Travel by DAR

Hometown: Walking the Bounds

(First published in Yankee)

It is a very moving thing to see a Fuller Brush man, an off-duty fireman, a Selectman chairman and his daughter-in-law, all leap over a barbed wire fence in an effort to find, before the sun goes down, a town boundary laid out by Puritans three centuries before. Moving, and not least for the fact that this is what the General Laws of Massachusetts bid its citizens do: Every five years, representatives of each town and hamlet must walk the bounds, making sure the stone markers that were put up in the 1600s haven't fallen down or been carted off to serve as third base in someone's sandlot baseball game. Moving, also, because in more cases than not a marker that was designated 300 years ago as being on top of an oak knoll is today between the lanes of an interstate highway. The world changes, and no one knows it better than we five who have volunteered to spend our Saturday afternoon squinting through the sharp autumn sunlight at an old town map.

Our first stop is on the clamshell driveway of a small, unpainted Colonial almost swallowed by cattails. The driveway is layered with crushed clam shells, which tend to resist rutting better than does gravel in mud season. A chained-up goat eyes us irritably as we stand about under the empty clothesline, and gradually the goat begins to growl. Jeremy Spencer (our Selectman chairman) goes to rap on the door window, which is covered on the inside by what looks like someone's old blue flannel work shirt. No one answers. Jeremy Spencer says, "Well, we do this to them only once every five years," and hops off the stoop onto a path through the cattails. We follow Indian file. Soon the cattails give way to wild raspberry growth and the daughter-in-law stumbles, but catches herself, laughing, saying she didn't get prickled. Deep inside the growth, our fireman (in blue nylon fireman's off-duty jacket) comes across a bottle. Nothing special: a Listerine bottle, circa 1980. Another 200 yards and the path opens up onto the crushed yellow grass of a tidal marsh which looks as though it's been slept upon.

With great respect, Jeremy Spencer carefully unfolds the old town map and reads an ancient notation that says there should be a fieldstone marker 100 feet west of a solitary elm tree - but there is no trace of any elm tree. We spread out, and in a moment Jeremy Spencer's daughter-in-law gives up a cry. We are proud of her, standing around the waist-high marker which is leaning just a bit, but not enough to worry about; she is proud of herself and breathes heavily, seeming to give off the sweet shy smell of lawn-mowers (her husband fixes them for a living). Together we feel the inscriptions on the marker: "1660," "1720," "1788," "1853." Jeremy Spencer touches its surface with a brush from an orange paint-pot he's carrying; it'll wash off before the five years are up, but orange paint is what all the Selectmen use nowadays.

Two point three miles in a straight line from the marker in the marsh should be another marker. On the ride over - tacking a quarter mile to the left, three quarters to the right along town roads - Jeremy Spencer recalls that when he last saw this next one it was in the middle of a cabbage field. Jeremy Spencer has walked the bounds three times before - he is the only one of us who has ever walked them before -but the last time was five years ago. When we get there he says, "Wait a minute, where'd these woods come from?" We are deep inside a thick new spurt of woods, through which the sun is beginning its drop; it seems to accelerate through the trees with disturbing speed. We cannot find the marker we're looking for, and our leader feels he is losing face. "One out of two," he mutters to himself as he leads us back at a good clip towards the car.

And here we are now, leaping over a barbed wire fence! It is quite a sight, all five of us in mid-air at sundown. It is a sight that makes me swear I'll never slam my door on a Fuller Brush man again. Now we are leaving behind the pasture with green chalk-dusted sheep (green indicates those ready for shearing, Jeremy Spencer thinks; red indicates those to be castrated). We are leaving behind the two kids who are wandering around eating cold apple pie off a tin plate with their fingers. We are far away from the 20th century now, searching for a four-foot high granite rod stuck deep inside a cedar swamp. "I remember coming out of the swamp onto a kind of island," Jeremy Spencer is saying, "and looking off to the left about as far away as that rotten oak stump there."

We look, but there is no four-foot high marker. "It says here that there used to be a stone wall nearby, but I think that disappeared a long time ago. That's the trouble with these old reference points," he says. "I've never seen them in my lifetime." We muck about, discouraged. All at once the shouts of a faraway football game reach me, and looking up in that direction I see it, four feet tall and emaciated, a Giacometti left by the Puritans. I am as proud as if I had led the U.S. Marine Corps to a hidden national treasure. We crowd around, feeling the inscriptions, touching it, venerating it for being sturdy enough to last another 300 years, for being lit up so nicely with the last of the day's sunlight coming through the yellow leaves of the birches and the green cedar. Huddled deep inside the swamp, we listen to the sounds of the football game far off to the west.

"Looking from island in direction of football cheers," Jeremy Spencer says. He writes it down on the old town map.