Appreciation …

… An Irresistible Long-winded Bore - The Atlantic.

In 1981, while I was staying in the nearby town of Austerlitz, I visited Phudd Bottom, Powys's improbably named upstate retreat. It was not very different from dozens of other slightly ramshackle clapboard houses in the area, but just down the road I noticed a house that was different. It was surrounded by a fence on whose pickets appeared to be decapitated human heads. The owner was a retired dump-keeper who had cut off the heads of discarded plaster saints, dolls, and sculptures and impaled them on his fence as decoration. He was an elderly man, and, as it happened, he remembered Powys.

 "Now there was one strange guy," he said. "Used to walk around in the snow in his bare feet. He'd say he just forgot to put his boots on. And then you'd sometimes see him banging his head on the mailbox. Strange guy."

I, too, have paid a visit to Phudd Bottom.