LETTERS FROM HOME: PUTTING THE WORLD BACK IN BALANCE

May 12, 1994

Dear David,

About 12 years ago, I went to a place a few hours north of here -- Happy Camp -- to write about a ceremony the Karok Indians perform "to put the world back in balance." A section of the Klamath River is closed to the public for a couple weeks, and members of the tribe come there to live as their ancestors had, they believe, since time began.

In particular, I had come to see the White Deerskin Dance, a ritual seldom seen because the skins are old, irreplaceable heirlooms passed down through many generations. The Karok believe albino deer, so rare, have special powers and that anyone who sees one will have a charmed life. Only one of the people I talked to had ever seen a white deer in the flesh, so to speak.

I wasn't the only non-Native American there, but every one of us had to have permission from the medicine man. He was an unsmiling, ponytailed, middle-aged man who, people said, had done time for shooting a man. When I asked questions about the ceremony, he tried to explain what was about to happen, but in the end just said, "You'll see. You'll see."

He fished for salmon in the traditional way, using a tool made of two long poles with a basket on the end. He balanced a pole on each shoulder, and stood on rocks above places salmon were likely to rest on the way upstream, then plunged the basket down and up in one motion. Once when the basket broke the surface, a 20-pound fish was inside.

The White Deerskin Dance began long after sunset. Five or six elders standing and softly singing in a dimly lit area opposite the blazing fire simply began painting each other's faces and placing the white skins on their backs, the heads atop their own. Slowly, in a way that seemed haphazard, they gravitated toward the fire, finally forming a line.

Some of the men played drums, and some blew on whistles made from egret legs. It all seemed disjointed and confusing at first, and there was no one to explain what was happening. But as they continued, my impatience for it to make sense gradually was replaced by the experience itself. As the dancers moved in time and the drumming and whistles intensified, explanations became pointless.

Some kind of spell was being created, one that was hoisting the hair on my neck. Primal, bone vibrating, sulferous, electrical, nothing-else-matters soul frequency. (Years later in an auditorium on the other side of the country, listening to Coleman Hawkins and Pat Metheny churn up whirlwinds of sound, I unexpectedly had the same experience.) I was trying to take pictures and notes, but couldn't separate myself enough to do it.

And just as the drumming and whistling and dancing reached an ecstatic pitch, they suddenly stopped. At that moment I looked over my left shoulder toward the fire. There in the breathless new silence a beautiful woman in a buckskin dress stood alone, her arms reaching toward the sky.

Later in my sleeping bag, the sound of swooping bats above me, I did not wonder at the significance. Only wondered.

The next morning, the women fed us salmon and fry bread cooked on heated river rocks. One of the most savored meals of my life. Driving back to "civilization," it somehow did feel as if something had been righted -- my own sense of what spirituality is. Aliveness.

So it was Saturday morning that DC and I were on our way to San Francisco for a baseball game, and I had closed my eyes for a few minutes to meditate on the wondrousness of most everything in the front end of this sentence when DC verbally nudged me awake to look at some yellow lupine growing on the hills to our left. I looked but very nearly groaned and was about to return to my reverie when we both saw the young white deer standing just off the right shoulder of the highway as we sped by.

Love, Sam