Stone Crazy

Well, I'm up late. I fell asleep for five minutes around 9:30 after reading to Merry, only to get up again to wash dinner dishes and wait for Kim's brother, Kenton, who drove in from Baltimore.

After cleaning up, I watched the first half of a DVD I've been eagerly anticipating. It's Stone Rising: The Work of Dan Snow, and I bought it after reading Dan's book, In the Company of Stone, which I checked out from the local library.

Dan is a Vermont dry-stacked stone waller. That job title doesn't quite convey what's perfectly clear from the video and the book: Dan is an artist of the first order, a philosopher, and maybe even a mystic (he muses about the "inner life" of stones and their languages, energies, and desires).

And his work is outstanding. The guy builds traditional New England stone walls, sure, but then there are walls that lead me to believe he's been necromancing M.C. Escher. He's done grottos, silos, ampitheaters. Check him out.

I'm a Dan Snow wannabe. And I've been collecting stone for use around the garden. In our Subaru. That might partially account for the broken axles we had fixed last fall.



I built a firepit nearly two years ago made from a bunch of smaller, flatish stones Kim and I gathered from a nearby road-making project. I don't know how Kim felt about standing next to a busy state highway, arms full of rocks, but I felt exposed--as if the rocks were, oh, I don't know, body parts, or maybe dirty magazines.

The firepit turned out well (after I somehow moved load after load down our steep hill via wheelbarrow). Better down than up the hill.

BUT, I mortared the stones. Dan Snow, I'm asking for your forgiveness. Dan thinks mortaring the stones is like chaining them to each other, deadening them so they can't move, change, become whatever they're supposed to become.



I dig up rocks in the yard when we make a new bed or set fence posts. Most are about the size of Yukon potatoes. Some are more like cabbage heads (er, if a cabbage were squarer). I've gotten a couple the size of a Gutenberg Bible. But they're not enough to satisfy me.

For a while I picked up rockfall from a railroad cut, but that got dangerous. I mean, all those boulders strewn between the cliff face and the tracks (15 feet, max)--uh, they didn't grow there. I'm obsessed wtih stone (and bricks, but that's another story), but I'm not wild about blunt force trauma to the head.

So I collect from safer places now. I've got one really great site, at woods edge near a cemetery. No, I'm not hauling headstones.



I seek permission now, too, which has emboldened me. I still look like a wild man, wind blown, sometimes rain drenched or snow covered, heaving rocks half my weight into the back of the car as relatives of the dearly departed meander respectfully between plots, flowers in hand.

But now I'm a wild man in no danger of a lawsuit.

I need more projects like I need a hole in the head (from a plumetting rock?), but I'm anxious to put my stone piles to use: I want to line our garden beds with smaller stones, and eventually I'm going to try my hand at dry-stacking a small retaining wall.

I'm not worthy, Dan Snow, but I'm trying.

Martin