For today’s Daily Create, we were given this image of a worker’s hands and asked to write a story about them. This story has been cross-posted from my Tumblr blog, Sandy Springs Eternal.
The photo above is from the movie “Once Upon a Time in the West” by Sergio Leone. Considered by many to be his opus magnus, in it, the railroad and increasing modernization, i.e. Change with a capital “C” sweep away all vestiges of the so-called “Old West.” Only Jill, the eternal whore according to Leone (the whore is also maiden, mother, and crone; that is, WOMAN) survives.
All the men with their cruelty, misplaced romanticism, their vicious rapine natures and their twisted so-called humanity get pretty much killed off, thank God. This much mourned “Old West” was about grazing rights, land ownership, the capitalist pigs vs the worker, the Civil War and the dubious influences of the Church.
This photo by Guardianreporter Jason Wilson, was taken a couple of days ago at a place my husband and I hold sacred; it’s the domestic terrorists who have taken over one of the last best places for wildlife in the US–Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters.
If there is a woman there to survive the standoff of the coming days, she’s nowhere in evidence, so no Jill to Ammon Bundy’s Jack.
The themes here are disputes over land ownership, the capitalist pigs vs the worker, disagreements over the interpretation of the Constitution, illegal occupancy of federal property, all given a twist Leone didn’t foresee–the self-styled “militia” leaders are the sons of a rich rancher.
These domestic terrorists are all grown up sons of survivors of the 1970s, whose values Leone was also conflicted about. These “kids” grew up watching westerns, spaghetti westerns, and western spoofs like “Blazing Saddles.” PLUS they grew up in the REAL West, the one that in spite of Leone’s violent nostalgia, still very much exists.
My point is that their heads are so full of a mishmash of cultural images from the movies that I suspect they don’t know what is real and what is Miramax. They’ve invented their own sense of what is right and acted on it. And nothing good can come of this as-of-this-writing unexploded powder keg.
If you want to watch a real life spaghetti western, turn on the news and crank up the sound track of your choice.
Some orienting notes: Today’s Daily Create presented an interestingly distorted map of the Oregon Territory circa 1841, just at the beginning of the wagon train migration. We were asked to write the beginning of a story that could have happened at one of the place names. My entire life and the lives of five generations of relatives are woven into the history of the place names on that map, so I felt a little dizzy trying to think about that.
Wondering what others had done, I wandered over to the blog post of Jim Groom. He had picked up on the Shasta region of northern California and gotten waylaid by the story of the legendary horse thief, Joaquin Murrieta.
As I wrote on Jim’s blog, “At one time in my life when I lived in the old inn at Glen Ivy Hot Springs, which is a geologic sister to Murrieta Hot Springs, out on 15 between Corona and Temecula (back road to San Diego), I became obsessed for a while with the origins of a nearby road called Horse Thief Trail. Local rumor had it that the horse thief in question was Joaquin Murrieta, but that turned out not to be true. However, my research on him turned out to be borderline obsessive, and I wrote a researched based fiction piece that sorted out the local pieces and retold the story.”
I hadn’t looked at this story since 2005, so I printed out a copy and read it–and I’m posting it here as its first publication and exposure to the public eye, assuming anybody will bother to read a 5000 word story in this age of quick mind munching.
I was amazed at how much accurate detail I managed to pack into it: the Luiseno cremation rituals, their creation story, the fire up Coldwater Canyon and the story of the last grizzlies in California; too, all the researched details of the Murrieta family, from the color of his hair (blond) to the true story of his final death and the secret interment ceremony; the origin of place names–it’s all woven in.
A YouTube recording of “The Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta” is posted at the end.
So my Daily Create today is to revisit my own passions about the West as it time shifted through the canyons walls of my home place. If you actually read the story, I would love to hear from you in the comments–and thank you ahead of time!
The Coldwater Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta
Glen Ivy Hot Springs can be seen from Highway 15 between Corona and Lake Elsinore if you’re headed down to San Diego on the inland route. You’ll see the exit sign to Horse Thief Road, but the real story begins one exit back, where Temescal Canyon Road winds up to the Hot Springs. In the old days, this was my country, and I roamed the Santa Ana hills and the archives room at the Corona Library like a native.
The main action of this story happens on this map. Glen Ivy Hot Springs , where I lived, is in the upper left where the blue ponds are. It is exactly located between the mountains and the dry steppe. The chase was directly up that canyon, called Coldwater. Nearby is Horsethief Canyon and Horse Thief Road.
I loved most the sharp contrast between the hot desert of the open hillsides and the sudden cool of Coldwater Canyon that put the “glen” in Glen Ivy. There are a hundred songs to be sung about this country, but I always liked one I heard in the migrant camps, “The Coldwater Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta.” It retells the story of the famous horse thief chased by officers of the law up Coldwater Canyon.
The legendary Murrieta knew these mountains were crosshatched by Luiseno trails. Horse Thief heads up the ridgeline to the top of Santiago Peak, but it branches off down other ridgelines. I have wandered these trails, thinking about Murrieta and his brothers, their violent past, their heroic system of driving horses 800 miles down California, across the desert to Arizona and Mexico along the road they called “La Vereda Caballo.” During the chase scene in the 1840s, the Luisenos with their cremation rituals would still have been where Glen Ivy is now, and the generations of chocolate-colored grizzlies still living and breeding in Coldwater Canyon, both surviving the cyclic wild fires and flood.
It is easy in the full moonlight to imagine Joaquin Murrieta, known as El Famoso in his own lifetime, riding out into the dim basin of moonlight in that opening between the canyon and plain. His half-brothers, Joaquin Manuel and Jesus Feliz, would be riding behind him to the left and right of the herd. The Luiseno, Pautovak, who had joined them two days before at Temecula, hazed mustangs from the rear. The horses snorted, moved sideways across the streambed, their flesh hot from the midnight gallop uphill.
Jesus Feliz had been the lookout who had alerted them to the approaching troops. The men scattered the ashes of their fire, riding hard and fast, the fifteen extra horses running between them. The Rangers were sure they had the thieves trapped between the north and south running walls of Temescal Canyon, but Luisenos and locals knew glens cut west up the mountain, traced by grizzly bear trails hundreds of years old.
Joaquin Murrieta swung to the ground, the down-canyon breeze telling him Coldwater Glen was directly ahead. Horses’ hooves sloshed up the deep groove of the channel; the horses sucked and blew at loose, starlit current.
Joaquin clambered the glen wall with both hands, reaching for toeholds with his leather boots. He was up in one quick scramble, jumping to get out of the way as Mozo’s hooves slid and pawed for purchase, the powerful haunches propelling him up over the waterfall into the dark protection of the canyon.
From the top of the falls, Joaquin could see the torches of the infantry. Bright moonlight gleamed on muskets; the sounds of wagon mules and shod riding horses rose on the night air. He considered the path ahead. Pautovak would help him find the grizzly trail he remembered from years ago, then to the summit of Santiago, down Trabuco Canyon, circle around east to pick up El Camino del Diablo, the so-called “Devil’s Road,” south over the border to La Berruga to sell the horses in Mexico.
“Joaquin Manuel,” he whispered to his brother, who was kicking water off his boot, “do you smell anything?”
“Smoke. From the rancheria?” He nodded his head toward the Luiseno village of Temescal not far from the troops.
Joaquin shook his head, “I don’t think so, the breeze is down canyon.”
“Wildfire?”
“Mebbe.”
Jesus Feliz muttered from behind where his deep-chested bay shouldered them all into motion, “Fire above, Rangers behind, grizzly bear wherever she hides on a moonlit night–it’s the devil’s choice, boys. Andale arriba and let the devil take the hindmost.”
They rode in the creek itself as the granite walls inhaled and exhaled. When they found a ridge angling out of the canyon, up they went, nineteen horses lunging, slipping, excited by the hard pace, the urgent air of the caballeros who hiss-whispered them up onto the ridge trail. From there, they picked up the old grizzly trail. It was still difficult going, but grizzlies traverse their own trails precisely, placing each foot in the same place each time they pass, so the trail was a foot deep in some sections. The chaparral on either side was impenetrable, so the horses moved along single-file. At twenty-five hundred feet, the trail topped a foothill ridge and leveled out onto a bench. Dry bunchgrass and oso berries made dark tufts in the moonlight. On the south side, a spring trickled over the edge, aimed for Coldwater Canyon. Joaquin held his hand up. The riders framed a semi-circle, aiming their looking and listening into canyon and outwash plain below. The troops had plainly set up camp for the night. Three fires and the sound of distant drunken laughter seeped uphill to the riders like smoke wandering through the chapparal. Pautovak pointed casually, wordlessly, so they all looked there and half-saw three riders moving out of the quarry toward the fires.
“They done laid off pursuit.”
“Looks like it.”
“Chickenshits. What kind of Rangers are them?”
“The kind that’ll shoot you in the back and ask questions later.”
“We’ll be home in La Berruga afore they sleep that snootfull off.”
“Best not tempt the devil, boys. Have a bite and ride on.”
The smell of the drifting wisps of smoke lifting up over the peak and wandering toward them grew stronger. The horses spread out, heads down, tearing at the grass. Joaquin Manuel and Joaquin, El Famoso climbed a knoll above the bench. Pautovak and Jesus Feliz sprawled on the other side of the herd. Pautovak mixed some panoli with water and sugar and passed it to Jesus; then he nodded to the horses with their fresh brands.
“Running M,” he said,” I hear that’s the brand of the Murrieta brothers.”
Jesus stretched, small and wiry, the minstrel-singer of the gang, the record-keeper. He nodded. “There’s seven Murrietas. Those two Joaquins, he jerked his head up hill, they’re half-brothers, my brothers-in-law.”
“I’ve heard of El Famoso. They say he’s a murderer, and the rest of you are, too.” In this way Pautovak invited the tale, the singing of the song, as was the way of his people, for the world is built of the stories we hear on the horse thieves trail.
Jesus shook his head.” None of the Murrietas robs stages, banks or travelers. For the most part we just round up wild horses and maybe a few others that aren’t too closely attached to their owners. Run them down to Mexico.”
“This ain’t your territory, is it? I heard you work the north end of the Great Valley, Carquinez Strait, Mount Diablo.”
“La Vereda Caballo. Eight hundred miles right down California, across the desert to Arizona and down into Mexico.”
Pautovak considered this. “That’s one hell of a trip.”
Then asked, “Why is he called El Famoso?”
The singer cannot withhold his song when the wild world demands its singing. “After his first wife died, Joaquin’s father Senor Murrieta married Senora Carrillo, and they had fourteen altogether. Two Joaquins and two Jesus’s, that’s how that happened, and we all come to California together from our home in San Jose de Guadalupe in Sonora. You understand, we’d found out the stories about gold in California was true. Joaquin Murrieta, he married my sister, Rosa, and she came, too, so I came along to see what was what in Californy. That Joaquin, you can see he’s a blondie, a lot of people down there are like that. He can speak English like a lord if he wants to, and sometimes he does, to fool people. He knows Spanish five ways to Sunday; some say he’s from Chihuahua and another will put you straight and say they rek he’s Spanish from the old country, all right.
“They had a good claim at the placer called Murphy’s New Diggin’s, but the miners, they said around they didn’t like no Mexes, but it was the rich placer they wanted up for grabs. One night, a mob of miners surrounded them. They gang raped Rosa and left her for dead. The other Jesus, not me, Jesus Carrillo Murrieta, their brother,” he nodded uphill again, “they hung from an oak tree. They tied Joaquin to the same tree and whipped him. Left all three for dead, but only Jesus Carrillo died.”
They sat in the quiet dark looking out across the Temescal spread below them. The full moon bathed the far hills in uncertain undulations of light and dark.
“After we buried Jesus Carrillo, Joaquin moved Rosa to Niles Canyon. He set up a blue tent for dealing monte down around the richest placeras in the Mother Lode—Melones, Cucumber Gulch, Carson Creek. Then dead miners began to show up; all of them dragged to death behind a horse. These were all the miners who had abused Rosa and killed Jesus; people figured that out.”
“Los Muertos.”
“Exactamente. That’s why they’re calling it Los Muertos now. When things got hot, Joaquin folded up his blue tent, Carpa Azul, they call it, that place down there, they call it that now, La Carpa Azul, and went to live in the caves on Bear Mountain. He’d make raids on the miners from there. He robbed them because he needed money, and he murdered them because they deserved it.”
“El Famoso.”
“Si.”
Silence followed; the moon darkened. Jesus took off his hat and turned it in his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair, put his hat back on. “He’s got too much blood lust. We thought we’d take him home for a while. Start over again just with the horses, no more mining, no more blood. Murrietas have always run horses. That should be enough.”
Pautovak nodded. “Horses are plenty. But blood lust. That’s like too much hard liquor; it takes more than just not drinking.”
“What do you people do for a cure?”
“Sweats. Temescal, that’s what it means, not in my language but in Aztec that the Spanish brought to this place when they saw all the hot springs. Some special plants, maybe, if the man goes to a shaman. But left on its own, the man’s soul will go find an animal, and the animal will know what to do.”
They both stood and looked up toward the two Joaquins, who were themselves staring up hill. The moon was at their back, and yet the rim of the summit glowed like the sun in full eclipse. Pautovak and Jesus Feliz both ran for their mounts and swung up into the saddle. They heard behind them a sound like “Woof! Woof!” before they wheeled their horses to see two grizzly cubs charging a young mare. Pautovak shouted and the whole herd pounded into motion. The mare squealed, kicking her heels at the cubs and racing away.
“Donde’sta La Mama?” Jesus shouted.
Up on the hill, the two Joaquins whistled for their horses. Joaquin Manuel’s horse came up the hill at a cross-angle; he jumped on without aid of stirrups, plunging through the chaparral after the stampeding herd. El Famoso had one foot in Mozo’s stirrups when three hundred and fifty pounds of Mama Grizzly appeared and stood up in front of him.
Mozo screamed and reared. Joaquin held on, gaining his seat but no control as Mozo took the bit in his teeth and ran for his life, south for the cliffs of Coldwater Canyon. The female grizzly was right behind him. Horse, rider and bear went over the ravine wall. Mozo tucked head, flipped and rolled in the way horses sometimes can without breaking their legs. Flying loose of the saddle, Joaquin was a human boulder hurtling over ledges, rock falls, slick-backing through water seeps. He grabbed for bushes, but momentum ripped them out of his hands. The last fall was twenty feet straight down off a basalt column into a deep pool of Coldwater Creek. The current pushed him to the lip of the rock fall dam where he clawed for the shore.
Primordial fear slammed his entire body when he saw the chocolate-colored animal charging toward him, the feral fear an animal has when it becomes prey for a larger predator, fear that freezes and flings into motion all at once. Joaquin scrambled on all fours for the oaks, but the hulk of bear caught up with him, picked him up by the back of the neck and shook him the way a dog shakes a snake. When she dropped him, Joaquin ran at the closest oak, tearing up the first twenty feet on sheer momentum. The mother griz charged straight up the tree after him and caught his left foot. He had a bear hug on the tree, but her weight pulled him down through breaking branches. When he landed, she swatted him with her right paw, raking open his upper left thigh and knocking him back into the icy water of the pool. Her breath, hot and fetid, caught him straight in the face. The smell of my death, he thought. Mama Griz turned away, sniffing the strong smell of smoke coming down canyon. She ran back up the way she had come with the sure-footed swiftness of a woman in her own country.
When Joaquin came to, his feet were freezing and his hair was on fire. He ducked his head underwater, dousing the flames. Wedged against the rock dam, he lodged in the only place of safety in this high, narrow reach of the canyon. Fire came down both sides of the creek, fast, white and lethal through the underbrush, crowning up in the oaks as it leaped from treetop to treetop. Joaquin said to himself that he had entered another world as white and red-hot as his revenge against the miners. Their fear, their blood in the highway where he dragged them over rocks and chapparal to their deaths, was like this fire that surrounded him. Slabs of light reflected off the black pool where he floated, and the creek ran with firelight like a river of blood.
Then he saw that some of it was blood, and the blood was his blood. He remembered the bear at the same time he felt the nauseating roll of pain from his back and leg. He trembled as he looked for the bear, but he saw no sign of her.
Joaquin forced himself to slide deeper into the icy water until he floated there up to his neck, his head on a rock, the fire burning above and on all sides. Memories came to him then as he drifted, and the memories circled around that one day when his brother had been hanged. Rosa screaming and then her abrupt choke when she had suppressed her screams knowing the sound only excited the miners. He could hear her gagging, attempting to vomit as she found ways to fight but they had her, and every foul coward among them had her. Finally, only her spirit could resist them, and by that she had lived. Tied to the great oak from which his brother’s body hung, Joaquin memorized every face lurid with bloodlust, hands scrabbling at buttons to lower or raise filthy pants kneeling or unkneeling from his wife. Every face. And to every face he found a name. Ratner. Whitbread. Slathern. Recker. Nagler. Grizzell. Dworshak. Cash. And not one face now twisted in shocked disbelief or pleading for mercy to mothers of the same name as the rope settled and tightened around its neck did he fail to drag at long length behind Mozo on those black desert gallops, the human rag and bone bag streaking the sand and rock behind with gobbets the ravens loved. The ravens came to expect him, to listen for the ardent pound of Mozo’s hooves.
Usually individual faces and names of the miners stood out in his memory, but for the first time fear had driven that specificity from him. He reached again and again for the murderous feelings that usually reminded him of who he was, but could not find them. The block head of the bear would seem to appear, her broad brow, quick, intelligent eyes, the pared back mouth showing all her yellow teeth in a warning roar and the quick jerk of his heart would wake him from the dream of his life.
Joaquin watched until the fire had passed over and disappeared around the bend. Dawn light filtered through the smoking skeletons of trees. He focused painfully on the first large shape in view, and it was the grizzly and her two cubs drinking downstream. The cubs began rolling in the water while Mama moved them off down the canyon out of his sight.
Joaquin’s teeth chattered. His head swirled until he saw black shapes that may have been burned leaves falling on the pool, but he forced himself to crawl out of the water into the fine ash settling on the small gravel bar. He lay there, panting, looking down stream, but they were gone. It was a long time before he could crawl to a charred branch that had been too green to burn through. He used it as a crutch to help him to his feet, and then to help him walk, fall, crawl, hobble upstream opposite the bear family. His guns had been on his mochila saddle with its double pommel holsters; he had no weapon but retreat.
The canyon narrowed. Sometimes he hopped one-legged in the water holding on to rock walls on either side of the gorge. He stopped to tear strips from his shirt, which he wound around his leg after taking a good look. The long claw marks on the thigh were deep and ragged, but the cold water had stopped the bleeding. His calf and ankle had muscle torn loose. He knew his back had been flayed open once again, and there were deep gouges on either side of his neck where the grizzly’s teeth had grabbed and shaken. At the base of his skull he could feel where his scalp had been ripped away to the bone. He wrapped his leg tightly as he could, but his body had warmed and it immediately bled through the shirt. He continued to walk slowly upstream all morning, soaking in cold water when the blood began to flow.
His mind drifted from place to place as it hadn’t since he was a boy; the burned land gave off a hot, rancid smoke like the breath of the bear. He dreamed back the sizzle of tortillas dropping onto the comal and the way that smell mingled with hot cottonwood moving upland from the river, gathering to it the ripeness of algae baking in the sun, of horses drowsing in the riparian shade. He dreamed back the first sweet roaring of sex in the blood when he courted Rosa, how smart she was as she calculated supplies for the long trip ahead, the inevitability of their marriage, but how reluctant he had been to ask her for fear of the no. Joaquin Manuel had pretended to want her, too, to bring him to the sticking point so the wedding could happen before the trip. If he hadn’t brought her out of the civilized world to this primitive, beautiful country, she would never have had to endure what she did endure. He should have left the placera when the miners first began pressuring him. Ratner. Whitbread. Slathern. Recker.
Joaquin dropped near fainting in a pool to chill his blood.
He remembered then as the ash-laden waters of Coldwater Creek held him against a sandstone boulder, a story Pautovok had told them around the campfire the night they had first met him on the Yorba Ranch. “In the beginning,” he had said, “everything was silent and empty and the only living thing was the Great Spirit, who created two great balls who were brother and sister.
“The sister became Earth, and the brother became Sky. They had only each other in that beginning, so they were married. Mother Earth gave birth to all the beings, who were like people, and then they became animals and even trees.
“Later there was a powerful shaman named Wiyot. An evil Frog-Woman sorceress bewitched him. His people took him to different hot springs to try to cure him, but he finally died at a hot springs near here, the one we call Mumona.
“As is our way, the people wanted to cremate the body of Wiyot. They dug a shallow pit, filled it with dry juniper, and laid the body in it. However, they didn’t have any fire. There were lots of volunteers who tried to bring fire, but it was Coyote who was smart enough to find some and bring it back.
“As usual, Coyote was too late. Somebody else had invented the fire drill, started the fire, and got the cremation going. Wiyot’s body was still fresh, so his arms and legs drew up in the midst of the flames and his body writhed, turning over on hands and knees. Finally, only the heart was left in the funeral pyre. The fire tenders were poking it with long green poles to make it burn when Coyote returned with his fire. He was so angry that he ran into the cremation fire, snatched the heart and ran away.
“Wiyot’s spirit rose to the sky and became the sky and the moon. Because of Coyote, though, and the evil Frog-Woman, death came to the world. Since Wiyot’s death, every one of us has to die.”
Joaquin wondered if he were Wiyot, if he had been cremated and at the end of his journey would he rise again as a full moon? He crawled up out of the water and leaned on his stick, panting. When he looked up again he saw the cave because the trees that usually hid it from view were burned. In the cave, he thought, I will be safe and sleep and heal enough to go find Mozo and my brothers.
The cave mouth was big enough for him to hop into. Almost immediately it rounded a corner, narrowed, and began to slant up. Fifty feet inside the cave, Joaquin stood still in the darkness. He thought that the cave should be full of smoke, but a light breeze moved by his cheek. His neck and shoulders were almost immobile now from the wounds left by the bear’s canines; he needed to find a safe resting-place. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized the darkness was not complete. There was some paleness to the walls ahead, so he put his hands on the stone on either side of him and crouched forward. Then he had to get on his belly, but only because his leg wouldn’t endure a crawl. He pulled himself through the cave toward the source of sweet air. There must be a shaft to the surface, he figured, a way out, a path to safety.
The light brightened at the next curve, then Joaquin was blinded by sunlight. He was in a well, a place where the top of the cave had collapsed. He moved toward the light and saw a spring surrounded by reeds and three willows, all in a circle of light no more than six feet across. He dropped onto his stomach and drank deeply of the sweet water, uncontaminated by ash. Joaquin looked up and could see bunch grass around the edges of the opening to the upper world. Evidently the fire had come straight down the canyon at this point and not spread north across the hillside.
Body fear woke him, and he was on the move, scrambling for the back of the well. He saw a horizontal crack in the wall at the eight-foot level, reached for a toehold, and adrenaline pumped him over the edge. He saw the cubs romp into the well before Mama Griz, who followed with no apparent difficulty in squeezing through the tight place. Joaquin rolled twice to the back of the crack and heard another sound. He turned and saw the back end of a rattlesnake disappearing over the edge.
Mama Griz charged the wall. She stood up on both hind legs and peered in at him. They locked eyes, animal to animal. She raised one immense paw and stuck it in the crack, swiping at him. Joaquin crouched back, still a few feet out of her range. She stood taller to get more reach and swiped again, getting closer. He could see the eight-inch claws now within ten inches of his stomach—but far enough. She couldn’t reach him. He heard her roar, stomp her feet, scratch the ground; she stood up and tried again, but he was unreachable now.
Pautovak found him there two days later. He pried the 195 pound, six foot two inch blondie out of his stone womb, dragged him out of the cave, and got him across Mozo. Pautovak handled Joaquin’s body roughly to get it through the narrow gorges where Mozo could barely squeeze. The way had been burned open under the trees where they passed as if through the strange and forbidden landscape of a dream. Bear paw tracks raced away from them in the ash under the skeletons of trees, but Pautovak did not see the great bears whose ancestors, like his, had lived many generations in the heart of these mountains.
They came to the mouth of the glen at sunset. The sky bled a strange violet mist in the distance where the fire burned itself out. Mozo stepped down the quarry falls delicately, holding Joaquin’s body steady across the saddle. Pautovak led the horse downstream to his village by the hot springs. Others moved forward to help him lower his burden to the ground.
Many had worked to divert the fire from the subterranean houses and ramadas of the village, so now it stood at the edge of the burn zone. After Pautovak had eaten, he held a brief, low-voiced argument with several men. Many people left the village to gather dry chapparal and oak logs, and Joaquin’s body was carried off to a ceremonial site a quarter mile away, deep into the burn zone, up against the side of the mountain. Here an old man, with the help of two others, dug a long, shallow pit in the direction of north and south. They used sharpened sticks of sycamore to dig the pit. It soon filled with three feet of dry grass, brush and wood brought from across the creek. Joaquin was placed on the pyre, head to the north and face upward.
The old man waited until everyone had come over from the village. They sat at a respectful distance. Normally the relatives would put their backs to the fire and wail, but no one knew this man. No one had heard of cremating someone not of their own tribe, but Pautovak had said this was a great man who carried the bear spirit and whose passing must be honored in the proper way. The cremation song began, and the old man lit the pyre.
A dryness to the air fed the fire; it leaped and spread in a full circle around Joaquin. When the flames reached his body, he awoke and had no fear. He pulled himself to one foot and climbed down from the burning mass, his light eyes reflecting twin flames in the black center of his pupils so that he looked strange to them, his long blond hair, singed and twisted from now a double burning, lifting in the wind of the fire. The villagers leapt to their feet, exclaimed and pointed, talking swiftly among themselves, reminding each other of other such stories of people who arose from the cremation pyre. The old shaman and Pautovak ran to Joaquin, beating at the flames.
Pautovak said to Joaquin, “You have slept through the winter of your bad blood.” The villagers fell quiet at this speech and moved forward, reaching out to pat him gently or touch his hair. Some murmured about his wounds and returned to the village for dressings.
Joaquin would have said he felt calm at that moment, at great peace with the world, so he could not explain why he dropped to the ground and wept. The two other men let the fire in the pit burn while Joaquin wept with racking sobs on and on, until both fires consumed their fuel and banked away to embers. One of the old women came back up from the village and mixed acorn meal and chia seeds with meat broth, then cooked this mush on a flat stone over the dying cremation fire. She handed the thin cakes around to Joaquin and Pautovak and the shaman. Joaquin blew his nose on the ground, respectfully, outside the circle, then chewed the hot bread slowly and carefully, not gulping like a starved survivor. Other villagers had brought food, as well, so all of them crouched in a semi-circle in front of the fire, eating in silence, sometimes speaking about what had just happened, wondering this or that about it, already beginning to shape the story.
Joaquin stayed in the village until he could walk again. Eventually he returned to Rosita in Niles Canyon. He led the horse gangs until the famous Battle at Cantua in July 1853. It is sung in some corridos that Harry Love beheaded him at Cantua, but others say El Famoso and Joaquin Manuel buried a different brother there. It is said that then they and Rosa and Jesus Feliz arranged to leave the country with their $200,000 in gold. However, in one of the variants of the song, it is recounted that before they could leave for Mexico, officers looking for some other outlaw killed Mozo and shot El Famoso in his bad left leg. He and Joaquin Manuel were five hours from home, and he bled to death on the journey back to Niles Canyon.
They dug his grave inside the saddle room where Jesus Feliz slept and buried him under the floorboards in a secret ceremony lit by miner’s tallow candles.
Of an evening with women present, the firelight soft on the singing, thoughtful faces, the cancionero will pick out the tune on his guitar of a well-loved corrido that has Rosa marrying Joaquin Manuel, and they two disappearing into Mexico, probably Mazatlan. They make several trips back to retrieve the gold.
This headline refers to one of the two bear cubs in this story.
In no song is it sung that in 1908, Brownie, the last chocolate grizzly of Coldwater Glen, was killed in Trabuco Canyon. And no one sings a brave or defiant corrido for the Luisenos who were moved to the reservation at Pala in Pautovak’s lifetime. It is the researcher’s truth, however, that although this story contains the facts of his life, Joaquin Murrieta was never in this area. The more common criminal missing from legend is the Los Angeles area horse thief Jose Flores, who really was chased by the Rangers and the Mormons up Coldwater in a daring escape.
And what music is there in a song that tells that the water from Temescal Creek was consumed by the city of Corona, or that today, the once lush primeval breeding ground of the great California grizzly is mile after mile of gravel pits? Here is the song then: the gravel-crushing machines grind away, grind away, and they fill the valley with noise twenty-four hours a day.
The red tile roofs in the center of this map are Glen Ivy Hot Springs. The massive quarry just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the burbs keep getting closer and closer.
The old grizzly track has grown over with chapparal, but the jeep trace to the top of Santiago Peak is still called Horse Thief Trail. There’s an exit sign off 15 between Corona and Lake Elsinore that says so. Migrant workers still live in camps near there, and sometimes you can hear them sing the Coldwater Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta.
The Daily Create was to make a gif from a “classic” section of a classic spaghetti western. The section was Clint Eastwood riding into town on a mule. Three racially stereotyped Mexican men, members of a local street gang, try to bully him and shoot at his mule’s feet as it turns and runs away from the sharp, explosive sound. The Eastwood character dismounts from the running mule by grabbing hold of a swinging crossbar. As he walks back to encounter the bullies, he passes the coffin maker and says, “Prepare three coffins”; i.e. he is premeditating murder.
Uncool.
He then returns to the men, and in an act of revenge that must swell every bullied schoolboy’s heart, he shoots not three but four bullies. I understand this is a male revenge fantasy, but I am definitely a person who correlates media saturation of violence with the acting out semi-adult males allow themselves to do with guns in public places.
In my neck of the West, the massacre at Umpqua Community College is still freshly with us. I jumped and my heart raced when Eastwood killed the four Hispanics at the end of the clip. The Kip Kinkle school massacre happened here at Thurston High School, and I was at the hospital when the victims started to arrive and the coffin rate started its grim count. The Clackamas Mall shooting happened not long ago near here, and my sister’s nurse colleague was shot. Need I start the current death toll from police shootings of women, blacks, and unarmed civilians?
Like many if not most American (women), I have a kind of citizen PTSD. I am not enured to the sound of gunshots. I don’t think the Eastwood character is even remotely cool. I see him for what he is: cynical, amoral, murderous. One review I read called him “mystical.”
Murderous young men are never “mystical.”
And that coolness factor is admired only by wannabe gang members and bullied, revenge-driven school boys, many of them older professionals now who grew up on this violent, poisonous pap and haven’t yet mucked out the barns of their interior worlds.
Gun violence is institutionalized in this country by a long history of media saturation, and while I am behind Obama all the way in his efforts to f-Ing finally DO some thing, ANYTHING about it, it still takes you and me examining our own soul’s deepest thinking about how okay it is to continue to endorse media violence.
Cuz cold blooded, premeditated murder is never cool.
This is a screenshot of a Google image search for “school shooters.” What do they have in common?
This is not the first time I’ve talked about the civilian PTSD from the schoolyard shooters. In this April 2012 digital story, I revisit the nervous aftermath of the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
The Daily Create is about “what’s in your pockets?” I like the symbolic image of the bolsa, the pouch as a seed place–testicles or womb– where hidden things whisper to life in the dark…
In my part of the world, many people both male and female wear medicine pouches on a leather thong around their necks, tucked in under their clothes. Made of tanned elk or deer hide–or a scrap of calico cloth–these bundles contain amulets sacred to the wearer.
Spread out in an aluminum pan under a medical examiner’s light, the contents would appear to be ordinary bits of gemstone, shell, or bone, but when contained inside their bundle and carried like a small second womb or testicle sac over the heart, they are charged with the meaning given to them by the wearer: a piece of Baltic amber to commemorate ancestors lost in a war; a feather from Raven, the Creator bird; a shell still whispering the power of the sea.
The tradition of the medicine bundle is inherited from Native American tribes all across the continent; however, the cultural context has been lost or changed. Medicine bundles in tribal cultures were subject to a latticework of rules and taboos unique to each tribe as well as sharing some pan-tribal commonalities.
In the 21st century, certain cultural elements have accompanied the medicine bag on its journey through deep time; primarily that its contents are sacred, private, and may only be handled by the owner. In my experience, the objects are often acquired in ceremony, which imbues them with special powers often associated with healing (hence, “medicine”) in the imagination of the owner.
Screen shot of a Google Image search for “medicine bundles”
The objects contained in a medicine bundle go to the source of who that person is. If I knew what was in your bundle, I would know an enormous amount about who you are in the world; that is, if you told me the stories attached to them: the war vet who carries a blue bead meant in the Middle East to ward off the Evil Eye–what terrifying memory is he protecting himself from? The mother carrying the tiny, clean skull of a vole–has she lost a pregnancy? Does she invite a new child into her womb by carrying three sunflower seeds; does she honor her own mother with those dried rose petals?
These are real objects with real value to real people, but they gain their power because they are rooted and growing in the imaginations of their people. Imaginal objects set up their own field of resonance and will link in the mind to related objects of its kind whenever its Person encounters them.
For example, Julia Shadow-woman lost her beloved dog. She took her grief for a walk in the meadow by the river. As she passed under the big riparian cottonwoods, she found a perfect small, fluffy feather with the distinct markings of an owl. Julia associated her love and grief with the owl feather, which she interpreted as a gift from the wild.
Julia knelt, took off her medicine bundle, and with a prayer and a small ceremony done in her own way, she tied the feather into her bundle and sent it down into the mysterious well of her imagination, where it found a home and began to grow.
In the evening, on her way home, Julia Shadow-woman saw an owl swoop low over the road in front of her car, and she knew the spirit of her beloved dog had been invited to live with the owls. From then on, every owl became sacred to Julia.
“Snowy Owl, Nisqually Delta 2012” Original Watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long Courtesy http://www.cherylrlong.com/
One day, Julia saw an ambassador owl from the local raptor rehabilitation center recruiting volunteers in her town square. She answered the call and began to volunteer at the raptor center working with injured owls. At first, she only cleaned their cages, but soon she was tossing them in the air in the flight cage, encouraging them to fly on reset bones. Julia felt she was servicing the owls in thanks for them receiving the spirit of her dog and letting him live with them in the air, sharing their wings, which she now helped to heal when they were broken. Julia went on to be a veterinarian specializing in raptor rehabilitation; like so many here in the West, she was a scientist who carried a medicine bundle.
Some may say Julia was superstitious or indulged herself in magical thinking, or was betraying her scientific training, but the rich, dark currents of the human imagination don’t have anything to do with such accusations. It works the way it works. It can certainly be suppressed; it can be polluted; it can be channeled. It is a fluid medium like blood or lymph or water, and it, too, births life, sustains life, gives habitation to that ineffable “me” the ancient ones called the seat of the soul. Dr. Julia Shadow-woman’s entire human existence is made richer, is given direction by her imagination’s healthy embrace of owls both real and imaginary.
Not everyone carries a real medicine bundle, but most people I know have one in their hearts–symbols that speak to us in dreams, in a sparkling network of coincidences, and peer out at us from the hidden cracks in the marketplace of the world.
“Turn a feeling into a character for a movie trailer.
What does Love look like? Envy? Who is Elation?”
This video softly cuts two ways in my mind. On the one hand, the theme and title are “I Dream a World.”
My own experience is that I do, indeed, dream my world into being. In the extreme, that is called solipsism, a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.
And of course, that other world over which I have no control bites back. It is foolish to think otherwise–Great Raven, who is World Creator, Trickster, and World Destroyer–teaches us that.
Raven: World Creator, Trickster, World Destroyer (Image courtesy: http://www.booksbyeric.com/call-raven-mocker/)
And that is represented in this little digital story by the lyrics to the song.
“Write a blurb about something you love but don’t say what it is until the end. Keep your audience guessing until you finally reveal what it was that you were talking about.”
I don’t actually know what a “blurb” might mean in this context as I associate blurbs with author endorsements on book jackets. However, this being DS 106, I felt free to reinterpret the genre of this challenge as a poem.
It is Sunday, I’m on the couch all day with a killer sinus infection (which accounts for the mood of the poem) , so I had the time to count out the pentameter (five beats per line) on my fingers and to work out the somewhat non-standard rhyme scheme (abba, cdcd, efef).
I came up two lines short of a 14 line sonnet, but I had run out of things to say, and anyway, there is such a thing as a twelve line sonnet, which I proclaim this to be.
I started by trying to describe these candles without saying what they are. They are in silver candlesticks that come from Peter’s parents, Bill and Marion, and currently they are on the bare “lake of wood” of the dining room table.
Candles Burn Out
Two silver hands rising from the lake of wood, fingers lightly clasping the tapered arms reaching like the aspen trees in fall, the way their leaves shake
alive with light, forest dancers blazing– or miniature suns, or passionflowers incandescent as the stars and trembling, waiting for the match, those lucent hours.
They say you and I are melting wax– our lives have leapt and flared, but in the end
only Love, that Light, will stay intact as we blow out like candles in the wind.
You can listen to me read this poem out loud by clicking on the bright orange arrow below:
The Daily Create on Jan. 7, 2015 was particularly convoluted, and, indeed, only two of us actually posted a completed project. Here’s the wording:
Long May You Run
Neil Young once wrote a song about a car he once owned. Make a song about an old vehicle that you remember fondly and include images of it in the video.
To break that challenge down into its component parts:
1. Write an original song
2. About a car you once owned
3. Record the song
4. Make a music video out of it.
As a frame of reference for what a lunatic challenge this is, let us review the description of Daily Creates as posted on the website:
The Daily Create provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through challenges published every day. Each assignment should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily. Developed as part of the ds106 open course on digital storytelling, TDC is open to anyone who wants a regular dose of creative exercises.
Rewind: You DID read 15-20 minutes daily, did you not?
Just for giggles, let me walk you through my process:
1. Ideas about old cars I have known and loved–check. I remembered the green Subaru Forester I dumped in a creek during a March storm in 2004
In March 2004, I was driving home from Linn Benton Community College to Eugene down Highway 99 in one of those bathtub storms. My green Subaru Forester hydroplaned and went off the road into a deep ditch of flashflood run-off. The water came right up through the floor as I wrestled the door open against the current. The strapping lads in the truck behind me turned out to be students of Peter’s Criminal Justice tech writing class and were trained EMTs. They were delighted to be of service and fished me readily out of the drink. “The Subaru she died.”
2. Write a song? I just about abandoned this insane quest right there, but my subconscious was hopping around full throttle with those Ever Ready batteries I gave it and reminded me of a cool workshop I went to years ago on the Mexican ballad style called the “corrido.” We wrote and sang little corridos that I still remember.
I let my fingers do the walking and came up with a Smithsonian site called Corridos Sin Fronteras that walks you through the structure of a corrido. Music is provided, and you can write in a template then click on the music and sing along with your song.
That process of writing and recording probably took an hour and a half, and it also took me as far out of my creativity comfort range as I have been in a while. That alone was reason enough to persist. However, eventually I had rehearsed behind closed doors enough that I could play the music and sing the song on my Mac Book Pro while recording into Sound Cloud on my iPad.
3. The next problem was not so much creative as technical; I couldn’t figure out how to download my Sound Cloud recording into iMovie on my iPad. I researched it on the web and finally bought a specialized browser called iCab for $1.99 that did the trick most niftily.
Oh wait. I’m not retired. I suited up and taught three classes, 75 students, everything from summary writing to how to use Google Docs to how to start using an iPad to what a digital story is…
I came home after 6:00 pm to a wonderful dinner and a glass of wine with the inestimable Peter Jensen.
7:00 pm and I was back at it. I had the sound track down in iMovie. From there it was a matter of visiting my Flickr collection of videos, Ganking (ganking: to yank photos off Google) a couple of (legal) Subaru shots, then doing some pretty rough video editing.
Some days I just want to paint a big red S on my chest–that’s SUPERWOMAN to you, bud!
Sign my name and load that sucker up onto YouTube with the correct tags to ensure it would appear on the Daily Create website. Done and done! Total time: two and a half hours start to finish plus a full day’s work.
And I’m not even saying it is much of a final product, except that it still gives me fits of the giggles. I hope you smile, too.
In this Daily Create, we were challenged to make a video about the inanimate aspects of the world around us. Mine turned into a somewhat moody or intimate introspective view of my study.
As always, these little videos are made on the fly; they are really more personal journal entry than presentation project. Like a journal entry, they are made in the fire and passion of the moment and then forgotten.
I had forgotten this one until I found it in my You Tube channel with its privacy setting still on.
Part of me said it was too long and wanted to edit it immediately; but then I fell into the mood of the song being sung by Siri Vik, my favorite local chanteuse (she teaches at Lane CC with me as a vocal coach), and
The Daily Create for Saturday, Jan. 3, 2013 was as you see with the additional instructions to write it as a poem. What a great prompt!
How the Story Goes
My name is Red
for all the usual reasons – the hair,
the character flaw of anger, a preference
since childhood for scarlet hoodies.
I am a comparative mythologist – I know,
I know, people call me the Fairy Tale Sleuth,
but the media – what can you do?
I’m really just a text wrangler,
a recorder of oral histories. I listen
at the pregnant belly button of the world,
omphalos of all story. I am
the squirrel Ratatosk running
I am the squirrel Ratatosk (Image courtesy of http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Rodent_Physiology)
on Yggdrasil, the eternal green ash tree
whose branches spread over the nine worlds.
I listen to Nidhug, wily vampire dragon
of the roots, and I carry his unlikely tales
to the eagle flying from the leafy
top of the world. I see all restless heroes
setting forth from little cabins squatted
too contented in the woods. I hear
the subtle Calls to Adventure
that whistle them down the wind.
And I have been known to help the hapless hero,
but there are other helpers, too, the King of the Ants,
Jesus or the angels in disguise, the tired,
the poor – Samaritan blood spills eternal.
I watch, I listen, I see those children
cross blind into the Zone of Heightened Power
and begin that terrible Road of Trials
from which no god can save them –
I thrust my hands in my jacket pockets,
pull the red hood up over my flaming hair,
and turn away.
I know how it goes, and knowing
maybe makes it harder to watch, easier
to turn away.
Crucifixion. Dismemberment. We laugh
when Coyote, trapped in the Great Mother Tree,
has to take himself apart to escape
that suffocating womb, pushing
his body parts, even his balls out through
the woodpecker’s hole,
all needing to be reassembled
on the Other Side. That’s tough.
It’s always tough. But that’s just
how the story always goes.
I’m up here in my Ivory Tower
trying to play it cool, but I still
The Fool from The Mystic Tarot Deck
(Image courtesy of http://mysticst4r.wordpress.com/)
get angry at the dimwitted Fool
stumbling along the rocky road to love,
or power, or enlightenment.
I feel every story like bearing a first born child,
and every fairy tale or ancient myth
is that dreadful push to leave
the Mother Tree behind, to reconcile
with the Sky Father, find a name
that is our own, one that rings true
to our toes. We seek the Elixir of Life
and Mastery of Two Worlds.
Let’s face it. We’re all lost in the woods
stalked by the top predator of the soul.
alive with light, forest dancers blazing–
They say you and I are melting wax–
