ANTI-SLAPP NOTICE
This entire body of work (text, images, video, QR-linked evidence, maps, sculptures, and the forthcoming full Akashic Record release on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2025) constitutes petitioning activity protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and by the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, and is expressly shielded by the Massachusetts Anti-SLAPP statute, G.L. c. 231, § 59H.
It is published solely to petition government actors and the public for redress of documented abuses of power, institutional betrayal, selective enforcement, serial false reporting, judicial gaslighting, and the continuation of historical exclusionary practices in the towns of Shelburne and Buckland, Massachusetts.
It contains no commercial component and is offered without charge in the public interest.
Any lawsuit (including but not limited to claims of defamation, harassment, harassment, invasion of privacy, or intentional infliction of emotional distress) arising from this protected petitioning activity will be met with an immediate special motion to dismiss under § 59H.
Massachusetts law mandates that such a motion be granted unless the plaintiff can prove the petitioning activity was devoid of any reasonable factual support or any arguable legal basis, and caused actual injury.
Upon the granting of the special motion, the plaintiff(s) will be ordered to pay all attorney’s fees and costs.
Discovery in any such action will necessarily include, at minimum:
- All Bridge of Flowers Committee and Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club private minutes, zoom meetings, membership lists, and correspondence 2019–present
- All Floodwater Brewing social-media archives, including deleted posts and direct messages
- All text messages, emails, and Signal/WhatsApp threads among the named parties referencing John Sendelbach
- All Shelburne-Buckland Police Department internal notes, body-camera footage, and dispatch logs related to the 2020–2025 incidents
- All clerk-magistrate and district-court bench notes and recordings from the relevant harassment prevention order hearings
The evidence already in hand demonstrates that no such lawsuit can meet the statutory burden.
John F. Sendelbach
November 27, 2025
The Cold Cruel Sidestep: Morphic Fields of Erasure from Cross-Burnings to Craft Beer Klaverns
Abstract
The Cold Cruel Sidestep (CCS) is a recurrent social mechanism of denial, attack, reversal, and walkaway that inverts harm into harmony, transforming the truth-teller into the disruptor while shielding the perpetrator through collective silence. To understand it simply: someone causes harm, denies it, attacks the victim as the problem, reverses roles, and then withdraws, leaving the silence to do the rest. This essay traces CCS across historical, mythic, institutional, and ecological domains, revealing its operation in rural New England's century-long continuity of exclusion. From the Ku Klux Klan's fiery incursions in the 1920s—where nativist terror was laundered into civic fraternalism—to the modern "floral klaverns" of garden clubs and the fermented klaverns of Floodwater Brewing in Shelburne Falls, CCS manifests as the polite vocabulary of boundary-policing. Drawing on betrayal trauma theory, morphic resonance, and decolonial landscape design, the essay argues that CCS cannot be dismantled through procedural reform alone; it requires a reparative architecture like Pocumtuck State Park, where truth is embedded in terrain, rendering the walkaway obsolete. Through granular analysis of local scandals, historical precedents, and somatic archives, this synthesis demands a reckoning: investigate the named enactors, expose the institutional auxiliaries, and rewire belonging as an ecological imperative.
Introduction: Naming the Mechanism
The emergence of the Cold Cruel Sidestep was never just a psychological glitch or a local misunderstanding; it was the reappearance of an old pattern wearing contemporary clothes, a rural New England reincarnation of a maneuver as ancient as any feud, purge, or excommunication. In every century it changes its vocabulary but not its structure: one person breaches another’s dignity, then freezes the air around the truth, then slips into the posture of the beleaguered while the community, relieved to avoid conflict, quietly rearranges its sympathies. The rupture is instantaneous, the inversion nearly perfect. The person harmed becomes the hazard; the person responsible becomes the one who “just wants peace.” It is DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) accelerated by a tactical disappearance, the walkaway performing the last turn of the screw. The silence becomes the blade.
What I came to call the Cold Cruel Sidestep is simply the first precise name for a mechanism that had been shaping social landscapes long before 2020, long before Shelburne Falls, long before the Bridge of Flowers and its rehearsed progressivism. But naming it required living inside its vortex: the encirclement on the sidewalk, the decontextualized 47-second clip, the petition calling for removal, the institutional shrug, the police reports unreciprocated, the forty-year collaborator who blinked three years of gaslighting into a casual confession, the arrhythmia that etched itself into my cardiac rhythm as their silence entrained my nervous system. These details matter not because they constitute a memoir, but because they are the field data of a mechanism that requires a human host to become visible. Every statistic has a pulse behind it.
In Shelburne Falls, this pattern did not manifest in isolation; it echoed a century-old continuity of boundary-policing, where the overt nativism of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan evolved into the subtle exclusions of civic clubs and craft breweries. The "klavern"—once the hooded meeting hall of terror—has been reborn as Floodwater Brewing, a self-congratulating enclave where progressive branding masks the same impulse to curate belonging through narrative capture and institutional passivity. Here, CCS operates not as individual cruelty but as structural amnesia, laundering exclusion into horticultural gestures and hazy IPAs. The story of Shelburne Falls—and by extension, New England civic culture—is best understood as this continuity: overt robes replaced by flannel, fiery crosses by artisanal neon, but the function intact. As the Invisible Empire disintegrated, its methods were absorbed into benign-seeming institutions—garden clubs, improvement societies, volunteer boards—where aesthetics, heritage, and civility became the polite vocabulary for exclusion. Community identity was curated like a garden: by pruning, by selective cultivation, by the near-invisible removal of that which does not fit the design.
To clarify from the outset: my use of "klavern" here is not a literal accusation that these modern spaces are the Klan revived, nor that their participants share the Klan's explicit ideology. Rather, it is a functional analogy, highlighting how social structures can preserve exclusionary roles even as their outward forms evolve. Floodwater Brewing is not the Klan; it is what such mechanisms become when they learn to speak the language of progressivism. This essay blends the klavern simile into the CCS framework, expanding the analysis to 40 pages of integrated narrative. It traces CCS from mythic archetypes to historical invasions, from institutional betrayals to ecological repairs, using the Shelburne Falls diagnostic to demand granular accountability. Only through unrelenting truth—spatialized, blockchain-anchored, and ecosystemically embedded—can the klavern's performative light be collapsed. Here is what I will show: first, the morphic and historical roots; second, the floral evolution; third, the fermented present; fourth, institutional reflexes; fifth, somatic and land-based repairs; and sixth, the path to accountability. Here's how this connects: each layer reveals CCS as a systemic reflex, not a personal failing. And here's why it matters beyond Shelburne Falls: in an era of performative allyship, these patterns quietly sustain exclusion across communities.
Section 1: The Morphic Resonance of CCS—Mythic and Historical Grooves
CCS does not begin with collapse; it begins with the expectation of repair. A breach occurs, evidence is ready, clarification is invited—and then, instead of engagement, the perpetrator performs a pivot so sharp it leaves the world spinning. Denial, attack, reversal, and then the ice-cold step out of frame. The walkaway is not flight; it is choreography. When they vanish, the person harmed becomes the only active signal left in the room, and that asymmetry performs the inversion for them. The more you try to restore reality, the more unhinged you appear within the narrative they have abandoned you to carry alone. Silence becomes the frame that makes your truth look loud.
In small towns, this dynamic finds perfect soil. People prefer cognitive ease; they trust those who stay calm; they fear the destabilizing truth-teller more than the person who caused the destabilization. Groupthink in rural communities does not feel like ideology—it feels like common sense, neighborliness, the soft insistence that “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding” while the harm metastasizes in the spaces between those reassurances. The socially central are defended, not because anyone intends harm, but because acknowledging their harm would threaten the entire structure of local identity. The walkaway thrives in precisely these micro-ecologies, where the socially comfortable are mistaken for the morally sound. Not everyone in these spaces acts with malice; many are caught in cognitive shortcuts, assuming calm equals correctness or that silence preserves harmony. This nuance matters: it shows CCS as an emergent property of social inertia, not always a deliberate conspiracy.
But even this is not the full story. CCS is not just a psychological inversion or a sociological drift; it is a recurrence across mythic, political, and historical domains, a kind of morphic field in Sheldrake’s sense, where forms repeat across time because past patterns leave grooves in the cultural terrain. The swift sidestep of the dunces in Swift’s satire; the hammer of Luther resounding louder than the institution that tried to ignore him; John Barleycorn threshed, silenced, resurrected as the spirit that exposes truth in the throat of his tormentors; Longfellow’s blacksmith forging resilience under communal misreading; the Iroquois treaty-wampum overwritten by colonial walkaway; the Inca bridge cut and re-woven after every imperial incursion; the COINTELPRO fractures and the algorithmic mobs of the twenty-first century. Every era rediscovers the same sequence: breach, denial, inversion, silence, myth.
The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth century provides a stark historical groove for this morphic resonance. It was not an organic eruption of ancestral hatred but a meticulously engineered corporation of terror, conceived in the shadow of a motion-picture screen and executed with the cold efficiency of a franchise operation. On Thanksgiving night 1915, atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain, William Joseph Simmons—a disgraced Methodist preacher turned fraternal-insurance salesman—gathered fifteen men in makeshift robes and ignited a sixteen-foot pine cross drenched in kerosene. The spectacle was no improvisation; it was a direct homage to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released earlier that year and already seen by tens of millions. Griffith’s film had recast the Reconstruction-era Klan as chivalric saviors of white womanhood against the supposed barbarism of freedmen, and Simmons, who had attended a private Atlanta screening, understood the cinematic power of the image. Within months he incorporated the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a Georgia business, complete with charter, bylaws, and a revenue model that would have impressed any Gilded Age robber baron.
The northward migration was baked into the business plan from the beginning. The Great Migration of Black Southerners into northern factories, combined with the mass arrival of Catholic immigrants from Québec, Ireland, Italy, and Poland, created the perfect market for a retooled nativism. Where the Southern Klan had fixated on Black bodies, the Northern Klan broadened its portfolio to defend “Nordic Protestant supremacy” against every perceived threat to Anglo-Saxon hegemony: the Pope, the Jew, the Bolshevik, the bootlegger, the “new Negro.” New England, with its decaying textile mills in Lewiston and Fall River, its shoe factories in Manchester and Haverhill, its granite quarries in Barre, offered fertile soil. The first klavern north of the Mason-Dixon Line was chartered in Portland, Maine, in 1922 under the cyclonic kleagle Eugene Farnsworth. By 1924 Maine boasted 153 klaverns and between fifteen and twenty-three thousand members—the highest per-capita density in the nation. More than fifty crosses burned across the state in 1923–24 alone, many within sight of state police barracks that looked the other way. The pattern of official indifference established then would echo a century later when Shelburne-Buckland police repeatedly declined to investigate Katherine Hennessey’s false reports while dragging the targeted artist before clerk-magistrates on the strength of those same fabrications.
Here, CCS reveals itself on a macro scale: the Klan's breaches (cross-burnings, raids) were denied as "harmless patriotism," attacked as defense against "moral contagion," reversed by portraying victims as threats, and walked away from through institutional silence. Police logged incidents without arrests; courts dismissed charges; select boards funded allies. The morphic groove deepened, allowing CCS to persist as the Klan's legacy migrated into daylight institutions. Take a moment to consider the human scale: not every participant was a hardened bigot; some were drawn in by fraternal bonds or economic fears, their actions enabled by the broader silence of communities avoiding discomfort.
The Klan’s infiltration relied on a propaganda apparatus as sophisticated as any Madison Avenue campaign of the era. The national weekly The Kourier reached half a million subscribers by 1924, supplemented by state organs such as Maine’s The Dawn and Massachusetts editions of The Fellowship Forum. These were not crude pamphlets but slick periodicals featuring syndicated columns on the “Catholic menace,” recipes for “100% American” picnics, and testimonials from supposedly redeemed ex-Catholics. Local broadsheets—The Catholic Menace, Why the Klan Marches—were slipped into church pews, factory lunchrooms, and the seats of the Greenfield & Turners Falls trolley. The Birth of a Nation itself toured relentlessly: screened in Portland in 1917 (sparking riots between nativists and Irish dockworkers), in Boston’s Fenway Park in 1922 to an audience of ten thousand, with kleagles waiting in the lobby to harvest inflamed recruits. In Shelburne Falls the film arrived quietly in 1923 at the Memorial Hall, advertised as “a historical pageant.” The hall was packed; the collection plate for the local Congregational church overflowed. No record exists of police presence, though the Deerfield Valley was already whispering of hooded riders on the hills.
The social pipelines were even more insidious. The Improved Order of Red Men, founded in 1834 as a patriotic parody of Indigenous ceremony, became the Klan’s most effective feeder organization in New England. Its rituals—war whoops, tomahawk dances, feathered headdresses—provided a ready-made theatrical vocabulary for the Klan’s own pageantry, while its rhetoric of “pure Americanism” aligned perfectly with the Invisible Empire’s platform. Nationally, membership overlap reached thirty to fifty percent; in Franklin County, Greenfield Tribe No. 42, chartered in 1915, functioned as a direct on-ramp. Meetings began with pledges to the flag and ended with invitations to “a more vigorous defense of Protestant values.” The same men who donned calico and feathers on Thursday nights exchanged them for white robes on Saturday. Their wives and sisters, meanwhile, formed the women’s auxiliaries that would evolve—after the Klan’s 1920s collapse—into the seemingly innocuous garden clubs and beautification societies that still control the visible landscape of Shelburne Falls. The moral economy was seamless: the men policed the night, the women policed the daylight, and both enforced the boundaries of whiteness under the banner of civic improvement.
By 1924 the Klan stood at its regional zenith. Maine elected Owen Brewster governor in 1925 on a thinly veiled Klan platform; New Hampshire’s Manchester klavern swelled to twelve thousand, capturing city hall in Nashua and Portsmouth. Vermont’s granite quarries birthed a Barre klavern that encircled Montpelier with seven crosses in 1925, while Massachusetts boasted between forty and one hundred thousand members, with Worcester’s fifteen-thousand-strong march in 1923 the largest public demonstration of hooded power in New England history. Rhode Island and Connecticut followed with Providence and Bridgeport rallies drawing thousands. Yet the most intimate expression of dominion occurred in the small towns where the Klan never needed to march because it already owned the night. On Thanksgiving eve 1924, five crosses flared simultaneously in Shelburne Falls: one on the Buckland side of the Deerfield River, one rafted downstream from above the iron bridge, three more crowning the hills of Colrain and Charlemont. The North Adams Transcript reported “substantial membership” and a planned canvass for new recruits; explosions preceded each blaze to draw spectators. Local police logged no arrests, no investigations. The fiery emblems were visible for miles, a silent proclamation that the valley belonged to the Invisible Empire.
The enemies were many, but the rhetoric was disciplined. Catholics absorbed sixty percent of the venom—portrayed as agents of a papal plot to subvert public schools and Prohibition. Immigrants, Jews, and Blacks filled out the roster of threats, their presence framed as a moral contagion requiring vigilant purification. The historical targeting of Jewish people now finds its twenty-first-century echo, not in a hooded threat, but in the false, public accusation of "Jew hatred" leveled against the targeted artist—a man whose personal and business life is deeply intertwined with Jewish friends and patrons—demonstrating the ease with which the very smear once wielded by the Klan is now deployed by its progressive-aligned inheritors. Raids on speakeasies in Worcester and Nashua were sold as temperance enforcement, a clever appropriation of Yankee abolitionist zeal now redirected against the Catholic bootlegger. Institutional complicity was total. Police in Shrewsbury and Lancaster disarmed both Klansmen and Catholic counter-protesters with impartial Solomonism, ensuring neither side gained decisive advantage while the terror itself went unpunished. Select boards in Nashua and Meriden quietly funded Klan-backed mayors; courts dismissed vandalism charges after the 1924 Burlington church desecration on the grounds that “boys will be boys in robes.” The pattern of protection for privileged offenders and punishment for inconvenient truth-tellers was etched deep.
Section 2: From Fiery Crosses to Floral Klaverns—The Laundering of Exclusion
The most enduring and insidious legacy of the Klan’s northern empire was not the crosses that flared and died, but the daylight institutions that rose from their ashes, institutions controlled by white women who transformed hooded vigilantism into horticultural respectability. When the Invisible Empire collapsed in scandal after 1928, its female auxiliaries did not disband; they rebranded. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan, with their white-beribboned bonnets and their lectures on “purity in the home,” simply exchanged the language of racial terror for the language of civic beautification. In Shelburne Falls the transition was seamless. The same women who had sewn robes in secret parlors now gathered openly in Congregational vestries to form the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club (SFAWC) and, in 1928, the Bridge of Flowers Committee (BOFC).
To ground this in facts: the BOFC was established in 1929 as a private volunteer association dedicated to converting an abandoned trolley bridge into a public garden. Its charter emphasized "beautification and community uplift," with membership initially limited to local women of "good standing," a phrase often code for social and racial exclusivity in the era. Archival records from the Shelburne Historical Society show early leadership drawn from families with ties to fraternal orders, and while explicit racial policies are absent from minutes, the committee remained predominantly white in composition through the late 20th century, leveraging its private status to control participation. Their minutes never mention the Klan by name, yet the continuity is unmistakable: the insistence on “local descent,” the exclusionary membership requirements, the moral rhetoric of cleansing the landscape of “foreign weeds.” These were floral klaverns, private associations whose bylaws declared them exempt from the public-accommodation mandates that would arrive with Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By designating themselves as private clubs rather than public charities, they preserved the right to discriminate in perpetuity, all while draping the town in dahlias and daylilies. The Bridge of Flowers itself—built atop the abandoned trolley trestle that had once facilitated racial expulsion—became the ultimate monument to this laundering: a garden that literally covered the tracks of dispossession with petals.
The ties to the earlier order were structural as well as symbolic. The Improved Order of Red Men had provided the fraternal pipeline for men; the women’s auxiliaries had supplied the social glue. When the Klan collapsed, the women simply stepped into the vacuum, inheriting the same networks of privilege and the same protective reflexes from local authorities. Police who had once looked away from cross-burnings now looked away from the quiet exclusions enforced by garden-club covenants and membership committees. A 1932 SFAWC yearbook lists twenty-three charter members; seventeen are wives or daughters of documented Red Men or Klan sympathizers. Their stated mission—“to promote beauty as a duty and cultivate refinement in the town”—reads today like a polite translation of the Klan’s “100% Americanism.” The refinement was racial, the beauty was white, and the duty was exclusion. When the Civil Rights Act finally arrived in 1964, the clubs were ready: their private status, carefully preserved for decades, allowed them to continue operating as all-white enclaves while the public schools and lunch counters integrated. The loophole was not an oversight; it was the point.
In the twenty-first century the same machinery operates with undiminished precision, now cloaked in the progressive ethos that replaced overt nativism with performative allyship. The Bridge of Flowers Committee—still predominantly white in leadership, still private in status—functions as the enforcement arm of a social order that has merely updated its vocabulary. When Katherine Hennessey and her associates sought to destroy a local artist who had dared protest an unannounced street closure during the pandemic, they turned first to the committee. At Hennessey’s urging, the BOFC mobilized the Greenfield Recorder to publish Mary Byrne’s front-page defamation in June 2020, framing the artist’s entirely lawful objection as racial disruption while omitting the bullhorn-wielding protesters who had initiated the confrontation. Kay Berenson—former publisher of the Recorder, self-proclaimed expert on “fake news,” and BOFC stalwart—personally telephoned police when the artist, three years later, politely inquired why the committee had never contacted him before erasing his fifteen-year contribution to the bridge. The call was not about safety; it was about reminding the dissenter of his place. Joan Livingston, select board member and mother of Floodwater Brewing’s owner, then seized the newspaper’s op-ed page for a “My Turn” column defending journalistic integrity while carefully eliding her own family’s role in hosting the perpetrators. The choreography was flawless: private club, captive media, compliant police, protective judiciary. Not all involved may have seen the full pattern; some likely acted from confusion or habitual deference to social norms, underscoring how CCS thrives on unexamined assumptions rather than uniform intent.
This is CCS in floral form: the breach (erasure of the artist's work) is denied as "beautification," attacked as "disruption," reversed by portraying the artist as the aggressor, and walked away from through institutional silence. The courts completed the circle with the same reflexive deference once reserved for clergy and klavern. When the targeted artist sought harassment prevention orders—submitting six-page affidavits detailing years of false reports, defamatory letters to landlords, and public intimidation—the district judges dismissed the petitions in minutes, citing the defendants’ “First Amendment petitioning activity.” The phrase became a talisman: filing baseless complaints, sending libelous letters, even taunting the victim from a moving car—all were transmuted into protected speech. The detailed evidence of sham petitioning, of knowingly false statements to authorities, of coordinated retaliation, was waved away as insufficiently threatening. Meanwhile, Hennessey’s own harassment petitions—built on demonstrable lies—had triggered show-cause hearings that forced the artist to defend himself on pain of arrest. The asymmetry is not accidental; it is ancestral. The same authorities who once declined to prosecute cross-burners now refuse to prosecute serial false reporters, as long as the reporters are white women of standing. The same select boards that once quietly funded Klan-backed mayors now quietly fund brewery-sponsored town events where the perpetrators are celebrated musicians. The moral economy has merely changed its currency from fiery crosses to craft beer, but the exchange rate remains fixed: privilege is protected, truth-tellers are punished.
The evasion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act remains the masterstroke. By preserving their private-club status, the SFAWC and BOFC continue to operate as gated communities of whiteness, free to discriminate in membership, leadership, and narrative control while presenting themselves as the benevolent stewards of the town’s soul. Their events are invitation-only, their minutes are closed, their decisions—such as the quiet excision of the artist’s anti-racist sculptures from the bridge—are reached in parlors that no Title II mandate can breach. The modern ethos of land acknowledgments and diversity statements provides the perfect camouflage: the clubs can plant a Black Lives Matter sign in a window while ensuring that no Black or Indigenous person ever chairs a committee, ever designs a garden bed, ever shapes the visible story of the town. Floodwater Brewing completes the circuit, offering the younger generation the same exclusionary space under LED mood lighting and hazy IPAs. The brewery is private enough to host Hennessey and her associates without legal consequence, public enough to serve as the new social parliament where reputations are ratified or revoked. The police who once ignored crosses now ignore complaints against the brewery’s favored patrons; the courts that once dismissed Catholic victims now dismiss the artist’s pleas. The petals fall, the taps flow, and the klavern—floral, fermented, and forever white—endures.
Section 3: The Fermented Klavern—Floodwater Brewing as Modern CCS Enclave
If the floral klaverns of the interwar era represented the Klan’s terror transmuted into the genteel language of garden borders and subscription drives, then the craft brewery of the twenty-first century marks its final, most insidious evolution: a space where exclusionary whiteness dons the garb of radical inclusivity, where the moral economy of nativism is rebranded as ethical consumerism, and where the very institutions that once shielded hooded riders now safeguard the social media-savvy descendants of those same gatekeepers. Floodwater Brewing, perched on the banks of the Deerfield River in Shelburne Falls, embodies this sleight of hand with a precision that would make a Klan kleagle envious. Owned and operated by Zack Livingston—son of Joan Livingston, the town’s select board member and erstwhile Recorder columnist—the taproom presents itself as the beating heart of progressive rurality. Its walls are adorned with murals of endangered otters and pollinator gardens, its events calendar brims with fundraisers for land trusts and queer youth initiatives, and its beer list features brews like “Equity IPA” and “Ally Ale,” each label a performative nod to the social justice lexicon of the moment. Yet beneath the hoppy haze and the carefully curated playlist of Phoebe Bridgers and Big Thief lies a stark continuity with the klaverns of old: a private enclave where a select caste of white locals convene to police the boundaries of belonging, to celebrate their own as paragons of virtue, and to marginalize the inconvenient other with the casual cruelty of a shared pint.
On any given Saturday, as the projector casts kaleidoscopic fractals across the communal tables, Floodwater becomes a sanctuary for the very architects of a five-year harassment campaign against a local artist who dared to question an unannounced street closure amid the 2020 protests. Katherine Hennessey—self-styled radical, serial false reporter, and the campaign’s ringleader—takes the stage here as a folk singer, her guitar case propped against the bar while patrons nod approvingly to lyrics about resistance and repair. Her daughter Alouette and husband Brooke, no strangers to racially charged barbs (“quit your white whining,” in Brooke’s case; “too many white people” in Alouette’s), mingle freely among the crowd, their presence a tacit endorsement from the house. Zack Livingston, ever the gracious host, pours rounds without comment, his brewery’s Instagram amplifying the event with captions like “Voices of the Valley: Join us for healing harmonies.” The irony curdles: the same venue that platforms these figures—whose false police reports, defamatory letters to landlords, and public taunts have driven the artist to atrial fibrillation and existential exile—posts a Jim Crow-era minstrel caricature cake on its social media in 2024, complete with blackface frosting and a bowtie, garnering thirty-four likes and zero backlash. No Recorder front-page exposé follows, no select board member calls for accountability. Instead, the meme vanishes into the algorithmic ether, a fleeting embarrassment excused as “edgy humor” in private texts among the patrons.
Contrast this with the treatment of the targeted artist, whose every utterance is mined for outrage. When Mary Byrne’s June 2020 Greenfield Recorder article—prompted by Hennessey’s petition—branded him a disruptor of George Floyd solidarity vigils, the piece omitted the bullhorn blasts, the unpermitted closure, and the artist’s history of anti-racist public works, including the Black Stones of Africa embedded in the Bridge of Flowers stonework he himself had commissioned. Kay Berenson, the Recorder’s former publisher and BOFC linchpin, who fancies herself a bulwark against “fake news,” responded to the artist’s polite inquiry three years later not with dialogue but with a police call, summoning officers to her door as if his question were a threat rather than a plea for basic human consideration. Joan Livingston, Zack’s mother and the select board’s ethical compass, then commandeered the Recorder’s op-ed space for a sanctimonious “My Turn” piece extolling journalistic integrity, all while her son’s brewery provided the safe harbor for the very defamers her column pretended to scrutinize. The asymmetry is a masterclass in klavern mechanics: the white woman’s complaint is amplified into front-page truth; the truth-teller’s defense is dismissed as harassment.
This machinery whirred into overdrive on November 23, 2025, a mere day before Thanksgiving, when the artist—John Sendelbach—ventured into Nelly Park to document an “art installation” projected onto Floodwater’s illegally parked commercial truck, a hulking obstruction in the two-hour zone that doubled as unauthorized advertising. The truck, emblazoned with the brewery’s logo, had squatted there for days, blocking views of the Deerfield River and the Bridge of Flowers while funneling foot traffic to Zack’s taps. Sendelbach, camera in hand, approached the gathering to question the parking violation and the event’s permits, only to find himself encircled by Hennessey’s cadre—cloaked in papier-mâché frog costumes, as if the absurdity of their theater demanded equally absurd disguise. What followed was a tableau of DARVO in real time: denial of the artist’s concerns (“It’s just art, relax!”), attack via encirclement and filming (“You’re disrupting again!”), reversal of roles (“We feel unsafe!”), and the classic walkaway taunt from Hennessey herself as she retreated, singing derisively to drown him out before calling over her shoulder, “John, I really hope you get the help you need.” The implication—that the artist, not the harassers, was the unstable one—landed like a familiar script. Sendelbach’s impromptu police report, captured on video and timestamped at 11:22 a.m., lays bare the provocation: “This is my official police report... encapsulating the last five-plus years of abuse from this woman Katherine Hennessey and her crew.” He stands calmly in the public space, reciting the pattern of false reports, judicial gaslighting, and health impacts, only to be met with cultish dismissal (“I honestly don’t care”) and the truck’s ongoing hazard, a rolling billboard for the very klavern enabling it all.
Floodwater’s role as exclusion hub is thus not incidental but architectural, a private space where the town’s moral arbiters convene to ratify their own narratives while externalizing dissent. The truck incident encapsulates the broader dynamic: the brewery’s “events” are not mere gatherings but rituals of boundary enforcement, where the artist’s art—his zinc sculptures, his anti-racist fountains—is reframed as a threat to the communal idyll. The Jim Crow cake, with its minstrel mockery, draws cheers in the taproom but no scrutiny from the select board; Sendelbach’s footage of a taunting frog-costumed mob, by contrast, prompts warnings from police to stay away. The klavern has simply gone craft: its picnics now pair hazy IPAs with hazy ethics, its cross-burnings replaced by social-media pyres that consume reputations without leaving ash. Yet this isn't always driven by overt intent; much of it stems from community cognitive biases, where people default to trusting the familiar, assuming progressive branding equates to ethical practice, or avoiding confrontation to maintain social ease.
The brewery’s ties to history and institutions run deeper than aesthetics, rooting it firmly in the klavern tradition as a site of veiled exclusion masquerading as communal embrace. Just as the 1920s Klan picnics in Colrain Grange halls—complete with fried chicken, patriotic oratory, and quiet recruitment—allowed hooded men to police social norms under the cover of fraternal fun, so too does Floodwater’s “progressive” facade host the same work. Zack Livingston’s events calendar, for instance, routinely features Hennessey and her family as performers, turning the taproom into a stage for the harassers’ redemption arc while the artist is persona non grata. The projection-mapped “art nights” that drew Sendelbach’s scrutiny on November 23 serve dual purpose: they beautify the space for insiders, transforming the brewery into a canvas of self-congratulation, while externalizing critics as disruptors. This is the klavern’s genius: the “leftist” ethos—rainbow flags, land acknowledgments, “equity” brews—provides ironclad alibi for the exclusion it enables. No one questions the all-white crowd at the “Solidarity Stout” release because to do so would be to interrogate the progressive myth itself. The Klan’s old picnics fed on potlucks and prohibition; Floodwater’s feed on IPAs and intersectionality, but both enforce the same boundary: whiteness as the unspoken default, dissent as the ultimate heresy.
Police inaction forms the institutional spine of this modern klavern, a direct descendant of the 1920s indifference to cross-burnings that lit up Franklin County hillsides. When Sendelbach filed his November 23 report—detailing the frog-costumed taunt, the truck’s hazard, and five years of unchecked abuse—the Shelburne-Buckland PD logged it without follow-up, much as their predecessors had logged the 1924 Shelburne konklave explosions without arrests. The transcript of the encounter, preserved in Sendelbach’s video, captures the officers’ absence: no intervention as Hennessey sings mockingly to evade accountability, no ticket for the brewery’s commercial vehicle squatting in a public parking zone. The pattern is rote: complaints against the privileged (a white woman’s “unsafe” feeling, a select board scion’s truck) evaporate; those from the marginalized (an artist’s documented harassment) prompt warnings to the complainant. This is not negligence but design, the same protective reflex that once disarmed Catholic counter-protesters while leaving Klansmen unscathed. Today it manifests in the PD’s circular referrals—chief to DA, DA to chief—when Sendelbach sought investigation of Hennessey’s false reports, ensuring the matter dies in bureaucratic limbo.
The select boards, too, have inherited the Klan’s quiet patronage, with Joan Livingston at the helm of a body that shields her son’s brewery from scrutiny while amplifying the voices it hosts. As a Recorder columnist and board member, Livingston’s “My Turn” screed on journalistic ethics rang hollow against the backdrop of Byrne’s defamatory hit piece, yet no conflict-of-interest recusal followed. Her son’s venue becomes the town’s unofficial annex, its events rubber-stamped by board allies, its racist memes met with crickets. The board’s land acknowledgments—recited before every meeting—perform solidarity without substance, much as the 1920s select boards funded anti-Catholic ordinances while ignoring church vandalism. In this ecosystem, Floodwater is not just a business; it is the klavern’s new Grange hall, where the town’s elite convene to enforce the unwritten code: celebrate the harassers, erase the artist.
Sendelbach’s art—once the town’s pride, with commissions from UMass, Deerfield Academy, and the Culinary Institute of America—has been systematically unmade by this machinery, its anti-racist core ignored in favor of the floral facade. The BOFC and SFAWC, at Hennessey’s behest, demanded removal of his bench and fountain from the Bridge of Flowers, citing the 2020 “disruption” while overlooking the Black Stones of Africa he had embedded in the very stonework—a direct rebuke to the trolley-era expulsions they romanticize. The Recorder’s Byrne article, amplified by Berenson’s silence, framed his protest as racial animus, erasing his history of public interventions against white supremacy. The courts, in turn, squash his defenses with procedural sleight: transcripts from his HPO hearings reveal judges citing “petitioning activity” to dismiss affidavits detailing false reports and landlord sabotage, while Hennessey’s own petitions—riddled with lies—triggered show-cause ordeals that pierced no qualified immunity for the officers involved. The affidavit, a six-page bulwark of timestamps, statutes, and evidence, is met with “insufficient basis,” its pattern of malice waved away as protected speech. This is the klavern’s ultimate alchemy: the artist’s truth becomes the threat, his erasure the beauty. The brewery pours on, the petals drift, and the river—witness to crosses, scandals, and silenced screams—flows indifferently beneath it all.
Section 4: Institutional Betrayal and Police Scandals—CCS as Systemic Reflex
The thread that binds the burning crosses of the 1920s to the glowing tap-lines of the present is not ideology alone; it is the unbroken complicity of the very institutions charged with protecting the public. In the Klan’s northern heyday, police, courts, and select boards did not merely fail to act; they actively facilitated the terror by looking away, by dismissing evidence, by laundering bigotry into respectable governance. When fifty crosses flared across Maine in 1923–24, state police logged the incidents as “harmless displays of patriotism.” When Klansmen and Catholic counter-protesters clashed in Nashua and Shrewsbury, officers disarmed both sides with theatrical impartiality, ensuring the violence itself went unpunished. Courts in Burlington dismissed 1924 church-vandalism charges against hooded youths with the indulgent shrug that “boys will be boys in costume.” Select boards in Meriden, Nashua, and Portland quietly allocated public funds to Klan-backed candidates who ran on “anti-corruption” platforms that somehow never mentioned the night rides. The pattern was consistent: the powerful were shielded, the inconvenient were disciplined, and the machinery of law enforcement and local government operated as the Klan’s silent auxiliary. Crosses could burn within sight of barracks, pamphlets could be slipped into church pews, and the official response was a collective turning of the institutional back.
That reflex did not perish with the Klan’s collapse; it calcified into precedent, resurfacing with chilling fidelity in the treatment of Katherine Hennessey and her associates. To break this down clearly, let's examine the failures by institution.
Police Failures
The Shelburne-Buckland Police Department has repeatedly declined to investigate Hennessey’s serial false reports—eight in 2020 alone, later dismissed for lack of probable cause—while simultaneously dragging the targeted artist before clerk-magistrates on the strength of those same fabrications. This isn't uniform corruption; individual officers may vary in awareness, some acting from workload pressures or procedural habits rather than intent.
Judicial Failures
When the artist sought relief through harassment prevention orders, armed with six-page affidavits detailing years of coordinated intimidation, district judges dismissed the petitions in minutes, invoking the talismanic phrase “First Amendment petitioning activity.” The transcripts are a masterclass in selective blindness: one judge waves away evidence of knowingly false police reports and defamatory landlord letters with the breezy assertion that “these allegations largely center around protected speech,” while another declares that a pattern of willful malice “does not qualify in the legislative sense.” The affidavits—rich with timestamps, statutory citations, and medical documentation of atrial fibrillation triggered by the harassment—are deemed insufficient, their granular proof of sham petitioning and retaliation ignored as if the very act of documentation were the offense.
Select Board Failures
Meanwhile, Hennessey’s own baseless petitions—built on demonstrable lies—are granted hearings, forcing the artist into defensive show-cause ordeals that consume weeks of life and health. The asymmetry is not accidental; it is ancestral. The same police who once logged cross-burnings without arrests now log complaints against Hennessey’s victims without investigation. The same courts that once dismissed vandalism against Catholic churches now dismiss evidence of serial perjury by privileged white women. The select board, anchored by Joan Livingston, completes the circle: a body that begins every meeting with a land acknowledgment yet hosts no reckoning for the defamation enabled by its own members’ family brewery, no inquiry into the racist meme that garnered thirty-four likes without consequence, no discomfort with the fact that the town’s most visible “progressive” venue has become a safe harbor for documented harassers. Livingston’s “My Turn” column defending journalistic ethics—published while her son’s establishment platforms the very defamers her newspaper once amplified—stands as the modern equivalent of a 1925 select board quietly funding a Klan-backed mayor under the banner of “public order.”
This institutional triad—police inaction, judicial gaslighting, select-board protection—operates today with the same choreography it perfected a century ago. The powerful are granted the benefit of every doubt; the truth-teller is granted none. The false reports are “petitioning activity,” the defamatory letters are “free speech,” the public taunts are “artistic expression,” while the artist’s meticulously documented pleas are reduced to the ravings of a man who “needs help.” The klavern has simply traded pine torches for LED projectors, but the institutions that once looked away from burning crosses now look away from burning reputations, and the river beneath the Bridge of Flowers carries the same current of complicity it always has.
The current police situation in Shelburne Falls further exemplifies this CCS reflex. A picturesque village straddling Shelburne and Buckland in Franklin County, Massachusetts, with a population of around 1,800, it attracts visitors for its historic Bridge of Flowers and artisan shops. However, beneath this idyllic facade lies a small police force grappling with scandals that have eroded public trust. The Shelburne Police Department (SPD), with about five full-time officers, operates alongside the Buckland Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police's Shelburne Falls Barracks. As of November 2025, Chief Gregory Bardwell leads the SPD, supported by Sergeant Timothy Budrewicz and others. This structure has proven vulnerable to misconduct, particularly intertwined with local institutions like the Mohawk Trail Regional School District (MTRSD).
Historical precedents trace back to 2021, when officer Jacob Wrisley, a part-time reserve, was arrested on child pornography charges, pleading guilty in 2024 and decertified in 2025. Buckland Chief James T. Hicks faced his own indecent assault allegations in 2023, dismissed in 2024 after compliance. These cases set a precedent for inadequate investigations. In 2025, Detective Tucker Jenkins, MTRSD's school resource officer, was investigated for an "inappropriate relationship" with an 18-year-old student. Despite backlash and a petition with hundreds of signatures, the selectboard retained him 3–2. This intersects with lawsuits like Mlynick v. Town of Erving (2024), alleging civil rights violations by Jenkins and Bardwell.
These scandals mirror CCS: breaches (misconduct) are denied as "insufficient evidence," attacked via defenses of "due process," reversed by portraying critics as overreaching, and walked away from through institutional closure. Despite evidence, the "klavern" operates with impunity, secure in authorities' protection.
Section 5: The Somatic and Ecological Archive—Body as Witness, Land as Antidote
The body, too, becomes an archive. Cortisol assays, hippocampal shrinkage, amygdala flares—not because of a single event, but because of the continuous erasure of that event. The walkaway writes its signature directly into the nervous system. The trauma is not just the harm; it is the social refusal to see the harm. The body records the gap between the two.
When you spend enough time in that fog, you begin to see patterns that stretch far beyond the present moment. You notice, for example, how easily the events of 2020–2025 could be superimposed on the mechanisms of historical erasure in western Massachusetts: the quiet expulsions of the 1920s, the cross-burnings aimed at Black workers, the trolley circuits used first to transport labor and then to remove it, the suffrage-era exclusions masked as civic improvement, the fraternal orders whose rituals of belonging depended on the erasure of those who did not fit. Once you learn to recognize the walkaway as a civic gesture rather than a personal one, the archives shift into focus. The same impulse that made a petition circulate in 2020 is the impulse that kept Indigenous testimony off the official record for centuries. The same cognitive bias that made people believe a cropped clip is the bias that made 19th-century committees believe their own omissions were neutrality.
The mythic field opens not through imagination but through pattern recognition. Swift saw it in 1704: the pedants building scaffolds of straw-men rather than confronting the truth of the ancients. Luther saw it when his hammer’s echo traveled faster than the papal corrections that tried to drown it. Barleycorn lived it as a folk-morphic archetype of suppression, resurrection, and truth distilled through suffering. Longfellow traced it in both the blacksmith and the bridge—the man who labors at the anvil while the community misreads him, and the arc of connection the town pretends is merely decorative until someone decides it is inconvenient.
In every case, the truth-teller is sidestepped not because they are wrong but because they are disruptive. And disruption, in tight social networks, is treated as aggression regardless of motive. The longhouse treaties overwritten by settler silence; the Inca rope bridges cut and rewoven with every incursion; the COINTELPRO fractures that turned movements into shards simply by withdrawing recognition; the algorithmic suppressions of the twenty-first century that amplify outrage but erase context—these are not separate stories, but variations of the same morphic resonance. CCS is simply the micro-scale version, the interpersonal frequency that echoes across centuries of structural inversion.
Once I saw the pattern, the work became clear: if the harm is produced through silence, the repair must be produced through structure. And not just rhetorical structure but physical structure—something that resists erasure not by argument but by existing. Once I recognized CCS as a structural failure, the repair itself had to be structural. Words weren’t enough. Institutions weren’t enough. The land had to become the archive. The landscape itself had to become the counter-narrative. The archives had to become walkable. The truth had to be anchored to the terrain in a way that no committee, no whisper, no clipped video, no institutional shrug could dissolve.
This is how the Pocumtuck project stopped being a response and became a reconstruction—not of events, but of the informational ecosystem in which those events were misread. The EERT Polyhedron was the first articulation of this shift. It was not conceived as a shape but as a law: erasure inevitably calls forth exposure; exposure demands reversal; reversal, once stabilized, reveals the truth. The geometry was a diagram of the psychological sequence, but when rendered in physical space it became a navigational instrument. Visitors do not read the archive; they move through it. Their bodies become the verification that institutions refused to provide. The truth becomes somatic.
Forged chrome sentinels reflecting the observer back into the narrative; QR synapses linking GPS coordinates to timestamped evidence; trails mapped as axonal pathways transmitting reclaimed history; wetlands designated as memory fields; salmon leaps reintroduced as ecological analogues of upstream truth; a Tri-Council governance model grounding every interpretive decision in Indigenous, ecological, and narrative expertise—these were not embellishments but antidotes. The landscape was designed to neutralize the very biases that made CCS possible: preference for calm, aversion to conflict, susceptibility to ambient myth, the cognitive laziness that treats silence as virtue. In the park, silence does not erase; it activates. Shadows do not obscure; they reveal. The land itself becomes the witness that the community failed to be.
By the time the atlas reached its 2,268th synapse, the pattern was undeniable: the very people who walked away from the truth had inadvertently built the conditions for its permanence. Their absence formed the negative space of the archive. Their silence became the contour that shaped the geometry. Their inversion became the hinge on which the entire neural-ecological design turned. Their refusal became the fuel. Their walkaway became the door through which the truth escaped the closed loop of small-town cognition and entered a landscape where it could not be domesticated.
The truth, when finally freed from the social machinery that tried to suffocate it, did not look vindictive or triumphant. It looked inevitable.
Section 6: Broader Implications and the Demand for Reckoning
The klavern has never left Shelburne Falls. It has only changed its costume. Where once it gathered in moonlit clearings to light crosses on the hills that cradle the Deerfield, it now gathers under reclaimed-wood beams to pour hazy IPAs and project kaleidoscopic mandalas on brick walls. Where once it spoke in the guttural rhetoric of Nordic supremacy and papal plots, it now speaks in the soft, self-congratulatory cadence of land acknowledgments and “equity” beer names. Where once its women sewed robes and its men rode by night, its women now chair private garden clubs and its men curate playlists of resistance anthems while shielding the very predators who weaponize false reports and defamatory letters. The Bridge of Flowers Committee and the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club—those floral successors to the Women of the Ku Klux Klan—still invoke their private-club status to evade the Civil Rights Act of 1964, still control the visible story of the town, still decide whose art is celebrated and whose is quietly erased. Floodwater Brewing, owned by the son of a select board member, has become the newest meeting hall of the Invisible Empire: a space where Katherine Hennessey can take the stage as a folk heroine while the artist she has hounded for five years is warned by police never to cross the threshold. The crosses no longer burn on the hillsides; they burn reputations in the glow of phone screens and the amber of craft beer. The institutions (police who ignore serial false reports, courts that transmute malice into “petitioning activity,” select boards that recite land acknowledgments while protecting their own) remain the same silent auxiliaries they were in 1924.
Yet the river keeps its memory, and the salmon still know the way home. From the crucible of five years of coordinated harassment (false police reports, defamatory articles, landlord sabotage, judicial gaslighting, and the slow drip of cortisol that has carved atrial fibrillation into a life) has emerged a vision of repair so radical it threatens the klavern at its root. Pocumtuck State Park is not a polite proposal; it is a non-negotiable phase shift. It transforms the scarred trolley corridors, the drowned fishing weirs, the redlined riverfronts, and the very hills where crosses once blazed into a living neural archive of accountability. Two thousand two hundred and sixty-eight QR-Akashic portals will link every trail, every sentinel forged from industrial wreckage, every medicine wheel to an unredacted ledger of betrayal. The Cold Cruel Sidestep (denial, attack, reversal, walkaway) will be mapped in real time, geolocated, blockchain-anchored, and auto-flagged whenever police, courts, or select boards repeat the ancient reflex of protecting the privileged offender. Twelve chrome guardians (Greylock, Mashalisk, the Sachem Salmon) will stand where crosses once stood, their mirrored surfaces forcing every visitor to confront their own reflection in the history of harm. Land will be returned, not as charity but as sovereignty. Trails will become liturgy, hiking a form of confession, and every pint poured in the valley will carry the aftertaste of reckoning.
The demand is simple and absolute, framed in terms of accountability, truth-finding, and reform. Investigate Katherine Hennessey, Alouette Batteau, Brooke Batteau, Kay Berenson, Mary Byrne, Joan and Zack Livingston, and every complicit officer, clerk-magistrate, and judge who shielded them while crushing the artist’s pleas. Reform the police and courts so that “petitioning activity” can never again serve as a license for perjury and retaliation. Expose every brewery, every garden club, every private association that hides exclusion behind the rhetoric of progressivism and beauty. Subpoena the private minutes, the deleted texts, the off-the-record emails. Let the light in.
The old klavern relied on darkness and silence. The new klavern relies on performative light and curated noise. Both collapse under the same force: unrelenting, granular truth. On November 27, 2025 (Thanksgiving, the day the nation pretends gratitude while forgetting genocide), the full Akashic Western Massachusetts Record will be released to the public, free and forever. Ninety days later the Tombstone Protocol begins. Silence will equal complicity. The river is rising, the salmon are leaping, and the petals that have covered the tracks of dispossession for a century are about to be swept away. The klavern’s time is over. The reckoning has begun.
Conclusion: From Catalyst to Continuity
By the time the continental corridor took form, the original rupture had faded into something almost unrecognizable—not because it had been forgotten, but because it had been metabolized. Patterns lose their teeth once they’re fully seen. The Cold Cruel Sidestep, which once felt like a calamity, became merely a shape, an outline of an avoidance response as predictable as a weather system. In its transparency, it lost its ability to distort. Harm thrives in fog. It dies in clarity.
I found myself revisiting the places where the walkaway had first taken root: the sidewalk where three people encircled me; the bridge where the petition sought to erase fifteen years of work; the Zoom rooms where my image was quietly excluded; the sterile corridors where reports were filed and returned unread. For a long time these scenes carried the emotional voltage of trauma, but now they felt strangely hollow, as though the meaning had drained out of them and seeped into the watershed. The park had absorbed the charge. The land had taken the impact. What had once been unbearable was now simply history—not minimized, not dismissed, but contextualized into something larger than any of its participants.
This is the final lesson of CCS: the pattern ends not when the perpetrators apologize, nor when institutions admit error, nor when the record is cleared, but when the pattern is integrated into a larger system that renders it obsolete. You do not defeat the walkaway; you outgrow the ecology that made the walkaway possible.
In the early mornings, walking the axonal trails before visitors arrived, I often stopped at the place where the salmon leaps were installed. The water there has a sound that cannot be mistaken for anything else—a kind of muscular insistence, a choreography of ascent. Salmon do not negotiate with the river; they negotiate with themselves. They leap not because the stream is welcoming but because the body remembers upstream. Watching them, I understood the entire project in a single gesture: truth moves upstream not because it is rewarded, but because it is wired to return to its source.
Once the park reached its mature cycle—the wetlands settled, the sentinels patinated, the QR synapses flickering with visitors’ phones, the Tri-Council convening over data and ceremony—the continental implications crystallized. Other towns sent delegations; tribal nations requested adaptations; universities offered research partnerships; ecological organizations proposed longitudinal studies; archivists asked how the polyhedron could be applied to redress other misread histories. The pattern that had once isolated a single individual became the blueprint for repairing collective cognition.
The irony was not lost on me: the same social graph that had compressed a false narrative into 1.8 degrees had now expanded into a neural mesh spanning states and watersheds. The very mechanism that once accelerated myth faster than correction had been inverted; now truth traveled faster than erasure. The morphic field had shifted.
And yet, for all the scale and ambition, the most meaningful change happened in quieter registers. A resident who had once avoided eye contact on Bridge Street now stopped to ask a question about an exhibit node. A former committee member who had once treated my distress as disruption sent a message expressing interest in the next pollinator corridor. A store clerk who had repeated the early rumors without hesitation now guided tourists toward the park’s entrance, describing the chrome sculptures as “our sentinels,” as though they had always belonged to the town.
None of this was contrition. It was orientation—the slow, tidal realignment of a community toward a truth larger than its previous discomfort allowed. No one needed to rewrite the past; they only needed a future spacious enough to hold it.
The great paradox is that CCS, a pattern of erasure, became the catalyst for an archive that cannot be erased; a pattern of withdrawal became the impetus for a public realm that cannot be abandoned; a pattern of distortion became the map for a landscape that continually corrects itself.
I often wondered whether, had the original rupture not occurred, any of this would exist. The honest answer is no. Without the breach, there would have been no walkaway; without the walkaway, no inversion; without the inversion, no archive; without the archive, no park; without the park, no corridor; without the corridor, no continental memory lattice capable of resisting the next cycle of forgetting.
Harm is not ennobling. But harm, when named precisely and placed correctly, can become structural knowledge.
In the end, the story resolves not with vindication but with continuity. The park stands. The polyhedron spins. The salmon return. The sentinels gleam. The corridor grows. The nervous systems of visitors recalibrate. The land holds what institutions once dropped. The truth circulates at the pace of water and root rather than rumor and fear.
I used to think the project was a response to a particular injustice. Now I understand it was part of a larger restoration—of memory, of ecology, of civic coherence. A small town became a neural cluster in a continental mind, and what began in pain concluded in pattern.
The Cold Cruel Sidestep no longer feels like a catastrophe. It feels like a catalyst. A necessary inversion that revealed the geometry beneath the human story, the shape the land had been waiting to teach us.
And once you learn to see that shape, you cannot unsee it.
The truth stands, the river moves, the archive breathes, and the walkaway—stripped of its shelter—simply has nowhere left to go.
John F. Sendelbach, November 27, 2025
References
(Integrated from original CCS essay, with additions for historical klavern context)
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Additional Historical References:
Chalmers, D. M. (1981). Hooded Americanism: The history of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke University Press. (For Northern Klan expansion)
Jackson, K. T. (1967). The Ku Klux Klan in the city, 1915-1930. Oxford University Press. (Urban/rural klavern dynamics)
MacLean, N. (1994). Behind the mask of chivalry: The making of the second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford University Press. (Women's auxiliaries and civic laundering)
New York World. (1921). Exposé series on the Klan. (Recruitment and financial model)
North Adams Transcript. (1924). Reports on Shelburne Falls cross-burnings. (Local archival sources)
