The firmament of stars

Unless you’re Daniel Boone or Jim Bridger or, say, Reinhold Messner, the great northern Italian climber who first ascended Everest alone, first climbed all 14 peaks in the world stretching 8,000 meters or higher without carrying extra oxygen, and first walked and skied across Antarctica and Greenland all by his lonesome or in the company of one other, you probably don’t operate alone.

Messner was also the first to cross the Gobi desert alone, a frigid region of only 500,000 square miles in northern China and Mongolia. That’s almost twice the size of Texas, which Messner has never crossed alone, to my knowledge. But there’s still time. He’ll only be 80 come September, and he’s only missing seven toes, amputated long ago following frostbite after a climb he and his brother made to the summit of Everest. His brother didn’t make it back, so Reinhold had to return alone.

The rest of us, however, operate in a firmament of stars, people living or dead who cross our paths to make our lives and communities richer and more meaningful.

Hanson’s archival collections and family history can be found at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation; at the Smithsonian Institution, in Cynthia Mott’s “Hanson Family Archives,” digitalcommons.usf.edu/masterstheses/ 91/; and in Patsy West’s book, “The Enduring Seminole: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism.” COURTESY PHOTO

Every time we walk around the block or ride to the store or adopt a dog or go to a church or a synagogue or a concert or a park or a museum or a school — every time we treat strangers politely or volunteer in a soup kitchen or help an old person cross the street — we do it in the company of stars who have shown us how and why. They may be invisible, they may live in another state, town or country, they may be in full and robust health or dead as doornails, but they go with us.

If you’re lucky, two of the brightest stars in your firmament will always be your mother and father. But there are others, too, stars we share, or should share, and sometimes do in actions or words.

This week’s front-page story focuses on a few — on a mere fraction of the many Floridians dead or alive who may justifiably be classified as stars. When we wrote it, when we designed it and when we printed it, we remained quietly frustrated: there are so many more we didn’t mention.

Roger Williams

If each of us stands witness to a starlight shining in some variance to the starlight of others— the same way people observing stars in the night sky may see different versions, depending on where they stand and what time of night — we can still take pains to share what we’ve witnessed with each other.

Who are yours, and where do the stars originate? How do they come into being?

Let me mention W. Stanley Hanson Sr., the so-called “White Medicine Man” to the Seminoles whose history, with photos shared by his grandson, is described only in the briefest of remembrances in our lead story.

A reader might justifiably conclude that Hanson bore a circumstantial similarity to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war: She was never born and raised. She simply sprang from the head of Zeus, fully armed and ready for battle.

But it isn’t true. W. Stanley Hanson Sr., tagged “the White Medicine Man” after a journalist witnessed the respect and trust in his actions and judgment Seminole and Miccosukee Indians gave him, didn’t just appear in their lives suddenly in the early decades of the 20th century, sprung from the head of American culture.

A resident of Fort Myers, he grew up around the Indians because his father, a medical doctor, treated them. Dr. William Hanson didn’t have to; a lot of other doctors didn’t. But he did. And young W. Stanley, a seed nurtured in star-growing soil, learned their language rather than just expecting them to speak English.

While that may not seem like such a big deal now, when the 20th century began the Indians had just managed to survive a very recent previous century in which white people, dressed in blue uniforms and representing the United States government, had sought to dispel them permanently from the world in three distinct Seminole wars.

So giving a white guy their trust was probably not at the top of their list of goals, virtues or survival-manual recommendations.

The Seminoles are famously the only tribe never to surrender to the United States, but they did manage to learn to live near the burgeoning culture of European Americans, several of whom, as Floridians, treated them humanely and with respect — not just W. Stanley Hanson or his father, for example, but Ted Smallwood. He operated the then-remote Smallwood store where the Indians frequently traded and didn’t cheat them. That store is now a Florida historic site worth visiting in Chokoloskee, about four miles south of Everglades City on the edge of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Woody Hanson, whose own father, W. Stanley Hanson Jr., was a Navy veteran of World War II who himself grew up around the Indians and passed his respect for them to his son, is the primary reason we now have not only a more-than-superficial knowledge of Woody’s grandfather, but a much deeper knowledge of the culture and history of the Seminoles in Florida.

Woody has — and continues to — pass it on.

He’s shared his firmament with us, and by Googling the Hanson Family Archives, you can see the formation of stars.

Meanwhile, I hope each of us shares his or her own stars with the rest of us, no matter how many toes we’re missing. ¦

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