to myself, so I didn’t post for the last two classes. Now I’ve got a moment, though, so I’ll just do a rapid-fire rundown of my latest activities.

NativeEyes Student Life lately:

Previous class on Oct. 14th and 15th:
We rode out to Bolinas starting predawn because one of our crew had to be there at noon. The ride was utterly amazing.



I hit a “wall of grief” that, at least for me, took precedence over the class activities. While the rest of the class went on a wander, I discussed my state of mind with one of the instructors. What follows is my internal process. The details are specific to me, but I think the core of it is a pretty common spiral of thought that many get into when they hit their walls. Either of the first two can feed into either of the second two, which can cycle back to either of the first two. It seems complex and overwhelming when one is caught up in it, but it’s really just a feedback loop of “everyone sucks”. And it’s really hard to get out of.

I’m paying a bunch of money to be in this class, and because I'm in this class and interning at another nature studies class, I don't have time to work enough to support myself, so I'm constantly stressed about money.

I’m just a student with no access to the information or decision-making process that the instructors work with.

I’ve got few skills and abilities when it comes to nature connection, having been raised in a city. I missed out on my birthright by growing up on concrete and now I’ve got about a three-year-old’s understanding of my environment. Therefore I suck.

I’ve spent a number of years working very very hard at learning about my land, mostly on my own but sometimes with teachers. I’ve seen amazing things, discovered wonders in my own backyard, and amassed much more depth of knowledge about my land than many of my peers. I’ve conquered many fears and endured extremes of weather and emotion. I’ve earned my knowledge, I want to bring that knowledge to others as a mentor/facilitator, and I’m not getting the recognition or support for that personal work that I think is warranted. Therefore my teachers suck.

I talked this over with one of our instructors and finally got most of the way out of the cycle. I think one of the voices in my head is still caught in the loop, though, since on a certain level, it’s all true. But most of the time I understand that the truth of the above statements doesn’t mean they have to be the overriding understanding that shapes my mood and perception in the moment. I have other understandings of the world that I can operate from, and that tend to be much more fun and functional, such as beauty and gratitude.

After that I joined the wandering group, looking for signs of water on the landscape. We wandered down to the beach and built a solar still. First we dug a shallow hole, about the same size as a plastic bag cut open along the side. We found some goopy green water and used bull kelp bulbs cut crosswise to hold the water in our hole, and placed a Frisbee in the hole as well. We covered the whole thing with our cut-open plastic bag, weighted down on the sides with rocks, and placed a single small rock in the middle to offer a focal point for the drips that would form and (with luck) fall into the upturned frisbee. We did get drops from the condensation that started as soon as we covered over the hole with the plastic, but never a drip.








For the record, I think the principle of a solar still is sound, but we may have started too late in the day and/or used too small a hole.

We also went and looked at tidepools.





Bioneers:
Networking.
Got a coal from my bowdrill with some kids who were wandering around the event.
Michael Meade is worth listening to.

Personal time:
Stolen bike! Holy crap my neighbors suck. I spent all of Monday working on my bike, putting on three new Blackspire chainrings, a new 9-speed cassette on the back, and a new chain, as well as tightening up the bottom bracket and ordering new rims and a new BB tool. Then I got up Tuesday morning and found a dangling cable lock in my backyard where my bike should have been. God knows what they did with the Kryptonite Evo U-lock. I really do not like living in this neighborhood full of crackheads and thieves right now.

Last class on Oct. 21st and 22nd:

We made a fire with a deep-red-barked maple that one of my classmates brought down from Covelo. The wood was both beautiful and sonorous when knocked together, and burned very brightly.

Our morning bird sit was an intro to raptor world, with a Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp-Shinned Hawks, and Kestrels making appearances.

We moved into midday with basketweaving, and finished our baskets with some time to spare for tracking.



Our mission then was to find 25 tracks of different animals in the space of about two and a half hours. We went down to the salt marsh and actually wound up finding 10 different animal tracks, both mammals and birds.

In some down-time some fellow students and I worked on the beginnings of buckeye and blue elderberry bow-drill kits. I’m very happy with my elderberry-on-elderberry kit. It’s an uncommon wood, it seems, for bow-drill, but I’ve been very successful with it so far. Next I’m trying out a buckeye-on-buckeye kit and will report back.

We finished the day with some grinding activities, first grinding natural pigments to paint with, then grinding acorns. We had to leave before the pit-baked acorn bread would be ready, though, so I'm trying to collect more acorns to do the whole process myself.

Basketweaving and Creekwalking

We held this class at Venture Retreat Center once again, with Jay Sliwa as our instructor, taking the opportunity to study up on some of Jay’s skills while Jon is in Germany. We arrived to news that one of the group had a whole salmon to share for our dinner. We spun up a coal and built a fire as the bringer of salmon had an impromptu filleting demonstration. Yum, sashimi.



We used the carcass to bait a trail camera southeast of the retreat center, in the edge between a coyotebrush stand and a grassy area, near the road, just up from the creek. We caught some critters chowing down. If I can get those photos I'll post them here. Until then, post a comment with your guess about who found the carcass and why you favor that particular critter.

The next day, after a damp, chilly, and peaceful bird sit, we came back to the fire circle and found piles upon piles of straight, supple green willow shoots. These were not like the standard twisty forky branches one commonly sees on trees unmolested by disturbance, but long straight canes at least three feet in length. Where could one go to find this much basketry material? What makes a tree produce long straight shoots? Could I find the right materials near my home in Oakland? Could I manage trees near me to produce this kind of growth?



Then we got down to the business of making burden baskets. Here’s a how-to of our process:

We started with four short lengths of thicker willow shoots, and four longer ones. We split each shorter one lengthwise, from the center partway to the ends, creating openings in the middle of otherwise whole shoots. We lined the openings up and pushed all four longer shoots through them at a right angle, creating a grid.



Then we began weaving the bottoms of the baskets. Taking two long thin shoots, we wedged the tips in the latticework and began twining. One went behind a thicker grid piece as the other came forward, twining around in a twisting pattern. Ideally one would spread the longer, thicker grid pieces as one wove, giving the whole an overall oval shape. I didn’t manage to do that part very well.

By this time the sun was toward the south and stomachs were growling. We stopped for lunch and I found someone to join me in climbing a tree.

When we returned, we started on the sides of the baskets. First we sharpened the butt ends of 16 long shoots, and shoved them in parallel to the thick grid pieces, producing a giant spreading hexadecopoid shape.


We then started “pricking up” the 16 long shoots, which entailed stabbing them through with a knife, near the base, but not cutting them, and then bending them up at a right angle. The pierced area bent rather than broke (if we were lucky) forming a vertical wall of weavers that were anchored in the horizontal base. We drew them together and tied them in a teepee shape over the base.

Then we began twining three shoots at once for the sides. We started by shoving the thin ends of three long shoots in adjacent crevices. The pattern was “skip two, under one,” though I found it more useful to just look for the next opening and tuck my furthest-away cane in it.



And that’s as far as we got in one day. By four-thirty we were all tired and a little bit grumpy from wrestling willow shoots all day, so we went for a wander up the creek.






One of us tried to jump and instead took a tumble when the bank crumbled. Waterproof shoes are great – for holding the water in when you’ve just belly-flopped up to your waist. Sploosh!

Laughter helped to release the tensions of the day, as did simply walking the creek. I hadn’t realized how tense and micro-focused I’d become, until we were strolling along the creekbed and I started to unwind. I felt my chest open and my back straighten. My weight settled down as my muscles loosened. My head came up and my neck released and stretched a little, and my focus began to spread out. I began to feel better, after not really realizing that I had been feeling worse.

As fun, addictive, important, necessary, interesting and useful as basketweaving is, I need to remember to walk the creek too.