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Reading "Stories of the Road Allowance People" was quite a treat for me. But one story found a special place in my mind and heart; it was about a fiddler who used to make his own music. When people asked him, "Where do you get your songs?" He gave them answers like, "the wind taught me this song," or "my horse gave me this song," or "I died and Jesus taught me this song in heaven 'cause there's no fiddles there." The wind taught me songs too. Riding home from powwows I would lean my head against the window of the car and try to catch up on the sleep I never got because I was too busy dancing or staying up to watch the last of the competitions. I could hear spirits in the wind, singing their songs as we flew along the highway. Mostly they were songs I had heard at the powwow, but sometimes they were songs I had never heard before. My adopted Cree mom ended up in a hospital in British Columbia because her husband had a heart attack at the wheel and nearly took her with him when he died. But she said he wouldn't let her go with him, his spirit made her stay behind. Her son contacted the Red Cross because she wanted to see me. So I got emergency leave from the Navy and came to Spokane, where my adopted brother came and picked me up. From there we went up into Canada and got my Cree mom. Going home the radio was playing, but I was listening to the wind rushing past the car because it was singing songs I had never heard before and I began to hum and then sing with the wind softly. My adopted brother turned off the radio and asked me to sing out loud so that he and our mom could hear the songs too. I opened my voice and let the wind come through it and they listened in rapt silence as my voice quavered with old songs that came from nowhere. When I finally stopped they were still and silent for a moment, and then my mom said, "That was really beautiful, thank you, my girl." My brother nodded in agreement and then asked, "Where did you learn those songs?" "The wind was singing them," I told him, "I heard them in the wind rushing past our car." He just nodded at this and for a moment he said nothing. Then he told me, "Remember them and pass them on, they are beautiful." Well, I don't know that I can remember those songs, I guess I would just have to travel that road again and listen for them. Maybe take a recorder along to help preserve them or something like that. I met this guy from Iran after that during my travels. He was an old man who remembered when Iran was still the Persia of his youth, though it hadn't been called that in a while. He told me that the Ayatola had ruined everything, destroying an ancient and beautiful culture with his religious fanaticism. He said that Persia had been a place of romance and poetry and you could hear it in their classical music. I forget how many basic songs he said there were, 126 or 144? He said that all their classical music was based on these original songs and that they had been learned from the birds who lived in Persia. The birds had taught the Persians all they knew about music. When I went north to work on a processor in Alaska I noticed that in the packing area of the ship the machinery sounded like it was singing a popular tune of the time, "After the Fire." Day after day the song rang in my head and I thought it was just a coincidence. But when I went to Tacoma to stay at a friend's place between seasons, I got this job in a door factory and after a couple of weeks I kept hearing a song in my head. After a while I bought an occarina from a street merchant who made them at her home with a small kiln and tried to create the song that was stuck in my head. I had never heard it before and couldn't think of why it would come to me or stay in my head so stubbornly. But then one night I was at work, helping with the peg driver machine, and suddenly I heard the song coming from the machinery. For a moment I just looked around me, listening to the machinery as one by one it all came together in a chorus that created this music. The factory was singing and I had heard its song without realizing what was happening to me. It was a beautiful song, full of longing and journies and things left behind. Eventually, when I began working on the catcher boats, I realized the boats all had their songs too. There was something about the way the engines would resonate through the hull that made their songs. The boat who taught me to listen to her kind was once called the Blue Dolphin, but her name had been changed to the All American, after the 82nd Airborne. She sang a waltz and I felt it was wrong for her to have been made into a crab boat full of angry men with bad habits and bad tempers. She had been meant for kinder endeavors than the extermination of an entire species of marine life. She had a beautiful soul that went unnoticed by those who used her now. She was always breaking down, something was always going wrong. I think maybe she was trying to tell them she didn't like what she was doing. It's
funny, but the machinery in the door factory and the boats of steel
on the Bering Sea give me a strange kind of hope for my own people.
The way I look at it, those things of metal never forgot they were
of the earth. They never forgot their songs. And it didn't matter
how they were forged or structured or what purpose they were set to,
they never forgot how to sing and their songs were beautiful. So how
can we not remember we are people of the earth? How can we forget
our songs or the things about ourselves that are beautiful? How can
we stop hearing the music in the winds? There are just some things
that nothing can change. | |||||
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