Happy Monday! And it's a frigid one here in Waterville, Maine. Three degrees and it feels like it. Just came in from throwing the bright orange rubber ball to my dog Henry. He's now exercised and I'm finally getting the feeling back in my fingers.
Last week I went to the Sagadahoc County Registry of Deeds in Bath to do some research for the new mystery series I'm writing. If you've never been to a registry of deeds, conjure up in your mind Bartleby the Scrivener, the character in the Herman Melville novella of the same name. Bartleby is a scrivener, that is one who copies documents, like deeds, in longhand, or cursive and that's what he does all day long. Until one day,he answers every request with the famous line: "I'd prefer not to."
That's what some people did for a living before the typewriter and photocopy machines. They labored on chest-high, slanted tables, almost like drafting tables, inkwells placed every three or four feet, copying the deeds, mortgages, easements and other documents that were put on record to help people claim their land and show "all the world" that they and no one else owned it. Those hand-copied documents were then bound into books about twelve by eighteen inches and three inches thick. In order to do our work back then, we had to hoist many of those books a day. They weighed at least five pounds or more. Then the original docs were mailed back to the attorneys or banks who handled the transactions.
When I began my training in researching titles back in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, there were still old tables with holes where the ink bottles would have been. In some registries, I'm sure they still exist. But most of them have been switched out with more modern, less charming furniture. But back to what I was up to.
My career has been varied, but for a twenty-five year chunk of time I did title examinations. If you wanted to sell or buy a house, you would want to have the title to the land searched to make sure there were no encumbrances on it. Like, for instance, you want to make sure that the person who says he owns it really does, so when you buy it, you own it. And you do that by looking at the deed you are going to receive at the closing, finding out where that person got it, and where the person before him/her got it, back forty years. You can go back as far as the records go if you want, and that's what I was doing last week.
I know of a rare heirloom apple that was developed on a farm in Sagadahoc County. No more oak slanted tables, but a jazzy new computer system that showed me a few transactions with my apple cultivator's name. That reference led me to a plan of an easement to a utility company. That plan showed that my apple farmer's land once abutted that easement and showed about where it was.
I only had a couple of hours to spend there, but what I found was a good lead. My friends, Penny and Sally, two veteran title examiners (or "abstractors" as they are called in Maine) helped me place where the farm might have been, now a cul de sac with homes snaked through it.
When I left the "Reg," as we fondly call it, I drove down the road where the farm once was. Along the way, I found two old apple trees right on the side of the road. I got out and took photos of them, and close-ups of the lone apple, browned by the cold, hanging on for dear life.
I kept going, and this is a long, long road. When I got to the utility easement, I got out, parked in the entrance to the cul de sac and looked around. No farmhouse. But then, as if it had shouted to me, there by the side of the road was a huge, gnarled, naked apple tree. I climbed down the short embankment, almost breaking a leg doing so, and practically hugged that tree. Well, I think I did hug it. I'm new at this apple sleuthing, but this looked like a very old tree. I found some "dropsies," stuffed them into my pockets and hoped the passersby didn't call the cops on some crazy lady down in the gully.
I don't have an actual photo of the apple I'm looking for. There is a sketch put out by John Bunker at Fedco Trees, the real apple expert. But it could be "the one." I took photos of them when I got them home, cut up the smallest one and dug out the seeds. I'm going to plant them and see if they grow.
The end of the trek came when I decided to keep going instead of turning back and going home the usual way. The plan showed that this road ended up in a town near the highway ramp. As I'd gotten off the highway in Bowdoinham that day, I passed "Fisher Road." I thought, "Someday I'll take that road and see where it brings me." Lo and behold, the road where I had traveled to find that farm turned into Fisher Road, and it brought me to that very intersection I'd passed by earlier in the day. I laughed. Some random journeys we take are not as random as we think. My entire day had been filled with synchronicity, happy coincidences, and I got home exhilarated.
As a writer, we don't have to search out real people, farms or apples to flesh out our fictional stories. But I love detection, and that's what I miss about my old career...title searching involves looking through books, at maps and plans, some of them quite old, and finding where your "locus" is "on the face of the earth." And I find it fun to incorporate that into my novel research, What's this one about? Think: "An Apple to Die For."
