|
Totem pole: Sept. 11 gift to NYC A dozen teenagers, many on the verge of dropping out of high
school, were placed in an abandoned Fort Ord warehouse. They were given an
old log, mallets and chisels -- and handed a mission: Create a totem pole. The result is a masterpiece that will soon become one of the
first permanent Sept. 11 monuments in New York City. The 23-foot ``healing pole,'' carved with sweat and tears, will
in two weeks begin a cross-country truck trip to the Bronx Zoo. There, the
pole will be erected at a Sept. 5 ceremony near the city's only waterfall,
and no doubt it will be seen by millions of visitors each year. ``Speaking as your typical, fairly cynical New Yorker, I can't
tell you how much the city has been touched by the outpouring of love and
generosity after Sept. 11, and this gesture from these Monterey County kids
was especially sweet,'' said Alison Power of the Wildlife Conservation
Society, which runs the zoo. When the project began in the summer of 2000, nobody ever
dreamed the totem pole would end up in the Big Apple. The 6,000-pound pole is the remnant of a 200-foot yellow cedar
tree, born in the Alaskan wilderness 11 centuries before Alaska became a
state. The log was cut down in the early '20s and brought to California to
support a pier at Port Chicago near Concord, site of a World War II weapons
depot. An explosion that could be felt in Reno rocked Port Chicago in
July 1944, killing 320 Navy personnel, more than 200 of them black sailors
assigned to work in unsafe conditions to ship munitions. It was the largest
homeland disaster during the first and second world wars. The log sat in Suisun Bay for a half-century until a coalition
of environmental, indigenous and spiritual groups salvaged it and nine others
from the delta's muddy waters. The One Voice arts and leadership program, which works for
disadvantaged youths in Monterey County, found out about the logs and pledged
to turn one into a totem pole and give it to a community in need of healing. Two years ago, program officials hired Shane Eagleton, a master
carver of Polynesian heritage from New Zealand, to teach 12 youths earning
minimum wage how to wield the mallets and a dozen kinds of chisels. ``People were kind of timid with each other at first, but we all
worked together great, and the project turned out to be something
wonderful,'' said Jaymes Lambert, 18, who was a student at Seaside High at
the time. Lambert was one of three black students. Two were white, four
Latino and three Asian. All had one thing in common: little or no experience in art. But
Eagleton eased their fears of doing irreparable harm to the totem by assuring
them that he could fix little mistakes. He let them practice on driftwood.
And with a chain saw, he laid out the basic design -- a helix shaped like
DNA. The design drove home the fact that, regardless of race or
ethnicity, humans are 99.9 percent identical at the genetic level. ``The DNA
also symbolizes the connectivity of all animals and plants,'' Eagleton said,
``since all living cells contain it.'' He took the youths on field trips to Point Lobos and other
coastal sites, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and libraries to research marine
life and animals. They carved dolphins, coral, frogs, birds, starfish,
insects and kelp into the DNA pattern, which is surrounded by swirls
representing the movement of air, water, fire and earth. ``The pole was just a floating log,'' Lambert said, ``but we got
a hold of it and brought it back to life.'' Rudy Rosales, tribal chair of the Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen
Nation, came to bless the pole in a ceremony with abalone shells and burning
sage. After the seven-week project was over, the young artists talked
about where it should end up. Columbine High School? Oklahoma City? But after Sept. 11, ``its destination became painfully
obvious,'' said Joseph Werner, executive director of the Workforce Investment
Board, which oversees One Voice. Demetrious Huggins of Monterey, one of the youths who worked on
the log, said New York is the perfect place for the Alaska timber. ``We're on the West Coast and they're on the East Coast, but we
want the people of New York to know we feel the same pain,'' said Huggins,
19, who attended a recent ceremony at which Monterey County firefighters and
police officers had outlines of their hands etched into the pole. Quite simply, said Assemblyman Simon Salinas, D-Salinas, the
project ``shows how art can change lives.'' Huggins, who wants to study art in college, agreed. ``What we learned most from this healing pole was how all things
in nature are interconnected,'' Huggins said. ``And,'' alluding to Sept. 11,
``how one break in this connection diminishes us all.'' Contact Ken McLaughlin at kmclaughlin@sjmercury.com or
(831) 423-3115. |