Waking Up On Turtle Island 2011

Looking through old sketch books during the summer of 2010, I noticed some drawings were dated "1990." That surprised me a little bit because in my memory I had the year 1991 as the beginning of just when I began to seriously doubt the "colonial origins" of the famous New England "stone walls" that are like some sort of trademark of the Connecticut landscape that I'd loved to wander since early childhood. I thought I was approaching a 20 year anniversary of observation, study and discovery, but as it turns out, it's 21 years after all that I have been Waking Up on Turtle Island.

It also turns out that January 31, 2011 might have been the last day I ever woke up on Turtle Island. I've been shoveling snow since the day after Christmas, filling buckets with sand and salt, digging my friend Kevin's plow truck out of driveways where it has gotten stuck, and eventually even clearing snow off of a 60 foot long by 10 foot wide flat-topped trailer that my brother-in-law Fred parked on the property back in the early 1960's. We had a tremendous amount of snow fall and buildings all over the state were collapsing.

I know now that some of the little pains and sensations I had been experiencing weren't exactly minor discomforts from breathing in frigid air or from lifting shovelfuls of snow up so high, but were these two little blockages in certain arteries that feed oxygen to certain muscles of my heart.

It's just by plain luck - and by my wife's insistence in the Emergency Room that I needed some immediate help as the chest pains had returned and intensified - that I'm sitting here, two stents in my heart, and writing about Waking Up on Turtle Island...

Tim MacSweeney

02/05/2011