The Powder Magazine

So i just went to Boston to help my sister pack up her stuff and drive back across the country to home. I have to say, my going out there was not so much an act of charity as it was tourism. i hadn't been to Boston in 15 years and the only thing I remembered from my previous trip was the swan boats putting around the pond in the Common. Not a bad memory actually, but one that actually--now that I think about it--may have been fabricated by reading Make Way for Ducklings so many times as a kid. Well anyway, Christina's and my first act of tourism in Boston was to take a ferry to the harbor islands. I am, of course, talking about Boston Harbor here, of "Boston Tea Party" fame. It was nice. The boat ride, I mean. There were about five thousand middle school kids on board with us, but rather than take offense at their, shall we say, obnoxious presence, we decided to enjoy them as we would any other form of native wildlife. (What would a tour of some historically significant site be without the obligatory middle school fieldtrippers, after all?)It turned out that on weekdays, the ferry only went to one island of the many, this island being Georges Island. This particular island houses an old Civil War fort: Fort Warren, where the Union used to keep Confederate prisoners captive. It is also a strategic point of defense for the harbor as a whole. The fort, like all forts, was roughly the shape of a donut. It was a huge, roughly star-shaped, stone edifice with a big green lawn in the middle. (They probably used to do drills and practices and stuff in this area, but the middle school crowd used it to play frisbee. Fair enough.) The fort was large enough that it enabled Christina and I to find places to explore unmolested by the seventh graders. There were many dark--possibly too dark--passages to explore, corridors lit only by the sunlight through the small slits in the wall, curving staircases, dead ends in the dark, etc. We hadn't thought to bring flashlights (gee, how did that one slip our minds?) so we tried to use the light from our cellphones in the darkest area with...hm...limited success. The whole experience was fun and just the right amount creepy. But finally, after all this tiring exposition, i have finally arrived at the moment that I want most to record: the powder magazine.

What is a powder magazine? I didn't know either. Turns out that it is a storage shed for ammunition and gunpowder and all that other nice, explosive stuff. It's a smallish, thick-walled building smack in the middle of the fort. Why the middle? Well, would you want the enemy to blow up your powder magazine--and consequently your fort--at the first opportunity? Probably not. So, we found this shed and decided to check it out. The ferry back was not scheduled to leave for another fifteen minutes, so we had time to kill, and why not kill it in a small, empty, thickwalled shed? So that's what we did. And then, we discovered the best-kept secret of the fort.

The entrance to the magazine was a narrow doorway that smelled like urine, and looked into an ominously dark--and boringly empty--arched room with a window at the other end. Wrinkling our noses, we started to turn from the doorway, but then turned back. The room was deliciously cool, and the day was hot. Once past the doorway, the bad smell seemed to disappear, and after a minute or two our eyes adjusted to the dark. The room really was as empty as can be, but this is what facilitated the magic that we discovered. "Listen!" Christina said. Listen! Sen! Sen!, the walls repeated. "Wow," I whispered. Wow, the room whispered back. All of a sudden, this old, unused, unvisited powder magazine presented us with unbelievable acoustic possibilities. We played around with various sound effects at first, but the sound of the room was so much like a monastery that it just begged one to sing a Gregorian chant. Since the only one I even kind of know is "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" we sang it together. We harmonized. I'm the first to admit I don't have an amazing voice, but we sounded phenomenal! This song inevitably led to other Christmas songs--which lend themselves so easily to being beautiful--and even some of the more musically complex hymns. (Only the Ralph Vaughn Williams ones.) A couple times during our impromptu concert, a couple people poked their noses in the doorway, smelled the stale urine, stared into the uninviting darkness and turned away, just as we almost did. We waited patiently each time this happened, and then, when they would leave, we would start humming, or whistling or singing once more. And then, after ten minutes, we discovered the best trick of all: you could harmonize with your own echo. I could sing a chord with only the sound of my own voice reverberating around the tunnel-shaped room.

I must say that we sailed back to the docks feeling very good about ourselves. It is a fantastic feeling to have done something different than most people, and to have taken the time to discover it. It was not smugness that we felt, but rather a kind of joy that truly beautiful things always seem to evoke. And the seventh graders only made our triumph more piquant.