Day: June 2, 2022

When I was about seven, we moved into the suburbs from an apartment in the city, and I was to begin at St. Michaels in the fall. I left everyone I knew and was surrounded by everyone I didn’t. I was an island no matter what Donne would say. I was shy, only child and never made friends easily. Faced with the opportunity to meet new kids, I would instinctively go the opposite direction. In my college years I heard Paul Simon sing that “a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.” That was the primary rule I operated on at seven, and even much later. In fact, I never really discounted that there was safety in solitude. The best feature of our new house was that it was across the street from the woods. Joy’s Woods, so named for the factory that owned it, became a playground for my overactive imagination. Looking back to that seventh summer, I knew the woods needed a better name, and the naming became my goal for the summer.

After bolting down my breakfast cereal, I’d dash across our street past the houses on the other side, down the dirt extension of Elmer Street that would someday be paved, and to the dirt of Jackson Street that formed the western border of the woods, in about 4 minutes flat; and I’d entered another world. I’d jog down Jackson to a faint track that had once led eastward to what was left of a small farmhouse. That road was the front door to the Woods, and it terminated in a stone foundation surrounded by rose bushes some long ago farmer had planted to brighten up his summers. We got a lot of rain in Indiana, so the roses continued to thrive without the help of man.

My days in the woods were solitary as far as people were concerned but I was seldom alone. It all started under the huge old Maple that I called the Library Tree because I would sit in a comfortable junction of limbs and read the books that I checked out from the public library. One day I notice a bird’s nest blown down by a storm with four eggs in it and I found it what seemed like a likely spot in the Maple that I could keep and eye on. The next day it was being tended by a pair of bright red cardinals. The male landed near me on a branch and chattered away seeming to acknowledge my assistance. Even after the brood had hatched, he continued to check on me daily as if he enjoyed my company. I don’t know what he called me in bird language, but I called him Horatio after one of my favorite fictional heroes.

Horatio must have told everyone he knew about me, because suddenly I began receiving regular visits from a squirrel named Simon, a cotton tailed rabbit named Harvey, and a beautiful female red fox named, of course, Lucy. One day, three older kids entered the Woods. I saw them from the Library Tree and got a chance to be a courier de bois, trailing a bunch of rival trackers. I made sure that I wasn’t seen and followed them to the south meadow before they wandered away again. I noticed Lucy had joined me, foxes are curious, and seemed to enjoy the game too. I read that the courier’s where the first white men to come to these parts to hunt and trap, and they got along well with Great Lakes tribes like the Chippewa, Ottawa, and the Pottawatomi who had several villages in the area around my town. In my mind, I was the friend of the Pottawatomi.

There were three meadows in the Woods separated by strips of forest and formed a rough u-shape of waving native clumps of grass. One surrounded the abandoned foundation and ran north and south, and I guessed it was the cleared fields of the folks who had planted the roses. The second ran at a rough right angle to the first from west to east and it could be seen from the Library Tree. I didn’t know who had wrestled it from the trees. Almost at parallel on the other side of the woods, the third meadow was a bit longer to the east and looked like it was a natural space. Around and between the meadows was the ancient hardwood forest with maples, oaks, beech, elms, hickories, sycamores, and tulip trees.

One afternoon, I was reading a Classics Comic of Treasure Island aloud to Horatio, who sat on the same branch and seemed to enjoy the sound of my voice. He cocked his red head to one side and seemed to be concentrating. We were about four rims from the ground. A rim was my chosen unit of vertical measurement in basketball crazy Indiana. Everybody could visualize ten feet. The sunny day began to change as a fog built up to the north and began creeping across the meadow toward the Library Tree. Horatio seemed on alert for some reason and anxiously stared at the fog bank. Suddenly a man walked out of the fog and pointed at me in the maple. He had long black hair and was dressed in dark deer skin trousers and loose long-sleeved shirt. From my height in the tree, he seemed small, but I couldn’t be sure. He motioned for me to come down, and I began the climb. If I had been older, I wouldn’t have been so quick to trust a stranger the middle of the woods; but seven is a trusting age and caution is often trumped by curiosity. Horatio suddenly found something else to attend to.

The fog continued to swirl into the trees as he waited for me to descend. I was facing him when I dropped from the lowest branch. He really was small, not more than up to my waist, with a dark weathered face and wild hair down to the middle of his back. I was startled, but something in his look convinced me not to be afraid. He motioned again and set off through trees toward the natural meadow. I followed and the mist seemed to go with us. He never spoke, and so far, I hadn’t either. When we reached the meadow he stopped, and the fog seemed to get denser. The little man clapped his hands and fog rose to reveal another older meadow. A clear stream flowed down the center of a village of perhaps forty shelters made of sticks and covered in bark. Several cooking fires burned, and perhaps forty people of varying ages were going about the business of life. They were dressed like the little man in deer skins and homespun clothes. As we watched they suddenly froze in place like a diorama in a museum. A tall man with graying hair was the only one moving; his hair was tied back, and three feathers were angled down from a knot of his hair on his neck. One was brown that I didn’t recognize but later found that it came from a Wild Turkey, the white one looked like an eagle’s, and the shiny black feather was a Raven’s. He looked straight at me and raised his hand in greeting. As the hand came down the fog closed in again and quickly vanished. The little man was gone, and the sun shown on the meadow I knew. I sat down on the dry grass I thought about what I had seen. I had some research to do tonight.

After supper I started with my second-hand set of the World Book which was missing Volume K. I had gotten adept at working around K. The first thing I looked up was Indian folklore involving little people. Almost all the tribes talked of them and seemed to regard them with a mixture of affection and caution. They had many different names, but the Algonquins who the Potawatomi were descended from, called them Pukwudgie. The word roughly means “little wild man of the woods”. They were generally friendly but were easily offended and had powerful magical abilities. You only saw a Pukwudgie when they wanted you to see them. This was all I needed to believe in them; a seven-year-old doesn’t doubt what he’s seen. I never did get to be a skeptic.

As for the Potawatomi, there had been a summer village near the lake called the Crescent Moon due to the shape of the pond it was beside. Living near the lake would be hard in the winter with the winds and storms coming down from the north, I couldn’t find any mention of a winter campsite, but I suppose it could be in the south meadow. I fell asleep dreaming of Pukwudgie’s and Pottawatomi’s and magic.

The next morning one of our famous summer rains began with the water falling so thickly that the other side of the street was hard to see. It rained furiously for three days like there was a continuous vertical canal between the Lake Michigan and the little city we lived in. I knew the animals in the woods would be laying low and I used the time to read every bit of info from the references and cross-references in the World Book minus K. One thing I found out that the Pottawatomi were in an old alliance with other Algonquin descended tribes the Chippewa and the Ottawa. The Pottawatomi were designated the keeper of the council fire. I assumed that a Pottawatomi village location was an important place because the council fire was important.

I was sitting on the front porch cursing the third day of rain, when our new neighbor Bill pulled into his driveway. He was a history professor at the Indiana-Purdue Extension out by the Toll Road. He came over and sat on the porch next to me and we commiserated about the weather. He and is wife had recently moved up from Terre Haute which means dry land. At seven I understood irony when I stumbled on it, even if I didn’t know the word yet. I decided to tell him about my theoretical village, and he said that he’d like to see the site. He didn’t have any morning classes the next day so we agreed to meet at 8:30 rain or shine so I could show him the woods.

The sun came up brightly the next day and steam was rising over the meadows as we walked through the wet grass. Through the steam I thought I saw a small figure, but I didn’t mention it to Bill who didn’t seem to notice. When we reached the third meadow, Bill stepped on a broken piece of pottery with part of a design on it. He took off his Purdue sweatshirt and wrapped the broken piece in it. Then, I noticed something shining in the grass. When I picked it up, Bill said it was a spearhead. In no more than twenty minutes, his sweatshirt held more that thirty “artifacts” as Bill called them. We turned toward home soon because Bill said he had several phone calls to make. The result of our brief expedition was that the rest of the summer and to almost Halloween, the woods had its very own archeological dig. The animals and I spied on them nearly every day until I had to start school at St. Michael’s after Labor Day.

I found out later that that part of the woods had been sold to a developer who planned to put up thirty “affordable” houses. The combined Indiana – Purdue dig eventually that the Pottawatomi had moved to that camp every winter from around 1680 to nearly 1750 when Indiana was the Northwest Territory. The archeologists covered up the excavations and left the land about like I first saw it that summer. They did build a small parking lot for about six cars and the intersection of Woodland and Coolspring. A short walking path led to the meadow where the state historical society placed an historical marker.

Winter Camp
This is the site of the winter camp of the
Pottawatomi Turtle Clan used from
1620 to 1750. The camp was discovered and
excavated by archeologists from Indiana
University in 1952 after being discovered
by James Lisak of Michigan City.

I’m James, by the way, and though I visited the woods several times before I grew up and left for college, I never saw the little wild man again. Some people still called the land Joy’s Woods, some called it the Winter Camp Woods, but I knew the real name was Puckwudgie’s Woods. Also, by the way, on the morning I got into my five-year-old Dodge Dart to drive down to Muncie and begin school, I was feeling the old seven-year-old blues about the sad fact that I didn’t know a soul at Ball State. I settled into the driver’s seat and caught site of something on the passenger: three feathers; a Raven, Wild Turkey, and an Eagle. I smiled all the way to Muncie.