O my brothers!May Yahweh, Zeus, or some other such Great Spirit, safeguard our mission to inscribe the highest pinnacle of the flatlander community straddling the banks of Alum Creek.
Ascending dizzily above one-story ranchettes of Alum Estates we by night mount the great vessel whose gravity-poised contents source the turquoise-tinted, chlorine-reeking, translucent fluid that by day laps about the ankles, waists and shoulders of athletic adolescents frolicking in and sunning by the swimming pool below. Bulbous orb, pale medicine green, erected at no small floated bond issue and taxpayer expense, presides pallid and impassive over exploding population displacing farmers on the outskirts of town. As nearby our recent red brothers fought, killed, and died on the bloody Alum banks, steamrollered out of history, Tecumseh and Company, once traipsing into camp at end of day laying their catch at the feet of matriarchs, now disemboweling the hapless odd settler, betrayed, outreached and overrun by inexorable plodding expansionary westward river traffic and trapper intruders extruding ever westward.
We climb your female containerness, we conquerors, we seekers, even unto Great Mother Nature herself.
I, my brothers, latest scion of clan Snaveley late from Germany-Switzerland by way of Virginia colony, along with Danny Rigged and Comstock Load, Anglo-Saxon mothers' sons all, we climb the mighty protuberant gourd to strike our images high above the township. Torn recent untimely from mothers' and sisters' domiciles creep we under dark of night and stealth of foot diagonally across rectilinear property boundaries, new world surveyors' traces.
We must stand tall, O my brothers!
Speak not of fear nor of the cold, brutal, masculine death call to initiatory night endeavor. Dawn will reveal to the waking world glistening, not-yet-dry pigment dripping our inscriptions, proclaiming us to Babbity boosters. Dawn will bring the rosy finger to crisply white-shirted Jay-Cees and stern uniformed police who must deal with our ridiculous outrage as well as real death, maiming, burning, murder, mayhem, and highway accident. We will meet them on the field as equals, all innocent and all murderers in our hearts, all drinking stealthily at the nightstream, we in rage at the sad, weary, tense, striving, insane fatherhood, inarticulate, isolate, inward-dreaming inheritors of 4000 years. The girls, God bless 'em, so recently untouchable, now touchable, now to be re-conquered (but so recently allies, mothers and sisters, sweet playmates). We leave feminized homes to stand in the world. O water-tower, ithyphallic guardian of booster truth, we got to get it up and take it down, encircle it with hieroglyphs in ritual defacing, claiming magical mythical real estate of our four-flushers. Where did we go astray on history's highway? Are we victims or conquerors?
He who comes after us must stand on our weak but willing shoulders.
This I say, O my brothers.
A copy of Snavely's Watertower Song reposes in the historical archive of the Alum Falls Public Library