There is a marking on the lower sluice wall, and there is a small war over whether anyone should care. The Warden of the Sluice has settled the question for himself. “Nothing of consequence,” he said, with the economy he brings to most things. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice has settled it the other way, with a diligence that is getting hard to tell apart from quiet mutiny, and has asked that the thing be entered in the record.
The marking sits two handspans above the current waterline, on the east-facing stone, between the gate mechanism and the point where the channel narrows toward the bend. The Deputy found it Friday afternoon. Or reported it Friday afternoon. The distinction matters, and she was careful to draw it. What caught her eye was the moss, or rather a change in it, on a stretch of wall that by her account had been evenly covered for two seasons at least. Pull the moss back and the lines show. Three of them. Short, roughly parallel, scratched or cut into the stone at a slight angle, each about a wing-span long, spaced two or three feather-widths apart.
The Deputy offers no theory about where they came from. She offers procedure instead. In a supplementary filing to the Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, appended to Monday’s conditions report, she sets out three points. The marking matches no maintenance notation in any sluice log, current or past. It appears to predate the moss by a span she is not qualified to estimate. A photographic record, if it can be managed, would be prudent. She asks that the matter go on the next agenda under miscellaneous observations. It is the kind of filing that wants nothing except to exist on the record, in case.
The Warden, asked, gave a view. He was at his usual station over the east channel on Saturday morning, watching a leaf work its way down the current, when this paper told him the Deputy had filed on a mark on the lower wall. He waited until the leaf had cleared. Then he said that walls acquire markings, that the sluice has stood longer than any bird now living can account for, and that the Deputy’s thoroughness, “admirable in its way,” was on course to produce more paperwork than the wall deserved. Had he looked at it himself? He had not, and did not mean to. “The wall is sound. The lines are lines.”
This paper went down on Saturday afternoon to look. The marking is visible from the east bank at low water. The three lines are parallel, near enough, and they are neither plainly natural nor plainly made by anyone. There may be a fourth, fainter and shorter and set at a different angle, off to the left of the group. There may not. The moss was in the way, and so was the bank, which turned out to be the kind that does not let a bird keep her footing while she squints at masonry.
On the way back, the long-resident frog surfaced, and was asked in passing, without much hope of an answer, whether marks on the sluice wall were a known thing. He said the sluice had “a longer memory than most residents give it credit for,” and that he would not be drawn further at this time. Then he went under.
So the wall has three lines on it, possibly four. The Warden has decided they mean nothing. The Deputy has decided they belong on the record. The frog has decided to submerge. The one party that could say how the lines got there, and when, is the wall, which has stood through every season anyone can name and is not in the habit of explaining itself. The Subcommittee will take the Deputy’s report at its next session, alongside Monday’s conditions. Whether anyone ever learns what the lines are, the stone is not saying.