Not really Sebright

One of the first tools that we bought as flute makers was an electronic tuner. We wanted our flutes to be concert tuned. That is, true to key, right on. In the early days we really thought we could tune each flute at seventy degrees and in another seventy-degree time or place the flute would play dead on key. We didn't have a full understanding of all the many elements that go into creating and sometimes eluding perfect pitch. Many of these elements seemed to involve something far beyond the reach of science, something closer to voodoo.
It remains a valiant goal, to provide customers with a G when a G is what they are after, but we have learned that when the flute leaves the ideal environment of our shop its pitch is somewhat out of our hands. Internal tuning is far more important to good music making than absolute pitch. If the intervals between notes are correct the flute will make good music. Ninety nine percent of our customers agree and for those who don't there is no help, because everyone's flutes suffer from the same vagaries of humidity, temperature and voodoo.
But that electronic tuner was a fascinating tool. Tom is an avid collector of data and an equally avid user of the data he collects. He likes to know temperatures and wind chill factors, inches of rain per hour, humidity. He likes to know how many cubic yards of concrete it took to build a dam, a bridge,. a tunnel. He always knows if the moon is waxing or waning, gibbous or otherwise, and the exact minute when the moon is full, not just full in appearance. He's brimming with information about light years, nebulae, …and other space stuff. His ability to explain far exceeds my ability to listen.  When solstice occurs he announces that we have just arrived at the down hill side of the year where the days are growing longer again; a time of joy for this family since three out of four of us have SAD (seasonal affect disorder). He's much quieter about equinox and the ensuing shorter days
So it was no surprise when Tom started checking the tuning of all kinds of things like the compressor in the shop, the whistle of the teakettle, the telephone, the refrigerator. Who would have guessed that the refrigerator hummed in the key of C, or that the telephone rang in F sharp? Who would have guessed? Who would have asked?  Then he moved on to the animals. Each one had his or her unique key or keys: Bella and Butch the cats, sweet old Jasper, the dog, Java the parrot, and finally the chickens, especially the roosters. Before I can get into that, though, I have to explain.
Our daughter Lily had joined 4H and had taken on a chicken project. She and her friend, Charity, had agreed to split an order of bantam show chicks from Stromberg's. If you're not a country person this last sentence probably doesn't make much sense. Stromberg's is a company that sells a great variety of handsome show-quality farm birds, and less pretty edible non-show birds. They have a wonderful online catalog with geese, game birds, peacocks, and more wildly exotic chickens than you'd ever believe. We discovered that one of the great deals they offered was a random assortment of bantam varieties, twenty-four mix- and- match chicks of both sexes at a bargain price. Lily and Charity got an order of these.
They were sent in the mail. Chicks can be shipped from one side of the country to the other provided it's done immediately after they're hatched. The Stromberg chicks, all twenty-four, were put into a heavy, well-ventilated cardboard box about one foot square. The darkness of the box kept them relaxed, and their closeness kept them warm, and being newly hatched chicks they didn't need to eat for several days, as they continue to digest the yolk. They arrived in good shape. The girls divided them up and set up housekeeping for their new birds.
Some of Lily's chicks were perfect and beautifully formed. Others appeared to have their wings on backwards, or to have feet coming directly out of their bodies, sans legs .We reflected that maybe we should have gone for the higher priced chickens As it turned out, though, all the chicks were well-formed. It was their exotic feathering that caused them to look weird, and in turn, it was their weird feathering that caused them to look exotic. Lil was good with her birds and they put on weight and grew mature plumage. We had frizzles, silkies, cochins, and one sebright. One day we heard an odd, strangled scream coming from the chicken pen. This was the sound of our first young rooster finding his adult voice. As it turned out most of our birds were roosters.
All roosters are competitive with each other. Bantam roosters go beyond simple competition. They're combative. We had housed the chickens in a covered pen to keep them safe from dogs, coyotes and raccoons, but it soon became clear that the greater danger was keeping them penned together. They were ripping at each other day and night and the main ripper was a beautiful young sebright, who after giving it almost no thought at all, we named Sebright, He was a beauty with complex black and white feathering, and he was a terror. All the birds fell victim to him at one time or another. After observing him in the chicken pen with the other birds we decided to let all the birds free-range.
As I said, most of the birds were roosters. This left the few little hens in the unenviable position of being much sought after—to put it euphemistically. Chicken sex is not pretty but it’s over quickly. For example, thirty seconds would be time enough for the entire honeymoon and the act itself. The hens flocked together for protection and often hid under the playhouse using the out of sight out of mind theory. The roosters roosted on anything high---the top of the playhouse, the fence, or low tree branches. Sebright demanded the highest of the high places. If another rooster attempted to roost higher than Sebright, Sebright would force him down and assume the new site. If Sebright had been the size he imagined himself to be he would have been about the size of a rottweiler
As I said before Tom had measured the voices of all of our pets. He then wondered, curiously, if these tones could be reproduced on the flute. In fact they could be but the animals didn’t recognize their voices as played by the Native American flute. Tom would play in a hopeful way thinking he was fording the gulf between animal and human speech, but the dog and the cats slept right through it, not even twitching an ear to indicate that they had heard anything, let alone something that spoke to them on a deep, interspecies level. The parrot, Java, loved hearing Tom play his parrot song, but Java was game for anything aural .If Tom had been saying blada, blada, blada the bird would have been just as interested. So Java too failed to grasp the enormity of what was happening.
Failing to rouse our pets was a small disappointment, but Tom carried on.
 He found that our young roosters primarily crowed a four- note song, and with the aid of the tuner he learned those four notes. He practiced them on the flute, and though it didn’t sound “chicken”, technology told us he was at least on key. One day between flute dips Tom wandered out into the back yard where the roosters were roosting on high things despite the obvious discomfort of sitting in the hot summer sun. Tom found Sebright on the peak of the playhouse, and knowing that he was the chicken tsar went directly to him and played the rooster song. All the other young roosters looked startled and nervous. Sebright had a different reaction. He lunged at Tom . He pecked his way down Tom’s body until he reached Tom’s ankles where he went for blood. Tom tried to  leave the scene but Sebright followed. He pecked with the frenzy of a cuckolded husband. . Tom struggled to stay upright (and to his credit never once used the flute to hit the bird) . If Tom had fallen… oh the humanity, oh the humanity.
Tom made it to the shop, shaken but wiser, and closed the door on the bird. We assume Sebright went back to the playhouse roof but we can’t be sure since Tom spent the rest of the afternoon in the shop “dipping flutes.” .He came into the house later, after dark, when the chickens had roosted for the night. The next morning with the whole Sebright incident behind him Tom went out to the newspaper box to get the paper. On his way back a furious mass of black and white came hurdling out from under a huckleberry bush and started in on the ankle again. In Sebright’s mind the insult of the flute was not forgotten. Tom had to use the paper to fight him off.
And so it went. Sebright never forgot, never forgave, and never missed a chance to charge Tom. Tom got used to being savagely charged by a four-pound feather- ball of black and white fury. For him it became a regular part of going into the back yard. He got so he could have a conversation with someone while Sebright hurdled himself repeatedly against his ankles. What exactly Tom said to him with the flute that day we will never know. All we know is that it spoke to him on a deep hormonal level and it left a bold imprint on his little chicken psyche.
Lily entered him and the other chickens in the county fair that summer. That was the point of the 4H project. There we learned that Sebright was a sorry example of a sebright, this bird we thought was so fine looking. He had a number of technical flaws that only a trained eye cold see. So not only was he a totally nasty bird, he was a disgrace to the breed. There was the fact of his memory though. It was outstanding. After the fair he and most of the other birds went to live with a woman in Olympia, Washington. And so our chicken ranching days came to an end, though not entirely. We kept a beautiful little Old English BB Red hen named Indiana, found her a BB Red mate whom Lily named Elvis and together they had several families of BB Red chicks. Later we bought the two of them a large white duck, Huey, as a sidekick…but that’s another story.
Copyright © Erika Stewart , 2005

 

One of the nicest things that happens to us as flute makers is that through our website and email we develop friendships with people all over the US and the rest of the world. One of these friendships involved a man from Alabama named Jim Dees. Along with other correspondences Jim would sometimes favor us with personal poems, especially ones that spoke of Jim's love of the natural world. But the poetry wasn't always his own. Sometimes he would send the works of well-known poets from the present or the past.
 
One day I opened our email to discover that Jim had sent us a poem by Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush". Years before when I had first read this poem I experienced that thrill you sometimes have when you realize that your mind is in perfect sync with another mind, when you know that you have shared a subtle but profound thought  with another person. I had known this thrush who could sing joy into a barren landscape, who could lend me courage.  I immediately wrote Jim to tell him that out of the huge universe of poetry, he had found the one poem that I held dearest.

I guess it might have just been a pleasant coincidence that Jim and I liked this poem, but Jim had another idea .He thought that the Darkling Thrush should be a flute. I'll let Jim explain:

"Thinking back to where I was then (mentally and physically), I had just returned to school after
a 13 year detour through mundania. During this time I was also reconnecting with my native heritage - getting reacquainted with my cousins on the reservation, taking language classes, etc., and had just been gifted with my first flute. Having finally realized that working long hours so I could buy lots of stuff hadn't made me happy, I was determined to share this epiphany
with as many as possible. Environmentalism and community service had become passions of mine, and I was working on a thesis titled, " Cultivating the Paradigm Shift: Selling Deep
Ecology in a Consumer Society". Some of my favorite faculty and dearest friends were comparing me to Don Quixote and suggesting my cause was hopeless, which is why I became
enamored with The Darkling Thrush. And it was just about this time that real hopelessness struck.

I emailed the poem to Erika and other friends on September 11, 2001, while the news was still unfolding. I knew from our history that the US government would almost certainly respond with massive violence leading to even more civilian casualties. I saw our near-term future descending into cycles of bombings and air strikes like you see played out in Palestine on a daily basis. Like the poem says, their seemed no cause for hope "afar or nigh around".

When Erika emailed back that she, too, felt a deep connection to the poem, I knew immediately what was called for. Clearly, some soul-flinging was in order. I told Erika that she was now the only person I trusted to coordinate the manifestation of Darkling Thrush as a flute. This flute would become my answer to those who said we would never learn to live in peace, with each other or with nature. Now when a cause seems hopeless, and it's tempting to just give up, I take out Darkling Thrush and play."

Tom would make the flute and I would decide upon the species of thrush, this darkling thrush, and then Matt would carve it and I would paint it. As it turned out our daughter, Lily also got involved. In fact, she had a considerable role in the flute's creation. She provided the wood.

Having lived all of her life on Phillips Lake, Lily was a water baby. The summer that she was 14 she started a diving project that involved organizing her friends and family--Matt's son, Patrick and daughter, Alexis in a competition to bring up branches from the lake bottom. Every afternoon, as the kids swam, the dock would become increasingly cluttered with piles of branches. Every morning I'd haul branches up to the firepit. One day I looked out the window and saw Lily struggling with a huge branch, perhaps 10 feel long. I called Tom and he went down to the dock and helped her pull it out of the water. Tom noted that it was fat enough around, about 4" inches in diameter, for flute making. We thought at first it might be madrona, a smooth-grained, pale wood, but later Tom recognized it as Pacific Yew one of our favorite woods. Because Jim was and is an avid ecologist using some form of recycled wood was a goal. Using Lily's lake bottom log seemed ideal.

From time to time while the wood cured I would do bird research. Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and lived in Dorset so what kind of a thrush might he have had in mind for the darkling thrush? I really never came up with anything that seemed to fit. I would find gray thrushes that weren't singers, or gray singers who didn't live in England. Finally I decided that the bird's song was the motivating force behind the poem and so I chose that beautiful singer, the wood thrush.

When Tom finally cut into the Darkling Thrush log he discovered that it had an unusual green cast to it. Somehow this seemed just right for someone who promoted ecological greenness. Our son, Matt, and I discussed the aged, frail and blast beruffled bird of the poem and wondered if maybe Hardy wasn't using poetic license there because neither of us could remember ever seeing a bird that looked old, or distinctly frail. Wild birds pretty much look great up to the moment they die. We could make him a singer though. Matt carved a beautifully proportioned bird with his beak wide open in song. I painted him and then gave the flute a wood thrush tie in shades of cream and brown like the bird. Darkling Thrush was born.

I recently asked Jim to supply me with a list of events that the DT had participated in. I knew that bird had been busy, but was amazed to get this list, which were only the events Jim could remember off the top of his head.

*Temple Mound in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta
*Fund-raisers for the Sierra Club, Mobile Bay
Watch, Earth Day, and other eco-gatherings in and
around Mobile, AL
*Southern Environmental Center in Birmingham, AL
*Jackson Square in New Orleans (I played street
musician for a day)
*Coffee Shops around the Mobile area as a member
of 'Karamawen' - "world music with a tribal edge,
spiced with the spoken word"
*Ft. Benning in Columbus, GA, as part of the
annual protest against the School of the Americas
(school of assassins)
*Boynton Canyon in Arizona
*Peace Rallies and Demonstrations in and around
Olympia leading up to and since the Iraq War
*Permaculture workshop in Lost Valley, just
outside of Eugene OR, conducted by Starhawk
(peace and environmental activist, author of
"Fifth Sacred Thing")
*Multiple performances at Burning Man, 2003 & 2004
*Vancouver Island, while beach-combing
*K-12 schools and daycare centers in Alabama and
Washington, while visiting and speaking on
environmental issues
*Capitol Theater in Olympia, WA, by request,
while introducing David Rovics (fundraiser for
the Green Party of South Puget Sound)
*All along the trails and lake-sides throughout
Wenatchee National Forest in the Cascades, while
working as a Wilderness Ranger in Summer '03
*In the mountains of Santa Fe National Forest in
northern New Mexico, while leading a conservation
crew of volunteer high-school students in Summer '04
*Pyramid Lake
*Crater Lake
*Procession of the Species, 2003 & 2004


Jim lives in Olympia, Washington now and is in his second years of graduate studies in environmental science at The Evergreen State College. He had this to say about his and the thrush's mission. "Darkling Thrush has been a special companion for me, an inspiration and focus I try to share whenever it seems appropriate. Just his name reminds me of the poem and its message, and that is something we all need right now- hope in the face of hopelessness."
 

There is an interesting post script to this story. The Procession of the Species  is a wonderful yearly community event in Olympia, where participants design costumes to represent something from the natural world. One year there was a snail that left a glimmering path and last year a dance troop dressed and danced as a field of flowers. In the 2004 Jim was a tree.   Near the end of the parade route he dropped the Darkling Thrush flute and it was crushed into many pieces. The bird itself was okay, but the flute was a mess.

 When Tom talked to Jim on the phone about it he was hopeful that it could be fixed. However, when Tom saw it he thought it was beyond repair and so it was decided that we would wait for another special piece of wood to come our way and we would build Jim another Darkling Thrush.

One month or maybe two, later Lily was in the office one evening using the computer when she saw the many pieces of the broken flute. She started fitting them together and before long had all the pieces in place. She showed Tom who then put a dowel inside the flute and started gluing. When the glue dried Tom filled, sanded, and refinished the flute and the DT rose to fly once more. He's out there, right now, spreading his hope.
Copyright©2005 Erika Stewart
 

What is a flute Circle?

A flute circle is a group of people who meet regularly to share flute fun. Circles are for players at any level from beginner to virtuoso.

 Maybe you need help with flute technique, or maybe you just want to share the fun of group playing.  There are many reason to belong to a flute circle.
 If you'd like to join in check the locator below which takes you to the web site of the International Native American Flute Association (INAFA) to see if there's a group near you.  If not, maybe you should start one... 
 

Flute Circle Locator
http://www.inafa.org