Purdeyville

"Eternity is a matter of opinion..."

This photo-essay describes the journey that Caleb Karcist takes on his way from the Harbor Ward to North Village to his voice lesson with Tessa Barebones, in the "Confession" chapter of Gloucestertide. The primeval forest of Purdeyville is the dark heart of Cape Gloucester, the original settlement, long since abandoned. Accompanied as ever by his dog Ibi-Roi, Caleb follows a trail that visits Bayliss's favorite themes: myth, ritual, and history.

Not far from their starting point they turned off Cod Street up the still-settled segment of Watling Road (the abandoned inland coach route) and crossed the Old Stone Bridge whose solid granite balustrades were smudged by a century of steam locomotives chugging through the cut. The cunningly pieced blocks of undressed stone, locked together by their own weight, spanned the single line where the right-of-way to Land's End sliced through deep walls of living rock as sheer as the Corinthian Ship Canal's.

A half-mile east of Washington Street (Bayliss's "Cod Street"), Gloucester Avenue crosses the Boston & Maine tracks leading toward Rockport. The bridge behind is Route 128. Caleb and Ibi are headed into the forest from where Blackburn Circle is today.

Here the ruins of modern pavement left off and the earliest track to Seamark dwindled into a recidivous double path of rutted dirt lined with grasses.

The nostalgic lane climbed a ridge of deserted pastureland, not yet gone to seed, where surface stones had been dragged and lifted into walls edging the road and still fended off the second encroachment of forest, which was adumbrated by hardwood scrub lodging along the borders.

So here Caleb and Ibi travel across the glacial moraine, where the geological record is written in granite rubble. Nowadays the forest is indeed encroaching, but the paths still stretch through the woods as a testament to the rituals of human endeavor forming patterns out of the void.

But instead of continuing to follow the old road down into hollow woods where it was still swamped with mud from the melted grip of winter (thereby skirting Birdhouse Hill to rejoin the eastern segment of Cod Street at Tybbot's Reach), they plunged off to their left on a path through the tumbled wall to a precipitous trail ending at the railroad tracks below. The cinder bed of calibrated parallel bars took them onto a short embankment across the old eastern inlet of Railcut Pond, long ago raised by a dam to become the city's first artificial reservoir, leveling the colonial mill-race of Quigley Brook, by which the public drinking water was still fed through a culvert buried under the elevated causeway.

The train tracks crossing the inlet. Babson Reservoir is here renamed "Railcut Pond" after nearby Railcut Hill. "Quigley Brook" is Alewife Brook. In one of his characteristically cinematic passages, Bayliss describes Caleb and Ibi's voyage through the forest where the ghosts of a glacier as well as the original Purdeyville settlers still haunt the hills:

Mild salt air from the northeast had yielded to a chillier northwest motion that veiled the vernal sun with reminders of bleak winter. In many places the paths were still sodden, and greening grass was coldly mushy under foot. Even the dry cedars and junipers did not yet trust the warming tilt of earth, though the leaves of deciduous bushes were already half unfolded, sparsely scattered around "Purdeyville Square", where three roads used to meet at the groin of a hamlet. Here the wooded fringes of the disincarnate community were out of sight behind ridges of thin rockbottomed earth that had once supported forests among erratic boulders previously strewn like megalithic dung by the last scouring glacier but now keeping company with the low boscage of abandoned agriculture.The thin boreal grass seemed cropped forever by vanished sheep and cattle. To this atmosphere Ibi was impervious, but for Caleb, who'd envisioned Spring, the parkland of nearly naked moor was exposed to a churlish sky. In this weather the Irish-Atlindu pastures were almost forbiddingly prehistoric. The immovable moraine was overgrown here and there with barely traceable Old World hedgerows or a haunted single vestige of of dooryard orchards, which had generally given way to juniper and cedar.

So here are the travelers at "Purdeyville Square," the crossroads of ancient Dogtown. There are still cellar holes here from the homes of its erstwhile inhabitants, reminders of a community surrendered to entropy. In contrast to the geological scarring that shaped its surroundings, however, Purdeyville has fallen prey to economic and political upheaval.

Ibi, busy, marked the titanic surface rocks that were incised with the Duke of Dogtown's mottoes, many of which would be obscured in summer by bushes or brambles. Now and then stepping off the path, Caleb reviewed his favorites:                    WHEN WORK STOPS VALUES DECAY

(Note that, in the desperate state of modern Dogtown, the conditional has become inevitable.)

WORK FOR THE NIGHT IS COMING and               ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF TIME but ignored   FAITH IS A GOOD IDEA                      KEEP YOUR PROMISES                      TRY TO LOVE FATHER                      SUPPORT MOTHER                      NEVER SIGH NEVER SIN and other Pauline pieties.

Massachusetts tycoon Roger Babson (Bayliss's "Richard Tybbot") employed Finnish stoneworkers during the Depression to carve inspirational slogans into boulders in the Dogtown woods. Most of Bayliss's examples are fanciful, but some are slight variations on the actual inscriptions. The graffiti of Wat Cibber ("executed hastily by the tricky light of moonshine") seem to be purely Bayliss's invention. The human journey through the wild woods of Time, Space, and Causality is guided by eternal markers like the stars as well as banal ones like Tybbot's boulders. The powerful in society take it upon themselves to litter society's path with their supposed wisdom, while the irreverent perspective of dissenters such as Wat Cibber is ignored. The boulder path actually stretches further south than the Reservoir. By the time they had crossed the railroad tracks, Caleb and Ibi would have already passed HELP MOTHER (presumably the model for SUPPORT MOTHER), though no mention is made of the inscription until the travelers reach Dogtown Square.

To Ibi in turn, further on, when his master had tried to hurry him past the Marking Stone (sacred library of scents) with no time for cursory sniffs, it seemed only fair to lag behind and study its laminations of history and new learning.

The famous Whale's Jaw rock formation is the model for Cynosure Rock, the Marking Stone of the Gloucesterman series: "split to one side by a millennium of frost, like the inverted jaw of a breaching sperm whale". The landmark is a much less majestic sight than it once was: thanks to reforestation, the Rock can't be seen through the woods until you're quite literally next to it. In addition, the bottom "jaw" fell over some years ago, robbing it of its cetacean symbolism. In Bayliss's works, Cynosure Rock is the center of canine ritual in Dogtown. In the "sacred library of scents," Ibi-Roi is bound to find recorded his recent Walburga Eve coronation (see Gloucesterbook). The learning that Ibi derives from his examination of the Rock is far more profound than anything gleaned from Tybbot's truisms. But Caleb needs to get to Powerhouse Cove for his appointment, so they continue on past the Rock.

He was looking for a descent somewhere between the fire trail (which veered off too soon to the Cod Street traffic of Seamark Village) and the path that would have taken them too far toward Pigeonhole Cove. By threading scrub oak and vegetating heaps of granite rubble, strewn in latterday underbrush about the rims of vacated quarries, he succeeded at last in coming out exactly where he'd hoped to. Rejoining the city's circumferential thoroughfare at a level halfway down to the sea, they crossed the broad and sturdy New Stone Bridge (too high above the abandoned roadbed of the private quarry rails to have been smudged by puffing coalsmoke), whence they were only a couple of cable lengths further to go down to the Barebones' Powerhouse.

Within sight of the quarry, the New Stone Bridge is where Granite Street (the Rockport extension of Washington Street) intersects Quarry Road. So the journey has been completed from Old to New through the mysterious heart of Dogtown, with bridges (a favorite Bayliss symbol) at either end to assist the crossing-over. Humanity travels through paths of greater or lesser use, and records the journeys using mythic devices that resonate in a population nurtured by them, or return as hollow echoes from a community turned to stone.