April 11, 2003

A Hell of a Cool Evening

Last night my girlfriend and I braved the cold and the wet to sit in the cave at Russell Cave National Monument and listen to a Cherokee storyteller tell creation stories and play a traditional Cherokee flute.

Now normally, Heritage Festivals and such leave me a bit cold, as I grew up hanging around North Georgia and North Carolina and seeing the "authentic Indian craft stores" and rather tawdry attempts to whore an already criminally decimated culture. I have a vast collection of crappy wooden figurines, "gee-haw whimmydiddles" and faux "peace pipes" sold as "authentic Cherokee crafts" with little gold "made in Taiwan" stickers in unobtrusive places. My grandmother used to love the stuff, but then, she was part Indian and from so far back in the woods in North Georgia that she taught the little six-fingered kid on Deliverance how to play banjo.

I suppose they were trying to earn a living using one of the only routes that was immediately available, but as Choogie Kingfisher proved last night, there are other ways to do it.

See, Russell Cave had been pretty well constantly inhabited by the Cherokees and their ancestors for more than 10,000 years. When the National Geographic Society began archaeology on the site in the late 50's, they found 15 FEET of cultural deposits in a single dig. Fire pits, shell middens, skeletons, weapons, bones, horn, flake middens, pottery, you name it. At the bottom was found a single broken Clovis-style point that may be as much as 15,000 years old.

With that much history seething around inside the huge opening to the cave, and a Cherokee once again playing that haunting music inside it, water falling from the long dripline, and torches providing light, I couldn't help but wonder how many thousands of times flute music has bounced off the limestone of that cavern, and how many people have gathered around a fire in the last 10,000 years right where I sat and listened to how Rabbit got his long ears and how Owl got his wide, staring eyes.

What a great way to spend an evening.