Dear West Chester friends and neighbors:
Do you remember the period of your life, starting at about age nine and lasting until about age now, when you were cynically skeptical of all the magic in the world, but secretly really wanted to believe in it? Watch any group of cub scouts walking through a haunted house, their words dripping with scorn: “THAT’S not a real spider web.” “THAT’S not a real mummy!”
I think the heat in this scorn comes from disappointment. These kids’ critical faculties have developed to the point where they can start to see behind the scenes, and they realize that most of the wonderful things they thought were real are, in fact, fabrications. And that’s a painful, painful process. Every one of those cub scouts is secretly wishing that they’ll turn out to be wrong, and that the haunted house will turn out to be real. In other words, they’re mourning the loss of magic in the world.
Imagine, for instance, that a sealed letter arrives at your house on a dark and stormy night, detailing a legal battle that has been tied up in the courts for almost THREE HUNDRED YEARS, concerning William Penn’s land grant, his embezzling steward Philip Ford, and William’s lackwit, gadabout son William Junior, who after getting expelled from the new Commonwealth for drunken brawling, moved to England and started a scheme with Lord Fairfax to recover treasure sent to the bottom of the caribbean by his grandfather, Admiral Sir William Penn. Imagine that the Quakers in Barbados have found this treasure. Imagine learning that YOUR VERY OWN great-great grandparents secretly smuggled some of this Quaker treasure up here to Chester County, and that it’s interred somewhere around the county seat.
Okay, are you imagining that? Well, how would you feel if, after an amazing adventure involving piecing fragments of documentation out of the back of family portraits, you found the spot mentioned in the treasure map you’ve carefully pieced together, only to find that the ground had BEEN RECENTLY DISTURBED, and something had OBVIOUSLY BEEN PLANTED THERE? I’ll tell you how you’d feel. You’d feel like Santa Claus had kicked you right in the solar plexus. You’d feel like the Easter Bunny had pulled off his fuzzy head, revealing a sweaty dude chomping on a cigar. And the guy with the cigar IS LAUGHING AT YOU.
That is why I wish to embark on the West Chester Buried Pirate Treasure Project. Here’s Phase I:
- Assemble a sizable amount of plausible pirate treasure, to include items like: silver-plated candlesticks, pearl necklaces, tiaras, costume jewelry, doubloons, and handfuls of glittering rubies and emeralds. All treasure will be plausible to a suspicious kid (no plastic, all “made in china” marks carefully filed off.”)
- Find or construct a suitable round-top treasure chest, divide the treasure into packets, sew the treasure into oilcloth sacks and seal the seams with tar, and lock them in the chest using multiple locks (necessitating multiple keys).
- Locate a suitable location (I have a great one in mind), and
- BURY THE TREASURE six feet deep. We’re talking four adults, four shovels, four hours. The real deal.
The final step in the plan? WAIT AT LEAST A YEAR. It is of the absolute, utter, most crucial importance that when our various children manage to unravel the Mystery of Penn’s Treasure, and when they at last arrive at the spot referenced in the map, that the spot where we all begin to dig is pristine earth covered in vegetation.
Kids cannot imagine waiting a year to do anything. If it’s covered with grass, man, it’s been there since the Pleistocene.
So what do you think? Who would like to volunteer their ancestors to become a retroactive part of the Secret Guild of Penn’s Treasure-Keepers? It doesn’t matter if your family hasn’t been living in Chester County for 300 years, there are plenty of plausible-enough ways to get your ancestors involved: “As it turns out, great-great-great grandma was an investor in the first East India expedition that Sir Admiral William Penn founded, and so she naturally gained a share of the prize money, which was then stolen…” “Well, as you know, great-great-great-great uncle Ezra was a cabin boy in Lord Fairfax’s flagship…” “Hey, did you know that every generation of our family up to Grandpa were savage Caribbean pirates?”
We can hammer out the details of the backstory later (by the way, William Penn’s ties to privateers and, sunken treasure? Quakers’ ties to the Caribbean? Embezzlement of dizzying sums? ALL TRUE.) For right now, we just have to get that treasure into the ground and start the grass growing over it. I’m thinking that each family involved could commission a Pirate Portrait of their ancestor, and we’ll seal a key into the frame of each portrait. Will the kids get suspicious that the Pirate Portrait may be done in a style not exactly common in the early 1700s? Maybe. But when I bring down a GENUINE* Buried Pirate Treasure expert from the Museum of Natural History in NYC to be present at the digging up of the treasure? NOSKEPTICISM WILL BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND US. It’s okay if the kids aren’t 100% convinced, but we are going to blow their little MINDS, man.
So: Who’s with me? Who’s in? Leave your message in the comments! I’m thinking we can fit ten families’ worth of treasure into a fair-sized chest. That’s ten oilskin packets, each sewn shut and sealed with tar. We’ll have to do this under conditions of UTMOST SECRECY. Don’t discuss this at the dinner table in front of little ears! In fact, I will delete this post after we’ve gotten everyone signed up. For kids savvy enough to find this post in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I’m sorry you had to find out finally and unequivocally that the treasure was planted. Bear in mind that we’re doing it because it’s important to always be unsure if maybe there really IS a cave with a pirate ship in it right under your feet.
UPDATE: McGlinch sent this picture of a stack of Pirate Golf Trophies in his mom’s basement. Excellent, this is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Imagine these holding up a pile of rubies and emeralds and what-have you:
Second, Shirley Vanscoyk (who happens to be our real-estate agent), just started a blog, and she’s been decanting essays there that she’s been collecting over the years. Just this morning, I had something really pressing to do but all work ground to a halt when this post popped up in my RSS reader. I lol-ed, especially at the part where Shirley manages to GET HERSELF FLIPPED OFF. BY AN AMISH MAN. Anyhow, you should go and read this post (especially if you’ve ever been to Good’s on the way to Lancaster), and then read all the others.
Third, a cool interview with Tikaro Interactive lead programmer Will Ronco came out today, in which Will comes across as an unbelievably nice, enthusiastic guy (which he is), but also one of the Fastest Men Alive (which he is.) But humble. Seriously, he’s got an astronaut vibe going on here.
tikaro.com 