Kate Wolf And The Red-Tail Hawk Memorial Tale--

I don’t have anything to add to the “honor thy soldier” dedicated posts criss-crossing the internet today, except to say, soldiers aren’t necessary when people behave- which, unfortunately, isn’t always.

But I do have a Memorial Tale that involves music and wine and a Red-Tailed Hawk, a good beer and an even better bird.

The Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival started in a family owned vineyard by a man named Cloud and one of the vineyard family. It started small, and it started dusty, all on an old, rickety hippy stage that got special attention from me, as I had volunteered to lend my carpenter skills to repairing the stage so that it was safe enough to perform on- if you weren’t a hippy.

Kate Wolf herself was a folk singer/songwriter who died young of Leukemia who left a legacy of songs and loving memories and whose totem animal apparently was a Red-Tailed Hawk. The Hawk graced the banner behind the performers and showed up in various ways in things printed about Kate.

Ashamed to say, I am not a Kate historian so just believe me that the Red-Tailed Hawk was a symbol associated with Kate and vice-versa.

Preparations for the festival went on the entire month before the festival started. Sometimes an hour after work, sometimes the site was the work itself. The last two weeks before the festival, I found myself on the 35 acre vineyard property everyday, working, eating lunch, working some more. I usually lost ten pounds in the preparation for this festival, and the day of, I would lay out a blanket beneath the best spot on the property, surrounded by friends and beer and wonderfully soft and harmonized folk music, and fall asleep.

And everyday while I was sweating in the early summer sun, trying to get fencing up and paths cleared and signs marking this and that hammered into the ground, at about 2 in the afternoon, a local Red-Tailed Hawk would fly down from its perch above and to the north of the vineyard, make a wide circling swath over the vineyard, and then head back on up the ridge.

Everyday.

Around 2 o’clock.

Everyday.

No days off for holidays.

Everyday. Seven days a week.

So when you gather a few thousand people together and you put them all in a mood to remember the sadly cut short life of a beautiful spirit who wrote beautiful songs, and you ply them with music and beer and wine and a backdrop of a gorgeous vineyard in June greenery, the air gets heavy with sentimentality and the desire to believe in the great oneness and universal connectedness and spiritual certainty of our time here on the planet comes over almost everybody like wafts of cooking pizza.

I mean, God’s bounty was before us- music, wine, nature, a loving heart memorialized…

So of course I had to feed into this by suggesting that Kate Wolf’s spirit was near and that I could sense it and that it was going to pay us a visit soon, because while I was working on the site before the festival, I had felt the same feelings and been visited many times by Kate herself.

Now, granted, I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, but in a crowd of people all in a loving mood, all huddled together on blankets with coolers and a communal spirit flowing all around (and a little hoochie too), this kind of BS traveled from ear to ear in rumor fashion and slowly spread from my special tree where I had been napping, and made its way outward in the four directions of the earthly sphere.

A distance out in the crowd, I could see tie-dyed ladies of mystical merit pointing back in my direction, their faces hidden beneath sun hats but their stories clear.

This was all right around 2 o’clock, you see. One group had finished and another was getting ready to prepare. An MC (a man named Utah Phillips) was waxing a bit about Kate herself, and the memorial mood took on a memorial mood. There was a quiet reverence and a palpable feeling of unity and love in the air. There was a single man talking, and thousands listening. Close to right on cue, the Red-Tailed Hawk swooped down and soared over the crowd, making a great circling swath over the vineyard behind the stage, then turning gracefully back toward the crowd, flapping a few times to gain altitude.

It screeched a hawk cry as it disappeared over the tree-tops and disappeared above us to the north.

For an hour after, I could see the awestruck fingers of story telling folks pointing in my general direction.

PEACE and spiritual bliss to all on this Memorial Day. May you remember something memorable and be visited by flying friends...

ADDENDUM- My favorite Memorial Day Post was written by Kario, here--