Vermont Serpentinite
Serpentinite is a common rock on Earth, and probably throughout the solar system. It is a type of metamorphic rock, produced when one of the most common minerals in the planet – olivine – gets exposed to water near the surface of the Earth, which of course happens all the time. A bit of water and a bit of pressure and the mineral structure changes, turning it into a soft, easily deformed rock.
Many serpentinites have a fibrous appearance like this one from Vermont. There can be two factors driving this appearance; first, these rocks are so soft that they can deform easily in response to the stresses of mountain building. In that case, these lines are slickenlines, reflecting one part of the rock grinding against another. Alternatively, some (But not all) serpentine minerals can grow in a habit where they form long needles; minerals that grow in this habit are lumped together as asbestos minerals. Serpentine-bearing rocks therefore can naturally host asbestos, and mines in the area where this rock came from in Vermont produced asbestos for more than half a century.
Serpentinite rocks and serpentine minerals are most often found where little bits of Earth’s mantle get thrust up onto the continent, creating a feature we call an ophiolite. These are commonly produced when continents collide or when continents run into island arcs, as a bit of the mantle gets trapped in the collision zone. The serpentinites in Vermont are the remnant of the Taconic Orogeny, a mountain building event 440 million years ago where a volcanic island arc was thrust upon what is today New England, folding and faulting much of the area in the process.
-JBB
Image credit: James St. John
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Previous TES series on Asbestos and health problems:
https://www.facebook.com/TheEarthStory/photos/a.352867368107647.80532.352857924775258/778584158869297
Sylvia and her mother had their lives changed forever when they stopped for gas at Sunoco at East Fishkill.
We search for signs and prophecies of the great changes that are waiting for us, but most often they come suddenly, in mundane places while we do mundane things. A heart attack while watching Netflix. A phone call about the pregnancy while you’re deciding on which brand of granola to buy at the supermarket. A sudden act of violence when you’ve stopped for gas.
Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole. Produced by Disparition. Part 2, chapter 5: Taconic.
Sylvia’s mother was also named Sylvia. Folks don’t think twice if a man names a son after himself, or even if all the men in the family have the same name for generations. But a woman names daughter after herself and everyone gets so confused, Sylvia said.
When she was little, she didn’t think anything at all about having the same name as her mother. Later she realized it was weird, and she didn’t like being weird, and it made her defensive about it and she didn’t like to tell people her name. When she hit her teenage years, she blamed her Mom and refused to go by Sylvia. I asked her what name she went by.
“Skip,” she said.
“Seriously?” I asked her.
“Seriously, Skip,” she said.
“Don’t be an asshole.” She was right. I apologized.
“Do you want me to call you Skip?”
“No,” she said quietly. “Ever since… ever since my Mom, I’ve gone back to Sylvia. I don’t hold it against her anymore, I get it. I get her so much more now that she’s gone. I wish I could tell her that.”
I let her fold under my arm. It’s been a long time since I was called upon to comfort anyone.
Sylvia was the one who saw it first that night. A man twitching near the dumpster. She thought maybe it was someone who had been injured, or maybe a drug addict, although the rural scene didn’t lend itself to that narrative. But her stomach bottomed out as she realized it was a crouching man, thrashing at something below him.
A person below him.
Sylvia saw but could not comprehend that the man was eating the other person.
“Mom,” she had whispered. “Mom!”
And her Mom turned, and to her credit, bless her forever, she did not wilt like I would have, or run like I once did. She set her jaw, said “Sylvia, honey, you get inside the station and find somewhere to hide.” And she pulled out her phone to call the police.
But of course the police wouldn’t have been able to help her.
And anyway, just after Sylvia left was when the Thistle Man noticed her mother watching. If Sylvia had been there too, if he had known that there were two witnesses…
But he only knew about one witness. One person who needed to be dealt with.
It wasn’t just the Thistle Man, she said. There was a second person there.
She walked around the Sunoco, putting on a show of careful investigation. But I could see her hands shaking as she clenched them tight at her sides. This place, for her, was a wound.
“We’re not gonna find anything here,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“It’s been years,” she said. “There wouldn’t be any physical evidence left.”
“No.”
“But this is what it is, Keisha. I remember a second person. The Thistle Man had help.”
She stared for a long time at the last place she had seen her mother alive.
“I need to know what really happened.”
“I know,” I said.
She nodded. “OK, let’s go.”
The Taconic Parkway is beautiful. A road that meanders. It feels like taking a walk in the woods. But taking a walk in the woods is something you wanna do slowly, on foot, not speeding in a car. It is a dangerous road. No streetlights, sharp turns, long periods with no shoulder, just a rock face on one side and a thin barrier on the other side.
If life is in many ways a balancing act between beauty and danger, then the Taconic is paved right down the middle.
Just north of Hudson, where we had delicious falafel at a kosher restaurant that advertises itself, almost certainly incorrectly, as “the last kosher restaurant until the Canadian border”.
We saw something strange on the hillside by the road. A huge carving of a human face, and in front of that, a giant figure seated on a throne. Their head flattened and curved into the shape of a ball. There are other statues all over the hill. It looks like a shrine to a god no one has ever worshipped.
Sylvia came back out when her mother started shouting. The lights had conveniently dimmed on that side of the station. There was no sound of police coming, of anyone coming. Of any help at all.
“You wanted to see,” the Thistle Man said in a voice that oozed out of his throat. He dragged one leg forward, the rest of his body leaning backward.
“Now you will see.”
Sylvia stepped toward them, but her mother caught her eye, and her mother put up one hand. You stay away, you hide.
“And I did, I guess,” she said. “I don’t remember what next. It’s all sorrow and blood. But I do remember a couple hours later, huddled up in the brush on the other side of the Taconic, hidin’. I remember footsteps in the leaves nearby. I guess the Thistle Man was looking for me, but he never found me. Still hasn’t.”
There was one more piece to this story, and it’s the piece we’re trying to understand now. There was someone else there with the Thistle Man. Sylvia remembered a person wearing a hoodie, standing next to her mother right at the end. In the darkness, Sylvia couldn’t pick out any more details. Just the Thistle Man and the figure in the hoodie. Small, faceless, with their arms out toward her mother.
“Someone helped the Thistle Man kill my mother, and I wanna know who,” she said.
We had wings at a bar in Red Hook. An older man and a young man sat at the end of the bar.
“I lived through Nixon, you know,” the older man said. He shook his head.
“I lived through Nixon and I never lived through anything as scary as this.”
Unsure of what else to do, we went the next morning to the Duchess County Sheriff’s office in Poughkeepsie. The woman at the front desk seemed friendly. An older woman, definitely not police anymore, if she ever was one.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Great question. I don’t know if anyone could.
We explained that we were looking into a murder that happened a few years ago. Gave the details. She did some searching on the computer.
“Huh,” she said. “This isn’t right.”
“What is it?” asked Sylvia.
“The case was closed. I don’t know why that would have happened. It’s a murder investigation, double homicide, only a few years old and no suspects arrested. Why would they close this?” She frowned, reading through the notes they had on file. “Why would they close this?” she said again.
Her tone wasn’t confusion, but despair. She knew exactly why they had closed it. She looked at us, lips half open, holding what she had to say next in her mouth for a while, and then she let it out.
“Go have lunch at the Palace Diner. It’s just around the corner. Food’s good there.”
Sylvia and I thanked her and we went to the diner. A grand 24-hour institution with a fast parking lot and their own in-house bakery. The kind of diner you can’t find outside of the Northeast.
We were halfway through turkey clubs when the woman showed up, holding a filing box.
“I want you to know that there are some of us who don’t believe in it. Who believe that this is the wrong thing, what they’re doing. I want you to know that we are not all on their side.”
She put the box under our table. “There isn’t much, but take it. Not me, mm-hm. At least not me.”
She turned and left without waiting for us to respond. Our waiter asked us if we were OK on our coffees.
We were OK.
There are a few straight vineyards in the Hudson Valley among the apple orchards. There is here, as there are in many places not notable for their wines, a serious effort to create a wine industry. The best New York wine I’ve ever had was maybe OK. But then as the climate changes, who knows? Certainly the areas famous for wine will lose their climate, and so one of these places we laugh about will become the new Bourdeaux. Or everyone will be too busy being refugees from our drowned cities to worry about wine.
The box was almost empty. No real investigation done on the case. The police knew who the killer was, and so officially had no leads. The bare minimum of paperwork, which is still a lot of paperwork, but none of it said anything. Restating basic physical facts of the scene, describing actions taken by the officer in a step-by-step style of writing designed to intentionally repel the reader through tedium.
Sylvia Parker Senior, another victim of the Hungry Man.
But there was one item of real interest. A manila envelope, folded over and mummified in packing tape. I took the knife from my bag and tore it open. Inside was a cassette tape.
“Camera at the gas station?” I said.
“Oh god, I hope,” she said.
“Do we have any way to play this?”
“Well, the region is known for antiqueing.”
We went to the grimiest antique store we could find in Hudson. A basement shop with childlike paintings of animals flying kites and riding skateboards outside. There was a taxidermied moose head on the wall, well on its way to falling apart. And in the back, for 15 bucks, there was a VCR/TV combo.
We got a room at a cheap one-level motel in Saugerties. Didn’t even bother bringing the rest of our stuff in, just the TV and the tape.
I closed the drapes. It was completely dark in the room. I plugged the TV in, stuck the tape into the slot. [VCR sounds]
Warped colors and digital static. Maybe all this for nothing. The tape decayed or broken. But then it resolved into a wide shot of the side of a gas station. There was Sylvia’s mother against the wall, and the Thistle Man stepping toward her. Not the same Thistle Man that had followed me last year, a different one. Just as misshapen and toothy.
And there was Sylvia coming out of the door, seeing what was about to happen, screaming. The Thistle Man seeing the younger Sylvia, braking into a drooping, melted smile.
“That’s not what happened,” Sylvia said. “I hid. She gestured for me to run. He never saw me.”
On the tape, the Thistle Man turned back to Sylvia’s mother. He didn’t walk so much as fall into her, his hand on her throat. And there was, yes, a person in a hoodie. I didn’t see them emerge from anywhere, just nothing and then a person in the shadows, like they had always been there and I had only now noticed them. The person rushed forward toward Sylvia’s mother. In the tape, Sylvia made a sobbing scream that we couldn’t hear because there was no sound. She, too, ran for her mother.
Before anything else could happen, the Thistle Man tore Sylvia Parker Senior’s throat out. I dunno how else to say it. He took it, like someone might take a box of cereal off of a shelf. He moved his hand back and there was something wet in it, and Sylvia’s mother had a gaping wound where her throat had been. Now
Sylvia was screaming again, not in the tape, but in the room next to me. I held her tightly, and she screamed into my shoulder.
The person in the hoodie reached the pair, and put their arms around Sylvia’s mother. They seemed to be easing her to the ground. The dying woman stared deep into the, to us, invisible face of the person, as though she had just seen something even more astonishing than her own death, and then she was gone.
The Thistle Man tossed what he had taken from the woman onto the ground, and then just as casually, picked up Sylvia as her run brought her in reach. He held her aloft, like a parent looking at a baby. He was laughing. His jaw wobbling wider and wider.
And the person in the hoodie got up from their crouch, reached over and took hold of the Thistle Man’s head. They yanked backwards and their strength must have been incredible, because the Thistle Man flew like he weighed nothing.
Sylvia collapsed to the ground and then, again this seems like such a simple way to say this but – the person in the hoodie took the Thistle Man apart. Tore off his arms and his legs and then popped his head off. It was very quick.
Sylvia was lying unconscious on the ground. The person in the hoodie picked her up and carried her out of frame, and the footage went to black.
Sylvia touched the screen.
“They saved me. All this time I thought they helped the Thistle Man kill my mother. I thought I gotten away on my own. But I would be dead too, if it wasn’t for whoever they are.”
“Whoever they were they were very, very strong,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “And it seems like they’re on our side.”
“So what now?” I asked her.
“Now, I have to go again,” she said.
“What will you do?”
“I’m goin’ to seek out this person, whatever they turn out to be. There is a powerful force of good somewhere. I won’t chase after evil yet. First I will seek that good.”
She hugged me, and I hugged her back, fiercely. We both were crying, of course.
Of course.
“You’ll see me again,” she said.
“I better,” I said. “Goddammit, I better.”
Knock-knock.
[left speaker] Who’s there?
[right speaker] Who’s there?
[left] I asked first.
[right] I have just as much of a right to know.
[left] You knocked on my door.
[right] There is no door, I just said the words “knock knock”.
[left] If there is no door, then what do you want me to do?
[right] Tell me who you are.
[left] Sure, but first tell me who you are.
[right] Who’s there?
[left] Who’s there?
[right] Who’s there?
[left] Who’s there?
[right] This is getting us nowhere.
[left] This is getting us nowhere who?
I agreed with Sylvia that it’s considered strange for a girl to be a Jr. compared to boys who are frequently given their father’s names. It really shouldn’t be that odd.
So there is another ally. Well, we can call the hooded person an ally but they didn’t exactly try to help Sylvia’s mother. Of course, they did deal with that Thistle Man so that works in their favor. Once again, Sylvia is on her own though that may be for the best. Keisha inevitably gets caught up in weirdness so having Sylvia pursue someone who works against the Thistle Man seems less of concern.
Props to that Police Station receptionist woman. I don’t know what she risked to get the women that tape of Sylvia’s mother’s death but even if we don’t know her name, she deserves our gratitude for being someone who is not afraid of the truth.
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