But the half left in the pond remains, in a material sense, what it has always been: a cemetery, with its dead.

This is not a claim about the specific beliefs of the Windover community or about what they would have wanted.

Those beliefs are inaccessible.

It is simply an observation about the physical reality: half the pond is a cemetery still, and the decision to leave it as such was a decision that honored the irreversibility of excavation.

The Final Return To The Ordinary Pond

There is something worth noting about how the Windover story ends — or rather, does not end.