“And then Larissa McKee changed the history of Springhill.
“She heard these stories about herself. She knew they weren’t true—so she wondered, what was true? She began to reason. She knew what no one else other than Otis knew—that she bathed in the spring in exactly the same way that the youthful-looking and long-lived men did.
“And she came forward. Not to defend herself against the scandalmongers, but to clear the brush away and blaze a path toward the truth—because she’d seen how enormous that truth was, how it could change everyone’s lives in a way they never even dared dream.
“ ‘The water,’ she said. ‘There’s something in the water at the spring.’
“At first everyone slapped their knees and howled. The goshdarned fountain of youth! What was the name of that crazy Spaniard who’d hunted all over the place for it? Ponce de León! Where was it supposed to be? Florida, right? Hell, no! It’s here in Gunnison County, Colorado!
“Larissa backed off from confrontation. She wasn’t out to be canonized or make converts. But of course she kept going to the spring with Otis. And pretty soon, she and Otis weren’t always alone there. The townspeople showed up on summer evenings, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone. They may not have been convinced, but plenty of them said to themselves, ‘Say, what if we’re wrong? What if she’s not crazy and there’s something to it? What have we got to lose? And look what we might gain! Let’s go there once a week.’ They came out to El Rico and asked, ‘Is that all right with you, William?’
“ ‘Be my guest,’ said Mr. William Lovell graciously.
“Still it took another eight or ten years before it fully dawned on anyone with half a brain that there was no other rational explanation. Larissa’s reasoning was ultimately seen to be simple, elegant, and inspired. William Lovell was the major convert. His three children were the proof, he proclaimed. One of them bathed in the spring and maintained his youth and vitality—two didn’t, and they aged. ‘Isn’t that a fact? And look what’s happening to the rest of you, the ones who are going there now and bathing. By God, look at yourselves! You’re barely changing.’’
“So in June of 1908 a town meeting was called, chaired by the mayor, my grandfather, Scott’s father. By then everyone had a barrel or jug of water from the spring in their home, but a committee was formed to investigate properly. It was called—with a touch of humor, I believe—the Water Board. ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this,’ folks said—’but let’s not tell anyone else yet. They’d laugh at us. Or worse.’
“Funds were appropriated. A bottled sample from the spring was taken by hand to Denver and analyzed there in the best hydrological laboratory. The report came back: the water was drinkable. Unremarkable. Nothing in it that shouldn’t be there.
“Since then, in the past eighty-eight years, that procedure has been repeated some two dozen times. Every time the Water Board hears of a new high-tech water analysis company that’s been formed, or any new microbiological instrumentation, we send off a sample of spring water for chemical analysis. In my time samples have gone to the Colorado Department of Health in Denver, to labs in Los Angeles, Los Alamos, U.T.-Austin, Washington, D.C. Of course we never tell the true reason for what we want done—we just ask for a chemical workup. Nothing ever turns up that shouldn’t be there. Maybe a tiny bit more n-butylbenzene and bromochloromethane than normal. Mild contaminants. Not significant. They’re found in the water supply of Carbondale and throughout the Ozark Mountains.
“I’m a chemist. You’re aware of that, but you never knew why, or how I got to be one. My education was paid for by the town. In the late forties Cornell had one of the best chemistry departments in the country. We always need a chemist here, to keep up with new technology. I’ll have a backup soon—Jed Loomis is getting his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Washington. One of the Pendergast girls is studying gerontology at Florida State. I told you that Oliver, whatever else he is, is a trained hydrobiologist—and Shirlene Hubbard has an M.A. in geology from the University of Colorado. We sent Oliver to seminars all over the country to study hydropathy, which is the curing of disease with water. A lot of it was crackpot stuff, but we have to know. We keep investigating. But we know no more now than we did ninety years ago. We may never know. If we did, if we could isolate the factor, everything would be different.
“That leads me to a vital decision made at the meeting in June 1908, and reconfirmed ever since. The decision of absolute secrecy.
“Back then, with the limited scientific resources available to them, the townspeople studied the spring. They brought in a big-time geologist from San Francisco. He was asked to determine the source of the water and approximately how much of it there was. Would it flow forever? The town told him they were considering starting a resort spa.
“This expert dug, and poked, and did a flow check, and consulted his charts and maybe even his crystal ball, and he said, ‘The source of this flow is separate from the aquifer—it’s an underground thermal spring. Might be mixed with snowmelt, or might not. It’s more shallow than deep. It could gush forever, or one fine day it could dry up. Its flow is not strong.’
“ ‘But do you think there’s enough water for a spa, a big public pool, like the one down in Glenwood Springs?’
“The geologist looked down his nose at these country bumpkins, and he said, ‘This is quite a long way for people to come in order to bathe.’
“ ‘Never mind that. If we open a spa to the public, if the water is used lavishly, under those circumstances would it last fifty years?’
“ ‘Good people, I doubt it,’ the geologist said.
“Then in 1909 the townspeople held another meeting. This kind of meeting has taken place every two, three, or four years since then. It’s almost always the same. Someone said, or says now, ‘I’m troubled. We have something that the whole world desperately wants. Do we have the right to be so selfish, to keep the secret to ourselves?’
“And someone else, probably a lot smarter and older and wise to the ways of mankind, always answers like this:
“‘Do you know what would happen if we told the world? First off, they’d call us crazy. But curiosity would get the better of them and they’d come and take a gander. Eventually they’d realize it’s true. After exhaustive tests they’d conclude, just as we did, that the chemical content of the water doesn’t yield to analysis—meaning that this is the only such finite pool known in the world. It can’t be analyzed chemically and then patented and duplicated elsewhere, and bottled, and sold in supermarkets in Boston and Bakersfield, Berlin and Beijing.
“ ‘But word will get out. This is not a secret that can be kept by more than a handful of closely knit people. And when the knowledge of what’s up here gets out into the world, whether by word of mouth, or newspaper articles, or radio, or on the Today Show, here’s what will happen, sure as God made eggs. Human beings will flock to Springhill not by the thousands, not by the hundreds of thousands, but by the millions. They’ll come by chartered jet, by bus, by helicopter, and on foot if they have to. They’ll come by the family and by the battalion, in such numbers that even these mountains that have been here nearly forever won’t be able to accommodate them. They’ll be camping in the forest, drilling in the rock and dynamiting in the snow, beating each other to death over every drop of moisture that falls from an aspen leaf. Chaos will be a pale word to describe what will happen to this part of the world. Government will have to take over in order to prevent anarchy. And that will be the end of everything, as it always is when government takes over.
“‘None of us here in Springhill will survive these events. Even if we’re not trampled to death by the hordes who crave life everlasting, our good life here will have been destroyed. And in time, since the aquifer is limited and the source shallow, the spring will run dry. Gurgle, gurgle, splat… gone! Despite their howls of anguish, everything the invading masses dreamed of will vanish before their eyes.
“‘By then the Elk R
ange will be a wasteland. Do we dare let that happen? Why?—so we can become rich? We don’t need to be rich. We want to live quietly and happily in our little Shangri-la, in our minuscule corner of paradise, as we’ve lived now for more than a hundred years, harming no one. We have what no one else in the world has, and we’ve cherished and protected it all these years. The fountain of youth! We’re unique. We’re blessed. We want to give our children what we have: not the patently impossible gift of eternal life, but the realizable gift of healthful longevity. And we’ll beg them to preserve and protect that gift. Pass it on as a legacy to future generations—at least, for whatever future the madness of this violent planet allows. Maybe for another century, maybe for eternity. Who knows?’
“So,” Sophie said, “the townspeople decided not to tell the world. They took an oath of secrecy. Each succeeding generation as it came of age has been sworn to that same oath. Springhill began to cut itself off from the other towns. ‘We’ll get big enough just by normal breeding,’ we said. ‘We don’t want new families. If the town gets too big, we’ll lose control of the secret.
“Back in the late twenties some union people from Denver arrived to organize the marble quarry and the coal mines. That was an ugly chapter in the town’s history. Folks told the union organizers to leave, and when they refused and tried to preach the gospel of the working class, our working class jumped on them one night over on Quarry Road—beat them up badly and sent them packing. The union gave up. ‘Let ‘em rot up in Springhill,’ the union organizers said.
“There’s never been a church here. That helped discourage people from moving in. The town developed a reputation—not undeserved—for being unfriendly to skibtails. I remember a sign on the road to Marble back in the fifties, which they said had been there since 1927. It read:
SPRINGHILL
INCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. POP: 282.
SPEED LIMIT, 5 MILES PER HOUR, STRICTLY ENFORCED
NO SALOON OR BAR
NO CHURCH
NO HOTEL
NO SOLICITING
NO CAMP MEETINGS ALLOWED
WATCH OUT FOR BEAR AND BOBCAT.
NEAREST AVAILABLE DOCTOR, 35 MILES
“Those were mostly lies. Someone had a sense of humor. Later they toned it down a bit—but not much.
“Meanwhile our marble sold well. It was used for banks, courthouses, monuments, mausoleums, city halls, schools, post offices, hotels. The Great Depression came along, and then World War II. Those were successive blows that a one-industry economy just couldn’t deal with. They didn’t need marble for submarines or atom bombs. In 1941 the Colorado-Yule over in Marble sold their facilities for scrap. The Springhill quarry had to close too, but we didn’t sell the facilities. We had our coal mines to live on—factories and homes still had to be heated in wartime. El Rico produced good-grade copper that was needed for rifle bullets. We tightened our belts a little. No one was rich, but no one was poor. We shared what we had. That became a tradition. People became one family—still are. Bound by their oath of the spring.”
Sophie stopped talking. She looked at him, took his hand, squeezed it, held the grip. “And there was a second oath,” she said.
He sensed the effort she was making to meet his eyes, not to waver.
“The water had to be kept a secret, that was clear, but even as far back as 1915 the people realized that it wouldn’t be a secret for very long if everyone in Springhill lived nearly forever. You told me once, when you were trying to explain to me some concept of the law: ‘Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.’ This was the reverse of that. Our people couldn’t let it be seen.
“Not that they believed that drinking the water of the spring would allow them to live to be Methuselahs. Some people wanted to believe that, but common sense soon told them it wasn’t true. The spring water retarded the aging process dramatically. But it didn’t do away with it. And in 1920 the coal mine blew up from methane gas. A few miners were killed. You could bathe in the spring all you liked, but you couldn’t avoid sudden death.
“William Lovell grew old. Never sick, though. He died with a smile on his face. So did Otis McKee, in the accident I told you about, and Francis Hubbard. Caleb Lovell, William’s son, began drinking the spring water at sixteen. He lived to be ninety-four, though he always looked thirty years younger. On a scuba-diving trip to Jamaica in 1953, Caleb’s tank ran out of air at a depth of a hundred feet. He had a stroke. He was buried down there at Montego Bay.
“Larissa McKee, who started ingesting the water at a younger age than anyone else, also grew very old, but by the time she died at the age of one hundred she looked and felt like an exceptionally healthy woman of, let’s say, sixty-five. An autopsy was done on her by our local doctor. It showed that her arteries were beginning to close up, and she also had some minor liver damage.” Sophie smiled. “I guess I forgot to tell you, she and Otis drank a lot of beer, and they both smoked Camels and a pipe. She might have lived another ten or twenty years before a fatal coronary or something else claimed her.”
Dennis interrupted: “Might have lived another ten or twenty years? What do you mean, ‘might have’? How did Larissa die?”
Sophie was silent for a minute.
“Voluntarily,” she said. “Larissa went voluntarily—as we all do. Or will do. Because we have to, and because we decide to. If we don’t have a stroke or major heart attack or cancer, or get hit by an avalanche like my first husband, or like Otis McKee by a car whose brakes fail, we live to the age of one hundred. A century. Enough, don’t you think? That was Larissa’s idea, and it became the key idea to the safe existence of the secret of Springhill. She started her mature life as a devoted sensualist. When she’d had her fill, she began to change: it was her wisdom and foresight which allowed this community to survive. First, she convinced everyone that the water would allow them to live nearly forever. And then she convinced everyone that ‘nearly forever’ was far too long—that ‘nearly forever’ would lead to disaster. She was the one who said, at one of those town meetings back around 1910: ‘If we live nearly forever, or even if we just live an unnaturally long time, the world will find out. We have to protect ourselves and our children from that catastrophe. We have to keep the secret, and guard against the invasion that would come if we didn’t.’ “ Sophie paused. “Dennis, we can’t be greedy.”
He looked at her; at last he was beginning to understand.
“It took a while,” she said, “and there was a lot of protest. Some people wept and beat their breasts … but they finally saw that she was right, and in the end they gave in. You can’t live a hundred and fifty years or more without the world finding out. Scientists and journalists demand to know the why and how of such things. They want to interview you and put you up there on the twenty-inch screen, or get you to endorse their brand of whole-grain bread and shake the hand of the president on the White House lawn and receive a plaque honoring the achievement. Centenarians aren’t as rare as they used to be, and getting to one hundred is becoming more common. But imagine if they found out you were a hundred and twenty! Or a hundred and sixty! And you looked seventy-five! And you could still ski the Dumps and ride a mountain bike uphill, and hike to 12,000 feet, and you had a full sex life—my God, you’d have a hell of a lot more than fifteen minutes of being famous! They’d hound you to your grave.
“And also we realized that even if you keep quiet about it, there are birth certificates, death certificates, IRS forms, passports, driver’s licenses that need to be renewed, Social Security benefits, Medicare—records galore. Everything we do has documentation. Our lives are exactly the opposite of private. Government doesn’t let you be. In Springhill we’ve learned over decades of study how to control all that. How not to be found out. That’s why the dates aren’t correct in the cemetery. It’s why we have home rule and deal with our own local taxes and records. That’s why so many of the men have the same names as their fathers. We make sure there’s always at least one doctor li
ke Grace to write out death certificates and file them with the state, and one dentist like Edward, who, if he has to, in an emergency, will get the records mixed up. One funeral home, and one registered nurse, as well as a few others trained by her, who are capable of administering the injection that people get—if they need it—on a day of their choice within a month of their hundredth birthday. It used to be cyanide. Now it’s potassium chloride.
“That’s what we do and how we do it. In each case we can manage the deception, we figured out, for a hundred years. Longer than that is too chancy. You might say, ‘Well, why not a hundred and five?’— and there’s no overwhelmingly correct answer. We simply decided on one hundred as a round number. A good number. A degree of deception to the outside world that we could deal with, that we could carry off with reasonable certainty.”
“Wait,” Dennis said, and raised his hand. “Look at my Aunt Jennie. There are plenty of people who live into their nineties now. Jennie might make it to a hundred. Or more. It’s not that rare in our time.”
“Jennie might make it to a hundred,” Sophie said, “but in what condition? In Watkins Glen that Thanksgiving your sister told me Jennie wore diapers, that she left pots of water boiling on the stove, that during the night her arthritis made her cry out from pain. Dennis, what good is living to a hundred and twenty, or even ninety-five like your Aunt Jennie, if the quality of your life fades and erodes—if you’re a burden to those you love—if you suffer? Do you understand that here in Springhill the man or woman who lives to be a hundred is in the prime of life? If we extended the departure to a hundred and ten or more, we would be found out, because at a hundred and ten we’d be easily as vigorous as a normal man or woman of sixty! Don’t you see? I tell you: we are blessed.
“So that’s the second oath we swear in that ceremony when each of us turns twenty-one. It’s an oath that we’ll depart voluntarily, and without fuss, at the mellow age of one full century. There’ll be a going-away party a little before that time, to wish us well. We call it the departure ceremony. Departure is the formal word we use for what’s essentially a voluntary death. A lot of songs and warmth and touching. Lots of laughs and reminiscences. And then we go. With dignity, surrounded by friends and family, and without pain. Can you realize how wonderful that is? What a fitting end to a long and decent life? How perfect?
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 24