Sandcastle Virtues

Livermore Falls police warn about falling bricks, debris at former United Methodist Church

Yesterday the town of Livermore Falls closed Knapp Street.

Bricks were falling from the former Eaton Memorial United Methodist Church at the corner of Church and Knapp. Not from demolition. Not from a storm. From a building nobody was maintaining because nobody was using it anymore. The freeze-thaw cycles of a Maine winter had done what neglect invites. The town manager said the bricks had been crumbling for a while. Now they were falling into the street.

The church closed in January 2017. Zero members. Zero attendance. Zero income. It didn’t collapse dramatically. It emptied out quietly over decades until there was nothing left inside it, and then it stood there while the winters worked on it, and now the street below has to close because the weight of it has become a hazard to anyone who walks past.

I grew up a mile up the road in Jay.

On Saturdays, if the parents of the kids in the neighborhood were feeling generous, they’d give us each a quarter. The thirteen year olds would gather the nine year olds and we’d walk the mile down to the Corner Store, across the street from that church. We’d go to the candy counter and fill a bag with penny candy and walk the mile back. No adults. No phones. No one tracking our location or calculating the risk. The thirteen year olds were in charge of the nine year olds for a two mile round trip and everyone understood this was how it worked.

I never thought about the church across the street. It was just there. Majestic and permanent, the way certain things are permanent when you’re nine years old and the world hasn’t shown you yet what permanent actually means.

In the center island of the street in front of it stood a war monument. A cannon barrel set on end with a cannonball fixed to the tip. Our Memorial Day parades ended there every year. I stood at that monument more times than I can count and I never once read the plaque. Never thought to ask who it honored or why the town had placed a cannon in the center of its main street to mark the occasion.

I’ve been thinking about that plaque since I read the news yesterday.

And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away
In the tidal destruction the moral melee
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the new-fangled way

Jethro Tull wrote that in 1972. I heard it as a kid and felt something without knowing what. The sandcastle virtues. Built carefully in the right conditions, real while they stood, gone when the tide came. Not destroyed by malice. By the natural action of the thing that was always coming.

The church hasn’t fallen because someone tore it down. It’s falling because the people who built it are gone and the people who came after them drifted away one by one until the last one turned the key in January 2017 and nobody came back. The building has stood there for nine years because nobody has known what to do with it. And now the bricks are falling into the street because that’s what happens to weight that has nothing left holding it up.

I don’t know what the plaque says.

I’m going this weekend to read it. To stand in front of that church with the barriers around it and look at what’s falling and what’s still standing. To be a man of fifty-seven in the place where he was a nine year old with a quarter and a bag of penny candy and thirteen year olds who took their responsibility seriously because that was what was expected of them and they rose to it without being asked.

I should have read it thirty years ago. I’m going to read it now.

That’s probably true of more things than the plaque.