Wayward Island 20 How Summer Solstice was celebrated By Jake Preston
Reader restrictions: no minors, no readers who are offended by explicit descriptions of gay sexuality. The story as a whole is a psychological study of gay athletic hunks who love nerds, and the nerds who love them in return. The story also deals with the problems faced by gay guys who live in rural areas. If these themes don't interest you, there are many other great "nifty" stories to choose from. Send comments and suggestions to jemtling@gmail.com. Jake will respond to all sincere correspondents.
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Benzion and Sarah Haiam flew to Duluth from New York and stayed at my cabin during the last two weeks of June. Red Feather and Chaim borrowed my car to pick up Chaim's folks in Duluth. In deference to his father, Chaim wore his yarmulke during their visit. The Haiams and Red Feather visited sights in Duluth, and spent a night at Gary's home. When they got to Lake Ashawa, they asked me where they could rent a car. I told them that they could use mine. I borrowed Tom's truck for the week. Benzion was a butcher in Brooklyn. We were determined that the Haiams wouldn't have to spend their hard-earned money in the North Country. Their son was part of our clan.
Chaim and Red Feather guided them to local sights: the underground iron ore mine in Soudan, the open pit mine in Hibbing, the Bob Dylan center, and the International Wolf Center in Ely, the Ashawa River waterfalls. Olaf gave them a tour of the Bear Sanctuary in Orr. I spent time with them boating and canoeing on the lake. Chaim showed off his water-skiing, a talent he acquired three weeks earlier when we sponsored an ARCH Triangle beach party that included water-ski lessons. One afternoon, we picked blueberries in a marsh, and harvested enough for three blueberry pies. Red Feather and I planned North Country meals: venison stew, venison steak, venison hamburgers, wild duck, fried walleyes and Northerns, wild rice, "Swedish" spring potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, whatever we could think of. It was too early in the summer for wild raspberries and strawberries, but we had homemade jams on the breakfast table.
A mother knows intuitively if she has a gay son. Maybe that's not always true, but it applied to Sarah Haiam. During her second night in the cabin (where the Haiams slept in my bedroom), she made a trip to the bathroom and heard Chaim and Red Feather making love in the loft. A groan could be heard from the depth of a soul: it could have been either her son or Red Feather; afterward, the playful chatter of two youthful voices in the intimacy of après-sexe. Always alert to the timbre of her son in the silence of the cabin, she realized that he and Red Feather made love every night. One morning when she collected laundry from the bedroom and the loft, she was neither surprised nor shocked to see that her son shared a double bed with Red Feather. Acting on an impulse that she regretted at once, she opened a dresser drawer and found a lube-tube, one of Jake's sex toys (a vibrator), a package of condoms, and a cellophane-wrapped bottle of poppers labeled Iron Horse, whose purpose was unknown to her. She realized that curiosity had brought her an uncanny step too far into the private affairs of two lovers, one of whom happened to be her son. She closed the drawer quietly, and went back to tending the laundry. The evidence was conclusive, but it only confirmed what she already knew by maternal instinct. She vowed to support her son in the way of life that God had ordained for him. What mattered to Sarah was that Chaim had friends who were kind, and a boyfriend who made him happy. She worried about Benzion, but was glad for Chaim.
Chaim grew up as a lonely boy in Brooklyn. The larger the school, the lonelier he got. In grade school he was inexplicably different from other students. In middle school he felt twinges of confused attraction to boys whose friendship seemed unattainable. In high school he was a loner, confirmed in the belief that he alone, of all the boys in his school, was sexually attracted to other boys. In the locker room, especially, Chaim had to act straight while casting furtive glances at the naked bodies of other boys. "What are YOU lookin' at?" once he heard a varsity athlete call out. As it turned out, the remark was addressed to another boy, but still, he thought he would die. His only friend was Leah Miller, a fellow violin student. He and Leah often exchanged confidences, but the secret of his sexuality was not among them. His classmates assumed that Leah was his girlfriend. No one suspected that he was gay, except for his Mom. It was something of a paradox: life in high school might have been less miserable, or at least less exhausting, had his classmates known that he was gay. Even so, Chaim found comfort in violin and piano lessons, and developed a natural talent that got him a scholarship with the Music Conservatory at Oberlin College.
As a freshman at Oberlin College, Chaim had male friends for the first time. Some were openly gay; others, gay-friendly. For some, an imperceptible boundary failed to distinguish between gay and gay-friendly. No matter: for his friends, music came first, and whatever social life they had was built around music lessons and concerts, and art exhibits and theater shows that called for musical accompaniment. For Chaim, life after high school was happy for the first time.
Late in March, the dorm counselor asked Chaim if he would share his room with a prospective new student who was visiting from Minnesota. When he met Red Feather, he experienced the sensation of gaydar for first time. He fell in love at first sight. The robust masculinity of Red Feather was a blip on the gaydar screen that made him irresistible to Chaim. Red Feather's countenance, so unmistakably Native American, was matched by Chaim's intense Israeli gaze, irresistible to Red Feather. No one in Chaim's experience looked quite like Red Feather, yet his profile and features formed a composite of all the unattainable boys he had desired in school.
Red Feather had many questions for Chaim about Oberlin College life, the Music Conservatory, and life in New York City. "I feel like this is my first time off the Res, even though I've spent most of the last six months at Lake Ashawa," Red Feather said. Chaim had questions about the Lake Country, and about Red Feather's life as an Ojibwe. Each lad seemed exotic to the other. Mother Nature took care of the rest. Differences attract. Extravagant differences attract extravagantly. Lust, friendship, and lust caught them at once in a rush, as if Nature had set out to prove, by scientific demonstration, that free will is just a human illusion.
Red Feather turned his gaze to Chaim's collection of books, especially his Tanakh, a large, blue-covered volume with white letters. It had Hebrew on the left page, and facing English translations on the right. He was a student of the Ojibwe language, he said, but he had to make his own facing translations in notebooks, which he hoped he could share with Chaim when he started college at Oberlin in the Fall. Chaim expressed interest in this multicultural exchange. "If we decide to become lovers," Red Feather said, "I'll teach you Ojibwe if you teach me how to read the Tanakh in Hebrew." Red Feather drew some Ojibwe symbols, explained their meaning, and showed how they could be joined together as syllables to make words and phrases. "Ojibwe is an agglutinative language. Some phrases and sentences look more like long words. But it's not as agglutinative as some other Indian languages, like Aleut." Chaim wrote the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning..." in Hebrew from right to left. Whenever a Hebrew letter appeared for the first time, he gave its phonetic and semantic meanings. "The letters have numerical meanings, too, what they call gematics," he said. Sitting side by side at Chaim's desk, theirs was a linguistic courtship, imbued with rising levels of testosterone that could not long be suppressed. Each foray into linguistic exotica was felt as a new temptation of the flesh.
Red Feather went down the corridor to the showers. When he returned, wrapped in a towel folded over to advantage his thighs, he showed no inclination to get dressed. The dorm room had two single beds, but Red Feather said there was room in one bed for both of them, "if that's all right with you, Chaim." He lay on the bed closest to Chaim's desk-chair. Chaim moved to the bed, and sat beside him. He couldn't take his eyes off Red Feather, who took Chaim's hand, and guided it to his chest. Chaim's hand roamed Red Feather's torso. Terrycloth materiality bore witness to Red Feather's throbbing erection. Red Feather held his hand at the back of Chaim's neck, and pulled him close. For the first time in his life, Chaim pressed his lips to another man's lips. Red Feather ran his fingers through Chaim's hair. His delicate touch to the scalp was experienced by Chaim as an electrically erotic jolt that transformed his tentative press of the lips to a passionate kiss. His tongue thrust into Red Feather's mouth.
Red Feather responded with just enough tongue-action to let Chaim know that his kiss was welcome, but he remained passive enough to let Chaim control the action. Their eyes met, ablaze with longing. Chaim watched while Red Feather untied the knot that bound the towel around his midsection. Chaim slid a hand beneath the towel. It roamed from thigh to pubes. Red Feather's cock throbbed over Chaim's knuckles. Chaim kissed Red Feather again. His hand cupped Red Feather's scrotum. His fingers found the contours of Red Feather's testicles. Ref Feather returned Chaim's kisses with passion. His cock throbbed rigid, while his body turned to putty in Chaim's hands. With one hand on each end of the towel, Chaim drew it apart theatrically, like a curtain that disclosed the glory of Red Feather, the chief object of Chaim's desire.
A boy with a Hanukkah dreidel couldn't have been more excited. Red Feather's shaft was bigger and thicker than expected, several shades darker than his light brown body, veiny-purpled, nested in an unruly mass of pubic hair, and dripping with pre-cum. Red Feather gasped joyfully and his cock throbbed when Chaim fingered it and wrapped a hand around it. Chaim slid a finger over Red Feather's pisshole and brought it to his lips for a taste of pre-cum. He wet his finger again and slid it over the mass of sensitive skin below Red Feather's glans. "Ooooo, don't do that, Chaim. You'll make me cum," Red Feather whispered. Chaim felt a brand new thrill in the power to administer pleasure to Red Feather's body.
"Do you like this?" Chaim asked.
"It's wonderful," Red Feather said. "My body is yours, Chaim." Red Feather thought about Drew Fox, Henry Hasek's best friend and hockey-mate: how Drew had surrendered his body so completely to Göran Svenson on Valentine's Day. Only close friends knew about this, and not from Göran. Drew talked about it one evening, in praise of Göran's talent as a lover.
In his digital manipulation, Chaim found Red Feather's foreskin. In had retracted to near-imperceptibility around his turgid shaft, but Chaim felt a subtle slide of skin, and eased it forward. Red Feather showed him how to raise the foreskin over his glans. "I've never seen foreskin before," Chaim whispered. He bent down and sucked Red Feather's glans in his mouth, and sought out the foreskin with his tongue. Red Feather pulled him off. "Don't do that just yet, Chaim," he said. "I'm so horny, you'll make me cum if you do that."
Chaim flipped Red Feather over. As Red Feather complied, he looked over his shoulder at Chaim with a sly smile and eyes flashing lust, happy to see that his inexperienced new friend was bold enough to take charge. Chaim ran his hands over Red Feather's backside from shoulders to thighs, and worked his way to curvaceous mounds and a cleft that formed an inviting trail to his portal. Red Feather spread his legs to give access. He arched when Chaim stroked the hairs in his cleft and ran a finger down to the portal. He arched a bit more when Chaim kissed his ass-cheeks, and ran his tongue up and down the cleft, probing the mystery of Red Feather, who sighed. Red Feather let Chaim linger over his backside for as long as he needed. Finally he said: "It's time you got naked, Chaim. I want to feel the weight of your body over mine."
In less than a minute, Chaim lay over Red Feather, who helped him arrange his midsection so his cock nestled in the cleft that had attracted his attention earlier. "Ahhh, that's it," Red Feather whispered. "Your body feels so good, Chaim. Your cock, too. I was hoping we could do this." Chaim kissed Red Feather's shoulders, and tongued his ears and the back and sides of his neck. Red Feather turned his face toward him for a kiss. Chaim frotted Red Feather's cleft with his cock. "I think we should love orally for now," Red Feather said, "but when we decide to fuck, I want you to be my top, just like this."
For Red Feather this was a moment of jouissance. The impulse was sudden, but not without forethought. Previously, he thought of himself as a confirmed top. He certainly was with me. Now he wanted to be like Drew. He wanted to experience the same satisfaction that Drew had with Göran-not just a one-time fuck, but a giving relationship. As for Chaim, well, the cognitive processing of Red Feather's message took time. To state it in the vernacular: he couldn't believe his ears. From boyhood he had been conditioned to defer to the wishes of others, not in matters of sex, in which he was virginal, but in all other things. Now here he was, on his first night of love with an awesome boyfriend who wanted him for who he was, and wanted to put him first. Lost in the ocean of Red Feather, he couldn't find words. He kissed Red Feather's shoulder, and in his own moment of jouissance, gave him a hickey that showed up later as an unmistakable mark of love from a boyfriend who had mounted his backside.
Not without an effort of the will, Red Feather resisted the temptation to invite Chaim into his love-canal: better to establish a romantic relationship first, Red Feather thought. He wanted Chaim to have something new to look forward to. "Are you all right with this?" Red Feather asked. Chaim was silent. Red Feather realized that he needed to be more explicit. "Is it OK with you if we wait until later for anal sex, but when we do, you'll be my top?"
"I think I'm gonna love you for a long, long time," Chaim said.
"Love will abide. Take things in stride," Red Feather said. He flipped and sidled into a 69 with Chaim. Their mutual fellatio alternated between loving exploration, and a passionate desire to fire a volcanic eruption in the other. They moaned in harmony when they filled one another's mouth with jizz. They shared a musky blend in passionate kisses while Chaim lay sprawled over Red Feather's body. Their cocks fought a sword-fight at first, but gradually melted into a common pool of lubricious penile emission.
Just after, in Red Feather's embrace, Chaim wept softly. He couldn't stop weeping. "No one has ever loved me before," Chaim whispered to Red Feather.
"Shhhh! Let's sleep now," Red Feather said. "It's time for sleep now." They didn't sleep long, and when they awoke, they found that they had other debts owed Nature, whose demands are not met without variety and physical exertion; but we've seen enough. For the rest of the night, give the college boys their privacy.
Chaim and Red Feather adopted Linda Ronstadt's "Long, Long Time" as their song, and played it often at the beginning of love-making. Their friendship deepened when Red Feather chose Chaim to be his companion to the Cleveland Orchestra (twice), and to the Playhouse to see Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding. For them it was like a double date with me and Mrs. Ravitch. Red Feather wished that he could be virginal for Chaim, but how could he change a history that had already passed? Even so, he thought philosophically, if it weren't for self- confidence, Jake Preston best gift to him, perhaps he and Chaim would never have found each other as lovers. Who could have foreseen the Ojibwe ritual of virgin-restoration, or the festive way in which he, Chaim, and Olaf gave up their cherries in a threesome?
These memories and thoughts came to Chaim as the time approached- and he knew it must-when he would reveal his gay identity to his parents. He wasn't worried about Mom. Maybe she already knew. Would Dad be terribly disappointed? He wondered. Benzion Haiam worked as a kosher butcher in a male-dominated working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where politics was liberal but religion was orthodox, and Chaim bore the burden of being their only child.
In the North Country, friends came and went as they pleased, usually unannounced, at my cabin, Ben Hasek's cabin, the farm, and the Wayward Island lodge. Sarah noted with interest that half of them were Ojibwe, and all were men, except for Mrs. Ravitch. "I guess you could say we're a clan," Sam Black Bear said when the Haiams encountered him during a hike in the woods near the Hasek cabin. He invited them in for coffee. They assumed that the cabin belonged to Sam, and were surprised when he introduced them to Ben Hasek, "the other Ben," as the cabin's owner. Notwithstanding their Jewish appearance and Benzion's and Chaim's yarmulkes, no one in the "clan" cracked jokes about Jews. Benzion noticed that. No one cracked jokes about gays, as was customary in blue-collar Brooklyn.
Next morning, Sam and Black Bear invited themselves to my cabin for breakfast with Red Feather and the Haiaim family. They had a reason. They invited the Haiams to the powwow on June 21, "our first Summer Solstice powwow," Sam Black Bear said. "Be sure to get there by ten," Ben Hasek said: "Otherwise you'll miss the wedding."
"Our wedding," Sam Black Bear explained.
"I didn't know gay marriage was legal in Minnesota," Benzion said. He tried to conceal is surprise.
"It's not," Sam Black Bear said. "But it's legal in the Ojibwe Nation. Dark Eagle and Jake Two Spirits found three historical precedents, so he and Billy White Cloud will perform an Ojibwe ceremony."
"Is there anyone in the Lake Country who isn't gay?" Mr. Haiam asked. He meant it as gentle humor. Chaim seized the moment.
"Dad," he said, "and Mom, you should know that Red Feather and I are just like Ben Hasek and Sam Black Bear. We've been lovers ever since we met at Oberlin."
Benzion looked shocked. He gave Chaim a stern look of paternal disapproval. He looked darkly at Red Feather. He started to speak, but Sarah Haiam interrupted: "Now, Ben, if it weren't for Red Feather Preston (she used his full name), it would have been someone else. Just be glad our son has found someone we can trust."
The tension died down. Chaim and Red Feather told the story of the Ojibwe Monument, which would make its first public appearance at the Summer Solstice powwow. They talked about how they went to the Cleveland Orchestra and Playhouse Square with Jake Preston and Mrs. Ravitch. They talked about how they met at Oberlin, omitting the romantic details. Benzion wondered if there was anything he could do about his son. "All you need to do is accept him, and support him, and be there for him," Sarah Haiam said.
The stock of wood for the fireplace was getting low. Even in June, a fire was needed against the morning chill. Red Feather invited Benzion to help him fetch wood. "Looks like I've been taken to the woodshed," Benzion joked. It was his first time alone with Red Feather.
"Mr. Haiaim," Red Feather said, "about me and your son.... Do you know the game of ice hockey?"
"Sure."
Red Feather: "Well, in ice hockey there's always a goalie, and the forward has to get through the goalie to shoot the puck into the goal. This is just between us, Mr. Haiam. When Chaim and I play hockey, Chaim plays forward and I'm the goalie. It's Chaim who gets all the scores. We've been that way from the beginning. Well, almost from the beginning: we had a long courtship. Please keep quiet about this. Chaim wouldn't like it that I told you."
Benzion couldn't hide his surprise. That such a shy boy, well.... Red Feather's outgoing masculine bearing led him to assume that Chaim played the submissive role. That troubled him much more than the thought of his son's gender-bending. He embraced Red Feather with an Iron-Man bear-hug. "Thanks for telling me," he said. When they returned to the cabin, each with an armful of firewood, Benzion seemed content with his gay son; proud of him, in fact. Every time he looked at Red Feather's backside in jeans (even straight guys could see that his figure was shapely), he gazed with the satisfaction that his son had conquered that ass, not the other way around. Sarah noticed the sudden change in his attitude, and wondered what Red Feather said to change his mind.
At Wayward Island Resort, Tom received a call from Tom Flack, who reserved all three cabins on the island for the third week of June. "Your resort was recommended by Drew Fox," he said. "He said we could be assured of privacy and discretion." Tom explained that the lodge and most of the cabins were on the mainland. The island cabins face the open water, and cannot be seen from the mainland. Flack is a fairly common name in the North Country, so it never occurred to Tom that "Tom Flack" was the Viking quarterback.
Terry Brown showed up at the lodge before Flack. With him in his car was Göran Svenson. Tom figured Terry for a sportsman who would want to go fishing, but Göran said they should take a canoe ride around Wayward Bay while they waited for Tom Flack and Drew. "There are three eagles' nests in trees in the island across from the open water," Göran said. "Let's check them out." Tom noted with interest that Terry deferred to Göran, whatever he wanted.
When Flack planned their one-week vacation, he intended to invite Henry Hasek, but Henry declined out of loyalty to Red Hawk. Besides, he didn't relish serving Flack as a constantly compliant bottom. Some guys might agree to that just to be seen with a star Viking quarterback, but Henry wasn't one of them. He suggested that Flack invite Drew-and arrangement that made it easier for Göran to spend the week with Terrry.
On the island, Flack shared a cabin with Drew. Their action together was erotic but not unexpected, as Drew was enthusiastic as a bottom. In island cabin number two, Terry expected the same compliance from Göran. He even bragged to Flack that he would make Göran his bitch. Göran had other ideas. When Terry groped Göran's ass, Göran groped back. He outmatched every attempt that Terry made to assert dominance as a top. Theirs was a romantic comedy.
"What are two tops supposed to do if they want to make love?" Terry asked when they got naked in bed.
"There's always oral sex," Göran replied, cagily.
"You know as well as I do, that's not enough," Terry said.
Göran: "Then one of us has to bottom."
"Thanks for offering," Terry said.
"Who said I'm playing bottom?" Göran protested. "I was volunteering you."
"I think the cutest ass should be bottom," Terry said. "That would be you. Or how 'bout this? The biggest dick should be top."
"I think the guy with the biggest foreskin should be top," Göran said.
"I don't have a foreskin," Terry protested.
"Maybe not, but I've got enough for two." Göran wrapped the end of his foreskin about Terry's glans for a bit of docking.
A dodgy look came over Terry. He decided to give it up. He didn't need to say it. Göran knew from his eyes. He flipped Terry on his back and took the lead in passionate fondling and cock-sucking. He mounted Terry's ass on a pillow and frog-legged him to display his purply-black portal. He rimmed Terry's ass. Terry fellated Göran's cock to throbbing hardness. When they were ready, Göran embraced Terry tenderly for a "bridegroom's kiss," a ritual that Terry had used on other guys in the past. It meant that penetration was about to take place, followed by phallic acts of conquest, reciprocated by unconditional surrender. Some gay men, when they're getting fucked, experience the sensation of a sudden fall into surrender, like sliding into sleep and then waking up with a start. For those who can feel it, the "slide into surrender" is habit-forming. This is not universally true, but it applied to Terry. All this and more was experienced by Terry, who found himself drawn into a world of sex upside down compared to his previous experience and self-image.
The Summer Solstice powwow began with Sam Black Bear's and Ben Hasek's wedding at 10:00 AM. The wedding was held in the upper floor of the barn which once had been used for storage of grain and hay. Behind the groom and the groom, the Ojibwe Monument stood covered with a ceremonial blanket, waiting to be unveiled. At the request of Mrs. Ravitch, the owner of the music store in Hibbing had donated an old but well-tuned piano. Red Feather and Chaim played piano and violin, a pleasant surprise for Benzion and Sarah Chaim, who quickly made friends with the Chippewa elders. The whole Wayward Island clan was there, and ARCH Triangle members, and Henry Hasek's hockey teammates, and friends from the Mission Church in Crane Lake. Drew Fox and Göran Svenson came with Tom Flack and Terry Brown in tow. Football fans recognized them at once, and word of their presence was whispered from person to person before they were formally welcomed.
That was my task, to make a start. I introduced myself as Jake Preston, "known to the Ojibwe as Two Spirits the junior Shaman." I acknowledged the groups represented, and extended a welcome to guests who had traveled a long way to be here: Benzion and Sarah Haiam from New York, Olaf Bjornsson all the way from Norway, and Tom Flack and Terry Brown, the Viking quarterback and forward. "Special thanks to our star musicians, too," I said, "Red Feather Preston at the piano, and Chaim Haiam playing violin."
Shaman Dark Eagle and Reverend Billy White Cloud took turns presiding over a ceremony that combined Ojibwe and Christian elements. The four Chippewa elders stood behind Dark Eagle. He began by declaring that this was the first legal gay wedding in Minnesota, held under the auspices of the Ojibwe Nation, whose civil laws took precedence as one of our country's First Nations. He rehearsed three historical cases of gay marriage in Ojibwe tradition, and displayed the birch-bark scrolls in which they were recorded. He related the miracle of Manitou, which revealed the Ojibwe Monument and appointed Summer Solstice as the date for the wedding and the powwow. "This wedding affirms Manitou's blessing on the union of Sam Black Bear and Ben Hasek Bluejay," he said. "It confirms the authority of Ojibwe law." Dark Eagle should have been a politician, I thought. If any Ojibwe had doubts about gay marriage, his declaration of Ojibwe independence gained their support.
Billy White Cloud read the well-known chapter about love, 1 Corinthians 13: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I make myself a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.... Love is longsuffering, and is kind; love does not envy; love does not vaunt itself with boasting; it is not puffed up.... Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails." In a prayer, Billy gave thanks for the Mission Church, which (he announced by this means) endorsed the marriage of its members, Sam Black Bear and Ben Hasek Bluejay.
Sam Black Bear and Ben Hasek Bluejay exchanged vows of loyalty, assisted by Dark Eagle and Billy White Cloud. Together they chanted an Ojibwe prayer to Manitou, the Great Spirit, the God of the Mission Church, too. Those who were able repeated each line of the chant. Steve Waabooz provided English translations.
After the ceremony, it was my task (as Dark Eagle's junior Shaman) to announce that the unveiling ceremony for the Ojibwe Monument would take place at 1:00 PM. I invited everyone to socialize, and greet the newlyweds, and examine the Ojibwe artifacts that we had on display in our makeshift museum. "Don't forget to visit the birch-bark wigwam in the barnyard," I said. I announced that Red Feather, Chaim, Olaf, and Red Hawk were available to lead folks on tours to the place on Rice River where the Ojibwe Monument had been found. People bought lunch at a concession stand manned by Mission Church congregants, and at a bakery concession, where Mrs. Helen White Dove sold dozens of pastries and pies.
By 1:00 PM, a large crowd had gathered in the barn-turned-museum. At Dark Eagle's signal I announced: "Would Red Feather Preston, Chaim Haiam, Olaf Bjornsson, and Red Hawk please come forward." They mounted the dais. "Chaim's and Red Hawk's parents should be here, too," I said. "Benzion and Sarah, and Peter Brave Heart, please come forward." When all were assembled, I said: "Our Shaman will tell us about the miracle of Manitou that revealed the Ojibwe Monument. Manitou revealed Himself to us through the work of these four young men. Before the Shaman speaks, let me tell you something about each of them." I started with Red Feather Preston, my son, and his adventures with Chaim, a fellow student at Oberlin College, and Olaf, the Norwegian student of bears. I ended by introducing Red Hawk, whom the Ojibwe Council had named as official photographer and historian of the Monument. Benzion Haiam's face beamed with pride at his son. So did the face of Peter Brave Heart.
Dark Eagle recounted the traditional tale of the Anishinaabe Trail. He told how the Ojibwe Monument was found below an old Norway pine, two and a half centuries old according to growth-lines in its trunk. "The Monument belongs to our Ojibwe ancestors from the time when they first arrived in the land of the Waabooz," he said. He recounted the peyote-ritual in which Manitou disclosed its location on Rice River, and the thunderstorm that Manitou sent to reveal it. "It was a miracle of Manitou, and a gift to the Ojibwe," he concluded.
With Red Feather and Chaim on one side, and Olaf and Red Hawk on the other, the youths removed the ceremonial blanket. People gasped and oooed and ahhhed at the sight. They had expected a stone with primitive markings. Instead they saw a granite stone, elaborately engraved with dozens of Ojibwe symbols. Some were familiar, but most were unknown. The wedding of Sam Black Bear and Ben Hasek Bluejay had been a historical moment at a personal level, but the unveiling of the Ojibwe Monument had national significance.
Red Hawk had prepared a sketch of the monument, trapped in its arboreal grave; it depicted Red Feather and Chaim clearing the engravings of sand and soil, while lightning flashed overhead and Olaf stood guard at the uprooted trunk of the Norway pine. Mrs. Ravitch transformed the sketch into an official poster for the Summer Solstice powwow. We sold dozens of copies on site, and several hundred on our website, to raise funds for the museum.
Some critics who were not in attendance at the powwow, and who never saw the Monument, declared that it was a fake, and that the "Manitou miracle" was a pagan publicity stunt to promote the interests of an impoverished (and therefore contemptible) Indian tribe, or, worse still, it was a fraud concocted to justify an illegal gay marriage. Red Hawk was not discouraged. Quite the opposite. The negative criticism inspired him to the assiduous study of Dark Eagle's birch-bark scrolls. Red Feather and Chaim joined him, guided by Mrs. Ravitch, their anonymous mentor. The boys announced, almost weekly, the discovery of a scroll-symbol that matched a symbol in the Monument. Gradually they built a dossier, as yet incomplete, that unlocked some of the Monument's secrets, while (incidentally) verifying its authenticity. They made plans to continue this study during future summer vacations. These were summer jobs. The Ojibwe Nation would pay them. In the following spring, National Geographic published an article about the Monument and its remarkable discovery, authored by Red Hawk, Red Feather Preston, and Chaim Haiam. The photos and sketches bore the signature of Red Hawk.
My story ends here. It goes without saying that in later months and years, adventure and romance continued to enrich the lives of the folks we've met in the North Country. Perhaps we'll meet them again at a later date, when they're all in college!