2002-09-01 - 11:07 p.m.
Feeling in the mood for a little adventure today, we set out in the new Skootiemobile with cameras and sketchbook, looking for inspiration. When you live someplace for a long time, and have taken pictures of everything that ever interested you in every season, it is hard to generate any enthusiasm for revisiting anything, especially in late summer when the outside world is overblown and frowsy. But we found our way out to a strange little park called Cave Springs that always seems steeped in untold stories. Other than a paved pathway with a few rustic benchs it is completely wild and undeveloped. Poison ivy grows enormous, and the grape vines dangling from the trees are thick enough to support any would-be Tarzan. The small lake is so completely covered with algae (pond scum) that no water is visible, and it looks like a giant green skating rink.
Years ago, in the 1920's, this was not a park but a resort with little cabins, built around the spring at the bottom of this rocky hill. Tucked away in the woods, are the remains of many of those cabins, all gone except for the old rock fireplaces and chimneys, standing alone. They are there to be discovered by everyone who walks through the park, and there is no longer any evidence of their former life, in fact each year they come a little closer to being taken over by the wildness of the park. The flowers still bloom, though: irises and lillies planted near where the doors would have been. I wonder who planted them there and if he or she could have imagined the flowers outlasting everything else in that place.
Standing in front of the hearth, where the cabin floor would have been, I have an overwhelming sense of human energy, and perhaps even tragedy. Almost as though things happened here that were never told to anyone, as though this place holds secrets between the stones. I always look for clues, but all fragments of the former lives have been eradicated after all these years. Only the chimneys still testify to the lives that converged here so long ago. I wonder why people back then would hide out in an isolated place like this. Was it a romantic place to carry on an illicit love affair, or a place you could go to drink when alcohol was illegal? I look at the fireplaces and think that everyone who has seen a crakling fire in one of them is probably dead by now. It is strange what hints survive from the past. Chimneys and flowers.
In the first fall that Skootie and I were getting to know each other, we went together to this place on a cold Saturday and walked in the deep fallen leaves. We both wore hats. When we were sure nobody else was around we held hands and giggled like little girls. She brought her camera and took a picture of me sitting on a wall. I carved our initials in the wooden railing of a little foot bridge out in the woods. Now it has a certain strain of our energy too: the memory of being frighteningly in love and not knowing what will come of it, so every moment together stands out in sharp relief from the rest of your life. We found....a place we could play together for a while, without getting anyone's attention. Which may have been true to the original intention of the place, after all.
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