A few years ago a subscriber wrote me a letter about Tom Wisner, describing him as an award-winning educator, someone who had recorded albums on Smithsonian/Folkways. She also described him as someone who had been homeless, and who cared a lot more about things like water and the Chesapeake than money.
When I visited Tom Wisner, he was living in Maryland Amish country. Tom is a poet, folk musician and disciple of the waters of Chesapeake. He is seventy years old and has been connected to the river all his life – first as a boy growing up on the James and Potomac Rivers – Chesapeake tributaries. As an adult he became outreach instructor for the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. For the last twenty years he has been a poet, storyteller and folk singer, traveling around the area, mostly to local schools.
The music and words he shares come out of the natural cycles of wind, the rain, the sea life of that watershed and out of the lives of the people he knew who lived those slower, circular rhythms. When I arrived on Tom's doorstep, he was there, relaxed, welcoming and talking of the old Chesapeake oystermen and of the ancient beauty of the Chesapeake Bay. Tom lives in a couple of rooms in a big old house that is the center of an intentional community. On a shelf in the small room were we sat and talked is a collection of 30 million-year-old snail shells.
I asked Tom about the role of beauty in his life.
“You use the word beauty a lot. I would encourage the word pace. Rhythm. For me the word rhythm has emerged above all other words. The word beauty is kind of ephemeral for me. I think more about peace. I long for peace. I long for a sense of contentment, like I had when I was a boy by that stream. I wish that I felt at peace with our process with this planet. And that I could be part of a culture that lived in unity with the natural system.
“I am at peace with what I am doing about that. I am very much at peace with that. I am not very much at peace with my fellow human beings. Up the road they are building a shopping complex. It is amazing. Damn near ten acres bulldozed flat. Another mall. I don't want to get on that much, but I long for peace from that.
“The songs are for me a source of peace, a source of sense of unity, a connection with the flow of things. If that is beauty, I could talk about that. I could talk about the peace that comes to me in that. That is what my songs have taught me. A lot about rhythm, pace. That is what they do for me. I don't go through a day without song. It brings the process of being with others into another form.
“At one time, before we got into the technological thing, we all lived those rhythms. But now much of the work that seeks to restore a human harmony with the natural world has also lost touch with the natural rhythms, the slow rhythms that underlie harmony.”
I asked Tom what he had learned about life, after almost seventy years of living.
“I have learned focus – learned to concentrate on what I am best at. And to hell with whatever the world is doing. To hell with them. You really can do that. You don't have to get out on the treadmill and do what every body is doing out there. You can actually do what you feel is right to do. And do it. And be okay. Provided you are strong enough to not look around at what a lot of folks have, and want it. That takes some doin' sometimes. Sometimes that takes some doin' for me. I tend to compare often. I will go into some my best friends homes, some are scientists at the lab, and I'll think, ‘Goddamn, I wish I had ….' But comparison sucks. It just sucks. You can't do that. You have to be just be whatever it is you are and follow it.
“On the score of integrating what I believe and how I live, I am pleased with how I've lived. I am pleased that I am for what I've been for. And I feel real unity with it. I feel great about that. I feel like, ‘Man, I am so about these rivers and about this Earth. I look forward to becoming it.' I don't fear dying at all. I look forward to it. There is a lot of joy in me about that aspect of my life.
“In terms of being a part from my children as they grew up, I am really ragged on that one. I am very ragged on it. I have a lot of pain about my distance from my children. And there ain't a damn thing in the world I can do about that. Nothin'.
“I've had some wonderful loves in my life. Some wonderful women came into my life. Gosh. I've been blessed with the loves that I've had. But there is a hole with the kids. A big hole.”
What has been the role of money in your life?
“I have never made any money. For me, institutions suck. They just suck. They suffocate me. I can't breathe. So I had to get out. I left. I have my own rhythms. They are deeply engrained – built right in at birth – a product of the life of the middle Chesapeake and the gentle repetitive cadence in the language of my mother's people. I have spent my life writing my song out of those fundamental rhythms. Each time I return to them through my songs, I am home.
“My mother's people are all James River people. I relate to them the strongest. And feel the most kinship with them. I don't have a whole lot of connection with my father's people. Or my father. I loved him, but didn't know him. It was my mom who brought my heart alive somehow with the land, and the waters, and the culture. I walked into a laboratory with that in my thirties. The lab was a good training – it is a mind place – studying a river system. I brought heart to that. “We live in a time when heart is important. It is what Tom Berry calls The Great Work (the name of Tom Berry's latest book) – getting back to where we were before we got into this technical thing. I am not able to articulate this idea as well as I'd like. I feel the words, and can't quite say them. We went apart way back there – the heart and the mind. And the mind got built real large with the whole tech thing. Some physicists are beginning to recognize that there is heart in physics. There is heart there. It is time to come back together with the mind and the heart. It has been my simple role to attend to that. To stay as close to the heart of this thing called ‘the life of the waters' as I could, and serve it.
“I don't know why I love water so much. I just do. I love water. It comes from spending my childhood along streams, messing with frogs. Tom Berry says that everything to him relates to a certain meadow from his childhood. I share that with him in the sense of a certain stream from my youth. If it was right for that little stream, it is right. And if it is wrong for that stream, it is wrong. It is just that simple. It is neat to reduce life to simplicity. In fact, it is not all that simple in terms of my relations with my children, former wife, etc. But in the sense of my presence here, it is that simple. And of course, that little stream has all houses on it now. All houses. That stream is gone. All it is is a concrete culvert going under the ground where these homes are.
“The people I have known on the water – the old timers I knew – eased with the winds. Do you think they live high stress? No. They lived simple. Their bodies even moved with it. They knew a rhythm and a tempo – different from this hard driving tempo we are into on the beltways. Wheels going to work. Drivin'.
“I once watched an old guy adze out a helm. Adze it out. I watched his rhythm. I was blown away watching him. He worked that adze down that whole keel. Whack. Whack. All day long. When you talk to someone like that, or hang out with them, their whole rhythm of stories, of song, their segue from song to story, is all in that beautiful simple balance. So I try to get hold of that in my songs, and in the way I live. It is so important.”
As the trip evolved, and the thousands of miles disappeared in my rearview mirror, I came to realize that what I was really seeking and needing was what Tom and I had talked about: the slow rhythm of peace and simplicity and handcrafted beauty.
Tom Wisner traveled by train up to Middlebury Vermont for HERON DANCE'S fifth anniversary. He told stories, sang had us all dancing in the aisles.
Tom now lives on Solomon's Island, Maryland. He is closely affiliated with Chestory, a non-profit created to celebrate the beauty and importance of the Chesapeake River. More information can be found at
www.chestory.org
(Chorus)
I'm Chesapeake born, I'm Chesapeake Free
I'm Chesapeake bound, (and) flowing with ease.
I'm Chesapeake born, and bound to thee,
(IN) Deed I am, (I'M) Chesapeake free.
I'm the son of the rain, brother of the wind
I follow on the water, I got tobacco on my chin.
I seen forty years of sunshine, wind and rain.
If I had a chance, I'd do it all again.
(To chorus)
She's the mother of the waters and the people of this land
Forty river children reach to take her by the hand
and flow through Maryland and Virginia to the sea,
Atlantic born, Atlantic bound and free.
(To chorus)
I hear your song so clearly and I know that down inside
the mother of these waters is flowing deep and wide.
Sons and daughters of the waters life within,
Gentle voices blending with the wind.
(To chorus...whisper)
(Repeat chorus ....full voice)
Vocals - Tom Wisner and Mary Sue Ross, Dram Tree-O, and the combined Hollywood and Arthur Middleton Elementary School Chorus
Guitar - Tom
Tom's note: This song calls folks in to join. If I had ten songs like this one I could make a living.
Hey there, wild river, teach me to flow!
Tell me your poems and all the songs that you know.
Touch me and wash me, and let me lie down
By the peace of your waters at night on the ground.
(Chorus)
Deep flowing river, where are you bound?
Tell me a story teach me your sound!
Hey there wild river, wont you teach me to flow?
Wont you stop a lazy moment while you're rolling along,
And sing me your song?
You're reborn each moment, yet old as the land, and
No longer flowing when you're cupped in my hand.
Join with my body as I drink life's fill, and
Blend with these waters and flow as you will.
(Return to chorus)
Vocals - Tom Wisner and Teresa Whittaker
Guitar - Al Petteway and John Cronin
Rythm Guitar - Tom
Bass - Frank Schwartz
With the words to "Made Of Water", Tom sent this note:
"My friend John Cronin grew up in this Chesapeake region and backed me on guitar when he was in High School. Later he married and moved to Calgary and became lead guitar for Ian Tyson of Ian and Sylvia fame. In studio we laid the track for Made of Water live! All in one take! One of those divine moments when an old song comes alive in the act of recording like it is all new for the first time!"
Made of Water
by Tom Wisner (c) 1997, 1979
I'm made of water
Flowing water
Sun and salt
And winds that blow
Though my bones
Were formed in mountains
It's through my blood
This river flows.
Driving down, the wind will sound
The rain will fall and roll on by.
Lord, I'm mighty grateful for
The love I see in my brother's eye.
And for the mighty river
Bringin' life a flowin' from the sky.
I'm made of water
Flowing water
Sun and salt
And winds that blow
Though my bones
Were formed in mountains
It's through my blood
This river flows.
Silver mountain flowin' down
Join with me and circle 'round.
Circle with my spirit free-
Golden water made of me.
Build my bones, build me right
And flow to mornin' from the night.
I'm made of water
Flowing water
Sun and salt
And winds that blow
Though my bones
Were formed in mountains
It's through my blood
This river flows.
I'm made of water
Flowing water
Sun and salt
And winds that blow
Though my bones
Were formed in mountains
It's through my blood
This river flows.
Vocal - Tom Wisner
Guitars - John Cronin
Bass - Frank Schwartz
