Bridge House

By the turn of the century before last, Cornell had finished building its main quadrangle on what used to be Ezra Cornell's high pasture between two gorges, but the campus was still separated by Fall Creek Gorge, from the undeveloped heights on the North. The side-gorges and steep glens made construction projects a special problem in the Heights, but Cornell wanted to reach across and put some women's dorms over there.
So the University held a design competition for a bridge to the Heights.





Oliver Fast, a post graduate student at the time, submitted a design for a full -span, stone arch, supporting not just the road-way, but also two stories of class rooms and prominent observation posts . Stone stairs wound down through the abutments to more rooms and chambers. Despite seeming archaic, the bridge would have been a feat of modern engineering, using Fast's own twist on the new iron-assisted, fero-cement, construction techniques, which the Ithaca architect Clinton Vivian and others were pioneering at the time.





The Fast proposal was just too new, too old, too crazy..... and to nobody's surprise, the competition was won by the steel bridge you see there today: radical then, but an antique now. They don't build steel erector-set bridges like that any more. And simply maintaining them has become a branch of historic preservation.
The barbed cable , tension core construction, which Fast invented never did catch on anywhere, and the next bridge across that gorge will likely be a spider-tech nano-fiber sequestered-carbon based, double-reflex, tension/ suspension system, which will itself weigh less than a city bus, and will be quickly reeled in for redeployment elsewhere.

But on the same day back when the design competition winner was announced , Oliver Fast wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, declaring in unprintable language, at unreadable length, and with no chance of having it published, that he would blankety blank go somewhere and build the blankety blank thing himself. for himself, and if necessary, by him blankety blank self.





Oliver Fast never went far, but this was at a time when professors were so poorly paid that they had to be rich already to take on a Professorship. so the exposure got him commissions to design mansions in the Heights. Each of the best Heights estates had its own dwarf-glen, or was a winding eminence between two border gorges.
Portuguese and Italian stone masons left over from the Cornell blue stone boom easily shifted to laying up houses like follies in Jane Austin Country gardens... or like mausoleums in her cemetery.
Homes with hundred yard, pounded cobblestone driveways and stone gate- posts the size of smoke-houses.
And then came the junior-faculty houses, closer to the curb , like ornamentally disguised gate-keeper cottages.

Fraternity houses became his particular speciality . Many Fraternity Trustees payed to go with some kind of fantasy historical theme, often Gothic or Medieval, with secret chapter rooms, and winding stone stairs connecting levels. Fast was good with that. The fraternity work made him rich.
Fast isn't known to have had family, or even any romantic affairs, or any social interactions outside of chess games, but his success allowed him to buy his own land in the Heights.
A deep, dwarf gorge cut through the middle of it.



Fast never drew any real plans for his Bridge House. And there was never even a point where we could say he first started.
Before he could think of beginning, he had to make extensive pick-and-shovel explorations into the structural stability of the abutment areas.
And then he kind of had to install the footings and cassons, so that the exposed shale didn't crack and collapse.
Cayuga Heights , Forest Home, and County Court record show that , although he never did get a building permit, the village boards were not able to stop Mr. Oliver Fast from continuing what he argued was essentially only maintenance of and improvements to natural stability
.
Just the temporary timber frame support for the abutment and the arch must have taken more than one season to construct..... and after that, things only went slower. The unique barbed-iron cable which he installed under tension in canvas tubes for the cement cores he had poured through the stone work, must have frustrated and slowed the traditional mason a lot.
Up the years, as the structure rose to a second story of rooms above the arch, the few stone masons who hadn't moved on or gone back to the old country, died off or became too old to climb. He kept his last old stone man around strictly as a chess partner, until that one got to be too old to stay awake at the board.


Fast finished hoisting and installing the thumb-thick, tray-sized, roof slates all by himself, one dark day a week before the fiftieth Christmas of his life.
He climbed down from the roof the last time that day and walked into the main foyer of Bridge House....into an empty chamber.... on what he must have suddenly realized, was a bridge to nothing....and him with nothing but nothing to do ever again.

Because, within a month of hanging the last roof tile, Oliver Fast attempted suicide by jumping off his bridge. But the scale was too small to kill him. He was lucky that it was early winter with two feet of snow and oak leaves drifted into the gorge. And lucky to have worked so long as his own earth-mover and stone mason, because, although his legs were paralyzed for ever, he was able to haul himself up out of the gorge .



After six months in a sanatorium , Fast still had enough money that he could return to Bridge House, supervise some remodeling, and then spend the rest of his life ( and the money) being cared for by a live-in Scottish nursemaid/ cook/ house keeper, and her husband the butler/gardener/ nurse's aid He had allowed them to bring their little rat terrier at their insistence that it was a working dog. There had in fact been a rat problem, but the dog spent most of it's life after that in Fast's Lap, which was fine with the dog and the man.. The Mrs. was a great cook, and . McRobbie himself was a chess player, and a busy amateur wood carver.
That is all,according to the day maid, who lived down in town and walked up to Bridge House each day. She testified that the two men sat around in front of the fireplace for as many hours carving chess pieces and arguing about books , as they did playing chess. Arguing and waving their carving knives, the men never went for each other's throats. Fast gave the maid and the milk man big tips at Christmass, and Mrs. McRobbie gave them scones and macaroons throughout the year.

In short....they were jolly happy for most of a a dogs age.
Then, following a particularly jolly Christmass dinner attended by the milk man and the day maid ( who were later married ) , Fast died of sudden heart failure .

He left everything to his dear McRobbies, with left overs for the maid and the milk man, although at that point, the real estate was most everything, and it's legal status was in question.

For reasons never made clear, the McRobbies disappeared a few weeks after Fast died. And they never did reappear to claim the questionable estate .

Some things will always be a mystery, and that is just fine, because we have to move on with history, and the point is: here for a time was a happy family. And, whatever you may have heard, happy families are not all the same.

Davey Weathercock and Olive: Cold Snap

As Davey Weathercock, with Olive the hen, I have a regular gig for Tiny Town Times, improvising a weather report from here on Pumpkin Hill. My nominal brother Davey Warren who edits the blog, used his photo manipulations software to squinch up my face for the blog profile picture so that I look more like the gnome you maybe imagine me to be...knowing I am so very short shanked.
So no, folks, there is no Davey Weathercock. It is only me: William Bonaparte Warren. But let's suspend disbelief for five minutes please.

Her Red Guitar

Gee is gone off again, but she didn't take her little red guitar with the door in its back. You open the door with a finger hole that has a painted morning glory vine twining out of it. The flowers are the pale blue of Gee's eyes. She pretends to play the guitar some , but mostly it is a portable cabinet for her big French knife, with the stone and steel.

The last time I wrote, she'd gone to Ithaca, just to pick up some smoked salt ... and to look in at Bridge House, she said.
I expected her back that night, but she was gone for a week...stayed overnight with the raccoons and graffiti at Bridge House, then took the rest of a week getting back. She makes a friend and professional contact every five miles.
She says travel is how she focuses.
I'd say even if she goes nowhere, she is always several places anyway. Or several people in one place. She says she's my Muse, but it's Davey who's supposed to be a writer. Why doesn't she amuse him? They ignore each other.
I don't know exactly what a muse is supposed to do, but it seems like mostly she just wants to be in the blog.

Like any aspiring actress in any town, tiny or big, Gee has usually been without a stage, and has mostly worked in the hospitality trade.
The overhead, tray-flourishing, side-steps she performed during her early restaurant gigs made Gee well known in Ithaca as the Zobo Waitress, but most of her acting jobs were with a few up-stairs theater companies which entertained fewer people than they employed, and payed only the land lord. That was before Missy Hooligan came through town.


A year or two after I myself had left town, Gee went off with Missy Hooligan's Tall Animal Review - a funky and eclectic bunch which included pseudo-apes on stilts and skates, a peg-legged, tattoed hog, and a coordinated shoplifting team, and also offered a wide range of theatrical improvisations.
When Gee joined the Hooligans, they began to include the little "dinner theater" productions, in which Gee was the star.
And she earned the two ee's in her name with her billing as the Mystic Miss Gee, the Palm Reader.
She has a nice professional way of taking your hand, while catching your eye with her own eyes - with those pale blue, nearly transparent irises that make you think she could look into your head. because it seems you can look into hers........ and and then she looks at your life line, and shudders at what she sees, turns away briefly and thwn offers a pleasant and vague prediction about travel and friendship. Or at least that is what she did for me. I'm guessing that her regular customers tipped her generously, for not telling them more.

The Missy Hoolahans , or Houlians, or Hooligans ...... by any name and in any era, or current mix of hippy, beat, and gypsy..... are a bunch of fellow travelers you wouldn't likely bring home for lunch: all artists of opportunity. They own very little, and sleep with their chickens , cats, dogs, and children, in or under vans and homebuilt trailers. Mostly, they launder their clothing without removing it. But they were artists and didn't need any license.

When the convoy made camp in some hidden place... often in a well located cemetery..... she could walk up to the door of just about any inn, restaurant, or bar, and talk the management into exchanging some dinner theater, for dinner itself.
She was all sincerity and enthusiasm...still is...without any acting.
Until the final acts, never more than three of the Hooligans appeared in the dining room during their productions. But twelve or twenty would be out back, busy writing themselves into the play, and they would each troop through at some point before the group bow and chow.
They were all charming...or entertaining....or distracting enough that they were usually well thanked and fed......but occasionally they were chased away or arrested, and they sometimes disbanded....for a while.
Once, for a Christian Businessman's fund raiser, they staged a Murder mystery robbery which, as far as the robbery part went, only pretended to be pretend. Not all of Missy's crew were involved in planning the robbery, , but those three got several years each in prison, and the Hooligan's dispersed for five whole years.
That was more than fifteen years ago. They have been seen around here again, only recently.

When they didn't get busted or otherwise interrupted for a long stretch, Gee would tire of that life.
So after the caravan arrived at some place where she wanted to stay for a while...she would just walk up to an Inn and tell the manager that, for no money at all, she would gladly clean a bathroom top to bottom ... as a demonstration..... and what's more, she would do it in fifteen minutes flat as they watched.

She would go over the place on all fours, sometimes plonking around on two inverted buckets with the bales over her feet, and scrubbing the ceiling with her hand brushes . She had a special pair of bushes with leather straps which, as the last step, she buckled onto her feet, then flooded and skated the floor clean This was all done with more ornamental movement than was practical....but she did do it quick as she said, and on the basis of her performance, maybe mostly on the basis of its entertainment value, she could get up to thirty dollars each to clean additional rooms.
I guess most people were so charmed they didn't stop to think that if they paid her thirty dollars for fifteen minutes of work, they were payiing her a hundred twenty dollars an hour.
No problem..... they would soon bring her into the kitchen, and before long hand her the general hospitality functions, and weeks of Inn sitting, especially for inns with multiple, demented and demanding pets.

She looped many times around the country between New Orleans and Nova Scotia, usually taking several years to complete a loop. Ithaca was not in the loop.
Somewhere along there she somehow gained a daughter, who split off on her own, a while back.

Oh I guess I don't want to know everything about her life between then and now.....or even between the time she left here for the smoked salt and when she straggled back.

After that, Gee was here again for about a week.... or maybe it was two or three short ones.
My housekeeping and personal grooming had gone a long way down a steep slope since she'd been away, and I was glad to have her home . it seems like most of the time she was back here, I spent in the bathtub .
This trailer is small enough that one of us has to be sitting somewhere if the other is only going to move around...... and especially when she's cooking or cleaning, launching around on my dry-wall stilts to do the ceiling, or wielding that big French knife of hers.

One day when she had been chopping and mincing for her portable pancake pies while thinking about other things, she powdered her face with some New Hope Mills pancake mix.
I was sitting in the bath with the old IBbook clam shell open on a board I had put across the tub,
When Gee walked in, her face all white with that pancake mix, I couldn't even see the oak leaf tattoo on her cheek.... I grabbed the edges of the tub ......my knees jerked and knocked the board.... and tipped the IBook into the water.

I snatched the clam shell out of the tub, and Gee hung it over the towel rack, but we both knew it was dead.

She was only interested in getting me to guess who she was made up as.
In the dewy, overheated atmosphere of the trailer, the New Hope pancake mix was already rising and bubbling on Gee's face.
She was being who?
I guessed Michael Jackson, which pissed her off. Jackson Pollock; not funny. I guessed Michael Jackson again.




The correct answer was Cameo White. If I hadn't been more concerned with the dead computer, I might have guessed it; she had been talking about Cameo White ever since coming back from Bridge House.



Why exactly Gee would identify with someone who died alone and was partially eaten by her dogs..... I can't say, but she tells me she wants to play the role of Cameo White in a movie set at Bridge House. Not that anyone is planning to make a movie.









Gee went yesterday to help her friend at the inn with a pet-wake they were hosting, and said she might stay over night to help with the breakfast ......then I know she was going to help with some tastings at the winery up the road for a string of wine tour buses coming through.... so I don't know when I will see her again exactly. But I've got the red guitar.

Ghost Herd

Quick in the Jungle

Dogless Days and Cupola Nights

Every morning this August, I went down to the chicken house and called the hens out to range with the three guard roosters - Dot, Lefty, and Whitey.
Some harmonica clucking and a trail of black berries gets them away from the door fairly easily. The native blackberries are the biggest and sweetest here this year I have ever seen in the wild.
But most mornings the hens then went right back into the hen house as soon as they had snapped up all the berries , and I was back in the trailer, having a bowl of berries myself.






The chickens knew that those hot and humid days of Blackberry Summer were going to be like a great big light bulb sitting smack on their backs.

Chickens don't exactly know the future, but they know the weather and are very sensitive to everything that comes from above.
They also sensed that pretty damn soon, molten chunks of glowing matter might just possibly come streaking down from the sky. Because August is the month of the yearly Perseid meteor shower.

Chickens are well aware of it, but humans mostly don't notice because most people are either living inside the regional light bulbs or are still blind from the protracted and overblown fireworks of July. And anyway, most people wouldn't notice a shooting star unless they got hit by one.
As the rate of the meteor fall was just picking up in early August, when there was still a fair amount of water in the ponds, G and I sometimes watched the sky at night from on our backs in the middle of the round pond. Except for picking blackberries a to watch the sky at night, me and G spent as much time indoors as the hens did. We were cooking and tubbing in the day time, and up in the cupola at night... under the the wide screen of stars, with the occasional fucking thunderstorm blowing by.....mostly sound and furious clouds, like stampeding buffalo ghosts.

And with the moon racing through (don't look directly at it or you will be blinded) , lying there was all in all the greatest thrill since flying in dreams.
But Dot, Whitey, and Lefty, roosting on Davey's deck rail, were not amused. They muttered at the thunder, and when an occasional star streaked across their piece of sky, they made the clucking five syllable alarm that sounds like "Jesus fucking christ", and then the roosters in the chicken house would start it up a few beats behind, and they would continue until they all came into unison and then it gradually quieted down to a murmer and to a mere rumor.... until the next star alarm.

Yeah, chickens know that thunder storms and meteor showers and shit from above in general are just dandy until you get hit by something.
And now brother Davey knows too . He isn't quite beaten flat, but he looks like he has at the very least been struck by lightning several times. He has taken some hits. Maybe it is about over now .....the pace of the events has slowed down...and he is starting to come out of doors.





Here's the hit list:
In the dog days of August both of Davey's dogs died; his truck quit; his hard drive died so he lost all the data; a close old friend was put in jail for a few years; he heard that his child hood ex wife - missing since - April, was most probably murdered; one of his three college room mates whom he had not seen in forty years, and who had just in July refound each other.... and with whom he was planning a reunion here in August....died suddenly..... and then Davey strained his loin or his groin or something, when burying the second dog, so now he can't sit still to write.
Of course he doesn't write much even when he isn't thunderstruck . The point is that he has been knocked silly by all this, but I still say that , half drunk and with the flu, I myself could write his biography on an etch a sketch, in about half an hour.
I just can't do everything at once...even if G can.



And what about the trip I planned, hauling and poling the Arc up Cayuga through the great lakes Chain to Great Bear Lake on the Arctic sea? It's not entirely off the agenda, but it is at least a couple of years away at this point.
My work here isn't finished. I think I have managed to get the chicken range under control, but we are without dogs now, so other critters are drawing nearer. The skunks are back living under the chicken house, and that is good because the coons and every other sort of chicken killers will stay back a little, but the chickens, especially the roosters, do not control themselves without some help, and I don't think Davey is ready to get with it..



I wish it would rain, really rain. People think it has rained a lot, but it was only a lot of sound and furious clouds. The water-table is very low by my measure: The dug ponds here are as low as they were during the drought several years back that killed all the bass in the upper ponds. Either it hasn't been raining (however it may seem to sun bathers and container gardeners) or else someone is sucking the water out from under us. Maybe the miles and miles of Cargil salt mines under the lake are flooding . Or maybe the natural gas companies or Nestle company is coming at us sideways for their bottling or fracking water.

A cat came creeping around last night. I saw it. Black and white. The Roosters raised the ruckus call.

G got a ride into town with her friend from the inn, to get some vinegar and hickory- smoked salt She said that while she was there, she planned to peek in at Bridge House.

Name of G

says she wants me to get a big fancy G, like the bigger one shown above, tattooed on me somewhere.
?Like maybe on the lower forty acres of my back?

I knew the G-on-me tattoo was one of the ideas that would most likely blow right through on its own, but we splashed each other and argued in the tub for half an hour about whether it made better sense as a tattoo for her own left butt hock...... since, on her right hock, she already has a tattoo of fractal stars in the constellation of the Big Dipper . The dipper handle extends down her leg, the north star out of sight. I kind of like it.
Actually I don't want the big G on her either, but until this discussion about the G letter , G had never told me that her real first name was "Virginia".
Virginia Ann Something-Something.
She doesn't go so far as to say what her maiden or married (ex) names are.....but she says they belong to well-known people she doesn't want to be associated with. I don't know for sure if that means she necessarily ever really was associated with famous people of whatever names, but thanks to the Cornell legal aid clinic, and a liberal judge , G is her legal first name. It is a G without a period, pronounced like the letter G but signifying nothing fixed.
Ask anoyingly what the G stands for , and she will say it doesn't stand for shit, and I had always given her that.

So I learn that G's parents named her Virginia Ann, and always called her by the whole Virginia Ann , which made boys of a certain age think of Virgin Aunts,or Ants in bras, so they would make appropriate comments.
She adopted "Ginny" as her name with friends, at school.
But when she was sixteen, she walked away from her home (in another tiny college town she won't say which) leaving with nothing but a shopping bag full of whatever stuff was on top of her dresser, and some compact food from in the fridge, including cheese, carrots, and a head of garlic.
From nowhere, like she gets everything else, she got the idea that chewing Garlic would keep male predators at bay, and as she walked out of town she husked and chewed gartlic cloves like they were sticks of Dentine.
A few prospective rides drove off as soon as they could get the window rolled up, but all in all the idea worked from the beginning, and she arrived in Ithaca on her second or third stop-over.
She stayed around Ithaca for ten years before I ever knew her. I passed though but was in the wild most of that time. She still had the garlic habit when I met her then. But it never bothered me.

Back then G asked herself what she wanted to do in life, and she told herself it was to be in movies. She some how thought that working in a movie theater in Tiny Town Ithaca was a way to start. She worked the concession stand at the Paradime Mall theatre complex until someone complained about the garlic pop corn.


When working or applying for work she usually wore long, kinky, apricot colored hair in scarfed bun, but outside, she generally let the hair fall around and in front of her pale eyes. Her hair has micro kinks in each hair, which has a hallo effect in many kinds of light, and also really holds scents.
The garlic aura kept her out of attempted Massage school too, but the big aura didn't keep her from getting a series of jobs in hippy restaurants: Moose Pie, Apple Blossom, XYZ , Frankie and Johnnies, Uncle Bodie's and the rest.
Using the plumbing at her job and sleeping on group home couches, at communes, and at pet sitting locations , she was tolerated, and protected, and gradually made herself necessary, then moved on.........around and around the ten or twelve hills surrounding Tiny Town. She likes to move. She might want to move me.
Ironically, or what ever you want to call it , she actually stayed a virgin until she met me.
But, believe it or don't, I didn't realize then that she WAS a virgin. That's because I was a virgin too - if you rule out episodes with trees and flowers, melons, and mud banks - not unusual with feral boys like me.

We have both come a long way , and it has been quite a while since G habitually chewed raw garlic, but along with her big Thing about Urine Utility, and her many other Big things, G is still big on garlic......only it is dietary garlic now.
I can go along with that. I will submit to her cooking. I can hardly get the grilled garlic zuchinni out of my head. It sticks to the inside of my head.a
G says that she is trying to develop a menu for a new Bridge House Inn. That again.
I can be easygoing like nobody else you know, but I'll go along with that move just as soon as I get a giant G tattooed on my ass.