29 March 2010
 
Moonset

Travel today; so I was up early, with visions.
 
Standing on the little deck outside the back-door to The Big Top apartment on top of the garage on the compound in Michigan to see the bright rich full moon settle into the waters of the bay near Nine Mile Point, precisely where the sun had extinguished itself in the waters last night.
 
Sometimes when the evidence of the motion of gigantic things strikes my puny senses I get giddy, almost like I could fall upwards into the vast dark heavens.
 
The computer tells me there is big weather on the east coast, where I have to be later in the day. “Damn,” I muttered. “Please, God, don’t leave me stranded in Detroit.”
 
I sat down with coffee to read about death on the Moscow subway and the waters off North Korea and it doesn’t register completely. The suicide bombers in Russia are women; when will that start here?  I don’t like the Metro as it is. It could be much worse.
 
There is none of that up here in the North. No infrastructure to speak of, none of the frantic bustle of the capital. I thought about what the Indian seer had told me the day before as I made coffee.
 
He was a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. They are part of the Ottawa people, and have been in these parts long before Europeans, and the logging that shaved these gentle sand hills, and the tourists and summer folk.
 
They have had their trials. The Iroquois Wars of the early 1600s drove the Odawa from their stronghold on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron and almost annihilated them. Later, they partnered with the French trappers and prospered in the fur trade.
 
The Odawa were a migratory people and pulled up stakes in the fall, traveling from the UP and the northern tip of the mitten to the southern part of Michigan, where the climate was more hospitable during the winter months. They did the trip on foot, while the current seasonal residents do it by car.
 
The population of the region triples with the coming of Spring and summer.
 
The Odawa used to come back north to collect maple syrup, fish and plant crops. When they weren't tending their gardens or doing their day-to-day chores, they gathered fruits, herbs, medicines, as well as any other food products they could dry and put away to be used during the long brutal Michigan winter.
 
The Odawa have done pretty as negotiators. A treaty of peace with the Iroquois saved them as a people. The elders agreed to it at a place just up the road from the compound called Waganawkezee (“It is Bent”) which referred to an ancient pine tree that leaned out over the bluff and was used as a landmark for the village. The French and the British referred to it as L'arbre Croche, or Crooked Tree, to the entire coastline between the tip of the mitten at Mackinac and the southern shore of Little Traverse Bay.
 
After the loggers and farmers came, the Odawa adapted to the new communities at Escanaba, Mackinaw, Cross Village, Good Hart, Middle Village, Harbor Springs and Petoskey. They ceased migration and signed two treaties with the American government in the Treaty Room in the OEOB in Washington that they spent the next hundred years trying to enforce.
 
They finally succeeded in 1999. The Band got their hunting and fishing rights back, independent of the bureaucrats at the Department of Natural Resources, and they got the right to operate games of chance whether Lansing liked it or not.
 
The casino opened on the top of the bluff above town in what had been the Victory Lanes bowling alley, and they have been on a roll since. They expanded their way through that, and began a concerted plan to use their sovereign status to tell the state of Michigan to go screw itself, and bought hotels and built a major new casino on the flat land south of the Bay.
 
They say the new casino is doing pretty well despite the recession- receipts are up 5% in the face of a weakened tourist market, and sometimes uneasy alliance between the Band and the City Council.
 
There were some hallucinations after the ice cream last night, and I realized I had become several guests in the eyes of my Dad, who was eager to get his house buttoned up for the evening. I kissed my Mom and made a great show of getting all of me out the back door so he could settle down.
 
I was not depressed, exactly; I am getting used to the idea that someone I love is drifting away into the darkness and there is nothing whatsoever I can do about it but accept the journey.
 
I felt like I did when I looked at the full moon and the broad sky and felt that loosening of gravity. I thought I would take a drive and look at the new casino.
 
I am not a mystic, though I have tried to understand the Sufis and their part in the great jihad. Of all the strains of Islam, that is the one that most appeals to me. There are many strands of spirituality unrelated to the practice of the Great Faiths. The Odawa were proselytized by the Catholics, first by the legendary French mystic Pere Marquette and later many more.
 
But they never abandoned the principles of their native animism, and it lives still. I saw the lights of the big new casino ahead on Lears Road, and marveled at the sprawling complex. The lights were just coming up as the sun faded. Things have changed in the little city by the bay.
 
I didn’t think that a crowd was what I needed at the moment, and I swerved the rental Caddie into an entrance to the vast new asphalt parking lot far distant from the new construction where I could take it all in. There was an old frame farmhouse, white paint faded and narrow and vertical as the Anglos built them back in the day. On the sagging porch was a sign that read: “Spirit Guide.”
 
I snorted, and almost lit up a Lucky before I remembered that the rental car was labeled prominently on the dash as “no smoking.” I still wanted a smoke, so I threw the gear selector into park and got out of the car. I was smoking and looking at the casino when I heard the creak of a door, and a soft but authoritative voice called out.
 
“I dreamed of you last night.”
 
I turned quickly and looked toward the sound of the voice. It was a man of indeterminate age with long hair gathered in a ponytail. He looked white, but standing next to him was a slender dark-eyed woman who looked like she could have been full-blood.
 
“That is interesting,” I said, taking a drag off the cigarette. “But I seriously doubt it.”
 
“I felt your doubt in the dream, but I knew you were here and that you would come, fleeing the cotton-wool of someone else’s great forgetting.”
 
He was right enough about that, I thought, and I was intrigued. I crushed out the cigarette on the fresh black surface of the parking lot. I walked toward the couple on the porch. You know I like a good story, and this one actually had me in it.
 
I will tell you more about it if I make it home safely. I think I will.

The Odawa shaman told me so.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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