Clear Pond: The Reconstruction of a Life

This is the story of poet Roger Mitchell's unique and intriguing search through more than a century of historical threads, looking for "a simple, singular man." The ostensible subject of his inquiry, one Israel Johnson, was a nineteenth-century pioneer settler who lived deep in the Adirondack wilderness. Despite having developed patents for a type of sawmill that remained in use well into the twentieth century, which could have made him rich, Johnson was "no one in particular," an everyman who died penniless, very nearly lost in the mists of time.

Roger Mitchell's painstaking search to reconstruct Johnson's life led into people's homes and family memories, into countless libraries, courthouses, and graveyards, into the National Archives, and far more. The story here is of
the finding, as much as it is of the found. And the acts by which it was accomplished have the reassuring and preserving quality of memory, both individual and collective. The story of Clear Pond puts a small island in the scream of time; and while it certainly does not stop time, it makes time go around it.