Todd Gipstein

Indy

Today I picked up a rock that looked like an arrowhead

(out of habit I'm always looking)

but it was just a piece of stone

that if worked had been rejected.

When my son was young (but past the age of needing

the occasional lift on the shoulders) we would hike the hills

in search of artifacts and poke around the "Indian caves."

He became "Indy, boy archeologist;" and

I earned the title "bogus archeologist;"

because by then he had studied enough to know woodland tribes

never lived in rock shelters, even as I estimated 3 feet of time-soil

lay over the ashes of a campfire built as the glaciers passed to the west

and remained sure the spring too handy and the cave too protected

not to invite habitation to wanderers in a strange land.

So now that his spirit inhabits the same space

time continuum as the first nation people's ancestors

I would like to ask him to settle the argument.

Was I right to feel their presence under the bluff?

Or now his with the red tail's cry?

I do know a young "Indiana Jones" is with me

every time I bend to hold the past in my hand.

By Phil Specht on Mar 28, 2012