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...

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)

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...

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...