Читать книгу The Site - Robert W. Nero - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIFOUND MY first arrowhead when I was about nine years old and living in an orphanage in Racine, Wisconsin. How I knew that this small, white chipped-stone was an arrowhead, let alone what it was doing in the flower garden beside the home, is puzzling. Still, I was a great reader at an early age, and I was allowed to browse through tomes in the extensive library left by the donor of this mansion-cum-orphan asylum. Doubtless, I had seen pictures of arrowheads, for I recognized it at once, and treasured it for long. That first arrowhead disappeared, along with all the other stones I was notorious for lugging around at that early age, in the sagging pockets of my bib coveralls.
My interest in arrowheads continued, and when I was taken up at eleven by Alta and Emil Erenz, foster parents who needed someone to care for, I soon began searching farm fields close to our house on the outskirts of Milwaukee. I seldom found much, certainly not an actual site. Owing to the annual cultivation of farmland, the soil was constantly being churned up, with little chance of erosion and concentration or exposure of material, and perhaps I was too far from a source of water. I walked for miles, spending hours by myself, and only occasionally finding a flint arrowhead or knife. But the rarity of my isolated finds gave added poignancy to the event. Even after more than fifty years I can still clearly visualize the shape and colour of certain pieces. I was rambling, searching, seeing birds, enjoying my freedom.
Once when I excitedly brought home an arrowhead, Emil scoffed at my find, for it was missing the tip. “That’s no good, it’s broken,” he muttered. Alta’s parents lived nearby and one day, when I stopped off there, her mother surprised me by bringing out a tin pail half full of arrowheads for me to look at. They had been found years earlier at a distant farm. I sorted through them with great interest. Some time later I went back, thinking that she might give them to me for my collection, but she said she’d put them away somewhere and couldn’t find them. Someone on the farm had collected them, had recognized and searched for those arrowheads. That elderly lady perhaps, when she was a girl? I drove out to that farm one fall, walked briefly over a hardened cultivated field, but failed to see any signs. Perhaps the arrowheads had come from a different field.
So anxious was I to acquire arrowheads that I responded to an ad in a magazine for a free arrowhead. Imagine my delight when I received a parcel in the mail from Arkansas containing six beautiful arrowheads. I hurried to show them off to Emil and his father-in-law. It was the older man who tactfully pointed out that I’d have to return them or pay for them, for they had been sent to me “on approval,” something I’d overlooked. I was crestfallen.
My folks had a cottage at a lake not far away, and in my teens I persuaded them once to drop me off several miles away from the lake near a spot along the Fox River where we could see several “Indian mounds,” sculptured earthen burial sites of the prehistoric Effigy Mound Culture, atop a nearby ridge. I reasoned that nearby fields along the river should be good places to look for arrowheads. As I recall, I didn’t find anything that day, but I had a good hike. Eventually, I found places in which to look in the vicinity of the lake, once even finding an arrowhead in the sparse lawn beside the cottage.
Indian mounds—they fascinated me, just as they did so many others. On hilltops beside rivers and lakes throughout southeastern Wisconsin, their prominent shapes were not easily overlooked. Usually burial sites, the smooth grassed forms of mounds drew my attention far more than did any churchyard cemetery. Something of the distant past, the lore of Indians, and especially the suggestion of buried goods—artifacts! I heard stories from farmers, from colleagues, accounts of ">mounds dug up, plundered, pillaged of carved catlinite pipes—pipestone, of spearheads, of skulls taken for souvenirs.
At Madison, Indian mounds, carefully preserved and identified with markers, occurred right on campus. Some mounds were in the shapes of animals, effigy mounds: eagles, swans, swallows, turtles, cougars, serpents, even humans—clan symbols, perhaps.
In an article called “Northern Woodlands” in Nature Canada, I wrote: “During my teen-aged years, going ‘up north’ was a joyful event, a rare opportunity to hunt, fish and explore in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin….Wandering alone for hours over distant hills I searched on sandy ridges for chipped-stone Indian artifacts. The pink and white quartzite ‘arrowheads’ I found were handled all day long, clinking in my pocket like old coins, but more highly valued.”
The Milwaukee Public Museum, I soon discovered, housed attractive displays of many subjects. A budding taxidermist in my early teens, I spent hours there, talking to such notable staff members as artist/ornithologist Owen J. Gromme and taxidermist Warren Dettman. Once, those busy people even came out to my home to see some of the birds I had mounted. At that time there were large series of arrowheads on display in old-fashioned glass-covered cases that one could lean over. I studied those arrays for hours, fascinated by the many different kinds. W. C. McKern, archaeologist and Director of that Museum, once kindly took time to look at some small flints that I was sure were artifacts. When he looked a bit skeptical, I urged him to use a magnifying glass, to see the tiny chipped edges that I thought must be man-made. I was deeply gratified when, after peering thoughtfully through a glass, he said: “You know, I do believe you’re right.” I was fifteen at the time. Only much later did I come to understand McKern’s stature as an archaeologist. His classification system for prehistoric culture complexes is still in use today.
Looking for arrowheads is fun, finding them is exciting and—like all amateur collectors—I enjoyed my finds, showing them to friends, handling them with care and just a little awe. Years afterwards, I could sort through my collection and recall the moment and place I’d found each particular specimen. Artifacts, in addition to their scientific or intellectual aspect, often have considerable artistic qualities. Even a crudely flaked implement has intrinsic beauty, and some pieces are aesthetically pleasing much beyond their functional design. A projectile point made of semi-transparent agate, for example, gleaming in the sun, is undeniably beautiful. I suspect that this aspect of artifacts is one of the reasons they are treasured by so many collectors. One small, pink quartzite arrowhead that I found on a hunting trip in central Wisconsin, ended up a few years later as a romantic sacrifice. I had taken the arrowhead to a jeweller who fastened it with a gold band to a necklace. The recipient of that attractive pendant, when I last heard from her many years later, was married and living in Hawaii. And, yes, she still had the pendant. Later, I discovered an even more satisfying aspect of my hobby: studying artifacts and writing about them; working up a report for publication, it turned out, yielded an even greater reward.
With the advent of World War II in 1943, I dropped out of university and left a factory job to enlist, and was soon looking for artifacts and finding them during my military training period in the deep South, searching in cotton fields and eroded gullies in Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. While stationed outside of Austin, Texas, a friend took me to visit the archaeology museum at the University of Texas. There I chatted briefly with Alex D. Krieger, as I later learned, a renowned archaeologist. It was a brief but inspiring visit. One day in Alabama I even dropped out of drill formation momentarily—a daring move for a young trainee soldier—to pick up a flint knife I’d spotted. It’s one of the few early finds that I still have left. None of my army buddies at that camp knew that on Sunday when I regularly left on a day pass I was off to look for arrowheads. How they would have hooted if they had known that I was doing this in the company of a seven-year-old girl! I had met Khaki, that really was her name, on her grandparent’s farm outside of town. She was good company, and wise beyond her years. When I pointed to the beautiful clouds forming above us one day, she said: “Yes, but you can’t walk on them.”
Stationed for five weeks in 1944 at Finschhaven on the southern coast of New Guinea in preparation for the coming invasion of the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands, despite a heavy workload I still kept on looking for artifacts. Bulldozers had cleared the forest growth to make a military campsite, in places scraping right down to the hard coral base. There must have been an early habitation site there, for I found five small ground-stone celts and several pieces of prehistoric pottery, all of which I gleefully pocketed. Let the war go on, I was still finding items of interest. Later, Mr. McKern wrote to tell me that the potsherds I’d sent him from New Guinea were similar to some he’d unearthed years before the war on one of the Tonga Islands in the Southwest Pacific.
I also found a few shiny flakes of obsidian on the bare dirt trails leading up the steep hills behind our temporary camp to a nearby native village—it was a long climb, but worth the effort, and a grand view over the surrounding forested range, jungle to the horizon. When I showed those pieces to the natives and asked about artifacts made of such material they seemed to know about them, but didn’t have any. Papuan villagers saw me so often they began calling me “New Guinea Boy.” Thanks to those people I acquired some interesting items of ethnological interest which I shipped to the Milwaukee Public Museum before we went into action. One of those items was a fine carved wooden bowl the natives had given me. About twenty inches long, it was carved out of black wood in the likeness of a crocodile, with the bowl in its back. The incised reptilian skin pattern was filled with white pigment. It was beautiful; they told me it was old.
Plodding up that jungle trail one early morning, I met a Papuan native man, a stranger, coming my way: colourful woven loin-cloth, braided arm-bands, wooden comb stuck in his bountiful hair. Any part of his apparel, I thought, would have been welcomed by the museum, but how do you ask a man for his clothes? We squatted down to chat, rays of sunlight streaming down through the tall trees and lighting up great scarlet flowers, white cockatoos flying high overhead. We both struggled to communicate in local pidgin-English; after an exchange of greetings, I learned to my surprise that he was hoping I could provide him with some condoms. It turned out that somehow he had misunderstood the function of prophylactics. He was anxious to acquire some because he thought that this would increase his sexual pleasure. Using a stick to make a sketch in the bare clay before us, I tried to correct his misunderstanding. A difficult exercise. Though he nodded agreeably as we parted, I’m not sure he really understood.
Corporal Robert Nero with Papuan friends in New Guinea, 1944. Courtesy Richard Fox.
One Sunday, village elders invited me to attend church with them. It turned out that they had been converted to Catholicism many years earlier by Dutch missionaries. I’m not religious, but it seemed appropriate to accept their offer. The church, like their dwellings, was mostly made of bamboo, but it was their largest building. Inside, there were rows of wooden benches on a clean, bare clay floor. A stout wooden crate comprised the altar, with a rusted tin can of G.I. vintage holding wildflowers. To my surprise, I was asked, as a guest, to sit on a bench at the front, facing the men and boys seated on one side, and the women and girls on the other side. During the benediction, one young woman nursed an infant and a bright green gecko, a kind of lizard, crawled along high up on one wall. At one point a large colourful rooster stalked past the sunlit door opening. It was enchanting. Everyone participated in the hymn-singing with great enthusiasm and skill. For me it was exciting and uplifting.
Another day, prowling through the burned remains of a dwelling, perhaps one destroyed by the Japanese—who at the time still held more northerly areas of the island—I found what I presumed to be a relatively recent artifact. That discovery led to the writing of a poem that later would be published—one of my first poems in print—I was elated.
In the Philippines I had neither time nor opportunity to look for artifacts; after all, we were at war. In northern Luzon, seeing handsome native Igorot men carrying gleaming steel-headed spears, filing down the narrow mountain roads beside us with their bare-breasted women and naked children, all of them bedecked with gold necklaces and bracelets, I thought again of the problem of collecting personal effects for the museum. Another day, I watched an Igorot man in full regalia being photographed by a soldier. When urged to do so, he thumped his spear on the ground, made an awful face and growled savagely at the camera. An impressive sight. A few minutes later, I overheard that colourful person as he identified Japanese-held positions, pointing to our Colonel’s map spread on the ground. I was intrigued to hear the Igorot man using the English language better than the officer. Afterwards, when I quizzed this English-speaking native, he admitted that he’d been educated at Oxford, and that he’d gone back to his native garments and spear in order to conceal his background from the Japanese.
SHIFTING VISION Watching tears streaming down the face of the Japanese speedskater last night as he received the Olympic gold medal I suddenly recalled how I felt mre than fifty years ago in the Philippines when I excitedly peered at prisoners-of-war: “Japs” standing glumly in a hastily erected stockade beside the road as we passed by awed to see the enemy alive and up close so thin and tired-looking, so shabby at variance with their dead in tidy uniforms.
Then the camera focused on the youthful
skater’s mother who put hands to her face,
moved across to fans waving bright flags
rising-sun flags, the same bright emblem
we young soldiers ardently sought:
gingerly tipping back drab Jap helmets
nervously, hopefully peering into pockets
even remorselessly looking under shirts
recalling the day I found, not a flag
but a packet of family photos: parents
slim pretty wife, two young children—
that’s when I stopped looking for souvenirs.
After the war, my spirits undampened, and encouraged and supported by the G.I. Bill, I returned to my university studies at Milwaukee. Restless and anxious to rid myself of some of my old ties, I gathered up nearly all of my carefully catalogued personal collection of arrowheads—nothing of great value, really—and took it all in to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Dr. Robert E. Ritzenthaler, then Curator of Anthropology, tried to discourage me from donating it, but he took if off my hands; no doubt the stuff sits in a box there to this day! Like McKern earlier, Ritzenthaler encouraged me to go on in university. When I somewhat tearfully mentioned to him that a girl I’d met during my military service had broken off our relationship, he gave me this fatherly advice: “O.K., that solves your problem; stop worrying about it and get on with your life.”
Not long after that, upon seeing a pretty blonde girl walking across the street towards me in downtown Milwaukee, I found a new love. When the attractive girl I was eyeing boarded a streetcar, I followed, even though it was not the one I was supposed to take. All alone on the streetcar with her, I invited myself to sit beside her, then proceeded to overwhelm her by pulling a dried piece of cat hide, still with the hair on, out of my briefcase, proof that I was studying comparative anatomy. It broke the ice. Well, it was her first day on a new job, and she was only seventeen—impressionable, and blue-eyed. Ruth Hoenecke was soon traipsing across farm fields with me in search of Indian artifacts. A stone axe-head which she found one day in my company near the Root Creek, south of Milwaukee, is one of our cherished possessions. No, that’s not true. I may cherish the axe-head, but Ruth is convinced that I’m the one who found it. Well, her sights have always been set on more important things: children, family, birthdays…. I keep “her” grooved axe-head on my desk. A poem, “Arrowhead Eyes,” published in 1997, in a limited way describes our relationship.
ARROWHEAD EYES Nowadays, when the snow begins to disappear and I’m walking in parking lots at bus stops, by phone booths in front of malls, along dusty curbs I play this looking game keeping an eye out for a lost penny or larger coin and find them I do, getting my kicks each time, savouring the moment carrying them home to show my wife.
“It’s your arrowhead eyes”
said Ruth, “You always were good
at spotting artifacts,” referring
to long days before we married
when I dragged her across farm fields
in search of “Indian relics”…
on these bright days it’s a relief
to look down and scan the ground;
I’m reminded of childhood days
when I hopefully chipped away at
ice on the sidewalk, circular spots
resembling nickels or quarters
but only uncovered bubbles.
