CHAPTER XVI.

TO THE PRESENT

Returning to the concept we used in the beginning, the ambiance of this two hundred year old homestead near the Pond, its lawns, trees, shrubs, flowers and forest is an example of the past becoming part of the present. The continuum into the present is enriched by what was accomplished long years ago on this spot. Shakespeare said the past is prologue. The past does speak to us here. Because of the maturing, we have the present pleasure. What went before us, slowly brought about by all those living here since the beginning, using human hands, endurance, spirit, taste, produced in our time a beautiful habitation for fully human dwelling. Time, nature and people worked together to produce a kind of ideal habitation such as Josiah Cotton, inspired by the poet, Pomfret, looked forward to in his time, so long ago.

Kamesit, the region around these ponds, is no longer as the Indians once knew it, but the charm of the region endures, in part from the ever renewing cycle of nature, the beauty that has been allowed to flourish by itself during the seasons, especially the beauty of spring flowers and the flaming colors of autumn, as well as even the clean snows after a winter blizzard. The loving care of the humans here from beyond two centuries gives delight to the present dwellers and their friends who visit. I would like to pay what homage I can raise to this care.

It is my hope that this excursion into the past, even though much of what went on cannot be recaptured, something of what we found will produce and illuminate experience now and give a place and identity in the present to what survives from long years ago.

the mile

the nylon swimming trunks expand with green as they follow the arms into the smooth wind down into the crayfish hour where leeches beat and grin; holding then a long while of wind I flash beneath the rippled skims and rattling boughs. down and straight out; becoming aqua-like again as the currents of cold catch hold of the sheaves of scalp and blow them in silence only to surface and explode, imbibe and refer the crest to gulls; down into a rhythm of quest. here shattering whole schools of fish and words I pry the pond apart and it regains me and squirts me out into the sailboat air. I touch the blossoming float of bobbing barrels and plane tree sides linked in beams of rocking wind and fresh pine trees crippling the breeze. up now the way I sit resting from the first one thousand strokes watching cool brooking pond glaze broiling on the planks then dipped into the longest hike of all I suddenly coast into the deeps leaving only behind “we are not come into mourning.”

--Tom Daley Chapel Hill, North Carolina

(A recollection from his experience of swimming the length of Boot Pond and back)

APPENDIX

List of Sources Consulted

Plymouth County Registry of Deeds

Plymouth County Registry of Probate

Plymouth Town Records

_A Little Commonwealth, Family Life in Plymouth Colony_ John Demos, Oxford 1971

_Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony_ John Demos--Offprint from the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser. m vol. XXII, #2, April, 1965

_Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth_ Part I, Historical Sketches and Titles of Estate Part II, Genealogical Register of Plymouth Families, Wm. T. Davis, Boston, copyright 1883

_Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian_ Wm. T. Davis, Plymouth, 1906, 542 pages

_The Arthur Lord Collection_, ed. L. D. Geller Pilgrim Society, Plymouth, 1971

_A Guide to New England’s Landscape_ Neil Jorgensen, 1971, Barre Publishing Co.

_Mourt’s Relation_, 1622 Dwight B. Heath, editor, Corinth Books, 1963

_The Wampanoags in the Seventeenth Century_ An Ethnohistorical Survey Catherine Marten, Plimoth Plantation Publication #2, Dec. 1970

_Plymouth and the Common Law, 1620-1775_ A Legal History by D. C. Parnes, Pilgrim Society, 1971

_Husbandmen of Plymouth_ Darrett B. Rutman, Beacon Press, Second ed., 1968

_The Mayflower and Pilgrim Story_ Chapters from Rotherhithe and Southwark Published by the Council of the London Borough of Southwark, 1970

_Sixteenth Century North America_ Carl Otwin Sauer, University of California Press, 1971

_A Geologist’s View of Cape Cod_ Arthur H. Strahler Natural History Press, New York, 1966

Opening Quotation from

_Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind_, by Shunryu Suzuki, page 29 Weatherhill, New York and Tokyo, Third Printing, 1971

AFTER KAMESIT

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

[1] Page 1--I have used as a reference for wildflowers _A Field Guide to Wildflowers_ by Roger Tory Peterson, Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, 1968.

[2] Page 1--_Indian Place Names of New England_, compiled by John C. Haden, New York, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1962, p. 73, refers to Kamesset Point, Dukes County, Massachusetts, Wampanoag, “at the place of great fish,” also given as “pine place.”

Two octogenarians in Plymouth were familiar with the word. One from Duxbury thought it meant “west wind.” There was a club on Lord’s Point on South Pond known as the Kamesit Club during the 1890’s.

John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, does not have the name in his dictionary.