It was supposed to have been just a quiet adventure. I was going to River Bend Park here in Fairfax County to try to find a Cyrano Darner; a state-rare dragonfly rumored to inhabit one of the ponds a mile or so upstream from the visitor center. I never got there. About 500 yards upstream, I saw a group of half a dozen vultures on one of the numerous rocky islets that dot the Potomac above Great Falls. They all looked like black vultures and I walked quietly to an opening in the vegetation lining the bank. I focused and shot maybe 5 or 6 photos of the flock. Finding vultures in a group is not all that unusual since they gather in sunny spots to bask and raise their low energy metabolisms to flight level. What was unusual, a small voice in the back of my brain was saying, was that they were all black vultures, not a red-headed turkey vulture among them. Black vultures will visually track turkey vultures to a carcass and drive them off when they get there.
The voice in the back of my brain was getting louder when I put the binoculars on the group and saw a pair of blue jeans draped over a tree branch. The jeans waistband ended at an old river worn log. The voice began to go off the chart when a vulture dipped its head down and I saw the exposed bones of the rib cage. The voice said, quite calmly, “We should go back and report this.”
I made my way back to the visitor center and found a uniformed park person at his desk. “I think I have found a body in the river” I said. His eyebrows rose, “Are you sure it’s not just a deer?” “Not unless they’ve started wearing Levis” I replied. I realize now that it sounded flip, but the twin ideas of “body” and “person” never made the connection. It was wreckage and it was human. Not someone’s kid or parent or whatever. Just a pile of bones in blue jeans. The park ranger walked with me to the point and glassed the thing in the river. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called it in. “Now the circus begins” he muttered.
First to arrive was the rescue squad. Their job, I gathered, was to ascertain that: a) there was a body and, b) it was dead. The ranger walked them upriver and when they got back, they began putting away the rescue equipment. It was now a recovery operation and legal issues reared their ugly heads. The Potomac River is technically all in Maryland, up to mean low water, a precedent dating all the way back to early colonial days. The body was in Maryland, Montgomery County, to be precise. Having grown up in Montgomery County and having lived along the river there for several years, I knew that the only safe places to launch a boat were at Cabin John, which was below Great Falls and impossible to traverse, or at Seneca, about 15 miles upstream from where we were. Montgomery told Fairfax to stand by. Meanwhile, Fairfax police began to arrive. A cruiser, then another, then another with an officer in charge. I was asked to wait so I could give a statement, having been the one who discovered the wreck. Helicopters began appearing overhead. US Park Police, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, News 7 and Fox. All holding station or buzzing up and down stream. One of the cops said Montgomery was putting in at Seneca and would be there within half an hour. One of the Fairfax Fire and Rescue people, who already had their zodiac in the water at the boat ramp scoffed. “Maybe an hour if they have someone steering who knows the line” meaning knew how to avoid the rocks and snags that make the Potomac such fun for kayakers. “We can have this guy in a bag in 15 minutes if they let us.” Somewhere along the way the “it” became a “he”.
I told my story to several cops in a row, uniform, uniform supervisor, homicide detective, cold case detective. The cold case guy noticed my camera and asked if I had made any photos. “Yeah, I wanted to get images of the vultures, but I think the body is in the pictures.” He asked if he could have my camera card so he could download the photos. Turns out that with digital, the first download is the official one and the one to be used in court. He promised to get the card or its replacement back soon. “We will take the images off if you don’t mind” he said. Sure, like I really want that in my camera—bad enough the image is in my brain. Last to ask questions was the WJLA reporter. She was pleasant enough in a wide-eyed gosh weren’t you scared kind of way. I gave some inane answers to the questions. Even spelled my name. So I made the news at 11, answering two questions. The caption labeled me as a hiker. Andy Warhol once said everybody gets 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t promise they would spell your name right.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Stone Monsters
It was a beautiful May day; the sun was shining, the sky blue, bird on the wing, and snail on the thorn. On the spur of the moment, I decided to go the National Cathedral to shoot gargoyles. I had read that the Cathedral had added a Darth Vader head to the collection and was eager to see it. I debouched from the underground garage near the north transept where I heard the Dark Lord was ensconced and gazed about. The bottom row of gargoyles were all there; the rattlesnake and the elephant with eternal mouths open to spout water (or boiling lead if you are a fan of the movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney Jr.). I was trying to locate Darth when a maintenance worker emerged from the basement. “Excuse me,” I asked, “I’m told there is a gargoyle of Darth Vader somewhere up there. Do you know where it might be?” He replied “Sure” and directed me up to a lonely tower where old bullet head was just visible. “Tell you what”, he said, “I’ve got some time left on my lunch hour—I’ll take you up there if you don’t mind the walk.” When gift horses stare one in the face, you don’t count teeth, and I enthusiastically agreed. Several stair cases, one elevator ride and a steel ladder later, we were up on the roof, over 100 feet up. “I’m not supposed to bring people up here due to liability, but just don’t fall off. OK?” We tracked around the transept, with “Bill” (not his real name to keep him out of trouble) giving a running narrative of all the gargoyles and grotesques along the way. “Bill” has been at the Cathedral for 25 years and knows every nook and cranny in the building. I squeezed through the passages between the flying buttresses trying to keep up and not miss anything. There were no fat hunchbacks. The sculptures were in themed pairs, flanking each gable, but from up top, they were seemingly out of kilter until I figured out the pattern. The penguin and baby made more sense when you knew the companion pieces were a polar bear and an old man.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
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