by Julia Robitaille

The vines, they choked out everything. The problem with the vines was that when Frank trimmed them, they always came back even stronger.

They started over by the black chain link fence, where the paved pass bordered the street by the swamp. They entangled the base post and climbed along the bottom tension wire to the top rail of the gate, weaving the galvanized black coated chain link fabric for a quarter mile. By the trail they quenched all neighboring vegetation. Runoff from city sewage harbored the space between the black chain link fence and the paved trail, where the vines could live untethered. Unbothered.

The unrelenting river breeze, as a cool breath of air, refreshed the thick summer swelter which hugged every bare elm trunk along the trail — each trunk, which, in time with its branches, wrapped itself in frost, then dew, then moss. Then, eventually, in the vines, which would wrap their appendages round and round in suffocating embrace.

The trail was frequented mainly by the people who lived along its path. Some camped in tents, others under technicolor Teflon tarps. Oftentimes, an inhabitant would emerge from the swamp, trudge up the ramp by the chain link fence, and embark on the paved trail. Another would bring a friend. In plaid flannel pants, oversized coats, and neon orange beanies, they walked in this way. They pushed shopping carts. They carried infants in their carts and packs on their backs and cigarette packs in their pockets.

Some of them walked half a mile north toward Electric Street, up the hill to the corner store and laundromat. Others travelled longer before taking the dirt path by the state women’s prison, which wound down to a sandy bar off a tributary of the river. Some walked South – past the black chain link fence and past the brittle brick mechanic, over the Riverwalk Bridge, and past the stadium which long ago housed a minor league baseball team. Behind this stadium stood more camps and more tents, visible from the trail as a mélange of orange and red and green neon spots on the bank — they reeked of sewage, likely because a few feet past the encampment stood the city sewage drain. But two miles back north up the trail there was still the black chain link fence that used to have the vines. They were constant and unrelenting. By the ramp, on the black chain link fence is where they began, creeping up from gravel rocks, and spilling over into the trail about two feet, sometimes more. Vines. Frank called them the vines. But really they were an invasive species.

Frank was the white bearded man wearing an oversized flannel and olive oversized cargo pants who also frequented the paved trail. His dress and constant presence might have suggested him to be mistaken as an inhabitant, a member of the neon communes. But he tells me he is not one of them. Though he doesn’t mind their presence, so long as they don’t damage the wildlife.

“Some of them leave their cans and trash around, in that space behind the arena… that used to belong to the family of deer.” That bothered Frank. He had much more sympathy for animals than for people.

Frank always carried a pair of clippers, which he used to carefully trim back the invasive species. He called it “self-defense.” “Before they clothesline you,” he’d say.

Frank would carry on, trimming the weeds along the black chain link fence and parsing through green smug thickets. And when he felt like he’d done enough for the day, he’d make his way back to a house on the side of the trail about a quarter mile from the black chain link fence. It was a two-family apartment with a four seasons porch, but Frank lived there alone. The screened windows displayed old stuffed bears, rakes, shovels, various garden clippers, plastic greeting signs. Handwritten notes plastered the walls on the inside, including one inviting greeting on the door. “Please knock. If I can’t hear you over the TV and the cats, there’s a notepad in the foyer.” On the wall hung a painting — a dirt path, that wound off to the right edge of the frame, surrounded on both sides by birch trees which drooped their sleepy branches over the path. And on a plastic board hanging by a string was the building’s namesake, typed in sans-serif Helvetica ink: “Frank’s Place” — though read too quickly it could have been mistaken as “Frank’s Palace.” It was — could have been found at an antique store or custom-ordered online. For some reason, each disjointed object seemed to be in its rightful place.

The vines, they choked out everything. The problem with the vines, Frank told me, was that when he trimmed them, they always came back two-fold.

A hallmark symptom of parasitism is its lack of immediacy. When an organism suffers from a parasitic relationship, its condition deteriorates slowly and painfully as the other soaks up every last glimpse of life.

Frank’s vines grew longer and stronger throughout the month of June, but as they filled in the greenery along the chain link fence, they sequestered the growth of nearby trees. They slithered and choked the trunks of youthful elms, their teardrop leaves scorched all other species in the green space between the trail and the street. “I soon realized I ought to pull the weeds out from their roots so that they didn’t grow back,” Frank told me.

Frank started trimming the vines along under the bridge, toward Sundial Ave, up to the Nylon Corporation of America where there was a big barbed wire fence with a big factory with an even bigger smoke stack. It used to get really overgrown – it still does. Frank would pick up the trash as he walked. And at the condos there was a dumpster, where he would throw out trash and scraps of vegetation.

 

“The men in my family are not too easy to get along with,” Frank tells me. “I try to keep women from having to deal with that as much as possible.” All except one of Frank’s cats were born at Frank’s Place, and they were all female. Little Mama was feral, Frank said. He found her two years ago on a winter walk, after she’d just given birth under a neighborhood porch. Frank fed her and housed her like she was his. She’s had four litters since. Frank is proud to tell me this.

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen it, but they go in a dark corner and they just give birth. You’d think it would be very messy, but they clean right up,” he says. “I hate to be graphic, but they eat the afterbirth.” TV plays gently in the background, and I conjure the image of Lily, a black tuxedo cat with white paws, a white face, and white feet plodding to a dark corner of the room in Frank’s Place. Flickering colors illuminate the darkness so vividly, reflecting the colors of daily New Hampshire news – when another homeless man steals a Toyota and drives it up 89, or Nashua man is charged for homicide, another overdose, it’s as if the blue and red phantasmagoric sirens of the screen illuminate the room. It’s almost as if the officer’s whirling lights and ambulent screams were right outside the screened windows of the four-season porch at Frank’s Place. And in the shadows behind the chaos, in a dark corner behind a beige armchair burnt with cigarette holes, Lily situates herself and gives birth to seven black kittens, all girls. The distress is ephemeral – within the dark viscera spilled out onto caramel base boards, tiny white splashes emerge – white paws, white faces, white feet. Frank lets it all happen but helps to bottle feed the kittens. When they’re a little older, he finds good homes for them.

Frank took winters off because he could. He lived frugally and indulged in his afternoon walks on the riverside trail. Starting by the Workmen’s Club, Frank walked down by the Club Canadian, to the connection where main street used to intersect the train tracks. The bridgehead was open. He would cross that bridge, embodying the ghosts of the former train cars, of thousands of hopefuls moving to a mill town, walking up and down the other side of the banks. Nobody did anything on this side of the river. The banks sparkled with light from afternoon sunshine through the barren branches and neon tents.

Frank can’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, so he breaks his sleep into chunks throughout the day. Once he wakes up and feeds the cats, he goes back to bed, waiting for the New England morning sun to melt the snow on the trail. At noon, he goes for his daily walk. Sometimes he’ll carry trash bags and shovels with him so he can clean and clear the trail, and sometimes not.

In 2011, Frank got the flu on New Year’s Eve, so he called the city asking if they could going to plow the trail. They said no. Out of spite, Frank to see whether or not he could shovel it himself. So he did. When runners started coming through from the Millyard to Kelley Street, they would thank Frank.

“I work on the trail when the need arises in my body to do it,” Frank says. He adds that his beverage of choice is decaffeinated iced tea — with no lemon or sugar. Antioxidants sohe doesn’t rust up. “It’s not like the snow is going anywhere without me.”

For the city, shoveling the trail is what they call a “Day Three Priority,” which means on the third day after a storm — if they have time to get to it — they’ll shovel. But the problem, Frank adds, is that New Hampshire winters often bring a storm every three days. The city never gets around to it.

“Now that I live here, I usually get a mile done every day,” Frank says. He’s an accidental unpaid city employee.

The paved trail has inclines in two directions: side to side and end to end. It’s slightly uphill from Frank’s place to Goffstown and slants down in the direction of the river throughout the entirety of the trail except for a small section from the tunnel to the intersection at South Main Street. Frank loves to go into detail on his technique.

Frank’s pass is the high side of the trail. He shovels a 6-inch strip on the side of the paved trail furthest from the river – the high side — so the melted snow trickles as water and drains off to the low side. Every hundred feet or so, Frank shovels out a patch running perpendicular to the trail – when the sun hits the snow and melts, the water runs downhill to the river side but also to to the next drain. So it doesn’t create no black ice, he said. If you shoveled the riverside, the snow from the higher side would melt and refreeze over your shoveled path rendering it unwalkable.

And this is where the leaves come in, he says. Frank shovels about six inches of the shoulder, between the trail and the trees. So when the snow pile melts, the shoulder, which is mostly made of packed rocks, can absorb and drain the water before it floods onto the trail. If leaves aren’t cleared, they ice up and mat down, blocking the water from permeating through the ground. “I have to make sure that all my shoulders are cleaned off so that I can have proper drainage. And it looks nice.”

Frank likes to collaborate with nature do the work.  If it’s a few inches, and he can push it, Frank can shovel the one and a half mile stretch from his house to the bridge in eight or ten hours. “See it’s nice now, that I live on the trail, because I can go one way, come home, change, rest and then go the other way out from my house.”

And a lot of the weeding, if you want to call it weeding, is getting rid of invasive species – the vines and stuff, as Frank puts it. I found out that instead of cutting them, you pull up the roots so they die, and they don’t come back.”

Along the wood fences by the ice arena, the vines were bad. “What would happen is the vines would grow up along the fences and in the fall when the leaves came down, they had no place to go, because the vines are all in the fence, trapping the leaves in between the fence and the trail. The vines were keeping from blowing away.” Frank pulled out the vines so that the space between the trail’s edge and the chain link fence could be clear, creating what he calls a “buffer zone” so that when autumn came, the leaves could blow through and out into the road.

 

Frank had always wanted to build houses that would stand for more than one hundred years – houses that coexisted with their natural environments. Frank always wanted to build a house into the north side of a hill, so that the eastern and western sides were open to sunlight, and you the back of it would be buried so that it would remain stable in temperature. It would be easy to heat and cool.

Frank lived alone. He’d mostly always lived alone. He’d been living alone since the age of thirteen, when he started at a preparatory school in Connecticut called Loomis Chaffee – “a sort of Philips Academy,” he said, assuming I might understand that reference. “What I couldn’t stand when I was at UMass — was all these people, who were now supposedly adults — acting like children. No offense,” he tells me.

School wasn’t what Frank thought he needed to pursue his house dreams. He left college after a year and a half. He fell in love. He moved to a town in upstate New York called Dannemora, which he told me is known for its prison. It lied at about the same latitude as Burlington, he told me. And it got lake effect snow from Lake Ontario in the winters.

Frank and his girlfriend would walk along the railroad because it was the only flat terrain. “I don’t think any trains went through – I’m not sure,” he said.

But Frank’s girlfriend went off to see the Olympics in 1980 and she never came back. So Frank had no business in Dannemora and he went back to Boston to learn how to build houses. “The right way.”

Frank eventually became a framer – an alcoholic framer. “Something that you can draw on paper doesn’t necessarily work in the real world,” Frank told me. “I did know a lot of the houses I worked on, I was able to make suggestions on how to build them better.”

And it would have all worked out, he told me, but in 1985, he was charged with a DWI. Then there was the recession, and things just sort of derailed, he said.

Frank eventually rented out a small unit in an apartment on the West Side of Manchester. Douglas Street Extension bordered the rail trail right near the black chain link fence, by the encampments. But if you followed Douglas street up the guardrail hill, it wound away from the trail, through a pack of subsidized housing complexes occupied by low-income, first generation families, immigrants. People bathed on the rooves and occasionally the teenagers in nearby schools sheltered in place. Then the teenagers became adults and moved in. Douglas Street weaved through these streets.

Frank’s girlfriends never tended to stay long. But he kept walking, as he had in Dannemora. Manchester was the product of a washed-up mill city that had once boomed with textile industry in the 1800s, with winding streets that used to be canals lined with abandoned brick buildings along the river. Old rail-road tracks were ripped out of the ground from a lack of use. The trussed bridge which once bore tracks was converted to a paved walking trail.

It was Pearl Harbor Day in 2004. Frank was working on one of his houses when he fell off of a gang plank four feet off of the ground. It was his first day in boots for the winter and his heel caught on one of the planks, lunging his body lunging forward into the muddy grass. The fall left him with a fractured and separated his shoulder and sprained left wrist. For months he was a laborer without work.

He spent that winter by the bottle, he says – drinking, if I wanted to know the truth, a box of wine a day and eating pizza because he says he couldn’t do much else in his little unit at the intersection of Douglas and West street, across from the Workman’s club. Between the pizza and the booze his body slowly shut down.

The timeline is hazy for the next few months. Between hallucinations, nothing was changing. His kidney and liver stopped functioning. His body couldn’t not properly drain fluids, he said, so he blew up like the Michelin man and turned septic. He eventually took a taxi to the Catholic Medical Center, not because he was raised a Protestant Methodist, but because it was the only hospital on the West Side. And a taxi was cheaper than an ambulance.

This was first week of April. “They were in the process of making me a Ward of the State. Because I was destitute, or whatever you want to call it,” Frank said.

Strapped to his bed in restraints, Frank drifted in and out. It was Cinco de Mayo and he couldn’t drink, so he stole mouth moistener and ended up in jail but it was maybe just a dream because the jail had a false ceiling with stilts. He was in and out of a comatose state. And the black nurse was running a brothel with all the other nurses were whores. He was living along the green line in Boston and going to Fenway Park because the man in the bed next to him had sports on the TV. He gracefully floated through wooded trails he used to walk on while nurses moved him from ward to ward to take tests and scans.

“I didn’t always know what reality was and what wasn’t,” Frank said.

“A helicopter would come into CMC and I’d think it was a war. I found myself dreaming that was bringing in casualties, which it was. I remember those dreams better than I can remember what I was just dreaming about last night. It’s a very odd thing.”

Somehow somebody got killed. In the dream. “I don’t think I killed him – but we ended up throwing the body in a river over a bridge in the middle of winter – it was a stone bridge and it was winter and the body disappeared,” Frank told me.

“Later on, I ended up living with the parents of the person that was killed. It was my sister’s place, but it wasn’t my sister’s place. And we went into her basement and somebody was talking about this button on a podium and they said that if you push this button, you’re going to change the world. So think about that before you push it. I did end up pushing it. I think that in pushing that button, I decided somehow something inside me decided to deal with the trail.”

But the dream ended and Frank woke up. He was released from the Catholic Medical Center on Memorial Day with thousands of dollars of medical bills. He was unemployed and uninsured, but they forgave the bills because it was a Catholic charity. “There was something I had to do to sort of repay that.”

But things cropped back up. A second accident broke Frank’s other shoulder. He stopped working. His father passed away in 2008, so he started receiving inheritance money from his parents. He was sober, and he started walking again.

“I could only go like a quarter mile and I’d have to sit down. Another quarter mile and sit down. I knew I had to walk, so I ended up trying to do more and more, getting up to three and then four miles. Then I was doing five miles a day. And I lost one hundred pounds. It’s a whole lot easier to walk around without a half a bathtub on your back. That is what one hundred pounds is. A half a cast-iron bathtub.

 

When weather permitted, Frank would cross the Riverwalk bridge and cut back the vines which were overgrown along over the graffiti under the bridge. In 2008, there was another recession and the condos closed for construction. Frank’s dumpster was no longer there and there was nowhere to put the vine scraps and the trash. If you don’t properly dispose of the vine scraps — if you just drop them in the wind, they grow and overtake the landscape. Within a year it was overgrown and strewn with trash. Then Frank began emptying and refilling the trash receptacles.

“Taking care of the trail sort of became something to do. It kept me occupied and gave me something physical to do because I’d been use to outdoor work for the past 30 years.”

Every spring, before the trail greens up, Frank spends his daily walks picking the vines at their roots and weeding other plants in efforts to control them ahead of time. So that when the vegetation greens up he can see the vines more clearly cut it back.

“When I got the money from the inheritance, I had to do something with my time… all these things were going through my mind – that all these people at the hospital had kept me alive for some reason.” “Part of it was to repay the kindness of the people who kept me alive while I was in a coma.”

When Frank makes his rounds by the black chain link fence, he undoubtedly runs among the people in the tents. They’ve always been here. Even before the trail existed.

“Their presence doesn’t bother me. If they respected the trail for what it is and who uses it and why and were goof neighbors, I would have no problems with them living there.” It only really bothered him when tents moved onto the football field because that was where the deer used to hang out – and they trashed the place. Not all homeless are bad, Frank tells me.

 

Two miles up to Goffstown on the trail, there’s a sandy beach where a couple lives in a tent. Frank says they’re really nice people and they’re living off the grid there. They have a 12 x 25 bedroom with a queen-sized bed and a kitchen. They respected the land – they planted trees, growing them from seedlings and acorns, they cut and use dead wood for building.

 

Frank is still living off of his inheritance. Off the land. “The money has lasted me a decade so far, and I hope another 5 years or so, if I can make it.”

The vines still grow up through the chain link fence, but they’re well contained. They’re snipped and every early spring, so that they can be cleared and rooted by mid-summer before the maple and elm trees drop their leaves they can blow off the trail, through the unobstructed black chain link fence, and into the valley before the river. And within hours of the first snowfall, a six-inch strip of pavement will mark the side of the trail adjacent to Douglas Street. It’s a whole system, and Frank’s got it figured out.

         “Before they built the bridge, I’d walk up to that chain link fence by the old trussel and sort of gaze over and think: “I wonder what’s down there.” When Frank’s grandfather died, he inherited a painting – “it’s a picture of a wooded path with a lot of birch trees, and it sort of curves to one side. It makes you wonder what’s around the corner.” The painting hangs on at Frank’s Place.