Recently, on an unusually cool winter day as I strolled down a tourist street in old Tombstone Arizona, I was struck by a wooden Indian in front of a cigar shop that looked so lifelike that I was infected with an irresistible urge to touch him. (Well, actually he looked curiously more like an Eskimo, but--) Notwithstanding or rather nevertheless, the temptation to yield to my curiosity was held in check only by a hand written sign hanging about his neck which read, "DO NOT TOUCH."
When I yielded to the temptation, spontaneously reaching out my poor wretched cookie-jar educated hand, the thing whacked me over the head with its tomahawk.
Lying there upon a gurney having been noticeably impressed by this fluke of nature, I was made to leave the Eskimo temporarily to get my head wrapped and bandaged to keep the injured parts together. Several weeks later, I returned to the shop and offered twenty dollars for the wooden thing fully intending to use it as firewood that evening. After the owner took my cash I took the wicked thing home, set it in a corner of my study, stoked up the fire and, reclining in my easy chair with my chin cupped in my hand, studied the monstrosity as it stood in the gloom beside the hearth and tried to discover the simplest means to reduce it to ashes.
To my astonishment the new environment had an effect upon the timber figure that exposed and overwhelmed my haughtiness with giddiness and an escalating sense of horror--as the artifact then began to creak and moan deep within its wooden core until suddenly, as if in answer to my involuntary shriek, its eyelids and jaw fell open and I found myself confronted by glowing amber eyes and a gaping oral cavity that displayed a lewdly twisted yet apparently serviceable tongue--and then it, or rather he, began to speak, claiming he was three hundred and ten years old, that he was the last descendent of a tribe of Indians that once lived beside Lake Tahoe and, that that famous lake was, in fact, named after him.
After the shock of seeing and hearing a piece of wood speak yielded to my higher capacity of reason and I found myself able to answer, I told the thing I wasn't particularly impressed with its babbling since I'd heard the "last Mohican" sob-story plagiarized under many strange and self-serving guises before, and had long determined that by whatever means available I would nip any new myth in the bud, if for no other reason than to save our politically correct world from the outrageous demands of yet another proverbial cry-baby. I must admit that for one devious moment I toyed with the idea of following through with my original plan, but then it occurred to me that the Eskimo's wooden flesh, or whatever petrified stuff he was made of, did in fact appear to be at least three hundred years old, and so, reluctantly, I abandoned my common sense and gave him my ear.
Buried deep within the pages of the book The Innocence Abroad, Mark Twain stated that Tahoe means Grasshopper-soup in some American Natives' tongue; but, if I recall correctly, he didn't offer a source to verify his claim nor did he offer a fair opinion as to why that lake had been named so barbarically. The wooden Indian, however, if one is to believe his story, provided an answer, being, as he claimed, the only witness with the insider's knowledge sufficient to obviate Mr. Clemens' prejudicial assumptions made against the Native American tradition employed in appropriating such a name.
This new perspective rekindled my interest and I soon found myself captivated as the Indian expounded upon two peoples that once flourished beside the lake. He described one as being a settled but once nomadic Native American colony and the other as a settling European pilgrimage--both having isolated themselves from the world in the western wilderness. According to the Indian (and I still believe he resembled an Eskimo more than his claimed western-counterpart) the Europeans arrived at the lake near the end of the seventeenth century just two decades after the Native colony had settled there--being just one year before he was born.
Continuing, the Indian changed his tone to grief, and described how the civilizations destroyed one another after assimilation first produced great wealth but later rapidly decayed with the advent of politics, greed and war. Admittedly the Eskimo's demand for sympathy and continual insistence upon gravitating toward the morose was irritating. He ended his tale overflowing with tears and sobbing hiccoughs, causing me to reflect upon current-Hollywood's overabundant holocaust inflections into just about every media theme, suggesting an agenda of deliberate pretense and manipulation. As for me at the time and perhaps for the reader at present, this overused unrequited grief-epitome attacked my sensibilities like a mosquito singing about my ear, as do all unabashed demands for victim-status. Morbid themes may captivate Hollywood moguls, unassimilated Jews and perhaps some graying hippies, but I find no release in rehearsing tragedy in this present world of overabundant unrequited tragedies. If there yet be a pool of grief, I reasoned, let the tears rest at the feet of this Tahoe fellow and all other obscure and ghostly types that demand victim status with no further public ado.
In dispelling Tahoe's legend, let it suffice to add that the Eskimo claimed that after the firestorm consumed the colonies the contemporaneous elders of all familiar tribes convened upon the matter and concluded that the ruins presented a curse upon the earth, and had every remaining artifact that possessed the propensity to produce curiosity-of-origin purged from the world stage forever. All the relics were thereafter gathered and hauled off a hundred miles to the south, and there sunk, and lost, deep in the murky waters of Lake Mono--(and, I might add) now are resurfacing here and there as indefinable tufa-abstracts anticipating future myths.
Lastly, as a most unfortunate turn to the end of this tale; telling this legend turned out to be the last voluntary thing Tahoe would ever do. After his discourse he closed his eyes and mouth while apparently yielding to a form of heart wrenching grief far beyond the capabilities of the common fraud, and returned to a state of rigidity about which I could find no further use for him; and so, overwhelmed with an overflow of tears and hiccoughing sobs of my own, I took him out to the garden and stood him up among the cabbages to scare the vermin away; and there he stands to this day
