Arrowheads

Arrowheads
Originally uploaded by FreeManWalking

Green in vast expanses is a sheet
stretched across my memory
of hills and bottomland
filled with tobacco
sprung from dirt
holding onto Indian rocks
waiting to reveal
the ages of the world
to the curiosity of
a young hand

On a rather glorious day in mid-May I was walking with my dog at Bakers Grove in Tennessee’s Long Hunter State Park. A soggy three weeks of rain and cool temperatures had left the world muddy but clean washed and the hillsides were as deep of a green as I can ever remember seeing them. Everywhere life was fresh and emerging, easing into summer. I was on a walk to photograph wildflowers but the prettiest and most interesting of these were already a month past bloom. I did find Indian pinks and wild sedum along with some nearly impossible to identify mushrooms.
I have walked this trail many times in the past two and half years since returning to middle Tennessee. It’s a good trail that skirts Percy Priest Lake and rambles four and a half miles, just far enough for a good walk without having to make a day of it though there would be far worse places to spend an entire day. It is on this trail that I have had many conversations with myself about what to do with my life: “should I go back in the Navy”, “should I quit this job”, “did I make the right move quitting that job”, and the always troubling, “I wonder what she’s doing now…”. It’s a trail I choose in part because I can let Maze Dog, my Australian shepherd/Lab mix, run off the leash while I loose myself in thought.
On one of my early hikes at Bakers Grove while enjoying the yellows and oranges of the hickories and sugar maples of the first autumn since my return to Tennessee, I was walking along a muddy stretch of the trail when I happened to look down and saw a shiny bit of flint. I stepped over it then immediately wheeled around and dug it out of the ground with my pocket knife. It was an arrowhead, right there in the middle of the trail. It had been stepped on and stepped over thousands of times. It was in bad shape. The back end was broken off but with its triangular shape, chipped beveled edges and flanged corners there was no doubting what it was. It called to mind another time when I’d been walking in the woods, wondering what path to take.
Back in 1998 I was working a job I rather detested on a loading dock for the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. One day I was out at the Gordon House on the Natchez Trace, once again looking for wildflowers, when I looked down and saw a shiny piece of flint partly sticking out of the mud of the trail. It was a well formed arrowhead with only the least bit of the tip chipped off. At that time I was struggling (if I can call making a decision that) with the notion of quitting the “good” job with Saturn in order to go to school at Mississippi State and work on a Ph.D. in botany. I agonized over the decision for about another week, then I got fired. I went to work in the garden center of a large home improvement store and went on to study some journalism at an in-state university then headed off to sea for nearly seven years. (Condensed biography).
Above are partial retellings of a story anybody who has read much by me is now familiar with. So now it is many years later in May on a day with the most beautiful blue skies and my dog is running around through the woods chasing squirrels and eating frogs. Once again I am struggling with personal issues, specifically, should I quit my job at this upscale little nursery where I work and buy a lawn mower and just cut grass in small yards and do some landscape design and container plantings for the rest of the summer? You see, in the fall I will be moving to Murfreesboro to start that Master’s in biology that I have put off for so long. I will be starting my own landscaping company while I’m there and I will be leaving the nursery where I have spent the past year. But I do like the steady paycheck and 45-50 hours a week and decent wage I make at the nursery…et cetera. So I’m rather torn up with the whole situation (along with the headache from two too many beers the night before). Thus delving into myself for answers I asked God for a sign. What did I get?
I look down and there it is. Here we go again. Lying on the rock in just a bit of mud is a broken arrowhead. Keep in mind I’m not out looking for arrowheads. If I was going to do that I’d find a ploughed field in a river bottom. In Tennessee you’ll find arrowheads all day long in such places. But no. I’m walking through the forest, occasionally looking down at where I step over uneven terrain.
What does it mean? I don’t know. I do know that there is a thrill in picking up something a human being made and that no one else has touched for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. I sent up a quick prayer to the Creator hoping that this projectile had brought food to whoever had shot it. If in fact the arrowhead is, let’s say, five thousand years old I can only imagine how alien our world today would be to the person whose hands had crafted this Stone Age implement. There is no way a person picking up my spent shotgun shell’s plastic casing five thousand years from now could live in a world more different from the present than our world is from that indigenous hunter’s so many years ago.

Arrowhead,
Tucked between two remote controls (pieces of plastic that control my evenings and some peoples’ lives) you look so out of place:
Chipped flint, cutting edges with a rounded heart. Relic of the earth when man was a child of the dirt and trees and running water.
Were you a product of war or a missed chance at communal meat?
Our meat is wrapped in plastic, our wars fought from pushed buttons.
Despite the smooth edges and erogonomic design the wars are more terrible and the lives of our food animals so much more brutal than your sharp edges could ever be.

I continued my walk. I had little epiphanies throughout the day like maybe I should start a line of outdoor apparel or maybe I should buy a $20 scratch off ticket and try to win some start up money playing the lottery. At any rate I’m pretty sure I’m receiving signs from “on high” but short of a burning bush saying “Do this”, I don’t have any real answers.