Four Walls
Michael Martone
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Mont-Saint-Michel
France
The island was fortified in 1256, resisting the sieges of the Hundred Years War. During the German occupation of France, the island was a major tourist destination for the Germans, a half million visited the island over the four years. A single American soldier, a Private Bougher, liberated the town, 1 August 1944. Why has no one made a movie of this, of Private Freeman Bougher liberating Mont-Saint-Michel D +57? Today, nearly three million tourists visit the island each year which has only 25 permanent residents (including four religious brothers and seven religious sisters) and two bombards, abandoned by the English 700 years ago, on permanent display.
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Gum Wall
Seattle
When it was cleaned in 2015, 2,350 pounds of gum were removed, dislodged by low pressure steam at 280 degrees that delaminated the layers built up over a quarter century. The announcement of the cleaning caused a ruckus, and fans and tourists of the wall were encouraged to share pictures of the wall from before the cleaning, their favorite conglomerations of gum once deposited there. The pictures were affixed to the wall after it was cleaned by means of gum. And soon the pictures and the clean wall the pictures were attached to were covered over by fresh layers of newly chewed gum. It has become a popular setting for wedding photographs and is a spot where one begins the Seattle Ghost Tour.
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Jericho
Tell-es-Sultan
West Bank, Palestine
Kathleen Kenyon excavated a wall within the Tell 70 years ago. The wall itself dated back to the Neolithic. Not just one wall but seventeen walls have been constructed then destroyed and the rebuilt again. Earthquakes. Nomadic invaders. Many walls were rebuilt hurriedly after their destruction. A the most ancient wall had a steep escarpment topped with mud bricks. If you think of this wall as a wall, it is the oldest wall (a true urban fortification), the oldest city wall unearthed so far. There was (is) a ditch as well. Nine feet deep, the dry ditch encircled the walls. It (the ditch) was cut into the bedrock at the wall’s feet. How was this accomplished? With what tools? By what machines? You will find the site two miles north of the modern city, adjacent to a fenced refugee camp.
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Troy
Hissarlik
Turkey
Of course, there is a wall that surrounds the walls of Troy. Outside the main gate, of course, they’ve built a wooden horse, large enough and with an internal chamber, allowing the visiting public access by means of an unsteady ladder. You enter the main site by means of a turnstile and think to yourself—go up! But here, at this Ilion, you go down. You go down and down through the layers of time, down to the time before time, the prehistoric, the prehistoric stone upon stone time. The 7th level, Troy VII, gets all the press, all the attention. It is the level Schliemann thought was the one, the one Troy among all the other Troys. You’ve seen pictures of the pilfered Priam’s Treasure, the artifacts sent to the Berlin Museum and then pilfered there by the Red Army and now resting in the Pushkin Museum. But the walls of Level 7 are different from the walls found in Level 1 through 6. What makes Level 7 different? For the first time there is writing written on a wall on that wall.
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Michael Martone‘s newest book is Table Talk & Second Thoughts. He lives in Tuscaloosa writing postcards and puttering in his gardens.
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