CHUCK BLANCHARD
by Claudine Payne
When Chuck Blanchard was 24 years old, a chance discovery started the young teacher on a journey that would take him a thousand miles south and many thousands of years into the past.
It was the spring of 1968, and he was working in his garden in Connecticut. As he troweled, a large black flint projectile point popped out of the soil of the radish patch.
"I looked at it," he told me, "I held it in my hand. And I tried to work back to what it meant, what its vector was." It was, he said, his first archaeological epiphany.
I talked to Blanchard recently at the time of the release of his new book New Words, Old Songs. Though I've known him for many years, it's hard to pin a label on Chuck. He is a writer, a composer, a pianist, a teacher (of "just about everything but math"), a woods-and-water person, and a survey archaeologist. He has performed his music on stage in America and Europe and in PBS documentaries. He ran his own theater for a while. He has published short stories in Great Britain, done archaeological survey in the Sierra Nevada, and created educational programs in New England. And to me and to other Floridians he has become a guide on the journey into Florida's past.
Thirteen years after the appearance of the black flint point among his radishes, Chuck made his way to south Florida. Curious about the makers of the flint point, he had been recording archaeological sites along the estuaries in New England. He had also been exploring the bays and harbors of California, and now he was intrigued by how similar in shape Charlotte Harbor was to San Francisco Bay and Long Island Sound.
He knew that large groups of people had lived around both northern bays in precolumbian times. What, he wondered, would have been the situation in the much warmer waters of southwest Florida?
So in 1981, he set out to explore the southwest Florida coast by canoe. "It looked like a canoe paradise," he said. "My take on the place was that you could live down there. It looked like a land of plenty."
In his 18-foot canoe, carrying the bare essentials of life, he paddled through the waters of Charlotte Harbor, Pine Island Sound, and Lemon Bay. And, everywhere, he saw evidence of people, past and present.
What he saw on that brief trip, although he says he didn't understand most of it at the time, stayed with him long afterward. He came away with snapshot images of enormous shell mound complexes, of a sand burial mound being vandalized, of a piece of Spanish olive jar on a shell-littered beach.
He returned to Florida every year after that trip, to explore the estuaries and to map sites. In the mid 1980s, two important events occurred that would lead to the creation of New Words, Old Songs.
First, he met Bob Edic, another northeasterner fascinated by life in the Florida estuaries. This began an enduring professional partnership and friendship. Chuck's friendship with Bob led him to archaeologist Bill Marquardt.
Since the early 1980s, Marquardt had been researching the prehistory of the Charlotte Harbor-Pine Island Sound area. According to Bill, "People would say, 'You know, there's this guy in a canoe who's going around looking at sites. You should meet him.'" So when Bob introduced them by telephone, Bill invited Chuck to stop in Gainesville on his way home to Connecticut. That was the beginning of Chuck's connection with the Southwest Florida Project.
Shortly afterward, when Bill was planning the Year of the Indian (YOTI) project, it was obvious to him that Chuck was the ideal choice to be education director. He had just the right combination of talents and abilities for the job. "The major thrust of YOTI," said Bill, " was to reach children. Chuck had on-the-ground, hands-on appreciation of the resources, and he was an experienced teacher and an accomplished writer."
So Chuck set up pioneering programs for teaching archaeology in Lee County schools and in the schools of surrounding counties. Soon he was a regular at the Pineland site, guiding schoolchildren from all over south Florida around the excavations.
But Bill had yet another task in mind for Chuck. "I wanted to put out a popular book on southwest Florida archaeology," said Bill, "a book that any interested person could understand and enjoy."
In the beginning neither Bill nor Chuck quite knew what the book would turn out to be. Chuck thought it might be a small pamphlet. Bill wanted something interesting and informative.
As Chuck began writing, he realized the need for something more. "I wanted to explain all those anomalies that I had not understood," he said. "And I wanted to make these people people --to let readers look into the eyes of other human beings."
So he took a personal approach, and with his first canoe trip still vivid in his memory, he wrote the book, as he says in its preface, "as though I were talking to myself, which happened a lot in the canoe."
New Words, Old Songs became a voyage through time, with Chuck as the tour guide. "He makes me feel as though I were there with him," marvels Bill Marquardt. "Chuck gave the book a face and character and soul that I could never have imagined."
It's been a long journey from the radish patch in Connecticut.
In a brief and very informal poll, Calusa News found that Chuck Blanchard's time windows were favorites of many readers of New Words, Old Songs. The time windows offer fictional vignettes of life in times past. Chuck describes them as word pictures. "They are like illustrations," he says, "pictures based on facts... portraits of a time."
Chuck opens three time windows in New Words, Old Songs.
Through
the first, we see the Florida of nearly 11,000 years ago, as bison herds draw
near the Paleo-Indian hunters waiting patiently for them.
The
second window opens a mere 1,300 years ago, and we find the boisterous
Mid-Autumn Oyster Harvest Festival in full swing.
The
final and longest time window shows us Tega, a young Calusa man, as he joins
caciques and calendar priests and maiden singers at the winter solstice ceremony
of A.D. 1494.
Devotees of the time windows will be pleased to learn that Chuck plans to
write three Tega-esque stories in the near future.
C. P.