Dead As Dutch

by Rich Docherty

  ~ * * * ~

  It wasn’t until his mid-teens that Irving Liberty Bell had learned the real name of his Grandpa Bud. Not that it mattered much that it was Harold. Or the fact that Grandma Clover was Geraldine on her birth certificate. For Irv, some of the best moments of growing up came after dinner, as he sat on the front porch and listened as his grandparents reminisced about their days living on a hippie commune in the late 1960s. Bud and Clover helped organize the Mustard Seed Collective on a two-hundred acre plot of woodland in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Irv enjoyed hearing stories of their self-sufficient back-to-nature society, how they made or grew everything they needed to survive without outside help. Their free-spirited attitudes captivated him as they shared an array of tales of experimentations with various forms of self-enlightenment—from meditation, fasting, and Eastern spiritual concepts—to “magic brownies.” It was the latter that led to the dissolution of the Mustard Seed when law enforcement authorities raided the farm and discovered a rather massive crop of marijuana plants thriving on the property next to the squash. Irv’s grandparents fled to New York City in their VW bus (they showed Irv a worn snapshot of the vehicle with a gigantic peace-sign symbol painted on its side amid bright, psychedelic graphics and pop-art renderings of flowers) where Bud hustled chess in Tompkins Square Park along the eastern edge of Greenwich Village. They became squatters in vacant—and condemned—tenement buildings on the Lower East Side where, over the next two decades, they led tenants-rights battles against city hall bureaucrats seeking to evict them.

  Irv’s life, as it turned out, hadn’t been all that much different so far—minus the hallucinogens—from the communal, self-reliant existence of Bud and Clover. He, too, had grown up in a rural environment, raised outside of Liberty (the source of his middle name) New York, a small town of less than ten thousand residents in Sullivan County in the southeastern portion of the state. His mother, Daisy, the only child of Harold and Geraldine (aka “Bud” and “Clover”) Irving, could track her lineage back to Washington Irving, the author of the well-known short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” This latter tale of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and his mysterious disappearance after a brush with a Headless Horseman had a profound effect on Irv’s boyhood beyond recurring nightmares. Its metaphysical element of a “ghost rider” was also responsible for his ready acceptance of other types of phenomena possibly inhabiting the supernatural world.

  Daisy was a substitute art teacher in Brooklyn when she met her eventual husband, Ethan Bell (a decade her senior), who for twenty-three years taught American history to tenth graders. After a brief courtship, they married, and when Daisy announced that she was with child, they moved upstate to raise their soon-to-be-born son in a more suitable environment than the cramped quarters they rented in a third-floor walk-up. Named after his famous ancestor, Irving was delivered at home with a midwife in attendance and was the first of three offspring. A brother and sister followed his arrival a few years later and, as a nod to Daisy’s parental heritage and Bohemian upbringing, were called Sage and Thyme.

  The family lived together in a comfortable country house that dated back to the late nineteenth century and still retained much of the original period detail. It sat on fifty acres of land, and its fertile soil was ideal for the vegetable garden that provided much of the food that found its way to the dinner table. Irv and his siblings were homeschooled by Ethan (the dining room served as a makeshift classroom) while Daisy worked at her potter’s wheel making colorful replicas of mushroom varieties—she was fond of black trumpets, chanterelles and porcinis in particular, due to their respective funnel, vase, and cap shapes—which she sold on a commission basis to galleries in nearby Woodstock.

  On weekends, when Irv was excused from chore duties and lessons from his dad, he could most often be found hiking with his friend and neighbor Garrett in the direction of Shawagunk Ridge, located west of Liberty at the northern end of the Appalachian Mountains. “The Gunks,” as the locals referred to them, were a major rock climbing destination. Irv and Garrett spent countless hours scaling the cliffs to the ridge summit and scanning the sky with their binoculars to spot a bald eagle soaring above its nesting ground.

  It was obvious from an early age that Irv possessed a remarkable mechanical aptitude. He found great satisfaction in fixing things, and even when they weren’t in need of repair, took objects apart just to reassemble again to find out how they worked. (Daisy could never understand how someone could ever have such a rabid curiosity about a toaster’s internal parts. However, she did notice that after her son’s tinkering, it did brown bread with a more even consistency.) Gadgets deemed beyond salvaging challenged Irv to devise new uses for them. He cobbled together a walkie-talkie from a pair of dead cordless telephones and repurposed a half-century-old radio into a speaker system for an MP3 player. Anything that involved capturing or manipulating sound fascinated Irv and inspired him to devise a set of headphones out of tennis balls and an audio splitter from an Altoids tin.

  When it was time for college, his initial thought was to pursue a degree in an engineering field, perhaps acoustical design. However, once on the Eisenhower College campus and his reputation as an audio savant spread, he was drafted on numerous occasions to assist film students with their projects as a soundman on video shoots. Irv found the combination of the technical proficiency required to record a pristine audio track and the potential for outdoor adventure involved in filmmaking (he envisioned a career making documentaries in remote sections of the world) to be an irresistible combination that prompted a switch of majors. In the Film Studies program, Irv was revered as a kind of guru and requests for his assistance were so numerous that he turned down many more than he could accept. There was also the occasional frantic student who resorted to pleading for his presence on their crew, as was the case in April, just after spring break. Irv could recall the late night knock on his dorm room door and an encounter with a manic senior who barged past him without bothering to introduce himself and spent the next two hours spelling out in excruciating detail—and boundless enthusiasm—ambitious ideas for his thesis film. To put an end to the exhausting filibuster, Irv agreed to act as soundman on the shoot, but after Stan Heberling hugged him and left sometime after midnight, he wondered just what he had gotten himself into…