Humming Bird and Hawk.

I heard a bird and I ventured outside, down the steps then up past the small lemon tree now bare of fruit and then more steps up to the small patio and the love seat. I looked up and I saw a hawk, swooping and reeling in the blue sky. 

I’d heard the name many times, Miguel Gavilan Molina, The Hawk, it was his radio signature at KPFA where we first met and where he worked as a producer on a daily public affairs program. He was deeply imbedded in the American Indian Movement and farm worker’s rights. His father had worked in the fields and taken young Miguel with him. He was Chicano; part Mexican, part Native American and had the high cheekbones and gravitas of Anthony Quinn and his skin was creased and tanned because he loved to work in his garden.

Miguel Molina, “the Hawk” took me under his wing when I arrived in California and here he was flying high above the Eucalyptus trees  and the pines over the red tiled roofs in the Oakland Hills and San Francisco Bay off in the mist. 

I remember a few weeks after I arrived at KPFA, Miguel came to my office for a sit-down. He wanted to take my measure. He closed the door, turned and sat and said in his quiet basso voice: 

“Andrew, I want to invite you to our Sunrise Ceremony, its on Alcatraz, you know, the old prison and it will be my honor to be your guide”.

Alcatraz is a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay famous as an inescapable prison. “The Rock”.

Every year the International Treaty Council organizes the Sunrise Ceremony, honoring indigenous resistance, cultural heritage and the 1969 occupation of the island by the American Indian Movement. AT the time “Radio Free Alcatraz” broadcast from The Rock and John Trudell who was a shining light, an artist, an activist, a political prisoner, was behind the mic. 

I awoke well before dawn on the day of the ceremony and took a cab to Pier 33 on the waterfront. It was dark and the wind whipped off the Bay and you could see the drizzle in the street lights and people were gathering now, shadows in the dark, warm clothes and muffled conversations and feathers and masks, costumes and drums and primal colors in the dark and the cold.

And then we were on the ferry bound for Alcatraz, crowded together, huddled and excited and I smelt incense and men were gathering around the drum circle and the ferry engine thumped beneath our feet and you could smell diesel and the sea. And soon Alcatraz emerged in the misty rain and the lighthouse high on the cliff flashed a warning and the island came into view. 

As we slowed and approached, another ferry sailed past returning for more passengers and the ferry business was good that day because thousands  attended from San Francisco and the Bay, Indians from the Americas, Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Lacondos from the forests of Chiapas came to Alcatraz to celebrate, dance, drumming around the fire and to pray.

And as the sun rose and cast golden light across the Bay, it lit the dark corners of the prison building now abandoned and only the ghosts remain.

And every year Miguel organized the KPFA outside broadcast and I was excited and honored to participate that drizzly dawn on Alcatraz. I felt to proud that day, to be manager of KPFA, a radio station that would broadcast this event and honor the ancestors. A-ho.

__________ 

A week ago I visited Gavilan at his home near Sebastopol on the way to the Sonoma Valley and the Russian River going inland. By then I had the small Mercedes Benz 190, an old white classic, the smallest four-door they made, with  sun roof and black leather bucket seats and it drove flat and stable on the long curves through the bare yellow Californian hills that summer. 

When I arrived Gavilan  told me to park in the shade because the sun was beating down and the dust shimmered and he opened his arms and embraced me and I felt his broad flat hands and  his voice vibrating in my chest as he pulled me close. Then he beckoned to a place where two stones sat insinuating comfortable contemplation and we sat opposite one another under a big Eucalyptus tree.

“Andrew, let me tell you something” and he touched my arm and looked down into the dust. “I remember the day my father and I first saw hope. Here we were a hundred or more farm workers bent over working in the hot sun and one of the workers cries out and points to a hill in the distance”.

Gavilan points his finger into the distance. 

“Rising dust and a line of trucks coming towards us. And now closer, flags now, red flag flapping in the wind and the dust and the men in the fields shouting in fear: 

‘Communismo, Communismo’.

“And the they shrank back and were silent now, leaning on their tools, their heads low and their narrow eyes suspicious  as the trucks drew closer. And now the trucks pulled up in clouds of dust, one behind the other and the workers shrunk back further. And Gaviln shrunk back and hunched his shoulders to make himself smaller. 

“And then a loudspeaker started and it told us we didn’t have to be afraid and we didn’t have to work like this and they were young students and farmers like us, with bandanas and caps and red flags with a black eagle like a Mayan temple in the center, flying.

“And Andrew, a man stepped forward on the back of the truck and it was Cesar Chavez. And the farm workers seemed to get bigger and stronger and they rose from their hoes and shovels and their heads were high and their shoulders were back and I’d never seen that before that day.” 

__________

I am psychologically ready to leave California, leave KPFA and start a new chapter. I was on the cusp. I was at Hecates Gate, another crossroads in the journey. I was walking through my own dream and felt spirits inside me and around me and I looked at Miguel and I loved him, his spirit, his pain, his overcoming and coming-through and how he’d adopted me, embraced me, initiated me into his life and his secrets.

 

The sun heals me, the warm Oakland sun outback at Casa Barbara where I sit to smoke. The humming birds visit sometimes and hover right infront of me then dart off to spear a nearby blossom. 

And sometimes crows caws cut the air and a hawk visited once with a message from Miguel. It waited looking at me a long time and then flew away, over my head and Miguel’s spirit was nearby. 

Miguel take me outside and says: 

“face the sun” and he lights sage and says a prayer to the rising sun and then passes the sage to me:

“Here Andrew,” and he passes me the burning sage and the sickly sweet fragrance and the smoke rise blue in the early light. 

“Andrew,” and he looked up at the new sky. 

“My teacher died last week.”

And now he looked at me and he said his teacher had been hospitalized and told his wife to reduce his oxygen and he crossed over. Miguel has tears in his eyes as he shared the story. 

Miguel is now an elder. He is connected. He’s a bridge between the Chicano Nation and the farmers and domestic workers. The brown revolution; American Indian, Chicano, Mexican, Inca, Aztec. Cultural. Political. Inevidable. A-ho.

And somewhere mixed in all that, KPFA, Pacifica Radio and the man who started and nurtured the idea of listener sponsored, free-speech, non-commercial radio, Lew Hill.