Flying Blind

This week Native Eyes met at Abbott's Lagoon, where the Marin County Tracking Club usually meets. The wind was howling and singing over the sand, so strongly in places that the tracks there would age to nothing in a matter of minutes. We spent the day playing with trailing and interpretation on these shifting dunelands.



Two fresh deer trails greeted us on the flat. We started trailing easily, but slowed to a crawl in more difficult substrates. We could see no tracks in the springy rushes, though our instructors pointed them out at times.



We wound up dividing, and each following our own ideas about trailing deer. One group felt compelled to run up the dunes. They looked down at the sand somewhere near the crest, and found fresh deer tracks galloping away from them. The crisp sidewalls of the tracks crumbled down as they watched. Keeping on the trail, they found it converging with those of other deer in the dunegrass, and followed until we were called back.

We took a brief intermission to eat lunch and look at the copious local otter sign. Here they've rolled in the grass and left lots of little snotty splats all around.



After our lunch and otter wander, we came back to a fascinatingly fun game on the sand flats. As we all turned our backs, three instructors walked around and did something, interacting with each other, in a pre-designated area. They retreated to one side of the outlined area and called us back. It was our job, then, to tell the story of what went on. After successfully interpreting the first simple turn-around in the sand, I felt effectively blind to the rest of the hidden story in the tracks. But after careful study and then relaxing into Owl Eyes (also known as wide-angle vision), I could start to put the story together. With all of us students helping each other out, the blind leading the blind, we found many (but not all) of the answers.



The next morning our dark-to-dawn bird sit attracted only the hardiest participants. We fox-walked through the steady drizzle, the feintest indigo of predawn and sensitive feet guiding us through the dark to our sit spots. The birds chorused with chips when it was still too dark to see them and then went about their business of feeding in the soggy brush with only a few notes of song. We were called in by a coyote howl after what seemed to be an uncharacteristically short time. Perhaps I'm starting to like going out before my morning tea, sitting in the dark and cold, and trying to listen for sparrow alarms? In any case, we gathered in the greenhouse to map what we heard and eat our well-earned breakfast. As always, some interesting patterns of alarm and silence emerged.

Earlier in the week, in our evening talk, Jon Young had introduced a practice called "Renewal of the Creative Path," inspired by the Haudenosaunee midwinter festival in which the Iroquois people renew their understanding of themselves, their connection to nature, their path in life, and their lineages. The Renewal process seems kind of like journaling and new years resolutions on steroids. I'm excited to begin. In preparation for the first part of Renewal, in which one reviews moments in one's life that exemplify connection to the Earth and nature, we launched into an exercise intended to get us out of our analytical minds and into our senses: a blindfolded Drum Stalk.

We had to find the drum, which beat from a far-off meadow. And we had to somehow keep our clans together as we walked blindly through brush and bramble. Many toes picked up many thorns on the way, some unfortunates became tangled in willow thickets, and some stepped off streambanks into thin air. We walked blind across two meadows, through brush, and over a creek. We scrambled up the creekbank to the drum, bruised, scratched, bumped and muddy, and electrically alive with sensory awareness. All clans had all members accounted for in the end.

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.

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.