Looking for Mr. Gilbert

William Brewster photographing the landscape from Lake Umbagog, Maine, c. 1900

“There are always two people in every picture, the photographer and the viewer.”

On Thursday March 16, 1898, Brewster and Gilbert spent the day packing photographic equipment, field glasses, clothing, and Brewster’s personal items in two trunks and a portmanteau and the next day boarded the Grand Trunk rail line at North Station in company with Caroline and ERS. The four of them traveled north to Portland, Maine, and thence inland to the town of Bethel, in midstate, near the New Hampshire border and about thirty miles east of the White Mountains. Here they debarked and took a carriage up to an imposing yellow mansion with a wraparound porch located at the southern end of the Bethel town common.

A medium-sized man with thick-lensed eyeglasses met them at the door and ushered them into a large sitting room on the west side of the house with windows overlooking orchards and pastures that dropped down to a stream and a lake, with a high band of ridges to the west.

Given the fact that he was living in a small town at the edge of a great wilderness, the man with the glasses was dressed rather formally. He wore a dark cheviot wool suit, a pressed white shirt with a starched collar, linen cuffs, and a silk neck scarf with a swirling Persian floral pattern. This attire was no accident; Doctor Gehring believed in proper dress.

John Gehring was a friend of William and Caroline Brewster, but he was also their personal physician and a specialist in diseases of the nerves. He concentrated his practice—and his unique cures—on those patients of the educated and moneyed classes who suffered from what was then known as neurasthenia.

No one in our time ever seems to suffer from neurasthenia—fortunately. It was one of those ill-defined diseases that struck those of a nervous temperament. Indications, according to contemporary medical literature, were characterized by an unspecified weakness of the nervous system, symptomized by a general feeling of malaise, combined with excitement or depression, flushings and sweats, unrefreshing sleep, headaches, noises or ringing in the ears, functional disturbances of the organs (whatever that means), muscular fatigue, and, among the many other symptoms, pseudo anginal attacks and—among men—loss of sexual power, “nocturnal pollutions,” and premature ejaculations. Dr. Gehring, in his wisdom, claimed to be able to cure all of these symptoms through his therapeutic programs.

His therapies were quite simple, and given the number of bizarre cures then (as now) at large, they were actually quite rational. Although the term is never stated in his literature, he recognized the power of psychosomatic illnesses and attempted to cure the various afflictions of neurasthenia by simple behavioral modifications. The harried, world-weary “inmates,” as they jokingly called themselves, were required to rise early in the morning, awakened by the sound of a gentle xylophone. They were to be at the breakfast table at 7:30, where they would dine on wholesome foods only. Following this they were offered a choice of outdoor activities, sawing or chopping wood for the fireplaces, tree trimming, nature walks, or, in the proper season, gardening, all to the aim of gained fresh air and exercise. There were lectures and discussion groups in the afternoons, and Dr. Gehring would meet with his patients privately for one hour a day to review their conditions. All patients were required to dress for dinner. The idea was that a properly maintained exterior would lead to a more balanced mental interior. With this in mind, no discussion of one’s illness was permitted outside of the sessions with the good doctor, and patients were not permitted to carry their medicines to the table but must consume them in private, in their rooms. Good posture, a smile, a sprightly walk were encouraged at all times.

Oddly enough, given the simplicity of the cure, it seems to have worked. Between the early 1890s and the late 1920s, Dr. Gehring’s institute was the rage among the rich and the intellectual community. It was, in the words of one contemporary article about the institute, a veritable spa for Harvard professors.

After Doctor Gehring’s death the institute lingered on under the direction of his wife and, after she gave up the practice, the building languished. It was refurbished in the 1940s and outfitted as a new establishment known as the NTL Institute, the National Training Laboratory, whose purpose was to advance the field of “applied study of behavioral science” through group discussion and interchange. Courses at the institute were designed to help executives understand the dynamics of the human interactions within their organizations, a role not always understood by those whose primary mission in life was generally concerned with the acquisition of personal wealth. Managers and corporate officers were instructed through the art of group dialogues to open the closed minds of business leaders to the feelings of others. No small task.

As with Dr. Gehring’s program, the institute made use of the natural surroundings and the isolation of the place to get the harried executives some perspective on themselves and their work, and their relationship to their employees—meaning, according to David Garrison, a local man who was associated with the local historical society, “get their acts together …”

“NTLs,” as the participants in the programs are known in the community, are not entirely popular with the shopkeepers and hotel and restaurant staffs in the town of Bethel, Garrison said.

The NTL program was the first by twenty years of a long line of similar encounter groups that arose in the late 1960s and still carry on today. I heard from a man who works in a similar field that it had actually enjoyed some success in humanizing powerhouse executives. Sometimes, he said, the program was too successful. Participants would return to their companies, work for a few months, then quit their jobs, divorce their wives, and fly off to the South Pacific, never to return.

I went up to Bethel looking for Mr. Gilbert because he often accompanied Brewster to the area, although he himself did not live at the Gehring Institute. He was quartered off campus in one of the cabins the institute owned down by a nearby lake, and here, while Mr. and Mrs. Brewster spent their days walking in the woods, chopping wood, dressing for dinner, and listening to lectures by Mrs. Gehring on cultural matters such as the structure of the late Beethoven quartets, Gilbert was free to do as he liked.

He must have enjoyed these outings in the new country of the north. Although he no doubt missed Anna and his children, the sojourns in Bethel had the elements of a vacation for him, a tradition that did not come into currency for most people of his class until the labor reforms of 1910. He fished in the lake and the streams, slept late, and, in later years, wandered over the landscape taking photographs on his own. He had learned to identify northern birds by this time and would report his findings to Mr. Brewster, thereby adding species accounts to Brewster’s growing annotated list that would be posthumously published as Birds of the Lake Umbagog Region.

I had presumed, when I first read of the Gehring Institute, back in Cambridge, that the old building housing the institute had been torn down. I had been in Bethel some years earlier—before I even knew Brewster was there—and had noticed the large yellow mansion at the end of town but had presumed it was someone’s private estate.

One of the photographic plates I had found in the Lincoln attic happened to have been annotated, which is what brought me back to the area. The image shows the back of the Gehring Institute, looking to the northeast. It’s not much of a picture to my eye: an old overgrown field of shrubs in March, bare limbs, no intriguing shadows, no definition anywhere, no singularity just, a brushy background, a light sky beyond. Just beyond the frame of the photograph is the house and an interesting, architecturally detailed railing at the edge of its surrounding porch. Not to criticize, but the inclusion of the carved wood human construction in contrast to the wildwood tangle just beyond, and beyond that the sky, might have improved the image. There are old trees just behind the photographer, which would have been there in Brewster’s time, an ancient white pine that soars ever upward and is trimmed of branches lower down. Nearby is a long sweep of field that was probably there in Brewster’s time too, and if the photographer had but turned the camera forty-five degrees, and waited, on any given evening there, he could see a low ridge of hills, the lighted sky beyond, images of sundown and the remains of the day. I don’t know what anyone saw in the dull tangle, but it must have evoked in the photographer some feeling, some essence that he wanted to capture. It is possible, however, that whoever took the picture did not have much of an eye.

By this time, having reviewed so many of the various images, I had come to recognize two different styles at work. A few of the plates and prints I discovered were signed or credited to Gilbert, and pairing these with others in the collection, unsigned, but taken during periods when Gilbert was not with Brewster, I came to be able to guess who would have taken a given photograph. I suspect, knowing what I now know about the styles of the two men, that it was William Brewster who took the Bethel photograph. Gilbert seems to have concerned himself more with balance; he would have swung the camera right to add some contrast with the railing, or farther left to exclude the brushy nothingness and show the full sweep of the valley below and the flaring sky above.

Mr. Brewster began going up to Doctor Gehring’s in the late nineteenth century, shortly after he hired Gilbert. At some point, while he was in the region, on his own, he began to explore the country to the north, along the western banks of Lake Umbagog. In the 1890s, this was still a wild region, wilderness even, and rarely visited. One of the earliest and best descriptions of the wild nature of the region appears in Brewster’s Birds of the Lake Umbagog Region, which was published after his death by the Museum of Comparative Zoology. It is likely that Gilbert had a hand in preparing the final manuscript since he was working at the museum at the time, and in fact in one of Gilbert’s obituaries he is listed as coauthor.

The book is primarily an annotated list of birds of the area, but there was a long introductory history of the town of Upton on the west bank of the lake, which the editors at the museum left out in the final publication. Here, along with accounts of the early white settlers of the region, are rich descriptions of the area before it was thoroughly logged over. Moose were common—as they are today—but interestingly enough, the white-tailed deer, which is not a deep-forest creature, was relatively rare. Forest-dwelling animals such as fisher, Canada lynx, and even woodland caribou occurred there, and otters were everywhere along the many rivers and streams of the region. Brewster and Gilbert describe huge rafts of ducks and geese out on the lake in the seasons of migration, and report that in early times the sun would be darkened for days at a time by the vast flocks of migrating passenger pigeons that flew over the area. By their time, however, most of these flocks had been decimated and the last passenger pigeon on earth died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, at the age of 29.

Given the wildness of the region, this section of the Maine woods began to attract a few urban dwellers who had been swept up into the back-to-nature movement that became popular at this time, of which William Brewster and his company were in some ways the forerunners. The American conservation movement had been set in motion by groups like the Sierra Club, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the burgeoning bird organizations fostered by Brewster’s Massachusetts Audubon Society were gaining membership. There was throughout the United States an appreciation for wilderness and the presumed benefits of outdoor activities, such as hiking, hunting, fishing, and camping. In the East, the Adirondacks were the epicenter for this movement, but northern Maine also attracted visitors. Guiding these “sports,” as the citybound hunters and fishermen were called, became an industry for the woodsmen who lived in the region around Umbagog.

By the turn of the twentieth century, more and more urban visitors were visiting. In time the road was improved from Bethel north to Upton, the town nearest the southern end of the lake, and within a decade the first noxious automobiles began appearing on the roads, spewing their poisonous fumes and spreading a coating of white dust over the roadside wildflowers.

Around Umbagog the earliest of the guides for the newcomers was a famous Indian named Metalluc, who is still talked about today. Metalluc had been a member of the St. Francis tribe in Canada, but for some reason had been banished by his tribesmen and had moved south. He lived for a while around the lower lakes of the Rangeley chain but also had an island sanctuary on Lake Umbagog that now bears his name. He was a great boon to the early settlers, and since he was a skilled hunter he would often bring them fish and game when they were hard-pressed. Eventually he began guiding whites through the forest on hunting expeditions, and soon became a well-loved forest character, just the sort of tamed “wild Indian” that Easterners so appreciated and Westerners loathed. Metalluc had a taste for drink, but he was reported to have been a friendly, tractable drunk and was often invited into the white people’s cabins to share a dram. His one curious characteristic was that he had an almost pathological fear of dogs and would not enter a house until all the dogs were tied.

Backcountry guiding is still a thriving business in the region. Early one morning I saw a truck with empty dog cages pulled over beside a back road and got out of my car to listen. Not far back in the woods I could hear the baying of hounds—somebody off tracking raccoons or foxes, I thought. As I was listening a blond man with wide cheekbones and flat blue eyes emerged from the forest down the road and came up to his truck.

“Foxes?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Just a little bear problem at one of the camps in there. State boys called me out to take care of it.”

We talked for a while about his business: How he much preferred the fishermen to the tough guys who think they want to hunt bears and then get drunk and piss in their pants when they finally see one, and how some of his “sports” tip very well at the end of an expedition and how some—usually the big bear hunters—drive off without so much as a thank-you. He told me about two men from the NTL Institute who asked him to take them out to have a “nature encounter.” This involved an overnight at a place not far from the Androscoggin River, which runs through this region. His sports stayed up half the night, drinking beer and listening to owls hoot and coyotes yowl and then told the guide they wanted to go for a walk in the night woods by themselves.

“‘Don’t do it,’ I says, ‘you’ll get lost and we’ll have to call out the search parties.’ But you know these guys, they do what they want, so off they go, and sure enough I’m up the rest of the night waiting for them to come back. They don’t show up by dawn, so I begin to track ’em. It’s easy at first, they’re breaking branches off and stuff, then they come to Crooked Brook there, cross, and I don’t see their tracks on the other side. They must have got it in their minds to walk in the water or something, or maybe they’re thinking they got enough power by this time to walk on it. Anyways, three hours I’m looking for them and then I give up, go back to the camp. Here they are happy as larks, brewing up coffee, and talking about ‘essence’ and ‘realization’ and shit like that.”

I told him about my own mission in this area, and he said there was an old guide in Upton named Buster Williamson who lived at the lower end of Umbagog and might be able to tell me something about the old days around the lake, since he was just about the oldest man alive in these parts.

I had heard of Buster from others and went up to see him that afternoon. He lived with his sprightly old wife at the mouth of the Dead Cambridge River, on the site of the Lake House, a boarding-house where the Brewsters used to stay in the late 1800s. I had with me prints of the Lake House and the surrounding landscape that I had found at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I showed these to the old couple and we were able to line up some of the same hills and points of land that appear in the images.

Buster was one of those chiseled old men you still can find in remote areas. Although he was weathered out from all his years living in camps in the woods, he had bright blue young eyes and a full head of thick white hair, and he was still trim. He had been hunting deer just the winter before and talked as if he was intending to go out again when the season rolled around, “maybe sooner,” he mumbled under his breath. Deer were overrunning his property, he said. He was well known in the area, a counselor for the younger guides, but he was too young to have known Brewster and Gilbert—he was born the year after Brewster died, and in any case, Brewster had quit the area long before 1919; he was not happy about the increase in visitors and he was especially put off by the invasive automobiles.

For several seasons, whenever he was away from his getaway at Doctor Gehring’s Brewster would live at the Lake House. But he so loved the area he decided to build a place of his own there. He constructed a cabin on a point of land, now known as Brewster’s Island, and lived there for a while, but he decided to have a large houseboat built where he could sleep, but also move around the lakeshore to investigate the still lightly described region. I also had with me a photograph of this famous houseboat, which used to be anchored in a small bay just below Buster’s property. Buster said the boat had endured long after Brewster deserted the region and that he had been on board many times when he was a boy.

The boat was a long bargelike craft with a narrow, open deck on which two sheds had been constructed, the foremost of which was roofed over with canvas. Slightly aft and attached to the first shed was a low cabin with a cambered roof, apparently a galley, since in the photograph there is a man standing in the doorway in a white apron, apparently a cook. On this day, the houseboat was lying in very shallow water among a congregation of kayaks and two lap-strake Rangeley Lake guide boats. There is a gangplank running from the houseboat to the muddy shore and, standing at its head, one hand on the galley shed, is an obscured figure dressed in a light suit and waistcoat, a high soft-collared shirt, buttoned to the neck, and a strange, light-colored derby, like a sun hat. This I believe is Robert A. Gilbert, one of the few images of the man that I was able to find, and even that one, suspect. There is an old woman in the front deck house and a rangy man in a tam-o’-shanter leaning against the wall next to her. The cook in his apron has appeared for the photograph from his stovehouse, and, standing askew on the gangplank, with an odd, gate-legged stance, is another man. Although his features are not clear, he looks to me to be Jim McLeod, Brewster’s perennial guide on his birding expeditions in this curious unpeopled country.

Periodically, sometimes in company with Caroline (who appears with her husband in another photo from this period taken by Gilbert), Brewster would move the houseboat to the head of the lake and ascend the wild Magalloway River, which in their time was heavily populated with loons, moose, otters, muskrats, and even a few of the then rare beavers.

On one of these expeditions, in 1903, Brewster, Gilbert, and Jim McLeod packed one of the Rangeley Lake canoes and set out to explore the upper reaches of the Magalloway, recording the birds and wildlife as they ascended the river. As they slowly paddled and poled up the river they saw fleeting images of unidentifiable creatures appearing and disappearing in the shadowed forest and heard the splashes of waterbeasts such as otter or muskrats. About a mile upstream they passed a settlement—a low log cabin set on a rise on the east bank, standing among stumps and half-cleared brush piles. There was a tow-headed little boy standing by the riverbank as they approached. He took one look at them and fled to the darkened interior of the cabin. Slowly, one by one, adults emerged to stare. They collected in front of the cabin and watched in awe as the canoe and its crew slowly poled and paddled upstream. There were two men in flannel shirts, their braces hanging loose at their hips, a woman in gingham, and three or four ragamuffin children, wild-eyed. Mr. Brewster hallooed to them and waved, and as they passed one of the men raised his arm above his hip in a weak wave and dropped it—not a word exchanged, nor a greeting. They continued to stare blankly, mouths opened, as the boat slid by.

—What was that all about?—Brewster asked McLeod, once they were around the bend and out of sight.

—Ain’t nothing—he said.—Just that they, ah, never seen the likes of him before—

He glanced at Mr. Gilbert.

One day while I was poking around this part of the lake I set out to ascend the Magalloway myself, rowing and paddling upstream in my 1910 Old Town rowing canoe. I had been here before on the upper reaches and was disappointed to see, lining the banks, any number of summer cottages, each with a dock and a requisite outboard motorboat, many of them powered by enormous high-speed engines. For some reason, other than a few intrusions, the lower reaches of the Magalloway (and also the far, upper reaches) are less populated, and I set up a good stroke and slid forward through the smooth waters, the wake streaming out astern in a dark rippling V. Where the river narrowed I put away the oars, switched to the stern, and began to paddle quietly, passing loons, headed downstream, who would dive at my approach and then reappear astern of me. I also saw a mother moose, who watched dumbly as I paddled by, while her calf fed indifferently, and there were periodic dives from kingfishers and still-as-a-statue great blue herons standing on the overhanging branches or rocks, eyeing the dark waters.

At a high point at a bend in the river, on the left bank I saw a large stocky man with shoulder-length black hair and dark eyes and pulled up to ask him (by way of openers only; I knew he wouldn’t know) if he had ever heard of a birdman in these parts named William Brewster.

“Don’t know the man,” he said. “But I’m not from around here.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“West of here—way west. I’m Sioux, come from the Pine Ridge, and I been living up the river a pace with a guy who runs a campground kind of place he calls the Tee Pee. He’s a dumb son of a bitch, but he likes Indian stuff, and he keeps me around for the tourists. I sell moccasins, hides, stuff like that.”

I curved the canoe toward the shore and held it in the current. The man seemed anxious to talk to someone.

“The stuff I sell,” he said, “doesn’t come from here. It’s made in China. Got nothing to do with these woods, but the dumb bastards, they like it, and the guy that owns the place, he likes it that the tourists like it. I teach ’em stuff about the Maine woods, tell ’em stories about wolves and bears, even though I don’t know squat. And they believe it. I just lie, you know, make stuff up and they say, ah, the guy’s a real Indian, they live close to the land, they know all about animals and the Great Spirit. I don’t tell I’m an Episcopalian. Don’t believe in no Great Spirit.”

I had been by this Tee Pee place the year before and even stopped in to talk. It was indeed a weird spot, with plywood teepees, a few cabins on the river, and a few camping and tenting sites. But the owner was nice enough, a talkative type who liked the country. I think he was a city boy himself, from Bangor or Portland maybe, or somewhere near the coast.

The Indian offered me a cigarette, and then asked me if I could take him across the river.

He didn’t know anything about boats (why should he, after all?) and nearly swamped me when he got in. He was a big man and sat up in the bow and brought the head down so low that I could hardly paddle against the current, but I got him over and grounded him without much problem and he climbed up on the bank and started off upstream.

“Come up the camp later, I’ll sell you some moccasins cheap,” he said, joking.

“I will,” I said.

As I was backing off, he called out again.

“Hey, you got any herb with you?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I bet you do.”

“No, none.”

“I know guys like you. You smoke a lot of dope, then don’t share it. The Indians, they always share, you know what I mean. You come up to the woods here, you got to share.”

“Well, I would share if I had any. I’d give it all to you.”

“I’d like a smoke. The boss—he’s some kind of religious nut. Doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke. How you going to live that way?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Never could figure it out myself. Anyway, good luck,” I said, and began to push off.

“Yeah, sure, good luck. Come up anyway, though, and bring some herb. We’ll have a talk. I’ll even buy it if you won’t give me any. I hate this place,” he said. “Too many trees. I’m going back where you can see some sky. There’s too many trees here. Can’t see the horizon except out on the lake, and I hate boats. I’m scared of them.”

“Get a horse,” I said.

“You said it, Mack. I wished I had a horse again.”

I left him grumbling on the shore and began thinking about what old Metalluc would have to say about this character.

I was staying down in Bethel at this time at a restored house called something like the Bistro that had been turned into a bed and breakfast and restaurant. It was run by New Yorkers who had come up to the area to ski and liked the place so much they decided to stay. The concierge, a man named Allen, was a displaced Londoner with a strong East End accent who had made a lot of money rigging the sound systems for rock groups. He and his wife, who did all the cooking, had a couple of young children and, unlike so many of the overly precious New England bed and breakfasts, they ran the place somewhat haphazardly.

This custom had gotten them into some difficulty with the stray NTLers who would come to eat at the restaurant and take rooms there when the institute rooms were filled. The Bistro had no air-conditioning, no TVs in the rooms, no blow-dryers, no hookups or connections for the electronic devices carried by the harried NTL executive visitors. This begat many complaints from the guests who expected special services.

“I just shrug, don’t I, when they say that,” Allen told me. “What are we to do, run out and buy a TV?”

Allen had his own complaints about the NTLers.

“You get the troubled ones here, sometimes. You get these types who are sent by their companies because they don’t have many people skills, as they like to say, and the NTL staff tries to get them to face up to the fact. Sometimes it works; they begin to look at themselves for the first time and you’ll see people sitting here in a corner in the living room sobbing bitterly while the other guests are trying to enjoy a drink.”

I had heard similar complaints about the NTLers voiced by waitresses in some of the other Bethel restaurants. The NTLers come in, stare at the menu, drink some water, eat some of the rolls, stare at the menu again, and then get up and walk out. Or they demand things that are unavailable, or require special orders, or change their minds after the chef is halfway through preparation of their dish.

“They’re all screwy in one way or another,” a woman named Linda, who ran a little spot on the green, told me. “I’m telling you, they get some real weirdos up there. Late one night, I’m closing the place up, and I hear some scuffling and grunting out on the green there. Here’s two naked guys, wrestling, right by the fountain, trying to ‘work it out,’ I suppose. People who live around the green sometimes hear yowling and singing at three in the morning. It’s like these middle-aged dorks finally figured something out. They grew up too soon, like they never had childhoods. Hey,” she said, “we all got problems. Get over it.”

All this talk about the NTLers made me want to go there myself and attempt to become normal. I had talked with the staff already while I was looking around the grounds and the main building, and they told me that there was a new group of “trainees” coming in the next day, so I went up in the afternoon as they were arriving.

In contrast to what I was hearing, they seemed a friendly lot. I met a woman named Mary, from Cincinnati, a large-figured lady who was having trouble lugging in her baggage. I offered to carry her suitcases for her, and found why she was having so much trouble. They were incredibly heavy. I had to horse them up the wide stairs around a bend on the landing to her room, which was a large airy space on the west side of the building with maple furniture and a view to the ridges beyond.

A huge friendly man named Bill strode in while I was helping her and shook my hand, firmly, with a hardy, hail-fellow-well-met grip that almost broke my fingers.

“Great place, isn’t it,” he said. “Great place. Marvelous views from here, I mean this is it, right? Kind of place to get away from it all, kick back and relax, take in the scenery. Right, Mary?”

Then he turned back to me.

“What company are you with?”

“My company?” I said, haltingly. “Well, I’m actually here because—”

“I’m with the AKL, out of Detroit,” he said, “we’re a great group, mission-critical applications, up and coming, we’re moving, a real operations-oriented group, got the staff, got the organizational charts worked through, and how about you, Mary, who’re you with?”

This generated an equally incomprehensible (to me) explanation from Mary, who found herself on firmer ground than I was, and off they went talking about plug-ins and electronic devices identified with acronyms that I, in my nineteenth-century innocence, had never heard of.

Downstairs again I met another man named Bill (which got me wondering if you had to be named William to be associated with this building). This Bill was draped with electronic devices, a cell phone connection clapped to his ear, small black boxes hooked to his belt and looped to his pants pockets, and a laptop case clutched in his right hand. He was a much quieter sort, though, shy even, and seemed a little frightened to be so far from home in so wild a place and amid the formal calm of polished hardwood floors, stained glass windows, and Oriental rugs. Home for him was Texas, and he was with the DNC, as he explained earnestly.

Mary, I believe, was from ABD, Carlos, whom I met later, was from San Diego and worked for the OAL Corporation, and another woman I met worked for a company called Eunix, or Eunice, or something that sounded to me a lot like eunuch—at any rate, a company with which I personally would not wish to be associated.

At seven the next morning, a Sunday, there was to be an inspirational “encounter” in the green room, and I was told by staff that anyone from the village could attend, so I got up early and walked over to the big event.

I was a little late and couldn’t find the right building, and when I finally arrived the encounter session was already in progress. Here, in a large circle, sat ten or fifteen men and women of various ages, holding papers and looking attentively at a huge African American man dressed entirely in black, with a halo of pure white hair and the white dog collar attached somehow to his black tee shirt. He sat overflowing his chair more like the Buddha than a Christian leader of sheep.

“Come in, come in,” he said, spreading his arms and indicating a free chair. “Please. Have a seat, we’re just introducing ourselves.”

If there is one thing I hate, it is “introducing” myself. It appeared that I had burst in on an ecumenical religious service of the New Age sort, conducted with a decidedly Christian bent. One man said he was an Episcopal priest. Another told us at length how he had found the Truth of the Bible. Another explained that she was an OD consultant (whatever that is) who had recently returned to her Methodist church. And all the others were good churchgoers of one faith or another. No Hindus, though, no Jews, no Muslims, and as far as I could tell not one good old-fashioned heathen—save myself. When my turn came, I didn’t dare explicate my pagan worship of the sun and nature and said I had been raised a Christian but had fallen by the wayside.

The Great Father pastor smiled and smiled and accepted my explanations.

“We all fall from time to time, do we not?” he said.

He himself, as he explained, was a worldly sort. He had worked with street kids in the Bronx—in fact he had a tough white man’s New York accent—and he still ran a little storefront church in the city most of the year and would come up here every summer to serve those few NTLers who still had a faith.

Most of the trainees I met at the NTL Institute, it must be said, appeared to be more comfortable with the religion of the god Mammon than with traditional religion, and even this devoted morning encounter crowd managed to use their Christian faith to either excuse or guide their work. Part of the program that morning was an analysis of Ezekiel 37:1–14, the passage in which a traveler comes upon a valley of dry bones, and the Lord commands that the traveler prophesy to the bones the Word of the Lord, whereupon the bones rattle and come together, bone by bone, assume flesh, and come alive. The bones, the Lord says to the traveler, are the whole house of Israel.

Having read the passage to us, the Great Father asked us for our personal explanations.

First to speak was the born-again Christian. He said the story of the bones was God’s way of breaking down and putting back together, and that that is what he was doing with his leadership group at the SoftData Corporation.

“I don’t always attempt to reveal the Truth in this group—there are three Hindus in my unit and a practicing Jew. But I apply the teachings of the Bible. The answers are all there and it works.”

The explication from the Episcopal priest I think was lost on most of the crowd. He proceeded to analyze the passage using arcane theological language, basically explaining the scene (I think) as a metaphor for the pilgrimage of the spirit from birth to grave to salvation.

A French Canadian woman with thin lips and tiny steel-rimmed glasses said she was a practicing Catholic but that the teachings of the church were not always conducive to good business practices (“Hear, Hear!” I said to myself silently), and that she was having a problem balancing her faith with her work; somehow she saw the dry bones as relevant to her work, but I couldn’t follow her logic.

The instructions and discussion carried on in this manner, with the participants revealing more and more of their personal problems and their faults and their attempts to improve themselves and work ethically in a basically unethical environment. Toward the end, there were actually a few emotional expressions of their faith, and then came the moment I was dreading.

“Let us pray together,” said the Great Father. “Let us join hands in prayer and seek in silence the proper path …”

Whereupon he took up the hands of the parishioners on either side of him and waited for the circle to close. The French Canadian woman snatched my hand and held me firmly in her dry claw, and a skinny fellow with thinning hair who hadn’t said a word tentatively took up my right hand. Poor fellow, his palm was cold and sweaty.

“We ask you, Oh Lord, to grant us a moment of silent reflection,” the Great Father said.

I don’t know what the prayers of the other participants were. Mine was for this affair to end as soon as possible.

On my way out I saw Carlos, the business executive from San Diego.

“You missed the religious encounter group,” I said.

He shrugged and blew out his cheeks.

“Did I? Well ain’t that a crying shame,” he said.

Carlos smoked a lot of cigarettes and didn’t seem happy from the start. I suspect his presence here was a command performance.

The Great Father announced that there would be coffee and pastries following the encounter, in the main dining hall. As I was passing by I ducked in to have a look and saw poor, shy Bill, he of the myriad electronic devices, eating alone in a corner. (Most of the new trainees had formed little cliques by this time.) I went over and asked him how he was getting by.

“I think I am learning,” he said, nodding. “Mainly, I think, I am learning that I still have a lot to learn.”

He looked down into his coffee cup. I touched his shoulder and said farewell and good luck.

Entr’acte

In 1916, Gilbert moves to Inman Street in Cambridge

In 1902 a volcanic eruption and fire destroyed the entire town of St. Pierre on Martinique. The first successful airplane flight was accomplished in December 1903. Headlines declared emphatically that there was no balloon attached to the aereoplane.

In 1913, Congress authorized the Hetch Hetchy Valley Dam, a major defeat for the Sierra Club and the aging John Muir.

In 1914 Archduke Franny Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, setting in motion a great world war. Germany declared war on France and Russia and invaded Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany. Austria declared war on Russia and France. Britain and Russia declared war on Turkey. British troops landed in France.

Charlie Chaplin began making films in 1914. In 1915, D. W Griffith’s produced Birth of a Nation. Blacks in Boston boycotted the screenings and demonstrated in the streets. Robert Frost published “North of Boston,” and George Washington Carver began popularizing alternative crops for the depleted soils of the American South—peanuts and sweet potatoes.

By the 1920s there were more than 100,000,000 people in the Unites States, of whom more that 2,000,000 were unemployed. Ku Klux Klan membership was at 4,000,000. Life expectancy was 53 years for males, 54 for females. The illiteracy rate was estimated at six percent, a new low. There were 400,000 miles of paved roads in the United States and it took about thirteen days to reach California from New York. Trouser legs widened during this period, knickers came into vogue, white linen suits were the rage in summer, and by 1925 the Flapper style was in full force: short skirts, no bosom, no waistline, clipped hair hidden beneath rounded cloche hats, and the sin of cosmetics was loosed on the land—powder, rouge, eye shadow, and painted nails.

In 1919 William Brewster dies.

The black photographer James Van Der Zee and his wife opened the Guaranteed Photo Studio in Harlem in 1918. Thirteen days of violence raged across the nation during the “Red Summer” of 1919, with twenty-three blacks dead, fifteen whites, 537 people injured, and 1,000 black families left homeless. Marcus Garvey led a parade of 50,000 blacks in Harlem in 1920, and A’lelia Walker, the daughter of Madame C. J. Walker, the hairdresser queen, maintained a salon of black writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Louis Armstrong left New Orleans and joined the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1920.

Gilbert began working at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1919, the same year as the Treaty of Versailles. Claude Monet painted the late Impressionist masterpiece Les Nymphéas. Renoir died, and in 1921, in Paris, Man Ray began making “rayograms” by placing objects on photographic paper. James Joyce published Ulysses in Paris in 1922.

That year in the United States, the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to vote. Plumed hats were out of vogue by this time, women smoked cigarettes, and the loathsome music known as jazz was sweeping the country. The consumption of alcoholic beverages was illegal in the United States—which is not to say that no one drank.