The Montis Abbey compound was originally built as a monastery in 1893, one of the older in our country, and it sheltered an order of as many as twenty-eight monks at its most active peak in the last century. At that time Farm to Market Road was a narrow dirt lane for horse-drawn carts that came to a small village north of Woodrow Lake (close to what is now the town of Lumby) for fishing and trade. While making their dusty way along the road, travelers would stop by the abbey for food and lodging, knowing that the monks were a hospitable, albeit quiet, lot.
The primary grounds of the abbey consisted of ten well-maintained acres on which seven buildings stood, one being across the road. An additional twenty-four acres comprised twelve acres of agricultural fields, four acres set aside for livestock and horses, and the remaining as dense woods that surrounded the complex and were used daily for hunting. Among a complex of assorted buildings and outhouses, the largest was the chapel and community house, which fronted Farm to Market Road. A short distance away stood the monks’ sleeping quarters and private annex. The other large building was the dining room and grand kitchen, with “grand” referring to the size of the room rather than any comforts or conveniences it had. Remaining were two smaller buildings: a guest lodge and library.
The monastery was stark at best. The monks worked hard, ate hearty meals and, above all, prayed in song and prayed in silence. Their prayers continued through many of our country’s most trying times until 1986, when the abbey was finally dissolved by its four remaining brothers.
Montis Abbey was then sold by the Church for a song, and for the next decade was used, on and off, as a private girls school for the few wealthy families of Wheatley. The school, though, met its demise shortly after two of its young, unworldly charges became pregnant by two boys from Lumby.
Over the next few years, the buildings gradually became lost in the overgrown landscape, but remained a target of stones that were thrown at those few windows that were still intact after the fire. It was understandable, then, that anyone driving Farm to Market would give the monastery no notice.
Mark and Pam Walker were no different. For the past four years they had driven to Lumby each Sunday for lunch during their four-week vacation in Wheatley. They would often stop, as they did on that specific morning, and park their car at the bridge over Fork River, halfway up Woodrow Lake, and walk down to Gunther Cove. From where they were standing, they could have seen the main house at Montis Abbey had they just looked.
But they were looking downward, carefully watching their footing as they made their way over large boulders and loose rock and traversed a steep embankment that brought them down to the cove’s bend. The cove was one of the many treasures Mark and Pam had found during their first time exploring Woodrow Lake—a small stretch of white sand no more than a few hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. As it was nearly impossible to access by land, and well hidden from view by water, the cove was seldom visited.
Mark and Pam had kept a travel magazine article about historic inns across America, and every now and again they would bring it out to plan a vacation that never was taken. Then, four years ago, their professional and personal lives had become so rocky that they knew they needed more time for each other. In particular, Pam agreed to set aside her work, as best she could.
Beginning that year, and each year thereafter, the Walkers came to Wheatley for their spring break, staying at the Cedar Grove Inn, a polished pale yellow and white mansion on the outskirts of Wheatley. Each Sunday they returned to Gunther Cove.
The hike to the cove was strenuous, but Pam was tall and lean and maneuvered over the boulders with ease. Mark would occasionally look up and see his wife several yards ahead, her ash blond hair catching the wind blowing off the lake. He always thought she was an incredibly attractive woman, and he felt that age was bringing out her finer qualities. As he told her many times, she was as captivating as the day they married.
Reaching the last of the boulders, Pam stepped down onto the smooth sand, marked only by the imprints of the animals that had been there the night before. They walked along the water’s edge until they came to a level area where Pam spread out the blanket that Mark had been carrying. Mark, in turn, poured coffee from the thermos and they sat down to enjoy another quiet morning, listening to the geese on the lake.
The first year they had come to Wheatley, they sat in that exact location on that same blanket and had one of the most heart-wrenching conversations either could remember. During those early-morning hours, words were spoken in fear and in anger, in desire and regret, but what ultimately mattered was that Mark and Pam still loved each other and neither wanted to get a divorce. On that morning, both agreed to try to recapture what had been lost during their fifteen years together.
Their marriage had become a disconnected shamble. After so long, momentum had done what it always does: it had carried them forward to a point in time when they no longer recognized where they had gone.
Pam never fully evaluated the toll that her work was taking on their relationship. She felt that it was a marriage to which she had committed heart and soul a long time ago. She had learned along the way that marriages are as different as the people who enter into them, and she knew hers was bound both by Mark’s love, patience and empathy and her strength and motivation. That morning, four years ago, was the beginning of a better phase in their lives.
The following year, in that same location, they had decided not to proceed with their application for adoption. For nearly eight years Mark and Pam had sought the finest medical treatments that would allow them to begin a family, but, as they came to accept, there were problems even the most advanced technologies or procedures couldn’t correct. Even though Mark had long relished the thought of having several small children underfoot, he ultimately abandoned the notion much more easily than did Pam.
“I think it’s a matter of balance,” she said logically, continuing a conversation that they had started that morning in bed, a conversation that actually began several years prior at Mark’s insistence. She gazed up at the mountains that were reflected on the still water of Woodrow Lake. The peaks were still snow-covered, but the air was becoming warmer as each day passed.
Mark moved closer to Pam and put his arm around her shoulder.
“That, and timing,” she added.
“But don’t we make our own timing?” Mark asked rhetorically.
And therein was the greatest difference between them: Pam was methodically going through life’s journey to reach a final “resting point” when there would be no worries and they could afford to follow their hearts. Mark, though, simply appreciated each day, changing direction on a whim, because in his mind it wasn’t the final destination that ultimately mattered. Mark knew they had reached a point some time ago when they could do something totally different, but he couldn’t break Pam free of the compelling force that had made her so successful in business. Only on vacations, when she was removed from that momentum, did she feel a twinge of uncertainty for laying her path so carefully and, at times, inflexibly.
“Perhaps when we go home, we can…” Her sentence trailed off, not wanting to make any promises she couldn’t keep, not wanting to disappoint her husband yet again. She looked up at Mark. His brown eyes were tired, she thought. He still had that same rugged handsomeness that first attracted her, but now his thick dark brown hair was speckled with gray, as was his well-kept mustache, which he allowed to grow in during their vacation.
“As we didn’t last year?” he asked gently. Everything seemed so simple to him: they were both forty-four, healthy, and had more money than they could ever have hoped for. Resting point.
“Are you happy?” Mark asked after they had been sitting in silence for quite some time.
“Yeah, I love it here,” Pam answered easily.
“No, I mean, are you happy with your life?”
Pam was initially taken aback by the question, perhaps by the tenor in which it was asked, but then thought carefully. “I feel it’s right,” she finally answered.
He pushed harder. “But are you happy?”
Pam was staring at the sand she was fingering next to the blanket. “It’s not that simple,” she answered.
“I don’t see any complexity in the question.”
“There are so many layers that most of the time I can’t even separate where one ends and another begins.”
Mark had heard this same argument many times before. “All right, let’s simplify: do you enjoy your work?” Mark prepared himself for another noncommittal answer, but Pam surprised him.
“No longer,” she said softly. “It’s changed so much these last few years.” She paused. “I sort of resent who I need to be and what I need to sacrifice just to play par. But—”
“There isn’t a ‘but,’” Mark interrupted.
“There is. The ‘but’ is that it affords us a life we like to live. The ‘but’ is the security it guarantees.”
“At what cost, though?”
“I’m willing to see it through for another five years, regardless how much I dislike it.”
“Pam, I don’t want you to be miserable just because you’ve convinced yourself we need more things. We have what’s important: each other.”
Pam felt trapped by decisions of her own making, and Mark so wanted to help his wife find her way out of the maze that they had jointly built.
“Look,” Mark continued, “your happiness is much more important than anything your job might offer in the next few years.”
Pam gazed at the sand running through her fingers, and then turned to Mark. His eyes were so gentle, she thought.
“Are you happy?” she cautiously asked him.
“When we’re together, yes. But those times are few and far between.”
“And do you still love your business?”
“Being a landscape architect is what I know, and I enjoy it a great deal, but I could easily try something different. I’m willing to forgo what I’ve built up in Virginia.”
“I wish I could say that as easily.”
“But if you’re unhappy, why is it difficult to let go?”
“It’s what I’m good at…. It’s who I’ve been for longer than I want to remember.” Pam shrugged heavily and then leaned her body into his. “It’s defined me, and I wouldn’t know where else to turn,” she added.
“You can turn to me.”
Well before noon, they packed up their belongings and continued hiking around the cove, stopping every few minutes to appreciate their surroundings, the soaring evergreens, the smell of moss. They finally reemerged on Farm to Market an hour later. As they drove toward Lumby, they were just passing Montis Abbey when they saw Hank.
Hank the flamingo came by way of Johnnie D (Jimmy D’s youngest son), who one day received a large box from Amazon. Having ordered a few books the week before, he was surprised as any in the post office to get a box that was at least four and a half feet long and two feet wide and equally high. Opening it, he found a tall, lanky plastic pink flamingo with long legs and a black beak, which had gotten lost and wrongly stamped in Amazon’s shipping department.
Being the restless and imaginative boy that he was, Johnnie decided to keep the flamingo, and after careful consideration named him Hank, after a hound puppy he had lost several years back. Over the course of that early spring, Hank, an otherwise well-behaved flamingo, found himself the victim of numerous pranks: being named as an altar boy in the Presbyterian Church Sunday bulletin, applying for a shift manager position at Lumby’s Sporting Goods and, worst of all, being accused of making sexual advances on a stone goose statue owned by Mrs. Bowman on Grant Avenue.
Hank continued to be seen about town every now and again: at the voting booths being as politically involved as a plastic bird can, taking the eleventh-grade final English exam, on the picket line in front of the lumber mill demanding better health insurance, and in a canoe paddling solo on Woodrow Lake. After a month of wild and carefree adventures, he finally landed on the front lawn of Montis Abbey, nesting in the overgrown foliage. Had one thought that pink flamingos were indigenous to the area, he would have been a candidate for the cover of National Geographic.
Over the weeks Hank became the honorary caretaker of Montis. Undiscussed with Johnnie D, someone began dressing Hank in appropriate, and occasionally inappropriate, attire, and soon several of Lumby’s finest sewers got involved to give Hank a well-turned-out wardrobe.
On that fateful morning when the Walkers took notice, Hank was basking in a pair of bright red shorts, a Hard Rock Café T-shirt tailored to his unique physique, a sun visor, sunglasses, and a towel loosely draped over his wings. They were so amazed at what they saw that they hit the soft shoulder going a little too fast.
When the car finally careened to a stop, they instantly broke into laughter.
“What was that?” Pam asked.
“A pink flamingo.”
“In Lumby?”
“Only in Lumby,” Mark said, still laughing.
At that moment, someone tapped on Mark’s window, which startled both of them, which got Pam laughing even harder—she now had uncontrollable giggles. “You folks all right?” a man asked loudly, still pecking at the window with his index finger. “I was driving right behind you when I saw you run off the road.”
Mark lowered his window, fighting back laughter, hitting Pam’s leg to quiet her down. “We’re fine, thanks,” he said.
“Looks like you’ll need a tow,” the man said, leaning forward to look at the car’s front end.
Mark got out to assess the damage; the tire was flat and the wheel looked very bent.
“Can you recommend someone we can call?”
“Oh, no phones up here,” the man said, not used to cell phone technology. “I’ll give John a call when I get home. If he didn’t go to church with Lilly, he should be here in about thirty minutes.”
“Thanks very much,” Mark said, shaking his hand, giving an evil eye to Pam, who was still in the car laughing.
While waiting for John & Son to drive the short distance down from Lumby and bring them a new tire, Mark and Pam Walker passed the time by strolling around the Montis property and peering in the dingy and frequently broken windows. The grounds were so overgrown, it was difficult walking through many of the fields, but they could still make out the abandoned orchard, the collapsing raised beds where the monks once tended to their summer vegetables, and the rose garden planted by some of the schoolgirls while boarding there.
The condition of the buildings appeared to range from “still standing” to “not still standing.” In back of the main building where the fire had been, two-by-fours were nailed together to support a massive tarp thrown over the charred roof opening. Over time the tarp had given way to bad weather, resulting in serious water damage to the inside. The outbuildings, though, were untouched by the fire, and had kept their condition as well as could be expected.
As the Walkers made their way around the compound, an idea that had lain dormant for years awoke and danced in the air like static electricity. Their first, hesitant words must have been so softly spoken no one would have been able to hear; the words were more of a heavy exhale with sound than anything.
“We’ve talked about it for a long time, you know,” Mark said, “talked about doing something different.”
“Yeah, but this is just too much. And we don’t even know if it’s for sale.”
“But this is what we said we wanted in our phase two, and now’s a good time for both of us to make the move.”
Pam wasn’t so sure. “It would take everything we have to just rebuild it, let alone turn it into a profitable business.”
“But we could do it.”
“Do you want to leave the East Coast? That’s where all our friends are.”
“But this place is incredible,” Mark said.
“And we don’t even know if there’s enough tourism to support an inn.”
“Then we don’t rely on tourists. We can get some local businesses to rent out space for meetings.”
Pam didn’t respond.
“And we can bring back the orchard…start making some cobbler.”
Pam, who still wouldn’t respond, just stared at her husband in partial disbelief.
“And, during the summer, we can have a farmers market.”
When they finally worked their way around to the front of Montis Abbey, Pam stood transfixed as she looked at the old chapel. A shiver went down her back. She stared at the massive stones that had been stacked a hundred years ago to form the walls and support the roof of gray slates, now worn and cracked from time and weather. She carefully walked up onto the front porch and ran her fingers over the handblown glass of the windowpane, feeling the ripples and small air bubbles caught in time when the glass was liquid, and noticed the window’s gentle tint of color that softened the view within.
What awed Pam the most, though, was the front door: a massive piece of redwood five feet wide and eight feet tall, carved with tremendous skill and precision. Scrolled columns were engraved into both sides of the door with an intricate pattern of spirals encircling a large cross that was centered between them. Above that, the word “MONTIS” was cut deep into the wood in detailed calligraphy. The hinges were of forged iron, each one of such size and weight that Pam thought they must have been hammered several centuries earlier and somehow made their way to this monastery, this door.
She turned to ask Mark a question, but saw that he had crossed the road and was making his way through what they presumed was once a vibrant and well-cultivated orchard. She watched as he stumbled over fallen limbs that were hidden under a carpet of wild vines and knee-high weeds. Mark was a fit, athletic man, but he had clearly met his match with this orchard, and Pam heard him laugh, swear, and then laugh again as he tried to make his way to the top of the hill.
Standing on the porch watching her husband, Pam allowed her heart to take hold and sweep away all logic, leaving her defenseless against the exhilaration of pure excitement. Here she could live a life that would bring her joy, a life shared with the husband she loved. She finally saw what Mark had envisioned, and she knew, in that one moment, that this was the compelling reason she needed to finally break away from her golden handcuffs.