I chipped it open and shined my light inside. The moment I saw what had been sealed into that dam all those years, I climbed back out fast, because the first thing in there was a row of stone cores standing on end like bottles.
Eleven of them. Drilled out of that wall with a hand auger, numbered in grease pencil, and every one crumbles if you squeeze it.
Behind them was a tin box with a wax seal, and in the box was thirty-one pages in a stiff engineer’s hand.
Otto Brandel kept that dam from 1919 to 1951. The milling company paid him forty-one dollars a month to grease the gate, cut the brush, and read the staff gauge, and nobody there ever once asked him what he thought.
He started coring that wall in 1946, on his own time with his own auger, because the mortar was going punky and nobody would come look at it. He wrote three letters to Green Bay and got two form replies and one nothing.
There are four hundred and eleven souls in the village downstream of that wall. There were about three hundred then.
On the night of the ninth of April, 1951, with the ice out and the pond eleven inches over the lip, Otto Brandel walked down there in the dark and opened that outlet gate all the way and left it open.
It took two days to run out. The mill lost its head of water and lost its season.
He sealed this chamber before he did it. Cores, notes, the copies of his three letters, and one page on top written that night.
They will say I did it out of spite over the wages. Nobody will ever be able to prove the wall was going, because if I am right the wall is not there to look at, and if I am wrong I have ruined a good company for nothing. I have thought about it for five years and I would rather be a thief than a man who waited. Whoever finds this, the cores are numbered west to east.
He was gone before the water was. The company had a warrant out in a week and nobody in the county ever saw him again.
He died in Thunder Bay in 1968 under his own name, working as a millwright, which took us six weeks to find once we knew what to look for.
Two engineers out of Madison came and took those cores. Their report is nine pages and it says the section he worried about had lost better than half its strength, and that dam would not have held another high spring.
His granddaughter is seventy-three and lives in Rhinelander. She grew up knowing her grandfather ran off after doing something to a dam and that the family did not talk about it.
She came out in September and stood in the empty basin with her son and her son’s boys.
There is a marker at the pull-off now. The town put it up, not us, and it took a year of meetings. It has his name, his dates, and eight words about what he did. The cores are in a case at the historical society, numbered west to east.