Buried Treasure

Go to the place on Zebedee where the hemlock forest transitions into a meadow of berries and thorns, and look very closely in one of the hollows of the trees and you may spot a cookie tin containing a weathered copy of the movie Moulin Rouge. By all means, take it home with you, pop a tub of popcorn and enjoy it with your SO. Otherwise it will be forever lost up there, a bit of trash, a tiny blight, where it was never intended to be.

It was the favorite movie of the very first Spartan Race gladiator and freegan extraordinaire, ferrier apprentice, and animal keeper for Amee Farm. He was so enamored of it that he would watch it every night on the top floor of the barn, once a hiker’s hostel, now the quarters for the farm hands. He’d sing along enthusiastically in between bites of the fully loaded pizza that he ate for dinner almost nightly. There was little recourse than to stash the movie safely in the game box of "Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader” where he would never find it. 

I offered little more than bemused shrugs any time he would go searching. A little dishonesty was worth its weight in gold for the serenity it would afford me.

When the time came for him to move on, the righteous action would be to return to movie to him in due fashion. I draped a note, a clue really,  across the top tube of his bike. It led him down Barn Dance trail to a wigwam built for a wilderness survival school. A subsequent clue brought him back to the farm to go mucking around in the pig pen amongst the residents who were so ravenous that they would just as soon nibble at your legs as the discarded oyster crackers which made up a large part of their diet. He loved that movie. 

As homicidal as he was by this time, it was a good thing I was nowhere near his next destination, the Pittsfield Cemetery, lest the temptation be overwhelming. It was not a particularly large cemetery, but it was no easy task to find one name indicated in the clue from hundreds of headstones. The farmer, there as a spectator more than as support crew,  reported that he stumbled upon the name in short order and moved on to the next destination. It brought him down through old Pittsfield and back towards the old defunct town of Michigan along a brook. Just upstream from a bridge was an inactive mine. Ten feet into its black maw in a  small pond he found a wine bottle and a clue folded within it.  

He had the final clue in his hand, cryptic and biblical, potentially leading him to Zebedee on top of the mountain and back to his muse, but time had expired. He had to get ready to make the cross country trip to follow his ferrier dream, but if you find it, by all means take it home, watch it,  and sing along to your heart's content.