Last week’s reasonably huge snow storm seemed like a good test for the tiny dime I recently hid in the huge wall along Review Avenue. Today I went to go find it, and to see if it had survived the storm without leaving its place. I will do the same for other coins I left in Manhattan last week.
The wall is really big. I love the wall, really I do, but the wall and the street itself are surprisingly vast. Review Avenue on weekends (when there is little activity save for the occasional bursts of 4 or 5 cars of traffic) is particularly spacious, and even a little creepy as night falls. Approaching the wall today felt like I was approaching an ocean, or a large wave. There are bigger walls on this earth but walking up to this one expecting to find a tiny little dime seemed more formidable than I imagined — ludicrous, even.
Armed, however, with a general sense of the dime’s location in relation to a certain building, and with a surprisingly clear memory of what the stone looked like, I walked right up to the right rock and, reaching up, found the dime! It had some mud on it but was otherwise no worse for wear. I was so happy I left an extra quarter on the same surface, and began to think of the great wall of Review Avenue as a safe-deposit box for small change and trinkets.
How much money (or anything else) could one store this way? On a wall as big as this I could hide a small fortune. Would I trust this system to conceal coins or objects of real value? Dozens upon dozens of ducats and doubloons, left to the elements (or perhaps sealed), sitting in public anonymity atop hundreds of these stones? I don’t have any such precious valuables to donate to such a project, but when I saw that the dime had survived the big storm I thought of the great wall of Review Avenue as a massive hiding place, a vast surface of opportunity for secret storage and clandestine gift-leaving.
