Shadows on the Moon
By
Craig M. Sampson
(© 2013)
For Jane……..who believed in this more than I did
Vermont……the place that was once a fond childhood memory for me, now brings nothing but involuntary waves of fear. The uncontrollable spasms of fright and anxiety cause my brow to instantly fill with the wetness of nervous perspiration and bring an unsettling to my stomach that can bring me to my knees. For a short period of time, I really thought that everything that had gone on there was over—that the horror I experienced there was finished. But that was just a respite it seems and when I think of Vermont now, and it’s like some sort of dark shroud has been pulled over my vision—a dark and black feeling so oppressive that I just pray to lie sown and fade away. My friends find me moody and aloof and detached these days as I find myself simply not able to get past what this experience has taken from me.
The vivid, pristine images of the snow-covered village of Langston, or the idyllic endless waves of green rolling hills that are stereotypical of northern New England that filled my days as a young boy now consume me with fear and anger—perhaps irrational to the outside observer or perhaps to you as you read this story, but as real to me as the cold gusts of Canadian air that routinely bring an icy covering to the slopes of Stowe in January. Vermont…..I just hear the word now and simply try and forget. So far this has not worked…..the dagger of pain and loss are still as fresh as when I first felt them.
My therapist mostly just endures me these days I think….for whatever reason, I am not making much progress at getting beyond this anymore…I am not sure she even believes me now. In all fairness, I can see her perspective….not sure I would believe this either except that I was there. She tells me I will make progress when I am ready—with a not so subtle roll of her eyes which she thinks I am not picking up on. Not sure if I see this as utter professional exasperation on her part or maybe she is just tired of dealing with me in general….most of my former friends are. Or maybe, just maybe…..she is right and I am not ready yet. It was years ago, but maybe there is something deep within me that is hanging onto a vivid, despite being highly damaging, memory that still bring me a slight hope that one morning I will wake up and all will be well….that all will return to “normal” and none of this will have been real….just a blip in my perception, an altered state that has sent me to another plane for some reason beyond my understanding. Probably not, though….seems to real to not be actually happening. I guess my biggest consolation is that at least I was lucky enough to get out in one piece, at least physically….Sarah wasn’t so lucky. Sarah got caught up psychologically in this thing long before, and it finally became real enough to physically manifest itself to the point of wiping her from existence.
I grew up in the suburbs in the 60’s—doesn’t really matter where exactly, as they were all the same to me then. Don’t get me wrong….compared to the standard inner city turmoil of that or another time, I had a pretty soft and comfortable life. The more I got out and met people and travelled around, I soon came to realize just how good my childhood was….no complaints there relative to the real horror stories I had heard from friends in my early adult years on how they had endured—sometimes barely—their childhood years. In the summers, my family routinely packed up the car and off we went to the “wilds” of New England. For what was in my experience at the time just what families did, once school was out we jammed the old station wagon with our gear and headed north…..when I close my eyes I can still easily visualize the scenes out of the back of the old wagon as the landscape rushed past me in reverse as Dad drove us to yet another unknown mountain getaway. When I say “wilds” it was not really wilderness in any sense of the imagination, but as a growing boy with a real fascination for all things woods and mountainous, it sure seemed like it to me. I have since travelled to places of true wilderness, and believe me there is no comparison….however, at the time it felt like a real adventure, like we were exploring unknown territory.
We were not rich—not like one of the Rockefellers or Howard Hughes, but Dad did well enough to give us these twice-yearly excursions to a small cabin we had in the foothills of Langston, VT. Not real sure how we came to have this place….from my limited knowledge of my parents’ financial resources, it did not seem like the type of thing they could afford, but as a kid your perceptions are often skewed. Maybe they had inherited it from some distant relative I had never met, or maybe my parents’ money was not in my world of understanding….never asked, did not at the time really care….just knew the time in Langston was special and was a time I treasured. To me, Langston and its immediate surroundings were as close to heaven as you could get—to escape the monotony of the growing embryonic suburban sprawl of post-WWII America with the advent of the mini-mall, the cookie-cutter housing tracts and the early beginning of the death of rural life, was plenty.
Even as a young boy, I never understood this rush of development. I guess everyone has their own definition of success and happiness, but what was going on in mainstream America at the time just was not my cup of tea—still isn’t. Dad worked as a drafting engineer at a small but growing aerodynamics firm and even to this day I am amazed at how he found a way to combine his love of art and science in a single career. For many years I have searched for this and for the most part feel like I am still looking for the right fit. I remember reading once that E.O. Wilson, the well-known sociobiologist, said that “the ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper”….guess that is sort of how I saw my father. For years I tried to be scientist, like Dad, but it just never took. Think my brain was just too consumed with the “poet-side” to understand any type of technology on more than a peripheral or surface nature. Dad also was a real “Dad”…..like a story from the old M*A*S*H television series in which Charles Winchester was relating to Hawkeye Pierce that his father was a good man and always wanted the best for him, where he had a father, Hawkeye had a “Dad”; that he and his father could be in the same room and still be a thousand miles apart. Like Hawkeye, my Dad was a real “Dad”. He never seemed to tire of hearing about all the details of what was going on in my sister’s or my life, and I have to this day never seen a more devoted and loving husband…remember this is through my somewhat biased eyes, so take that for what it is worth. Mom did not work—at least in the traditional sense of women in the workplace today. But believe me, between my Dad, my sister, and I, Mom had plenty of work. Looking back I cannot imagine how she would have functioned taking care of the family on top of a fulltime job, though many women today so this with what seems to me to be relative ease and flair.
Mom and Dad met after the war and immediately became poster parents for the “baby boom” generation—as much as I did not care for the suburbs, our lives were pretty sweet. Dad’s firm made some very wise and timely business decisions in the early 60’s that paid off well. Vietnam and the Cold War were cash cows in many parts of America, not only for corporations themselves, but for most of its small and dedicated work force that was allowed to participate in the financial success of those decisions through company stock options. At the time, this was a very foreign concept to my father, but he had such trust and faith in company’s leaders that he took full advantage of all that was offered to him as one of the original base of employees at the firm. This I was to learn later was what paid for the cabin in Langston as well as provided for my sister and myself to go to college. At the time, remember real estate was not such a privileged luxury as it has become these days…as I went over all my parents’ papers when I wrapped up their estate following their deaths—more on this later—I was amazed at how generous his firm had been with this benefit and what a great deal Dad had gotten on the Langston property. I am not sure what the cabin may be worth these days—hung onto it originally for sentimental reasons—but am sure what Dad paid in 1970 was a small fraction of its present value. These days, the cabin remains intact but empty….have not been back there since Sarah was taken and cannot imagine returning anytime soon.
Dad was never much for travelling….he was part of the massive recruitment during WWII and I think that experience was all of the worlds that Dad ever cared to see. Certainly it was under an enormously desperate and hideous situation, and though he never discussed it, I think it really made Dad just appreciate being at home and what he had. The travel bug has been part of me as long as I can remember, and to this day I am so grateful of when I grew up so as not to be called upon for a military emergency so that I could explore the world without the emotional baggage that comes back home with almost all military veterans. In my early days of trying to be a scientist, I had this friend and he and I would regularly discuss this fact being born in the late 50’s to early 60’s, particularly when all the interventions in the Middle East began. We marveled that we had magically fallen in between all the major US skirmishes in our lifetimes…..as my friend Steven used to say, “too young for Nam, too old for Iraq…”. I cannot begin to imagine how an experience of that magnitude would have changed the course of my life or my strong passion for travel. Despite Dad’s strong aversion to travel, he still made the effort to get the family away on a regular basis. I am sure this was more of something he saw that the family enjoyed and for brief respites he was willing to provide. The Langston cabin was the great compromise in my mind to provide this….as a family we still could feel like we were going I on this great adventure and Dad had the anchor of a traditional residence to buffer his reluctance to leave home base. So, almost always twice a year, once to revel in the legendary mammoth snows of the “Northeast Kingdom”—I know that moniker sounds trite and hackneyed today, but as a kid I loved that name—and once to luxuriate in all the enveloping coolness of the Vermont summers. I am not sure which I enjoyed more—I still find myself reacting to a major snowfall here in the Colorado where I live now as I did as a 10 year old kid—or hiking through the mountains in the summers. Colorado has been the best therapy available for me in this regard….I can still immerse myself in the outdoors that have captured my heart and soul as a young boy but the dramatic difference in surroundings between Colorado and Vermont give me enough separation emotionally to still be able to enjoy it.
From the back porch of the cabin there is instant access to the Green Mountains and I could not imagine anything much better. Despite all the extensive travelling I have done since and with all the many wild and wonderful sights over the world that I have had the privilege to experience, those early memories in Vermont still remain very special to me. When Dad first came home and announced the opportunity we had to purchase the property in Langston, Mom and my sister were tentative, but I was ecstatic—my whole young life I had spent hours pouring over maps which was my vicarious travel practice. I knew early on that I wanted to see the world, but if I could not actually be participating in this dream, I would do the next best thing with my collection of maps. At the time I had a limited vision of all the places I wanted to visit, but for some reason the draw of New England was strong….maybe it was due to the fact that it was not that far away at the time or that at my age this seemed like a grand adventure. From the time I was maybe 10 or so, the vague idea of being a vagabond crept into my imagination….just roaming from place to place with no real itinerary or plan. However, for some reason the thought of Vermont and Maine kept intruding into my thoughts. Much to my mother’s dismay, she would often find me, late at night, lying across the floor of my bedroom among a wild array of maps strewn everywhere. I am pretty sure she was not too crazy about this, especially when I had school the next day, but relatively speaking I guess it was a pretty harmless addiction and on some level I guess she rationalized it by seeing it at least moderately educational.
At age 10, even among the more exotic maps of Africa, the South Pacific, Europe, and Asia, she would most often find detailed maps of northern New England on the top of the pile. To this day I am not sure what drew me more intensively to the area…maybe as I mentioned before it was the more local nature of the destinations or the history or maybe to my 10 year old brain, these places were just as exotic and unknown as any. For me, Maine seemed to stick out prominently as this giant land mass uniquely squeezed in between the mountains and the ocean. The long seemingly endless coastline was of particular allure….we lived in a beautiful spot but was land-locked. The ocean has always fascinated me and the history of Maine’s lobstermen and a fog-shrouded rocky coast seemed magical. As for Vermont, I guess it was simply the combination of the long formation of the state boundaries, which to my young mind seemed to be composed of endless arrays of forest and rugged mountains. From photos I had seen of the area, the trees seemed to stretch away to the horizon, only broken by the granite outcroppings of the Green Mountain backbone. Having been raised in the relative ennui of generic suburbia, my vivid imagination conjured up images of Daniel Boone, Lewis & Clark, Kit Carson and innumerable other American explorers that I had studied in school. I was desperate for wilderness…something on a grander scale than the low-lying foothills that were just beyond the city limits.
The cabin at Langston is old and full of character, but not run down at all, to my mother’s surprise on our first visit in the summer of 1970. It is a simple design—2 stories with a traditional cellar made of a granite wall. The whole thing could not be more than ~800 to 1000 square feet on each level, but the surrounding property made it feel much more expansive to me. The house itself is of log construction, as was the tradition of its era with a forest green tin roof. The lower level has a living room, small dining area, and a kitchen with a small, narrow pantry off the west side of the kitchen. The whole downstairs is awash in a natural wood color, the interior having since its original construction been finished off in smooth wood paneling over the original logs. There is a sliding panel—large double pocket door--that separated the living room from the dining area that slips into the walls between the 2 rooms by means of a set of rollers. As a 10 year old boy, I never got over how cool that one feature was—in all my years I had never seen such a thing or even considered that such a feature existed. The living room is modestly furnished, with an overstuffed sofa next to a large stone fireplace and 2 chairs from my grandmother’s house that had been reupholstered more times than I can remember. A large loom rug of muted reds, blues and greens covered the wood planks of the floor and are a great place to lie and stare into a roaring fire in the winter while dreaming away of things to come.
The dining area is also rich in dark woods, with a long pine table that my grandfather had made as a young man—one of my mother’s prize possessions. Her father had worked for years in a textile mill to support his family—one of the few men in his neighborhood that held onto a job during the Great Depression. Despite this avocation, his real passion was carpentry; but due to other circumstances he never had the opportunity to spend more than a passing hobby-type dedication to it. Much like my own father, circumstances larger than what was in his heart intervened and sometimes you have to just go with the cards you are dealt. This was a shame, though, as Mom told me her father was a natural artist with wood---the harsh conditions of the mill eventually took my grandfather in his prime, before I was born and though I have few, one of the real regrets in my life is never having known him. Everyone in the family seems to hold Edwin in high regard with only the most reverential of auras coming out when speaking of him. I think this is why the table was so important to Mom….not only is it a beautiful piece of furniture, only rarely seen these days, but it reminds her of him and what could have been, what should have been for him if he had been born into different times or circumstances. I am sure it was from this place that Mom was constantly striving for my sister and me to have all the opportunities possible; that we were constantly prodded and encouraged to pursue what we loved, no matter what…not to compromise for anything less.
The kitchen is on the small size, relative to most modern kitchens today, with a few wooden cabinets that holds the sparse collection of stoneware we used while there. It really is a reflection of the times in which it was built and we tried to honor that tradition by just adapting to the design. Underneath the simple tiled counters are more simple cabinets that held just the basic supply of cooking apparatus. This was not a primary residence, so we just went low key and basic in what we had there….truth was we hardly ever spent more than a month or so out of the year at the cabin, and part of the reason for going there was to escape a lot of the trappings of our real house. There is a small square wooden table in the center of the kitchen covered by a simple blue and olive checked cloth around which 4 wicker chairs stand. A section of the counter, next to the sink had somewhere along the line been converted to a butcher block cutting area and designed so that remnants could be simply wiped into the sink for disposal. In the southwest corner there is a small wood stove that is still the primary source for cooking…..again to my 10 year old sensibilities, I thought this was the ultimate in wild living, just one step up from cooking over open flames. To my Mom and sister…..not so much. They lived with it, but based on their body language and facial expressions, I am pretty sure this was not what they would have preferred. Dad did accommodate them with some basic counter top appliances to make meal preparation easier, but to me I still see cooking on that wood stove as one of the great early memories of that cabin.
When I was really small, maybe 4 or 5, I can remember visiting my grandmother at the home she grew up in where there was still an outhouse (no longer used) and a wood stove she still used to cook on. In all the times I hung out with her in her kitchen while she cooked on that stove, I never saw the woman measure anything, follow a recipe, or ever not cook/bake something to perfection. I am guessing this is becoming a lost art….don’t get me wrong…Mom was a great cook as was my sister later in life, but never on a wood stove. Maybe it’s the grandmother factor?? This unfortunately goes for me as well….I finally evolved into an adequate cook, but never got the hang of the wood stove as a device for anything but heat. The number of meals I ruined trying to imitate my grandmother is epic. The pantry is separated from the main kitchen by a long blue and olive tapestry—to match the cloth of the table—that hangs from the top of the doorway. It is barely wide enough for a single person to sidle into and was a storage area for various staples such as flour, sugar, rice, and potatoes….and of course Mom’s world famous oatmeal raisin cookies that just seemed to appear from nowhere. They were of course not a product of the wood stove, but somehow, and I have no idea how this works, the jar where she stored them never seemed to go down…was always plentiful. Yeah, yeah, I know cookies are not a staple…but at 10 years old they sure should have been.
From the living room, a long set of stairs ascends to the second floor—they ran straight up to a small landing, and from there turn 90 degrees from the landing to the upstairs hallway. There are 3 bedrooms, all of good size considering when the cabin was built….2 on the left side of the hallway which are adjoined by a common door and a 3rd single bedroom across the hallway. At the end of the hallway, past the bedrooms is a bathroom, the only bathroom in the cabin. The bedrooms all have basic, but sturdy and well-built beds that were designed as built-ins to each room. The furnishings are wonderfully lofted traditional quilts and heavenly soft feather pillows. From my memories as a kid, there was nowhere better to sleep than in one of these bedrooms. It was like falling into an endless cloud, which on a really stormy and cold night was a real treat. There are no wood stoves or other heating devices in the bedrooms, but a previous owner had built in duct work that piped heat from the wood stove in the kitchen to the rooms…just enough to ward off the chill of a brisk Vermont night, but not enough to overwhelm you. For whatever reason, the bedrooms had not been finished off with paneling like the main floor, but retained the interior log construction. The original logs had been significantly refurbished since their initial construction and the interior logs glowed with a sheen of high oil. When you turn on the lights at night, the whole interior of the bedrooms gives off this warm glow that is real hard to describe…just makes it a very comforting, pleasant place to be at night. Not much else in the way of furnishings in the bedrooms…just simple bedside tables with small lamps. Like I said this was our getaway cabin.
The bathroom on the upper level is tiled in white squares that had dispersed among them an intricate green design….maybe on every 5th or 7th tile in a very appealing and attractive array as to not overwhelm the room. The design itself is some sort of ivy-like vine…have no idea what….you are talking to the wrong guy if this is of specific interest. I just know it is pretty and is a nice touch to decorate up some bland white tiling. There is a huge old fashioned porcelain tub, with really cool claw foot pedestals…thought of describing this as claw feet, but not sure that is real expression. The tub has a circular rod that runs around the perimeter for hanging a shower curtain, and a single shower head that extends from the side wall coming into the tub from the side rather than the front. Again as a kid, I thought this was pretty cool….probably it was just different from what I had seen previously, but to this day I still think this is a nice variation in design. There is not much else to describe in terms of the bathroom…just a regular standard sink with a mirror above it and a clothes hamper between the door and sink.
In the ceiling of the hallway is, however, a feature worthy of mention…only because it was one of the causes of fright for me as a child. I was a pretty centered and stable kid growing up, but this feature really threw me off for a few years until I outgrew the irrational fear. In the center of the ceiling of the hallway there is access to an attic. There is simple access to the attic through this door by means of a standard pull rope that is attached to the door and hangs down far enough to allow you to grab it. Looking back now, my anxiety over this door and the attic beyond…mostly the attic beyond…I am sure was from my penchant of stories of Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and H.G. Wells among others that filled my young head with creatures vast and hideous. The fact that the access door creaked enormously did not help but it was in fact the dim recesses of the attic itself that caused my heart to race, my pulse to quicken, and my imagination to run wild especially during the night. Any self-respecting 10 year old with any type of active imagination can tell you that evil entities are most active after the sun goes down, but that doesn’t mean they just go away when the sun rises. At 10,my guess was that they just went into hiding to save up energy for night time activity, but if the opportunity presented itself, that there was no reason for a card-carrying union member attic monster to bypass a tasty child-snack if all the stars were aligned in their favor….still seems pretty reasonable to me in fact.
If these resident nasties were not currently loitering about in a cellar, then the attic was where they could be discovered. Especially in the event of a curious 10 year old boy poking around where he had no business in the first place….or is it just me? In addition to the really squeaky attic door hinges, the remainder of the house is sparsely furnished ion terms of floor coverings—just some simple thin runners in the hallway and plain area rugs in the bedrooms. The result of such a design is not much in the way of muffling everyday movement about the upper floor unless you are really careful to muffle your steps….this plus the attic door plus the natural sounds that come with the settling of an older structure add up to what can be a pretty unsettling acoustic situation for an unusually imaginative 10 year old. It was on more than one occasion that I was convinced that either someone had broken into the house in the night or that the attic denizens had decided that despite what we are told in the Bible, that all things do not come to those that wait, and that it is high time to take matters into their own hands…all 20 of their own hands, and claws, and fangs, and fiery breath, and….well you get the idea.
While we are on the subject of “where in fact do the nasties live?”….we come to the cellar, the ground zero of all my pre-adolescent fear of house monsters. In relation to the attic….the cellar was absolutely petrifying….no contest. The door to the cellar of the cabin is off the kitchen in a small alcove before you go back into the entryway of the living room. As you open the door….of course it’s creaky….you had to ask?????....it’s a cellar door for Christ’s sake!!!! Sorry…..anyway, the stairs leading down to the cellar itself are pretty well worn, handmade out of wood with a sturdy but aged handrail. The flight is illuminated by a single 40 watt bulb at the head of the steps which just barely illuminates the landing at the bottom. The floor itself is still earthen…we just never used it enough to finish it off and I never in all the years of having been there seen any flooding or even any type of moisture problem. The odor from the cellar as you can imagine, partly due to the floor and partly just from the sheer age of the cabin is pretty musty reeking of age and earth. When we first acquired the cabin, we discovered the cellar to be adorned with rusty, neglected yard tools and garden implements—sickles, shears, trowels—which had been abandoned by a former owner, all hanging on nails protruding from the upright supports as well as most of the overhead rafters. Years of cobwebs…..naturally….hung in vast arrays between the implements making, at least to my 10 year old mind, a really in demand set for Hollywood for a haunted cellar. If you walk just to the right of the stairs and take a sharp right again, you will encounter the first of several smaller rooms that had been partitioned off of the main cellar itself. The first of these, the only part that in fact had a cement floor poured was an old coal bin. On one wall, just above ground level you can see the chute where the coal was delivered, with the room itself being maybe 6’X10’ and low enough that as an adult you have to stoop if you walk into it.
I remember my father telling me stories of shoveling coal into the old furnaces and cleaning out old embers that did not fully combust at the house where he had grown up in Virginia. I could easily see myself burdened with this task had it been necessary or if in fact anyone in the area was still using coal as a heating fuel. My father, like most men of his era lived for his “in my day, we had to walk 3 miles through the snow uphill just to get to school” stories, and I am confident that he would have been more than happy to have me experience firsthand the joys of coal stoking. The other small partitioned rooms were empty at the time….guessing they were used for storage of some type in their day—just simple square rooms with no windows or other access to the outside. As I mentioned, the most noticeable thing in the cellar was the odor….just full of the aromas of age. Mostly this was the rich organic smell of the earthen floor, but contributing is the odor of the simple passage of time, if that makes sense. It’s hard to accurately describe unless you’ve been around it—just this dank, musty, old smell; sort of a combination of rust, humidity, and decay that is common with older buildings in the east. When I was very young, the entire atmosphere gave me the shivers….and at this age I never…I mean never…..went down there alone unless there was no way around it making me look like a real goof. Over the years I came up with some of the most elaborate schemes and excuses known to civilized man at the time to avoid the cellar. My apprehension of the cellar eventually faded with time, but to quite honest….to this day I am not completely comfortable in such places. Fortunately, in Colorado, the concept of a cellar is rare outside of farms out on the eastern plains with most homes in the mountains where I live now having opted for a crawlspace if anything….somehow I just cannot envision cellar nasties resigning themselves to a crawlspace….I figure even monsters have standards.
Upon returning from the dreaded cellar to the kitchen, you will find a small cramped room from the kitchen that leads which is screened in and leads to an expansive area of grass which subtly blends into the forest. The room itself was nothing real significant other than it gives you a nice area in which to store outdoor gear, which is how it has been used while I have been there. Mom and my sister were not real keen on venturing outdoors in the winter, but Dad & I went out regularly and this is where we stored our snowshoes and cross country skis and related gear. It was also large enough to pack away all the hiking accessories we had which the whole family engaged in during the summers….packs, tents, etc. The room also made for a nice intermediate area in which to shuck off any gear before entering the house, what most people here in Colorado refer to as a “mud room”.
The door of the mud room leads gradually into the forest of the property with a well-worn trail weaving through the stands of trees to the foothills and then into the more serious mountains around Langston. The trail, after leaving the collection of trees just a the back of the property meander quite a ways through some low lying grassy hills which eventually evolve into what are typically seen in the stark granite outcroppings normally associated with northern New England. At the rear of the cabin, the grassy areas are lined with towering conifers and a variety of hardwoods—mostly maples and oaks—which are places that I lazily daydreamt under in the summers of my youth. Around the closest grouping of maples on the east side of the cabin was a side screened in porch that had been added at some time long after the original construction. It was typically northeastern, with a wide sitting area complete with this hanging porch swing, which as a family we spent many evenings in reading, playing cards or some other board game, or just listening to the resident insect population as they set up housekeeping. If I close my eyes, and think back…..the times with my family on the porch are still some of the happiest and most vivid memories I have of the cabin as a growing boy.
In the winters, Dad and I would venture out into the surrounding woods and up into the nearby foothills on either snowshoes or cross country skis, depending on the conditions, both of which he taught me how to use at an early age. Mom and my sister never really caught the “outdoor bug” that thrilled the two of us---they loved coming to the cabin in the winters, but just had no interest in leaving the warm and cozy confines of the cabin unless there was a pressing need to run into town. The winters in Langston were, in those days, legendary….at least in my memory. Maybe this was because of my size at the time or maybe due to the climate of the day….in any
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.02.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-8427-7
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