Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character

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GUNGYWAMPING

In a forested bottomland of southeastern Connecticut,amid stony outcroppings and strewn granite boulders, lies an unusual cluster ofnine beehive-like stone shelters. As far back as anybody can remember,including the Pequot Indians, the area has had a funny name: Gungywamp. When Ifirst heard about the place, I called around and found David Barron, then thepresident of the Gungywamp Society. He invited me to join him on a walk in thewoods with some fresh recruits, mostly married couples in their fifties. Hetold me that the Gungywampers believed that the odd stone huts are Celticdwellings, an abandoned camp left by Irish monks who visited America fifteenhundred years ago.

After parkingour cars on the side of a remote road, a dozen of us slipped into the woods.Barron, a tall man with sprouts of white hair exploding out from under a Greekfisherman's cap, marched with vigor, bubbling with enthusiasm. As a guide, hecut a familiar figure. He possessed a partiality for crippling puns. Whensomeone had to peel off early from the group, he shouted to them, "Shalom onthe range!" He smoked so much his white mustache was tainted yellow. He had asalty way of sprinkling his comments with innuendo that amused the wives, yetaffected a Victorian coyness about cursing. When I found some trash--beer cansand cigarette butts--obviously left at one shelter by some teenagers, he let flythe foulest term possible: "Sheitzen!"

Then Barron ledus to a large rock. He wanted to know if we noticed anything. There were somelichens on it, not much else; we stared intently. Barron explained that therock had faded carvings on it and that one of them was a Chi-Rho, a symbol thatsuperimposes the letter X over the stem of a capital P and served as an earlyemblem of Christianity. We all squinted.

"This particularstyle of Chi-Rho was common among Irish monks during the fifth to seventhcenturies a.d.," Barron told us excitedly, linking the symbol to a time when acertain Brendan the Navigator of Ireland, according to legend, sailed west insearch of the Promised Land of Saints. "Do you see it?" We all leaned over,carefully scanning every blotchy divot. An uneasy silence, broken only by thecracking of twigs beneath our boots, seized the forest.

Slightly annoyedat our befuddled postures, Barron turned an exasperated, upturned palm towardsome mild indentations. He sneeringly referenced skeptics at Harvard and Yalewho had looked at this evidence and were unimpressed. "Haaaavard," he said withthick snark. Right away you got the sense that there were two kinds of esotericknowledge at odds here. The elite evidence-based world

of "Yaaaaa-uuuull" and this other kind ofknowledge--Barronic knowledge--that meant you had to see things differently.Barron took a piece of chalk from his pocket and traced over some worn dimplesand there it was. A white Chi-Rho leapt off the speckled gray of the boulderlike a 3-D trick. Many in the crowd ooo'd and aaah'd. It was an emotionalmoment to stand in this quiet hardwood bottomland and suddenly feel itinstantly transform into a place of antiquity. A new idea had us in its grip,this notion that Irish mariners once stood right here fifteen hundred yearsago. Then again, a few of us eyeballed another nearby chiseling, smoothed downby weather in much the same way, and we wondered what runic name it went by: JCIII.

When you come across a guy like...