I’m verily inspired by potsherds and beach glass, coal fragments, and other detritus churned up on Rosslyn’s waterfront. Or disinterred from the yard while planting a garden or building a stone wall. I stall a while and meditate on the process of fragmenting, the potential for reimagining artifacts. I wonder about dark or damaged backstories, sharp shards, mollified by time’s persistent palliative pressure into “worry beads” carried and caressed like the glass glob I carried in my pocket for several years as a totem, a talisman, a pocket palliative for angst. Imagine delightful detritus strung into necklaces, assembled in mosaics, relics rhymed in song, or puzzle-pieced into a poem.
Relics Rhymed (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Relics Rhymed
I gather fragments wrought asunder by great gusts, gales, and tempestuous tantrums of feuding forces, jagged shards tumbled in the roiling surf, defanged, lenified, smoothed, polished, and rhymed by the tides of time, memory’s meager mitigating reach.
A runaway run-on identifying as a poem, a piece of a poem, a poetry puzzle piece,… Make of it what you wish. Those last two lines are a piece of what I’ve been wrestling with in many ways. In what ways does the past extend into the present? To and through the bits and pieces proffered by history, inherited evidence of a long before, timeless tidbits ostensibly proving our place in the river of life and death, creation and destruction? Do these artifacts salve us?
Many questions. Few answers.
Wanting wonder, I’ll simply allow that — as so often — relics rhymed.
Searching for Poetry Amidst Architectural Salvage (Photo: Geo Davis)
Searching for poetry, questing for questions that need no answers to matter and guide and enrich.
This might be my epitaph. Some day. But not yet. I hope.
Today, the vernal equinox, I awoke at 4:00 AM, eager to start cooking a wild boar roast I had thawed. Actually it wasn’t the roast that caffeinated me prior to my first cuppa MUD\WTR, that zero-to-sixtied my green gray matter within seconds.
If the human brain were a computer, it would be the greenest computer on Earth.
You with me? Caveat emptor: it’s going to be that kind of post!
It wasn’t anticipation of the pulled wild boar that I enjoyed for lunch (and soon will enjoy for dinner) that prevented me from falling back asleep. (I love variety, but if it ain’t broke… And if you’ve cooked 5.4lbs of wild boar shoulder, then share, eat, share, eat, share,…)
It was one of those light-switch-on awakenings. Sound asleep one moment, wide awake the next. 100% alert, cylinders thumping away, and focus dialed in. Monday morning’s are often like that for me. And with an ambitious punch list for the icehouse rehab, I needed to hit the ground running. Or jumpstart the week by roasting a wild boar shoulder?
Both.
But, after talking through exterior trim and clapboard siding with two contractors, explaining how to prune watersprouts (aka “growth shoots) out of our mature American Linden to another contractor, and various other midmorning miscellanea, I headed into the carriage barn for some, ahem, research.
I’m still sorting through architectural salvage and surplus building materials, endeavoring to make final decisions for the icehouse. Woulda-coulda-shoulda tackled this many months ago, and I tried, but the process continues to evolve. In some cases, it’s continues to elude me. So my endeavor continues.
Today I ruled out a couple of ideas I’ve been developing, visions for upcycling deconstructed cabinetry from Sherwood Inn days. The visions have faded, but all is not lost. In the shadowy space they’ve left behind, I stumbled upon something else.
A poem.
Searching for Poetry Amidst Architectural Salvage (Photo: Geo Davis)
Searching for Poetry
Wabi-sabi wandering,
wabi-sabi wondering —
reimagining relics,
architectural salvage,
weather worn detritus,
offcuts, rusty remainders,
time textured tatters,
pre-mosaic fragments,
and dust mote mirages —
so much pulling apart,
so much pushing aside,
searching for poetry.
Today I concluded that the vision I’d been pursuing — a vision of upcycling deconstructed cabinetry and paneling from the Sherwood Inn’s colonial taproom — had been little more than mirage. However as this mirage vanished, I happened upon a glimmer of clarity, fleeting but encouraging, around an even bigger mystery that I’ve been chasing. Also mirage-like, also elusive, also a problem that persistence might hopefully tame, also a quest for questions that illuminate and instruct even when their answers evanesce.
This glimmer of clarity (try to imagine a spark that just might benefit from attention, a flickering flame that invites kindling with promises of a roaring bonfire) materialized briefly where moments before a mirage had danced and vanished. And what did I see? Companionship. Kinship. Similarity. Affinity. Between poetry and architectural rehabilitation and adaptive reuse. A glimmer and gone. I exaggerate, but the picture is at once protean, subtle, and elusive.
Nevertheless, I will continue to strive, risk, and experiment. I will continue essaying to illustrate the intimate overlap between poetry and construction — especially between composing lyric essay and adaptive reuse of existing buildings and building materials — until my wandering and wondering renders an oasis. Or admits a mirage.
For Sale: Hyde Gate (aka Rosslyn), in Essex, New York, April 1910.
Rosslyn artifacts pop up all over the place! And they’re not always Rosslyn artifacts; sometimes they’re Hyde Gate artifacts or Sherwood Inn artifacts… Honestly one of the most enjoyable aspects of owning and renovating our home is stumbling across interesting relics of its almost 200 year history.
I originally came across the advertisement above on eBay. The auction item was a full page ripped from the April 1910 edition of Country Life in America. How could I resist? One more quirky artifact for the digital library!
Turns out it wasn’t the only time that Hyde Gate (aka Rosslyn) was advertised for sale or rent in the early twentieth century. A March 1910 advertisement is available on Google Books. A handy tool for finding print book content, Google Books offers increased functionality for out-of-copyright content such as this old magazine. For free you can “clip” the image (at right) to use elsewhere, and you can even clip the text content from the page. The following is quoted from the ad:
For Sale: Hyde Gate (aka Rosslyn) in Essex, New York, March 1910.
FOR SALE “HYDE GATE,” Essex, N.Y. FOR RENT
The country residence of Caleb James Coatsworth Esq. is just at the outskirts of Essex Village on Lake Champlain, New York. The house faces the lake, and the grounds run right down to the lake with bath houses and a large private dock. The house is between eighty five and a hundred years old. Is built of brick. It is very beautifully furnished with the real antique Colonial furniture and although lighted throughout with electricity there is not on modem electrical fixture on the first floor.
In the hall there is an old lantern, and in all the rooms old candelabra hanging from the ceilings; there are also lamps on the centre table lighted by electricity. The house is a beautiful example of the Colonial period. It contains ten bed rooms and two bath rooms on the second floor, and three bed rooms on the third floor, also two lavatories on first floor. One can leave “Hyde Gate” in an automobile after breakfast and lunch at Lake Placid, or leave “Hyde Gate” in the morning and dine at Bretton Woods in the White Mountains, or dine at Montreal, Canada. Lake Placid is fifty miles from “Hyde Gate” by road; Bretton Woods one hundred and eighteen miles; and the Windsor Hotel, Montreal, Canada is just one hundred miles; all the roads are very good. It Is a great central starting point for automobiling. The owner of “Hyde Gate” has made all of these trips. You can leave the dock at “Hyde Gate” in a launch and go to Westport, NY, or Vergennes, Vermont (the oldest city in Vermont) through the beautiful Otter Creek or Burlington, Vermont in less than an hour, or “Bluff Point” in two hours where the Lake Champlain Hotel is located, which is considered the best hotel In the Adirondacks.
The grounds contain between five and six acres, beautifully laid out, and there is a great abundance of flowers, a large kitchen garden, and quite a number of fruit trees and currant bushes, etc.
A stable with room for five horses, carriage room for five or six carriages, large harness room with glass case for harness, and good comfortable quarters for coachman. There is a large carriage shed outside of table where extra carriages can be stored, also suitable for two automobiles, several chicken houses, and a pigeon house. There is a large new ice house with a cold storage house built in connection with it.
Hyde Gate” is just half way on Lake Champlain, and one can make the trip to New York in a motor boat in two days running spending the night at Albany, or you can run to Montreal with a motor boat in two days.
A couple of years later a similar advertisement ran in the April 1912 issue of Country Life in America. And it would seem that Caleb James Coatsworth was learning a thing or two about advertising with each return to ink. The text length and detail is generally the same throughout, but a bit of brevity slips into the equation, and the photographs improve significantly. Perhaps there are later advertisements that I’ve missed?
Let’s take a look at the copy for Coatsworth’s 1912 Hyde Gate advertisement:
For Sale: Hyde Gate (aka Rosslyn) in Essex, New York, March 1912.
For Sale HYDE GATE ESSEX NY For Rent
“Hyde Gate” is just at the outskirts of Essex Village on Lake Champlain, N.Y. It is the country residence of Caleb James Coatsworth. The house faces the lake, and the ground runs down to the lake. There are bath houses and a large private dock. The house is between 85 and 100 years old. It is a beautiful example of the Colonial period; made of brick. It is very beautifully furnished with antique colonial furniture. It contains ten bed rooms and two bath rooms on the second floor and three bed rooms on the third floor. Also two laboratories on the first floor.
The grounds contain between 5 and 6 acres beautifully laid out. There is a great abundance of flowers. A large kitchen garden and a number of fruit trees and currant bushes, etc. A stable with room for five horses, accommodations for 5 or 6 carriages, large harness room and good comfortable quarters for coachman. Another carriage shed affords accommodations for extra carriages and two automobiles. There are other outhouses. Further particulars from
Two laboratories on the first floor? Fantastic! It’s handy having multiple versions of this ad to sort out the unlikely presence of a pair of labs in a summer residence… Two lavatories, now that makes a little bit more sense. Imagine the ten year old son who’s spent all spring looking forward to summer vacation on Lake Champlain. His father has promised that their summer rental includes two laboratories. Oh, the experiments that have occupied the boy’s daydreams in the final stretch of the school year. A homemade volcano, frog dissection,… the options are endless. And then to arrive after an exhausting journey along bumpy roads in the days long before air conditioning. And the lad races inside to search for the laboratories, to find the answer to his fantasies only to discover that it was an error. Two lavatories? What sort of evil joke is that?
