Monte's Quest

On Saturday morning I participated in a Move to Remove demonstration on Falmouth Green, in the shadow of the First Congregational Church. I had made arrangements to interview one of the other participants, Monte Ladner, after the demonstration.

I met Monte at his car which was parked across the street from the white-fenced green. He was rushing to unload camera equipment from his trunk.

“Unfortunately, I have another appointment,” he said when he saw me. “I was supposed to meet the pastor here at eleven. I’m ten minutes late. He’s taking me inside the steeple to photograph the bell.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the church. “Can I come?”

Just then his cell phone rang. “If this is the pastor, I’ll ask him.”

It was the pastor, and the answer was yes. I helped Monte lug one of his tripods to the church door where Pastor Jonathan Drury waited.

After brief introductions, Pastor Jon guided us up a red carpeted stairway to the balcony. Pausing, he looked down at the main floor and gestured to a pew in the front row, near the pulpit. “That pew was rented by the parents of Katherine Lee Bates. She wrote the lyrics to America the Beautiful.” 

Without waiting for our reactions, Jon turned on his heel and opened a side door to another staircase, rough-hewn and steep, that led to the attic. “If it seems like I’m in a hurry, I am,” he explained as we mounted the stairs. “You’ll want to be up to the steeple and down again before the bell starts to toll at noon. It’s loud.”

“I don’t want the bell to toll for me,” Monte said.

When he reached the attic, he set down his camera bag and donned a mask. “I have asthma,” he gasped. “It’s dusty up here.”

There was more than dust. There were cobwebs and dead flies, pipes and ceiling insulation, broken shutters and loose boards. And, hanging from a post nail, there was a dead bat that Jonathan rather proudly pointed out to us as if he had placed it there himself to spice up the tour.

We stooped low to sidle under old plumbing. We straddled splintered beams. We wound our way along a maze of narrow planks. Finally we approached the foot of a wooden ladder. Its rungs were splintered, its steps worn and misshapen. At the top the ladder was a crawl space, an open wooden hatch, through which sunlight shone.

I went first. Halfway up, Monte handed me one of the tripods. Lifting it over my head, I slid it through the opening. Arching my back to fit, I hauled myself through the hatch after it.

Up yet another ladder, we repeated the same process. And suddenly there hung the object of our quest, alone in the silent, drafty steeple, an upside down bronze cup. At its base, the bell is wider than a hula hoop, and it’s almost as tall as me.

“How old do you think this is?” Monte asked when he climbed through the hatch and began to set up his tripods.

Years ago I had visited Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell with its iconic crack. In comparison, except for patches of green patina and some light brown streaks, this one seemed in pretty good shape.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Monte smiled. “It’s really old,” he said.

“Really old?”

Monte nodded. “Really, really old.”

Pastor Jon, a portly man, had lagged behind us in our trek up the ladders. Now his head poked through the hatch.

“Paul Revere made them to last,” he huffed.

“Paul Revere?” I asked. “This bell was cast by Paul Revere?” So, just as I thought, this bell was older than the Liberty Bell, but only by twenty years.

“It came to this church in 1796,” Pastor Jon said.

“That’s why I wanted to come here,” Monte explained. He picked up his camera and attached it to one of the tripods.

Gingerly, placing my feet carefully on the slanting slate floor, I circled the bell.  Around its upper circumference there’s a somber inscription: “The living to the church I call, and to the grave I summon all.”

According to Pastor Jon, Revere cast the bell mostly from copper and a bit of tin. He added a pinch of silver because he believed that it added a nice tone to the bell’s sound. Metal is ageless, but, like all whom the bell summons, wood isn’t. Revere’s bell is suspended from a rusty iron yoke, and the yoke is attached to a wooden wheel, much like a wagon wheel, that used to swivel to make the bell toll. The wooden wheel, probably the original, is beyond decrepit. Today a hammer strikes the bell.

“I’m switching to a fish eye lens now,” Monte called. “Jon and Ann, move over so you’re standing opposite me.”

“Sometimes I wonder if this bell should be in a museum,” Pastor Jon said as Monte snapped more pics, “but I feel that it belongs here on the Green where so much has happened since Paul Revere’s time.”

How many gatherings had this bell witnessed over the centuries? How many Sunday services? How many funerals? How many community events? I thought of the demonstration on the Falmouth Green that I had just left -  and where I had heard this bell toll at eleven o’clock, not quite an hour ago. And I realized that Paul Revere would have been more than satisfied to discover that Americans’ predilection for resistance has persisted for well over these two hundred years.

That’s me with Pastor Jonathan Drury behind Revere’s bell.

           

Monte’s beautiful photo is posted online. You can view it at Ocean 1047’s  Facebook page.

 As of yesterday, it had 2200 views.