Reflection on Solomon Wilbert:
Or, How I First Heard About the Treasure
Or, How I First Heard About the Treasure
I never got a chance to meet Solomon Wilbert.
He was a quiet man who lived a quiet life: writing for a newspaper, collecting facts about his hometown and enjoying his friends and family. It took me months to dig up a picture of him, or to meet someone who knew him firsthand.
For such a quiet man, you think he wouldn't leave much behind; but, that would be an understatement. Solomon collected odd and ends, bits and bobs; creating the most eccentric and odd museum of records, newspaper clippings, photographs, labels, check stubs, and documents you ever heard of.
Somehow, all of this ended up at St. Cecilia's, lodged away in a closet to be forgotten. A mountain of files and bankers boxes waiting for someone to get desperate or bored enough to sort through it and clean the unfortunate closet it happened to be located in. Nobody got quite bored or desperate enough to tackle the challenge, until last spring...
At first the collection seemed to have no purpose or meaning. Maps of the area were stapled to stories of Spanish expeditions into the midwest, searching for gold. Diaries from the Civil War were mixed with court cases from the 1970's. Local maps were systematically crossed off as if Solomon was searching for something. I was a third of the way through the papers before I even caught a whiff of the secret behind this obsession: treasure.
At first it seemed fantastic. Who finds treasure in the midwest? But after the sixth or tenth time it came came, stings started to look different... The dots started to connect themselves, and I found myself thinking the craziest of words... What if?
I must admit, the quality of Solomon's research declined in his later years. Neatly penciled notes turned into scrawls that could take twenty minutes to decipher. It looked like an obsession that would die with him. But somehow he hung on, and the thread of truth that worked its way through the yellowing pages of maps, tax records, and redacted interviews eventually lead somewhere: somewhere that was close to the treasure, only a few steps away. But it wasn't meant to be...
Solomon Wilbert passed away on a cloudy April day in 2010. He never found the treasure he was looking for. The research he amassed over a lifetime almost went to waste. To be honest, some days I'm not entirely sure it leads anywhere. But then... Things just come together, and I wonder:
What if... What if we got enough help... Could it all be true?
He was a quiet man who lived a quiet life: writing for a newspaper, collecting facts about his hometown and enjoying his friends and family. It took me months to dig up a picture of him, or to meet someone who knew him firsthand.
For such a quiet man, you think he wouldn't leave much behind; but, that would be an understatement. Solomon collected odd and ends, bits and bobs; creating the most eccentric and odd museum of records, newspaper clippings, photographs, labels, check stubs, and documents you ever heard of.
Somehow, all of this ended up at St. Cecilia's, lodged away in a closet to be forgotten. A mountain of files and bankers boxes waiting for someone to get desperate or bored enough to sort through it and clean the unfortunate closet it happened to be located in. Nobody got quite bored or desperate enough to tackle the challenge, until last spring...
At first the collection seemed to have no purpose or meaning. Maps of the area were stapled to stories of Spanish expeditions into the midwest, searching for gold. Diaries from the Civil War were mixed with court cases from the 1970's. Local maps were systematically crossed off as if Solomon was searching for something. I was a third of the way through the papers before I even caught a whiff of the secret behind this obsession: treasure.
At first it seemed fantastic. Who finds treasure in the midwest? But after the sixth or tenth time it came came, stings started to look different... The dots started to connect themselves, and I found myself thinking the craziest of words... What if?
I must admit, the quality of Solomon's research declined in his later years. Neatly penciled notes turned into scrawls that could take twenty minutes to decipher. It looked like an obsession that would die with him. But somehow he hung on, and the thread of truth that worked its way through the yellowing pages of maps, tax records, and redacted interviews eventually lead somewhere: somewhere that was close to the treasure, only a few steps away. But it wasn't meant to be...
Solomon Wilbert passed away on a cloudy April day in 2010. He never found the treasure he was looking for. The research he amassed over a lifetime almost went to waste. To be honest, some days I'm not entirely sure it leads anywhere. But then... Things just come together, and I wonder:
What if... What if we got enough help... Could it all be true?