This document from 1994 attempts to recreate the early story, which basically suggested that when Connecticut Light and Power flooded the residential valley that became Candlewood Lake in the '1920s, the children who remained in the submerged homes were fortunately able to adapt. They're the wrong people when they emerge in the 1970's (well preserved by the water) to find that their modern day twins living in one of the lake front homes.  

References:  Treasure Island/Water Babies  This sketch recreates a memory of the old story.  

The Amphibious Life of the Wrong People

by Peter Dizozza

We were wrong to stay there when the flooding began.

Houses, cars, they're doing it, all right.  Church steeples.  Situated below the water line.

We were wrong to let our children be born into water.
Way wrong.   

We're growing and aging very slowly in the water.  

Our lives are long.  We're 90 and we look like teenagers.  

The Wrong Family

Adapt or die, water babies!

The Wrights have this to say about the Wrongs, "They should have, at least, saved their children, Beebee and Deedee, from the flood."

Having been impregnated by a farmhand who became her husband, Mary has married an interloper, an intruder, a social climber.  Her brother doesn't approve, though the husband is a beautiful man and Mary does well for the family to mate with him.  

The lake rises slowly.

"Why do they push us from our home, my father's farmland.  My brother was arranging for them to give us money.  I'm still waiting for it."  

The twins know nothing.  

We don't know where we came from.

My pregnant mother.  Our mother's body. 

"I'm not leaving until I've been fairly compensated."

"You're brother already received the payment.  Flee.  They're flooding the lake!"

Her brother set her up to be drowned.  

Her twins are born into the water.  They age slowly.  

The twins learn English and receive child rearing from bootleggers hiding out on Bootlegger's Island. 

The island across the way, formerly the smaller of the twin peaks of a mountain, becomes Skeleton Island after one of the bootleggers dies.  

The bootlegger plan.

We help the bootleggers.  They go between the two islands through a tunnel they built before the flood.  When the tunnel floods, they die.  We don't.

Tell us the craziest idea you have.  We'll do it. 

It's a big lake. 

There's nothing in here to kill us.  We're the only fish in the sea. 

When her ten toes wrap around the fence, she holds on by the toes of her feet.  She holds on, each individually grabbing an area of wire.  

They arrive at the sun drenched corner of the isle during construction of its clubhouse in 1955. 

Renters meet them in the 60s.

We're the gate keepers, 

The trolls extracting tithings when you cross across the causeway.  

You don't know what you're thinking 'til you say it out loud.

A genuinely good good sportspersonlike grin 

With just a toach of gloating.  

She finishes her game, having won, she rushes forward, 

Shaking hands over the net with her competitor,

Beaming an expression of utmost cordiality, 

Yet she slightly lifts her leg to mark her territory. 

Oh no, what if I'm the one that's born!
Left for the crows in a field of corn

I wish I was somewhere where the crows had more selection.

Or a way to camoflage my innocence from detection.

Only the guilty shall be feasted upon by predators.

Like sitcom scripts by overpaid actors.

The actors are crows and I'm suddenly their script, Ah!

By stage fright ripped and stumbling out the backdoor.
Pow, I've broken through and I'm suddenly reborn.

Born one, born what if I'm the one that's born.

Oh no what if I'm the one that's dead.
Left in the field where the people are bred

And buttered up for a short and wicked life

Shred beneath the blade of a motorized carving knife

Not by a farmer's wife but by a drunk accountant's oversight.
Now you be kind to this glaring discrepancy

That made mince mouse meat out of me

That gave me the ghost of a split second of a life span

That separated the rodent from the man

You're kind to overlook the magic jot within the figures

The ink blot shivers and the youthful glance destroys!

Dead one, dead, what if I'm the one that's dead.

Born one, born, what if I'm the one that's born. 

She said, I can see it, now, you don't know how to live.
Your schedule is random and you're mem'ry's like a sieve. 

Who gets your clothes when you get scared and rapes you while you're dressing? 

Hats off!  The flag goes by. 

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