October in the Shawnee

I remember White Eagle was at the campfire the night that a drunk farm kid stumbled in and shared some of his information. There were other people there, too, Grizzly Bob, Smoky Joe, who was a rival of Grizzly Bob, Mac, Fawn, and Chloe, for starters, besides me, but I don’t remember all that clearly, there might have been a few more. It was late already, maybe past eleven, but it didn’t matter in the rainbow campground; people were up all night often, and sometimes things didn’t get started until about midnight.

So-called rainbow people would gather somewhere in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois in October by general agreement; someone would find a place where everyone could camp and they would arrive, often hitchhiking, all through the fall, and then leave when the weather got colder, usually heading for Florida, Texas or warmer climates. Often they knew each other from past gatherings or from staying at one of many rainbow farms or ranches around the country. They fancied themselves modern-day wanderers, living light off the land, never settling for very long, exploring and living out Native American prophecies, learning how to get food from the forest to supplement what they got from dumpsters in town, or from panhandling, or from various other means. Usually visitors brought stuff. The better prepared were ready for about a week or two in the woods.

So, on this night, a kid drives in, parks his truck and walks right past A-camp. A-camp is where the drinkers stay, up by the two-lane, and they stop outsiders and usually get their alcohol and use it up. Sometimes this works well for everyone: the outsider gets a drunken version of what’s going on; the A-campers get a steady supply of alcohol, and everyone else stays deeper in the woods, left alone. This kid got past A-camp somehow, came to the campfire deep inside the encampment, brought something to smoke as an offering, and settled on a log near the fire to talk for a while.

Now I’d hitchhiked down from Maine, on my way to Nevada, and wanted to rest a little; I wasn’t much interested in the talk around the campfire, and in fact was ready to settle in for a good outdoor sleep. I could have easily gone twelve or fourteen hours if they’d let me. But this farm kid started telling about the Indian mounds in the area. When he was growing up around here, he said, his parents told him that there were Indian mounds everywhere, and even pointed them out. They were especially in the lowland areas near the river, but you could find them a ways off the river also. Most were overgrown and worked back into the land so that, since the land was hilly anyway, it was hard to determine what was a natural hill and what was on old Indian mound, covered with trees and brush until you didn’t know what it was.

White Feather pricked up his ears; I know he was taking in every word. He could tell when someone knew what they were talking about. It’s true that the kid was drunk, and had smoked a bit, but it didn’t matter. He’d been in the area all his life. He had no reason to lie. Also, it seemed like there was a reason he was here, in this place, telling this. Sometimes people say stuff because you're meant to hear it. Smoky Joe said right off the bat they ought to form an expedition and go check a few of those Indian mounds out. There was general consensus about that; you see, these rainbow folks like nothing better than a good tromp in the woods, you never know what you’ll find, and a couple of people knew this part of the forest well enough to know a bit about what the kid said about how to get there. The main problem here was a kind of rivalry developing between Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob.

There were three mounds right over this very bluff, the kid said, and gave directions, though the directions didn't seem very clear to me; I knew very little about this forest. Smoky Joe made him repeat them, but White Feather didn’t need that. He’d heard it well enough the first time.

It was now about three in the morning, but nobody there made any move toward their tent or sleeping bag. The kid kept up with his rambling. He was a nice kid; cowboy hat, blue eyes, slightly slurry in his speech betraying a little of what he'd drunk. Every time it rained, the farm kid said, you’d find arrowheads in the gulleys, but you couldn’t tell if the arrowheads were from the mound people or from the generations of Indians who came through the place later, the more modern ones, who were found by the Europeans when they started canoeing in the place around 1600 or 1700. By that time the mound people were gone, but their mounds remained all up and down the river, and who knows what was in those mounds. Some of the mounds, like Monk's Mound in Cahokia up near St. Louis, were entire cities, covered over and over with mud until they were huge, wide towering things; others were smaller, and represented either homes, or burial sites, or other things. Once, up near Cahokia, an archaeologist figured out that some mounds were placed facing the direction that the sun of the summer solstice, or maybe the vernal equinox, came in. Those mounds, he figured, would be more important mounds, likely to be a burial mound of a leader. And, sure enough, in this one mound, they’d found a leader, with rocks, jewels, shells, and skeletons of young girls in there with him.

Now it was a point of pride among the rainbow people that they knew the vernal equinox from the solstice; they were in touch with the natural world, and would therefore know which of the mounds to go poking around in, if they chose to go that route. Both Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob laid claim to some knowledge of the vernal equinox; maybe they already saw the expedition as sure to happen and each wanted to establish himself as leader. Their rivalry was in full swing here as they discussed particulars of the vernal sun in this particular part of Illinois. I myself knew nothing of the equinox, or of the area; I had nothing to offer, nothing to pretend; if there was an expedition, I’d rather just sleep. But I watched in grim interest, because of Chloe. Chloe and Grizzly Bob were an item, but were known to be having trouble. I sensed Smoky Joe being more than a little interested in this situation. In any expedition anywhere it would be of more than passing interest if Bob went, if Chloe went, and if Joe would be in the same expedition.

White Eagle stared straight ahead, poking at the fire with a stick. To White Eagle it wasn’t a day-trip, or a leisure excursion. He knew the Shawnee pretty well. He’d been scouting the place out for years. He knew where several mounds were, right off the bat, besides the obvious three the others were after, that weren’t far down the trail. The question to him was, what do you do when you find it? Do you break right in and look around? White Eagle had no problem walking across a cemetery, or reaching into a dumpster. But he had trouble with the idea of messing with Indian graves.

Around four in the morning the kid actually left; he had to go to work somewhere in the morning, and there was some discussion of how to get back onto the main roads from where we were. White Eagle was most useful in this kind of situation; he really knew his way around, even though, as far as I could tell, he had no car, and rarely left the encampment. The kid thanked us and left; then, talk of an expedition then began in earnest. I was against going right away, because I really needed some sleep; I made my feelings known. I, however, was sorely outnumbered. After a couple of pots of chicory coffee, an expedition was gathered that had Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob as leaders, with Chloe, me, Mac and Fawn also going along. When it came time to go, though, White Eagle was nowhere to be found, so we left without him. We took some provisions but packed lightly. The sun was coming up across the river when we got up to the bluff but in general it wasn't hard to see where we were going. We came down the bluff into the bottoms along the river.

At various times I got views of people and the way they walked through the woods; usually we were on a path; some wore moccasins or had hide water-jugs over their shoulders. Chloe was by far the most interesting person to watch. I had fallen for Chloe, though I knew she was with Grizzly Bob; most of what I knew about Bob or anyone else, I knew from talking to Chloe. Whether she and Bob were married or not I had no idea. I wondered how a woman could camp for weeks at a time and stay so beautiful, yet she did, and she wasn't particularly threatened by being with a crowd of rough characters in the middle of the woods. Fawn was a little more nervous about it, but Fawn had Mac; they'd been traveling together for a year or two, and had just come back from Guatemala or some such place. Smoky Joe was like me, a free man, unattached. His parents back in Tampa or someplace wanted him to be a doctor, but he wanted to tromp around the woods all the time with the rainbow people. He was willful, in other words. Like the rest of us, he felt pressure to get back into the world, make money, live a normal life. But unlike us, he was likely to never buckle to that pressure. He walked with a purposeful gait, which was ironic since I never figured out what he would have done if we'd actually found a mound. The woods were beautiful with their early-October colors and there were caves made of large rock overhangs everywhere; one could feel the overwhelming presence of others in the area, who had lived in this wooded river-valley for years; where else but in these caves?

At one fork in the road Grizzly Bob wanted to go right, but Smoky Joe to the left. We stopped and sat along the path to discuss it, and try to recall what the farm kid had said. Chloe sided with Grizzly Bob, naturally. But Mac also believed we should go right. That was enough to swing the balance; I had no feeling except trying to stay awake, and Fawn was of no use in that situation. We went right. But alas, the going got tough and now Smoky Joe got more vocal about his disagreement, harshly blaming Grizzly Bob.

Grizzly Bob was a large guy who got the name Grizzly from his facial hair. He was an ex-con, trying to stay off alcohol and the hard stuff, but always threatening to get back on it under pressure. I worried about Chloe and thought she looked kind of beaten down half the time, but she had choice to stay with him. He carried a large knife that he used for everything, and made me, for one, willing to go along with him just so I wouldn't ever come up against it. But Smoky Joe had no such compunction. He felt like he knew the woods, knew the direction, knew where he wanted to go, and this wasn't it, and it was Bob's fault. Pretty soon the two were yelling at each other; harsh words were said. We were way out in the woods; we were lost; we'd probably been going in circles. Nobody could even say for sure which direction we were going anymore. The problem was, any rational consideration of the right thing to do was now lost in this heated argument which threatened to turn violent. I remember looking at the afternoon sun coming in through the canopy of trees overhead and feeling like the Shawnee was a beautiful place, being defiled to some degree by these two buffoons ready to kill each other. Every once in a while, the sun would glance off of Grizzly Bob's knife, which hung from his belt, and I had passing illusions that maybe he wanted it that way, maybe he knew the sun's angle as well as he said he did. Smoky Joe badgered him relentlessly, unfazed by the knife.

But it was Fawn, in the end, who saved the day. She got between the two men and started challenging them to use what they knew to help us find the way. In fact each man knew quite a bit, and pretty soon the two leaders agreed to go back the way we'd come and take a different, shorter, route back to the campfire. We arrived at the campfire at about eight or so, well after dark, but that was ok, because we knew the way at the end there, and when we got there, a big dinner was being served, as if they knew six hungry hikers were about to arrive. Around the fire we told our story, how we ended up in the middle of nowhere, how it almost came to blows, how we turned around and came back. People there knew quite a bit about Cahokia, about how there were mounds all up and down the river; how they were pretty much overgrown now; how Cahokia had been the biggest city in North America for a thousand years; how they'd traveled the rivers up to Montana, northern Minnesota, the Smokies, and the Gulf, all to trade for and bring back things like silver, obsidian, or fine shells.

Rainbow people were at their best when they were well-fed and talking dreamily about ancient Indian tribes. As out of sleep as I was, I was enjoying the campfire now, with its drum circle, beautiful Chloe over there with Bob's arm around her, one pot of chickory coffee after another. When I finally slept, I slept maybe sixteen hours or more, and had to leave almost immediately when I woke up. I had a good memory of the woods, and especially that night's campfire. But what we'd all forgotten was White Eagle. It turned out, as I found out way later, that he'd found an Indian mound, but had fallen into a deep hole, at or near it, accidentally, and died, and wasn't found until much later. When they found him they were pretty sure it was an accident, but you never know about these things, sometimes it seems like the mound just swallowed him up and took him.