18 September 2009
Hole in the Fence
(Maddy on Richard Quirin’s Grave)
I’ll explain all this tomorrow, I swear. But I am still crackling with adreniline, and this part is not embroidered or tall tale.
The names, of course, have been changed to protect the guilty.
We dined at the Officer’s Club at Bolling Air Force Base.
It is not that anymore, not precisely, but we hardly have time to discuss the cultural change in the United States Military over the last quarter century, or how the O Club once symbolized the core values of the professional officer corps.
It doesn’t any more, but the magnificent structure still anchors the stately row of homes allocated to the leadership of the Service, and if you blink just a little bit, you can imagine what it was like, back in the day.
It was a lavish buffet that strangely featured no less than three different styles of pork chops.
Just over the fence from the elegance is the rest of Anacostia, and where we were going adventuring.
Go to the Google Home page, select “maps,” search for “Washington DC,” and zoom in on the lower SE portion of the District. That is Anacostia.
If you drag the map along to the edge of the land, you will see from above what we were about to see up close and personal.
I hope you are doing it in the privacy and comfort of your cubical or office. You are looking a clear summer day. Where we were the clouds were drifting overhead and the sky was doing a desultory spritz.
You cannot get the smell from where you are. There is an odor of corruption even over on General’s Row at Bolling, and when the wind is from the south, the smell of Blue Plains is almost overwhelming.
We stripped down the valuables and tucked them away in the trunk of the blue police car. Then we piled in, four of us, and drove out the back gate and over to DC Village.
This was The Day. We had done the reconnaissance, and now it was the confluence of opportunity, access and time.
We drove down the Boss’s Parkway, past DC Village, and into the gravel lot next to the abandoned power plant to the abandoned hospital. We could have driven down the bike path, but we did not want to have the car vandalized or towed and be left on foot.
There is stuff going on there, other cars, a big fenced lot for people doing something in the Butler huts that still function. There are fences everywhere. This is a place where there is trouble.
Maddy, the Colonel, Priam and me walked back toward the path.
We were headed for DC Stone SE 8. This is a big deal. The stone is at the back of the DC impound lot, a target, since it has things of value in it, and accordingly defended. The Stone is- or was- the marker between the Lot and the state of Maryland.
Turning onto the asphalt path between the end-of-season high grass there was a pile excrement. Human, possibly, based on the volume. But whatever left it was big enough not to mess with.
There was deer spoor, too, once we passed through the gap in the fence. The plops were much darker and smaller in mass than what marked the beginning of the path, but shit just the same.
This is not a manicured park. This is abandoned. What we sought was exactly the point between the two jurisdictions, the middle of the fence, less than a quarter mile down in the dense underbrush. The last major work here was in the 1950s, some major grading to fill in wetland, and there were overgrown mounds to follow in the grayness.
The remains of camps and cars protrude from the ground there. Beer bottles that have been here a long time. Gas tanks and auto plumbing subsumed by straggly undergrowth.
Hard to walk, following deer paths and on high alert in case the sometime residence of these lonely groves are home.
Forced by terrain, we find ourselves on a minor promontory surrounded by green water and cattails. Backtrack, the pork chops of lunch gurgling in the gut.
Someone has had a vehicle here and not long ago. We follow two narrow tracks through summer growth higher than our heads. There is a gravel trace that appears, leading from the locked gate next to the Impound Lot. I know, as you do, that this leads close to the stone.
We follow it up to the District Boundary, and what we can see from here is that the fence lurches down into verdant growth. An orange traffic cone is there, supposedly one of the markers for the stone, and I jump down and examine it.
No dice. Further on it must be, funny, it looks like such a short distance from above.
Broken concrete, a barrier against passage. Over and through, just on the other side, there it is.
It is not a stone like the others. This one has been replaced, and is now nearly eight feet below ground level at the bottom of a narrow concrete pipe. Only the top of the pipe is exposed, and looking down into, only dark water is visible down below.
The original stone was removed in 1958 during construction and then either lost or stolen from a storage facility before it could be reset in the ground. It was replaced in 1962, and that one lasted until 1991 when the bicentennial resurveying team dug it back out of the ground, using old photos to approximate its location.
The team then decided that the best way to preserve the stone was to put it back into the earth, this time protected by a taller pipe that was visible above ground.
I have now seen 39 of the 40 stones, or the places where they once stood.
Of course there was another hole in the fence, adjacent to the impound lot. There is nothing to defend there, and it was much easier to walk back across the gravel lot in back of the power plant.
Everything overgrown. No people. A caterpillar tractor is idling. Something is happening here, but it is being conducted by invisible beings.
The car is still there, the tires still on it.
“Do you want to find the Nazis?”
“Hell yes. We won’t be back, and if we do, the land will have changed again.”
“Let’s do it.”
Back to the path, back past the pile of shit. We turn left as we cross into Maryland. The cemetery had been located on the District Line, starting just a few feet in. The survey markings on the old maps indicate the number of feet from the SE 8 Stone, and we plow through the tall grass and find a trail of sorts along the fence.
DC Village is on the other side, and we have been there, part of the story I cannot get to today. Breathing heavily, I nearly fall over a felled tree. Feet disappear in the grass. Brambles and stickers grasp. A white-tail deer bolts from a thick copse, startling us.
Looking up we see the tall tree by the traffic circle- you can see it on your image, but that building is gone, even the wreckage we saw last week. We are at the rusty fence now, and passing the demarcation of the old cemetery boundary. The graves begin here, just on the other side.
There is a hole slashed in the fence. The way is open.
Hell yes.
We crawl through, and stand on the soil above the remains of the nameless.
There are hundreds of them all around us in the earth, unmarked. Trees and vines rise up all around. Bottles and cans and strange pipes litter the ground.
Spooky green and gray and dark.
Thirteen rows, each eight feet. Two and four feet between the heads.
“That is where #276-281 lie,” I say. We move up the hill. There was a perimeter fence, outside which the Germans were buried under military guard. It is still there, a boundary inside a boundary.
There is another hole gouged in the fence, and at precisely 2:08 on Thursday afternoon, Maddy climbs through, and is standing next to an empty bottle of muscatel under a low canopy of brush on top of the earthly remains of Richard Quirin, Nazi Saboteur.
In order, next to him, lie Heinrich Heinck, Herbie Haupt, Edward Quirin, Hermann Nuebauer and Werner Thiel.
We found them.
Now, the question was whether the car would still be there when we got back.
It was, and what a trip. Telling the story at the bar that night, I could not help but let a note of triumph creep into my voice. Not only a District Stone, I said, butsix Nazis in one afternoon.
An old pal looked at me and snorted. The Nazis had killed his grandmother in Europe, and as far he was concerned, they could go fuck themselves.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com