Reply #120: When you have held it in your hand. . . . .

[Tansy_Gold]

My paternal grandfather was a racist. He despised my mother -- his daughter-in-law -- because her mother was Jewish. Yet he claimed, without concrete evidence, that someone back two or three generations from him had married an Indian woman. I never found anything, other than a woman with the last name Crow, that was even suggestive of such, but neither did I ever challenge it.

When I married and moved to Indiana, where my husband's family had a small farm, I found a few broken "arrowheads" in a desk my husband had shared with his brother when they were children. When I asked him about them, he said he'd found them while walking behind the tractor during spring plowing. I was fascinated, even though they were obviously crude and broken. I couldn't wait for the spring to arrive, so I could walk behind the plow and look for arrowheads. I never did.

But some years later, when we contemplated buying a neighboring farm, we walked to the back of the 25-acre property with the real estate agent to check out the small patch of woods, and as we returned, walking through the recently plowed field, I saw a starkly white stone poking out of the moist black earth. Far too large to be an arrowhead, it was part -- only part -- of a spear point. The chert material was coarse, the edges dull, but it was my first find.

Then one windy afternoon, my husband and a friend went to play golf and I walked along, having nothing better to do that day. The cart path was fine lakeside "blow" sand, and the wind stirred it into the air, creating a threat to my contact lenses. So I walked with my hands cupped around my eyes and looked down, and that's how I saw the oddly textured bit of brown flint, its edges covered by sand but its surface distinctive and unnatural,lying in the middle of the cart path. I picked it up and held in my hand a beautiful long spear point, unbroken except for a tiny chip on one of the tangs. The edges were sharp and translucent, the shape sleek and aerodynamic.

We'd gone rock hunting one day, long after our move to Arizona, and we came to a crestate saguaro. They are rare enough to be worth taking a picture. As I hiked to the far side of the big cactus, where the light was better, my husband called to me. Thinking from the tone of his voice that he might have stepped on a cactus or something, I hastened back to him and found him simply pointing to the ground. At first I thought the object was a piece of chalcedony, a common enough rock. But as I looked at it, I realized it was another spearpoint, fashioned not of flint like my find on the golf course, but of beautiful pink chalcedony. Roughly the same shape as but slightly smaller than the flint one, it was just lying there in the desert gravel.

A few years after my husband died, I went rock hunting with the local club. There were about 15 of us, including several children ranging in age from 5 to about 12. We parked at the bottom of low hill, and trudged numerous times to the top of the hill, a distance of about 200, 300 yards. Not far. And the slope was very gradual, making it easy to make many trips and bring down many of the rich red jasper pieces that littered the top. As the afternoon waned and it came time to consider leaving to come home, I made one last trip to the top, then came down the well-worn and slightly muddy path all of us had used all afternoon. Slightly muddy and slightly slippery, so I kept my eyes on the ground as I walked with my hands full of jasper chunks. Why I saw it and no one else had, I don't know, but I did, and this time it was indeed an arrowhead, small and made of the same pink chalcedony that is so common in the desert.

It is one thing to see them in a museum or a collection. It is another thing to watch the modern knappers turn a blob of obsidian or a nodule of flint into a knife blade. But it is altogether different to find it where it lies and pick it up, wondering how it got there, who made it, why they lost it.

I've found pottery shards too, and remnants of walls. The connection is made.



Tansy Gold