Arrowheads and magic Eyes or How to Grow Up to Be What You Want to Be

I wasn’t very good at spotting arrowheads. I lived at the lake with my parents. Each winter the water would recede in preparation for spring rains. The power company had decided that it was better to open the dam and let the next lake down the chain deal with spring flooding.  In front of our house a large shoal would reveal itself. It reached out from the shore at the top corner of the cove and extended straight out a good 200 yards. Muddy, red clay covered in gravel sized rocks.

A neighbor three doors down had a huge collection of arrowheads that the water would churn up from the sticky mud each year. He said that they were really easy to spot. They just stood out.

So sporting rubber pull-over-your-shoes snow boots I made my away along the shoreline to the mucky red sandbar (or claybar, in reality. But that doesn’t sound quite right). Spluck, spluck, splucking my way to the plethora of arrowheads and Native American artifacts waiting to be discovered by me.  This was going to be great. Newspapers would be calling.  The elders of the Catawba tribe would probably want to shake my hand and personally thank me for recovering long lost spiritual relics. I’d be an honorary medicine man!

I was a hundred yards out into the stretch of mud when I stopped and took a good look around. My neighbor had said “they just stand out”. I scanned the thousands of arrowhead sized clay coated rocks. Nothing stood out.  I must not have been at the good spot yet.  I looked across the water back toward my house.  My neighbor must have spotted me because he was making his way out to join me. I kept moving.  I had to beat him to the treasure.  He already had about a million.

Another fifty yards. Nothing.  Feeling like Yukon Cornelius, I squatted down to get a closer look. Red gravel. That’s what I saw.  My competitor was gaining on me.  He had real hiking boots.  It seemed like an unfair advantage.  I stood up and started out again, only my boot stayed where I had been squatting. Stuck. Next, I planted the bootless foot straight down into the soppy, sinky sludge. Now my tennis shoe along with the foot in it were stuck as well. Ugh. And here he comes. Practically gliding over the stickiness in his fancy hiking boots!

“Hey”, He said. “Found anything?”  I was half standing/half squatting and stuck in my tracks. Literally. He popped my rubber boot out of the mud and held his hand out for me. He pulled me back to full standing position and handed my boot back to me. “You should get some hiking boots”, he told me. Ha! Exactly.

And right then and right there, he said,” What did I tell you? They just stand out”. Without moving a step, he bent down and picked up a perfectly shaped arrowhead. “Yeh”, I said. “I was just about to pick that one up."  He smiled and held it out to me.  I took it and looked at it. 

It's beautiful. It's really old.

And someone a long time ago had carefully crafted it. Had used it to hunt. To feed his family.

I took off the other boot and started following my new best buddy around.  Every few feet he stopped and picked something up.  Sometimes it was nothing. Sometimes it was a broken piece of pottery. Sometimes it was an arrowhead.  Some perfect like mine.  Some with broken tips. Some worn smooth from the water lapping over them for a couple hundred years. But in every case, before he leaned down to pick them up, they still looked like clay covered gravel to me. He had magic eyes, I decided.  Nothing “stood out”.  He kept saying it over and over. He said, “I told you”, he was giddy now. “It’s only your first time out here and you spotted one right away.” He glanced down at the beauty in my hand.

I thought about Indians. American Indians. I thought about how I had admired them as far back as I  could remember. 

As a kindergartner, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “An Indian.” This used to send my brother into fits of laughter.  I didn’t get what was so funny. Indians are noble.  Indians use strong words like honor. Indians tear up on TV when they see all the garbage left lying around by white people. 

Indians tell the truth.

Could my friend with the magic eyes see the guilt I was feeling?  I started to say that…

“Hey” he interrupted. “I think we are in the middle of a good spot. Look around you.  They just stand out.” He guided me with his eyes.  I followed his gaze and Bing!  It just stood out. An arrowhead.  I grabbed it up and examined it.  He looked at it over my shoulder, going on about how cool it is and how easy it is to spot them. It is cool. Not as perfect as the first one that was actually his find, but I had found this one. Sort of.

We kept looking. He found a few more. I found a couple of pieces of broken pottery. I didn't find any more arrowheads. I had two in my pocket. I really couldn't claim either one of them as true finds of my own.  But I did. I took them home with me and never looked back.

I showed them to people over the years always telling them that I had found them. I kept them in a box of special stuff. A polished rock that seems to magically stay frigid cold to the touch, a piece of petrified wood someone gave me. I showed these things to my own children and told them how I had found them. Magic Eyes never got credit.

Right in that same box with the arrowheads is a square tile of wood.  Back when I would say I wanted to be an Indian when I grew up, an older kid down the street had listened.  When he was away at camp he painted this wooden tile for me. The painting was of a noble looking Native American Chief in full headdress. On the back my name had been inscribed with a wood-burning tool. I treasured it. But I had not lived up to it.

So now I am saying to the world that my friend had magic eyes. He could spot beautiful ancient tools in the midst of a vast red field of gravel. I had no such talent. I’m coming clean.  I’m making an attempt at nobility and honor.

I want to still have a chance to grow up to be an Indian.