David Harp Found Key to Life and Happiness in a Harmonica : Health: This is a story about pain and redemption, about one man’s journey into the light, and his willingness to guide others there.

It’s 90 degrees at Leafy Glen Day Camp, where 150 Scouts sit in a sun-blasted field watching a beefy hulk in bright-red suspenders printed with musical notes.

Sweat drips from his face as he saws the air with his arms and clops out a rhythm with his right foot. The campers think he is teaching them to play the harmonica. Mesmerized by mad-scientist eyes, they take turns bleating out the simple riffs they’ve been practicing since this morning.

It isn’t until the last Brownie has played that David Harp reveals the real reason for his visit to Leafy Glen:

“Paying attention is the most important skill a person can learn, more important than playing the harmonica or playing sports or even reading. Because if you can pay attention, you can learn to do all those things,” he says. “You’ve proven what good attention-payers you are. A person with a harmonica in their pocket should never have a wasted moment in their life. I hope the harmonica will be a friend to you as it has been to me.”

With that, he unplugs his microphone, keyboard and speakers, and loads them into his ancient Honda, pausing for a trip to the men’s room, a slug of iced coffee, and an odd, enigmatic remark.

He says, “I am not what I seem.”

This is a story about pain and redemption, about one man’s journey out of the darkness and into the light, via Canada, South America, and a $2.25 Hohner Blues Harp, key of A.

If that seems an unlikely path to salvation, consider this: “People love the harmonica,” says Harp. “It’s the most forgiving, most accessible, most empowering instrument in the world.”

In fact, it is so accessible that Harp claims he can teach virtually anyone to play in a matter of minutes--three minutes, to be precise. Granted, he does not claim he can teach them to play well. “But it is better to begin doing something a little bit right away rather than not doing it because doing it well would take too much time or energy,” he says.

He has proven his point by teaching an estimated 350,000 people to play at least a little bit, 50,000 in person, the rest via his videotapes and books. Not only campers, but corporate executives, doctors, nursing home patients, substance abusers, inner-city kids, the disabled, the sick and the dying.

He has taught people ranging in age from 8 months to more than 80 years. And in the process, he’s taught many of them a lot more: How to breathe easier. How to quit smoking. How to meditate. How to build trust. How to handle rejection, even the most insidious kind of rejection, the kind that comes from within.

It’s a strange stew of disciplines: music, psychology, religion. Call it what you want: Zen and the Art of Blues Harp Blowing. Metaphysical Fitness. Those are but two of the three-dozen books, tapes and videos that make up the David Harp phenomenon.

There’s no end in sight. As Harp sees it, there’s no limit to what the harmonica can teach people, because what it’s really teaching them is that they can learn to do anything.

David Harp can discuss the harmonica all day long without exhausting its attributes. It is cheap. It is versatile. It is portable, easily concealed in a pocket.

Initially, this was a problem for Harp, who bought his first harmonica as a fashion accessory with no intention of playing it. Then he realized there was no other way to carry it so it showed.

To understand why he bought it in the first place, you should know a few things about David Harp, born David Feldman, the son of a New York City firefighter, in Brooklyn in 1951.

Growing up on Long Island, his best friends were Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two nerdy, unathletic kids who would later distinguish themselves as Ben & Jerry, the ice cream moguls.

But as students at Merrick Avenue Junior High School, none seemed headed for greatness, least of all David Feldman.

“He was very difficult to deal with growing up, an enfant terrible,” says his twin sister, Nina Smiley, who describes him as arrogant, flamboyant, obnoxious.

She remembers him monopolizing their parents’ attention by arguing with them until he was blue in the face. She also recalls him disrupting her seventh birthday party by going into the bathroom and setting loose his entire collection of frogs.

Jerry Greenfield remembers David stripping off his shirt during a performance by their high school jug band to reveal a dancing figure he’d had somebody draw on his back. “He got a kick out of trying to shock people or do the outrageous,” Jerry says.

But behind the bravado was a basket case. “I was in constant pain,” under attack by his own negative thoughts. They came at him like bullets, a steady barrage of self-doubt and self-hatred. He had no idea how to fight back.

It was no surprise he did poorly in school. The surprise was his test scores: high enough for a full scholarship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. He studied psychology, as did Nina at Vassar. She went on to earn a Ph.D. from Princeton.

It was during the summer of his freshman year that David bought his first harmonica, the latest in a series of props he affected to compensate for his lousy self-image. He figured it would be just the thing for his hitchhiking trip to Alaska.

“I was in my Bob Dylan phase at the time. I had the denim jacket, the wispy goatee. My hair was growing. I was working my way down the Dylan checklist: What else did I need? Oh! A harmonica! I bought a Hohner Blues Harp, key of A, for $2.25.”

That might have been that, except that no one could see it in his pocket. “I started holding it up to my mouth and blowing in it. After a couple of hours, I was able to pick out a tune. I actually went so far as to buy a Dylan songbook. By Ohio, I got my first real song down: ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.”’

By the time he reached the West Coast, he had fallen in love with the harmonica, largely for the attention it brought. He only made it as far as British Columbia. “I would have gotten farther if I’d stopped playing when people asked.”

Back at Wesleyan, he drove his roommate crazy by playing the same few songs over and over. His roommate suggested he might like to play blues. “Actually, he bought me a blues record and said, ‘Learn this or I’ll kill you.”’ He learned.

There was one other noteworthy moment that year. While rock-climbing in the White Mountains, something he had no business doing, David lost his footing and started to fall. He caught a small tree in the crook of his elbow; that’s what saved him. But during the split-second when he was falling, he felt something he’d never felt before: Peace.

“As soon as it was hopeless, I experienced an alternate reality. I saw myself lying on the rocks below, and I felt fine, more at peace with myself than I’d ever felt in my whole life.”

He didn’t know what to make of the experience. But he didn’t forget it, either.

He graduated from Wesleyan and got a job at a state hospital, but quit after less than a year. The hospital setting exacerbated his hypochondria, one of his many neuroses. In 1974, he moved to California. From there, he decided to hitchhike to Brazil.

By Ecuador, he’d begun giving harmonica lessons. Just north of Rio, he played on TV. Back in San Francisco, he worked on a political campaign. He wanted to keep teaching, but moonlighting was forbidden. In a moment of inspiration, David Harp was born.

“I went to a Laundromat and put up a 3-by-5 card for giving lessons. I put up David Harp, a phony name. I got a couple of students, put up more cards, went to a local alternative school and taught a class. Within a couple of months, I’d quit my day job. By mid-September of ‘76, I was teaching full time.”

He also wrote his first harmonica book, using the experimental methodology he’d learned as a student to develop his “amazing hand-signal method,” simple signals indicating where to put your mouth and when to breathe in and out. The book, “Blues Harmonica for the Musical Idiot,” has gone on to sell more than 100,000 copies.

Things were going well when his best friend got drunk and drove his motorcycle into a guardrail. And David hit bottom again.

“I was devastated. I had no resources to deal with the death of a contemporary. I was lonely, depressed and unhappy.”

He’d been about to go national with his harmonica book, but his prospective publisher had abruptly backed out. He soon found out why: The publisher stole his idea and put out his own book.

“A few months before, someone had given me a book by Stephen Levine, who was a counselor to the dying. He said you can work to control your mind. The idea opened up a whole new world. I saw an ad saying Levine was doing a meditation workshop. I was such a mess, I decided to go.”

Midway through, one of the leaders pulled a book from his pocket. “I thought it was the competition’s harmonica book. It wasn’t, of course. But at that moment, I recognized what an abusive relationship I had with my own mind.”

He decided to go back to school. Perhaps he could learn how to save himself. At California State University, he studied meditation as a form of self-help. His thesis earned him a master’s in psychology and laid the groundwork for a new book, “The Three Minute Meditator,” co-authored by Dr. Nina Feldman, his twin.

It also saved him, once and for all, from himself.

Through meditation, “I gained a tremendous amount of control. The better I get, the easier it is to deal with thoughts and feelings, to treat them as objects rather than something mystical. I can discard what I don’t want and keep what I do. I no longer have to give in to every negative thought that comes into my mind.”

Nina meditates too. She says it’s like wiping dirt off a windshield, enabling her to see. She and David are close now. “I can see that we both had an emptiness within. I tried to fill it by being independent and stoic, David by being flamboyant.”

He still loves attention. But he now gets it as David Harp, a far warmer, more generous man than David Feldman ever was.

His metamorphosis continued with his 1980 marriage to Rita Ricketson, a native Vermonter who manages his business and musical press; and with the births of Katie, 6, and Lily, 6 months. The Harps moved to Vermont in 1990.

From the Middlesex trailer that serves as his office have come nearly three dozen products, not just on harmonica but on whistling, back pain, music theory, meditation.

Ever the entrepreneur, he hits the QVC Home Shopping Network in September. His current students include childhood friends Ben and Jerry, and the governor of Vermont, Howard Dean.

For one recent lesson, Harp arrived sweaty and grubby and wearing old shorts. Dean, 46, a boyish man wearing neatly shorn hair and a crisp summer suit, greeted him warmly. They grinned at each other, enjoying the contrast.

Appearances are deceiving. Harp and Dean speak the same language: “hand wah-wah,” “pucker-noting,” “blow-bending.”

Like Harp, Dean came of age playing harmonica. Then came medical school, family, politics. “I hardly get to play anymore.”

Harp helps him warm up with simple scales, then gives him a few pointers on technique. By the time they cut loose with some improvised blues riffs, Dean sounds better than ever, and for a few minutes, the usual soundtrack of bureaucracy gives way to the music of cowboys and campfires, hippies and hobos.

When Harp isn’t giving lessons, conducting workshops or writing books, he trades his suspenders for a jacket and tie and hands out harmonicas at nursing homes, where he teaches for free.

Twenty years after putting up that first 3-by-5 card, he still knows precisely where David Harp ends and David Feldman begins. “As God created me, I have created David Harp.

“He’s forced to operate in the bottom-line business world. I wish I didn’t have to charge and could do it all for free. Then I would not feel the need to be quite as entertaining. But people want everything easy and bite-size. That’s part of his charm.”

Such regrets, though, are fleeting. Like David Harp, David Feldman is a happy man, a man who no longer need fall from a cliff to experience peace. All he needs is a harmonica and a song.

If you visit Vermont, you may hear him. He plays all the time now, on the street, in the fields, in the car with the windows rolled down so his songs can spill out.

Folk songs. Rock songs. Blues songs.

Songs in the key of life.