The Water Lot
We’ll never see the likes of our neighbor Tink again: men from this part of the world who went to work full-time in the woods or on the farm just out of eighth grade, laboring by muscle power alone, and women – to whom the term housewife seems ludicrously inapt – who kept their families and hired help and chickens all fed, the houses warm, clothes made and repaired.
We lost Tink four winters ago. He was 97.
Stories were the common currency in lumber camp, kitchen, and barn. Tink, who began logging at 13 years old and weighing 108 pounds, blessed our family with a lot of those tales.
I’m thinking today of a place he called the Water Lot, where early citizens sought a way to supply the village. The lot lies at the base of a very sheer incline, and the descent and ascent make for the most strenuous nearby hike I know. Depressions still show down there in the bowl, chopped with mattocks and wedges from the limestone cap in the late 19th century, even before our old neighbor’s time.
Along with a few lengths of lead pipe, the holes are all that’s left. The effort was abandoned, according to what Tink learned as a boy, after very little water was discovered, and such as there was no good, reeking of iron and sulfur. Same way Hell smells, pretty likely, Tink said with his trademark rogue’s half-smile.
It’s worth a detour to note that the water source they did eventually find lies high on a hill five miles from town, and that local men got together to dig six foot-deep trenches from there to the village and to each of its houses, all in the summer and early autumn of 1915.
Sometimes it’s emphatically clear to me that I’ve never worked hard, even when I’ve had what I thought were bone-wearying jobs.
What is gone, like our ancient neighbor’s archaic diction, like those meager excavations – whatever’s faded, failed, or derelict – may turn picturesque with time. Consider, say, Roman or Mayan ruins, the Temples of Angkor Wat.
No one, of course, will arrange travel excursions to the Water Lot. It’s not on so grand a level, except to the tiny number, maybe me alone, who love it precisely for being so remote and hidden.
Few ever stoop to inspect those muddy holes apart from some hunter or animal, perhaps a moose in spring who sniffs at some paltry puddle, then ambles on to the freshet on the sidehill. However ungainly the beast is, it has some elegance there.
Of course, there is my own construction, as is the moose.
Even into my early sixties, I’d scamper down to the lot and hike up again at a pace that stuns me in retrospect. At 80, I pause for caution at every outcrop going down, and the same for respite coming back. There’s some advantage to this pace in that I sometimes notice things more thoroughly, or I hope so.
But just now I’m recalling something inexplicable. Not long ago, headed downward, I was sure I heard a cry in the hollow, a seemingly human one. A surge hot as solder shot through my soul. Near-perfect silence followed, hardly interrupted by whispers of breeze in the understory. That quiet unnerved me above all – can I put this adequately? – because it distilled the prior sound. No, I can’t find words to explain myself.
I continued even more warily for a while but in due course I puttered around the Water Lot for half an hour, always with that eerie feeling that someone might be watching. From one edge to the other, however, I found no evidence of struggle or blood or human presence of any kind.
I sat on a windfall spruce, trying to make my mind as empty as one of those forsaken pits. Yet I had no defense against the notion that the awful sound had come from somewhere deep within me, perhaps in protest of a pain whose meaning gets clearer every year.
I come to the Water Lot to bring back Tink and a few others like him. But even if unawares, surely I’m also searching – as futilely as the old timers did for water here – of a younger self. Maybe he’d put up a more vigorous fight against becoming a ruin himself, a scattering of relics that unknown successors might find.
Suppose they did, though. They’d fetch back nothing sublime.