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Architectural drawings are spread across a wooden table under yellow afterhours tungsten. “You’re staying for the party, right?” Ken is big, with tiny green eyes and a well kept red beard. He has a wide, aquiline nose. When Carson responds yes, Ken continues his tour.
The drawing is for something key shaped. But with dozens of surveyor’s symbols, cross-sectional grade illustrations and other unreadable engineering subtleties.
“I cut through the woods a year ago. The cutting runs here [along the length of the key]. There's a 3.3° grade from this spot here all the way down here.” His thick finger points to one end of the key to the far end. “It diverges maybe .2 -.3° the whole time. You’d never notice it. Unless you had the largest carpenter’s leveler in the world.” His mustache parts with a tiny grin. Ken’s dry humor. “To the eye, it looks flat. To water, it's a straight smooth decline.”
Seeing for ourselves, Ken leads Carson (and Sasha, on camera) over the snow to the woods' edge behind the house. Ken starts indicating with his arms like a real estate agent.
"The base of the key is somewhere out here," Carson narrates over the footage of Ken silently pointing, counting steps, describing measurements with both hands and finger. He's totally animated now. "Ken can't hide his excitement and so winds up describing his project to us in pieces. We struggled to put it together.
"But now that I've seen it, I think I can say it's pretty amazing."
We see a long corridor of white snow through tall pine. It's not cut parallel but gradually V-shaped, with a thin black line running up the middle. Your eye, guided by the white of snow, the black line, and the forest boundary, runs the walled convergence to an ankh-shaped stanchion hundreds of yards away. And what do you know: it's the pole on the little island pricked with trees. Behind the island is an empty field tilting down to the lake, a humpbacked rolling hill, and beyond that, the gray ceiling of winter.
"Ken’s project, I realized, is a kind of North American Stonehenge. He calls it a Solstice Alidade." Back to the pine corridor, over a fuzz-folk, Neutral Milk Hotel-like version of Syd Barrett’s “She Took a Long Cold Look.” Little loafs of sandstone line the forest edges. Down the middle, more sandstone bricks create an unswerving, heterologous sluice in the ground, three inches wide: the black line. It is unnervingly straight, regardless of earth’s bumps and twists. The sluice runs down Ken’s invisible grade and then, coming closer, divides into two streams which encircle an arcaded bower or grotto in the center of large stone slabs. A little tornado of smoke twists upwards from the center of the bower.
After a few seconds, the precise placement of the large erect stones suddenly reveals itself. They’re like sentinels. Inside the bower, also made of stone and entwining ivy, oak beams cross the top with a gnarly overgrowth of grape vines. A shallow but wide iron bowl hangs from a beam. Inside of which roils a small but steady fire. Hanging from the bowl like an ancient Japanese bell is an iron cylinder.
Beneath the cylinder and firebowl there’s a labyrinth formed by little pebbles on the floor. Ken walks the tightening circle of the labyriinth’s center until he can reach up and place two logs into the bowl, feeding the fire. Then he follows the labyrinth out.
In the rear, cut into the stone a perfectly smoothed hole. The camera, sensing a companion iris, peeks through.
“With Druidic precision," Carson explains, "the circular opening on top of the pole on the island lines up exactly with the circumfrence of the firebowl cylinder and this hole at the rear of his bower.” The camera turns then to a blacklimbed, leafless apple tree behind the bower, waiting for spring.
Back in the bower, and excited himself, Carson describes what happens next. “The earliest sunbeam on the morning of the solstice will rise right over there, poking through the ankh, through this bower, through that hole and onto the apple tree. Ken says it should be ready by tomorrow, just in time for the sun’s rebound, and the party.” He then moves closer to the camera, confidentially. "But the forecast doesn't look too good."
Another image of Ken dragging several logs by tractor. He hoists and leans them into a triangular pile. It looks like the preperation for a bonfire.
“This is amazing,” Sasha says.
Over images of burly, yellow coveralled Ken striding across his winter acreage, tinkering, riding his tractor, Carson says, “She’s right. Regardless of the weather, we’re both awed by Ken’s project. So is my sister. She's fallen in love with someone who can match her grandiosity and redirect it into the world around him.
“Which, I learn, is a fairly recent accomplishment. His life before Shannon was doing odd jobs, drinking, hunting, fighting, fixing cars. Making prosciutto was a lark. The movements of the stars literally went over his head, indifferently.
"Somehow, just having something like Shannon in his life, he is now a post-medieval enviro-cosmic landscape sculptor. ”
He cuts to a computer screen of Ken’s website, Black Cauldron dot com.
“That’s how his agent describes him in the artist profile on his website and artist catalog. And he’s already moving onto another Neo-Iron Age project. It’s working title is Ecclesiastic Orrery. It’s not far from the Alidade.”
“The idea here being that the sun hits the panel, which drives the motion not only of these planets [the iron cages] but also comets and meteors in a way even Ken admits he hasn’t figured out.”
Tilting up from a copper disk blooming with oxidation, we see Sasha, in the sundial garden, looking upwards at pallid winter sky.
Later, more hushed confidentiality in their bed room at night. “Having seen what we saw today, the proto-medieval cosmic sculptures, and the sundials everywhere, Sasha and I are wondering if the solstice party will even be a party. We’re kind of thinking it will be .... "
He turns to Sasha, petting a big Newfoundland on the bed. "How did you put it?"
"Sort of a reverential observance. Something holy. In the holiday/holy day sort of way." She pats the dog with a big playful whoompf. "Which could also be cool."
Back to Carson, nodding, kind of. Not too sure. "Yeah ... maybe."
Fade to black and Carson's voice over.
“Except then the beer truck pulls up.”
/continued
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Next: The arrival of Bewei and how the solstice is really saved
"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011
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