THE FREE PILE © 2026 John F. Sendelbach

Chapter One — The Free Pile

The sign at the end of the driveway said ESTATE in the hand of someone who had run out of marker halfway through, so the E was black and confident and the rest went gray and doubtful, and Cole thought, as he always thought, that the sign was more honest than whoever made it had intended. That was how an estate went. It started bold. It thinned out. By the end of a Saturday there'd be nothing at the top of the drive but folding tables and the smell of other people's basements, and someone would take down the sign and not save it, because nobody saves the sign.

He was there at six-forty. The sale started at seven. The dealers were already parked along both shoulders of the road, tailgates down, coffee going cold in the cup holders, and they nodded at him the way men nod at a thing they've decided not to worry about. Cole was not a worry to them. He didn't buy furniture, didn't buy gold, didn't run a booth or a website, didn't flip anything fast enough to matter. He bought what they'd throw in the truck at the end of the day for ten dollars a box just to not have to load it back out. He was, to the trade, a kind of weather. You didn't compete with weather. You just noted it and went on.

He kept his hands in his pockets until the door opened. It was a habit from a long time ago, a discipline, because his hands were the part of him that got him in trouble. They wanted to touch everything, and touching told him things, and knowing things at an estate sale before you were supposed to know them was a good way to make an enemy of a man whose whole morning depended on not knowing them yet.

THE FREE PILE

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach

Chapter One — The Free Pile

The sign at the end of the driveway said ESTATE in the hand of someone who had run out of marker halfway through, so the E was black and confident and the rest went gray and doubtful, and Cole thought, as he always thought, that the sign was more honest than whoever made it had intended. That was how an estate went. It started bold. It thinned out. By the end of a Saturday there'd be nothing at the top of the drive but folding tables and the smell of other people's basements, and someone would take down the sign and not save it, because nobody saves the sign.

He was there at six-forty. The sale started at seven. The dealers were already parked along both shoulders of the road, tailgates down, coffee going cold in the cup holders, and they nodded at him the way men nod at a thing they've decided not to worry about. Cole was not a worry to them. He didn't buy furniture, didn't buy gold, didn't run a booth or a website, didn't flip anything fast enough to matter. He bought what they'd throw in the truck at the end of the day for ten dollars a box just to not have to load it back out. He was, to the trade, a kind of weather. You didn't compete with weather. You just noted it and went on.

He kept his hands in his pockets until the door opened. It was a habit from a long time ago, a discipline, because his hands were the part of him that got him in trouble. They wanted to touch everything, and touching told him things, and knowing things at an estate sale before you were supposed to know them was a good way to make an enemy of a man whose whole morning depended on not knowing them yet.

The Four Blocked Flows: An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

The Four Blocked Flows

An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

Curatorial Introduction

The acquisition of the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract marks the first official, paid accession of the Mohawk Repair Institute. Purchased from an online antiquarian picker who recovered the document from an anonymous estate clearing in Maine, this deed is far more than a fragment of local ephemera. It provides a contractual snapshot of a town systematically re-engineered in the mid-19th century—a landscape where the same elite hands that dammed the river, channeled municipal capital, and constructed new civic spaces also signed off on the physical relocation of the dead.

Exhibition Overview: “The Four Blocked Flows” is an archival and topographical exhibition that uses the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract as a lens to analyze the systematic interruption of four interwoven systems of circulation in Shelburne Falls during the mid-19th century: biological (salmon), hydrological (streams), social (labor and capital), and memorial (the dead). The Mohawk Repair Institute presents this material not as antique nostalgia but as the evidentiary basis for design-driven interventions aimed at daylighting buried streams, re-marking forgotten graves, and restoring the town’s open circulation between past and present.

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

A Daylighting, Greenway, Watershed Learning, and Community Repair Proposal

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

OVERVIEW

Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.

Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.

The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.

Immediate Municipal Actions Required:

• Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
• Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
• Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
• Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

fish tour

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.

Happy Birthday to Omi: Erna Anna Marta

Today we light one up for Omi—Erna Anna Marta Knoop Sendelbach—born somewhere in the fog of 1900 Germany, back when the ground itself was starting to shake under the coming madness of the Weimar years. The family did the math and shipped three kids stateside—triage by ocean liner—because staying put was a losing equation. Omi lands here and the whole bloodline reroutes.

The notes on this photo are from my father, Frederick—three years old, already in the frame like a witness who doesn’t yet know what he’s witnessing. He’d grow up carrying the story in fragments. We never met our grandfather; heart gave out the day after Christmas in the 1940s—holiday lights still up, system offline.

Omi was partially deaf, which meant you didn’t talk to her, you projected. You leaned in and launched your words like they had to cross weather. So yes—if we’re loud, that’s not personality, that’s infrastructure. That’s inherited acoustics.

“Omi” just means grandmother in German. But in this house it meant: speak up, stay alive, cross oceans when you have to, and don’t expect the world to lower its volume for you.