On a windy Thursday we took a sort-of field trip to Angel Mounds State Historic with our grandson Cash to see what the one hundred plus acres might reveal. We call these nature outings, “Watcha-walks” because when we are out in nature someone’s always asking, “Watcha find?”
In the wide-open spaces surrounding the ancient Indian mounds, Cash kicks up his heels and sprints, letting out pent-up energy from a day in the classroom. He is a kid who wants to please his teachers, and that pressure can translate to a head of steam when he runs. Snack in hand, he races me along a higher mowed pathway that border the mushy ground and patches of dark green bulrush. He is leaving his knowledge from school in the dust – not trying to write on the lines anymore.
We crossed a long metal bridge over a wetland area and he disappeared to look for tadpoles down by the bank, and I heard him talking to himself about their legs popping out and webbed toes. Immersing his hand in the deep puddles of cold water, he watches the minnows rush back and forth, some stopping to nibble, but most are nervous and flit away. He watched them for a long minute and a few pass through his fingers without fear. A vain attempt to grab one and his Nike shoe slides down the slippery bank and leaves an oddly familiar commercial swoosh in the sludge. Now he was just a kid with a pair of mud-caked shoes, not a kid being fashionable. He’s been baptized by mud now, those deep-red remnants of southern Indiana clay and silt too, built up from the Ohio River that flooded these lowlands for a thousand years. In its heyday, this farmland sustained up to a thousand Mississippian Indians, Mound Indians, who farmed the enriched soil, then mysteriously vanished.
I looked down at Cash from my post on the bridge and thought I saw a hologram of another boy next to him on the bank, crouched and making swirls in the water with a stick. Maybe it was a Shawnee or Hopewell, poking fun of Cash when he slipped, like we did as kids when a friend did something foolish. It was only an outline of a boy, though, and faded into the background of the camel-colored fields. I walked down to give my grandson a hand up the steep bank. I think he knew it was time for one of grandpa’s Ted-talks.
“See these little mountains here in the dirt?” I point to a scattering of yellow clay chimneys. Like awkward pinch pots from a first graders, they are the work of crayfish, or crawdads, that sometimes burrow down as far as three feet and methodically haul up mud to build their narrow, fragile stacks.
“Oh yea, I know what those are. Those are holes for snakes,” Cash answers, “and they’ll eat you alive. We better run!” He is seven now, the age where everything turns to a monster attack, usually from Planet Eyeball.
“Hold up,” I say, “they aren’t snake holes. They are made by crabs. Each of these stacks is where a crawdad lives,” I tell him. In the summer, when the water is warmer, he and I will return and I’ll tackle my trust issues by sticking my arm down the hole and bring one up for Cash to see. Crawdads have a mean pinch, not enough to draw blood, but pack enough pain to let you know they aren’t happy about being drug out of their home. Cash will want to hold it – he is curious, and fearless with animals, the result of feeling giraffe’s tongues at the zoo and corralling flies to his Venus fly traps at home. We may have a field biologist in our family future.
If Cash doesn’t mind the pinch, his research might bring him back to this same spot in the future with a camera and a clipboard, where he will record data about a crab’s behavior. There’s not much known about fresh water “mudbugs,” as crawdads are sometimes referred to. In a hundred years, the crawdads may be the only ones left farming here, if we humans are not more careful; now they are part of the substrata ecology – burrowing, mounding and adding to the most fertile farmland, according to some farmers, in the entire Midwest.
In college, I took a break from studying some weekends to backpack off campus, illegally camping in a forest, Spangler Park, some twenty miles outside of town. At the time I had a dog, an Irish Setter, which meant I had to live off campus, but my camping excursions afforded my dog the chance to run like a wild Banshee through the woods, sometimes all night long if I let him. Even in the middle of the night, his nose was working overtime, scaring doves out of their comfy roosts, and stirring up the deer who had settled for the night in their hovels. During the day, my friend Jim and I hunted in the creeks for crayfish, boiled and ate them, but they were sandy and tasted too much like farm runoff. I don’t mind trying new kinds of food, but crayfish, even when we boiled them, still had the aftertaste of cow manure, and after the first few, we said no thank you.
Among the rocky creeks where we waded, my dog hunted the crawdads too, and like a typical setter, struck a perfect point – feathered tail sticking straight back like an iron rod, one foot up and the characteristic focused stare. The crawdads then used its defensive tail swipe that propelled it backwards. Fooled, my dog would snap at the water to catch one, but the crawdad darted undetected, the other way, under his legs, and then let the current carry it away. “There it is!” I’d yell, but humans are the only creature that can follow a pointing finger to a target. My dog certainly couldn’t and stood looking at my finger as if it were a treat. Meanwhile, the crawdad was backing itself into a hidden crevice, claws ready to snatch up a passing water bug.
Back on campus, another buddy of mine had a pet hermit crab as a pet he kept under a light on his desk. If someone found a dead fly or roach, they’d take a study break and stop by Bill’s room to entice the creepy looking crab to come out of its shell and eat. I think Bill talked to the crab late at night when everyone else on the hallway had gone to bed, when long hours of studying for law school had smudged his glasses and the words in the thick textbooks began to blur together. Two hermits they were, one human and one a crustacean, both living under the same desk light, both detaching themselves in the isolation of dark and quiet all-nighters. Occasionally, Bill would come out of his room and stand in the hallway to smoke, flicking the ashes into his own hand, then retreat again into his intellectual man-shell.
Cash and I have graduated from the squishy pond bank and he climbs up to meet me. With very little rain this Spring, we can head out across the more solid earth to one of the Indian mounds jutting up out of nowhere, like a grass volcano. At its heyday, when a thousand Indians farmed here in community, they might have escaped to the top of the mounds as the Ohio crept forward or gone up to perform a ritual dance. No one is really sure. Or, they may have run up to the top just for the view, like us.
Most of us separate that sort of spiritual climbing from our other needs, the one where we eat, sleep, work and commune with one another. But the line between nature and spirit wasn’t so blurred here for the Indians because survival was closely tied to the next rainfall or flood, or the appearance of a deer. Nature, being ever-present, was the god of these Mound Indians. It provided some solace perhaps, that their lives would be filled with what the earth and the sky and the lakes would send them next.
“Let’s race,” Cash yells, and takes off through a wide swath of Spring grass. I keep up with him for a while, but I’ve done this race before and winning isn’t that fun for me now, not like it is for him, and he easily outdistances me. There are thorny brambles and stubborn shrubs that can rip through your skin and leave you with hundreds of tiny scratches, so we pick our way up carefully, a hundred feet up, to the top of the mound and look far out to patches of forest casting their late day shadows our way. We are hoping to see a deer come out for dinner, but if there is one there, it is hiding on the edge, between the tree pillars as it feeds on the soft new shoots of tender field grass.
When I look out there across the expanses, I see history, but Cash only sees the present. To him, this is just another playground, a place to imagine a make-believe war. My backpack is filled with findings of our Watcha-walk, the rocks and sticks he plans to use if we are suddenly under attack. He’ll lay them out on the kitchen table for his brother to see when he gets home, and to repeat the Ted-talk to his dad and mom, the one he seemed so bored with, about what lies at these ancient Indian mounds.
He will spread everything out on the kitchen table, the dirt clods and the leaf skeletons he found, and have a story to tell about each one. He will describe them to his parents as different kinds of weapons, and to a seven-year-old, anything can become an imaginary weapon. Then dinner will be served and placed down between the objects he found, and Cash will mention that while he was on top of the tallest mound, he could squint and see a sliver of the Ohio River drifting by, and that he got to the top of the mound first and saw everything out there before anyone else did. He’ll tell them he saw the ancient Indians coming out of the forest and that they waved at him from a distance and one of the children left him a secret letter with his name on it.
“It’s a great view up there, Mom,” Cash said with delight, “Really it is.” And looking back now at my time with him, I’d have to agree.