Things You Can Miss When You Don't Go Outside

After all of the fun, the traveling, the working til the wee hours of the morning...perhaps I was not at my sharpest...

So, I wake up stupidly early, and decide I can operate a motor vehicle and head off to Starbuck's. So far so good...but on the way, I thought I was hallucinating - big time.

Passing the Akron landmark, the 36 foot tall sculpture of the Indian chief Roytaynah, I noticed SOMETHING was different about it. It was covered with scaffolding and being prodded by a guy in a bucket crane and abuzz with workmen, looking strangely similar to the swarms of ants or termites that I supposed they were there to eliminate...Turns out that the artist himself, one Peter Wolf Toth, was in town to apply preservative to his work. Who knew?

The statue, erected in 1985, has already been doctored with foam, fiberglass, polyurethane and previous coats of preservative.

In 1971, Toth began his masterwork - the Trail of the Whispering Giants - his mission to put a statue memorializing American Indians in every state. His very first wooden American Indian statue was created in 1972 at Sand Run Metro Park, carved out of a dead elm tree found at the park. Today, he has completed 67 of the giant statues, with at least one in every state and several in Canada. Rotaynah, the Tuscarora word for chief, was his 51st statue in the installment. It is carved from Kentucky red oak, is 25 feet in circumference and weighs 20 tons.

This was a big deal, that I just HAPPENED to stumble upon - Barbara TwelveEagles of the Native American Indian and Veterans Center in Norton came because she wanted to meet Mr. Toth.

While I was out, I stopped into Border's and picked up a copy of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found , which I saw came out in paperback when I was in Chicago, but I didn't want to lug it home from there...

Thus fortified, I returned home and basically did nothing but nap for the rest of day. Glorious!