Waking Up on Turtle Island: November 2009

Monday, November 30, 2009

35th Reunion Hike (Part One)

Robbie ponders the Mysteries and Legends of the Caves - or is it Legends and Mysteries?

The long weekend of ThanksGiving 2009 also just happened to be the chosen date for my old high school's 35th Class Reunion. Ed the Shred, captain of the Block Rock Dam Surfers Team back in our school days, flew in from the Great Northwest and needed some CT woods time, a break from that godforsaken high desert he desparately tries to eke a living out of (I once visited the nearby Warm Springs Indian Museum where I was told by a woman known as Gramma that Bigfoot bones are never found because UFO's pick up the dead bodies - but that's another story).

After a brief disscussion, we decided to head up to a bit of Mattatuck (No Trees in the local Quripi dialect) State Forest where we often camped out at various caves during the early seventies where the Shred once hid and could never find a bottle of whiskey that would now be over 35 years old. The locally famous Leatherman (http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/34330/cold-spots-the-legend-leatherman) stayed in these caves giving them their modern name, but long before that this area was known as the Old Hunting Caves (Waking Up on Turtle Island: April 2007 - Waking Up on Turtle Island: April 2008)...

In the Possible Pissepunk (Sweat Lodge):

The First Turtle Find of the Day was incorporated into the stone work at the source of a nearby spring. The flat head

is not a common thing, but it occurs elsewhere:

Nearby Stones on Boulders:

Then some Hunter kicked us out, as if this were his state land, and not our state land, made for you and me. But he did have a gun...

Friday, November 27, 2009

Puzzles

Just how many snow plows, mowers or bumpers have hit this little stone wall, I will never know. Funny how these tumbled down stones can sometimes seem to fit together as if completing a puzzle and I wonder, "If a single stone, removed from a rock pile, breaks the prayer, how do you heal the many stone rows that have disappeared? One Turtle at a time perhaps???

Turtles in the Round Mounds

Up by my old chicken coop, more and more turtles continue to "come into focus." This is along a stone row that looks linear at first (up where it meets a zigzag row that contains a mortar stone - veryclose to a large, sort of "free-standing" box turtle sculpture or petroform), that then sort of zigzags, that then turns into several circular mound-like stone piles that I could never figure out before a day or two ago. I've been experiencing Advanced Turtle Vision after noticing the same old as well as new turtle shapes incorporated into stone rows all over the place, causing a shift in my vision and my thoughts. Many a row I dissmissed as more likely being an historic fence, I now see as Native made because of those turtles coming into focus...

Close Up - Centered on Carapace Stone:

(That's my foot, lower left)

Monday, November 23, 2009

The First Thanksgiving

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's my family above, before my dad could afford a camera

and had to actually paint imitation photos for the Family Album.

But do you know the story of the First Thanksgiving??

It all started when the Pilgrims left England and later Europe as well back in 1620...

...they landed at Plymouth Rock
and sent a little boat ashore:

They were met by Indians who showed by means of signs that they were peaceful:

Other Indians joined them after a brief snowfall, pointing out the way to:

Plymouth Rock!!!

Below: Pilgrim grips Indian's hand, telling him he can help him.

Note the small stone and the bloody red toe of the Indian's left moccasin,

as well as the long crutch/peacepipe, carried by all Indian men...

"We'll show you how to move rocks!" says Miles Standish (standishing)

to Samoset, whose toe really, really hurts.

A month later, the Indians
are

delighted and on the third thursday of November

bring the starving Pilgrims a whole bunch of food:

Indian women remarked on how much nicer it was

not to bash their knees into rocks or stump their toes

on stones when working (the only legitimate work these

Pilgrims recognised) in the cornfields:

So everybody had dinner

and lived happily ever after:

So, not only is that the story about the First Thanksgiving,

but it also tells how fields clearing piles and every stone wall you see,

just like these below, came into being, all those many years ago...

But, Wait!

Not all people agree!

Here's some people somewhere

doing something on what they say is the

Real Plymouth or Pulpit Rock:

Great Profiles in Turtles

Three stones or so, similar looking in color, suggestive of a certain creature swimming along, headed east, on a stone row across from an old 1730's mill in Watertown CT...

Here's a rock pile, New York State with a...

Three Marginal Scutes

Small carapace stone w/ those scutes in a garden:

3 foot long Carapace Stone with similar quartz marginal scutes on a zigzag stone row around a riparian zone of a small stream:

The last photo is by Peter Waksman, a large stone with the marginal scutes in quartz...

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Three Turtle Faces

At the Lower Zigzag Stone Row
on the otherside of the road:

Where the Old Colonial Stone Wall meets the

Older Native American Zigzag Stone Row:

Pinned by the roots, possible tool and white quartz turtle...

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Watertown CT

More Turtle Visions

Some stone row turtles, in a stone row of turtles...

Monday, November 16, 2009

Turtle Visions

Friday, November 13, 2009

Pile by a stone row

Thursday, November 12, 2009

More Squiggles

Boulder just above the zigzag...

Photos from along an old "fence line."
The squiggles to the left are that old fence line - presently a property line between a cornfield and an Open Space Preserve...

Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York‎ - Page 43 Susan Allport - Architecture - 1994 - 208 pages

"But a farmer would have put up a worm fence around his field and would have tossed stones against that fence... the original wooden fence would rot and he or his son, or perhaps grandson, would be left with a chimera of a fence, a pile of rocks with the backbone of a zig-zag fence but with flesh of stone..."

Quartz in the center of a circle?
I kept getting this impression that there were rockpiles on the stone row,

circles of stone every so often, between some rather

TESTUDINATE

groupings of stones...

...so I brushed away some leaves and sticks,

and find this stone sits on a stone that is broken in half...

Nuchal Scute???

Turtle

Head???

End Stone

Another row, another stone catches my eye...

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Rockshelter Springs

Stone worked springs below a rockshelter site...

Stone rows:

At some time or other, I recall seeing a spring up in that area of evergreens at the top of the photo that hides much stone work and many possible rockshelter sites. Roadwork by the State of CT in 2007 has changed things around - there's no stones, no spring apparent below this big stone where I remember the water used to trickle out...

..above this big stone - on top of it and to the side of it - there is a zigzag row of stones at the latter and a rock pile I never noticed before on the former. And I promise to go back and actually photograph the cleaned of a little after photos...

Below the Culvert(s):

Stone Pile & Zigzag to Stone Pile:

Zigzag to Serpentine:

Monday, November 09, 2009

Another Squiggly Line

Some more squiggly lines in a 1934 aerial photo get my attention, mostly because a town crew just "improved" the drainage of a culvert. Quite a few dump trucks full of material were excavated in a day long project. Were stones removed? I don't really know, but it's possible. It's a spot that's been disturbed before, the nameless stream rerouted for the road, as well as to "improve" (drain) the cornfield across from it, sometime after 1892. The old and probably not very accurate map shows the stream in it's former and possibly original position...

And I'm going to name this little water feature "Rock Shelter Sprane (Spring)" because it originates as a stone bordered spring up by a possible rock shelter site and "Sprane" sounds so old-timey...

By the 1950's the sprane disappears from the map, but it's really still there, routed into culverts passing under the state highway and my road, filling ponds and running through ditches on the "improved" landscape, all new adventures for this spring, yet with remnants of its original "improvement" visible, a old scheme written in stone, other portions perhaps buried by natural processes over time...

Here's a photo of the area "improved" the other day...

And a totally complicated one with all my additions... Some photos of what's left by the roadside:

Friday, November 06, 2009

Squiggly Lines on an Old Photo

A 1934 aerial photography cropped, zeroing in on some squiggly lines,

that turn out to be familiar rows of stone.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Another Familiar Place and Something "New"

A familiar place again, a zigzag row of stones along the east branch of the river - one of many rows that remain along the water features, many many more, even along the main river, lost from flooding and human activity. Why I never saw it before I'll never know...

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Toes and Claws

A cat, some mounds, some snapping turtles - with similar shapes, like a low backed shell with a diagonal quartz line on it, a sharp 3-toed right forefoot, blunt slightly larger left foot - on the two snappers, I mean, not the cat or mounds...

The second snapper:

The right foot:

The left is larger and is blunt, just as on the other:

Head with eyes, foreleg with toes, part of a larger mound of stones...

Closer:

I've poked around a little around the base of a mortar or two looking for the pestle stone, removed brush and leaves, but have never done any digging - for many reasons, all of them good. These mounds were excavated/exposed by chickens scratching and pecking on and around them about 20 years ago...

This spot has been posted about before:
"Great Moments" scan from Sketchpad Lucky day
One isn't Good, But Two is Better July 18 Funny...

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Could it be...

William Cothren, in the History of Ancient Woodbury (pg. 880), writes:
"But by far the most curious and interesting relic that has been found in the ancient territory, is also in the writer's possession. It is no less than an Indian idol or charm, artistically cut from a piece of rock, which appears to have been originally a piece of petrified walnut wood. It was found in 1860, on the lot near F. M . Minor's, before mentioned as the place where the most perfect specimens have been found. It was discovered while hoeing corn. It evidently represents some animal, but it is difficult to divine what. It has a pretty well formed head and body, with large, round ears, and holes for the insertion of four legs, but the latter are missing. It looks as much like the representative of an enormous lizard, as any thing. It can hardly represent the Good Spirit. It is not of a sufficiently attractive conception for that. It may, therefore, be presumed to be the likeness of Hobbamocko, or their Spirit of Evil, whom they feared, and worshipped more assiduously than the Good Spirit, whom they supposed lived quite at his ease, caring little for the actions or affairs of his red children, after having given them their corn, beans and squash, and taught them the mode of their cultivation. Some of these relics our artist has endeavored to make plain to the "mind's eye."

I wonder: "Could it be a "Foot Snake" or "Horned Serpent?"

Waking Up on Turtle Island