Chapter 11: Pirate Treasure

It’s odd, but many of the things we believed as children we later ridicule as adults.

When I was five years old, I came to believe that Silver Lake in Kingston, Massachusetts had gotten its name from a vast hoard of pirate treasure which was lost when an old steam ship blew up and sunk at the turn of the last century.

How I came to this belief remains a mystery. On a June day I found a gleaming silver walking liberty half-dollar in the sand along the shore. There at my feet lay shiny proof that silver lined the bottom of the lake!

One summer day after another, I watched with growing excitement as water levels dropped. They were brought on, my grandmother said, by the drought. However, I knew better. No Great New England drought was drying up my lake. It was the work of treasure thieves! My grandmother had once spoken of them “bailing out the ocean with a spoon.”

Even to my young mind, it seemed like it would take a long time to empty an ocean with a tool from the dining room table. However, it seemed possible that very determined treasure thieves could drain a tiny thing like a lake if they were using enough buckets.

By mid-August, the water level in the lake had dropped to its lowest level in decades. New islands had risen to the surface. Vast expanses of muddy lake bottom lay baking in the hot sun, cracked and broken like an old dinner plate.

There was no sign of pirate treasure. As I walked out over the crumbling lake bottom, I realized where the treasure had gone. When the steamship exploded, the force of the detonation had shattered the lake bottom like glass as it blasted its way clear through to the center of the earth.

I rested easy knowing that not even treasure thieves would be able to recover it. At least I still had the silver coin, which must have blown clear as the ship sank and the earth opened up.

Trees and Indian arrowheads fascinated me. My grandmother had a collection of hundreds of arrowheads and spear points gathered over the years and passed down through the generations. Most of the artifacts were found in her backyard garden.

She was an old Yankee who took great pride in being a descendant of Governor Bradford of the Mayflower. Listening to her, one would think that the Pilgrims had just landed a few years ago. She even told of how her great-grandmother once found an arrowhead in a log she was splitting for firewood.

After hearing my grandmother’s story, I examined almost every tree I passed while walking in the woods. I was looking for a little piece of stone sticking out through the bark that would mark that tree as an Indian tree.

I was selective in my search. I only inspected big trees, the ones most likely around during the times of the Indians and Pilgrims. I never found any arrowheads but I did discover a lot of rusty nails.

“Why so many nails?” I wondered. Then I realized it must have been because the Pilgrims were so poor they couldn’t afford bullets. I had visions of my Pilgrim Fathers fighting it out in the back woods with nothing but nails and gunpowder. It seemed perfectly obvious. In the movies, when the good guy shot the bad guy, he usually said, “Well, I nailed that hombre.”

Somewhere around this time, I also acquired the belief that trees remembered everything they heard. When the trees didn’t think anyone was around, they would whisper secrets to each other as the wind blew.

I spent hours laying in the tall grass listening to the talking trees. I imagined that if I listened very carefully, I would still be able to hear the voices of the Pilgrims and Indians.

Evergreens talked the most because they had so many needles with which to hear and whisper. Pine trees also seemed to be sorrowful. They always sounded like they were sighing as they cried sticky tears of pine-pitch. Pine trees wept because they were so old and remembered so much. The fir trees missed their Indian friends, and even the Pilgrims had gone.

Near the talking trees on the other side of a rock wall, there was an open field with grass so tall that when the wind blew, it looked like waves on the water. Scattered about the meadow were islands of baby evergreens.

When I played and walked through the grass, I was careful not to trample the young trees. I figured that they would think well of my kindness and speak fondly of me when they grew tall and wise.