An Exhibition in Bronze
by Joseph Hohman
Benjamin Cellini, Curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art
Interviewed April 8, 2160
“On permanent collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art is the Linwood Ecstasy, sometimes referred to as the Linwood Agony, one of the finest bronze sculptures in the museum, remarkable for its unparalleled execution. But despite the caliber of its craftsmanship and composition, we known next to nothing about the work’s provenance or its artist. It was donated to the museum in 2149 by Terrance Linwood, after whom the piece is named. After his grandfather’s death, Terrance claimed to have found the sculpture in a storage space the old man rented in the East End. No one in his family seemed to know anything about the sculpture and, given the fact that it was not accompanied by any documentation, its history was uncertain, to put it mildly.
“Our preservation staff have studied the piece on and off since its donation, in an attempt to uncover some clue to its origin, but so far have not yet uncovered anything substantial. The piece depicts a full-sized male figure, kneeling, its arms stretched up in yearning, its face a torn canvas of agony and ecstasy, thus the trouble of its dual naming. The figure’s skin, hair, and clothing are cast in uncanny detail, and everything, from the weave of its shirt to the bulging of its veins, can be seen with close enough inspection. As an even greater display of the sculpture’s mastery, as impossible as it may seem, the work appears to have been forged from a single cast.
“And though the work exists today solely for the awe and wonderment of the public, we hope to someday unlock the mysteries of this truly magnificent work of art…”
The Mason Daily (Archived)
Published June 15, 1960
After being reported missing two weeks ago, Christopher Layton, 20, of New Haven, CT, was found yesterday by local police, walking along a forestry road south of Mason, CO. Severely dehydrated and missing his left arm, paramedics rushed Layton to St. John’s Medical Center in Mason where he was admitted to the ICU. A full press release by law enforcement is forthcoming.
Patrick Whitlock, USFS Backcountry Ranger
Interviewed November 2, 1994
“…That’s how it all started, with that damn kid. For the better part of two weeks we looked for him, crisscrossing the backcountry from Monarch Pass to Herman Gulch without much to show for our efforts. It figures that then he’d just show up on his own, walking along the highway. Made all our searchin’ just one big waste of time.
“I heard he was in pretty rough shape when they found him, a right mess if ever there was one. Heck, it ain’t surprisin’ he didn’t last long after they picked him up. But credit’s due where credit’s due, and for some trust fund kid playing wild man, he sure could’ve done a lot worse. Heck, he’s lucky he walked out of them woods. It’s a miracle he lasted nearly as long as he did.
“Before he died, we had a pot goin’, the guys up at the station, bettin’ on how exactly he lost the arm. We argued over it for a few weeks trying to figure it out, it’s just not something that happens too often with hikers gone missin’. Most folks were betting he got attacked by some wolf or bear, but a few, myself included, we put our money on him hacking it off. I figured he might have been crazed enough to do so after everything he went through. But when the cops got him talkin’, he didn’t say nothin’ bout bears or wolves or doin’ it himself. He started spoutin’ off about some pond or something he found up in the mountains, and the next day, guess who the cops had investigate his crazy claims? They sure as hell didn’t do it themselves.
“We searched for about a week before we found what the kid was talkin’ about, and, wouldn’t you know it, that kid was a lot less crazy then he seemed to be. God rest his soul…”
K108.9 Radio Bulletin (Archived)
Broadcasted June 27, 1960
Today the US Forest Service has announced that over 500 square miles of backcountry are being closed off as part of a private investigation. They have given no indication as to the scope of the investigation or how long it is expected to last. In the meanwhile, Forest Routes 8J36 and 8J32E have been closed down. Hikers in the area are being diverted around the closed-off site.
Bob Wallace, Investigation Lead
Interviewed January 12, 1994
“…They called me in to take over from the cops and rangers at the end of June. I’d done some work for Congress and the FAA, investigating accidents, some natural, most man-made. I’d never seen anything quite like what was going on in Colorado, nor had I ever heard of anything quite like it, which is why we ended up writing the book as we went along. There just wasn’t a standard protocol for that kind of thing.
“We ended up calling in the Army Corps of Engineers, CDC, NIH, USGS, NSF, basically anyone with a background in the natural sciences or engineering. In a week we had out-scaled any other ongoing investigation by a factor of ten, but that didn’t mean we had a handle on the issue. It was at that point that we made our first mistake and opened up the investigation to folks from the private sector, anyone we thought could help…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…At the time I was a PhD student working under Dr. Brendan Willamette out of Chambers University. We were in Utah scouting out dig sites for the upcoming season when Dr. Willamette got the call. All May and June we’d been out chasing fossil-beds in Arizona and dinosaur teeth in Dakota, but we hadn’t found anything too promising with our leads.
“We hadn’t heard anything about the hiker, it wasn’t the kind of thing that we kept our ears open to, and we hadn’t heard about the government investigation either until Dr. Willamette was called out to give his expertise. Given the luck we’d had scouting, he didn’t think there was anything to lose in heading up to Colorado. It was a better alternative than going home empty-handed.
“We finished up in Utah and arrived in Mason two days later. I was expecting to see something small, a construction job or some ramshackle dig-site, figuring we were there at the request of some developer, come to sign-off on continued digging. But there was nothing like that.
“We were picked up in town and driven out into the mountains, through a couple of checkpoints manned by armed guards. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought we were being driven to a military base. They definitely didn’t want anyone getting too close to what they had out there…”
Memo of CDC protocol for site (Archived)
Posted June 26, 1960
A quarantine area is to be erected around the hazard site and supporting rock structures at a minimum distance of forty feet. Entrance to the area will be controlled through a security gate along the perimeter’s southeast face. Guards are to be posted every fifty feet. All temporary facilities will be erected a minimum of fifty feet from the quarantine area, and access roads to the site must remain clear for use by emergency personnel. Access to the hazard site will be limited to half-hour intervals. All requests for entry must be submitted twelve hours in advance through the coordination team. Within the quarantine area, full hazmat PPE must be worn. After access, all team members must discard all PPE and any contaminated equipment and move to decontamination. All discarded equipment must remain in the quarantine area until it can be properly disposed of. All personnel will be limited to one interval in the quarantine area every three days until further notice. Any adverse reactions must be reported to the medical team immediately.
Bob Wallace, Investigation Lead
Interviewed January 12, 1994
“…We had to be careful. We didn’t want anyone else to end up like Layton.
“In our reports he’s listed as the first casualty of the investigation. I always found that funny given the investigation didn’t start until after his death, but I guess there wouldn’t have been an investigation if not for him.
“It’s not his fault that he died the way he did. Lost, starving, exhausted, dehydrated, he barely knew up from down, and so it makes sense that he didn’t see the signs of warning all around the pool. He didn’t see that there were no plants growing around the water, no wildlife in the area, not even flies. And he didn’t notice any of the things littering the bottom of the pool. He must have thought he’d found salvation after being lost for so long, but the second his hand touched that water, that was it. He was done for.
“The only reason he survived as long as he did was because he had enough sense to cut off his arm to keep the infection from spreading. He’s lucky that water never touched his lips. If he had, there’s a chance we never would have found him, and then the investigation wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t be sitting here now…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…For the first few days they didn’t tell us much of anything, and it was a week before Dr. Willamette and I got any idea of what they needed us for. They’d found a spring up in the mountains, some pool, and at the bottom of this pool they’d found bones, thousands of bones, mostly birds and deer and a few feral Canidae, but that’s not what we were called out for. We were there to identify the other bones, the ones that logically should not have been there.
“The first people on the scene, the rangers, thought they might have been the bones of some deformed bear or moose, a leap in logic I’ve never quite understood. No, the bones weren’t nearly so young or so easy to explain away.
“If you looked closely, there were tusks and claws as long as your arm and rib cages big enough to hide inside, to say nothing of hordes of decorative skulls and tails, dating anywhere from the modern day all the way back to the Mesozoic. Put simply, the pool was full of fossils.
“There were more of them than we could count, concentrated at the bottom of the pool, but that wasn’t what we found so awe inspiring. What was vastly more remarkable was their condition. Against all known laws of decay and entropy, none of these bones had begun to petrify, and looked as fresh and white as anything that might have fallen in a few weeks before.
“It was unheard of to say the least, and, simply put, it was the paleontological find of the decade, maybe even the century, and Dr. Willamette and I were right there at the front of it all. The only obstacle was that the bones were all a good twenty feet under the water. You’re probably thinking that doesn’t seem like much of an obstacle, but if you know anything about the pool, then you’ll know what an obstacle every inch of that water was to us, let alone twenty feet of it…”
Diane Chen, Chief Chemist
Interviewed May 19, 1994
“…We didn’t know what we were dealing with at the time, and forty years later we still don’t.
“The problem was that whatever solution was in that pool, whatever it was, while it looked like water, it definitely wasn’t.
“Solvent P-6582, as we started calling it, reacts unlike any other liquid I’ve ever come across. In the confines of its pool, it is stable, sterile, unimpressive except for its use as a preserving element. It works well as an antibacterial agent, killing off the cells and microbes that normally cause decay, and that, combined with the natural flow of the liquid, worked to slowly erode away any and all soft tissue that fell into the pool. What it left behind were hard tissues, like bone, caught in a state of biochemical stasis.
“But removed from the pool, exposed to air, Solvent P-6582 is wildly reactive in unforeseen and hazardous ways. For this reason, we took every step we could to prevent any contact with the Solvent. After we’d heard what it had done to the Layton boy, we weren’t ready to risk endangering any of our personnel.
“Sadly, our tools and machinery didn’t fare much better. Any machinery submerged into the Solvent operated alright while it was submerged, but as soon as it was brought back out into the open air, the tools and machines became completely incapacitated, corroded, and hazardous to any immediate intervention. We had to have daily shipments of cranes and winches to replace all of those we ruined…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…It was awful. We wasted four months out there doing absolutely nothing, waiting for some kind of progress to be made. Everyone was feeling the strain, and it got to a point where any time a crew would try to breach the waters, a group of us would gather to watch, hoping and praying that they might do it. But every time, no matter what, they failed.
“We did our best to stay hopeful, Dr. Willamette and I, and every chance we got, we visited the pool, taking pictures of the fossils, making sketches, recording notes, details that we could research at leisure back at our tent. We classified the skeletons we could see, but that didn’t amount to many with all the clutter. The rest we hopelessly guessed at, waiting for the day we could study them firsthand.
“The waiting made me an anxious, nervous wreck, but I kept myself sane cataloguing and sorting through my notes, cross-referencing them with the books we had on hand, and formulating systems and procedures to be used for studying the bones once they were recovered. It was pointless, trivial work, ultimately unnecessary, but it was how I coped.
“I won’t claim that I handled the stress of it all that well, but if I was bad, Dr. Willamette was so much worse…”
Letter to Dr. Douglas Stack, Chair, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Chambers University
Sent August 15, 1960
Dear Doug,
Something has come up. I’ve found something out in Colorado, something I’m not allowed to say too much about, and I need you to find someone to cover my classes. It looks like I won’t be back by the time the semester begins. I can’t answer too many questions right now, but know that I’m not just chasing another gamble. This won’t be another Carson’s Creek. After all those close calls, I think this is finally my chance, this is my chance at some recognition. I’m not about to throw it away.
Do what you have to on your end, dock my pay, put me on probation, fire me, whatever you have to do, though I hope you’ll keep me on. In a couple of weeks, once this goes public, everyone’s going to want a piece of what I’ve found. If you’re smart, you’ll keep me around.
-Brendan C. Willamette
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…He didn’t want to leave, even once the school year started, and the longer things dragged on, the worse Dr. Willamette became. He became increasingly distant and prone to bouts of rage. He could be quietly reading one minute, and screaming and cussing me out the next. At night, he barely slept.
“More than once I woke to him missing from our little tent, and each time I found him pacing the pool’s perimeter gate, muttering to himself. There were plenty of signs he wasn’t well, that he needed to get away, that he needed help, and I probably should have told someone what was going on, but Dr. Willamette wasn’t the only person stressed by the situation and he wasn’t the only one taking it poorly. And besides, whenever he brought up what he was going to do when they finally did recover those bones, he started beaming like a child on Christmas morning, too excited to be talked down.
“I see now how wrong I was to just sit back. If I had known what he would do, I never would have let him stay…”
Bob Wallace, Investigation Lead
Interviewed January 12, 1994
“…The incident happened around 3:20 AM on September 4th. Most of the people onsite were asleep at the time, so I can’t tell you much about the minutes leading up to the event. But if you’re ready to move on, I have an entire filing cabinet full of testimony as to what happened after the alarms went off. I can get them for you if you want, but we might be here for a while…”
Zoe Ball, Surveyor (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…I woke up to people screaming…”
Jimmy Dennell, CDC Investigator (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…I thought there might have been a gas leak or something with the way people were panicking. I started grabbing my stuff thinking we were gonna have to evacuate…”
Fern Waller, Asst. Lab Technician (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…A bunch of folks were crowded around the fence. Security kept yelling at them to keep back…”
Alphonso Davids, Forester (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…I was one of the first ones there…”
Polly Bass, Hydrologist (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…Someone had scaled the fence and dove into the pool…”
Ron Underwood, Hazmat Technician (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…They woke us up and had us put on our hazmat gear, but by the time we were outfitted and ready, he had already surfaced and pulled himself out…”
Lynne Edgar, Backcountry Ranger (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…He had a rock with him…”
Fern Waller, Asst. Lab Technician (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…A skull…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…A ceratopsid skull…”
Zoe Ball, Surveyor (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…He came out of the water gasping, dragging it out of the water, onto the shore. Steam was pouring off his skin and under the spotlights he almost looked pearlescent, like a full-body oil sheen…”
Camille Boyce, Field Biologist (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…The ground beneath him hardened into this gold-colored mat…”
Elliot Webb, Geologist (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…His skin and clothes and the skull started breaking out in these little spots of shiny brown, almost like metal…”
Camille Boyce, Field Biologist (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…It spread all over him, the weird, metal film…”
Zoe Ball, Surveyor (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…It was almost beautiful, the way his skin danced under the spotlight, but the noise he made, that scream will haunt me till the day I die…”
Lynne Edgar, Backcountry Ranger (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…He wouldn’t stop screaming, he kept clawing at his skin…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…No one tried to help him…”
Ron Underwood, Hazmat Technician (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…We couldn’t help him. No one could. By the time we got there, it was already too late. We would have just been risking our own lives to try and save him…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…He saw me in the crowd and started to crawl towards me. His limbs were stiff and jagged, barely able to bend, and his eyes looked pained, pained but somehow happy. He looked happier than I’d ever seen him. He tried to speak, but his throat had already frozen up, his chest cavity, slowly filling, choking off his air and blood. Before he died, he shot up in a spasm and raised his arms up…”
Zoe Ball, Surveyor (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…Almost like he was praying…”
Elliot Webb, Geologist (Archived Interview)
Interviewed September 5, 1960
“…Like he was begging…”
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…They told me afterwards that he didn’t suffer, that the pain receptors in his body were eaten away before he could feel anything, but it sure didn’t look painless…”
Bob Wallace, Investigation Lead
Interviewed January 12, 1994
“…It shouldn’t have happened. I regret that it did. But if anything good came from the incident, it at least served as a reminder to the crew, letting them know why we had to be so careful, why we had to put up so many precautions. They saw with their own eyes exactly what those waters did to anyone unlucky enough to touch them…”
Diane Chen, Chief Chemist
Interviewed May 19, 1994
“…Solvent P-6582, when removed from its pool and exposed to the air, turns anything it touches into solid bronze. We still don’t know why…”
Chambers Gazette (Archived)
Published September 12, 1960
At the age of 67, Dr. Brendan C. Willamette is dead. He died last week on a paleontological dig in Colorado of natural causes. He is remembered as a great husband, father, grandfather, teacher, and mentor to those who knew and loved him. He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Stacey G. Bloom; children, Eric Willamette, Justine Smith, and Wendy Linwood; and grandchildren, Timothy Willamette, Brooke Willamette, Bailey Smith, Seth Smith, Caleb Smith, and Alex Linwood. Brendan’s funeral will be held this Wednesday, September 14th, at the United Fellowship of Saving Grace in Chambers at 2:00 PM.
Dr. Ray Halsey, PhD student under Brendan Willamette
Interviewed February 28, 1995
“…I never found out what happened to the body. Last I heard the government held it in quarantine, making sure it was no longer a hazard to others, trying to understand why the waters had done what they had done to Dr. Willamette.
“For a while I hoped that they might return his body to the family, that they might get some sort of closure, but his wife died ten years back, and I don’t think his children were ever told about the incident. If he ever did show up on their doorstep, I don’t even think they’d understand what they were getting. I can’t help but feel it’d be a waste of time to try and return him now, but at least it’d be better than having him sit in some government storage for the rest of eternity.
“After the accident I didn’t stay around Colorado for too much longer. I took the time to study the skull Dr. Willamette had recovered, it’s what he would have wanted, and then I went back to Chambers University to focus on my studies. It might not seem like much, but since the skull represented a then unknown species of Ceratopsidae, in the same family as triceratops, I took the liberty of naming it after Dr. Willamette: Aesceratops Willamettia. At least that way he might be remembered in some way…”
Benjamin Cellini, Curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art
Interviewed April 8, 2160
“…Whatever the case may be, whatever events may have led this wonderful bronze, the Linwood Ecstasy, to find its way to our proud collection, we look forward to sharing it with the public for years to come, and hope that all who look upon it can find something to take away from the beauty it displays.”
Joseph Hohman is a Texan writer exploring art and science through experiments in structure and style. He earned his Bachelors in Biochemistry from the University of North Texas, and is currently working towards his MFA in Fiction at Indiana University.