A Builder's Tale Chapter Forty-Two
Daphne, The longest day and coming summer, Fetes and Beauville
Chapter Forty-Two
Daphne
The longest day and coming summer
Fetes and Beauville
Life as it has been so accurately and tritely put is a journey. And as with any trip or adventure, the traveler cannot help but gain, or soak up something along the way. A remembered picture, a special scent, a unique view, a perspective that inspires awareness and then knowledge. For some of us it is easy, like breathing… Wisdom arriving over years and seasons, gradually, a symbiosis.
For others, awareness comes hard. Those who find their journey as Sisyphus experienced his daily rolling rock…a life of constant struggle, learning nothing, but that life is days of purpose and striving, redundant and repeating until, if one is lucky or finds inspiration, knowledge and awareness finally arrive, the result of the fatiguing painful passage of time.
And then… There are the other travelers in this human-life parade who accept the rolling rock as life itself. Those who smile and cry, who walk and weep, who live and laugh and observe the journey collecting a few wise sayings and homilies as the years pass by before they place them on their tombstones… The common man.
Finally, you have the few, the comfortably secure, and the wealthy, for whom the idea or labor of a Sisyphean existence is impossible to conceive. Those who race or stumble, blithely, blindly, sometimes happy and sometimes not… The psychobabble neurotics, with their imagined slights and problems, who only experience growth from a shock to the system, an event that tilts the balance beam, that strips away the filter, a crash, a collapse proclaiming… ‘See what you thought was difficult, was easy, what you thought were reasons for despair were nothing at all.’
This is… And was Daphne. With a life of constant stuff and little thought, she had simply rolled along, oblivious to her good fortune. Unearned, it provided nothing but what she had known, and no self-worth at all, and perhaps oddly, she had felt no need to seek it. She was a hamster on a different wheel and one who had never really thought about it. This had changed with horrible significance, with Tim’s death. Daphne had suddenly become aware… perhaps too aware.
In fact, her complete zeitgeist might have toppled like a spinning wheel, its bearings busted, sent wobbly rolling off into some unhinged insane landscape, had she not stumbled into GG-World. Her recent investment success has saved her… Providing hope and definition, a purpose that fills her newly emptied spaces. For, if she can be so right about the market, possibly she might be, or have the potential to be right in everything. Perhaps she had never needed Tim, and perhaps his passing had opened insights, forced her to examine as it had frightened her out of her wits. But with GG-World, it seemed that she would not only actualize… She would survive and flourish.
And…So… The stage is set once more for summer in Beauville, as she comes and goes. Grand Rapids north to Beauville, there and back again, sometimes with her girlfriends, and other times with Cort. Throughout the month of June, she visits every weekend, an unwanted chaos of supervision. Through sun and shower, wind and calm. In Beauville to watch the longest day launch and live and die with the setting sun. Summer already on its path towards winter, with the sun turned south, as she lounges aboard The Master Mind which has arrived, just in time, with Cort at the helm, and a crew of two, a week before this pagan day of light. She has placed her condo on the market. Long July visits are planned. It is show-time for her and ‘her creation’ … Her new home in Beauville.
And… unexpectedly, in these weeks of early summer, Daphne is becoming better acquainted with Janet and Conrad. Or more exactly, Janet has decided to cozy up to Daphne, putting her prejudice against new money aside… Inviting her for drinks and for lunch, and Daphne reciprocating aboard the Mastermind, or at ‘picnics’ in her new home, on weekends or in evenings with the workmen gone, as Janet examines, praises, and envies this new Wilson house, realizing how grand the place will be. Odd, perhaps, but maybe not… Because after all, it is finally about the money, isn’t it? And Daphne seems to have a lot of this… ‘Three Banks Full’.
And Janet, alert to circumstance and the abilities of the almighty dollar, senses that opportunity may arise next door at the edge of her forest… That by cuddling up to Daphne, and practicing ‘friendship’… She may benefit, and perhaps her endeavors too… Her many fetes require sponsors… Cash! Even as her and Conrad’s cash is in decline… going, going, gone, soon spent… If she keeps nibbling on the principal. Who knows? Perhaps she will be able to sway Daphne to her view of the world.
Daphne has Nimby possibilities, and better a burger moneyed friend than a burger moneyed enemy. So, when Janet discovers that Daphne has older money too, from ‘Dad and Grandfather,’ Janet makes a decision… Why not provide her new neighbor a place on the preservation board… Explaining to Daphne the wisdom of limiting growth, and though Janet had lost the battle on Longbottom estates, the war continued, and perhaps Daphne might join her in preventing any more development on Lake Arnaud, now that she planned on moving north to Beauville.
To further acquaintance, Janet has offered to help her find a horse and teach her riding. Not a simple task, because after one misadventure, it is clear that it will be like trying to teach a bouncing babbling sack of potatoes to sit proper in the saddle. But something may be gained. Who knows, who knows? Life goes on. Janet is a tough old compromiser. She may have lost the battle, but never forget, she still might win the war. And if Daphne cannot adapt to horses, perhaps she can convince her to buy a sailboat, get rid of that ostentatious Master Mind?
At any rate, enabled by Janet and not, Daphne finds herself attaching… Sending tentacles into the fabric of the land and the community, liking more and more, the idea of becoming a citizen of Beauville. In town, the ladies know her, or of her. The rumor mill is always running. They have heard and seen. She is the sad woman, the woman deprived of her husband, but making the best of it, shopping, chatting, shopping… the owner of that new residence at the point where the camp and some say the old Indian village once existed… That tip of land thrusting out at the edge of the bay, with her new house at the point, seen everywhere from the North Western shore, or from the water… large… immense… and obvious to all, soon finished and magnificent. That new Abernathy designed ‘cottage’ in Longbottom Estates.
In late June, she sits aboard the Master Mind II, or Too (never certain if Tim had meant the double entendre or not) with a coffee in her hand, awakened by an early morning crash of steel, and the screech and roar of a crane, observing slabs and rectangles of steel swinging through the air, four hundred yards to the South of the marina … Activity at Brown’s Camp Hope For Little Children.
What an eyesore, she thinks, unsure of Brown. She has learned that Brown has a plan (as usual and almost always). He has informed and conferred with Wilson. He intends to provide Daphne riding and stable privileges the same as he has done for Janet… A means of pacification intended to protect Camp Hope, a favor to Wilson to keep her happy, and a way to “keep those two females occupied, dependant, and off my back.” Daphne has heard first from Wilson and then from Janet that “There will be more trees.” an instant forest like her own, but denser, and soon planted by Brown, with Wilson’s aid.
Their intention is to hide Camp Hope and to mitigate controversy, as Brown provides privacy for his floating Marina and the ‘Founders’ yachts, while also salving Longbottom’s fears that Brown’s Camp will keep him from “Selling out and moving on”.
However, while interesting and excellent for the drive in. This is not a large concern for Daphne as Chateau Daphne sits another hundred yards distant from the marina. GG-World is rising, the money flows, and she will not be living aboard the Master Mind forever. Brown’s “Steel Stonehenge with an amphitheater,” as Janet has described it, will not bother her for long.
Still, with her morning coffee, she is interested in the activity… the hovering steel… Most of the containers are positioned horizontal for housing, but here and there, Brown has embellished Wilson’s plan, placing containers not only flat and horizontal but also vertical and inclined… Blue, green and red ones. Some vertical for observation… For a better view of the lake and land and the summer boat parade, with stairs inside, and viewing decks on top and portholes in the sides, a place for a child’s imagination to find adventure, and imagine distant history.
A location for small Indians and cowboys, pirates (it all becomes confused in childhood) to view the water and imagine battles and canoes, and French trappers, explorers, priests, the French and Indian wars, the British marauding, killing, and Indians doing the same. Actual history or imagined from some distant Beauville past, a picture easily painted for all of Northwest Michigan. Who knows, it may have been here, as it was at Mackinac? Brown remembers childhood. The portholes were his idea, the observation decks too… A place for a child’s imagination to soar. But there will be no campers this season. The founders will arrive this year. Next year will come the children.
So, this morning Daphne watches, an excuse to occupy her eyes and thoughts and accompany her coffee, the Jezebel’s cough and belch and roar, pushing the barge about… Aligning it to the shore, as the crane lifts and swings rusted steel pipes, as the Jezebel’s pumps attach and suck water and muck from beneath these, sinking the pipes into the lake’s bottom… One every ten feet, to serve as anchorage for the barge and docks that will form a removable, ‘temporary’ marina for Camp Hope.
This is different and much less expensive than her marina, where the Master Mind is the only boat. Because Long Bottom Estate’s marina has its permits granted… purchased… and is solid concrete permanent. The planning process had taken years of argument and Janet’s fighting… Made of cement and steel and treated pilings… with docks of rot-resistant exotic Kauri from New Zealand. (like teak, but harder and more expensive)
Brown’s new marina, not so much, and not at all…there had been no permits needed, because the central barge is a boat, and the floating docks thrusting from it, they and the steel pipes, everything is removable and thus temporary… though much of it will remain year-round, with the barge frozen in the ice, and the docks stacked along the winter shoreline.
The marina at Longbottom Estates required expensive permits. Brown’s, so far, has not. And the do-gooders, now lacking Janet Wainwright, of the new “horsey riding privilege” and “new horsey riding stables,” as Digger Brown has phrased it, have become reluctant to mess with Camp Hope for little Children and the Brown Foundation. Development is development, but good works are good works, and Brown has trapped them in and by their own hypocrisy.
So, Brown’s Camp, its reality and politics, does not matter much to Daphne, except as short-term scenery, another activity to observe when she is not tromping about her house, or watching the stock ticker move upward aboard the Master Mind. She can tolerate the noise. She is intrigued by the progress. Will they make it? Daphne, and all the citizens of Beauville are invited, and her invite includes a front-row seat, and comes personal from both Brown and Janet, to attend the fourth of July Fete, where Brown’s buddy Walshinksi will fire rockets, and Janet will conduct her choir in celebration of our nation’s birth, and of Good Works Brown and his new ‘wonderful and kind’ endeavor. Yes, Camp Hope for Little Children has a ring to it… Beauville, the beautiful, a caring community.
Yet, no campers will be present at this year’s festivities. This year there will be only local children. The hopeless children will not be arriving until next summer. Still, this summer, the docks will be in, the shipping containers numbered and in place, and semi-circled, tiered and facing the water with the dining hall finished, waiting in use, except for that special Fete. And some of the foundation founders are already planning. Some may even commence construction on their new high bluff cottages, far back, across the road, four hundred feet above the water… their views magnificent. Smythe and Brown have decided on ATVs or golf carts to ferry the founders back and forth to enjoy the pleasures of the founder’s beach and the new marina. Someday, who knows, an ATV bus may even be on hand.
Daphne gazes North toward her new residence. She is settling in, and as soon as the house is done and the condo sold, if it goes first. She will buy a proper boat, a smaller, older sailboat, become a sailor, a permanence, and a part of the place. Janet has explained the joys, and visions of shining varnish and brass, white sails, green grass, straw hats and old wicker picnic baskets cross her inner eye. She has bought a new magazine, Old Boat, and a book, Beauville in the Twenties. Her new home will become as the years advance her family past’s myth-memory of timeless summer. Perhaps it is time to reconcile with siblings and invite her nieces and nephews, who may someday have children too. She will become the auntie of the big house.
And when Chateau Daphne’s finished, in the cupola, at the tippy top, she has decided to place Tim’s ashes permanent and next to a bronze telescope, closer to heaven… the imagined better place where she hopes he now resides, not because she has forgiven him, but because if heaven exists for Tim… then surely, someday, it will also welcome her?
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The last days of June race on and by. The longest day begins and ends as the sun rises, shines, and sets as far north on the horizon as it will for another year. Not yet high summer, the fourth of July next week, the summer’s warmth in waiting, the days are already growing shorter. As if impossible, even as summer flowers bloom, and summer residents arrive, the year is already dying… on its path towards Christmas.
A latent awareness of the fleeting season haunts this northern vacation town, we know as Beauville, where there exists a frantic jubilance to summer that one does not see or sense in the center of the nation. It is the sun perhaps, so far north and already heading south, so bright and high in the sky, it’s short impermanent intensity, a specter hovering above weeks of celebration. Beauville in summer, where people party hard and sometimes lose themselves and drink too much. A time when visitors, natives, and summer folk run amok, fall off boats and docks and drown in the still cold waters… When visitors drive their toys too fast, drunk and sometimes crashing into bridges… Where water sports and golf are king, and where Yachtsmen ground their craft on shoals, run amok in storms, their sloops and ketches on occasion sinking.
For those who visit and buy the fudge, for those that summer in Beauville, for those that are passing through, and for those who buy the junk, the bad art, the rubber tomahawks… Something is always slightly off, an odor, a glitch in the timing, a metronome’s catch, a possibility hovering in the traveling clouds… Chaos, chaos, chaos and celebration… Because it will all end so soon. In a mere six weeks, the tourists, and the residents of the grand old summer homes. They will vanish, some with their children back to school, others off to different pleasure places.
And this makes every celebration a bit more insane than it might be, and for Fourth of July at Brown’s Camp Hope… Insanity is waiting.
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It is almost the 4th of July, and a beautiful morning that might summon peace or deep thought. This is not the case for Janet, who has risen early, the future beckoning. She walks gazing across the length of Longbottom Estates, her long strides full of determination, bending forward at the waist, arms swinging, a silk scarf rolled downwards from her thrusting chin stretches out behind her driven by a morning breeze and her purpose driven pace. In profile, you see the stride, the extended legs, the flowing scarf, her angular aging face, her high forehead… Hair blown back, her nose pointed towards the road in front of her. It is the last day of June and the 4th is only days away. She is intent on the preparations for the opening of Brown’s Camp Hope for Little Children.
The road is damp from dew, but it will soon be dusty. It has not rained for days, and there is talk of canceling the 4th of July fireworks displays all over Northern Michigan for fear of fires. The nightly news has been full of weathermen's warnings. But this should not affect Brown’s Camp Hope celebration, where the fireworks will fall on water.
Janet is the lone human out this early. She is half way to Camp Hope with Long bottom lane running straight before and behind her. Retracing the shadow of her steps you see, first, 100 yards behind her, Wilson’s landscaping… the recently transplanted conifers with new budding green tops, the deciduous maples and three of the four birch trees taking hold and leafy full, as if they were born to this spot, their destiny to hide the permanence of Chateau Daphne from a future neighbor’s eyes. Here and there are gaps in the foliage where white Tyvek walls reflect and scatter light, awaiting shingle siding, stone, and trim. Twenty-six feet of vertical wall until above the trees, you can see the shadow of high gables, and a newly cedar shingled roof. Higher, a gray stone chimney with two-tiered top rises, as Grace, with phallic laughter, predicted it would a year ago… A vertical coned capped statement against the sky. Further and another three hundred yards distant, north of Daphne’s, Longbottom Lane meets Janet’s transit path, her forest, and in the distance, a hint of a clearing and the shadow of the dark roof planes of Deer Haven where Conrad has risen, and is morning puttering, having a whisky coffee, creating poems.
Before her, to the south, 400 yards ahead, she can see the multicolored shipping containers of Camp Hope rising askew and straight, lintel’d and inclined, their bright colored assault softened by the morning light. Immediate to the shore, Brown’s large barge rests solid on the water at the edge of floating docks. What a mess of architecture, she thinks, but who cares? It exists, and now there will be a celebration.
She increases her pace. An old ski pole, held in her right hand, serves as her walking stick. She thrusts it forward, timed with her stride to the beat of music in her head. A baton sticks out of a new score grasped in her left hand, the tube of music she has written and is humming, much of it stolen from others, composers from the past, but arranged by Janet for the celebration. She thinks of music and hastens on.
Janet wishes she could conduct the 1812, but her orchestra of two violins, a base, a viola, one French horn, two trumpets, a clarinet, a sax, two flutes, and only one trombone, is not sufficient. In fact, she acknowledges to herself as she squeezes the tubed score using it to flail at a swarm of insects… Her opening 76 trombones arrangement is limited. But no one will say it is not creative. She has never heard two violins mimic 75 trombones before…
The combination, it should work. When the brass bursts through eighteen measures on, and she does have the flutes, the sax, and clarinets for piccolos… unless her singers drown out everything in a sharp off-key cacophony. But no, it will be alright, and then it will all flow into Shenandoah. The chorus has performed her arrangement of Shenandoah many times, so the only thing they need to learn, except for a few patriotic Yankee doodles, and a couple of other dandies, will be the finale. And for this, she has written her arrangement of the Coke Advertisement ‘Teach The World To Sing’, with ‘new and better’ lyrics promised by her husband Conrad. Fun, fun, fun, she thinks… And then… There will be the explosions and the fire shower.
A producer and performer must know one’s setting. And Janet sees herself as both of these. She crosses the dirt road where it turns left uphill towards the asphalt and the highway and beyond, gazing at a hodgepodge of dirty yellow Caterpillar machinery and tool trailers. More of Brown’s junk, she thinks, watching a bulldozer cross the distant field and begin to push over small trees. She knows this is for the new larger barn and stable, but still with Brown it is always destruction, belching clouds, and the smell of diesel. The man is a menace. But a creator too, in his own shabby conman fashion. Janet knows that Camp Hope is half a con. She has kept her opinions silent. Because the con benefits her too. And, who knows, hope and little children, there’s a ring to it. So, well, life… Principles are amorphous, are they not? And perhaps she can encourage Brown to include little Indian children, make it appear she is part of something progressive and hopeful… A conversation for her parties.
She hastens to the shore and then down the dock to stand in the center of the barge where she will perform. Gazing backwards at the rising shipping containers where there are workers draping bunting and a huge multicolored banner … Brown’s Camp Hope for Little Children. Brown has caught on to the rainbow movements, and the banner is banded with top and bottom colored stripes. Apparently, thinks Janet, there will be green and red and blue children all attending his Camp Hope. A good sign that perhaps she can convince him to include the Chippewa children too… But again, someday in the future, and not yet, this summer.
She strides the barge, one hundred and twenty feet from one end to the other, then climbs the small stage centered for the festivities. The first two steps are tiered platforms wide enough for tables, and then four more steps of normal width, with the stage presenting four feet above the barge. To her right, there is a fifteen-foot square refreshment tent, to her left and sixty feet away, Walshinksi’s tug is berthed, with its new canon-pumpkin gun pointing towards the west. Pallets sit before it covered in plastic. Fireworks cautions labeled in dangerous reds on wooden boxes readable beneath the plastic. Next to these, an array of steel tubes point skyward. These are launchers for the fireworks to come.
Janet stamps her foot to test the stage, then turns toward an imagined crowd and makes a bow, then pivots West toward the platform where her chorus and orchestra will stand and sit. Her music begins to mutter in her head, and she raises her baton and squawks. “I’m a Yankee doodle dandy.” Pausing for an anticipated explosion, she continues, “A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam born on the fourth of July.” Her arms flap, her nose points with her imagination. Then she stops.
Coming from behind her, she hears shouting. It is a big stepping, bellowing, Brown, his large stomach before him, well carried by long tree trunk legs… shoulders like an ox… Brown with his smiling giant head. “We’re expecting, we’re wishing, we’re wanting a great show, Janet.” He claps the air. He is an event arriving in to an empty brunch morning. She thinks, the fool is growing, he is gaining stature, his language is gaining rhythm. This whole Camp Hope idea has sent him over the edge. He might as well be a politician. She shudders at the thought, then walks down the steps towards him.
Janet is as tall as Brown and her eyes stare at him across her beak like an appraising bird of prey. Brown beams back, aware that his bluster and buffoonery make her crazy. It is their game and lately Brown has been winning. He knows it. Janet is his stooge, performing on his stage. He’s got her; especially now that her horse is in the temporary barn across the road…free riding, camp hope approved, conducting at his celebration.
“Stooge, stooge, stooge,” he would like to shout to rub it in for those many years of her hassling him at boards and meetings. But he does not need to shout. She is standing on his barge. And Brown owns a good baritone, so he launches into “I’m a Yankee doodle dandy. A bit trite, Ain’t it, Janet. George M Cowan.” Now, how did he know that? thinks Janet. Brown looks back at her, his Diggers Do It Deeper cap shouting its message at her nose…