by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
I’ve been having the feeling lately that history is watching me, not the other way around.
Stones fall in, pushed by time and weight. Everything shifts. Everything continues to shift. Even blocks this enormously grand, set in place by the repetitive motion of Irish hands, working for 30 cents and a gill of whiskey a day. They worked digging this canal for its three years, then moved west to blast more rock and cart a hundred thousand tons of dirt for yet another canal, only to stay one day ahead of hunger. Stones fall in.
Poison ivy overcovers. What enticing lost object might have been waiting a century for me alone to discover under its shiny leaves? I’m not going to find out.
Even though I know it’s something good. There’s this keen sensation of certainty when something that has been untouched for a hundred years is near. From amid the ruins of forgotten acts it exerts a magnetic pull, more insistent the longer it remains unfound. Unfound it almost always stays, no matter my increasing frenzy, whacking through the undergrowth of a battlefield woods, sweating and in need of water, or patiently toeing up shards of teacups and dirt-stained plastic in an old farm dump, convinced here are minié balls sunk into deep bark or there a book whose pages have miraculously remained unfoxed, free-turning, and not glued into an evil-smelling brick.
The hints that I have been so long living not in the solid world as I had been led to believe become increasingly noisy. They are loudly whispered suggestions that all this—you and your works, my fellows!—are holograms made only of light and projected fibs. For the longest time I could not see. Or perhaps it’s that I have only recently completed my transformation into that pitiable specimen, the history nerd. But suddenly I’m not only metaphorically veering across the center line because as I’m supposed to be watching the road I’m instead craning my neck in search of evidence.
Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, I now realize, this ground beneath us—the history that put us here at all—is actually a good foot or two below where we think we are. From the buried past bits of truth stick up. The only passion I feel anymore is for spotting it.
Look. The grass seems thinner down there—could that be a remnant of the Delaware & Hudson towpath? So the canal has to be nearby! Oh my god it just might be under the road. (Eyes back temporarily to where they should be; death or at least folding metal and showers of pebbled glass averted.) For years I passed by it a hundred times and barely noticed that fragment of rock structure; now it has the power to get me killed. An eerie mixture of perfect calm and sweeping hysteria floods over me. I brake, hard, for historic markers. I have yielded to genetic forces beyond my control: I have become my father. The torment of childhood was the summer vacation, so fondly anticipated for its promise of ice cream and, just maybe, a new ceramic horse figurine (palomino please). Instead, hot and vaguely carsick, we’d be pulled out by the side of the road where, next to the damn black cannon that burned my hand under the blasting sun, we’d receive a 20-minute précis of troop movements that apparently occurred once upon an impossible to imagine time that wavers on a distant horizon.
Today, for a closer look at piles of stones that might reassemble themselves into a well-built and prosperous canal, I drive to the village of High Falls. I leave the car behind to pick my way through the silent woods where busy industry once assailed the senses. It was not a woods then. I’ve seen the ancient photos, even if I keep being unable to orient from them: where is that street now? Which direction does this face? I see that that building remains, but this one is gone. Or wait, did they turn it into the restaurant over there? As if on a balance beam, I’m advancing through the undergrowth along some sort of narrow six-foot-high ridge heading toward the river—it might have been a declivity in another time, since up becomes down after enough decades have cycled through—and I too am turning end over end. But first it brings me to a prohibiting fence around an abandoned house, boarded up, listing, once-red siding faded to the color of long-spilled blood. The earth keeps reaching up to reclaim it, but not yet. I press myself through a hole in the fence wires. Around back, the cellar door is open to me. How many of the most valuable things in life are found on the other side of a warning. Do not enter. Forbidden. We are watching you.
No one is watching. And disobedience is freedom. Trespassing is how you know you’re alive. Make sure to bring a souvenir from the past back into the present. Otherwise you may not remember you were there. I slip inside the cool air within the walls of the laid-stone foundation. I feel certain, in the heightened fairy tale writing itself into fact in my mind, this was a lock-tender’s house. It is next to an old lock, after all. I think. It is hard to know, but I fancy I can now read traces from a hundred fifty years ago present only to my keen and knowing eye.
I will find him still here in the air dense with mold and earth, decay and rebirth.
Sheet music scattered on a broken table. Nearly a hundred years old, some of it. Though a chunk of cellar wall has been torn away, none too recently, the wind and driving rain of three quarters of a century have left the paper untouched. There is some reason for this. I take it that I can take it. No one would care as much as I do. I search through all then hide one pamphlet in my notebook. Chappell’s Famous Ballad Successes, a “thematic” it is called—an ad by any other name, hooking the hopeful with the first three staves of each song; if you want more, and it is ardently hoped you will, you must buy the full piece for 40 cents. There is some meaning to my choice. I’ll assign it later. I hear the locktender moving across the boards above. A boat is floating into sight, just exiting the long trough that is suspended on 8½-inch wire ropes, “well-varnished,” over the Rondout Creek a dozen yards away. A river of water over a river of water. The aqueduct is a necklace, strung from beautiful impossibility, decorating the neck of American ingenuity and commercial might. The artery beats with rhythmic arrival of the nation’s lifeblood, boatload after boatload of anthracite coal from Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is bound for the brilliant, bursting future. First, though, it will stand in silent black mountains on the manmade island at the Strand near Kingston.
Stones fall in. I sit down on the aqueduct’s abutment arising from the riverbank. A ghost sits down next to me. If I stood up, I would hit my head on the wooden underside of the watery bridge. If only it were here. But it too was claimed by time and fire in 1916 after it was deemed an “attractive nuisance” from which kids would leap into the rocky water below. Its finishing stone was engraved “1849” and the people celebrated. Forty-nine years later the last boat passed through, then the water was let out of the D&H forever. The gaping maws of the Roebling aqueduct’s abutments try to speak to each other across the distance of the creek. The day is still quiet. I am alone. I am not alone.
Next to me, another ghost enters the body of the first. And another. Their presence makes the air heavy. It is like the day itself is keening.
I weep for my father, but he is here. I have so many questions only he can answer. I did not know I should have asked sooner. The last boat passed before I thought it would.
He wants me to stop crying. Spilled milk, he admonishes, as he always did. But there is so much I need to ask you! Another ghost enters the body of the last. And then I know. That ghost in my father—it is history. History, idea. History, pursuit. History, unknown. The accretion of the dead who once passed this place, leaving faint marks getting fainter even as I sit, while the infinity of cells shed by everyone who is gone still sift through the air. They fall unfelt on my father and me. He looks out over the creek. I imagine I hear him say, with a certainty that joins the sound of water flowing past, “See? You too. You too will someday fall.”
I’ve been having the feeling lately that history is watching me, not the other way around. It’s near, it’s underfoot. It’s ongoing in parallel time, and it only takes a small sidestep to get from now to then if you stand among ruins and learn what it is you’re truly seeing. I had no idea for a long time that the places I felt most drawn to were actually the graves of old canals, or that they had been so transformative to American history. When I started studying them, I discovered that they were my origin, too: two canals were the sole reason my hometown of Akron came into being. I would never have been born there, or at all, if not for canals. Increasingly, the past—attained through the hidden doorway of its remains in the present—is the place I inhabit.
—
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of five books, including The Place You Love Is Gone. She is currently editing an anthology of writing about motorcycling, and working on a book about America’s canal era. Other work has appeared in Harper’s, Prairie Schooner, Hinterland, and Tinhouse.com. She writes about travel, history, books, photography, and film.