On Thursday, we travelled from the south shore of Long Island to Danbury to
attend a Dropkick Murphys concert at the Ives outdoor concert park. The
next morning, I set an agenda to drop by the Stormfield area the next
morning on our way south. I'm not always a fan of GPS, but as we had to
change roads 8-10 times on our way down, I had to put up with it in this
case. In less than a half hour, we were on a little barely paved road
called "Mark Twain Lane." We were looking for the Lobster Pot, the cottage
that Twain secured for his trusted (then disgraced) secretary Isabel Lyons.
The Google map showed that it was just south of the main road, but it
wasn't. After the road bends to the left, it ends rather abruptly. On the
left, we did see the Lobster Pot. I walked out to check if the studio was
entertaining visitors that day, but I got no response. I peeked in the
glass door and was met by a portrait of Twain himself. Then I walked to the
garden gate and took a peek (and a photo).

On the way back to the car, I remember noticing a strange thing. There was
no sound at all. Living on Long Island next to a parkway, that doesn't
happen very often. I remember the same thing in Benson Arizona more than 40
years ago, but it's pretty rare. At the point where the road ends, there is
an ornate stone gate identified as the number 30. I correctly guessed that
this is the only part of the Twain estate that did not burn down at one
time or another. There was no sign signifying this as private property, but
I still didn't have the nerve to cross that gate. We drove south where
there were a couple of houses and then nothing. The house at the end had
giant scultures all over the front and back lawns. My main goal to was to
find the Stormfield area, and we'd done that, so we went back to the
highway.

Just as we got on highway 53 we saw the Mark Twain Library in Redding. We
had to stop for that because my wife and sons are also librarians. There
was a bench with a sculpture of Twain looming in the background. Twain
helped found this library just before his death, and his presence is felt
in every corner of the building. All of the walls are adorned with his
quotes including, sadly, the apocryphal one about how much his father had
learned by the time that he (Twain) had turned 21. Since Judge Clemens died
when Sam was a little boy, that doesn't add up.

Later I looked at the Google Map again and switched to the Satellite view.
To my great surprise, the area we had visited showed up as forested
wilderness. Had I just made a trip to the Twilight Zone? Around the corner
the library was there, but the Lobster Pot and the nearby houses didn't
exist in Google Land. I tried MapQuest and, sure enough, saw every place
that we had visited, as well as the reconstructed Stormfield well past the
#30 gate. There's a mystery here, and maybe somebody in this group has an
answer, but I'll just let that one ride for now. Photos I took on this trip
can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/terryballard/




-- 


Terry Ballard
Author and Leisure Studies Manager
http://www.terryballard.org
Author of the book "Google this"
http://googlethis.com<http://googlethisforlibraries.com/>

"My memory has a mind of its own."