Bird songs dont lie, p.2
Bird Songs Don't Lie, page 2
My mother lived in the small shack next door and spent much time with her. She often told of going with her grandmother to the San Luis Rey River, which runs through the Pala Indian Reservation, to collect grasses for basket making. My mother learned to pick grasses, how to soak them, and, while seated next to her grandmother, how to weave the tight coils that would grow into a basket.
My mother often stayed with her grandmother and would complain about being so cold in the thin-walled shack, the wind slipping through cracks, as she tried to sleep beneath threadbare blankets. And she’d sneak into her grandmother’s bed and warm her frozen feet against her grandmother’s back.
For a time, my great-grandmother and her husband, Pedro Trujillo, raised chilies, and my mother helped to string them and hang them to dry for use in winter stews.
Pedro died young, and Esperanza, husbandless, set up housekeeping with a man named (I think) Epiphano Fidelio. The reservation knew him as Jack Johnson, because he resembled the boxer. We knew him simply as Uncle Jack.
He was my great-grandmother’s common-law husband and lived with the family in their small house, even after she died in the late forties. He slept in a small back bedroom, a place of mystery for me, for Uncle Jack was a man of power, and there were things—like crystals under his pillow—that you weren’t to touch, or some of the power could bounce back on you and maybe make you sick, or loosen your teeth, or cause you to fall off a roof.
It was said he used his power mostly for good, for healing, but you never knew.
To us kids, Uncle Jack seemed a gruff man. My Uncle Copy tells the story of getting whipped by Uncle Jack with his belt for fighting with a younger cousin.
“He was strict,” my uncle said. Now he can laugh about it. I don’t think he thought it was funny back then.
After my great-grandmother died, my Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack used to drink wine in the shade of an old tree at the side of the house, and they could be heard laughing the afternoon away. When I was about ten years old, my cousin Randy discovered Uncle Jack dead in the outhouse, his heart refusing to take one more beat. Uncle Jack was one of those people in my life that I always wished I knew better.
My great-grandmother died a long, slow, painful death of stomach cancer. My mother often rubbed her stomach for her. “Oh, girlie, your hands feel so good,” she’d say.
My Uncle Copy sat at my computer, and we looked at the old photos. He’d comment: “There’s the house where I was born,” “That’s me in that cradleboard,” and “I’m sure that’s my mother.”
And the memories flooded in. All because of a LinkedIn message from Bryn Potter. Thanks, Bryn.
April 25, 2014
REFLECTING ON A LIFE
In his bedroom on the Pala Indian Reservation, his old marriage bed has been replaced by a hospital bed, where he now spends his hours in striped sheets, propped up on pillows, staring at a white ceiling fan.
There’s a new flat-screen TV mounted to the wall, but it’s turned off. He finds his memories provide better company.
On a table near his bed, there’s an abalone shell with a bundle of dried sage wrapped in red yarn. The tip of the sage has been burned to smudge the room. A set of antlers from a young buck sits nearby.
Richard “Onnie” Mojado (he spells it Onnie, but it’s pronounced Oonie) has pancreatic cancer. He’s in hospice care. Maybe the word hospice has a softer sound than hospital, but the meaning is less than comforting. It portends the end.
His bedroom window is open. Sounds of the outer world seep in: the whir of cars on Highway 76, the occasional yip from a passel of rez puppies tugging on one another’s ears, a crow scolding from a nearby tree.
In the next room, his daughter, Trina, watches TV and talks on the phone. Every now and then she checks on his comfort, brings him a plastic cup of grape juice with a flexible straw.
Onnie is seventy-two but looks older. Once a 280-pound man, strong, handsome in a black cowboy hat with a beaded hatband, he’s now a desiccated version of his former self. Cancer knows no mercy.
I’ve known Onnie for most of my life. Way back when I played fast-pitch softball for the Pala men’s team, Onnie was my coach. We’ve played on the same peon team off and on for more than thirty years. He’s godfather to my youngest son, Bear.
He’s a family man. His wife, Brenda, died several years ago, but he has Trina, and a son, Lawrence, and five grandchildren.
He worked twenty-seven years for the Fallbrook sanitation department, and after retiring from there he worked four years for tribal maintenance, and another five as security for Pala Casino.
He’s gonna die on the reservation where he was born. He wouldn’t have it otherwise. In quiet moments, the ceiling fan spins images from his life.
He sees the cup he drank coffee in as a kid. He drank it sweet but with no milk. Lactose intolerance is common with Indians.
“Coffee for breakfast, coffee for dinner. It’s mostly what we drank,” he says. “And we had a lot of mush for breakfast. No steak and eggs in those days.”
Sometimes the fan spins him a rabbit sitting in a clearing in between sage and chamise, his iron-sighted .22-caliber rifle trained on what was just a trigger squeeze away from becoming dinner. He’d carry them home by their hind legs so his mom, Dorothy, could fry them up in a cast-iron frying pan.
“Dang they were good,” he says.
Once his Uncle Porky bought him a fielder’s glove, a Spalding. You couldn’t give a kid who loved sports as much as Onnie anything better. He rubbed it down with neatsfoot oil until it was soft as an earlobe. He shoveled in many a ground ball at shortstop with that glove, snagged many a line drive in the outfield with it.
After high school, he joined the army, stationed at Fort Ord and Hunter Liggett. He’s proud of his military service and active in local veterans’ affairs.
Onnie grew up across the street from Brenda, the girl he would marry. They were high school sweethearts. She went to college in Utah, eventually got her master’s degree, and headed up the Pala Head Start program for thirty-eight years. All four of my kids went to Head Start; all four learned to read from “Teacher Brenda.”
Sometimes, this fan spins visions of his brother and sister, now dead, playing in the yard, or his children opening Christmas presents, or his wife singing Indian songs; she had a lovely voice.
He took his last drink about forty years ago. He simply quit when he found that drink was interfering with family.
Onnie liked to travel with his family. He usually bought a big van, large enough for them to be comfortable in. They made summer trips to Fort Duchesne powwows in Utah, where Brenda was originally from.
“I loved going to those,” he says.
They traveled as a family to peon games all around Southern California and Arizona reservations. They liked to eat at Denny’s while on the road.
When we played peon, an Indian bone game, Onnie usually anchored one end, while I had the other. King Freeman and John Chutnicutt would take the inside positions. Later his son played too, father and son singing in unison.
Onnie has a distinctive singing voice, clear and resonant. Of all our team members, Onnie was the one most likely to go on a run. He was Coyote, fooling opponents into thinking he was hiding one way, but smiling when showing them they were wrong. There was seldom a game when he didn’t have at least one good run.
Onnie has had a good run. He tries to be philosophical about the unavoidable end. Maybe he’ll just fall asleep and not wake up. It can happen any time, he says.
“I don’t think about death much. I think about life, all that I’ve done, all the people I’ve known, all the good and bad times I’ve had.”
And he has his faith. Most Sunday mornings he could be found at the Pala Mission’s Mass. Father Rey still brings him communion.
I ask him, “So what was most important?”
Without hesitation, he says, “My family. Keeping my family strong, everyone going in the right direction.”
You hear a lot of talk these days about what a real man is. To me, that’s a real man.
May 23, 2014
MEMORIES OF MISSION SAN ANTONIO DE PALA
Rain Bird sprinklers twitch over the front landscape of Mission San Antonio de Pala. June sunbeams play in the spray like a Horace Silver jazz riff. The morning air is cool, damp; the red and purple geraniums drink it all in.
A white campanile with its double-decker bells stands above it all. But it’s a tower of confusion, a symbol of mixed feelings. Below the bell tower, a red-winged blackbird lands on the circular river-rock wall that serves as a planting bed for flowers. These days roses, daisies, and poppies splash color on what I remember was once the mission fountain.
When I was a kid, koi and goldfish called the fountain home. I used to like to watch flashes of gold and calico fin through the algae-green water. The fountain also served as a wishing well. Tourists and locals alike would close their eyes tight, make wishes, and toss coins into the fountain. Silver coins would flicker through the green water on their way to the bottom.
I guess the idea was that this was blessed ground, and wishes made here had a better chance of being granted. I don’t know if the wishes ever came true. But I think it’s a matter of mathematics that at least a few did.
When the fountain got too choked with green, the mission priest would put out a call to rez boys to clean it out. The summer sun would sting our shoulders as we sat to remove our Converse high-tops. We’d jump into the water in our cutoffs to pluck coins from the muck and try to remove the algae, which slipped through our fingers like overcooked spinach.
The priest would stand by in black pants and a white T-shirt with a bucket for us to drop the coins in. It was odd to see him so casual. For us boys it was a romp.
Nobody on the reservation had a pool back then. If you were lucky, you’d sit in a galvanized washtub in the front yard or in a horse trough in the barn lot to cool off. Climbing into the fountain was the closest most of us kids got to splashing in a pool.
The priest kept most of the coins, but after we’d cleaned the fountain as good as we could, he’d give us a few. It was crazy-good to feel them jangling in your wet pocket. We’d race across the street to the Pala Store and buy treats. One of my favorites was a bag of peanuts dumped into a bottle of Pepsi. I liked to see the salt fizz. I liked the taste of Pepsi-soaked peanuts as well.
The Pala Mission was built in 1816 with Indian labor under Padre Antonio Peyri, a Franciscan priest. Peyri is credited with founding the mission, actually an asistencia to Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, but it was Indians who mixed the mud and straw to form the adobes.
They cut timbers with handsaws on Palomar Mountain and dragged them with horses to form the rafters. In many places, the walls of stacked adobe bricks are more than four feet thick. It was hard work, sometimes done under the sting of a lash.
My grandparents were married in the mission. So were my parents. So was I. My kids have all been baptized in the mission. My grandmother went to Mass there every morning. But I seldom go to Mass there anymore. The mission, however, endures.
June 20, 2014
A PART OF RESERVATION LIFE
When I was seven or eight, back when cattle grazed much of the local countryside and pickups outnumbered sedans, when most yards had a few chickens pecking for insects, I remember riding with my uncle down Pechanga Road. We were probably taking my grandfather to a Pechanga tribal meeting.
I remember going past the Salgado home and seeing one of the boys, maybe it was GiGi or Gino, carrying a rabbit by the hind legs into the house. He paused for a moment at the door to let little brothers and sisters playing in the yard see what he’d brought home. The image of him standing there, holes in the knees of his jeans, rabbit in hand—the proud hunter—remains fixed in my brain as an iconic reservation image. To me this is what rez life was about in those days.
I wanted so badly to be the proud hunter. I was too young at the time, but the desire to bring home game burned in my innards.
A few years later, I was allowed to roam the Pala Reservation backcountry with my cousins on hunting outings. On the way back we’d be hot and tired. We’d put creek pebbles in our mouths to stave off thirst. Once, we tried cutting open a cactus to get moisture from the paddle, but a snake, a red racer, slithered out and we didn’t want any part of that.
I didn’t have a gun yet, but they’d let me shoot one of theirs. They’d set up beer cans on a fence, and I’d aim at the center of the red X on Lucky Lager cans.
I was just learning and wasn’t much of a shot. But for Christmas when I was eight or nine, I got a lever-action Daisy BB gun. It was the cool kind that resembled a Model 1894 Winchester, the kind cowboys carried in scabbards on horseback. I spent my days honing my shooting skills with that gun. It was my gun.
There were big boulders down by the bridge, where lizards liked to hang out. I’d stalk them, stepping slowly and quietly in my Keds, the river-bottom sand muffling any sound. I’d spot one doing push-ups on a rock, raise the BB gun to my shoulder, and place the lizard in the buckhorn sights.
My father was on his college rifle team and was a heck of a shot. He taught me gun safety at a young age. I have an older cousin, Robert Banks, who was a terrific shot. I once saw him hit a jackrabbit on the run. To this day I’ve never shot a rabbit on the run, but he could do it. He was my idol. I wanted to shoot like him.
When I was old enough, about ten, I started carrying a .22 on hunting outings with my cousins.
Roaming the sage, chaparral, and cactus with a gun in hand, looking for the camouflaged shape of a rabbit hiding in the brush, remains a favorite memory. I’d bring home rabbits—carrying them by the hind legs—and my grandmother would heat her cast-iron frying pan, dip rabbit parts in flour, and fry them in bacon grease.
Back then, money was tight. The extra protein was welcomed. Most Indian boys did the same for their families.
Back then, I never heard of a kid taking a gun to school. Somewhere along the line, something in society went very wrong. I wish it were otherwise.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been hunting. But there was a time when it was simply a part of life. Once, I loved guns. Today, my feelings are mixed.
September 5, 2014
BEING IN THE SWEAT FOCUSES THE SENSES
Balanced on pitchfork tines, a river rock glowed red with fire-borne heat. Oh so carefully, Frankie Orosco, the fire tender, lowered the football-sized rock through the doorway, setting it in front of Randall “Doc” Majel, the sweat leader. Doc grabbed the rock with forked deer antlers to place it in the center pit.
The lodge, about twelve feet in diameter, was more than ample for the ten of us who were sitting on a ledge carved into earth facing the pit. Above our heads, surplus military canvas stretched over bent willow branches formed a cathedral-like dome.
The flap covering the doorway was folded up, allowing night-cold and firelight to seep in. Once the rocks were in place, though, Frankie lowered the flap, and darkness became tangible, our interiors fusing with lodge interiors. And thusly the sweat began.
We were gathered at my buddy King’s house for a New Year’s sweat, a thing we’ve been doing for more than thirty years. But this time we missed New Year’s because rain and snow dampened our best intentions, so we settled for a couple of nights after. If the sweat lodge has taught us anything, it’s taught us to be flexible.
Doc sprinkled a mix of wild tobacco and sweet grass onto the hot rocks, and soon the interior filled with sacred smoke, like incense in a confessional. The rocks, which had been scorched in the fire for several hours, hummed with heat and power. The rocks glowed, and through the smoke I could make out the faces of my sweat brothers and sisters, and faces in the rocks themselves, faces of the primordial past.
With a ladle fashioned from a gourd, Doc scooped water from a bucket and splashed it onto the rocks. The water beaded, jumped, sizzled, and steam billowed like a symphony.
I’m gonna stop the description here. I won’t recount the prayers of the sweat. What is voiced in the sweat stays in the sweat. It’s a shared moment, but a private moment, with a code of silence invoked.
But it’s okay if I speak a little of what happens for me inside the sweat. I once heard of life described as “the dance of person and presence.”
I examine that phrase in the sweat because there is no place where I am more present. All senses focused on the here and now. I hear the sound of voices raised in ancient songs, the rhythmic explosions of seeds inside gourd rattles, the smells of blistering rocks meeting fresh sage. I feel lightened, purified, made whole. There is a sense of ancestors infusing my being with their wisdom, their strength. And that’s just a little of what happens for me.
A couple of months ago, as I walked to my writing shack out back of my house, I happened upon a dead red-shouldered hawk with wings outstretched in the dirt. The hawk must have died in the night, because it wasn’t there the day before.
I regarded the hawk as a gift from the Creator, and glanced skyward to say thanks. I cleaved the talons off and dropped them into a Mason jar of alcohol and glycerin, letting them cure for several weeks to preserve them.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt a kinship with hawks. Every time I’ve spotted one soaring, heard one keen, watched one dive with talons outstretched, I’ve felt blessed. Hawks and I have a special relationship.
I wrapped the preserved talons with a length of leather bootlace and gave them to my sons, Brandon and Bear, for Christmas.
It’s not easy being a man in this world. I gave them the talons so they might borrow on the hawk’s strength and wisdom as they make their way from cradle to grave in a world that doesn’t know the meaning of fair or unfair. In the sweat, I prayed for them, for all my loved ones, for all humanity.
I think about things like that in the sweat.
Here’s wishing you all strength and good fortune in the coming year.
