by Ralph Bowden
*****
Ed headed out to the barn about six, well before the October sunrise. This was it. He wouldn’t forget what he was about this morning. There would be no drifting off, wondering what had become of the goats or chickens. Just to make sure, he had written out instructions when planning this, and clutched the note in his hand now.
He read the first line as soon as he was inside the barn and out of sight from the house, in case Marge was watching. She knew about him, he was sure. He had slipped up too many times recently, repeating himself and asking things he should have known. But this morning, he was on top and in control.
“Loft. Retrieve gun.”
Ed found the rifle case where he had hidden it in the loft behind some hay. Marge had probably forgotten about the old deer rifle. He hadn’t used it in years. He pulled it out and confirmed that he had cleaned and loaded it. But then he lost his way. Why was the hay still here? It was a fire hazard. He should fork it down. He could use the extra mulch soon and . . . no, he was losing focus, and referred to his instruction list again.
“Get gas can.”
That was downstairs, next to the tiller. It was almost full.
“Have matches?”
Yes. He had actually remembered them earlier, when lighting the burner on the stove to boil his breakfast egg.
“Out back. Into woods.”
He carried the gas can and rifle out back of the barn, keeping it between him and the house. He passed one end of the garden and spotted a cabbage that needed picking. He started to set the can and rifle down and do that.
No! With effort, Ed forced himself back on track and continued straight into the woods, which still provided good cover. Only a few leaves had started to turn and fall. He trudged up along the pipe to the spring, working his way around the back of the neighbor’s ‘mini ranch’ mansion. It was a struggle to fend off sidetracks here, like checking the spring and looking for mushrooms. At one point, he set the can down and leaned the rifle against a tree and was about to grub around in the leaf litter to see how the ginseng was doing, but something wasn’t right. This wasn’t deer season yet. Why was he here with a rifle? And carrying gas around?
It came back again. Ed kicked himself for being an old fool and read the next instruction.
“Set up behind shagbark.”
He moved on toward the vantage point he had scouted out and prepared.
The last line read, “Wait until they leave. Then finish things.”
Cinderella Tank
When the municipal water line came through on Harbor Road in 1934, the old tank on the hill behind “Fessler’s castle,” as it was called locally, was no longer necessary. It had served as a kind of standpipe. Water collected from the roof of the castle was pumped up to it to provide the pressure to flush the toilets and fill the bath tubs.
The tank, drained and cut out of the system, gradually fell into disrepair. Screening at the top corroded away and leaves blew in the vent spaces between the walls and the conical roof structure. The roof itself sagged more every year and the shingles on top wore down to no more than tarpaper tabs. The old walls held up, though. They were mortared native stone, probably two feet thick at the bottom and at least a foot at the top. The cylindrical tank was about 30 feet across and at least 20 feet high.
Local boys found the place irresistible. The tank was hidden in the woods on a hill 200 feet above and behind Fessler’s castle. The stone projections on the outside of the walls were climbable, at least to the daring and skillful. Inside, the walls were mortared smooth.
One of the first adventurous, daredevil kids who had discovered how to climb the outside, had pushed the old screening out of the way and thoughtlessly dropped or carelessly fallen inside. His buddies panicked. Some tried to find a vine or a rope to rescue him, but they either found nothing suitable or couldn’t climb up the tank to provide it to him. They were also afraid of being punished for trespassing – the property line in the woods above the tank was fenced and clearly marked – and assumed somebody else would rescue him and take the rap. The trapee therefore spent a frantic, tearful, and cold overnight in the tank while his parents fretted and called out the police and fire departments to search until one of the guilty accomplices confessed.
Local parents demanded then that the tank, as an “attractive nuisance,” be securely fenced and secured. Old Gilbert Fessler, the grandson of the robber baron who had built the castle in the early years of the 20th century, had died a few years before, and the estate was in the hands of a receiver, who, after suitable legal pressure, had reluctantly agreed to take the demanded action.
The job was poorly done, however, and local kids soon discovered ways of climbing a tree by the new fence and dropping over. The tank was indeed an attractive nuisance. Neighborhood boys insisted on breaking in. It was a challenge to their nature. The receiver hired a caretaker/guard for the whole estate and posted ever more signs threatening ever more draconian prosecution for trespassing. But every effort to secure the place became another challenge to neighborhood boys. They soon discovered that the guard was passed out drunk by noon most days and seldom came up through the woods to check on the tank even when sober. So long as tank visitors didn’t make too much noise during hours when the guard might be awake, they could use the tank freely. The necessary stealth just increased the tank’s appeal.
Climbing the tank became a kind of initiation test for local boys, who established ranks according to how fast the climber could reach the top. The well-known story of the first kid trapped in the tank encouraged followers to bring ropes along. There were many instances of boys at the top playing the game of pulling up the ropes and extorting promises, threatening to leave those inside trapped. It was a great venue for practicing the skills of treachery, deceit, and sometimes diplomacy.
Neighborhood guys used the tank as a secret hideaway and base, a kind of lair in which to plot their subsequent adventures. Those adventures sometimes included enticing girls to the tank. Pre-pubescent groups of adventurous and curious boys were known to lead unsuspecting (or perhaps not) girls to the challenge of the tank; taunting, daring them to scramble up the walls and down inside onto the years of accumulated leaf litter to play “Doctor” and explore their gender differences. Older boys with more hormonally-driven motives would sometimes carefully prepare the tank with blankets and pillows, beer, and cigarettes, and entice their girls to the tank, hoping to use it for forbidden trysts and passion. Scheduling the tank’s uses sometimes became a problem. One could not simply hang out a “do not disturb” sign without guaranteeing that heads would appear around the top of the tank peering down to inspect what might be going on inside.
The tank was thus a neighborhood institution for youth of all ages and genders. Paths led to it from Harbor Road up around both sides of Fessler’s castle, and also half a mile through the woods from several access points on Bay Drive above. Everybody growing up in the extended neighborhood knew of it. Most parents did too, and every time they managed to intercept fragments of youth gossip and stories of nefarious activity at the tank, they rose up indignantly and insisted something definitive be done. But nothing ever was. A series of receivers, bank estate managers, and real estate management companies found themselves responsible for the un-saleable Fessler property. They paid for liability insurance, but without, in most cases, appraising the insurance agents of the tank problem.
But youth, as a generation or two rolled by, became more engaged with video games, rock music, cell phones, and text messages. Prowling stealthily through the woods to climb fences and scramble up old stone tanks no longer appealed. Even younger kids with little to do during summer tended to stay inside with their increasingly enticing electronic goodies.
The tank was thus gradually abandoned by its traditional clientele and turned over to nature. Its roof sagged and leaked a little more each year, the leaves inside composted down to rich organic litter, the fences rusted away, and vines and moss covered the stones. Bi
rds found many places to build nests. Wasps, mud-daubers and insects of all kinds loved the tank as it disappeared into its environment.
Then, Gino Salvatore discovered it in 2009.
Gino was an artist and architect, out of work. No sensible person would hire him because of his wild, fanciful, and impractical visions, and his reputation for being, frankly, impossible to deal with in most respects.
He could, however, be amazingly persuasive, indeed mesmerizing, to rich, older, women. For one thing, he was devastatingly handsome, a classic Latin lover type. Possessed of a silky baritone, he sometimes broke into Italian as if forgetting himself in the heat of a compelling artistic inspiration. The effect, under the right conditions, was powerful.
In July, 2009, Gino managed to get himself invited to the summer estate of Margaret Franklin, the recent widow of Dr. Albert Franklin, a noted Manhattan neurologist. The Franklin “estate” was a pseudo villa on the harbor shore just below the old Fessler’s castle, which, on the up side of Harbor Road, cast its baleful and deserted presence out over the harbor and several newer, smaller, but still substantial and exclusive harbor shore properties.
At the beginning of Gino’s second week in residence, Mrs. Franklin had business in the city and left him to entertain himself for the day. He was restless. The creative juices were building up in his soul, stirred partly by his carefully concealed contempt for the architecture of the Franklin “villa.” Fake styles of any sort outraged his aesthetic sensibilities.
At breakfast on the veranda – it was a beautiful day – Gino happened to look up and was struck by his view of Fessler’s castle. It was hideous, and architecturally even more contemptible than his host’s villa. It rambled over the hillside mixing one faux style after another, from Medieval to Italian Renaissance to Scottish Baronial. It polluted the visual landscape from all over the harbor and cried out for immediate demolition.
After breakfast, he got the basics from old Manny, Mrs. Franklin’s groundskeeper. Yes, the castle had always been there and empty for as long as Manny could remember, well before the Franklins built their villa and the rest of the harbor shore properties were developed. Nobody could do anything with the place. It was built solidly into the hillside, and was by now quite unlivable without extensive and prohibitively expensive remodeling and upgrading. Even tearing it down would cost more than the resulting bare and steep property would bring, despite the view and the tony neighborhood.
Gino could barely restrain himself and set off to explore the property. The huge, carved and blacksmith-banded oak front doors were chained and locked. Signs were posted everywhere warning of cameras, armed guards, and attack dogs, though the place was obviously deserted. There were some signs of half-hearted vandalism, but the windows were ornately barred and even the service doors were well-secured. Gino had no interest in exploring the undoubtedly execrable taste represented by the decaying interior anyway, so he made his way around the outside to the back. He climbed the hill above the spires, gargoyles, and castellated turrets. The site, with its commanding view of the whole harbor, took possession of his artistic soul. Could this whole hillside be refashioned into a major work of environmental art?
And then he stumbled on the tank, its fence rusted and falling down, moss growing on the stone walls between the tangle of vines that had taken over the whole thing. There was no sign of the old roof, which had fallen in completely. Gino had no idea what it might have once been or that it was in any way connected with the monstrous abomination on the hillside below. This was totally different. No criminally misguided architect had planned this. It was primitive – or even extra-human, archeological evidence of something mystical, profound, and pure in its unpretentious simplicity. An ancient and majestic structure that nature was in the process of devouring and returning unto itself, as nature was designed to do.
The spiritual vibes were overwhelming. The old tank affected Gino like a newly discovered Mayan site, an ancient, forgotten mystery shrouded by centuries of jungle. This is what should stand out grandly on the hill and overlook the harbor. Gino’s vision began to take form, like Creation on the first day.
The rest of the morning, he tramped all over the old Fessler property, familiarizing himself with terrain and views. Coming down for lunch at 2, he dug out a sheet of his sketching paper and began a map of the place, which he took back up with him after quaffing two glasses of Mrs. Franklin’s fine Cabernet, and gobbling an apple and a baguette with fromage. All afternoon he looked, explored, visualized and sketched.
When he picked up Mrs. Franklin at the train station at 6:06, he was gushing a stream of half Italian visions that would remake the whole harbor environment, give it an artistic focus by transforming the old Fessler property into a monument to the power of the environment. The centerpiece, the shrine, would be the ancient structure he had found deep in the woods high on the hill.
“But what about the castle itself,” she asked. “I’ve always thought it was an ugly old thing. Don’t you think it’s ugly?”
This elicited a passionate torrent from Gino. The castle, of course, must be obliterated.
“But as I understand it, old Fessler spared no expense in building the place, and they excavated deeply, and had armies of workers here for years pouring the foundations. Somebody told me once it would take a bunker-buster bomb to demolish the thing. And we couldn’t have it tumbling down on San Cristobel” (Mrs. Franklin’s name for her own villa estate). Gino might have been willing to countenance that, but couldn’t afford to say so.
“Well, then, it must be covered,” he pronounced. “The best way would be for vines to absorb and mask it. We must plant the most aggressive invasive species available, to swallow it whole. Nature should turned loose on it to attack and consume the vile thing.”
“But it’s all concrete and stone, Gino. Your invasives might cover it, I suppose, but it would take millennia for any biologic action to break down all that masonry.”
“Fine! Let the process begin here and now, as our statement for the future,” and here Gino switched over into one of his authoritative-sounding Italian diatribes, complete with elaborate inflections and gestures that left Mrs. Franklin both concerned for her safety – Gino was driving her Lincoln Town Car – and in the dark, since her Italian was limited and she had no idea what he was talking about.
“But Gino, that’s all fine, and I too would be glad to have the old place gone or covered up, but exotic invasives aggressive enough to do that would spread and take over the whole neighborhood. We can’t have that. I wouldn’t want your bamboo or Brazilian peppers or kudzu leaping Harbor Road and infesting my property. And the neighbors would sue. You know what they’re like. Why not just a huge canvas, artfully placed over the old castle and acting as a kind of apron or stage for whatever it is you’ve found up in the woods. That Frenchman – what’s his name, Christo? – does things like that, doesn’t he?”
This grabbed Gino. Yes! A canvas! Christo used acres of synthetic architectural fabric to drape landscapes or create fences. But a real canvas could be painted. Gino could see himself designing and painting a huge abstract mural which could make the message explicit, though of course in symbolic language. Draped over the old castle, it would direct visual attention to the focal point, that incredible squat cylinder. Gino still hadn’t conceived of it as just an old water tank.
The rest of the evening, he and Mrs. Franklin worked out the practical necessaries. Or rather she did. Gino was concerned mostly with the canvas, and sketched furiously, trial after trial. From his point of view, the biggest problem was deciding on the canvas design. It must convey his message, but in subtle tones that would be both gripping to the eye and accessible without being blatant. The surface would undulate, of course, as it passed over the irregular shape of the castle and the hill behind it. How could the art on the canvas work with the high and low points to contribute to the message?
Meanwhile, Mrs. Franklin wondered what would be involved in getting perm
ission to cover the old castle, the potential tourist attraction value, real estate business incentives, and possible grant funding for the project. She liked Gino. He was interesting and flattering to have around, and his project here was indeed exciting. But she was also realistic enough to know better than to commit much of her considerable fortune to his project. No, she argued, her children would not stand for that. The money would have to stay in municipal bonds and conservative mixed stock funds.
Many challenges emerged out of their mutual thinking, such as how to support the canvas across the long spans between the towers and pinnacles of the castle, the main roof ridges, and the hill behind. Hollows in the canvas would collect rain water. The weight of it would rip out the canvas. Either the hollows would have to be carefully planned and reliably drained or some kind of understructure would have to be built to give the canvas its own, hollowless, shape. Would the current owners or responsible parties, if they agreed to the project at all, allow the castle to support that understructure? Could they be persuaded to let the castle’s awkward high projections be removed? Would they insist on access to the castle under the covering canvas? Surely they had their own hopeful plans for the castle and the property despite the fact that generations of such hopeful plans had all failed.
Mrs. Franklin, after a strenuous day in the city and an evening of Gino’s intensity, retired at 11:30. Gino was a night person generally. His accumulating inspirations on this night in particular kept his steam close to the high pressure limit until about four, when he crashed on the couch, dropping his pen and latest sketch on the carpet.
Mrs. Franklin was naturally up and doing well before Gino. She gathered up the latest of his sketches and the earlier crumpled and abandoned inspirations, and made four or five phone calls to arrange a meeting with the current agent listing the Fessler property and the bank officers who were responsible for the property management. The former was so desperate to move the property that she latched onto the wild-sounding project enthusiastically. It would publicize and draw attention to the property. The bank contact was considerably more skeptical. But here too, the property had been moldering on the loss ledger for so long that he ultimately agreed to hear details. While Gino snored away on the couch, Mrs. Franklin checked with the local Chamber of Commerce and tourist bureau. Both were encouraging. Then she went on line and looked up contemporary environmental art projects all over the world and printed out documentation that might bolster the case for this one.
Finally, about 11, she decided to personally investigate the structure high above the castle that had so inspired Gino, who was still asleep. Mrs. Franklin was in her early sixties, and not a vigorous outdoors person. She was afraid of bees and other stinging insects, snakes, the possibility of falling and woods hazards generally. So she recruited Manny to come along.
At first he had no idea what they were looking for in the woods behind and above the castle, even after she showed him Gino’s latest sketch. It finally came to him, though, half way up the hill beside the castle, as he stopped to let Mrs. Franklin rest.
“Oh, I know! It’s the castle’s old water tank. I was up there myself as a boy fifty years ago. It’s still there? Well, yes, I guess it would be. Stone construction, after all. And he finds all kinds of artistic and environmental meaning in it? Ach. Each to his own.”
The tank, when Manny led them to it, did not particularly impress Mrs. Franklin, though she knew Gino well enough to see how it might grab him. Manny muttered and grumbled.
“It was covered at one time. Looks like the roof’s fallen in. There is a way to climb up there on the rocks that stick out, but the vines are so thick now you could probably climb them easier, I’d guess, if anybody cared. And you say he wants to make this a kind of beacon or lighthouse for the harbor? Mmhf.”
Gino was finally awake – groggy and taciturn but awake – when Mrs. Franklin returned. He gradually revived as she told him of her success in arranging a meeting with the principals responsible for the Fessler property, and the positive reception she had from others. When she told him that what he had seen was in fact the Fessler castle’s old water tank, it took him a few minutes of ranting in Italian to decide that this base nature just reinforced his initial impression of its special character. It was a Cinderella story, wherein something humble – a servant, in effect – ultimately outclasses its master. They had tried to hide it away up there, as the ugly duckling, until it emerged as elegant and totally in harmony with nature, unlike the gross and crudely ostentatious castle. When Mrs. Franklin happened to mention Manny’s misinterpretation of Gino wanting to turn the old water tank into a harbor beacon or lighthouse, he was stunned, but recovered quickly enough to appropriate the idea as his own. “Why, yes, I’d been thinking of that very thing, a light to the whole harbor. And it would only be right, after all those years hiding in the woods behind the monstrosity out front.”
So the project to rehabilitate the old tank to honor art, cosmic justice, and the environment, was off to a booming start. Gino, the artistic maestro, got to stay rent-free at Mrs. Franklin’s through the summer and into the early fall, as he settled on the design of the huge canvas. Mrs. Franklin found a fenced-off parking lot at a currently shut-down factory owned by the husband of one of her bridge club members. Once the canvas arrived, Gino was out there in the hot sun of late summer, day after day mapping out and filling in the huge mural. Whatever else might be said of Gino, he was a hard worker when inspired by his own visions.
Mrs. Franklin had contacts in her fashionable and wealthy community, and in the city, where Dr. Franklin had been a notable philanthropist. Instead of trying for a grant, she sold the ropes that would hold the canvas in place; each would be named after a donor. The bank and real estate people agreed that the attention stirred in the artistic world to the old Fessler place would aid its ultimate sale prospects. Lawyers for the bank worked out a deal with the attorney representing the non-profit Mrs. Franklin organized as a production company. They agreed that the property would be reserved for art, and not shown to prospective buyers for three years. The production company would agree to publicize the project in national and international art periodicals and arrange maximum exposure. After three years, the property could be shown, but the canvas would stay in place until a sale closed. The bank agreed that the highest projections from the castle could be removed temporarily, and a canvas support system could be attached and supported by the castle. The production company hired an engineer to work with Gino on the details of preparing the site and spreading the canvas.
By mid November, the completed canvas was in place and Mrs. Franklin arranged a grand opening for donors, the art world, and the press at her villa. It was an unusually mild and clear evening. Gino, deeply tanned and bursting with himself, took early visitors out into the harbor on Mrs. Franklin’s cruiser for the best view of his creation, which was indeed striking. As the sun sank, the tank light illuminated the whole harbor. (There had been some complaints about that from other harbor residents. The Coast Guard complained too. A final agreement on what hours the light could shine was still to be arranged.) Later, Gino guided guests by a whole wall of photographs documenting before and after and all the stages in between.
It was quite an event. The roofless old tank, still covered with vines and moss, and un-retouched except for the addition of its light, became a celebrity, honored far and wide. The local historical society affixed a plaque documenting its origins and functions. Low birth and undistinguished early decades were no hindrance to its accession to status and glory now.
St. Cecelia’s Beach
The beach at St. Cecelia’s State Park was always best in winter because it was reliably deserted. I didn’t care about sunbathing, swimming, surfing, beachcombing, or ogling the bodies. I came here for solitude, and just the beach ambience, whatever the weather conditions. St. Cecelia in winter could be cold, stormy, mild, sunny . . . anything was possible, even occasional snow and ice. It didn’t matter. The spi
rit of the place, when I had it all to myself, had calmed my stress level and comforted me through many trials, losses, and failures over the years.
The campground back in the piney woods was also reliably deserted in winter. The park ranger station was only open two hours a day to register campers.
I had to honk. The ranger had fallen asleep leaning back in his chair, his feet up on the desk, his mouth open.
“Day pass?” he asked, groggily.
“Camping. Three days.”
He looked at my ordinary mini-van. It wasn’t an obvious camper, with a high top or tent or cargo rack on top. I had frequently slept in it, though, lived in it for as much as a week at a time when reviving my ability to cope with a world that I often found alien.
“There’s no water,” he warned me.
I nodded. “Power, though, right?” That’s all I cared about.
“Yes. Ten dollars a night.”
The off season rate. I paid, cash.
“There’s nobody else. Pick your site and register it in the mailbox.”
“Thanks.” I drove in, and found my usual spot at the far end of the loop, actually at the far end of the little dead-end drive off the loop, the most isolated spot, the farthest from the toilets and bath houses, which of course were shut down for the season. There were a few porta-potties spotted around the camp.
I plugged in my extension cord, locked the van, and hustled out on the quarter mile woods trail to the dune boardwalk. It was already late in the overcast December afternoon. I’d have no more than half an hour to commune with the beach.
The trail needed maintenance. Pine branches swatted me in the face, and puddles soaked my shoes quickly. But the day was relatively mild, and still. Often, you could hear the surf crashing from my remote campsite, but today only the lightest breeze wheezed through the tall pines, and the ocean was at peace. I hoped to absorb some of that, without WiFi or even reliable cell phone reception. I had told nobody where I was going, and if anybody tried to reach out and touch me, they would fail. That was the whole point.
The sea might be at rest and the breeze weak, but salt air reached my nose while I was still well back in the pines. I stopped a moment to savor it. It was one of those smells that calls up all kinds of memories that aren’t memories, exactly, but impressions, déjà vus, urges, joys and fears. So much of my life had been shaped on or near the land/sea transition that just being here exhumed me, myself, concentrated and stripped down or filtered out.
The lines of dunes had shifted since last time, two years ago. They had rolled back toward the pines. Did that mean the beach had widened? Or had the sea eaten it away? Probably that. The distance between the dunes and the water’s edge was fundamental. If the water’s edge moved in, so would the dunes.
The boardwalk started as soon as the pines stopped. So did the signs with their prohibitions: stay off the dunes; protect the sea oats, fragile native grasses, and wildlife; no firearms; no alcoholic beverages; all animals on leash and to be cleaned up after; don’t litter; take out everything you take in. And so on.
I was taking in only a flashlight. No food or drink, no children, lotions, toys, or beach furniture, no reading matter, no electronic book reader, no camera, no cell phone or tablet. I had stripped away so much “civilization” I felt light on my feet, which hardly touched the weathered and splintery boardwalk planks. Sand covered those planks as I approached the dunes, but the boardwalk hand rails remained unburied enough to keep me headed toward the verge, where land and sea met.
Topping the dunes, the horizon opened out. There it was, the earth’s watery cover, treating the beach gently this evening. The tide – only a foot or two here – was out, widening the flat beach considerably. The high tide mark was at least 100 feet in from where the ripples now petered out into foam and sank into the sand. That sand was smooth as far as I could see in either direction, with hardly a break anywhere from seashells, flotsam, trash, seaweed, crabs, clam squirt holes, or even birds. There were a few sandpipers down the beach, scurrying along, racing the advancing and retreating swash. And here and there a gull stood placidly on one leg, probably lulled into lethargy by the sleeping surf. Not enough breeze this evening to make it worth lifting off or to allow soaring. Covering the sky was a solid gray cloud bank, darkening to the east. To the west, I could make out no trace of a sunset. These clouds were thick and in control of the sky and what light remained.
It was just what I needed. Almost nothing going on as far as I could see. Which, from the dune top, was quite a ways, out to where the sea dropped over the earth’s roundness and gray sea merged into gray sky. There was one ship, way out, but it was too close to the edge of darkness to tell what it might be, and too far away to make any difference even to me, hungry as I was for solitude. As long as I had the beach to myself, with no sign of current human habitation, my space boundaries were satisfied. Yes, far to the north, a gradual curve brought distant lights into view. But the population needing those lights were separated from St. Cecelia’s beach by a major inlet. They would not bother me.
I sat for a few minutes on the partially buried boardwalk handrail enjoying the comforting distance to everything but the quiet slap-slap of the nearby ripples as they died on the sand. It was so quiet. Hearing is amazing when it doesn’t have to compete with civilization. Every little squeak of the sandpipers – or possibly other, smaller birds I couldn’t see – registered clearly. The sounds, the distance, and the presence of the enormous sea, so ancient and eternal, so full of life, started to drain away my fussy little human concerns and merge me into a larger reality, like the sea itself.