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Jack has been the janitor at the school in Oracle, Arizona for almost 30 years.
He walks over to have a word with me while I paint the soccer field. The spray paint
machine squirts out straight lines as I measure out a series of geometric shapes,
squares, circles, and rectangles. I kick a small stone from my path and realize quickly
that it is a piece of American Indian pottery.
I show the pottery shard to Jack the janitor but he is unimpressed. I remember, he
says, back when Alice Hubbard Carpenter used to find that stuff all over town.
Someday, he says, somebody like Alice will dig up this old soccer field and decide
that all these lines are items of religious and geometric significance like the Nazcal
lines or the star alignments at Stonehenge in England.
We both chuckle over that one as I continue to carefully measure straight lines and
paint the soccer field.
Only later do I discover that the Indigenous Peoples of this region used to play a
game descended from the same game that the brothers play in the Mayan underworld in the
creation story told in the ancient text the Popol Vuh. A descendent of the same game the
Aztec were playing when Cortez arrived on Mexican shores, the skulls of the losers piled
high outside the stadium.
I learn all this from a book written by Alice Hubbard Carpenter, Oracle Alice, and
it also tells me that our soccer field, Home of the Oracle Mountain Vista Cougars was
probably an ancient site of a Hohokam village which also probably included a ball court.
It would have been a playing field similar to our present day soccer field where the
People gathered to cheer their team on and place wagers of turquoise, macaw feathers,
seashell jewelry, and copper bells with members of an opposing village. Oracle Alice
once found a human figurine made of clay whose skull was designed to hold a headdress of
brightly colored feathers. She named him The Feather Prince.
Inspired by Oracle Alice’s archeological finds, my wife, daughter and I headed out
in the family automobile to search for a village which Alice Hubbard Carpenter describes
as being, alongside the old wagon road to Casa Grande, a place where the boulders are
adorned with petroglyphs. Near as I can figure by the maps, the village should be
somewhere near Big Chief Butte. We risk my automobile’s front end on the dusty, washboard
road searching in vain for the village. We had hoped to discover our very own Feather Prince
sacred figurine.
Sadly, we fail to discover the village near Big Chief Butte, but we do find an old mine and
in the process, frighten a mama bobcat and her fierce, teddy bear-cute kitten from an
abandoned shack. We walk around and discover some baby vultures whose ugly naked heads are
adorned with down. Inside the old dark mineshaft we find two barn owls looking back at us
with heart shaped faces and piles of pyrite crystals (fool’s gold) on the ground inside
the entrance.
We load back into the car and head home, dusty, disheartened and too tired to cook
dinner. We order a pizza and become couch potatoes in front of the television. We sink deeper
into the couch as daughter Samantha chooses a nature program an episode about the life of
Audubon, the great bird illustrator. Inspired, she retrieves her crayons to create her own
drawings of the creatures we see while out on family adventures. As time passes, I notice
that she begins to do better in science at the Oracle school, especially the natural
sciences.
Even if we never did find any pottery on our trip to Big Chief Butte, I suppose
that I owe Alice Hubbard Carpenter a debt of thanks, because you will never find any
treasure if you don’t look, and if you do look you are bound to find something of worth.
Samantha , our own little Feather Princess gets out her crayons and bird books again,
drawing diligently.
By Gary EveryOracle, AZ
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