They started over by the black chain link fence, where the paved pass bordered the street by the swamp. The vines – they entangled the base of the gate post hinge and spread to the expansive top rail for the length of a quarter mile, quenching all neighboring vegetation. The thick swelter of the summer coupled with the relenting river breeze and 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 trail was frequented mainly by the people who lived along its path. Some camped in tents, others under technicolor Teflon tarps. Every so often one 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 walked half a mile north before exiting onto Electric Street, up the hill to Kelley Street for the corner store and laundromat. Others travelled longer before taking a dirt path by the state women’s prison winding 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 once housed a minor league baseball team. Behind the stadium were more camps and more tents. They were visible on the trail as a mélange of orange and red and green neon hues spotting the bank, and they reeked of sewage, probably because a few feet past 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, unrelenting. Near the middle of the black chain link fence is where they began, creeping up from the gravel rocks, and spilling over into the trail about two feet, sometimes more. Vines. I call them the vines. But really they were an invasive species.
A white bearded man wearing an oversized flannel and olive oversized cargo pants also frequented the paved trail. His dress and constancy in those parts might have lended him to be mistaken as an inhabitant of one of the neon communes. He was carrying a pair of clippers, which he used to carefully trim back the invasive species. “Sort of self-defense” is what he called it. “Before they clothesline you.”
He carried on, trimming the weeds along the black chain link fence, parsing through green thickets in the sweltering heat. When he felt he was done, he made 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. The windows displayed teddy bears, rakes, shovels, various garden clippers, and dollar store plastic greeting signs. On the inside, handwritten notes plastered the walls. “Please knock loud. If I can’t hear you over the TV and the cats, there’s a notepad in the foyer.” Hung on the wall was a framed painting of a dirt pass, surrounded on both sides by birch trees which wound off before turning right, so that the distance beyond was shrouded by trees. Dangling from a string on the window was the namesake: “Frank’s Place,” though if you read it too quickly it could easily have been mistaken as “Frank’s Palace.” It was typed in sans-serif Helvetica ink — could have been found at an antique store or custom-ordered online – there was no way of knowing where it came from, but it belonged here.
The vines, they choked out everything. The problem with the vines was that when Frank trimmed them, they always came back two-fold.
Parasitism is not just a relationship. A hallmark symptom is its lack of immediacy. The host’s condition deteriorates slowly and painfully as the parasitic species soaks up its last legs of life.
The vines grew longer and stronger though 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 out all other species in the green space between the trail and Douglas Street. Frank soon realized he ought to pull the weeds out from their roots so that they didn’t grow back.
It’s still dark out when Frank wakes up at 6am, so the flickers of colored lights coming from the television light the room. He feeds his family and watches the news while he eats breakfast. There are five of them. They’re all female: Gwen, Penny, Lily, Whitney, and Little Mama. Two kittens and three moms. “The men in my family are not too easy to get along with,” Frank tells me. “So I try to keep women from having to deal with that as much as possible.” All except one were born at Frank’s Place. Little Mama was feral and Frank found her on a walk two winters prior, when she’d just given birth under a porch. When she got pregnant again, she let Frank feed her and house her. She had four litters with Frank.
“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 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 –flickers through colors illuminating the darkness so vividly that occasionally, when news breaks of a crime – a homeless man stealing a Toyota and driving it 45 miles up 89, another Nashua man charged for homicide in dealing a deadly dose of heroin – the blue and red phantasmagoric sirens of the screen illuminate the room as if the cop car’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 the dark corner behind an armchair burnt with cigarette holes, Lily situates herself and gives birth to seven black kittens, all girls. Whitney had 4. At least she was lactating so she could help feed the kids. The distress is ephemeral – within the dark viscera spilled out onto a caramel base boards, emerges tiny white splashes – white paws, white faces, white feet. Frank takes a hands-off approach. He lets it all happen –Lily eats the afterbirth and feeds the newborns. Frank helps to bottle feed. Frank will continue his role as secondary parent to these kittens until they’re a little older, then comes the hard part where he’ll have to say goodbye. He finds good homes for them.
For the past eleven winters, Frank has followed the dame routine. Once he wakes up and feeds the cats, he gets back to bed around 9 am to sleep a couple of hours. He’s waiting for the sun to warm up the snow on the path in the New England morning. He can’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, so he breaks it into chunks throughout the day. At noon, he goes for a walk, returning around 3:45. Sometimes he’ll carry trash bags and shovels with him so he can clean and clear the trail, and sometimes not. If there was a recent storm, he’ll try to get out and shovel before anyone has had the chance to walk on it.
“I work on the trail when the need arises in my body to do it,” Frank says. “I can’t always work two or three days in a row because I exert too much.”
“My liquid of choice is decaffeinated iced tea with no lemon or sugar – a lot of antioxidants so I don’t rust up. It’s not like the snow is going anywhere without me.”
Most of the time Frank tries to get the path shoveled half a mile south, by the mechanic, because that’s where a lot of people will get on it.
“Now that I live here, I usually get a mile done every day. In the last couple of years, the city got more involved. For them, it’s what they call a Day Three Priority. That means on the third day after a storm — if they have time to get to it — they’ll shovel. But the problem is that a lot of winters, we have a storm every three days, so they never get to it.
When Frank matriculated as a freshman at UMass, he had dreams. He wanted to build houses that would stand for more than one hundred years. But not just regular houses. Frank wanted to construct houses that cooperated with, rather than obstructed their natural environments – “built in a better way so that there was a lot of room but there wasn’t a whole lot of wasted space or wasted lumber going into building a box on top of the ground.” Frank tells me that he would’ve built 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 it would remain stable in temperature. It would be easy to heat and cool.
Frank was used to living alone. He’d been living alone since the age of thirteen, when he started at a preparatory school in Connecticut called Loomis Chaffee. “It’s sort of a like a Philips Academy,” Frank says, and though academically it prepared him for university, Frank struggled to adjust to the college life. “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, in Frank’s opinion, teaching him what he thought he needed, so he left college after a year and a half. Oh and also he fell in love.
In 1977, Frank moved to a town in upstate New York called Dannemora, which lies at about the same latitude as Burlington, Vermont. His girlfriend had lived there. He tells me the town is known for its prison. And that it gets lake effect snow from Lake Ontario in the winters. Frank and his girlfriend would walk along the railroad. “It was in the mountains and the only place that was level to walk where you weren’t going up or down a hill was a railroad. I don’t think any trains went through – I’m not sure.”
Frank’s girlfriend went off to see the Olympics in 1980 and he never saw her again. So Frank went back to Boston to learn how to build houses “the right way.” He tells me he learned at that North Bennett Industrial School in North End of Boston, where the Prince Spaghetti Guy from the commercial would run by and yell “Prince Spaghetti Day.”
Frank eventually became a framer – an alcoholic framer, is how he puts it. He says it would have all worked out but to be honest, in 1985, he was charged with a DWI. Then there was the recession. Things just sort of derailed. “I found out that a lot of the times in business you’re just trying to stay alive, make enough money.”
Frank depended on his boss to give him rides to and from sites when they were too far to walk. “My boss would just leave me there with the crew. I have the ‘Mass ability’ which you really need in construction. You can’t just be a smart ass and not be able to deal with people.” “Something that you can draw on paper doesn’t necessarily work in the real world,” Frank tells me. “I did know a lot of the houses I worked on, I was able to make suggestions on how to build it better.”
Then Frank moved up north again, this time to Litchfield, New Hampshire in a little house by a pond bordering Wilson’s Farm off of Charles Bancroft Highway. Page Road. It had the only X-rated Drive-in in the state. A friend of a friend’s father owned nearby Nesemkeg Farms and Frank rented his grandmother’s house. Time passed, Frank built houses with the sunlight setting on Page Road, with the drive-in and on the roads of the homes built by frank’s laboring hands – Concord, Litchfield, Penacook.
He 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 packed hood of subsidized housing, low-income families, first generation families, families of immigrants, trap houses, people who laid on the rooves and where occasionally shots fired put the teenagers in nearby high school in a shelter in place. And the teenagers became adults and moved in to become the next generation of renters. Douglas weaved through these streets, and Frank lived on Douglas Street by the intersection of West Street. In an apartment across from the Workman’s Club – one of the city’s oldest social clubs – one of many remnants of obsolete antiquated social clubs falling out of order at the sides – the Rimmon Club, the Club Canadian, and the Alpine Club. A glorified low-functioning bar at this point.
His girlfriends never tended to stay long. But Frank kept walking, as he had in Dannemora. Manchester was the product of a washed-up expunged depression mill city that had once been booming with textile industry in the 1800s, as evidenced by acres of abandoned empty brick buildings along the Merrimack river and winding streets that used to be canals. And old rail road tracks that were once frequented by cargo, business cars, and migrant Canadian workers who sought opportunity on the West Side. The tracks, from a recent lack of use, were ripped out. The trussed bridge which once bore tracks was converted to a paved walking trail.
Frank took winters off because he could. He lived frugally and he 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, ghost of the former train cars, thousands of French-speaking 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 except the people who unofficially lived there in tents. Frank started trimming the vines along under the bridge… going south toward Sundial Ave, up to the Nylon Corporation of America where there was a big barbed wire fence with a big factory with the big smoke stack. It used to get really overgrown – it still does. There would be trash, so Frank would pick it up. At the condos there was a dumpster, where he would throw out trash and scraps of vegetation.
It was Pearl Harbor Day in 2004 — Frank was working on one of his houses. He was walking down a gang plank from the house to the ground which was strewn with numerous perpendicular 2 x 4 planks to serve as stepping points, but it was his first day in boots for the winter and his heel caught on one of the planks, sending his body lunging forward, plummeting four feet off the plank, into a front-faced snow angel well into the ground. The fall broke and separated his right shoulder and sprained his left wrist. For months he walked around with a cast on both arms, temporarily out of work as a laborer.
He spent that winter by the bottle, he says – drinking, if you want 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. Frank was hallucinating. He lived in a three-story building on Douglas Street and he thought his landlord was putting a 4th story on it. He tried to stop drinking. Nothing was changing. His kidney and liver weren’t functioning. His body couldn’t not properly drain fluids, so he blew up like the Michelin man and turned septic, his arms the size of his thighs, weighing 330 pounds. He 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 a lot cheaper than an ambulance. He was brought to the ICU where they drained him of 100 pounds of fluid. 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 remembers waking up in the hospital strapped to his bed in restraints. It was Cinco de Mayo and he couldn’t have drinks, so he stole mouth moistener to drink and ended up in a jail but it was maybe just a dream because the jail had a false ceiling with stilts and he was in and out of comatose state. And the black nurse was running a brothel with all the other nurses were whores. “I didn’t always know what reality was and what wasn’t.” It was springtime, so Frank was living along the green line in Boston and going to Fenway Park because the man in the bed next to him had a ball game on. He gracefully floated through wooded trails and through the rail trails he used to walk on while nurses moved him from ward to ward to take tests and scans.
“While I was in the coma they had me strapped down in restraints because I kept trying to pull out the catheter and the feeding tube. A lot of times in those dreams I was in restraints. I was observing something going on but I couldn’t move.”
“This was also the time when The Matrix was coming out. So even to this day, I sort of wonder what was real — even after the coma. Is this real? It’s a very off feeling.”
“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 these 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. Which is probably something that happened in the ICU. Somebody I was with or something – 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.”
“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,” Frank says. In the next couple of years, he went back to work and did what he could – he was weak but worked as a lead man.
But like the vines when trimmed and not rooted, in 2008, Frank’s problems came back two-fold. A second accident broke his other shoulder. He stopped working. His father passed away in 2008, so he started receiving inheritance from his parents. He started gaining weight. He was sober. He started walking again. He had to do something or else he’d end back up in the hospital. “That was when I really started walking a lot more.”
“When I started walking the trail, 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 huundred pounds is: half a cast-iron bathtub.
He would start up by West High and walk up Notre Dame Ave, to Northwest School, back around the Projects, to Barkley Street. Walking the same loop, through the same puddles, the same black ice, trying not to get hit by cars in the middle of the road, because the sidewalks weren’t plowed and there’s no place to walk in the winter.
When weather permitted, he would cross the Riverwalk bridge and cut back the vines – the invasive species 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.
It just so happened that in early 2009, the city paved another side to the Riverwalk trail. Extending past the old mechanic, stretching two miles west, toward Goffstown. But with no appointed caretaker the trail, left unadopted, started going to trash like Riverwalk. “When I was walking there would be poop along the trail and I’d take a stick and I’d knock it off.”
Frank moved from his unit by the Workmen’s Club down Douglas street, down past the winding packed units with multi-families, where Douglas touched the newly paved converted railroad trail. Only a couple hundred yards from the newly appointed black chain link fence which was already overgrown with vines.
One day an old neighbor asked Frank if the city could do something about trash cans. She walked her dog and since there were no trash on the trail, she needed to carry the poop all the way get home all the way from the trailhead connection – a short entrance to the trail where a ramp connects to Douglas Street by the black chain link fence between Franks place and the football field. So Frank tied a kitchen bag to the black chain link fence. People started using it and Frank emptied it daily, walking it to the receptacles at the road intersections.
He would walk half a mile up north to the green receptacle under the Kelley Street Bridge so it could be emptied, and back to the chain link fence to replace the trash bag. He would repeat this several times per week, emptying the kitchen bag of poop bags, beer cans, Takis wrappers, and cigarette butts. Walking and picking up trash as he went along, Frank appointed a trash can at football parking lot and another at softball fields.
The trash near the softball field a quarter mile from the street was too far for a city trash truck to come pick up. So frank adopted this receptacle, taking the responsibility or carrying it a quarter mile up the trail to Kelley Street. “I ended up beg, borrowing and stealing the tote that’s on electric street by the bridge and the one what they call The Bucket– the one by the mechanic. They’re all ones I absconded – well they gave me the one at Electric Street… but I sort of repurposed one from the softball field – let’s put it this way – sort of with their blessing.”
“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.”
In 2011, Frank got the flu on New Year’s Eve. He called the city asking if they were going to plow the trail. They said no. Frank made up his mind. “I said ‘Fuck it, excuse me, but I’m gonna see whether or not I can shovel it’… and so I started shoveling it,” Frank says. Then runners started coming through and going from the Millyard through to Kelley Street back to the Millyard. They’d thank Frank. “It’s nice to get that kind of comment and now especially in the last four to five years, as I’ve perfected it.”
Last August, Frank was assaulted in the trail, leaving him with a torn meniscus and small fractures in his tibia and femur. He couldn’t do anything from August to Thanksgiving. He needed to get the leaves cleaned up before the snow came. It messed up his system for shoveling. “It’s not really picking them up as it’s getting them out of the way,” Frank says.
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. A road is high in the middle and slants down both sides for drainage. A trail just does it in one direction, for drainage. The Goffstown rail trail slants down in the direction of the river everywhere except for a small section from the tunnel by the mechanic to the intersection at South Mainstreet by the Club Canadian.
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 water drains off to the low side. Every hundred feet or so, Frank shovels out a patch running perpendicular to the strip. There aren’t any storm drains, so when the sun hits the snow and it melts, the water runs downhill to that side of the trail but also to the river side of the slant to the next drain. So at night, the water drains off and it doesn’t create no black ice. If you shoveled the lower side (riverside), the snow from the higher side would melt and form black ice because it would cross the path running down the watershed.
Now this is where the leaves come in. On the upper side of the trail, where Frank piles his snow, he shovels about about 6 inches of the shoulder, between the trail and the trees or in some parts – a fence. So when this snow pile melts, the shoulder, which is mostly packed rocks, absorbs and will drain the water before it can get on the trail to form ice. If leaves aren’t cleared, they ice up and mat down, blocking the water from permeating through the ground. The melted snow travels over the trail due to the slant to the river side and freezes up as black ice. Shoulders are important to Frank. “I have to make sure that all my shoulders are cleaned off so that I can have proper drainage. And it looks nice.”
His methods are refined to collaborating with mother nature do the work. “If you even open up a 6-inch path on the blacktop, creating a stripe right down the middle, the sun hits that and warms it up, and melts the ice on either side. The stripe gets bigger and the trail itself gets bigger and bigger.”
It depends on the storm but if it’s a few inches, and he can push it, Frank can shovel the one and a half mile stretch 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.”
“It became more of an obsession.” For the past eleven years, Frank has been shoveling the trail every winter, and tending to its weeds in the summer. “I hold the world record for the amount of snow shovels.”
A lot of the weeding, if you want to call it weeding, is getting rid of invasive species – the vines and stuff” Frank says. 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, on his daily walks, 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. “In a way, its self-cleaning” Frank says.
About the time the trussel bridge went in, connecting Frank’s section of the trail to the Goffstown trail, Frank got together with a city employee named Tom Matson. “We decided that I could do anything I wanted- as long as I did no harm so to speak, which is kind of how my live my life anyway. I try and do no harm.” Matson is the director of operations for parks and rec. so he works with frank to rake care of things he can’t handle – trees too big to cut up – if its blocking trail, it becomes liability to the city.
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.
“It’s kind of nice out there. Well, it is nice, you know that. It’s really nice to get out of the city. When I first started doing it, I did it on the down low because I wasn’t doing it for people to thank me, I was just doing it because it needed to be done. But then I sort of came out of the closet and was doing it – more just making it sort of my project.
“What would happen to the trail if Frank wasn’t there?” I ask him. “Well, it would go to pot. In a matter of a year, it would probably be overgrown. The city just doesn’t have the time or the real inclination to clean it.”
A symbiotic relationship is defined by mutual cohabitation to the benefit of both species. No, Frank is not paid for the job he created for himself, even though the City depends on him to shovel the path after every storm, weed, mow the grass on the edges of the trail, emptying and replacing the trash receptables, and keeping a watchful eye on the walkers of the trail. Frank gets exercise and the satisfaction and fulfillment he had craved from building houses. He always wanted to build his own sustainable house and live in it.
“I couldn’t build houses anymore after the 2nd accident, both shoulders were gone. The thing I liked about building houses was how I would see the product of my work. I could see the product and say ‘I built that house, you know. That house is a good house. The quality was there, and I could take pride in that. And I’d get comments from people that came in – different subcontractors that’d say ‘this is a good house, you did good.’ A house is something that’d be around 50 or 100 years.”
Frank is the Godfather of the west side rail trail. “Another reason why I do the trail is because – it sounds corny, but I can save a life, which includes my own.” “A lot of these people, especially the older people, wouldn’t be out if it wasn’t for the trail. And we have to get our 10,000 steps in.”
“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. I felt like I should volunteer my time and this way I can do something for the community and at the same time, not have any bosses that I have to answer to.”
“It’s sort of satisfying to see people enjoying it and having it look nice. At one point, Hippo had it as the 3rd best rail trail in the Merrimack Valley.
When Frank makes his rounds by the black chain link fence, he undoubtedly runs among a homeless presence. 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.” He says it only really bothered him when a couple moved their tents in the football field because the thing that got him was that’s where the deer hang out – and they trashed the place.
“It disturbs my clientele – the people that uses trail – older people get accosted by them, young people get accosted by them.”
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. Much to Frank’s approval they respect the land – they planted trees, growing them from seedlings and acorns, they cut and use dead wood for building. Frank approves this use of his trail.
Frank is still living off of his inheritance. “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.