Six Years in the American Petri Dish of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
Where a Man Built Things from Stone and the Town Tried to Bury Him Under It
Let us begin with the flowers, because the flowers are the key to everything, the Rosetta Stone of the entire catastrophe, the single most clarifying fact in a story dense with clarifying facts. The Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, is exactly what it sounds like: a former trolley trestle over the Deerfield River that a women's club decided, in 1929, to cover with perennials. More than five hundred varieties. It is genuinely beautiful. Tourists come from three states to walk it. The Deerfield River runs twenty feet below through ancient glacial potholes the size of Volkswagens. The bridge connects the villages of Shelburne and Buckland across a gap that is, depending on your disposition, either picturesque or symbolic. What you need to understand about the Bridge of Flowers — what you must hold in your mind as a kind of north star for everything that follows — is that I spent fourteen years in professional service to that bridge. I designed and built permanent installations on it. I embedded polished black stones in its fountain pavement as a permanent anti-racist tribute to a stonemason's biracial daughters, because he asked for something lasting and I understood what lasting meant. I was described by the committee chair as “a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to us when we've had particular needs.” And then, in June of 2020, I was subjected to a public cancellation campaign that attempted to have my work removed from the bridge, organized by a 18-year-old woman who was not present at the incident in question, processed without a single phone call to the man whose name was in the headline, and amplified by a Facebook video that began recording at the exact moment the physical confrontation that had produced my visible distress came to an end. Not before. At the exact moment it ended. Alouette Batteau hit Facebook Live at 10:41:01 AM. The two minutes before that timestamp — the face within twelve inches of mine, the fists, the crowd pressing me against the east railing, the three ignored requests to step back, the police officer fifteen feet away who did not move — do not exist on the public record because they occurred before anyone thought to document them. Or perhaps because someone decided not to. The flowers are beautiful. The timing was precise.
This is my story about a small town in western Massachusetts, which means it is a story about America, which means it is a story about the particular texture of progressive cruelty — the specific flavor of institutional cowardice that has developed in communities that believe very sincerely in the language of justice while practicing something that would give justice a migraine. Shelburne Falls is a village of roughly two thousand souls straddling the Deerfield River and two county lines, presenting to the world a face of charming authenticity — locally sourced, wildcraft-adjacent, deeply committed to the right politics, the right signs in the window, the right vocabulary for discussions of harm. It is the kind of place where the farmers market is a religious experience, everybody has a strong opinion about the architecture of the new pavilion in the town center, and the phrase “community standards” gets deployed with the confidence of someone who has never had to personally defend what that means. It is also the kind of place where a police sergeant can write in an official incident report that he has decided not to call the subject of a complaint because it “hasn't worked in the past,” and that report becomes the operational policy of the department for four years, and nobody says anything, and the same sergeant later physically jockeys his body in front of a citizen's camera at a road race while the police chief threatens the citizen with arrest for trying to speak, and then the same department requests and receives a merit raise thirteen days after a federal judge denies its detective qualified immunity for manufacturing probable cause, and the select board chair calls this “well worth it.” This is a very specific kind of place.
I arrived in Shelburne Falls in 2006 with a Cornell horticulture degree, a UMass landscape architecture background, a welding torch, and a habit of building things that lasted. I built a bench on the Bridge of Flowers that people still sit on to grieve their dead. I built the trolley gate that recalls the 1908 trestle origins of the structure. I approved Paul Forth's Black Stones of Africa into the Pothole Fountain pavement — polished stones shaped to the continent of Africa, nine years before anyone called me a racist. I built a ten-foot brook trout in Greenfield from fourteen hundred pieces of donated stainless steel cutlery, because public art should mean something to the specific body of water it stands next to. I drilled the anchor holes for the Sojourner Truth memorial plaques in slanted granite in Northampton and cemented them permanently into place. I had a commission from the Culinary Institute of America and an AIA Honor Award and a thirty-year record built almost entirely on the recommendations of women who had seen the work and decided to call. This is the professional record of a racist misogynist who hates women and targets children, according to the narrative constructed in the summer of 2020 and circulating through Shelburne Falls ever since — pre-loaded into strangers before they've said hello, delivered as established fact by a woman I had never met to my friend at a tag sale in May of 2026. “She goes around town telling everyone you hate women.” The stranger said this without hesitation. She had not heard one word of my account. That is not ignorance. That is infrastructure.
The founding event is June 6, 2020. A Black Lives Matter demonstration on the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls, organized without notifying adjacent business owners, co-organized by Julie Petty — who at that point had been my closest friend for forty years and did not tell me the event was happening. I found out when my road was closed. I walked to the bridge to document the closure during the COVID-era economic shutdown, which was my legal right, and was immediately surrounded by six to eight people, pressed against the east railing, and had Katherine Hennessey close to within twelve inches of my face with fists visibly clenched, screaming “we're doing this because we love you,” while a uniformed police officer stood fifteen feet away and watched. Then Alouette Batteau raised her phone and hit record. The crowd went quiet at 10:41:01 AM. The recording began at 10:41:01 AM. What viewers saw was a visibly agitated man surrounded by calm people asking him to be quiet. What had produced that agitation is not on the tape. It is in the two minutes before the tape. The tape is the argument. The two minutes before the tape are the truth. Twenty-two thousand people saw the argument. Essentially nobody saw the truth. Within hours the petition was live, organized by a twenty-one-year-old who wasn't there. Within days it had six hundred signatures. The Bridge of Flowers Committee — which had worked with me for fourteen years without complaint — was holding secret Zoom meetings about removing my work. The Greenfield Recorder ran two front-page articles without calling me. I lost thirty pounds in ten days from the physiological shock of watching a fabricated identity attach to my name in real time while institutions processed complaints from people who had never been asked to substantiate them.
Consider, for a moment, the anti-racism plaque. The Bridge of Flowers Committee installed one in June 2020, at the entrance garden of the bridge, in response to the petition. Committee chair Annette Szpila described it as honoring “the anti-racism spirit of the petition.” The plaque was placed approximately three feet from the permanent anti-racist installation invented by the mason Paul Forth, that I had approved, built at the bridge at the committee's request, which had been embedded in that pavement for years, which none of them had apparently thought about when deciding how to respond to a campaign calling me a racist. The irony achieves a kind of structural perfection that is almost too neat to be real, the accusation installed over the fountain with the embedded as existing refutation... on the acclaimed pedestrian bridge in western Massachusetts, commemorating nothing more clearly than the committee's failure to make a single phone call. America is occasionally a poet. It is rarely a fair witness.
The permission structure is the hinge on which the next four years turn. On July 13, 2021, Shelburne-Buckland Police Sergeant Kurt Gilmore wrote in his official incident report the following sentence: “I told Hennessey that I was not going to call Sendelbach because it hasn't worked in the past.” Read that sentence with the care it deserves. A police sergeant, in an official document, in the year of our Lord 2021, explained that he had decided not to contact the subject of a complaint — not because the complaint lacked merit, not because he had reviewed evidence, not for any articulable law enforcement reason, but because previous attempts at contact had not produced whatever outcome he found satisfying. He put this in writing. He filed it. Nobody above him said anything. That sentence is not a lapse. That sentence is a policy. It states explicitly: one party in this dispute will receive police services. The other will not. It was followed for four years. Between 2020 and 2023, Katherine Hennessey filed approximately eight police reports against me. I was never contacted before any of them. Not once. The first time the Shelburne-Buckland Police Department initiated any communication with me about any of those reports was March 3, 2023, when a process server handed me an emergency Harassment Prevention Order. Three years of reports. Zero interviews. One quiet sentence in a 2021 incident report, operationalized as departmental policy, sitting in the file like a small bomb that everyone chose to step around.
All eight reports collapsed when examined. The March 2023 emergency HPO — obtained via a sworn affidavit claiming I had “homicidal tendencies” and would “try to hurt or even kill” her family — was vacated by Judge Mazanec after he heard the audio recording of the encounter the affidavit described. I was calm. She was laughing. The charge of criminal harassment, co-signed by Officers Pettengill and Jenkins — whose own report states they arrived “aware of prior incidents” and who had never met me before they co-signed the document — collapsed at a June 2023 show-cause hearing when a clerk-magistrate reviewed approximately one hour of evidence and found no probable cause. The first time anyone looked, the charge fell apart. Jenkins sat in the room and watched it happen. He generated no perjury referral. He took no corrective action. Three separate HPO petitions from the same complainant — denied, denied, denied with prejudice, the last designation reserved in Massachusetts courts for documented bad faith — and zero perjury referrals from any of them. The machinery of accusation ran for three years on municipal fuel without anyone in authority asking why none of the complaints had ever survived the first moment anyone reviewed evidence. The machinery ran because the machinery had been told to run. That is what the Gilmore sentence means. It is the key that winds the clock.
What does it cost a human body to live inside that machinery for six years? This is not a rhetorical question.
Atrial fibrillation onset, formally diagnosed in 2021, attributed by my physician to the sustained stress of the documented harassment pattern. The American Heart Association — which has no opinion about any of the parties in this story and no interest in its outcome — notes that untreated atrial fibrillation reduces life expectancy by five to ten years and that repeated episodes are self-reinforcing, each one lowering the threshold for the next, the heart progressively learning that chaos is its default state. On October 19, 2025, the Massachusetts State Police documented my heart rate at 130 to 230 beats per minute on a LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor at their Shelburne barracks. Officer Sheerer witnessed the episode and called EMS. The machine has no motive and no capacity for exaggeration. It reads electrical activity and reports the number. Three days earlier, on October 16, Chief Gregory Bardwell had been presented with me in documented atrial fibrillation at the Neighbors gas station on the Mohawk Trail, asked to feel my pulse, and said “I don't want to.” He then stated — incorrectly, under Massachusetts law — that he was unable to charge false police reports, and walked into the convenience store for coffee. This exchange is on video. The state trooper called EMS. The chief called for a medium regular. The cardiac monitor was not surprised by what it found three days later. Neither was I.
The Walker letter deserves its own moment of silence. On September 6, 2024, Katherine Hennessey wrote to my landlord Brad Walker at The Mill: “He's a menace to the community and it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.” This letter reached Detective Tucker Jenkins. He read it twelve days late. He filed no report. He issued no warning. He made no contact. He took no documented action of any kind. She had written the prediction in his professional inbox. He read it and did nothing. Fourteen months later, on a public sidewalk, in front of witnesses, she fulfilled it. The sentence “it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt” is either a threat or a prophecy or both, and it sat in a detective's possession for over a year before she made it true. The Walker letter is the document that converts the entire six-year arc from a pattern into a test. The department was tested. It failed. Then it asked for more money.
November 30, 2025, is where the argument about whether this constitutes a pattern or a series of unfortunate coincidences ends permanently. At approximately 5:32 PM in front of Floodwater Brewing on State Street in Buckland, Brook Batteau charged out of the building and shoved me hard off the curb with both hands. I fell to the pavement. Batteau jumped on me from behind and began punching. A second individual grabbed both of my elbows and pinned my arms. Katherine Hennessey exited the brewery behind the attacker and struck me repeatedly in the head and face. I did not retaliate. I screamed for help. Eight to ten adult bystanders were present on a public sidewalk in the middle of a village. None of them intervened. My iPhone had fallen to the road during the initial shove. The screen was still lit. It was still recording. Katherine Hennessey bent down, picked it up, walked approximately seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in. I watched the lit screen arc into the water. She walked back and resumed striking and kicking me from behind — a second, separate act of battery, occurring after a deliberate pause that included the destruction of evidence. In the 2020 Facebook thread, in the middle of the original mob, a commenter named Victoria Rolon had written: “I would throw his camera in the water.” Five years and five months between the ideation and the execution. The mob imagined it in June of 2020. Katherine Hennessey delivered it in November of 2025 with the purposeful gait of someone completing a task that had been on the list for a long time.
Zachary Livingston, co-owner of Floodwater Brewing, gave Sergeant Gilmore a sworn statement in which Brook Batteau admitted to him immediately after the assault: “You don't understand, John has been after my family for five years.” Livingston said: “But you still shouldn't have pushed him.” This admission is a confession in the plain sense of the word. What Batteau calls “being after his family for five years” is five years of my attempting to get a defamatory video removed from the internet. He was present at the December 2025 HPO hearing. He had told a neutral witness with conviction that he had acted on five years of accumulated grievance. He chose not to say this under oath. The man who charged out of a brewery carrying five years of narrative violence as his moral authorization declined to repeat the story in a room where it could be examined. His silence in that courtroom is its own kind of document.
Now we arrive at the Shelburne Police Department's response to a documented assault with witnesses, a neutral business owner's sworn statement, and a recording device in the Deerfield River: to suggest, the same night, before his investigation was drafted, that the assault defendants seek Harassment Prevention Orders against the assault victim. Sergeant Gilmore's own summons report states he “suggested” this. This is not alleged. It is in the official document. The man who later issued probable cause against Katherine Hennessey for two counts of assault and battery and malicious destruction of property also, before interviewing me, suggested she pursue civil legal protection against the man she had just been charged with beating. Three courts subsequently denied my petitions for protection, each starting fresh, each constructed around the framing Gilmore's coaching had established the night of the assault, none with access to Judge Mazanec's three prior not-credible findings against the same petitioners. The architecture of the counter-filing that successfully reframed a criminal battery as a mutual harassment situation in three consecutive civil proceedings was built on the night of the assault, by a police sergeant, before his own investigation was drafted. An officer does not do this by accident. An officer does this because a decision has already been made about which party in the dispute is a community member and which is a problem, and that decision shapes every subsequent action as naturally and inevitably as water finding its grade.
Camera sources were never requested. The Neighbors Gas Station cameras would have proven Hennessey's December 1 sworn affidavit geographically impossible — she claimed she had “chosen to drive away” upon seeing me, when in fact she had driven past the store entrance to the far end of the lot where my van was parked, crossed my rented property line, executed a peace sign followed by a middle finger, mouthed profanity, and sped away. The newspaper rack she cited as her alleged destination is not visible from where she would have needed to drive to reach my van. But we do not have the footage, because Gilmore never requested it, and I couldn't locate the relevant window without my phone, which was in the river, and the footage is now presumed gone. Crystal Visions, ground-floor business at 44 State Street, my old shop of nine years, with a direct camera sightline to the phone toss location: never contacted. A law office across the street with an exterior camera covering the same sidewalk: never contacted. The brewery interior footage: requested nine days after the assault, after the overwrite window had closed. Tom Del Negro — identified by witnesses as the man shouting from the brewery door before Batteau charged, identified by me to Gilmore through the brewery window that same night — appears in the summons report only as “a male” I “pointed at.” He is never identified. Never interviewed. Never appears in the official record of a violent assault he is alleged to have initiated. He was erased from the document. This is not incompetence in the way that misfiling a form is incompetence. This is a managed record. The evidence that most directly threatened the preferred narrative was allowed to reach its natural expiration date while the department completed its paperwork.
Tucker Jenkins is a document unto himself. In March 2023, he co-signed a criminal harassment charge against a man he had never met, based entirely on the account of a complainant whose every prior report had collapsed on evidence review, driving to her residence carrying — in his own report's words — the weight of every “prior incident” they were already “aware of,” building a charge from one side's unverified complaints without a single phone call to the accused. The charge collapsed the first time anyone looked. Jenkins sat in the room and watched. He generated no perjury referral and took no corrective action. In January 2025, a separate investigation found he had made twenty-five phone calls totaling sixty-seven minutes to an eighteen-year-old female student at Mohawk Trail Regional School over a thirty-day period and had deleted text messages related to those contacts. The Berkshire District Attorney's Office found the conduct exceeded professional boundaries. The school district terminated his position. A community petition calling for his removal from the police department gathered over two hundred signatures. Jenkins declined to be interviewed by DA investigators. Chief Bardwell publicly characterized the two hundred plus signatures as “reckless spreading of reputation-wrecking rumors” — a remarkable statement from a public official about citizens exercising their constitutional right to petition their government, and one that reveals with unusual clarity whose reputations Bardwell considers worth protecting in Shelburne Falls. The Select Board voted to retain Jenkins in a three-hour executive session. On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni denied qualified immunity to Jenkins personally in Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al., finding it plausible that he had “provided misleading information” and ignored exculpatory facts to manufacture probable cause. The mechanism the federal court found plausible maps directly onto Report 23SHL-8-AR: an officer building a charge from one side's unverified complaints while ignoring everything on the other side. Thirteen days after the federal ruling, Chief Bardwell submitted the merit raise request. He described his crew as “fantastic.” Select Board Chair Rick LaPierre called it “well worth it.” Nobody asked the obvious question: well worth what, exactly, and measured against what standard, and has the word “fantastic” lost all traction as a descriptor, or does it now simply mean “employed and not yet deposed.”
The race day incident is where the civil rights violations stop being abstract and start being visible on camera in broad daylight. August 10, 2024, tax-free weekend — the biggest retail day of the Franklin County calendar — and the Bridge of Flowers Classic has shut down the commercial heart of Shelburne Falls with its annual ritual disregard for the businesses that pay taxes on State Street three hundred and sixty-five days a year. A sign on a telephone pole. Chief Bardwell's personal truck among the vehicles blocking a road I needed to reach my own office for a postal deadline that would now be missed. When I sought redress from race director Michael McCusker — walked up to a man on a public road, a completely legal act protected by the First Amendment, conducted in broad daylight with a camera rolling — McCusker got in my face and offered nothing except a sarcastic remark about my memory, and when a volunteer in a turquoise shirt threatened to go on Facebook and destroy my reputation, McCusker stood there and watched. And then Amanda Kingsley, first time "meeting" her — who in June 2020 had publicly called for boycotting Metal Stone Arts and advocated organizing lists of racist businesses, and who therefore arrived at race day 2024 with a four-year documented conflict of interest that should have disqualified her from any official role involving me — refused passage, called me an asshole, and said “we've been through this before,” which is true, we had, just not in the way she meant it.
Chief Bardwell arrived and threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct. Not the man hurling expletives. Not the man threatening to go on Facebook. Me — the man with the complaint. When I asked him to define “appropriate level,” he scoffed and walked away. He issued a threat and was not interested in defending it. Simultaneously — and this is what the video documents with a specificity that resists alternative interpretation — Sergeant Gilmore was physically jockeying his body back and forth to keep himself between my camera and the turquoise-shirt volunteer. He moved when my camera moved. Not once or twice but repeatedly, the deliberate kinetics of a man who understands exactly what a camera sees and is determined to control the frame. Thirty to forty feet separated me from the volunteer. Gilmore was not managing a physical threat. He was managing a visual record. He then shook the volunteer's hand as the man drove away. The First Amendment does not have an asterisk that reads “unless a police officer has decided to move in front of your lens.” Two officers. One target. Two constitutional violations running in parallel, on camera, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, while the man being protected hurled expletives and nobody said a word to him. This was not race day behavior. This was the permission structure wearing a yellow safety vest.
This is the thing about small towns — and the progressive variety in particular — that takes a while to understand if you've been raised on the comfortable theory that cruelty wears predictable costumes: the permission structure does not require malice. It requires only the consistent application of different rules to different people, the habitual choice of whose complaints get heard and whose get filed, whose phone calls get returned and whose get added to the list of things it hasn't worked to respond to in the past. Gilmore did not need to hate me to write that sentence in 2021. He needed only to have already decided, at some level below conscious articulation, that one party in the dispute was a credible community member and the other was a problem. Once that decision was made, every subsequent action followed with the logical inevitability of water finding its grade. You don't investigate the complaints against your community members. You investigate the complaints of your community members. You don't review eight reports for evidence quality when the complainant is a community member. You process them. You don't generate perjury referrals when a judge finds the testimony not credible, because the community member you've known for years is probably right and the judge can be wrong. You don't preserve camera footage when the footage might complicate the narrative you've organized around. And you suggest that assault defendants seek civil protection orders on the night of a battery because they are community members who are clearly frightened, and if that also happens to neutralize the assault victim's legal options for the next three proceedings, well, that's just how things work out sometimes. The permission structure doesn't announce itself. It accumulates. And then one November evening a woman throws a phone in a river and it has all been building to exactly this.
There is a woman who attended a public event November 22, 2025 wearing a paper-maché frog mask specifically to avoid being recognized, then walked directly up to me, said “John, I hope you get the help you need,” called police claiming victimhood, and flipped that reality in an HPO petition December 1, 2025, in which she swore she had “stayed quiet” during the interaction. There are fourteen minutes of video and full transcript documentation that she did not stay quiet. She said my name. She delivered a taunt. She does not recognize the contradiction because from inside the narrative there is no contradiction. I am the danger. She is the community member. The frog mask is just prudent preparation. This detail sounds invented. It is documented.
On March 23, 2026, while her parents were on bail for assault and battery against me, Alouette Batteau posted Instagram lyrics expressing a wish to kill a man with bare hands, captioned “this one goes out to my stalker! teehee wish i was joking.” The word “stalker” is not generic in this record. It is the specific and exclusive label this family has applied to me in every sworn affidavit, HPO petition, police report, and piece of live court testimony across six years of proceedings. “Wish i was joking” removes the artistic defense from inside the same sentence. A named collaborator commented “hope they d!e!!!!!” — three exclamation points and a character substitution that represents the contemporary equivalent of swearing a solemn oath. Chief Bardwell reviewed the post and issued a written response classifying it as “part of a musical performance” that did not “clearly establish that the statements are directed toward you specifically.” He copied the Northwestern District Attorney on this response. He sent it while Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were on bail for assault, while a court-imposed stay-away order was in effect, while a federal civil rights lawsuit was in active discovery against his own detective. He read a post that said “this one goes out to my stalker” and concluded it might not be directed at the man this family has called a stalker in every legal proceeding for six years. This determination required a level of institutional commitment to a preferred conclusion that goes beyond incompetence into something that begins to resemble a vocation.
The Pocumtuck people fished the falls at Salmon Falls for thousands of years before the first dam went in in 1798 and the nitrogen cycle broke and the salmon stopped running. The salmon carried forty to eighty tons of marine-derived nitrogen up the river each year — to the forest floor, to the Three Sisters gardens, to the watershed ecology that sustained everything. Eight dams in a century. The salmon blocked. The nitrogen severed. The Pocumtuck dispossessed. The agricultural system that had fed the valley for millennia defunded by the simple act of pouring concrete in a river. Shelburne Falls was built on the trolley corridor that displaced the sixty or so Black residents who had lived there before the expansion required their absence. A burning KKK cross was floated under the Iron Bridge in 1924. These are not ancient histories sealed behind museum glass. They are the morphic substrate of the place, the gravitational field that bends every present action toward its historical precedents, the reason a town that posts Black Lives Matter signs in its windows can also construct and sustain a six-year institutional campaign against a man who built anti-racist art into its most beloved public space. The town did not invent the pattern. The town inherited it. The pattern is in the water. The pattern is in the soil. It is wearing it like a comfortable old garment that nobody has examined closely because nobody has had to, because the garment has always been here and the people who might have raised objections were either gone or quiet.
I know this now with the clarity of someone who has had every comfortable illusion stripped away. It is why, from inside the wreckage of my professional life and the documented deterioration of my cardiac function, I have been designing a Pocumtuck State Park proposal — reparative landscape architecture that would restore salmon passage to the Deerfield River watershed, honor the sixty displaced Black residents with sixty polished black stones in a stainless steel geodesic lattice, establish a ghost-frame trolley trestle planted with native vines along the corridor built on their displacement, build something that addresses what was actually taken from this valley rather than simply gesturing toward what was lost. The Pocumtuck State Park was not a thought I had before this campaign. It arrived through the destruction. The campaign that tried to erase me produced, as its primary unintended consequence, a man who has been stripped of everything he had to protect by being agreeable and can now see the entire valley from the exposed position of someone standing on the thing that was supposed to bury him. This is what institutional injustice does when it miscalculates. It generates the very person it was trying to prevent. The scapegoat walks back in from the wilderness. The pattern that sent him out is named, mapped, built around.
She threw the phone in the river. She didn't throw the record. The record was already everywhere else
I am sixty years old. I have atrial fibrillation and a phone in the Deerfield River and a lawsuit with thirty named defendants and a federal case in active discovery and three citizen petitions in circulation and a website at johnsendelbach.com with no login and no fee where the entire archive is available to anyone who wants to read it. My bench is still on the Bridge of Flowers. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the Pothole Fountain pavement, three feet from the anti-racism plaque the committee installed to respond to the campaign calling me a racist. The brook trout is still in Greenfield. The salamander is still in Amherst. The Sojourner Truth plaques are still in the granite in Northampton, anchored by holes I drilled in 2002. The work is still in the ground. It cannot be deleted or memory-holed or thrown in a river. It predates the founding myth and it will outlast the mob because stone and welded steel do not care about Facebook and do not respond to petitions and were not designed with the permission of anyone whose opinion might change. A stranger told my friend at a tag sale that she'd heard I hate women. When she heard the actual story, she was visibly shaken. The poison is in the water. The record is not.
On the day Katherine Hennessey threw my phone into the Deerfield River, she confirmed every single thing I had been documenting for five years — confirmed it physically, in front of witnesses, with a neutral business owner's sworn statement attached, in an act the mob had first imagined in June of 2020 and that she performed in November of 2025 with the unhurried deliberateness of someone fulfilling a long-standing obligation. She bent down. She picked it up. She walked seventy-five feet to the bank. She threw it. She walked back and kept hitting me. The phone is gone. The record is not. The archive is open. The flowers are still blooming on the bridge, five hundred varieties above the potholes above the cold dark water where a screen that is no longer lit is still, in every meaningful sense, recording.
The phone is in the river. The record is not.
John F. Sendelbach
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026 · johnsendelbach.com