The Quarry Pond
William Locke Wheeler
The architecture opens to the public at ten o’clock a.m. Before the gates open, the architecture appears more or less closed, unfolding its many layers. Irregularities in its manifestation suggest multiple purposes. The architecture describes itself without language. Geometries of sunlight and shade adorn its autonomous surface with patterns. The way the architecture stays in one place while everything else moves inspires a sense of serenity. The architecture is a goal.
Visitors will visit the architecture to look for things. Specific things which they have fixed on more or less in advance, which they will either forget or learn to disregard in the course of their visit. While some visitors find it unnecessary to prepare their preconceptions for transformation, some intend to evade discussion of precisely the aspect that most vexes their mind. Some regard the architecture as an interlocutor, and some are convinced of its silence. All plan to inhabit unusual perspectives while joining commonplace choreographies. All who find themselves led by an ambivalent flow will seek shelter under a complex unwavering history. Previous scans of tourism brochures will have branded bird’s eye views into memories beforehand.
The majority of the architecture has no roof. On the outside of the inside, where there is a roof, routines are unfolding behind thick wooden doors. People are executing habitual movements while practical objectives are taken into account. Subjects are weighing their historical options. Books are ordered for the gift shop, many of which examine aspects otherwise unaddressed by supplementary historical trappings strategically placed throughout the architecture’s interiors. One person imagines the architecture without objects and then yawns.
Conversations are drawn out in order to delay the inevitable; the inevitable is discussed as a facet of the everyday. Focuses are sharpened and private thoughts are sequestered. Doors swing open on heavy iron hinges. There is shade on the eastern side of the court. The reenactors are getting into their costumes, exercising caution as they handle historical accessories. Birds on the grass seem experienced in distinguishing stale crumbs of food from bits of gravel.
This day begins one of many scheduled visits.
I make a new approach from the city toward the architecture, remaining open to the possibility that this visit will be different.
I am seated on the lawn external to the architecture. I open my sketchbook. I close my sketchbook. I flip the pages of my sketchbook from start to finish. It makes a breeze on my face. I fan my face with my sketchbook and look around. I stand, tuck my sketchbook under my arm, lock my bike to a no-parking sign and proceed up a sidewalk leading to the architecture. I cross a drawbridge over a drained moat which is now a sunken lawn. The drawbridge leads into an entrance hall. Another gate opens onto a square court; in the middle, a chained-off grassy patch which is not quite a square and not quite a circle. I scan the court for a quiet sketching spot. I intend to sketch the architecture.
Portals and other mismatched openings surround me at right angles; four walls are cocked at other obtuse angles, confusing the dominant perspective. People are going in and out of rooms on all four sides. Sizeable masonry stones of random shape and size have been smoothed over to create the unified surface of an impenetrable zone. A solitary masonry stone lies half-way in the shade. The stone has bench-like dimensions. Visitors hurriedly shuffle in to occupy spectatorial vantage points. Perceiving the stone as the only shaded seating opportunity, I determine the most direct path to it. Circumambulating obstacles, I take a curvilinear route in an attempt to claim the cool parcel of stone.
A sly man slips sideways into my desired seat, eyeing my awkward approach. I abruptly slow my pace and nonchalantly sit on the sun-roasted side of the rock as if it were my original intention. I lean back onto the wall, inserting my scalp into a meager sliver of shade. I open my sketchbook. Its nauseating white refulgence stares back at me.
My shaded neighbor regards me without regarding me, scanning me sideways through black wrap-around sun glasses, breathing intently, staying cool, facing forward. Synthetic breathing fabric breathes in front of a chaos of monochromatic t-shirts whirring.
I wonder about the overall functional design of the architecture. On my last visit I had only been zooming in on details. But now, my interest is becoming global. I reach into my satchel for the brochure distributed at the box office. I am informed that the shape of the architecture offers the opportunity to shoot enemies from all directions, including from all sides.
I unfold a century-old map of the architecture. Each room is numbered and labeled. Or labeled by number. In the four corners lie “unexplored” chambers which have since been explored.
A man’s voice pierces the din, announcing intentions. His intentions are more or less known to all in advance. I detect a surprising trace of rage in his voice. Surely He finds the reenactment humiliating. His costume is a slapdash mixture of contemporary and historical elements. He and two other men draw close to one another, shoulder to shoulder. They march out of step. One of them is the leader and the other two are subordinate. They proceed up a stairway leading to the top.
School pupils follow the three men up the stairs to the top and hold the men’s solemn faces in critical regard. The three men begin to perform shooting a cannon. On command, they take multiple steps forward, backward, to the left and to the right, ultimately ending up somewhere else than where they started. Now they are standing next to the cannon. One man reveals a long torch, and another man lights it with aplomb. The torch bearer stands away from the cannon ritualistically, moves his arm upward in an arc and then back down, then touches the torch to the fuse. The fuse ignites and makes a hissing sound. The cannon fires. Bang. It shoots a blank towards a row of white houses in a retirement community across the river.
People look at the river, at a splash that doesn’t splash.. A wet explosion that doesn’t explode. The whole ritual distends; it is protracted and funereal. It is the beginning of the ending of a never-ending beginning.
The leading man breaks character to chastise a group of children for sitting on something they shouldn’t. “The coquina crumbles!” he barks. The children stand up and bend their torsos inward, hang their heads, smile while trying not to smile. Coquina falls from the seats of their pants. The man’s face is flushed. Then something comes over him and he is once again pale. The man douses the torch.
All three men march out of step even though they try to march in step, shoulder to shoulder, down the stairway, turn left, and then march to the door of the administrative office. The three men, shoulder to shoulder, are about to march through the door to the administrative office all at once, but the door is too narrow. One man gets behind the other two, two go in shoulder-to-shoulder, the third trailing behind. They go into the administrative office and close the door behind them, signalling the end of the reenactment.
My gaze shifts around awkwardly, trying to lock onto an item of significance. A telling object. I imagine the architecture without objects, the objectness of the architecture taking over. Fleeing into introversion and resulting perversion, I turn my attention to familiar things yet project onto them unwieldy fantasies arising from incomplete research. I pull from my satchel the print of the Cheyenne? Zotom’s drawing of the architecture. I enter Zotom’s drawing. Staring downward at it, I walk forward. The drawing is a map that focuses me.
The next day, I return to the architecture, hoping to experience something new.
I remain open to the idea of sketching. I draw one diagonal line, a tiny oval shape, and I fill in the shape. Evolving obstacles make me despondent. I erase the line and the tiny oval shape, which resists complete erasure, and I close my sketchbook. So much for drawing what isn’t there, or a drawing that never was.
I pull the print of Zotom’s drawing from my satchel. The simplicity of Zotom’s drawing stuns me. There is no outside in his drawing, only inside. His isolated rendering of the architecture is engulfed by the emptiness of the surrounding page. I imagine a cannon firing from his drawn architecture. The cannonball would disappear into the nothingness of that otherwise blank page. There would be no splash, no explosion.
Zotom drew the prison that surrounded him more or less impenetrably, back when the architecture in question was a prison. Zotom’s outside-less depiction of the architecture is at once a horizon and a verticality, a slightly raised terrain seen from a distance. An island of detail. Just a little rise in the landscape.
Atop Zotom’s drawn architecture are little structures that are brown in contrast to the gold of the architecture. They constitute another layer. I distinguish little gabled roofs on wooden shacks. Gable after gable, making a zig-zag line.
The US-Army captors instructed Indian captives that taking their lives into their own hands meant learning to build little wooden houses on the gun decks of the architecture—which went over especially well when considering that solutions were already being sought to the overcrowding of the prison. The Indians’ activity of building their own architectures was regarded by the captors as character-building. Learning to build little wooden gabled shacks constituted one step toward a real base-level assimilation of nomads into white man’s capitalism. These shacks—the zig-zag line I see in Zotom’s drawing of the architecture, which he made around 1876—have long since been removed. They are not seen as part of the architecture. They are seen as an impediment to the true interpretation of the “Spanish Colonial Origins” of the architecture. In the gables’ place stand men wearing fake beards and women in flamenco dresses bought in the costume section at Wal-Mart.
A man announces today’s first reenactment. Having seen the display before, I rescind my attention for him and hurry to the room with the carving made by the Kiowa captive. The carving is shielded by the glass of a free-standing display panel, as if by a giant magnifying glass. The display panel bears a descriptive passage detailing some basic aspects. The descriptive panel says the carving is a drawing. I
consider defying the descriptive panel’s interpretation. But to what end? In my eyes the only self-evident facet of the carving is the fact that it is carved. Carved out of the coquina by an Indian captive imprisoned by the US Army for fighting against westward expansion and genocide. Scratched out of the dusty coquina that crumbles easily. The coquina that flurries from squirmy children’s trousers. (I will soon explain the nature of the stone called coquina.)
I toy with the idea of deeming the carving a signature or a portent. I lean into it. Squinting my eyes, it is hard to make out. The display panel lights it from all sides. It would have been more intelligent to light it from one side, as to cast it in stark relief. Lit this haphazardly, it’s hardly distinguishable from the wall. I can’t see the carving at all. The display panel instructs us as to its meaning. I consider deeming it an entirely different sort of reenactment, performed in silence by a prisoner. An invocation of another location, another truth, another life in another place and time. The display panel names the carving a Kiowa sun dance.
I concentrate all my faculties on the carving, blocking all else out. It is my big other reason for being here. It is the peripheral center of the architecture. It simultaneously ignores and restructures the architecture. The glass layer that claims to protect it in fact contains its destructive force. The carving is the reenactment to end all reenactments.
I hear a loud bang on the roof above my head.
As if on cue, I bend over in front of the carving, my arms outstretched as if I were about to dive through the glass and into the carving. I try to achieve a right angle at the hips. My fingertips touch the descriptive passage, and my arms and torso create a flat extension stretching from the display panel, bent at the hips, and continuing down to the floor. Though I try to achieve a perfect right angle at the hips, my cramped and untrained body ultimately manages little more than an “r” shape.
A family enters the room, whereupon the mother says “Oh!” and quickly redirects the family into an adjoining room.
What I need to do is go through the motions. I devise a sequence on the spot. It is comprised of the “r” pose, a second action where I mime hammering nails into wooden beams, a third action where I mime stabbing the wall with two knives, one in each hand, pulling myself upwards on the coquina like a rock climber, to try and reach a porthole through which I can escape, and a fourth action consisting of a short speech. The speech is the following sentence: “Sometimes I think that enough pictures have already been taken of certain things.”
I perform this four-phase movement sequence over and over in front of the carving. Mothers nervously guide their children away from the carving room. I then
continue to repeat the four-phase sequence cyclically, but while doing so I travel out of the room and into the open air of the court. I perform the sequence over and over while traveling up the stairs to the top. Some curious children are instructed by teachers not to follow me. I hear someone say “Just ignore her.”
I continue performing the sequence while traveling, until I reach the cannon. I conclude in the right-angle pose, my endless-seeming repetitions having made my back more flexible, ending with my hands inserted into the barrel of the cannon. I then start up the sequence backwards, repeating everything in reverse.
I go back along the same path, cycling through the same movements backwards, delivering the speech backwards—“Sgniht niatrec fo nekat neeb ydaerla evah serutcip hguone taht kniht I semitemos.” I perform the sequence backwards all the way back into the carving room, where I finish in front of the display panel that is preventing the carving from destroying the architecture. Exhausted, I wonder why nobody has intervened to put a stop to my impromptu performance, or, better, why nobody has attempted to inquire about its purpose. Feeling disheartened, I turn my head to the left and recognize that I am alone in the room and that visitors to the architecture are making a point of ignoring me. Neither sketching nor performance seems to help me capture in reenactment my shock at the emptiness of the reenactment in whose shadow I’m trying to reenact the shock of my first visit to the architecture on this, my second visit to the architecture.
The next day, I make a sideways approach toward the architecture’s shady side, knowing full well that if it had been a few hundred years ago I would be shot.
I gain access to the architecture’s exterior in the wee hours by besieging sloping lawns leading up to the moat. I wield my still-blank sketchbook. I note that my artistic beleaguering of the architecture is an attempt to peer through the keyhole of the Kiowa Indian’s carving’s exercise in time-space decoherence, an event that crashes and scatters historico-pictorial jetsam in slow motion suspended in a low gravity situation. A bomb explosion whose shrapnel you can dodge. This is all accompanied by the sound of tire treads trapping and releasing air against asphalt.
The outer reaches of the architecture’s history are the inner border areas of the city’s political consciousness. Having become bored of what in this case is self-satisfied torpidity, I unlock my bicycle from the no parking sign.
I ride along the seawall and across the river. I ride down a highway, pedaling against coastal winds. I turn off onto a dirt road, guessing it might lead to the beach. My intention is to look at the architecture from another perspective. One far away,
across the river, next to the ocean, far enough away to show the architecture like Zotom shows it. Thin, flat, elongated and distant.
A sign on my right distracts me from my preplanning. The sign requires inspection. I find a small plexiglass box attached to it. The box holds brochures. I slide one brochure out of the receptacle and peruse the introductory text. I leave my bike at the head of the pathway and walk to the point of interest. At the path’s end is a clearing that gently slopes down into a pond.
It is afternoon, and the pond’s surface is reflective of the feigned stasis superimposed over it, underneath of which it asserts a primeval enthusiasm. I dive, as it were, through its watery shroud of historical markers and penetrate to its core of refracted geometries. The transition between its surrounding and inhering features is obscure, resulting in the parrying of any perceptible joint.
The pond extends away from me. Another display panel sunk into the ground at the pond’s shore reveals what an invisible entity considers hidden. The pond’s water is amber to dark brown. Flora encloses it. Live oak palmetto mainly. Roots pull the flora farther into a place, and intermittently puncture its mirror image in the water. The swish of car tires insists on American peripateticism. A carving throws its voice across the river and into the briny waters of a carved-out pond. A negative space?
I read on the historical marker that the pond is a defunct quarry for coquina rock. Coquina is a mixture of shell fragments and quartz grains bound together by calcium carbonate. The coquina extracted here made the architecture. The architecture came out of here, so here is the architecture’s capsized superposition. The architecture’s negative space, like one of those concave face sculptures whose gaze seems to follow your every move. The builders of the architecture started carving out coquina here three and a half centuries ago. Raw material was extracted here. Almost two ceturies later, restorers once again carved out coquina here to restore the architecture. Future restorations may do the same.
A pale line at the bottom of the quarry pond requires my attention. It begins at water’s edge and proceeds straight ahead farther into the pond, leading down until it disappears beneath the water. My intuition tells me that this line indicates the direction from which the coquina blocks were hauled out of the quarry by Spanish Royal slaves and low-waged Native American laborers.
I compulsively follow this pale line, which is colored amber by the pondwater. The pond is characterized by this golden line. It radiates from a center containing all stages of the architecture’s existence. A historical vanishing point. Fort, fort, prison, fort, prison, monument, museum, fort, monument, museum, and then finally fortmonumentmuseum.
The line leads to a murkiness from which the historical entertainment of the reenactment draws its dark power, to a depth where a captive manages to nonviolently liberate the architecture from the winners of history through carving into the stone that was carved from this pond. A double carving, to carve the heart out of the architecture, to ritualistically enact the symbolic killing of the architecture, something which will obviously need to be reenacted. This is the humid profundity that pins back my arms and keeps me from sketching the architecture. This is the line that leads to the architecture and its inundated origins.
The next day, I decide not to return to the architecture, nor to the quarry pond.
After having done some research, I have, in fact, made a jolting discovery.
My position—sitting on the northern tip of an island—is not connected to the architecture by a line spanning north-west across the disemboguing river; it is not connected to the quarry pond by a line spanning south. These positions are unconnected cut-outs, images on the surface but in fact only receptacles for absentist images. There are no lines between them. I am not sitting on a map.
I have gone all the way out, past everything, surrounded by so much quickening water and thrashing wind that it almost feels like drowning. A horrifying insect the locals call “fuckbug” bites a bloody hole into my ankle. I watch the river empty into the ocean violently. I watch the violent home waters of great white sharks. I am clutching photocopies of two separate photographs. The first photograph, flapping in the wind, is an aerial shot of the architecture, taken around 1950. In it, a reenactment is taking place on the grass in the court. Folding chairs are placed in rows on the grassy patch. People are walking all over the grass, heedless of the dusty troughs their confident strides produce. Women are wearing flamenco dresses to accentuate the actual origins of the architecture, and to gloss over the rest. There’s a little grandstand in the rear sheltering VIPs from the sun. Perhaps it isn’t even a reenactment at all. It is some kind of spectacle. The second photograph is of the quarry pond, taken five years ago, and there is no water. The pond is empty. Meaning it’s not a pond, only a depression in the ground, covered with bright green grass. And this photo reveals that the pale golden line disappearing into the bottom of the quarry pond is in fact a footpath rather than an outward trajectory. A path that leads people underwater. A path worn by visitors, whose end is as easily definable as its beginning. I look up from these two photographs. I am unable to descry the
architecture from this vantage point, out on the tip of the whipped island. I can only make out a nondescript bit of coastline and the bridge far in the distance. It’s as if the architecture has sunk.
