I got a million of 'em, Gang, a million of 'em ... and (for some strange reason) memories thereof come in swarms (like the Ort Cloud comets, as we are told) for apparently no known reason. (Actually, I think it is just 'tough growing old,' as 'tis said. And Lord knows the comets are old.. so there you are!).
Yesterday, I got all unhinged remembering some odd archaeological capers back in my youthful Viking-hunter days - and dispatched a couple of dispatches thereon broadcast to the lot of ya... Sigh... (Even wove in a tie to "current events" (DaVinci humbug) - which is my inheritance from many a year at workaday journalism and I know my long-gone mentors would be just so proud of me...Sigh again.).
Today's homily is rather more-in-the-same-vein: an "odd" occurrence which I'm sure has other explanations, etc. - but as it "fit the circumstances" so well there is always the temptation to wonder anew...
'Twas the Summer of 19 and 51 or thereabouts I would guess, and warm weather found me once again traipsing through the then-lonely scrub pinelands of the Mid-Cape area of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I was surveying the land at the upper extremities of Follins Pond, which is near Hyannisport (and we all know where THAT is: onetime "family compound" of the 'Chappaquiddick Kid' (those over 30 here will recall...) and other ill-starred members of his clan...) But in 19 and 51, the soft seawind murmured only in the pines and one had it all pretty much to oneself, as it were.
Follins Pond lies at the head of the Bass River, which flows southward a short distance to empty into Nantucket Sound. It was on the shores of Follins, mind you, that "we" had found a "Norse skerry" (according to F.J. Pohl, the eccentric old Viking scholar, whose eyes and legs I once served as during a short summer season or two...). "Skerries" were rock outcrops back in Scandanavia - along the shores of the fjords. Pohl had introduced me to the issue of "mooring holes" - holes drilled into the skerries of their native lands by the Vikings, using iron drills and hammers and whereby they moored their "dragon boats" to pins inserted therein. They (the holes, not the Vikings) always show bulged-equilateral triangular cross-sections (consequence of twisting the drill in the hand), and always were inclined past the vertical inshore (so as to provide a good "keeping" when the mooring lines came taught upon them...). Old World scholars knew them in abundance; they are well documented there.
Pohl insisted if I would go to Follins (he was even then in his eighties I suppose, and his days in the field were long behind him - but of conjuring up larking good adventures for young fellows to undertake with their better wind and untried muscles (I just remembered another! LOL) - he had no peer!) and insisted I would find a mooring hole there! First, I must fill you in a bit more.. (We'll get to the odd part by-and-by...)..
His readings (in the original!) of the "Flatyjarbok" (Flat Rock Book) - a chronicle kept I believe by Icelandic monks in the 13th century (some 300 years after the Viking Period events they chronicled therein...) were (still are?) reputed to be highly veridical recordings of exact data and passed-down oral traditions from their Viking forbears. Including their detailed (even) day-to-day sailing instructions for reaching Vinland - and further accounts of what befell them once there.
What caught Pohl's eye (back then) was one account which recorded how one group of Vikings around the Summer of 1003 had "....come down along a vast sandy beach which trended away southwards many leagues then abruptly turned for equally unknown long distances westerly. Near this bend in the shore were many shoals and foul waters." Without too much cavail, this "description" pretty well refers to the general area of Monomoy Point at the elbow of the Cape - graveyard of many later ships and the mariners who ran aground in them.
This Viking party (I believe there were three "dragon boats") followed this land west a ways when they "...came unto a brackish river flowing into this Sound from the land. The waters here too, were very shoal; they tried to enter this river, they said, but were grounded by falling tides, etc. Eventually they succeeded, however, and ascended the river a short ways where it came into a fair size pond. They moored here ... I think they said on the west side. Finding the prospects to their liking, they then set up a more permanent camp and built "booths" (said to be semi-subterranean chambers lined with logs and roofed with sod). In fact they wintered over here - and late in the year they drew their boats up into a gulley at one end of the pond to keep them safe (they had no real prior knowledge of the generally mild winters on the Cape and naturally prepared for protection from ice as they would have back in Greenland and Scandanavia as their own forbears did, etc.)
This party if I recall all this so long after now, was actually under the direction of one Thorfinn Karlsefini - a half-brother to the illustrious Leif Ericcson himself. Accompanying him was in turn a sister or half-sister of his, named Freydis - a gal for all seasons she - a real Viking warrior maiden - more anon! And a number of other associates and followers including two men known as the Finnbogi brothers - and all the latter's followers and attendants. Several dozen people probably in all...
Now following Pohl's suggestion, my buddy, old Bob Hurst - his whereabouts unknown these many years now - and I, went to Follins and pitched a camp in the woods one time. Next morning we rolled out, and surveyed the pond down below us (we were on a moderate bluff - west side as I think). And there down below us was a big rock outcrop - maybe a 100 feet or more offshore right into the pond - the only such rock outcrop for all I know on the whole darn Cape (which I once knew like back of my hand from crawling over it) - mostly sand outwash plains there and glacial till... not many rock outcrops.
It was - in fact - a skerrry (!) - and the only such around that entire perimeter of pond that could possibly look like such or have attracted the attention of Vikings!
Could this be the "skerry" indeed which Dr. Pohl had "predicted" - where the first whitemen ever into North America had first set foot on our Continent? Sort of the Plymouth Rock you might say of the Viking set... upstaging Columbus, Miles Standish and all the rest of the crowd by several centuries? Our hearts beat faster...
We went down the slope and it was decided that I should strip naked (we had no swim suits but there was no one around - though the area today is completely over-run and overbuilt with houses, etc. -( indeed one builder's sign last time I was there referred to it as "Viking Landing"... Sigh) and I should then (with my Mother's Brownie Box Camera - borrowed for the occasion) undertake to swim and/or paddle out to the rock and take a look-see. Bob would hold the fort back at camp...
And so, like Leander breasting the Hellespont, I plunged into algae-choked Follins and made my epic dog-paddle trip out to Pohl's skerry. Once there, I pulled myself up on the rock, shook off the clinging bits of rockweed, etc. and set about a minute examination of the skerry surface. (It was quite a large outcrop - I would guess maybe 10 by 20 feet or something like that... I don't know.) What I do remember is that suddenly there before me - at my feet - was a hole - about an inch or so in diameter - showing a bulged, equilateral triangular cross-section as I stared down into its black recess - and withal, greatly weathered and worn: individual grains in the rock showing out in relief (weathered) since the long ago day whenever that hole had been drilled! Drilled by human hands! Jeezul! Was I looking at a "Mooring hole" made by Tenth Century Viking explorers to our Continent here? Was I the first (white) man since to ever stand here in this place - and even faintly aware of what I was looking at: the spot - the very spot! - where the very first Whitemen into the New World may have stood?
Heady stuff, that! Even at 23 - 24 yrs. of age...
So, with a feeling akin (was it Napoleon?)...that "...ten centuries look down upon you" as he said to his army assembled at the foot of the Sphinx - whatever - I focused on the hole with Mom's box camera... and backed slowly up (and kept backing....) to compose my picture. You guessed it! Like the classic photographer's joke where the guy looks in viewfinder and backs up and up and up - and right over edge of ten-story building trying to compose his "subject" in lens - I backed right over the edge of the skerry!
Down I went! Kerplunk! Into about maybe three - four feet of water - one hand (my left) extended below me to break the fall - the other extended out full to the heavens with Mom's box camera - to be saved at all costs!
I came up spluttering. The box camera intact and dry: it never dipped below the waves! But... my left wrist was spouting blood something terrible! You see, I had driven it hard into a bank of oyster shells which lay all around the base of the skerry - and laid open my wrist real bad...
Jeezul!
(I pause tonight, sip my bourbon - and look at my left wrist once again: there as affirming my story, I behold faint criss-cross scars of this venture - still there after all these years and testimonial to fact I relate the truth here!)!
I found my feet, steadied, drew a breath ... and hollered! "Bob!" "Bob!" "Help!" The words echoed out and up and were lost in the pine trees on the bluff... Silence. Finally a return shout:
"What's the matter?"
"Damn!" I shouted. "I fell off the friggin' skerry here, and cut an artery in my wrist! I got my mom's box camera I got to bring back safe! And I am a 100 feet offshore, naked, and standing in oyster shells! What shall I do?"
To my dying day I will remember that faceless sound that drifted back down from on high - lost in the pines on the bluff:
"Punt!"
I made it back to shore. Bob bound me up. Got me into jeep. We drove around looking for help. Wound up in ER of "Mid-Cape Hospital" as I recall... wherever and whatever that is. Sawbones fixed me up - bad wound: take pills - get your local doc pull stitches in ten days, whatever. Then: "You some of them college fellers, right - what's looking for the Vikings up here?"
Answer: "Right!"
We slept that night in dew and damp and cold and leaves - my old WWI pup tent our only shelter - by morning my arm was swollen double size: the 19 and 51 Field Season closed therewith -and we broke camp and departed.
We haven't got to the odd part yet (despite your presumptions to the contrary). Pohl was ecstatic over the 'mooring hole' of course. There was more. He had gone on to "predict" that there must be a gulley (or traces of one) around the perimeter of Follins Pond. (The Massachusetts Archaeological Society Field Parties reported there was one such, indeed!) Pohl then "predicted" ... "If you will excavate there, you will find ancient ship's shoring timbers that outline double-ended vessel of about 75 tons burthen, and it will have been drawn up there for the winter." This is where the Karlsefini party hauled its dragon ship!
So they did. And they so-found! (Jeezul!)
Unbelievable! The "test of science", right? You predict - and then you go there and look. If you find... Voila!
The basking was short-lived. Guy shows up: "What you got here is Pinky! Where they hauled a Pinky!"
(Sigh). Those taking notes in back of hall can go to restroom. I am going to pour another bourbon - and continue the lecture. Dinner is on the way (direct Naomi quote).
Intermission!
Well, what this guy brings to party is "fact" that Colonial fishermen used "pinkies" ( a unique double-ended sailing fishing boat of the times - I used to see historic rebuilds and reconstructions of same out in Long Island Sound when I sailed there...) in and around the Colonial waters of Cape Cod. "Came the Revolution" (the American one, this time) and the wily Colonials used to dry dock their "pinkies" each winter in obscure gulleys and hollows along the New England shore to hide them from maurauding British men-o'-war, whose parties used to come ashore and try to burn them where they found them....See various tales thereto of my HYPERLINK "http://bwpowell.com/rose/roseindex.html" http://bwpowell.com/rose/roseindex.html
Monkey wrench in the gears! And later, a radiocarbon date (in those days, very new and iffy technique), came back that the C-14 date of the ship's shoring timbers at Follins was indistinguishable from "a control pine cut at New Haven 1859" - or some such damper as that...
Sigh.
Now... back to the Sagas! LOL!
This part is neat! The "Flatyjarbok" records among other observations, that Freydis (remember her?) came one day to half-brother Thorfinn, leader of the group, and said that the Fi nnbogi brothers had been (well - stuff like this as it were)... "...pinching her butt as she strode about the camp and all such stuff as that, and leering at her betimes and so on. And if he were half a man (Thorfinn, that is) he would put a stop to this and that would be that!
(One wonders a bit about Freydis - for the Icelandic Sagas go on to relate that Thorfinn's bull (whom he had also brought along out to Vinland for the occasion) was put out to pasture in this new-cleared land. And that the Skraelings (a dusky-hued race of inferior beings who inhabited these woods -and were wont to alternately trade, steal, and attack the camp (with piercing screams )...."Skraeling" is Old Norse for "screamer") were terrified of this creature and often spied on it from the woods..... Do make one wonder, no?....
Anyhow, on one such occasion, Freydis - donning her armor (but perhaps not all of it?) is recorded in the "Flatyjarbok" as having strode forth one morning in conical hat and all (perhaps with little else?) towards a threatening bunch of "Skraelings" - to whom she then "...smote flat upon her bare breasts full hard with her sword "... at which the Skraelings - aghast at such display! - immediately left off their attack and departed for parts unknown!
(I am not making this stuff up!).
Back to the Finnbogi crowd...
Thorfinn (perhaps as all males when endlessly importuned by shrews in their midst) then called the Finnbogis to account. He bade them gather their arms and men together and depart at once - to a pond located right above Follins - today called Mill Pond, in fact. This they did and they built new booths there, (the Finnbogis) and settled in to wait the winter out.
Or so they thought.
But Freydis was not satisfied.. (Oh! the trials one must bear with a shrew in the house - or the booth, as it were. Whatever).
And so the "Flatyjarbok" tells us (told Pohl) that ...one fine morning Freydis again donned her armor and summoning such of Thorfinns followers who would accompany her, marched through the woods to this pond (MIll Pond?) and taunted the Finnbogis to come out and "fight like men". The Finnbogis - in their underground lair - heard this, and true Vikings as they were - they sallied forth to do battle. Alas! they had to issue forth from their "booth" one-by-one through the narrow entryway - and just outside was Madam Freydis - the Valkyrie from Hell - and she smote off each head as it appeared. Then to top it off, the Sagas relate, they fired the booths into the bargain and burnt them completely up...
Sigh.
Thus the Finnbogis.
And the Ages rolled on...
Flash forward now, Gentle Reader. Here comes (at last!) the odd part. Really. It is now 19 and what maybe - I don't know: many years later. Bob Hurst has gone where the transient archeo types go - wherever that is. I alone, like Ishmael, am still upon my "Vision Quest" here for the elusive Vikings. I am back again on the Mid-Cape. I am at Follins Pond! I barely recognize it! Houses everywhere! Settlements! Gated communities! The works! Barking dogs, screaming kids! Obviously "progress" with a capital P...
A guy there I knew loaned me a rowboat. Alone, I rowed desolutely toward the upper end... Here I found a culvert, hidden 'neath overhanging Scuppernongs - maybe Concords - what I know anyway? - Heavy and laden with grapes. It was late in summer. I pushed into the culvert and a few bold strokes sent me through the lead - and out into another world! A wholly "new" pond - one we had never visited before. "Mill Pond" so-called - smaller, more private - and unlike now tumultous Follins which I had just left other side of the road, still largely undeveloped. Sylvan, Untouched.
As I drifted out across its surface, through the lily pads, I saw an old guy standing on the shore - in the woods - regarding me. He hailed me. I replied - and rowed over to him. "Howdy," says he. (Pause) "Bet you might be one of them college fellers up here a-lookin' fer the Vikings, right?"
"Right..."
He stood there - alone - right at the water's edge. Edge of the pond. Nice old guy. Maybe even 70 years old. Maybe. Young'rn me right now... but what the heck...
I rowed in near him - maybe only ten feet out. Drifted silently. No breeze. Bugs hummed in the vines. The Scuppernong vines whatever they were.
Then he began out of nowhere. "Lived around here all my life."
I said, "That right?"
He said, "Yep, my grandaddy had a farm right over there" - waving toward other side of pond. "He was a farmer alright. (Pause). We kids now we had to get charcoal for him from the charcoal pit. He had a blacksmith forge you know. (I hadn't known) Fixed everything for everybody."
"That so?," I said. (This was all before my blacksmith days you see: http://bwpowell.com/blacksmithing/blacksmithing.html ) So you see, at first the mention of charcoal meant nothing to me...
"Yep. Used to dig it right out of the ground over there - prime black charcoal. Good stuff."
I thought to myself: "Charcoal? Why on earth (or "in" earth) as it might be, would there be charcoal below ground here?"
I asked him.
"Dunno," he said. "No one never figured it out actually. All gone now. Long time ago."
I thought - and into my mind came an image of ancient chaos and the Finnbogi's "booths" going up in smoke alongside an unknown pond in ancient Vinland - along with what was left of the Finnbogies - once. Long ago...
"This charcoal spot," I said. "Do you think you could show me where it is?"
"Kin show you where at it was, " he said. "Like I said, all gone now. Long time ago. We kids dug it up all long ago. Granpap he burned it in his forge. Nothing there now. Anymore. Nothing."
Odd. Real odd, to my way of thinking. Monomoy Point. The shoals thereby. The Bass River flowing south - as the Sagas said. The only skerry in Follins - with an ancient drilled hole. And now this - the last remaining, "hidden" pond - Mill Pond - and it with two big, onetime spots or places in the ground where the (unquestioning!) locals had dug charcoal once for a smithy's forge...
Odd, no? Very odd. To me, anyway. The bugs hummed. The scuppernongs dipped almost into the water: the Vikings name - Vinland - meant "land of vines (or grapes)". Indeed, one of their party, one Stryker - a German - is said in the Sagas to have made the discovery of grapes himself and showed his fellows the route to wine (their preferred beer being long exhausted)...
The sun was lower down now. Time to go. I bid my erstwhile informant goodbye - he waved and vanished into the woods. I rowed silently and reflectively back through the culvert into busy Follins Pond.
I have never been back.
bernie