Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones

“What do you call that?”

“What do I call what?”

“That thing you have there. What is that?”

I get that all the time. People tend to pay attention to only the things that bite at them or threaten too. It’s as if they can’t see what’s in front of them because they choose not to. I get it. Living in a time when one wrong step can get you killed, or worse, whishing you had, makes one a bit psychotic. But that is no excuse for not paying attention. As a matter of fact, it should make people more aware of what is going on around them, but it doesn’t seem to. 

I have personally been attempting to recreate the sounds around me. It came to me one day when sitting down by the pond that my forbearers claimed at one time, had not been there. They said it was just a small stream that ran through our hunting grounds. It was the beavers they claimed that moved in and ruined the neighborhood. 

The story of how life changed after that was interesting, but I was not interested so much in life, the physical everyday mundane activity that we all endure, as it is the fate of humans, but how to alleviate the boredom. If we could learn from our furry friends we would feel less like a slave to our wants, and spend more time on our needs, which would give us more time to seek answers to life’s provocative questions. 

I watched the beavers because of all the concern they have generated in the community. Change is expected but for some reason when it occurs, it sends a current of static fear through the community. The usual complaints surfaced; the changing environment, wasting natural resources, and attempting to alter the way things have been done here, well forever.

Things changed so fast we hardly had time to understand what was happening and why. First the trees started to come down. One here, one there, no one paid much attention at first. Was unusual though, these stumps that looked like buried writing utensils. Then the stream began to back up. At first it made getting water easier, but then people started doing their laundry in this latest phenomenon, and so we had to revert to our old ways of dipping from the moving stream. 

The pond turned into a lake as more trees disappeared, and I began to notice above the rumblings of the towns people a peculiar noise. It was like a muffled explosion. It was like listening to thunder when hiding under a buffalo robe. A hollow haunting sound that seemed to shake the air until it found your ears.

I hid in the woods watching and discovered that the sound was a means of what I believed to be a form of communication. We had used fire ourselves to warn of impending trouble. Someone even came up with the idea of blowing into an animal horn. The most ear-piercing sound emanated. Some claimed the sound was worse than the forewarned trouble. But you do with what you got until something better comes along.

There had always been an assortment of noises made by us, whistling, shouting, that sort of thing. Then some decided to put a cadence to words, and then what we began to call music, was born. The word was claimed to have originated from a notion provoked by the sounds, beauty, and emotion. Which made no sense to any of us, but it did provide something to do while we toiled at our meaningless jobs. 

Anyway, I was hiding in the woods listening to the explosions and saw eventually what caused them. The beavers were hitting their broad tails on the ground. I believed it was a way of communication. When ever people or other animals they feared approached they would slam their tails on the bank of the pond, and they would disappear into their stick houses. The sound intrigued me.

I attempted to duplicate the sound. I believed if I could replicate the sound it would have no end of uses. Sound carried great distances and didn’t have to be visible, like fire, which when you live around trees can be a problem.  You may plan to run up on the hill to build a warning fire, but by then, it most often would be too late.

I found a sound that mimicked the thump of the beaver, quite by accident. A rabbit ran into this log. It was being chased by a fox. The fox was too large to go in after the rabbit so abandoned the chase. I took a limb and hit the hollow log. The rabbit spurted out. I was so captivated by the sound I forgot all about the rabbit. I spent the afternoon hitting the log and realized the changes in the sound depended upon where the log was struck. 

I spent all my free time attempting to duplicate the sound. I experimented with all types of logs and finally came to the conclusion that for them to be of any use, I would need to make them moveable. I chopped the log into pieces that I could move, but the sound was not the same. I placed one hollow end on the ground and that helped, but it wasn’t until that fateful day that I discovered how to replicate the sound that I consistently wanted. I had thrown my deer hide wrap over the log to keep it out of the dirt. A dragon fly landed on the skin and being afraid of dragon flies, I swatted at it with a limb I carried for protection. Something about dragon flies that puts us all on edge, and we tend to over react. Some believe it is our cellular memory of the dinosaur era we never experienced but found instinctually frightening and caused what became known as backwoods mania. The sound that occurred that day, however, was inspirational.

I made modifications as I experimented. It wasn’t however until I realized that fastening the skin tightly over the hollow logs opening, caused a resonating sound when struck, like the sound caused by shouting in a cave. I experimented for several years until I believed I had found a way to duplicate the sound.  Varying resonance, depending on the size of the log and tightness of the skin, could be achieved by striking the skin on differing distances from the center.

During this time, the mouth sounds that had become popular, mainly because anyone could make them, and horn blowing, became part of the rituals that gave a new meaning to our lives. We no longer had to pretend we saw spirits; we could actually create them. Their voices could be heard, even though the spirits could not be seen. 

Everything changed the day I brought the log. People thought it was a strange basket I made for some unknown reason, until I began to beat on it with small tree limbs. I tried using bones but people said I was being disrespectful to the spirits.

The reverberations it produced caused the other factions, horns, whistles, voices, to fall into a cadence that came to be known as music.  The name applied to it because it sounded like the word mimic, and then evolved because we are notoriously poor spellers, into the word music. The fact that we have terrible idiosyncratic accents, didn’t help either.

Our gatherings became notorious for raucous activity and physical gyrating, that appeared to be induced by the beat. Our notoriety spread and we became known as a merry band of noise makers. Many of the older members of the community were opposed to the new meaning of spirituality brought on by the new sound. They allowed the activity, but only if we took it to the quarry where the sound would be contained and participated in, by only those that wished to be inspirationally moved by sound. And so, the Holly Days Festival was born.

I became known as the little drummer boy, even though I wasn’t a boy any longer, and certainly was not little. I believed it was because of my cherubic features and my falsetto voice. I guess everyone likes the idea of creating a mystique about things they don’t understand. 

And thinking back on how it all began, made me realize, creativity is born in many forms, and we have the beavers to thank for what we now call, rock and roll.