The house wasn't built. It was rebuilt. My grandfather's father
took down the Great Switchback coaster in the eighteen-nineties
and used the timber for the family home. The porch trellis, the
railings, all of it — you could still see the grain of the coaster
in the wood. Guests used to ask if that pattern was decorative.
It was structural. When the Army moved the fence in nineteen-thirty-eight
they rolled the house up the shore on log skids. My father remembered
the sound of it. They called it Building 600 after that and the
family kept living in it. We ran the beach behind it for another
twenty-four years. In January of sixty-two the letter came, and
the state took the last ten acres, and by the following autumn
we were gone. Building 600 is still there. That's the strange
sentence at the end. They took it, and then they did nothing.