Where Do They All Go? Transcription

Where Do They All Go? Transcription

Where Do They All Go?-- Transcription

Prepared by Shawn Nicholls and edited by Daniel W. Patterson

[FILM] (View of a hand carefully laying a pig fetus upon soil—a clip from Jerry Payne’s 1968 footage from his doctoral research on the process of decomposition. Then these lines appear:
“The decomposition of animals after death is of limited aesthetic appeal, but very important.”
Jerry Payne, “Nature” September 14, 1968)

TOM DAVENPORT (V/O): In the winter of 2009 Rose Payne sent me a picture of her husband Jerry and their friend Abbot Francis Michael, on one of their butterfly-counting expeditions in Georgia.

JERRY PAYNE: Oh, I see it. It’s tilted on the side.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL STITELER: Red-banded hairstreak.

PAYNE: Definitely a red-banded, right there. It's tilting to get the sun. It's still cold, so it's moving its body so it can get maximum solar radiation to warm up. That’s a good find.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Red-banded hairstreak. Little tiny butterfly. Nectaring on wild cherry.

(A busy highway viewed through a windshield, with titles: Where Do They All Go? A film by Tom Davenport.)

DAVENPORT (V/O a view of him, driving): That April, I decided to make a pilgrimage to Georgia and visit my old childhood friend. I was a few months shy of my seventieth birthday. Jerry had come back to Virginia while his parents were still living, but I had never visited him during the fifty-odd years after he had moved south for college and work. He lives with his wife, Rose, near Macon, Georgia on about eighty acres, which they have made into a nature preserve.

PAYNE: This actually has one or two insects I collected as a teenager in here. I'll wait until Rose brings the other box. As I became more affluent in life, I bought display cases to convert my insects from cigar boxes over to display cases so I could take them when I gave talks.

(Jerry’s wife Rose brings out another box and hands it to Jerry.)

PAYNE: It says, Upperville, Virginia, June 1954. Host: Elderberry. Collector: J. A. Payne. That one. That's an Elderberry Borer, one I collected in June of 1954. That Luna Moth is a little faded. A lot of the insects will fade. They will lose their vivid blue and green colors. There was one time in my life where I tried to devote about an hour every day to collecting insects, and I just tried to collect them all. I figured I could collect them all. I didn't know how many was out there.

PAYNE: I grew up in Northern Virginia where, for twenty years or so, getting around by vehicle was not an option. I walked or rode a bicycle. I never had money for an automobile, and a lot of people I knew that didn't. You do with what you got. Insects were there, plants were there, I realized real early in life that I wasn't going to be able to date many girls. You know, how you going to go to a prom in high school on a bicycle? I tried that, most people do not appreciate being picked up by a bicycle, and you're not going to walk to a prom. My high school was fourteen miles away.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Father Francis Michael is the abbot of a Trappist monastery near Atlanta, where he, Rose, and Jerry often meet to count birds, butterflies and plants.

PAYNE: Now, there's your duskywing there.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: That's the second one. Let's see if that's a sleepy.

PAYNE: Sleepy duskywing?

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: No. That is not. But that one is. Ok, you're still not seeing it? There's the stick, straight ahead. . . .

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Jerry and Rose and I all reached three hundred birds for Georgia in the same year.

PAYNE: Yes. We now keep Francis Michael’s bird list. All the birds he sees, he reports to us, so we keep the records.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: I keep losing it.

PAYNE: He keeps losing it, so we keep the records. So we have one sheet that has our records—Rose and mine, and Francis Michael’s on it.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Oh, here's an eastern-tailed blue.

PAYNE: Should be looking for the dogwoods

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Did you see where it went?

PAYNE: I don't see it now. I know where it went.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: I think it was an eastern-tailed blue, don’t you.

PAYNE: Let’s see if we’ve got any eggs on it. That’s the only host we have . . . .

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: You know, I grew up in Philadelphia in a row house, and so there wasn't even a tree on my block. I don't say I was completely uninterested in nature, but there wasn't much nature to be interested in, you know? We went off to old lots and found snakes and that kind of stuff, but you know, I had a front lawn and back yard that grew some vegetables, but there wasn't even a tree on my block, just fifty houses facing fifty houses, parking on one side of the street. So when I came here, it was like, "Wow, man, this is like, really cool." He knew the plants and the birds (we were talking that about that this morning) before he went to grade school - I wish I had that, but growing up in Philadelphia, it's not really likely to happen. Oh, there’s a dusty—no, a cloudy wing, Jerry….

DAVENPORT (V/O): I had posted a film on YouTube from a project Jerry had done for his Ph.D. at Clemson University in the 1960s. The original 16 millimeter footage is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. On YouTube, the clip had become popular, with millions of hits and thousands of comments, mostly from teenagers coming to terms with their own mortality.

PAYNE: Animals die all the time, but we've been out here two days, and that's the first evidence of any dead animal we've seen. The skeleton of a box turtle. So where do they all go?

PAYNE: (O/C): I was interested in what happened to animals after they died. I was interested in the physical conditions of decomposition and the biotic. “Biotic” meaning the living. I was interested in what insects were involved with decomposition and whether the stage of decomposition was dependent on the insect or vice-versa, and whether you could use insects to characterize the stage of decomposition or the time of death.

PAYNE: My research was not original. There had been a lot of people who worked on decomposition before, but I choose the pig as a model since its skin and everything is closer to a human than anything else.

DAVENPORT: If I die soon, they'll definitely put me there.

PAYNE: You don't want me to do a study on you then?

DAVENPORT (V/O): No. (Laughter) I met Jerry in the 1950s riding the school bus to Marshall High School in Northern Virginia. Jerry was a year and a half older than me, and we shared an interest in hunting and fishing.

PAYNE: This one is from our days, the “jitterbug,” from our days. This is the jitterbug I had when you and I fished. This is what caught the big bass at Gall's Pond. See that side, that fish was a vicious one.

DAVENPORT (O/C): Remember that time you hooked me in the head?

PAYNE: Yes, and had to take you to Upperville….

DAVENPORT (O/C): Dr. Warren.

PAYNE: And your mother let you drink beer that day to calm you down. The thing is, I should've thrown you back in instead of keeping you, that would have made things a lot better.

PAYNE: I keep things around a long time trying to figure out what they were. And you know, I just think that beaver skulls are nice things, but you know, instead of being white or off white, you know that looks much prettier. (Motions to the painted skull in his hand.) And I've always been interested in animal skulls. That's how I learned the different species of animals. Whenever I saw a dead animal, I always prepared the skeleton to look at the skull and everything. And of course, when we ate squirrels and groundhogs and rabbits growing up, I always saved the skulls. Picked the meat off of them, saved the skulls.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Jerry grew up in a tenant-farmer family on Llangollen Farm, a four-thousand acre estate near Upperville, Virginia, that the millionaire financier and film producer John Hay Whitney [1] bought for his bride, Elizabeth, in the 1930s. Jerry's father, Mason Payne, ran the dairy on Llangollen. His father came from an area in neighboring Fauquier County, called the Free State [2], which was known for its rough and ready ways and described in a 1911 New York Times article as "a river of poor whites in an ocean of aristocracy."

NANCY PAYNE SHEPHERD (a sister): This is the barn up there, where daddy worked.

RONALD PAYNE (a brother): Where's the barn?

NANCY PAYNE SHEPHERD: Right here. .

RONALD PAYNE: Is that the one he would ride the hay out of? (points to Jerry.)

NANCY PAYNE SHEPHERD: Yeah, got that too. Right there. He drove right out that window on a bale of hay.

RONALD PAYNE: Several times.

JERRY PAYNE: Had to get the landing down correct.

RONALD PAYNE: They can really hurt you when you get on top of the hay like that.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Jerry's mother, Becky Payne, also came from an Appalachian background in neighboring Clarke County. She worked in the big house on Llangollen as a cook after Liz Whitney had divorced and remarried. [3]

JERRY PAYNE: When I went to the big house, I had to go in the kitchen door too. I couldn't go in the front door. Nobody could go in the front door except, I would say, people of her equal. You went in through the side door or the kitchen door. The only thing I ever did for Ms. Tippett was when the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes and the Preakness was run, I would collect watercress—the watercress they used to make sandwiches with and the mint they used to make mint juleps. And I would collect that from Llangollen, from the streams below the dairy barn, and take it up to the big house.

JERRY PAYNE: Is my hair good and straight, Tom?

RONALD PAYNE: Show 'em what you got on top.

JERRY PAYNE: No, I'd rather keep the hat on.

ARLENE PAYNE EASTMAN (sister): Should we hug each other?

JERRY PAYNE: Let's try not to get that personal. This is a family portrait.

JERRY PAYNE: This is something we learned from our father. You know, this is how he trapped game. To do this, you need a forked stick for your trigger, and you need an arena to put your apples in. I'm driving a forked stick in the ground. This is going to hold the trigger. This and the trigger are the principal components.

RONALD PAYNE: I see what I was doing wrong on mine.

JERRY PAYNE: What?

RONALD PAYNE: I had both forks going the same way. Pretty hard to make that trigger go off.

JERRY PAYNE: This is the arena the apple's going to be put in, or the bait. It doesn't have to be an apple. It can be an onion, or it could be a carrot, or a piece of celery, something that you know that your rabbit will want to eat. Okay, Ronald, here is the important thing. You keep the tension on and protect Jerry, the baiter's, hands. He’s got the tension. I'm trusting him, he's my brother. The little arena or the circle of the sticks is so that the rabbit will put its head in to eat the apple. Now, release the pressure. Ronald….

RONALD PAYNE: Watch out for the….

JERRY PAYNE: Yeah, watch out for the hammer. Ok.

RONALD PAYNE: Caught a stick again.

JERRY PAYNE: Caught a stick again. Rabbit got away.

(Walking through the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Upperville, Virginia)

JERRY PAYNE: That was my favorite elementary school principal of all time, Susan Woolston. She paddled me more than my mother did for transgressions I made in elementary school. I think I've clapped as many erasers for her and wiped as many blackboards as any student in school. But she also was one that really nurtured my love of nature. She tried to make me give up eating bird eggs and killing birds for identification and, you know, learning to identify through use of a field guide and a pair of binoculars, neither of which I owned. You know the lady truly had a great imagination. She forced me to go on nature walks, bird walks, and even took me to my first Christmas bird count. And sent me to nature camp at Lake Sherando [4] for three weeks one summer, where I learned how to identify birds by song, learned how to identify plants and trees and live in the woods.

PAYNE: I love that part of Virginia. I love that part of Virginia. The wildness that was there. You know, I lived less than three quarters of a mile from the Appalachian Trail, less than half a mile from the Blue Ridge Mountains, I could be in the woods and away from everything. I could wander, walk for miles. The farm I grew up on, Llangollen Farm, was about four thousand acres—swamps, meadows, and so forth. Many of them I wandered in collecting insects and trapping mammals, hunting and fishing. But I knew that I could not stay on Llangollen.

PAYNE: My mother supported me in anything I did, whether it was good, bad, indifferent. She's the one that said, "You can do anything you want." And basically the one that said, instilled in me, that whatever I do, get an education.

The rich landowners had put up money to support some of the deserving students to go to college. And they probably figured there wasn't half a dozen out of the two counties that were able, you know, be willing to go to college. So you had to go take an initial scholarship test at the Middleburg Community Center. And I took the test, wrote the composition and everything, and got down to the final competition, where you had to go back for a personal interview. And, I don't know how many there was, but I know I went into a big room with a real long table. It reminded me of King Arthur's Court, you know, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, that's a book your mother let me read which was thoroughly enjoyable. So I felt like that, and they questioned me and asked me why I want to go to college, where was I going to college. That was a question I couldn't answer. I sat there puzzled, I said, "I haven't applied to any school yet." "Why?" “Well, if you don't have money to go to college, why would you put down fifteen dollars down” (I think at that time ten or fifteen dollars) “to fill out an application to go to college.” And they said, "Well, what do you want to do." And I said, "I'm interested in biological science. If I go to college I'm going to major in some biological science." And they said, "Well, you have a scholarship. Get accepted to college."

(In the Trinity Episcopal Church cemetery in Upperville, Va., a shot of the gravestone [5] of Paul Mellon, one of the wealthy property owners and philanthropists in the county)

PAYNE: From then on, when I entered college, there was nobody here that knows me, not a single person that knows me, except two or three other classmates of mine that went to VPI, and I was not taking any classes with them. So when I was in the room, I was on an equal basis with every single person in there, whether they went to prep school, whether they went to the biggest high school in the state of Virginia, or the smallest. When they closed the door, we were all equal.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Jerry went to Virginia Tech, but after two years, he moved to the University of Tennessee, where he was able to work in a cooperative program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He took pre-med courses in entomology, and it was there his idea of dating death with insects developed, and became the summer carrion study he developed at Clemson University in South Carolina.

PAYNE: Reviewing the literature, people had studied decomposition before with different animals. You know, people, ever since the time of Linnaeus [6] people had noticed where they collected insects—from dead animals or what, from flowers or what—and they put down notes, and then people had noticed which insects you found on dead and decomposing animals of all sorts. But there had been few comprehensive studies made. There was one done on sheep in Australia, one done on small mammals in North Carolina, one done on dogs in Tennessee, and various other ones. I read those papers in reviewing the literature, but what I wanted to do was characterize the insect community with decomposing animals, and at the same time, do the physical characteristics. The temperature of the pig as it was decomposing, the odors, and the weight loss. I could find no records where anybody weighed pigs as they decomposed, or weighed animals as they decomposed. I wanted to find how fast the animal was decomposing. So I weighed all my pigs every four hours, and I kept temperature records, and I kept odor records, and I found that by the end of six days in the summer in South Carolina—and this was a summer carrion study—that ninety percent of pigs exposed to insects were gone. In six days! Ninety percent was gone in six days. As I used to say, after six days, all you had was a few bones, and a hank of hair, and a snout or two. You didn't have much.

PAYNE: And at the same time, I was comparing pigs that were completely or mostly completely free of insects to see what happened to them, how fast it took them to decompose. What happened in six days with insects took over two months without insects, and it never got down to ten percent. They slowly lost their moisture, dried out, dehydrated, and you could have pigs that were free of insects. You could still recognize them as pigs one year later. So I wanted to see if I could use the insects to outline discrete stages of decomposition—although realizing that it's a steady process—and whether you could put a time on it. Because once people find you're working with decomposing pigs, they automatically think that you're using it to estimate the time of death of a human. You're using it in forensic entomology. You're using it to try to determine the time of death. And I was further interested in, later on (which I did for my dissertation) is what happens to decomposition of the pig when it's in a different environmental condition—when it's buried, when it's in water, when it's in different heights above the ground—because you don't always choose the place you're going to die.

DAVENPORT (V/O): The scientific journals published Jerry's work, and it attracted popular attention in Time Magazine.

PAYNE: I always say, "That research was worth two points to me." On one of our statistics exams, in experimental statistics, after it appeared on Time Magazine, the professor of the class, Wilbur Byrd, had a bonus question, "Who in our class has recently appeared in Time Magazine?" And I got that one right, and I got two points for it. And then, every interesting person I thought was interested in decomposition of animals, and every nut, and every nut nut, wrote me letters. Sort of like what you see on YouTube.

DAVENPORT (V/O): I invited Jerry to my studio in Virginia to talk about the time-lapse film from the 1960s that had become so popular on YouTube.

[FILM] (Jerry Payne’s film from his doctoral research on pig decomposition)

PAYNE (V/O): I have been asked to speak about my time-lapse film on pig decomposition by insects and other organisms, work that was done forty-five years ago. My comments will be pertinent and poignant, especially since it's allowing for what may have been forgotten forty-five years ago.

PAYNE (V/O): I used pigs that were taken from pig farmers—either by Caesarean or died at birth. These were kept in a freezer and brought out the day of my pig decomposition work, so each pig placed out on the ground was free of any insects that I knew of. Within fifteen to thirty minutes when the pigs are placed out, flies arrive and lay eggs. That's what you see as the yellow covering going over the pigs around the mouth, the ears, the stomach fold, between the legs. They lay them where the natural openings are. This is nighttime. As you can see, there is reduced activity of insects. You will see some movement. There will be ants and stray flies. Ants came to feed on the carcasses at night—on the fluids and on the insect eggs. By the second day the eggs were beginning to hatch. You will see the movement of the maggots across the throat, around the legs, across the back. They're entering the natural openings of the pigs or wherever there's fluids and cracks in the skin. As decomposition takes place, the pig will begin to bloat, and the natural openings will become more apparent, and you will see a lot more insect activity, because now you're attracting some of the larger and smaller beetles to the carcass, which will feed on the eggs and the maggots. There's so much maggot activity you can see the movement of the ear and of the mouth. Look at the clock to notice the passage of time. Night again. Mainly ant activity, and maggot activity. Odors of decomposition during this time are not very decay-pronounced. They're becoming stronger as the time goes on, but it's not ammoniacal or distasteful at this time. You can stand it. Good time to make notes. But the farther away you are from the pig, the better the notes are.

The beads are put out to show what effect the insects have on soil movement, and you will watch the beads as the insects leave the carcass and go in the ground. They will move the beads, and the beads will move away from the carcass. You have many, many, probably thousands of maggots on this carcass, and as they get bigger, they have to, they will leave the carcass to pupate. This is advanced decay. The body will rapidly be removed by the insects, maggots. They're bigger now, so they eat more, and they consume it a lot faster. And the insect activity also will move the carcass—or what's left of the carcass. See the boiling activity of the insects. They're just moving the beads away and under the carcass. And notice how the pig has expanded the area it once covered, all the way from the clock, into a foot away. We're getting close to the “remains” stage where nothing is left but bits of skin, cartilage, and of course, bones. And some of the harder to reach portions of meat and fat and gristle.

DAVENPORT (O/C): What are those black spots?

PAYNE (V/O): The big ones are beetles, either scarab or staphylinid or histerid beetles. You had a lot of beetles come at this stage, because they were feeding on the maggots, primarily, and burying what pieces of meat were still present. And of course you would have some insects attracted at this stage just because they were coming for the skin and the hair. I'm removing the carcass to show that underneath the pig you have an outline of a carcass, or as I like to say, "a pig shadow," where moisture's been retained, and there are extra amounts of decomposed flesh in this area. (Scraping away a layer of soil) Now you will find out where all the maggots went.

PAYNE: It makes you think insects have a greater role than people think. You think of insects as pests in your garden and insects that make honey and everything, but you forget about the most important part of insects is, you know, the turning of carcasses back into organic matter to be used in the soil, to turning over the soil and everything—the part that you don't talk about. You know, death and decomposition doesn't come up in everybody's conversations. You know walking the cemetery like we are and talking about death, that seems to be a taboo among Southern people. They just don't talk about it.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Now, this cemetery that we're walking around is really interesting, because it's not just natural burial. So in other words, the people can't be embalmed, and they have to be in a biodegradable container or no container, just in a shroud, or not even a shroud, just a body straight in the ground. And not only is it natural burial but it’s conservation. Everybody who's buried has to plant either native flowers or native trees. And so when this is finished, it's going to be completely native, and it's just going to look like a woods. You won't even know anybody's buried here, although we'll see the stones with the names on them. But they're flat into the ground. Unless you were standing there, you wouldn't know it's a cemetery.

(Long shot of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, in Conyers, Ga. Abbot Francis Michael Stiteler was elected to head the Monastery in 2004.) [7]

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: All monasteries try to be self-sufficient. It's in the rules. The rules say you should live by the labor of your own hands and have enough to give to the poor. So, unlike some Catholic religious orders that live on alms, monks are supposed to live by manual labor. This monastery over the years has done all kinds of stuff. I mean, back in the '40s and '50s of course they tried agriculture. They had milk cows. They had beef cows. They had chickens. They had rabbits. Lots of different things over the years. The stain-glass, of course, has been happening for years and years, and so has the bonsai. We have a long way to go. We're forty percent of what we need in the hole every year. We took care of ourselves for fifty plus years, and then in the last five, six years we've had so many people get old and sick that the health care costs were just—our industries haven't been able to keep pace with it. The latest thing is the green cemetery, of course, that's—the latest industry is that we have the first natural, conservation cemetery in Georgia.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Beautiful! Just a wonderful way to use the property, and especially for us as monks to allow people to be buried here. We'll pray for them of course. There's the first grave right there

DAVENPORT (O/C): Does a body underground decay as fast as one on the surface?

PAYNE: I can only speak about pigs, and pigs don't decay as fast underground as they do above ground. I've never worked with humans. Definitely, the soil is a barrier to a lot of insects, and of course the soil is cooler or colder than the surface temperature, so it's cooler and less insects. So decomposition is much slower underground.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: If you read the description of embalming, I mean if that's the alternative, I mean that's as gross and as horrendously invasive as having your body that's dead eaten up by, you know, worms and insects. It's a brutal. . .embalming is pretty brutal.

PAYNE: Plus you're introducing chemicals in embalming. In natural death you're not introducing chemicals, any man-made chemicals.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: At least for Christians, it's ashes to ashes. The body's gone, it's meant to go back to the dust. So people really shouldn't be too grossed out.

PAYNE: And it's not new. That's what happened in the past. That's the way you were treated in the past.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Up until the Civil War—. Here's a cherry [tree].

PAYNE: Yeah.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Sometimes butterflies are on this. I'm surprised, Jerry, that there's—there's a butterfly, right there! Right here. See.

PAYNE: I misspoke, these are not honey bees. These are native bees.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: The red-banded hairstreak is six, ten inches above you.

DAVENPORT (V/O a series of photographs showing the passing of time and people in Jerry’s life): Jerry worked for the USDA in Georgia, turning down administrative jobs near Washington, D.C., for work in the field on pecan and peach pests. He became an authority on fruit and nut trees, which led to a trip to China and Vietnam in 1990.

PAYNE: I have six organisms named after me: two millipedes, an isopod which you would call a sowbug or a roly-poly, a spider, and a beetle, and a protozoan that lives in the cloaca of a turtle, and it was named in honor of the discover and not where it resided.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Jerry remarried in the 1980s, and his wife, Rose, shared his interest in birds, butterflies, and plants. They retired together in 1998, volunteering as biologists for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and managing their eighty acres at Tick Hill.

PAYNE: If we could, we would go out every day, every single day. It's called learning one location very well. If you do it every day, you go through all seasons, and you get a sense of when the insect or bird appears, when it disappears. You get a sense of when plants flower, fruit, when they go into senescence. It's just becoming very, very familiar with one location. It's not new. A lot of people did back during Darwin's day, and a lot of people don't know that Darwin for forty years, the last forty years of his life, he and his wife went out and walked their property, tried to do it every single day. It was like a ritual.

DAVENPORT (V/O): Jerry asked Father Francis Michael about his taking off from his many responsibilities as abbot.

PAYNE: I just wondered if that bothered you.

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: Yeah, like I say, very little. Sometimes I realize I use it as an escape. Sometimes I do use it as an escape. But, I think in general, certainly the time I spend with you two I would say almost a hundred percent of the time I come back refreshed. And a lot of people want to make religion and God be a real tight kind of scene, you know? I just don't believe that. That's not my experience of God. And even the people, the original founders of our order—the most famous one is Saint Bernard and I sometimes quote him when I get backed into a corner—he said, "I learned more from the woods and trees than I learned from books." And so I think we have to understand that certain people need a broader palette.

PAYNE: And this is some of my “found art” that I brought in. I haven't quite figured out what to do with it, you know. I know this is a good one. That's going to be a snail. I can tell that. You can see the tentacles on it. But a lot of times it will lay here—or lie here, whichever is the word you prefer to use—until somebody tells me they see something in it, and I'll look at it, get it out, and paint it.

(Jerry painting bones and creating sculptures with them.)

ABBOT FRANCIS MICHAEL: You know, my hope is, whatever years I have left—I'm fifty-nine this year. I'm not that old—I'll just do what I continue to do. Give myself to the life. Ponder God. Ponder creation. Ponder the world. Ponder friendship. (He shrugs.) You know. . . .


End Notes
1. John Hay “Jock” Whitney (1904-1982), from Maine. He was a U. S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, financier, movie producer, soldier, philanthropist, and collector of art. In 1930 he bought 2,200 acres of Llangollen as a wedding present for his bride, Pennsylvania socialite Mary Elizabeth “Liz” Altemus. They divorced in 1940. One of the ten wealthiest men in the U.S., he had a subsequent wife, was “romantically linked” with many other women, and had at least nine other homes in America and Europe.
2. See “The ‘Free State’ of Fauquier, Virginia,” a website created by the Fauquier Historical Society. http://www.fauquierhistory.com/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Free%20State.pdf
3. Liz Altemus Whitney (1906-1988), was married four times. In Jerry Payne’s childhood she was called Liz Tippett, the name of her last husband. According to her obituary, Llangollen had grown to encompass 4,000 acres. Her passion was raising and racing horses, and at one time “she owned the second largest stable of thoroughbreds in North America.”
4. A recreational area in Augusta County, Va., constructed in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal Depression-Era work program.
5. See a close-up of the stone in the Find a Grave website. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~vafauqu2/Trinity/MellonPaul.jpg The monument was designed by John “Fud” Benson of the John Stevens Workshop in Newport, Rhode Island, who is featured on Folkstreams in the film “Final Marks.” His son Nick Benson writes, “That is a stone designed and carved by my dad. I should say the ornament [a sheaf] was carved by my dad and I carved the letters. He did a beautiful job on this piece. It is one of my favorites. All of the stones in that lot [the Mellon gravesites at Trinity Episcopal Church] came from our shop and represent all three generations of Benson work.”
6. Carl Linnaeus (1707- 1778), the Swedish physician, zoologist, and botanist whose Systema Naturae (1735) was a foundation for modern rank-based classification schemes used in biological sciences.
7. Founded in 1944 by twenty-one Trappist monks from the Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the Monastery of the Holy Spirit is of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, more commonly known as the Trappists.


CREDITS

Editing and Writing: Tom Davenport

Cinematography: Forrest Oliphant, Tom Davenport, Rose Payne

Audio: Nate Rhodes, Tom Davenport

Photos courtesy of: Rose Payne, Arlene Payne Eastman, Nancy Payne Shepherd

Special Thanks to: Jerry A. Payne, Abbot Francis Michael Stiteler and the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Arlene Payne Eastman, Ronald Payne, Nancy Payne Shepherd, Mimi Davenport, Shawn Nichols, David Taggart, Dan Patterson, Beverly Patterson

Music: William Bolcom’s Violin Sonata No. 1. III. Quasi-Variations: Scenes from a Young Life, Naxos Records

Dedicated to the memory of our parents Mason and Rebecca Payne and Robert and Elizabeth Davenport

Copyright: 2012, Tom Davenport