Letter to Dragon: Drum ... drum drum ... drum drum

Dearest Dragon,

What a shining day it was! Making a hand drum with Mark Ressl of The Giving Trees in Rosendale has to be possibly one of the most true experiences of my 49 years on this planet. True as in killing chickens, eating a porcupine, giving birth, my God immersion experience, and sitting with Baba’s body after he passed - that level of true.

Really, Mom, you are saying this about a drum making workshop?

Yup, my dearest, I am.

Life comes from death. Which, in turn, makes more life. It is one big circle. It is all the same thing - just different forms.

The life of a drum comes from the death of an animal. Our life comes from the death of vegetables and animals that feed us. One day, in turn, our lives will nourish worms and plants. Truth.

From the moment we arrived to the grassy space with wooden tables it was clear we would be working tangibly with the animals whose death allows us to make music. Somatically we conjoined with Truth without any of our modern separation (based on convenience or yuck or time, etc).

This was not a plastic wrapped boneless chicken breast in the refrigerator section of the grocery store. This was a collection of dead deer skins being fermented so we could work with their hides. There were smells. There were oozing liquids that sometimes splashed. At one point I noticed a nearby deer skull, half decayed and covered with flies.

You and I worked in tandem to keep things moving forward.

I sanded the maple frame. You, wearing the biggest longest plastic gloves I had ever seen, scraped the hair off of a deer skin so that it could be stretched out and dried.

I wandered over to hear you and Mark talking as you worked together on a hide.

“This is so cool!”

Mark looked up at me and smiled. “It certainly is. We honor the animals by eating them, and then we can play their skins and remember them and appreciate them. That is one thing I love, every drum is different. Instead of trying to control that - to some extent there is controlling that - as we learn and try different things. But also accepting - this deer, this deer sounds like this. And I love that.”

This deer sounds like this.

The next step after removing the hair was to stretch out the hide - to expand the area that could be used for the main face of the drum. At one point, Mark leaned down and started drawing on the tacked skin. “Let’s take this buck for example. This spine is relatively the same thickness all the way. And then this butt cheek is relatively the same as this butt over here. But you see, the belly skin is much thinner because it needs to be more flexible. Ideally, you want your drum face to have relatively the same thickness skin for the whole thing. So we want to expand the skin as much as possible to get the biggest possible face for the drum.”

Oh right, this animal had a spine and butt cheeks.

Mark had put aside a skin for us that had been stretched, dried for a few days, and was soaking so it could be worked into a drum.

You asked Mark, “Why is this skin so dark?”

“This deer was hit by a car. The blood and bruising show up on the skin.”

Putting the sanded maple hoop onto the spine area with thickest skin, we cut around the edge giving ourselves room to pull up the skin over the wood and lace the back of it. Using very sharp scissors, we cut a continuous 2 inch strip in a spiral working inward. Then we leaned back and streeetttccchhheeeddd that strip. Deer juice dripped and splattered as we pulled the strip as tight as we could.

Then it was time to punch holes at regular intervals in the outside of the roundish skin. After which, we worked together weaving the continuous lace through the holes.

Finally, the whole drum was laced. Then another stretching of the damn skin over the frame to make the lacing as tight as possible.

“Is that a tick bite?”

“Could be.”

“What is this layer of spongy red stuff on the skin.”

“I think that is fascia, we can scrape it off.”

Fully tightened, we brought the drum home to dry (away from the dog - rawhide deliciousness as it is).

The malleable soft skin has turned into smooth tautness.

And the deer sings.

Thank you Mark so much for your guidance and enthusiasm. For those of you in the Hudson Valley there will be a Family Hand Drum Workshop held by Mark and hosted by Wild Earth on September 19. I wouldn’t miss it.

Thank you Dragon for an amazing day with you. Truly a red letter day for your mother.