was born in a river town. Except for a year in Saranak Lake I have never lived more than a mile or two from a major river. As a child growing up in a southern Wisconsin river city, I believed that a message in a bottle tossed into the Rock River would float downstream to the Mississippi and make it's way to the Gulf someday. After that it would be on the wide ocean, the plaything of its currents, and any seashore or beach in the world was a potential landing place for my letter. Many of us also believed that Huck Finn was a real kid and some wouldn't learn that his story was not an autobiography until as late as junior high. This was more of a disappointment than an embarrassment. We also learned about this time that the locks and dams on the Rock and Mississippi would make raft trips to New Orleans rather difficult. We were the last generation of Americans to regard our rivers as the great roads that they once were, a dream that had persisted since before the canal, the railroad, and the superhighway, only to disappear forever in our generation.
When I was nineteen I was a divinity student at a seminary/novitiate near Franklin, Pennsylvania. The building was located on the brow of the stumpy remnant of a mountain, part of the Allegheny chain. Those primeval hills, once as tall and as fresh as the Alps, have been reduced to humble mounds after nearly endless cycles of rains, frosts, and the abrasive mantle of adamantine ice. Only a fraction of a second ago in geological terms, man learned that buried in these hills are oil deposits which came to be the earliest exploited in America. Many active wells in those ancient fields still exist, though they are nearly depleted.
These old mountain wells are often pumped from a distance, by cables hooked from the well to a prime mover that may by a mile or more away. The well itself is a lonely structure, often in the middle of the woods, or standing forlornly at the edge of an isolated meadow. They look nothing like the massive pumping rigs one associates with oil fields in Texas, but are usually a simple rocking arm no higher off the ground than the height a man, moving slowly up and down. At the engine site, there is a huge wheel lying flat on the ground, with heavy steel rope radiating out from it in every direction through the underbrush and forest, like the web of some monstrous spider fallen flat. The engine is attached to a cam device causing the great wheel to oscillate slowly almost 180 degrees, first clockwise, then counter clockwise. The attached cables slowly pull the distant pump shafts up, then let them fall again. The small amounts of crude extracted are collected in nearby tanks.
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hen walking through any of the hills where there are active wells, you might walk over one of these slowly moving cables. They rustle back and forth through the brush like some ridged snake, a confused and narrow fellow, unable to decide whether to come or go. The surprise to the uninitiated hiker is greater when the distant engine is far enough away to be out of earshot, so that the cable appears to be self-actuated. Over time, they wear shallow grooves in the earth, cutting into low hills and rises, becoming partially buried. On one calm, chilly late fall afternoon I was repairing the oil storage tank for one of these old pumps with two other seminarians, when we heard our old pickup truck roaring down the service road. It was Mr. Beatner from our maintenance staff, who had driven up in such a hurry to tell us breathlessly that Kennedy was shot. For this reason, if anyone asks me where I was that day, I think about nearly exhausted Pennsylvania oil wells and snakes in the grass.
The great stone house where I lived that year had been converted by the Catholic Church into a retreat house and novitiate for a religious order, to which I was attached at the moment as a prospect. In its earliest years the place had been the mansion of an eccentric millionaire and politician named Joseph Sibley, called by him River Ridge Farm. He was a very minor but wealthy member of the waning robber baron class, exiled there, or so it was said, by court order after conviction for crimes whose nature had been forgotten by my local informants, Peanuts and Stella (whose last names have long since slipped my mind). These were the ladies who came up from Franklin to cook for us during the week, and they had many stories about life on the mountain in this old house, but I never had the chance to verify the accuracy of any of them. Besides, we sometimes had the impression that they considered perfectly healthy young men willingly living together without women just dumb enough to believe any tall tale, and they certainly loved to tell stories.
If old Sibley had really been banished to his mountain estate, the possible real reason for his exile may have been more political than criminal, after all. Besides being a man of substance, and an amateur scientist and agrarian, he had also been an active politician. He had served at times in congress as a Republican, and then as a Democrat, and again as a Populist, which may have been a record until 
then for party jumping. It is possible that his political enemies, who by this time must have been from every corner of the political landscape, combined just long enough to pass a law against coat-turning, and then arraigned him with it. But whatever his crime, and newspaper accounts of the time report bribery and other irregularities, we were told by Peanuts (or was it Stella?) that after his day in court, his wealth, his lawyers, and most of all his connections, had secured him perpetual semi-confinement to his mountain estate. It was in this way that he managed avoided the rigors of the penitentiary.
is prison was a lovely many-roomed stone building of remotely Italianate design, which gave it the appearance, when seen from the river valley, of a Roman villa. This may be what the patrician Sibley had in mind when he designed the place. Its walls were made of four-squared granite blocks wonderfully fitted and it was covered with a beautiful red Chinese tile roof. The front of the building faced away from the valley below toward the nearby top of the mountain. A great lawn at the back, large enough for a polo match, began at the elevated veranda next to the glass doors of a ballroom and library. The lawn sloped away to the forest at a rather steep grade, which would have made any game of polo more interesting than usual.
The interior of the house was considerably altered by the time it's celibate occupants had arrived. The once beautiful bedrooms and sitting rooms upstairs were rather crudely divided into "cells" about the size of the average YMCA flop, and furnished to a Spartin degree that would have pleased St. Anthony. The grand rooms downstairs, the ballroom, the dining room and the library (now striped of it's former collections, replaced with reading of a more spiritual nature, and sparsley at that) were reduced to a bare depressing emptiness, with only a few pieces of furnature against the walls. The refectory, or dining area, could have been a high school cafeteria in any Appalachian town or village. There was little there between the picturless walls but tables, chairs, and about a dozen salt and pepper shakers. The food was plentiful, albeit peasant-plain, and Thanked Be God, the coffee pitchers were never empty.
The estate itself covered half the mountain and overlooked the meandering Allegheny far below. As big as the mansion was, it was nearly equaled in size by the stone gatehouse a quarter mile down the road. This building contained room for six automobiles and a repair bay, and the living quarters on the second floor had seven rooms. His demesne had included a completely staffed self-sustaining farm and several orchards, all supporting the Big House, but by the time I was there, the countless fruit trees had long since suffered the effects of neglect and the fields around them had not endured the plow for almost two generations. The great house had been well cared for through the years, first by the fading family, then by thoughtful real estate people, anxious to present this largest of white elephants in its best light to wealthy inquirers. Apparently Holy Mother Church was richer than the rest.
In the weedy and neglected inner courtyard of the U-shaped two-story mansion, old Sibley had found repose in a private family cemetery. Apparently, he had been laid to rest with his wife, although exactly where she was buried was a mystery to us. We discovered the headstone of one Mary Sibley while clearing weeds for a garden not far from the kitchen dooryard, lying flat on the ground, face up to the sky. It was never clear to us if this was his wife or his daughter. Like the old sandstone grave markers in cemeteries everywhere, it was weathered to near-illegibility, but her name could still be discerned. In the courtyard there stood the family monument itself, around which would be gathered the family graves. It had a huge square base topped by a great obelisk reaching nearly to the second story roof line, and it was beginning to lean off center as the earth beneath it settled. It bore no inscription except his name - no date, no epitaph or memorial, just "Sibley", in large raised letters. The fame of certain people requires no biographical information on their gravestones; their name is enough. In his time, Joseph Sibley was one of these. Today this slightly tilting monument is only a cenotaph. In a later time, his clay would be moved to the common boneyard in town (Franklin Cemetary), to sleep with the plainer classes. This explained his derelict monument and that of the woman. I never heard who moved him, or when it was done, but I can imagine that this proximity of the dead may have been unnerving to survivors. We can be certain that the house sellers had little desire to try and unload a building with an attached tomb at the rear.
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So this place had once been a congenial asylum, where a man of substance who was forbidden to wander abroad had brought the world to him, and whose parties and soirees were still remembered in the town after four decades. I was told that on those nights the lights of the mansion on the mountain were visible from nearly anywhere in the valley and from Franklin itself, and even by lonely travelers peering out of the night windows of trains speeding along the tracks beside the river. Often in the late evening on those festive occasions,
his chums and their many servants would approach in baggage-laden caravans of Duesenbergs, Cords, and Auburns from all over the East Coast. As they wound up the mountain road, city eyes stared out of the car windows at the unfamiliar sight of endless woodlands on each side of the motor path. The beams from their headlights bobbed up and down on the long crushed rock roadway, as they pushed upward past the open gatehouse and on to the great building itself. On clear evenings, when the breeze moved toward the river from the elevated veranda at the rear of the mansion, the music of their merriment could just be heard, especially jazz. Other times, music from the violins and cellos of his more genteel fetes seemed to never get much further than the hardwoods on the side of the mountain.
The year before while living in New York, the Adirondacks were similar in many ways to where I was now. One of the things I would recall later about my year just a few miles from the Canadian border was that it was the coldest winter I had ever spent in my life. It was beautiful there, and the country was certainly wilder, which attracted me to it most of all. But there was no river. And there was no mist, only lakes and ice.
n Easter Sunday, 1964, I stood on my spot at the upper edge of the back lawn, looking out over the river valley. It wasn't misted today, but cool and clear, and the stacks of the refinery next to the river were not releasing their usual effluvia into the valley air. I had already told Father Master that I would be returning to Wisconsin with my parents who were visiting for the Easter holiday. He wasn't exactly surprised when I told him, nor were my parents, for that matter. There was no vocation after all, perhaps only an unfocused desire to leave my hometown, to get as far away as I could on someone else's ticket and do some good at the same time. I guess this was my raft ride down the river to another city where I'd never been before. I had no clear idea at all what I was doing there, and I also knew that were a couple of others that should have been leaving this weekend, as well. I suddenly remembered a conversation that I had had a couple of years before with a friend of mine who was also a seminarian, about life in divinity school and the personalities who populated the place. Much of what he had to say made more sense today than it had at the time. We all knew each other here by now, and in the concentrated emotional atmosphere of the average novitiate, few personal shortcomings escape the beady eyes of one's fellow novices, who take endless enjoyment thinking about these things. But they would stay on as I heard in later years, and I wondered if they ever wished that they had left the mountain as I would that Monday after Easter, and never looked back.
Please Visit - The River City by the Plain
