Travels in a Stone Canoe: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers - Hardcover

Chapter 1

"Harvey, I've met this Indian...."

Nothing has been the same for me since those simple words were spoken. My life's real work had abruptly and inexorably begun, and I was merely annoyed.

Looking back now, nearly two decades later, I try to reconstruct how it all began, how it came about that we -- two unlikely white journalists -- became runners stumbling between two worlds, spirit-journeyers on the path of the Wisdomkeepers. Events that seemed isolated and utterly unconnected at the time I now see as parts of an emerging whole. What's more, the whole itself keeps changing, as do we. The ever-shifting parts dissolve and reform, metamorphosing in and out of each other as in a dream.

The pieces of memory come floating back at me.

There was Steve Wall, who got me into all of this, and there was Two Trees, who envisioned this spirit-journey in the first place and who remains a dark and unsettling enigma to this day. There was the Maestro's mystic condor in Peru, and there was Frank Fools Crow's miraculous eagle at Wounded Knee. There was Leon Shenandoah, who taught us there was a path, and Mathew King, who taught us there was a set of instructions for following that path. "Original Instructions for being human," he called them. There was the eagle's feather and the owl's claw -- the signs that Two Trees predicted we would receive and which assumed a special metaphoric power for us as they propelled us onto the path. And then there was me, yanked out of the ordinary and flung into it all despite myself, protesting and complaining all the way.

I remember that pale gray morning in late November 1981. A light snow was falling at an angle past my seventh-floor window at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was at my desk writing an article for the magazine about the return of the Sinai Peninsula from the Israelis to the Egyptians ("Eternal Sinai," April 1982). Just six weeks earlier I had stood some twenty-five yards from Anwar Sadat at the moment of his assassination during a military parade in a sports stadium outside Cairo -- not quite the usual stuff for a National Geographic staff writer and, since my article wouldn't be published for many months, hardly a major news scoop. But I was properly shaken by the incident, seeing some special if indefinable personal providence at having been present at that vortex of history. I remember, moments after the first shooting began, standing there poised on the stadium tarmac, frozen more in amazement than fear, caught with arms akimbo in the crossfire between Sadat's fleeing assassins and the security police, bodies falling all around me. As I stood there a young dark-skinned Egyptian man in army fatigues, probably no more than seventeen or eighteen, ran wildly past me, his doelike eyes wide with fright; he was followed by half a dozen screaming security police in their blue uniforms and white helmets. Perhaps thirty seconds later they carried him back past me like a sack of potatoes, pummeling his limp form with fists and truncheons. I managed a few frames with my camera before being pushed into a crowd of journalists by police. "No pictures! No pictures!" they screamed. I remember most vividly the tumbled wooden chairs, thousands of them, which had been flung aside by the terrified crowd as it tried to escape the shooting, and the astonishing redness of the blood spreading out from under the bodies strewn around me on the tarmac. I distinctly recall asking myself, "What in God's name am I doing here?" and, all the while, thinking of my wife, Lorraine, and our children back in Washington. Though she hadn't told me for fear of upsetting me, weeks before Lorraine had had a kind of dream or presentiment about my being surrounded by blood. She follows the way of Subud, based on the Latihan, a spiritual exercise of surrender to God, and for weeks before Sadat's assassination she had the inward experience of there being a shooting, with blood everywhere and me in the midst of it. When she'd received that blood vision repeatedly during her Latihan, she feared the worst but knew I couldn't opt out of a major magazine assignment on the basis of a dream or presentiment; nor would I have. She even secretly packed a bag so that she would be ready to fly out to Egypt in an emergency. When she watched TV that day, October 6, 1981, and heard the first news of Sadat's assassination -- she knew I'd be seeing him that day -- she was actually relieved; she instantly realized it was Sadat's blood she had seen in her Latihan, not mine. I don't know why she didn't think it was my blood, too, which it might well have been, but she simply knew it wasn't, she said -- which I confirmed to her by phone from Egypt a few hours later.

Now, months later, back out of the vortex of history and safely ensconced in the secure confines of my office, I was trying to reduce the complex elements of that event to a few paragraphs of crisp, factual, unemotional copy for the magazine when the telephone rang and my new life began.

The voice on the phone was Steve Wall's. He was calling from the Appalachian wilds of northeast Georgia, where he was at work on a freelance contract for the magazine photographing a story ("Wild Water, Proud People," April 1983) on the Chattooga River, the wild-watered river of the movie Deliverance. Steve and I had worked together briefly a couple of years earlier on an article about Vietnamese boat people who had migrated to the Gulf Coast. He had a pleasantly blasphemous manner about him and was one hell of a photographer. He also had a way with ideas and a mulishly stubborn habit of seeing them through to the end, come what may. The article on Vietnamese boat people had been his idea; he'd been given a speculative go-ahead or "flyer" by the magazine, then found that the elusive refugees he'd hoped to photograph at Empire, Louisiana, had fled white persecution to Biloxi, Mississippi. For weeks he hung out on the Biloxi fishing docks, where the Vietnamese fishermen congregated, getting to know them, winning their friendship and trust, and sending back to Geographic a trove of remarkable photographs -- rich, warm, intensely personal, and human -- that demanded publication. I was assigned the writing end of the article, which appeared in the September 1981 issue as "Troubled Odyssey of Vietnamese Fishermen." Steve and I had gone our separate ways on different assignments after that but had taken something of a liking to each other and had spoken of getting another magazine assignment together if the opportunity arose.

His voice on the phone was, as usual, excited. Steve doesn't chitchat. He expounds. He discourses. He overflows with passions and wild enthusiasms. In that mellifluous North Carolina accent of his -- "You're the one with the accent!" he has told me many a time -- he announced, "Harvey, I've met this Indian."

I could hardly have been more dismissive. "Really?" I asked him. "You've met an Indian? So...?"

Steve continued, unruffled at my tone: "He's a medicine man, a Cherokee named Two Trees. An incredible character. Told me he knew I was coming to see him before I got here. Said he'd been expecting me."

"Oh, sure..."

"Now listen to this, Harvey. There's something very special about this guy. He has this idea. I think it'd make a terrific story for Geographic. He says he's had a vision about a journey to what he calls the Grandfathers -- the greatest medicine men and spiritual leaders of the seven great Indian nations. He says it's a kind of mission, a journey of penance. He calls it a 'spirit-journey.' He wants us to go with him -- "

"Us?"

"Yeah...you and me! You didn't think I'd forget you, did you, partner?"

Something within me groaned.

Steve went on: "He wants me to go with him and photograph the whole thi