Pipestone National Monument Week 2

I carried on with researching and preparing my programs for the summer this week and I arrived at a solution for my guided walk. It speaks well of the training I got as an SCA intern as to the interpretive process model, a way of organizing a program in a technical manner. While I resisted the model at first, I have grown to depend on it for deciding what things stay, what things go, and how to approach certain topics. Some say, when it comes to interpreting, "Either you have it, or you don't," and, while true, the process model is a good way of assessing whether your "it" is working as well as it should.

I searched for a way to make the traditional elements of the pipe relevant to an audience that would have no idea what a pipe means in a physical and spiritual sense, as well as the quarrying process. While family traditions centered on holidays might be a good approximation, they may not be universal, and as soon as one approaches religion it becomes very dangerous ground. So I thought of baseball. Without giving it away, baseball as an American tradition approaches the sort of significance pipemaking has for its culture, but pipes take on an additional spiritual dimension that baseball cannot.

The birds have been busy. The robin nest next to the waterfall that I showed video of last week has remained successful. The two chicks now are feathery and getting pretty big. One of them sat up in the nest and stretched its wings while I was watching it, causing a scolding from the adult robin in the tree that was watching me.

I only took my camera into the park one day this week, so I regret not having more to show.

I got an unusually close-up look at one of the clay-colored sparrows.

Clay-colored sparrow

A gray catbird sings every morning as I walk out to check the river gauge. They have a complex and interesting song.

A common yellowthroat foraging along the creek. Once I learned the call, I realized they are always there, but difficult to spot unless I stay put long enough for one to emerge. They sound like they're saying "What'choo want? What'choo want? What'choo want?"

Poison ivy

My cell phone only works in select parts of town, but I discovered that the new Casey Jones State Trail on the east side of town was a hotspot. I can walk about half a mile one direction before it cuts out. Another place it works if I don't move around much is at a park on the west side of town, where the baseball fields are. I saw part of a little league baseball game as I was patrolling for the specific spot I could stand where my phone would work. Having played catcher through high school, my impulse to coach was too strong and I had to leave after the ball hit the backstop for the twelfth time.

The final mystery for the week was that people reported seeing a little, brown animal in the park. One of the maintenance guys swore it had a ringed tail, suggesting a raccoon, but he said it was not a raccoon. Another lady came in an hour later and saw something brown she couldn't identify. I work at the desk a lot of the time with the law enforcement ranger who is there permanently and our general assumption was that it was a woodchuck. I went out to look for it, but could not find it. Of course, that was when the stories about "little people," or "chichis" came out. I guess, like gnomes, they steal things and cause general chaos. One of the guys who does craft work in the visitor center used to work maintenance and apparently heard weird noises when he was cleaning alone at night. Just for fun, I thought I'd ask around whether people had heard of the "chichis," and they said, with a straight face, "Oh yeah, they're real!"

In other news, it snowed in Dickinson, ND over the weekend.