Prologue…

Once, at the end of WWII, I had a furlough to Paris. On the wall of a gallery hung a sort of surreal painting by a Frenchman: school children circling a Maypole in a schoolyard - laughing and holding hands. Their bombed school lay in ruins behind them. In a cutaway view just beneath their feet, the artist had shown the decomposing body of a dead German soldier, buried in an unmarked grave just as he had fallen.… I have never forgotten that picture. Nor a grave very like that I found in a German barnyard once. The artist had titled his picture "The Dust is Whirling in The Dust."

THE LIMO is on time. Four a.m. (Just ten days and a lifetime ago). The warm Florida pre-dawn engulfs us as we stumble outdoors with our luggage. My runaway teenage granddaughter with the rows of studs in her ear - chooses now in her colossal immaturity, to make a statement of how mature she really is, by materializing out of the dark at 3:30 a.m. Gracing us with her presence, one presumes, to travel north for her grandmother’s funeral. Perhaps someday I shall tell her about Darwin’s Tip - artfully hidden now by her ear studs - which doth mark the beast in us all… Perhaps I will. Perhaps not.

Lynn - my stepdaughter - has forgotten to print the airline tickets (some wizardry of "do-it-yourself" she has picked up "online."). How can one forget to print one’s own tickets? She runs back indoors. The driver frets, the granddaughter pouts, I am just starting the obligatory Florida day’s sweat… Soon she emerges again, slams the house door behind her, and hops in. We are off.

An hour later we cross the great Tampa Bay Bridge… the flesh-colored lights on causeways and fishing piers like strands of pearls on the waters to left and right. Soon we are at the airport. We pile out - to find Lynn has us at the wrong airline. Neither she nor I are thinking too clearly after this past week: her mother - my wife - has just died. We hastily regroup and check in at the proper desk. An officious bureaucrat swabs out the shoes of a guy ahead of me, and the swabs are smelled by a machine … Sometimes I think I have lived too long.

Soon we are airborne.

At LaGuardia, we are joined by our (step)grandsons… one flying in from the West Coast, the other up from Georgetown U. In a rented SUV, we all drive north up I-95 to Stamford - the old "hometown" - though none of the family lives here anymore. Just the last gravesite in the family burial plot, and now it is to receive its final resident…

I have not been back in 20 years…passing through Greenwich on the way, we go right over one of the first archeological sites I ever found and excavated hereabouts, so I stop and try to find the spot: cornfields and open marshes are long gone: expensive homes now cover the land… I can hardly find a landmark to orient myself. (http://bwpowell.com/archeology/indianfield/field4.html)

Next day we meet the funeral director. Millie was Jewish, so it is to be a Jewish funeral: details must be finalized. I have asked Lynn to handle the religious "loop" here, as it would be rather unseemly for an agnostic such as myself to be interfacing somehow with all these rabbis and cantors. Sure enough - soon there is a dispute - Millie should have been buried "sooner". But Lynn (a clone of her mother) is more than their match - pointing out that it was all well and good in Old Testament days when everyone lived a stone’s throw apart in a small village, for all to gather together posthaste: but the reality of the matter (she states forcibly) is that in today’s world (where shoes must be sniffed ere one boards the plane…) the family is scattered across the globe, and cannot all return "by sundown" or even "by the following Shabbat…" (Her clincher: "…and besides air fares are exorbitant unless you wait a week…" She carries the day: the rabbis relent).

WE pick the casket: bleached pine - simple. The desire (Lynn’s and her sister’s) for permanence (in an impermanent world) dictates a concrete vault - at odds with the simple all-wood casket mostly favored in their belief - to help hasten the return of "…ashes to ashes and dust to dust…" It is no time for theological discourse - especially from an agnostic. Yet I am informed the decision is "mine" alone as the surviving spouse, etc. I wave my hand and defer to the daughters: "Whatever they want…" Done deal.

The family once owned many buildings and a thriving print business in the heart of downtown. Now the main building is gone: a gaping 40-foot hole marking where the roots of a new high-rise are being poured. But the "old original print shop" out back, yet stands facing on another street: now converted to a boutique restaurant. Inspired, I go in and make arrangement for the family to dine here this last evening! It is very expensive and chic (the food excellent the service execrable). I alone am likely the only diner pondering the civic wisdom that condoned a license to feed the public in a building once saturated with lead dust (hot type!) and the noxious fumes and chemicals of printing inks. Here, too, I refrain (uncharacteristically) from voicing my somber thoughts…

The dust is whirling in the dust…

Next morning we gather. Forgotten friends. Faithful employees. Relatives. The grandfather clock in the funeral home foyer strikes the hour. The Cantor begins. From Proverbs…"A woman of valor… to find, is hard." My eyes tear. She was all this and more. And that is how it is printed in the Good Book - but as a verbal person I can’t help but note the inverted grammar … I almost wait for the "already yet" to follow… He reads the anecdotes and memories we all submitted. Including mine. How once on a South Pacific cruise we "crossed the line" (Equator) at midnight, and I returned from the ship’s bar with some Doubting Thomas’s to whom I had promised to demonstrate the Coriolis Effect of water in the drains as we did so (swirling opposite ways in northern and southern hemispheres). Millie had retired earlier - and woke to a cabin full of jabbering strangers flushing her toilets and running the basins full of water. From the shower stall I called reassurance to her - that it was only the Coriolis Effect we were all checking. She mumbled good-naturedly that the toilets had worked when she retired, but then - addressing the multitude: "My husband never does anything like anyone else does - including fixing the toilets!" With that she rolled over and went back to sleep…

Her 17-year-old grandson reads his comments in person - tears streaming down his face. More grit he, than his goy granpop - I let the Cantor read mine. As does most of the family - including my North Jersey ‘straight-out-of-the Sopranos’ son-in-law… like me, unsure of himself. Couple of softies. A nephew spoke. Lynn, too. The composite that emerged was of a truly loved and honored person who affected many lives….

Then her grandsons and family pallbearers loaded her into the hearse and the cortege departed. Lynn and I followed in the rented "family" car - she driving - a brand new Ford Explorer for which she has already gotten 26-bucks worth of traffic tickets and put a dent in the front fender. In just two days. One week to go. I look out at streets and roads we pass along - once as familiar as the back of my hand.

At the cemetery, we gather graveside. It is their custom to shovel in the dirt - the Cantor turns to me. Pater familias. All that jazz. I invert the shovel for the first shovelful as he shows how to symbolize the reluctance with which we all take up this mournful chore…then I shovel in the first two loads. Their hollow "thump" on the white pine coffin below burns into my brain forever. It is very hot - I take off my coat. It is curiously surreal…my body has no weight. I think ironically on my archeological digs: there we shoveled the dirt out of graves: here we are shoveling it in….

The dust is whirling in the dust…

.

The family recites kaddish. It is ended. Nearby are her mother and father’s graves - the sod between them thick and unbroken. I wander over alone for a breather. Only I know what is under the sod at this spot now. Not even the rabbi knows. Jerry is there. Jerry was a handicapped brother whom the family never spoke of - he was in a state institution all his life. He died when he was about 50 or so I guess, and the State cremated him and sent Millie his remains. She was very upset. Not only was he Jewish but he had been cremated: no rabbi would take him into a Jewish cemetery. Her distress was terrible. So I said "I will get him in."

She stopped crying: "How will YOU get him buried there?" she said. I said, "You’ll see." So I went out to my forge (God how I miss my forge!) and I pulled out a long iron rod from my scrap pile, and "took a heat" and soon I had forged up the nicest, prettiest Star of David you ever saw - maybe 8 inches wide. I smoothed and polished it some. Then I got a shovel and the tin with Jerry’s cremains in it, and the forged Star of David, and I said, "Come on, get in the car". It was a bright spring day like this very day we were burying her here, and we drove up to the cemetery. No one was around - leastways any watchdog rabbi - so I just moseyed in, and dug a hole down between his mom and pop’s vaults and slipped old Jerry in, and put the Star of David on top of the tin and all - and filled it all back in nice as pie. That was long ago and the sod is green and thick there now. Like it will be some day over Millie’s grave. Over yours. Over mine.

Maybe this all offends you - I don’t know. I don’t much stand on religious notions about death and all anyhow (not to mention "creation" and all that goes on in between! LOL). As a goy, I like to think of what I did as sort of a "mitzvah" for Millie - who was generous and helpful to others all her days, even as I have generally been not.

Always the dust is whirling in the dust….

.

Then we all drove to Pellucci’s Italian family restaurant up on the West Side. Mama Pellucci took us in and fixed lasagna and we had lots of red wine and I relaxed a bit, and Paul Calle was there and we talked about the days when I still lived here and he painted me and all the mountain man things we did and now I hang in museums and galleries and forgotten bars all over the world and now he is the numero uno painter of the Canadian fur trapper scene and the Hudson Bay Company entertains him and Olga all the time at their far northern "factories" (as they are still called) and so on and on, and Sven the Swede was there too - and they all wanted to hear my tales again and I had forgotten anyone back here even remembered me, let alone liked me… and Sven the Swede remembered all my tales, too - of the things we did and all - but he tells them different than I do - because when I tell them I am always the winner, and when he tells them I am always the loser - like the time the sewer line in my basement blew up in my face because I did not screw down a cap like Sven told me too, or the time I screwed up big time and pumped gasoline fumes into my household water tank from a jackass rig on my old Land Rover and for a while only gasoline came out my showerheads and water pipes. And Sven never tired of laughing at me in my misery and advising I not smoke cigars while showering and so on and on….

So then it was done, and they all left, and they said come back and live with us again, Bernie, and I said well maybe - maybe not - I don’t really belong anywhere anymore really. At least not right now. Then they were all gone.

The dust is whirling in the dust.

The next day, Wednesday, I had to be alone. Or I was going to lose my cool.

So I lost it anyhow…. I once did a lot of archeological work back here finding and excavating prehistoric Indian sites (some of the first scientifically described in Connecticut!) and Colonial home foundations and so on. Most of my work I eventually published (in top journals … where I earned the enmity of many professionals as I did it all for a hobby, what they did for a living. And most of them can’t publish anyhow they are so inept and tongue-tied…and so folks don’t like it when you do "their" thing as a past-time…). In my next life I am going to read up on brain surgery I think - higher class of people.

So I thought I will go out today and try to find some of my old sites! Back in the woods.

Now some of these I dug 40 years ago and have never seen since! I had no current maps so I hoped I would recognize the land. There had been many changes and a lot of water over the dam in the ensuing years. I was partly motivated by fact I have one of these great new digicams now and can take great pictures - whereas back then, many of the sites were never adequately photographed though I mapped and sketched the artifacts and finds and all

And so I decided to find the lost Riverbank Cemetery off Farms Road (http://bwpowell.com/archeology/riverbank/rbank.html). It was not even easy to find back when I dug it - but I found it again after a few false starts. It was another hot day… it occurred to me that relocating other ancient burial grounds was a rather "strange" way to relax after burying a loved one in a modern one… but I have always kind of marched to a different drum anyhow, and too late to reform at this stage I guess…

Even the vestigial hints of headstones that had first clued me in 40 years ago when I stumbled on this site were gone now and no one at all would ever suspect the many unknown graves still here. Only in one fencerow corner did I find a couple of "headstones" - indistinguishable from the surrounding country rock, really. And I searched in vain for some ancient headstones that were back then all but engulfed in the boles of mighty expanding oaks: presumably the trees have now swallowed them forever. I thought on George Pershing and on Mac McCormick who had helped me map and excavate here… where were they now?

A somber place even in the sunlight to visit a day after a funeral. The dust is whirling in the dust…

Next, I found a long abandoned road - now chained across with warning signs - that led to a reservoir on whose western side, steep cliffs fronted, and where once, long ago, I discovered an undisturbed, pristine early Indian site: the Mianus Gorge Rockshelter (http://bwpowell.com/archeology/rockshelter/gorge2.html). Here very early Indians - possibly of the early Archaic Period perhaps - had left tools and weapons where they had camped beneath a massive overhang. Using my cell phone, I sweet-talked my way past the operations manager here (whose phone number was conveniently given on the Keep Out sign…). I convinced him I was not a terrorist bent on poisoning the watershed but only a lonely old coot desirous to taking pictures of a rock ledge back in the woods. "Can you do it and get your pictures you want in less than a hour?" he asked. "You bet," I said. "Go for it," he said - "but don’t carry a backpack as they will arrest or shoot you on sight if they see you."

I said, "Watch my dust!" I locked the car and was over the chain link and gone in about 60 seconds. I began to lope up the hot, dusty, unused road. The thermometer stood at an all-time high for the Northeast on that day: near 95 (hotter than here in Florida) - and it had been many years since I ran these trails…Still, I am yet a runner (make that staggerer, if you will) so I kept the pace, but the years have not been kind I thought to myself. Soon the tears, held in check for days, streamed down my face at last: being back in "real" woods was a great relief somehow and I trot on and on. The hemlocks are larger… Here and there new talus slopes speak of rock falls and slides since my earlier days… I undergo sort of an epiphany as I run: days without eating, stress, travel, sorrow, the shock of seeing long forgotten things and places and people, the heat and thirst - all sort of contribute to the experience…

I thought now on my first wife, long deceased herself and who helped hunt and excavate sites with me here herself so long ago. I felt like some sort of modern day Scrooge revisiting the scenes of his misspent youth - only no Ghost of Christmas Past accompanied me. But there were ghosts a-plenty nonetheless… After about a mile or two - totally soaked in sweat which was drying with alarming white salt bands on my black shirt … I came at last to the dam - I had not seen for 40 years. Down I ran along a now empty spillway to the base and then heart pounding, up through the riprap to the top and then a long slant clear to the western end across the entire dam length - running alongside a concrete topping wall. Not a soul around. No one goes up there or is ever allowed in there anymore the Operations Manager had said. (Back then, a companion who tried to find me once, and could not, reported that a bear had overtrod my tracks in the snow one winter day when I had visited the site alone…). But today I was not alone. This I knew somehow… Where the wall abutted the cliffs, I was simply up and over the concrete without even thinking so obsessed was I with seeing the scene of my earlier exploits again - and I dropped down on the other side to discover that the wall was much higher on that side - and how the heck was I going to get back out now? Oh well, I thought, maybe I will let lucky and die of a heart attack or fall off the rocks into the Gorge… and I pushed rapidly on…

Suddenly … peering ahead through the faint green, new Spring buds… I saw it once again: my heart stopped just as it did that day forty years ago when I first found this site: a massive dark overhang jutting out of the hillside and forming the roof of the rock shelter. I have returned once more.

Gasping, I struggled up to the floor of the shelter. The dripline had reformed in all the intervening years (decades!) and (again) quartz debitage and chips were coming into view but this time with an admixture of beer bottle fragments and some other white man trash left behind by fugitive pot smokers and hippies who I found later, had entered the site long after our work was done. Now even their traces are largely gone. When we found it first long ago, no one (no white men) had ever visited it since the Indians had left it centuries before. (Perhaps a lone hunter: we found one brass cartridge case I recall…).

I paused to run my fingers into the soft dirt… thinking on Jean my dead first wife, and yes - those early inhabitants themselves who thousands of years ago, lived and died in this very same shelter!

The dust was whirling in the dust again…

I retraced my steps. Back at the car, breathed into my cell phone to the ops mgr: "I’m back! And I did not bust a leg on your property or pick any mushrooms either! I owe you one. Took me just 40 minutes. Not bad for an old guy, huh?"

Next on down and miles away to Lambert House - one of several early Colonial homes in the area and where a large party under my direction did an excavation of the cellar floor in the winter of 1972-73 I think it was. (http://bwpowell.com/archeology/lambert/lam1.html). The once chaotic dirt-floored cellar had been all cleaned up in the interim, and paved over - but wild-eyed and disheveled I took my pictures of her cellar, as an amazed Office Manager of the firm now resident there (the Historical Society moved out some time back…) stood by. Then I threw her a wave, and off I roared…

Now I faced my greatest challenge: could I find after all these years the Eckart Site at Southbury where my group had dug so long and hard over many field seasons? Sven’s house was nearby so I swung in there and I drove up his hill to see him again. Time warp. The same junk cars are still there, rusting peacefully away as when I left. It was like coming home in some way. Comforting. He was there, and gave me two cold glasses of cranberry juice, then after the obligatory jibe about how one’s wits go first as you get older, he got me oriented again: I had forgotten the name of the road I had to take: how could I? - "Poverty Hollow Road" - one of those delightful New England rural roads up through the backcountry which led me on to distant Southbury where this last site lay in deep, difficult woods - well off the highway. It was already mid-afternoon and the sun halfway down the sky.

Well - in a way it’s more of the same: I did find it after all. Just as we left it when the last day’s dig was done so long ago. More time warp. Vandals have been "potting" here since we dug - destroying these invaluable prehistoric traces which the American zeitgeist (if you will) to this day still does not "value" (ask me about the Miami Circle some day…). Far back in this remote Connecticut upland lies this spur jutting out from the hills. Today all is overgrown with forest but many thousands of years ago - I think perhaps as far back as early Archaic times and maybe even into Clovis - hunters once camped here and in a vastly less forested and more open "tundra like" environment they could look up and down the valley stretching away before them - which Lake Lillinonah now fills almost to the base of the spur… Here they worked out literally thousands of chipped quartz points over many, many years - but some bear incipient flute marks and basal grinding of the very earliest inhabitants to our Continent… Nearby lie many very ancient and unknown quartz quarries - worked later by the first white settlers for the "silex" as they called the quartz in those days… But we have found projectile points at the very base of their spoil piles!

I have never described Eckart yet. Others have. But our data and our finds are yet in storage. I should do this first chance. Before I die. It is an obligation. I have so many… So many gave their all here: building roads into the site, digging for me (all this volunteer effort you know - no one got paid!) We could field 60 people a weekend here. I ran that site like Leakey ran his in East Africa! LOL! I found the remains of our cook shed: Jean used to feed them all at sundown. At night we had huge fires and sang. They are all gone now. Some of them married (each other). Yes, we had dig romances. Jean and I were the father and mother figures. Some went off to die in later wars. Some just went off - over the edge of the world - who knows? - like the Vikings thought they did when they went too far west …

One or two became professional anthropologists. Chance letters years later told me that it was I who inspired them when they had dug with me on our hardscrabble digs … In a way, knowing that has made it all worth it. I know lots of guys with sheepskins who never yet inspired anyone to "go for it." Professionals don’t know everything.

So now I have returned to Florida. Yes - it’s "quo vadis" time again now… For sure. For the second time in my life. Enough already. But …I will think of something.

Dust also settles - as is said. As well as whirls.