Saturday, February 19, 2011

opening post

Near where I live is an artificial lake, artificial like all lakes in Southern New Jersey. It was created with the erection of an head-wall, typically where a rural road crosses a creek. The resulting swamp would have then been cursorily cleared of trees or the trees were at least cut off at water level. The stagnating, choleric pond then has a limited life span of one hundred years or so, before the accumulating detritus and plant matter restore it to the condition of it's origin. 
This particular one was established and owned by some Wesleyan/Methodist religious group, with an abundance of the surname Wilson. Cabins were erected around it's white cedar lined shoreline and equipped with outhouses. The leach-fields of it's crude septic systems hastened the small-scale ecological disaster of confined groundwater in a watershed that is mostly sandy delta.
It quickly became unfit for swimming and unhealthful for any other purpose, but continued to be used for such as it was ceded first to the county and eventually the state. In it's periods of near abandonment, it was ice skated on in the winter but it's relatively shallow depth and the heat of decomposing leaf litter, lily pads and their associated root systems, along with the root boles of the trees that once lined the stream that now forms the channel made consistent, safe freezes impossible. So the poor little "Wilson's Lake" was dangerous notoriously in that sense as well. Finally the hapless little stagnant pond became a receptacle for gray steel transformers or whatever those ubiquitous canisters are that are typically attached to power poles every where, discarded along with their polychlorinated biphenyl coolant by poorly supervised employees of the Atlantic City Electric Company. The reptiles and amphibians there are prone to tumors. 
Along the west shore as I have walked many times through the plots where quaint cabins once stood is a track-way, it weaves it's way through the long abandoned cabin sites. At its terminus is, the midden pile. The midden pile is a small scale refuse dump, a place sufficiently removed from the domesticity of the cluster of cabin sites to shield the summer vacation residents from the obnoxiousness of their own refuse. I have been with friends who will tarry there musing over antiquated condiment jars, rusted cans and cork topped bottles. I studied the wire key for opening a canned ham distractedly. I am unable to endure that place. I do not understand how the trees themselves do not pull up their roots and flee. I believe I feel the body of a ninth child, discarded among the litter, drowned moments after birth by a depression era mother unable to care for the first eight. It is, I think the living trees themselves imprinted with the shame and personal horror of the ignominious burial. Perhaps it is delusion that makes me feel the rising bile in the chest of a father, intoxicated to shield him from a guilt that will shadow him through the remainder of his intoxicated life. As his breath steams in "off season" December chill, He scrapes away refuse and labors to excavate a resting place for the cooling body of a newborn. I cannot prove this. I would not waste my breath or credibility speaking of it to anyone who might have the vaguest interest in proving it. 
I do not believe in "ghosts". I do believe that all life is not only connected but sentient. The DNA that we all share lends us community and ties us, one to the other sublimely. Nothing lacks consequence. I will make no assertion concerning whether these cumulative tragedies have impacted the place or something older and more odious has drawn the tragedies. But that living things can bear the imprint of events and that for the duration of those lives these events can be carried into future, I have little doubt.

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