The Nipmuc Indian Who Saved My Summer: A Native American Man Meets a Bullied Boy

A NIPMUC INDIAN MAN SAVED MY SUMMER WHEN I WAS 12 YEARS OLD. HIS NAME WAS "TALL LUKE"When we were kids at Webster Lake in Massachusetts, near the border with Connecticut, we heard about Nipmuc Indians. For a long time, some kids thought people were saying "chipmunk." It makes a sort of sense. You associate Indians with knowing everything about animals and plants and living with nature in ways most people today don't know how to do.The Nipmucs, sometimes spelled "Nipmucks," were the native American people who first lived around Worcester, Massachusetts, near where I grew up in Webster. In fact, they lived throughout parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, And they were there long before the English colonists or any other white people arrived. Before anyone kept records of the region.My father, mother, two older sisters, younger brother, and I lived in a house, which we called a "cottage," right on the edge of South Pond, one of the three ponds that made up Webster Lake. We had a wharf sticking out into the lake. We tied up a row boat, there, and fished from the end almost every evening, sometimes by casting a fishing lure, or plug, toward the middle of the lake. On a hot day, when visitors arrived and got into their bathing suits, they would run full speed down the gravel path next to the cottage, onto the wharf, right out to the end, and do a long jump or dive into the lake. You could get a splinter in your bare foot from that old wharf, though.I said the summer when I was 12 years old was my best. I think it ended up that way not because of a "chipmunk," but because of a Nipmuc Indian, Tall Luke. That doesn't sound like a Native American name, but there is an explanation.