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By Sheila Orysiek
 SAN DIEGO—It was early spring when several family groups of people turned their backs to the sea and began walking eastward on their annual trek to the mountains. They crossed the coastal plain and entered the wide waist of a long valley. Women carried all of the household goods plus infants on their backs, while the small children walked beside their mothers. The men held their weapons and tools. They also brought with them gifts from the sea; shells and dried fish which they would use for themselves as well as for trading with people from the other side of the mountains.
Late spring found the people in the foothills that gradually piled higher and higher into massive granite mountains capped eternally by ice. Above them towered saw-toothed peaks that ripped into the blue sky as they walked beside rivers, swollen, clear and swift with the melting snow; the water plunged through yawning valleys. Along their path they gathered early berries, dug bulbs from the still cold earth and filled their baskets with acorns which was the staple of their diet.
By early summer the group was in its usual yearly campground in the mountain pine forests among the giant red trees. Even there higher peaks towered above them. On the ground the snow was mostly gone except for pockets in the shadows and clefts of rock. The days were pleasant with sunshine and the nights cool.
The people spent much of their time sitting on a huge flat granite shelf of rock; it was a very rib of which the continent was formed. The sun shone warmly upon them as they worked at their chores. Men shaped flint, which they had traded from the inland peoples, into arrowheads and other tools and made arrow shafts, straightened them and affixed feathers and points. Women tended to the children and made baskets. Some of these baskets were water tight and others were used for cooking by dropping in heated rocks with the food. Another group of women pounded the acorns into meal with small pestles in the rock face. In time, after generations of grinding the acorns, deep depressions were formed into the granite itself. Then the acorn meal was washed repeatedly to leach out the poisonous tannins.
A few women climbed down the sloping face of the rock and waded into a small stream that wound its way along the bottom. They chose long reeds and brought them back in bundles to where the others were working. Very carefully they peeled off the flexible bark into long strips. Then as one woman held two strips between her teeth a second woman stood in front of her and twisted one strand about another making it into strong pliable string. It was made sturdy with saliva. This string gave the people a means of carrying things, tying up their belongings and setting snares.
A breeze whispered through the surrounding pine trees, blue jays argued as they flew by and a woodpecker pounded out his story on a tree trunk. The voices of the people blended together as they gossiped and laughed while small children tottered about. Life was good in this idyllic climate and place; food was close to hand. They easily supplemented their fruit and nut diet with small animals they trapped and hunted. Through the centuries, even when the giant trees were young, the people had come here to this forest in the mountains.
For about thirty years my husband and I had made an almost yearly trip to Sequoia National Park. At that time I was deeply involved with teaching ballet, rehearsals and performing. I looked forward eagerly to spending a week or two in the giant forest, reading my books as I sat on a log or just watching a tree grow.
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In the early 1980’s the U. S. Forest Service had a wonderful program of hiring school teachers and college professors to work during the summer in the park as Ranger Naturalists, presenting different programs and lectures. A geology professor might take a group of visitors hiking in a glacial valley, or a botanist would take us for the walk around a meadow. I always signed up for all these activities and one year it included a demonstration on Indian Crafts.
The teacher was an extremely good looking young man who told us he was of Indian descent. He took a group of about twenty for a short walk out onto a huge outcropping of flat granite and showed us the bowl shaped depressions in the rock face explaining how the Indian women had ground acorns into meal. The men in the group were given flint and the teacher demonstrated how to shape it into arrow heads. Then he took some of the women down to the base of the rock where we plucked tall reeds from a stream bed.
We sat down on the warm rock surface and began the task of peeling back the pliant skin from the reed stems. As one of us held two strands in her teeth another twisted the stems. Being novices at this task it took us quite a while and a great deal of concentration. When we were finished we indeed had a strong pliable string.
We were totally focused on our task. The gentle sun bathed us as we sat together cross legged in groups. The breeze was soft and we heard it sing sweetly through the trees; the same trees that had watched other women long ago at the same work. We were so totally engrossed that we lost all sense of time and only when the slant of the sun and a cooling of the air attracted our attention did we suddenly realize how the afternoon had fled. Four hours had gone by, no one had consulted a wrist watch - in fact we forgot we had such a contrivance.
If at that moment we had been asked where we lived or what our telephone numbers were, few would have been able to answer readily. It was like being jarred awake from a wonderful dream. We had leapfrogged backward over the centuries.
Most of us had never experienced being a part of a human community in such a way, engrossed in producing something and needing each other to complete a task. Our modern society places so much value and attention on the individual and the privacy of that individual, that working as a group, so completely dependent upon one another without the awareness of the passage of time, was a novel experience.
As I slowly walked back to my cabin, I found my mind reeling, almost unable, and certainly unwilling to come back to my time, my century. I actually felt a sense of loss; the sense of human community had been so strong and delightful. Now I was back both protected and isolated within the walls of privacy modern society erects; property boundaries, fences, telephone answering machines, avoidance of eye contact, fearing to intrude on another’s space and time - and always the need to consult a clock. I felt that I had truly touched and been one, if for only a short time, with the String Makers.
So it must have been for the Tribes of Israel in their travels, needing one another to complete the tasks of living and religious observance; incomplete except as a group, standing together at the base of Sinai. Judaism has always espoused the need for mitzvah as a group, the necessity for living cooperatively within the human family - not alone in an individual wilderness.
I’ve kept my wonderful Indian string, and it reminds me of mountains, rushing streams, a warm shelf of rock and the time warp I shared with total strangers, who became fellow time travelers.
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