One day, Chuck called and asked if I couldn't drive over to see his new home he was building and how much he wanted to see his old buddy, and so on and on. Time hanging heavy on my hands, as they say, I did just that. Following his instructions, I found the little-used dirt track leading off the highway somewhere over near Pawling, I think it was.      

     My jeep bounced along up the hill, the road getting worse and worse. Was I even in the right place, I began to wonder. Then a reassuring sight appeared before me in the Wilderness: around a bend, and suspended by badly weathered ropes, was a large pile of boards - hanging out in space from the limb of a large oak beside the road. The height of the pile off the ground - about four feet - was the clue that the pile had been secured together while still on a truck bed - and then the truck in all probability just driven out from under and on its way. This was an old Rhine strategm (recall moving day long ago back at Whatmore's Estate).

     I was on familiar grounds.

     Soon, I saw a pile of discarded... tombstones alongside the track. Mysteriously piled up out here in the deep woods. Onward! These were unmistakeable signs of an ancient truck in distress on this lonesome byway, and of a lone driver doing his best to keep abreast a developing situation... (Perhaps - most likely - around three a.m. of a dark and rainy night, lightening flickering eastward over the mighty Hudson River Valley... the headlights out, of course, to stop drain on the battery... and grunting and straining mightily to divest himself of these lithic markers to humanity's common end...).

     At last I emerged on top of the hill. Someone was apparently making modest efforts to lay stone foundation work for a home up here. They hadn't gotten far... Tools were scattered about. Sacks of mortar were stacked under a tarp. Little else, save for a broken barbecue grill, and a rather large and lidded tool box affair - like track walkers or highway workers sometimes have at their disposal.

     A lone figure was squatting at one end of the foundation - laying stones in fresh mortar. The figure did not at first say anything or even look my way. Finally it rose and ambled over...

     "Hi, Chuck..."

     "Howdy"

     "What's shakin...?"

     "Not much."

     With the niceties thus dispensed with, I was given a short tour of Chez Rhine. It was vintage Rhine - Chuck Rhine, that is. (There were significant differences, father and son). Chuck was spending most of his time here - alone. He lived in (!) the highway tool box - windowless, airless, dark - like one's own coffin, sort of. Nights he just - well - hopped in and pulled to the lid. Settled into his sleeping bag and dozed away till dawn. Kind of like the movie "vampires" always shown crawling back into their boxes at the sun's dawning, only here Chuck was - crawling out! He breakfasted on barbecued hot dogs on his grill. And he worked at his stone foundation.

     It was all rather austere to my way of thinking. And there had been problems of getting supplies and materials all the way up the hill (I had noticed). Worst of all - he had had a great misfortune that had set him way back: he had bought a very nice, professional mason's level (six foot) with which to check his footings. And it turned out that the vials in this level had been wrongly set so they gave erroneous readings!

     It took him a long time to figure out what was wrong - but he finally did. However, he had relaid the foundation so many times to get it level, that he had about used up his budget - and you could tell he was discouraged.

     I hung around a while. There didn't seem to be much to say or do. (No heavy lifting even). I noted some stone cemetery furniture scattered here and there in the grass - including several plot posts: the old kind that used to sit in the ground at the corner of the family plots, you know. Very much like hitching posts for horses they were...

     And so I left as the sun was setting towards the West. Some time after that (how long?) Chuck called to tell me that he had "given up" on his dream home and was moving on. He had simply walked away from it - abandoning tool house quarters and all, to the bank or whomever might stumble upon the place during a ramble in the woods. He added that if there was anything up there I could use - I was welcome to it, then he hung up - and was gone.

     Next weekend, I drove over again - this time with my son, now grown half to manhood and strong as an ox. We found the dirt track - the boards still swinging silently on their branch in the woods - the gleaming tombstones marking some unknown cenotaph in the Duchess County woods - and so to the top. There, with my son's assistance, I loaded one of the burial-plot corner markers.

     When we got home, I planted it upright in the ground out by our barn - as a hitching post for his sister's horses! Carved ornately in the gleaming white marble was the cryptic line... "No. 23". I wondered often if it might have been a companion piece to "Poor Little Willie...". It broke my heart to leave it behind when we moved this last time, though it weighed maybe 600 pounds and all and I couldn't take it with us. That's not the only strange thing I left behind either - above or below ground... but we must be getting on with our tale.