In Maine: Storytellers Cast Their Ancient Spell

Once upon a summer's morning, on the stage of the Opera House at Rockport, Me., a lanky bearded man in striped shirt and suspenders, looking as if he were off a potato farm, sits on a piano bench beneath an 1890s-style white-and-gilt proscenium arch. At the First Annual North Atlantic Festival of Storytelling, Michael Parents is speaking of creation.

The story Parents tells is from an Iroquois legend, explaining how birds got their song. God, it seems, decided on a fair and just competition. Each bird would fly upward as far as it could, and at that level where its lungs burst and it could fly no higher, it would hear the song it was destined to sing forever. The higher the level, the sweeter or more powerful the song. This was an ingenious idea, even for God, and he was, Parents points out, "kind of proud of himself, in a Great Spirit sort of way."

Then, suddenly, right before everybody's eyes, Parents transforms himself from storyteller into bird. He sinks his neck into his shoulders.

He flaps invisible but powerful wings. He crosses his eyes fiercely.

His hooked nose curves even more sharply above his downturned mouth.

With pride, with paranoia, he twitches his head from side to side. He becomes an eagle, the odds-on favorite to win God's most majestic sound. It may be Sunday morning in Rockport village in the year 1981, but now it is also the first day of creation. When Parents' unsuspecting eagle—with a thrush stowed away on its back—lifts off majestically at the upward wave of the storyteller's hand, the audience lifts off too, out the window of the Opera House, above the sun-dappled boats lying at anchor in Rockport harbor, beyond time, beyond space. Somewhere off in a primeval woods everybody's inner ear hears a sneaky, undeserving little hitchhiker of a thrush trill the loveliest of songs.

The exposition, quiet as a Sunday-school teacher's lesson, is over. The storyteller, in the fullness of his craft, has struck, and the spell is on, as surely as it was when Homer conjured up a fleet of ships on a wine-dark sea bound for the walls of Troy.

Again and again, during the two days and two nights of storytelling, the small miracle happens. There is a perfect gesture, an eloquent word, a scrap of song or dance, and the imagination soars. "Storytellers," said that old Celtic taleteller William Butler Yeats, "make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear, and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels."