Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  JUDY WOLF WORE colonial dress, apron, and bonnet in all seasons—I don’t think I ever saw her in modern clothes. She is a dogged historical researcher who helped identify some of the soldiers buried at Fishkill. Every month, she and Lance Ashworth, the president of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, comb through the Revolutionary War muster rolls. Then Wolf tries to verify the soldiers’ deaths through archives, electronic databases, pension rolls, and doctors’ journals. Valley Forge’s military archives have been consolidated, but Fishkill remains an orphan; Wolf has had to range widely to find records about its troops. She was stunned when the archivist at the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, which specializes in supplies and logistics, and should be a central source for information about all the supply depots, admitted he had never heard of the one at Fishkill.

  Knowledge of the Fishkill Supply Depot and its ghostly inhabitants has given Wolf a claim. “By the time I verify that someone died at Fishkill, I’ve spent so much time with them, these guys have turned into family. I feel very motherly and protective toward the soldiers,” she said. “There are times, honestly, I think they are helping me. They want to be found.”

  By early 2014, Judy Wolf had identified an astonishing eighty-four Revolutionary War soldiers who had died in Fishkill and were, presumably, buried in that graveyard, among them a Canadian nurse and Captain Abraham Godwin, wounded in action and buried near his son, Captain Henry Godwin. The phrase “sick at Fishkill until he died” appeared with haunting regularity on the “rescued” roll call on the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot’s website.* The pages memorializing the dead by name appear in black and white, “and will remain colorless until the day that we can announce the soldiers’ burial ground has been acquired and preserved, once and for all.”

  While the Friends’ group continued to research individual soldiers and conduct respectful ceremonies to honor them, the graveyard was trapped in a parallel universe of tawdry commercial real estate. County records evidenced petitions and suits involving GLD3, LLC, the owner of record of the Crossroads lot. Between 1998 and 2012, there were liens and judgments, leases and mortgages, ambitious plans and delinquent taxes involving a property reduced in price to $5 million and assessed by the county at $400,000. After the second CRM firm confirmed the presence of graves, the New York State Historic Preservation Office had recommended no construction on the lot without a major reconfiguration that skirted the burials. A stream and wetlands on the property already limited its building potential. Like millions of Americans, Broccoli owned a piece of real estate whose value was far less than what he had hoped. Now he wanted to sell it. And who else but a preservation group would want this land?

  A FEW WEEKS before Memorial Day of 2013, heavy equipment appeared in the clearing, and bright-orange polyethylene warning fences ringed the grave site. Every few feet, the orange fence was broken up with signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING. A press release† announced that yet another CRM firm—the third—was completing a survey to determine the boundary of the burial grounds. The press release included this provocative paragraph:

  Statements reported in the press claiming that certain named individuals are definitively buried on this property are purely speculative. While there is some historic documentation of individuals being hospitalized and dying at Fishkill Supply Depot, this certainly does not mean that they were buried at the Depot, or that their remains were not removed at a later date and reinterred elsewhere. It is not even certain at this point whether the few graves found are those of American soldiers, British mercenaries, or evidence of a previously unknown small family cemetery.

  The statement ended with the reminder that the site was private property, not open to the public.

  Bill Sandy wrote to me about the press release. “It is just a distraction.” He told me not to worry about the caution fence, either. Several Friends had met with Broccoli, who told them that he, too, was eager to preserve the burial ground; he assured them they would be able to hold a Memorial Day ceremony at the site. “We’re on a slow course to intersect,” said the president of the Friends group, Lance Ashworth. “He needs to sell the land, and we’re the only people who want to buy it. But there will be lots of gnashing of teeth and pain along the way.” No white knight has appeared with millions of dollars. The Friends group keeps a tip jar at the Van Wyck Homestead, takes donations online, applies for grants, meets with representatives of land trusts and preservation funds, does the massive detail work that will one day, they hope, end in preservation.

  By Memorial Day, the bulk of the tape and signs had been removed. The crowd had grown, too, no doubt alarmed by the appearance of bulldozers and that fiery press release. Twenty-six men-at-arms—military reenactors, one on horseback—and several camp followers in colonial dress led seventy others down the Albany Post Road, including several in contemporary military uniforms and three descendants of the soldiers identified as the Revolutionary War dead of Fishkill. Reenactors and politicians took turns solemnly reciting the names that the Friends had found in the archives. Abner Hill . . . Gift Freeman . . . Josiah Graves, Sr. . . . The archaeologist stood with his head bowed. The man on horseback held his reins tight as the muskets fired volleys into the woods.

  EVIDENCE OF HARM

  Bearing witness

  ERIN COWARD was in Hawaii on September 11, 2001, and woke up six hours behind the news. It didn’t seem real to her; the attacks felt like something that happened on television. When she returned to her family home near Washington, D.C., she made her brother drive her to the Pentagon so she could see where the plane had hit. More than five years after 9/11, she saw a listserv notice from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York: Archaeologists needed for a World Trade Center recovery team; experience with human remains essential. Coward leapt. It was work, and the contract archaeologist always needed work, but beyond that, she said, “I wanted to make it real. This was my connection to those people.”

  Coward, an attractive, compact redhead with slate-blue eyes and a direct gaze, reported for duty to a converted warehouse in Brooklyn. There she was fitted in a hazmat suit with goggles and boots. Thick rubber gloves were taped to the suit at her wrists. The material she would be screening—six feet of topsoil from the area around the towers and even debris from the sewers—was toxic; her health had to be monitored regularly. Coward and her team were instructed to look for artifacts, bones as small as a quarter of an inch, and teeth. A baby’s tooth, Coward said, looks like a pebble to the untrained eye. All day the piles of debris came to her on conveyer belts. “We went through some ugly stuff—tampons, rats. It smelled,” she recalled. “Someone found a freshly severed finger and we had to call the police. Trust me, you don’t ever want to go through anything from the New York City sewers.” But that’s the job: “I get paid to look at people’s trash.”

  She plucked evidence of harm from the conveyor belt. She found ID cards. She found a child’s wristwatch, its pink strap still fastened. She found a baby’s T-shirt with a bear on it, burnt around the edges. “That was hard,” she said. “I found it the day of the Virginia Tech shooting and called my friend and said, ‘Can I come over and just hold your baby?’”

  Like the other “arkies,” Coward tried to keep the grim business from overwhelming her; endurance was part of the job. She lasted a year. “You’re standing there for eight hours a day, so they allowed us to listen to our iPods,” she said. “It was nice to look up and see someone dancing. We were alive.”

  Archaeologists were not originally part of the rescue and recovery after 9/11. Archaeologist Richard Gould reported walking lower Manhattan weeks after the attacks, encountering “fragmented human remains along with other debris in alleyways, on top of Dumpsters, and on fire escapes.” He and others volunteered their services but were told that power-washing teams had already been dispatched and the priority was cleanup. With archaeologist Sophia Perdikaris and several detectives trained in forensic recovery, Gould organized a
team of archaeologists and persuaded the medical examiner’s office to let them excavate in a parking lot outside Ground Zero. They found human bone.* Human remains were still being found in 2006, when construction turned up scores of bones and personal effects. Soon after, Coward saw the medical examiner’s call for archaeologists.

  Five years after she had sifted its blighted dirt, Coward walked with me through Lower Manhattan. The new tower rose above us; ironworkers moved on an upper floor, filling it in. We got tickets to the memorial site and lingered near the reflecting pools built in the footprints of the Twin Towers. “Reflecting pools” sounds peaceful, but these were cavernous, with water roaring down into what looked like a black hole, black marble etched on all four sides with names of the dead.

  Coward was almost forty, though she looked younger. She had spent five years in the Army and had “tons of cousins” who served as well. She had read and reread Ayn Rand, not The Fountainhead, but Anthem—“That message of individuality was so important if you were in the military, you know?”

  Though she did not yet have a master’s degree, Coward had eight years’ experience in cultural resource management. “CRM work, that’s where you see the worst burnout,” she told me as we wandered the site. “Jobs aren’t steady, you move around constantly. If you want to have a family, you can’t. One week in Virginia, and then you’re in southern California, and then you’re in the Sudan.” She had yet to marry. “I need to find someone who understands I might be gone six months out of the year.” Coward had deliberately sought jobs in a variety of places, first in Maryland, Virginia, and New York City, “but the East Coast is mainly colonial archaeology,” she said, so she branched out to Hawaii and the American Southwest. She was at her happiest in field school in the middle of the Arizona desert, where the entertainment was as simple as sitting around a campfire at night drinking cheap beer.

  The attrition rate for this kind of work is high. “I know at least ten archaeologists that are out of it now; they’ve gone into the medical field mainly, because they needed money and more solid jobs. There are archaeologists I’ve talked to who go from job to job to job. That terrifies me. People with master’s degrees and twenty years’ experience—I had a B.A. and was just starting out, and we’re working for the same pay. They got involved with CRM work when they were twenty. Now they’re sixty and all they have is a car.”

  Because so much CRM work is done for legal compliance reasons, the paperwork can be daunting. “I tell people who want to be an archaeologist, go on a dig,” Coward said. “See if you survive the paperwork. Everything has to be documented: beginning of the day, end of the day, end of the month. Then try writing a report about not finding anything.” She’s comfortable with the uncertainty: “You can’t set out to prove something,” she said. What, then, can the archaeologist accomplish? She can say: “Here is something we can reasonably say is true.”

  Coward’s take on the work she did boiled down to one word: professional. That’s what the World Trade Center recovery team had been looking for, professionals. She is tough on amateur archaeologists. Coward grimaced. “Don’t do it,” she said. “An amateur pulls a pot out of a dig—it’s like telling a murder detective, ‘Don’t worry, I collected your evidence for you.’”

  School for Forensics

  I RODE SHOTGUN with a CSI team, cruising the back roads of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens with a bundle of red pin flags, looking for places where a drug-addled felon might have dumped the body of his waitress-girlfriend. Our driver was Amanda, a crime-scene analyst in gritty Camden, New Jersey (two tours of Iraq, two young children at home). Squeezed in the back, next to the children’s car seat, were Lorna, a Scottish Ph.D. candidate in toxicology (one layer of blond, asymmetrical hair over a darker layer, two bracelets with skulls), and Alex, master’s degree from Bradford University (West Yorkshire, England) in human osteology and paleopathology, meaning she knew a lot about bones, especially old diseased bones (dark asymmetrical hair, skull necklace). All three were in their twenties, sharp-eyed and competent. What is it about attractive young women and forensics? Did Temperance “Bones” Brennan, hero of the novels by Kathy Reichs and of the television series now in perpetual syndication, anticipate this trend, or inspire it?

  Amanda had been late that morning to the Rutgers Pinelands Field Station, where our class in Forensic Archaeology to Maximize Evidence Recovery met, because her GPS had led her to a dirt road a mile or two away. So when we received the police report on the missing waitress, along with a map showing her house, the bar where she worked, and the dump where her boyfriend was employed, Amanda had pointed down at the unpaved fire road where her GPS had led her, a possible route between the waitress’s house and the dump, and said, “That would be a great place to bury a body.” We knew from our morning’s instruction that a killer who knows his victim is more likely to bury her close by; that if the body wasn’t in the backyard under newly poured concrete, it was likely to be somewhere along the route the killer traveled from home to work; and we knew to look for a spot off the road, possibly behind a screen or barrier and near some kind of landmark, so the killer could find the spot again and keep an eye on it. There were exceptions, as our instructor, Kimberlee Sue Moran, pointed out, but criminals behaved in mostly predictable ways.

  We had a plan. We pulled out in Amanda’s car and drove onto the dirt road. We saw the other team—two more twenty-something women, a young male anthropologist, and a male homicide detective in his thirties—planting pin flags in the piny woods. “What do they see there?” Alex wondered. We spotted two places along the fire road where a car could pull over. One seemed particularly promising, by a trail with a big pile of natural brush to furnish a screen. In the wet, cold spring of 2014, much of the ground in these woods sprouted moss, but the area behind the brush pile did not; it was a darker color, as if it had come from a deeper layer, and it felt spongy underfoot. Alex pointed. “A piece of rope!” Amanda said triumphantly. Lorna planted several pin flags, then we continued cruising. We were a good team; we found another spot that also looked promising.

  I was only a little freaked out by the morning’s instruction. Kimberlee Moran, cheerful, attractive, thirty-five—this field was made for young, tough people—had emphasized that forensic archaeology was simply archaeology, conducted to a more exacting standard. You excavated and bagged artifacts systematically, but separately; you mapped and sketched and photographed at every turn; you guarded vigilantly against contamination; and you followed police procedure, logging every step in the chain of custody and making sure your methodology could stand up in court. No problem. Then: “Let’s share case studies!” Moran had said to start the class, and she and her two assistants had proceeded to tell us stories about the bodies they had encountered and the challenges they faced gathering evidence. I learned some things I can’t unlearn: human kneecaps look like rocks; bones when burnt, shrink and twist. Moran’s assistant, Ani Hatza, though still in her twenties, had worked on more than a hundred cases. She recalled a woman who killed her husband, then burned his body and dumped his ashes in a trashcan. Hatza’s team had had to excavate the trashcan, layer by layer; one person at a time in the cramped quarters. “We also found a cat in there,” Hatza said. “Good times!” The box of doughnuts in the middle of the table went untouched.

  Fortunately, I was not at one of the five body farms in the United States (one memorably described by Mary Roach in Stiff ), where those who donate their remains to science are buried, excavated, then studied by law enforcement people and archaeologists. Instead, I was in a corner of the vast and creepy Jersey Pine Barrens where, as John McPhee wrote, “From a gang-land point of view, it makes better sense to put a body in the Pine Barrens than in the Hudson River. [A] state trooper said to me: ‘Anybody who wanted to commit a murder—all he’d have to do is ride back there with a shovel. They’d never find that body. I always did figure there’s a lot of bodies in there.’” New Jersey does not permit burial and excavation of humans
for the purpose of training professionals in forensic skills, so the victim we were looking for, the hapless waitress in our dummy police report, was actually a four-hundred-pound pig, buried by Moran and her team a year earlier. Depending on the temperature and other conditions, a body takes a year to three years to skeletonize—but “we checked it a few months ago,” Moran reported, “and it was still fleshed.”

  Unfortunately, neither of our teams had pinpointed the pig’s burial site. Nor had the other team. Moran and her assistants, Hatza and Eric Young, took us out behind one of the outbuildings at the field station and led us down a sandy trail through the woods. We hiked a mile or so to a spot closer to a busy paved road than the fire road. There, in a clearing near a big cistern, was an obviously disturbed piece of ground, roughly rectangular and sagging in the middle; at a certain point, a buried body begins to collapse and the stomach ruptures, leaving a telltale slump in the soil. Moran also pointed out straight edges where a shovel had sliced into the earth. “There are no straight lines in nature, people,” she told us. I maintain that our mistake was in overthinking our criminal’s desire to conceal the body. He was no mastermind, just a panicked criminal; maybe it hadn’t occurred to him that he could find better cover off the fire road than the highway. But what, I wonder, was buried in the sites we did find? We were there for only two days; we had no time to investigate the rest of the Pine Barrens, full as it might be of murder victims. The next day, we had to excavate the pig.

  SOMEHOW I FOUND myself alone in the woods the second morning. There was only one restroom in the field station, and I was last in line. By the time I emerged, everyone was gone, but I wasn’t worried; though the site was a hike from here, it had been easy enough to get to, and there was that big cistern nearby, an obvious marker. But the first trail I tried was a dead end and I had to double back. I tried another that felt all wrong. The sandy ground and piny woods looked the same no matter which way I turned, and the trails seemed to be multiplying. There are more than a million acres in the Pine Barrens; it covers a huge swatch of the map. Perhaps you remember the episode from The Sopranos where two mobsters, Paulie and Christopher, decide to dump the body of their Russian victim in the Pine Barrens. They drive to the vast, gnarly-wooded wilderness, pop the trunk, and fall into a horror story, Poe by way of Godot. The body is not dead; the mobsters are attacked with the grave-digging shovel and have their car stolen. Paulie loses a shoe. The men wander the woods in sharp coats and what’s left of their shoes, shivering and bickering. I knew how they felt.