WNET takes only a part of this story. Like the bears gorging at the trout spawn at Grant Village, there is more of this than they can digest, and a lot below the surface.
In the run-up to the Independence Day broadcast, several members of Alton Picke’s two crews quietly outline a book. He sees them making furtive notes. They could not query a literary agent until after the Independence Day broadcast, but then, on the following day, they were released from secrecy. Each sent their e-mails off to New York City, hoping to line up a willing editor.
The morning after the broadcast, Alton Picke sent a query off to Runic Gotham Literary and to their senior agent, Butch Runyon. This is Jim Bennington’s agent. An hour later, Runyon asked for the manuscript. Picke sends him only the first fifteen chapters. He does not know the ending. Runyon signs him up just the same.
PBS always goes deeper than just the surface news. Now, it becomes a cliché to say that the biggest part of this story is below the surface.
Even so, there will still be more to tell, at levels deeper than the geologist or the television producer can acknowledge. I speak of faults that do not lie beneath the planet’s crust, but beneath our own.
Children are attracted to dangerous things. With luck, they learn to survive their own impulses. How you make them give up on an idea becomes the tricky part of life. Or else, the hunger for it never goes away, and then surviving childhood becomes our lifelong job.
The children of the neighborhood crossed the street to enter into the 300 acres of rolling pastures that the farmer reluctantly sold. All around them, it was being excavated and graded. Basements were being laid up in courses of concrete block. Walls were being framed-out with lumber. Joists were laid on their strong edge, from ridge to eave, to form the slope of roofs. The whine of circular saws and the percussion of hammers echoed from hillside to hillside. At 3:00 PM each day the backhoes were left where they were. The framing stands like movie sets alongside the rough outlines of streets traced by limestone riprap and gravel.
Nine-year-old Claire Cheviot had talked the neighborhood boys into digging a cave on the hillside that overlooked their school. At first, they went home dusty, to pat themselves clean before going inside for dinner. But as they dug deeper, the ground became moist and parents became dismayed with the mud, and worried.
At three feet down, Claire had directed them to turn the trench horizontally—and into the hillside. They dug. Candles burned in niches. Soil was lifted out in buckets. She planned for them to finish with an underground room and there hold meetings. Soon, they would be collecting lumber from the houses going up. They would cut it and wedge it into place to brace against the earth.
The noise of the cave-in never made it to the surface. It was only the plume of dust rising up out of the shaft. The biggest boy reached her ankles and pulled with an unforgiving force borne of terror and pity.
Claire hacked deeply, sputtered furiously, and then coughed at length, while the boys stood in a worried circle, looking down the shaft at her muddy head. The sound of heavy equipment rose above the hilltop. Its yellow boom pointed a toothed bucket above the crest. A backhoe appeared riding on twirling rubber tracks. Claire’s father looked big and stern. He shook his head to see the blackened face of his daughter rise up from underground. Almost too late, he thought.
Claire and the boys backpedaled from the approaching backhoe. Soon, her father had excavated all their work, surely saving the life of one or the other of the stubborn, dirty children.
The children trailed along behind, as Claire’s father moved the backhoe to the place he found it. They stoically bore the lecture as he marched them back into the neighborhood.
Down in the basement, the collected rocks in their rows and columns still lay upon the big table. The little cards, hand-lettered with the names, still lay tucked beneath each one.
Since they have started seeing Claire on television from time to time, either her mother or her father often stand before the table, repeating old anxieties like a rosary.
Claire’s horizon was always looking down.