Yeah. Look upon my works and despair, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Or Gordon Lightfoot. Whoever I was trying to ape with this drivel. Guess I won't be quitting my day job to become poet laureate of Sugar Creek after all.

Or a mystery-solving archaeologist, for that matter.

Today is our fair hamlet's 198th birthday, and about a month out from the 222nd anniversary of the events of our dubious legend. Seems a fitting day to announce that all my hopes for my great summer find have come to naught. I sent the remains of the pistol lock to a Mr. N_________* at the Ohio History Connection about ten days ago, along with my theories. He actually called me, which gave me some initial hope, and made some interested noises, but said even without testing they were unlikely to find anything conclusive from something so degraded. He said some things about interchangeable gun parts, musket balls, campaign buttons, and other things that might narrow the find down to a few decades, if I could locate them.  I really wasn't listening that hard after the first bit. But I got the hint that proving such a major discovery from a few rusty gun parts would be "next to impossible." That rang through loud and clear. I thanked him and hung up. Then I went out on the porch and sat, listening to the sound of no birds. 

I'm still sitting here, looking upon all my works culminating in this shitty poem, and...well, you know. Feeling profoundly stupid. What the hell was I thinking? Indiana Corrie was going to roll up with this piece of junk coiled in his bullwhip and be hailed as the greatest treasure hunter since Howard Carter? God. Did I really think that? I'm horrified to say that, yeah, I did. You'd think I'd be used to humiliation by now, but somehow it stung more this time. When you hang so much on something so trivial, it just shows how little else you have.

Pathetic.
Old.
Man.

* Note: while Mr. N__________ acknowledges receipt of this artifact from Mr. Corrie on September 19, 2013, it has since gone missing from OHC storage and has yet to be rediscovered.
​

October 13, 2012 ​

I'm on the porch. I'm sleep-deprived out of my skull. My hands are shaking as I write. I'm getting red clay all over everything. And I don't think I've been this excited in my whole life. 

You know the cliche "it came to me in a dream?" Sure, we all do. As a plot device, it's eye-rolling, lazy and laborious, a deus ex somni placeholder for something better to come along and propel the story forward. Nine times out of ten, that "something better" never shows up, leaving you with pure, pulp garbage. 

Well God help me, something in my subconscious doesn't realize what a hack it's being, 'cause it came to me in a godd____d dream. 

I slept badly the night my little fantasy fell apart. Rachel said I thrashed around so much in my sleep it drove her out to the living room. I woke up with a full-body tension headache and a vague memory of loud, disturbing dissonance in my dreams. Lurched through my classes the next day like a zombie, although I doubt the zombies I teach much noticed. Didn't think much about it - until it happened again the next night. And the next. And the next. More than two weeks of high-anxiety night-sweating that had me wondering if I'd acquired Mad Cow Disease and had my wife no doubt considering divorce and/or murder. Every night, the same blaring, unsettling noise saturated my dreams.

Then the noise started to shift. I'd say it was about five nights in that the wall of sound started to split and divide, becoming multiple, distinct sounds that became a little clearer each night. I realized that certain barking, staccato sounds were speech; that intermittent tapping was running feet; that gut-wrenching thuds were guns. It was as if I was listening to the soundtrack of a movie through a broken speaker system that was very slowly being repaired. 

By the time the images started to appear, the sounds were sharp enough that I could see the story: two groups of men, running. One clearly chasing the other. High-pitched, warlike cries and shouts of panic. Thunderous gunfire being exchanged, bullets hissing though the air and whining off of targets. The splash of something wet. One long, agonized scream of pain. The images by contrast were little more than disorienting flashes of light, and I'd wake up in an even worse mood than before, impatient for the two to sync up. (Rachel swears I yelled out "Focus!" in my sleep one night.)

Then last night...f___ing eureka.

The sound was nearly crystal clear. The images were blurry black-and-white hand-held. I made out trees, gray sky, snow on dead grass, shadowy legs running. Objects whizzing through the air too fast to see. Feet bursting into clear water. A hand, brandishing a long, dark object...

The pistol. It hung there in the frame briefly, then an arrow punched through the man's wrist and it sailed off into Sugar Creek -

​I was halfway across the front lawn before I woke up fully, running full-out for the creek. I was barefoot but wearing pants, thankfully, and had a trowel in my hand that I must've grabbed from one of Rachel's flower pots. I could hear Rachel on the porch, yelling something at me. I learned later that I'd scared her half out of her mind, leaping out of bed bellowing at the top of my lungs. I didn't slow down at all, but dove to my hands and knees by the spot where I found the gun and started digging like a gopher, throwing water and rusty sediment everywhere. 

And I found bupkis. My adrenaline rush petered out and I collapsed sideways, panting like an old dog and looking like a homicide victim from all the red on me. If I'd had any breath to spare I would have laughed, and then likely puked and then cried, all in that order. What will Dr. V______ think of this, I wondered: I am officially certifiable. I laid there as Rachel raced toward me and dawn extended its rosy fingers along the length of the creek toward the opening in the trees...

And in that light, I saw something I had never noticed before:

​This blue ash tree just to the right of the entrance to the woods was pockmarked with holes and scars. Just riddled with them. The sounds of whizzing bullets and whining impacts that filled the dream now seeped back into my mind, and then I did laugh, silently and completely without breath. I had found it, I thought. I was Archimedes in the godd____d bathtub.  I flopped over on my back and I looked up at Rachel leaning over me, staring at me like I had grown tentacles. I beamed at her, and reached out to embrace her in my muddy arms. She squawked and fell back on her ass, and I laughed out loud, choked a bit in the middle, but managed not to puke.

This is it. This is the start of something amazing.
​

September 13, 2013

Found this journal under a pile of old school papers in the office. Part of me vaguely recalls burying it there sometime in mid-July.  Wouldv'e driven a stake through its heart if it had been an option. I'm rereading some of the crap I wrote on my worst days this summer, and there were some bad ones where I nearly went mad staring at the walls: "Ate a sandwich. Sat on the porch for an hour. Went back inside. Couldn't take the silence. There don't seem to be any birds around. Think I'll go back to sleep." Jesus. Lucky thing I don't own a gun. 

BUT! My reversal of fortune has gone through its own reversal recently. I actually found a job (of sorts): adjunct teaching at the community college one town over. I swore to myself once upon a time that I would never re-enter that hell, but this summer taught me some provinces of Perdition are more pleasant than others. Gives me an idea for my first course: "Unemployment and Porch Sitting: Dante's Hidden Tenth Circle." 

Rachel's also done well for herself, securing a writing job for the town newsletter. (I still remember a time when the Sugar Creek News was almost a newspaper in its own right, although its hard to believe a town this small could ever support it.) She also does online test-scoring part-time for extra money, and between the two of us, we're doing all right. Randi just started her first semester at OSU, pursuing a double major in English and History. (I swear, I tried to warn her. I just hope that academia is kinder to her than it was to me.) She's also insisting that we start calling her "Miranda" now, and throws a fit whenever we slip up. It'll take some getting used to, I admit. 

Oh, and then there's this: 

 I found this toward the end of July, when desperation drove me off the porch and out for a walk along the creek. Not to overstate it, but this may have been the thing that brought me back. I saw the lock sticking up out of the rusty muck of the creek bed like a hitchhiker's thumb, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. A little digging and I found the rest. I'm sad to say it was intact when I pulled it out, but quickly disintegrated into its component parts.

For the uninitiated, I'll just say it: this is the lock and trigger mechanism for a flintlock pistol, easily two centuries old if not more. It woke my mind right the f___ up, and got the historian in me salivating. It also lodged a thought in my head that, weeks later, I still can't get rid of.

The Legend.

Could this be proof?

OK, I know I'm an idiot for even writing this. I've been ripping the townies for years for believing in this bastardized Washington Irving crap. Let's look at the facts: in two centuries, nothing has ever been found to corroborate it. Not one brass button, not one arrowhead, and not for lack of trying either. Back in the early '90s, around the bicentennial of the Legend, there was a small flurry of morons combing the creek with metal detectors. We were told it drove our nearest neighbor Bill Pryor apes__t, all these people swarming "his land." (He's claimed for years that his property extends deep into the woods, and gets pretty belligerent about it. He's a bit of a prick.) He made such a stink about it that he actually got the Town Council to ban metal detecting in Sugar Creek. The craze died out soon anyway, as all it produced was piles of rusty beer cans from the '70s. If anything was going to come to light, it would've been then.

But would it, though? Lots of big historical discoveries have happened by accident. The Lascaux cave paintings were found by a bunch of kids chasing their dog. Herculaneum was found by a farmer digging a well. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Terracotta Army in China, the Rosetta Stone, the god_____ed Venus de Milo, for Christ's sake. Why it is it so unlikely that I didn't just stumble across the thing that everyone else tried but failed to find? 

I've been sitting on this for a month and a half now. Why? There's no question that this is an artifact. Even if it's not proof of the Legend, it's still something. What could it hurt to check it out? What pride do I have left to bruise, anyway?

I realize in rereading this thing that I still owe a drawing of the creek from back in June:

In West Virginia years back, I saw a stream that had been corrupted by acid mine drainage. It looked a little bit like this, turned a bright vermilion by mineral pollution. There are no mines near Sugar Creek though, and never have been.  And the texture...the sheer viscosity of the water is just impossible to explain.  Every theory put forth to explain it - soil content, freak algae growth, bacterial infestation - none of it has held up. The Legend neatly fills the hole that science can't, and doesn't look like it will be dislodged anytime soon.