I call this one "What Homer Forgot To Tell Us..." And I take my inspiration from the blind bard's all-encompassing list of details and minutiae that befell one of his greatest folk heroes (old Odysseus, as his fellow Greeks knew him or Ulysses among the later, literate Romans). What fell out on his famed 10-year return ("The Odyssey") from the spectacular send-up that he and his fellow Greeks (and more recently, we know, Brad Pitt) had pulled on the sleepy Trojans. Circe the Enchantress, Polyphemus the Cyclop who ate both men and sheep for breakfast, Scylla and Charybdis and the song of the Sirens, etc. etc. All put down there in verse and has entertained - and enlightened the more enlightened - down through thousands of years.

But Homer missed a big one...he missed one detail. For sure, for sure, good buddies.

For one of Odysseus' stops assuredly (on his way back to claim his kingdom) was... Southern Connecticut! Yep, by Jinkies, and in the following passage, I shall set Homer right, and thus have contributed my bit to the history of Man...

It all began one day when I received a phone call from (Dr.) Fred J. Pohl - the celebrated Viking scholar and literacist. Dr. P lived in Brooklyn - and I, at the time, southern suburban CT (Fairfield County to be exact). We have met Dr. P. previously (earlier tales here).. He was sprightly, animated little old goat of a guy - erudite beyond words - and full of "whatever and vinegar" as the saying goes. He was even then in his eighties - as also previously noted.

As usual, he was spluttering with excitement over the phone (sure tip-off that Fred had run on to some new "fact" in his endless mining of obscure tomes in the NY Library and elsewhere...)

"Bernard Powell," he rapped out in his crisp, no nonsense little voice (he always called everyone like that: both their first and last names...). "Bernard Powell! I have discovered the most wonderful evidence that the pre-Homeric Greeks may have visited your state! A previously unknown "site" has come to my attention near New Haven - just north of you a bit".

"Now a small party under my direction is planning on driving up there tomorrow - and I want to stop and pick you up to accompany us as well. (He paused briefly while I turned over this fantastic revelation in my mind...) Then...

"Can you please be out alongside the Merritt Parkway tomorrow morning about 4:30, and with a stepladder, please? We will see you and pick you up! "

Then he added that his "party" themselves were bringing climbing ropes, field gear, notebooks and everything else we might require. Indiana Jones was yet a long way into the future... but the whole thing smacked of an early version of the Temple of Doom sort of adventure...

Greeks in Connecticut? (Why, we didn't even have any "...wine-red seas...") Indeed!

And why the climbing ropes?

I did however retain enough presence of mind to blurt out..."I really would like to go with you all, Doctor, but if I were to stand out alongside the Merritt Parkway at that hour of the morning with a stepladder by my side, I am afraid the State Troopers would beat you to the pickup!"

He took my meaning at once, and quickly said, "Oh, that's alright. Forget the stepladder! It would prove handy but we can do without..."

And thus I was entered on the roster of the strangest field party I ever fell in with. An early supper and early retirement... and I was in my assigned roadside place at the named hour...

It was a large old touring car of some kind I think - big old sedan whatever - with NY plates. I squeezed into the already mostly full back seat. There were five or six others - most had dark stocking caps pulled down to their ears and dark, bulky clothes on...two guys were asleep in the corners of the rear seat. I was glad I had foregone the stepladder: I'm sure it would have clinched it for us all in case of a "routine traffic stop". But no such ill fortune befell us.

Dr. P. was up front rattling off a mile a minute about this spectacular find. After all these years, I find I cannot quite recall all the specifics of how it had come to his attention. I wish I could. Dr. P, whose fame was spreading, had had early articles about his Viking theories in the Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere (actually how I ran on to him, in fact) - and he had "informants" all over the place. College kids, naturalists, assorted crazies and what not - kind of like a sub rosa CIA net or something. Rather mysterious.

He had branched out naturally - as do all who follow this sort of thing - into what you might call "PreColumbian Contacts Generally". The Vikings were just a subgroup here...

"Someone" had seen the site - or something. Much of it was hearsay however, and there were fantastic and isolated details: a running Greek-key embellishment was carved into a long stone ledge; a virtual "King's Seat" or throne carved nearby - with fluted armrests no less! - chiseled right out of the living rock... griffin's heads, "Doric Columns" - mind-blowing stuff...

We turned off the Parkway somewhere up there - maybe Orange St. Exit - I'm guessing. Been a long time now - well over 50 years - and I have been gone myself from the Nutmeg State some 15 years or more... We headed down to the shore... the site was "near the head of a marsh - in a big stone ledge that came down through the woods there..."

To my query did the Dr. have a map - maybe even a USGS Quadrangle topo - the answer was "No" - never use them. I suggested such a map would prove helpful - perhaps letting us find a "first ledge" inland from the marsh. Blank stares. They were largely literacists and these finer points were lost on them. The road petered out (in the wrong place). Waving marsh grass grew around us. Denser woods up beyond... Seaward of the marsh expanse, the sunlit waters of the now dawning day over Long Island Sound sparkled and shown.

It was decided we would "split up" and search. The Dr.'s word-of-mouth hints to be our only field guides. The rest, encumbered with their climbing ropes and other paraphernalia went off up parallel to the marsh; I struck out rather inland for a distant grove of trees. I had not gone far when off through these woods I spotted the first rise of rock - a long low ledge of old metamorphosed schistose rock so familiar to me from my long years of searching for overhangs and "rockshelters" in these very same ledges. I scrambled easily up to the top and wondered if my companions were maybe busy driving pitons before them as they labored inch by inch up these old ledges...

I came out on top, as I said - and there before me was the resplendent mowed lawn - and garden - of one of the grand old mansions along the Sound - itself a classic old English half-timbered structure with leaded diamond windows and steep-pitched roofs at the head of the long sweep of lawn. The kind of thing duplicated 8 or 9 miles away across the Sound on the other side: the famed "North Shore" of Long Island - everything reminiscent of the Great Gatsby era, when many of these grand old estates had been built.

The garden was in bloom - beautiful - and near its center stood a garden upright of some kind - on top of which was a stony looking object - I could not quite make out at this remove. I ambled idly over - and soon saw that it was a stone head - a carved stone head in classic Greek style (or Roman). Like the ancients made anyway... "Nice object" I thought. Wonder where they bought it?

"Roman head," said a voice at my elbow. I whirled around. It was the gardener/caretaker himself and he had seen me crossing "his" land...

I begged his pardon, introduced myself and said, "Yes, it is a nice head and looks well here in the garden."

"Missus found it years ago," he said. "So I set it up here for her. Better'n one of those durn reflective globe things they all want nowadays."

I agreed heartily with him - and thinking she must have found it on one of her European junkets or somesuch (the rich are very different from you and me, as the old saying has it), I asked him where this was. Italy maybe?

All he said was, "Down below."

"Down below?" I thought. Down below what? An atavistic tremor was starting down from the nape of my neck.

"Down below the ledge there. Where you just come up. (then) "The old tombstone makers place..."

"Tombstone makers place ...?," I half-asked - my voice cracking...

"Yep. Years ago. They used to come up here from the Monument Works you know. Clear over to North Branford... somewhere I guess. Always was bunch of 'em down there pounding away..."

(Then) "Didn't you see their stuff on your way up?"

"It's still possible to see traces of what they did here and there" he continued - "Up more maybe that way (pointing) closer to where the ledge dips down toward the marsh... Not much left now. No one goes down there anymore..."

The ripple reached clear to my gut now.

I bid him well and set jauntily off in the direction he had indicated - more toward the lower marsh end. Soon I was back in the trees and descending along an overgrown path - when I heard voices - excited voices and many exclamations. Not far off. Not far at all: I came into a sort of glade at the edge of the marsh, but still in the shade of the trees: there was the rest of the gang. They had found it!

The only spot in the New World where Ionian Greeks had perhaps once set foot! Indeed, it bore a strange resemblance to a lost temple-maker's delirium here - for here and there about the glade in under vines and fallen logs and overgrown with mosses and encrustations on the ledges were traces of the stone carver's art gone mad: interlocked Greek keys no doubt. More than one, in fact. Doric pedestals, Ionic columns, long flutes in bedrock, rosettes in bands and panels on the blank, staring ledge walls. Best of all - Dr. P. himself was sitting in the "King's Chair" -his arms outstretched on the "fluted arm rests."

"Bernard Powell!" he said. Triumphantly. "What do you think of this?"

At first, no one would listen to me. And then one or two did and they all turned to me. But disbelief was followed by a sort of "let's kill the messenger" sort of attitude. Finally, resignation and acceptance. No Greeks. Just Nineteenth Century tombstone journeymen - learning of their trade is all.

We hiked back to the car mostly in silence. The climbers' ropes had not even been uncoiled. The trip back down the Parkway was uneventful, too. And mainly in silence.

They left me off at the same spot where I had joined them so much earlier in a day that dawned brightly - but now was turned rather gloomy and solemn.

I don't think I ever saw or heard from Dr. P again after that. He died years ago, of course. The search for Vikings in New England, which actually has roots long before my day, received a kind of body blow with the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland many years later. New England, with maybe more eccentrics per square mile than the rest of the country (and certainly more Yankee Sea Captains in an earlier era) has always been home to spectacular "odd ball" antiquity finds (no few being traced to lost or purloined items from those same sea captains themselves - thus the South Sea heads, the Chinese coins, the Mayan pots, and all the other wonders in the literature there). Not to mention the Newport Tower, the Deptford Knight, and the famed Pattie's Caves up in New Hampshire... Or coming down to most recent times - the purported readout of "Oggam" inscriptions on rocks and ledges where plow marks and other "natural" features have come to support a whole "Mystery Cult" in its own right - much of this at the hands of the also-eccentric Dr. Barry Fell once of Harvard, etc.

But the Greek Stone Carver's site down near New Haven finally cured me of this whole will-o-the-wisp search for traces of immediate pre-Columbus cultural contacts and evidences, and I moved on more fully into the mainstream search for and study of the prehistoric Amerindian cultures.

I have never really regretted it - but now and then - as here - I recall some of these escapades and so share them with you!

Good Digging!

bernie