STONE SMILES

Here I am stonewalling again, building a dry stone wall - or rather, in this case, rebuilding a dry stone wall - for the first time in about 15 years. The wall was hastily built by the city fellow I was 15 years ago, so it didn't last well. A well-built stone wall should be able to last at least a thousand years, a duration more familiar to me now. I'm rebuilding the wall as the retaining wall for a new kitchen herb garden we're starting; we've outgrown the older small one.

It gets infectious, once you start building a stone wall, after you've learned how. It's like a puzzle, with all the pieces secretly scattered all over the place, and maybe elsewhere too. You keep your eyes peeled wherever you go, you develop an eye for rocks. Mainly, though, I'm dipping into the stony equity I've built up in one corner of our property, treasures I've dug up in getting the land to say vegetables and flowers instead of who the hell are you?

My stones are not the nambypamby perfectly lapidary sedimentary kind laid down gently by quiet valley streams over eons, that split and stack like Lego; mine were formed in primordial fires and planetary upheavals long before there was any need whatever for stone walls, so they are stubbornly hard and shaped the way they damn well want to be shaped, which makes my big wall puzzle interesting. Sometimes it takes hours, even days, of looking out of one eye while doing something practical, to find just the right stone (or close enough) for the uniquely shaped space available in the rising wall. I've got the first course of of big stones down and tilted just so, and am starting on the second course, which is when it begins to get tricky because from now on I've got to cover the seams, or at least not extend them straight up and down.

The big trick is to be as patient as the stones themselves, to think and act in rocktime, which was an unknown factor for me when I first came here from the city, where everything was right now and on schedule. I wanted my stone wall now too, so I got a city kind of wall. It didn't last long, due to a few other factors that must be considered in metamorphic stone wall building, such as rain, ice and the earth. Humantime hurry, apart from resulting in a wobbly wall, will also pinch your fingers and toes all the way down the line, to say nothing of what it does to your back.

But it's a pleasure learning to go and then going at a stone's pace, scanning all the stone faces for the one that smiles at you with the very shape of that gap you have in mind.

STONELIGHT

It is long, too long, since I have done the simplest tasks for which the body is fitted, such as carrying stones. It is good, very good, to do things for which standard education is of no avail.

Building with stone for the first time meant hefting stones in a way I never had before. Most of my earlier stone hefting had been in preparation for throwing; the rest was just the unalloyed, aimless hefting that comprises most human/stone relations. Never had I sought to address stones in their individual natures.

I began to turn them over in their beds and behold their personalities from all angles, and saw the light that shines from a stone that has anything like the shape of that particular emptiness in the wall you're building, and how the stone that fits acquires a very valuable value and cannot easily be replaced.

The stone builder also learns what hands actually evolved for: not for derivative things like grasping handles, pounding keyboards, turning steering wheels or operating remote controls, but for holding stones! Hands evolved to lift, heft, and hurl stones (such hard, straight, primitive words those three, clearly made for use with stones). For of course man the word-user first 'lifted' stones, first 'hefted' stones and first 'hurled' stones. The palms are made to hold stones, and the fingers to adapt the grip to stone facets, in a way not necessary with a fruit or a club or a martini; there was need to be able to quickly pick up something heavy of non-repeating shape, what else fills the bill in every respect but a stone; thus the human hand evolved from mere treelimb-grasper into quick stone-grabber, which doesn't say much for the evolution of our disposition, but does explain the ongoing need for stone walls, and the basic and somehow surprisingly right-at-home feeling hands feel when holding a stone.

And stones for their part have much to say to us, in their own forthrightly reticent way, of time and purpose, of trust, constancy and patience. If one can fall sufficiently silent to hear them, they are well worth listening to.

Thus in a pleasant place on a pleasant day, it is pleasant indeed, particularly in retrospect, and more than fully organic, to have one's head filled with stones, that rattle around and crack open new thoughts, polish old attitudes to a new sheen and grind up fixed ideas into the wherewithal of germination.

The stones on my place (my land is a veritable stone mine) are mainly of the metamorphic type, born of fire and pressure and therefore oddly and stubbornly shaped, so for the most part I must use as-is what I pick and choose, a lot like being born has turned out to be.

NEAR HOME CHEESING NA BARBEN!

This morning I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom when I heard Echo shout from the kitchen: "Near home cheesing na barben!!" I yelled "What?" and she said the same thing again. I turned off the water, stopped brushing my teeth and yelled again. She replied: "There are monkeys in the garden!"

Echo has no trouble getting monkeys out of the garden, but when I'm home she defers to me for the simian strong-arming. Somehow the monkeys knew I was brushing my teeth; they're onto the finer points of my schedule and have updated their Blueberries. So I yelled "Flow gum stow gnat femme!" Echo said "What?" I emptied my mouth of brush and foam and yelled: "Throw some stones at them!" (From our arsenal thereof, conveniently assault-ready on the deck railing.)

Moments later I heard the whiz of stones through garden vegetation, accompanied by shouted superior-feminine Japanese impolitenesses regarding the simian species in general, these individuals in particular. Echo doesn't get totally simian on their asses like I do, though; English has much more depth and potency in that regard.

Turned out it was just a traveling family of three: dad, mom and junior on a day trip through what was once their Eden until I bought my piece of it from other humans, the little tyke climbing my trees and just gamboling and hanging out while the grownups did the marauding, but in this garden there was nothing maraudable left; mom just wandered aimlessly around doing the simian version of tsk-tsk, while dad just sat there in the middle, gazing at where his onions should have been, scratching his head and wondering what the hell happened to his tomatoes. And the chard—someone had terrible manners, just bit it off at the stalk! Not even a bean leaf to be had, what is the world coming to? Then to top it off there were stones in the air.

I felt no sympathy, of course, and even better, now the monkeys are wandering the mountainside trying to memorize the new stone-bringing phrase "Near home cheesing na barben!!"

Satisfaction can take amazingly diverse forms.

SON OF STAIR TASK


So it was that on the first morning I stood, coffee in hand, gazing like MacArthur out the kitchen door at the site of The Stair Task, sussing it all out, making all the mental calculations, selecting the tools, establishing procedure, estimating costs and times for a work force of one soft male getting on in years who still thinks he has the body of a long receiver and an intuitive lock on the common sense of a civil engineer. I am surrounded here on the mountainside by superb stonework, as manifest on all the rice paddy terraces going up the mountain, and as the ancient buildings of Japan, the temples, castles etc. can attest, some of the finest and most amazing stonework in the world can be seen here. I have seen it and studied it, so no problem with that little staircase in my garden, right?

That was a couple of weeks ago. I got all the many rocks together, good ones flat on one side with slightly rough surfaces, culled from among the many that reside on my mountain estate, then I tore out the old gap-toothed staircase and began to lay out the large and heavy, diversely shaped rocks to achieve a stable level surface and discovered what I already would have known, had I been more attentive back in geometry class: you can't make a flat surface by stacking randomly irregular polyhedrons unless you're god, or have access to a godly time scale and resources.

Despite what I had led myself to think, this was not at all like building a wall, where you start at the bottom with big rocks and build up with smaller ones, following the many rules of rockwall construction until you reach the top. I tried different tacks, of course; I leveled some dirt and dug in and arranged some large and heavy rocks atop it so they were rather even along the top, then realized there was no way I could stack rocks atop those to achieve an even and stable step without using cement, which I did not want to do because I knew even less about cement than I knew about rocks, and I don't trust anything in which I can be permanently immobilized.

So I gave myself some badly needed advice and purchased some flat rock slabs to use in forming the steps and risers. "This worked for the pyramids, so it should work for me," was the logic I employed. These slabs weighed about as much as I do, maybe more, so it wasn't easy to try it this way and that while turning the dirt of the staircase into mud with my sweat. Sweat seems sweatier when things aren't going the way I've assured myself they will. So after attempting a variety of Macchu Picchu and Easter Island techniques, I managed to get one step to stay in one place without falling over in a half-ton pile of rubble, but then the weather spotted me in the garden and proceeded to rain for all four days of my vacation, as I stared at the step from the kitchen doorway through some of the hardest rain I've ever seen in my life; I imagine that many folks caught out in the open were knocked insensible by the falling drops.

Today, in the sunny blue sunlight that flooded the garden as though I were going to work, before I left for the office I noticed that the stone step was still standing, but it was way too high and in the wrong position. Thank goodness the rain had stopped me. Thence, in the delight of that knowledge, to the office.