10

Writ in Stone

The modern era is a time of exaggerated urgency and detachment from things natural. Our food is genetically modified, our clothing comes from synthetic fabrics, and our electricity is produced by nuclear reactors. Our daily routines are increasingly overwhelmed by electronic devices—cell phones, beepers, faxes, Palm Pilots, wireless transmitters, Internet streaming, etc. Information flows so quickly that television has become interactive. Unfortunately, the distinction between real and unreal, between authentic and virtual, is fading away, especially for children.

Part of us yearns for contact with something simple and honest, like homespun cloth. Fieldstone walls, especially old, decrepit ones, give us that simplicity as well, being so elemental in form and function. They are also unambiguous evidence of a Yankee culture that expired midway through American history. This makes them almost as sad as they are simple.

Stone walls were once as mundane as they were ubiquitous. Like trees in pastures, and small brooks, they were noticed but given little thought. Farmers' journals and account books, as well as published eighteenth- and ninei teenth-century farming manuals and magazines, seldom contain more than a sentence or two about the subject. With rare exceptions, no more attention was given to stone walling than to shaving or hanging the laundry, as it was little more than a routine farm chore.

Today we are able to appreciate stone walls perhaps because "we no longer have to build them," as noted by Kevin Gardner, writer and master builder of stone walls. Instructions on how to build stone walls can even be found on the Internet. Stone masonry has become much more than a respectable trade; for many it has become a well-paid craft. Gordon Hayward, horticultural writer and stone-garden designer, documents the increasingly urgent desire for stone as a landscaping material.

Twenty years ago, when I started designing gardens here in the Northeast, stone supplies were limited to very few choices.... Now I visit those same yards, and others across the country, and see rows and rows of cut bluestone, sandstone, and limestone for patios and pathways. Piles of inexpensive granite cobble and lichen-covered boulders on pallets are ready to go, as are rounded river rocks, granite fence-posts to mark garden entrances, cast-stone pavers, stepping stones, cut stone benches and garden ornaments, or palletized wall stone from all over the country . . . All this, and stone walls going up everywhere.¹

It's hard to explain why stones have become so popular. Kevin Gardner, author of The Granite Kiss (which takes its title from the slight wound, the scraped or gently smashed finger caught between stones during the process of wall building), says stone walls convey an "almost primal impression of order and safety." This may be the case for those who are contemplative by nature or artistically minded or interested in historical preservation.

But the appeal of stone walls is much broader. They have become the icon for the hero-farmer, one whose legacy is made of fieldstone. Gradually evolved through colonial and Yankee oral traditions, this was no ordinary man. With a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other, and standing stoically between his glistening plow and patient team of oxen, he conquered the wilderness, did battle with the stones, won, and then vanished. Susan Allport's Sermons in Stone elegantly describes the relationship between the hero-farmer and stone walls. "Written in these walls are eloquent reminders of the odds against which the early farmers of this area worked, tilling thinly soiled ground whose main claim to fecundity was the abundant crop of rock that heaved to the surface each winter."²

Like all myths, there is a grain of trath in the construction of the hardscrabble hero-farmer. But there are several distortions, which, once revealed, give way to a more universal means of celebrating walls.

Easiest to dispense with is the myth that farming in general and stone walling in particular was a male activity in which brute strength and tenacity were the most celebrated values. It wasn't. Patience was the predominant virtue. New England's early farmers were a patient and pi ous group of people—man, woman, girl, and boy. They created America by working:

Hand to the Plough

Wife to the Cow

Boy to the Mow

Maid to the Sow³

The role of women in New England farm activities was summarized by Elizabeth Forbes Morison and Elting E. Mo­rison, authors of New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History:

Insofar as liberation is a function of equality, the women were liberated: they worked just as hard as the men—and somewhat longer. The average membership in the family in the first part of the last century was 6.7, and mothers did most of the things necessary to feed and clothe that membership. They often tended the garden; invariably processed, one way or another, all the foodstuffs; often picked and cleaned the wool; usually spun and wove and cut and sewed. They washed, scrubbed, mended, fed the young stock, raked scatterings in the haying season, administered herbal teas to the feverish, picked apples in the fall, bore 4.7 children and—especially in the first two decades—brought in a good deal of the family cash.⁴

The walls and farm tools remain as testaments to the heavy muscular work, done generally by men. Comparable testaments to the work of women are disproportionately small, because most of their effort was spent working with organic materials, few of which have survived, except in the form of progeny. More important, in retrospect, the stoniness of New England has been exaggerated. Agricultural reports make it clear that New England soils in every state were, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and remain today, highly fertile when managed wisely.⁵ Stone was an annoyance throughout the region, part of the bargain a farmer made when he wished to have good hillside pastare, which, in turn, meant glacial till. And even though clearing of this stone was a large effort, it was dwarfed by the much, much larger effort of running the farm, most of which left no trace of physical evidence.

The hero-farmer of New England is the Eastern counterpart of the cowboy of the American West. Cowboy, horse, and pistol merge into a symbol for western settlement, and for the rebirth of a nation after the Civil War. The eastern version is the farmer-citizen Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he helped frame the U.S. Constitution—the man with a three-cornered hat, linen shirt, muzzle-loading rifle, team of oxen and one-bottomed plow, something like the minuteman statue in Lexington-Concord, Massachusetts. Like the western cowboy, he stands larger than life, stereotyped in tough simplicity. Had his trials and tribulations not been exaggerated, the myth of the hero-farmer might have withered and died.

The hard reality is that the cowboy was a small player in a much larger story of how mining, railroad construction, Pacific shipping, and sod-buster farming settled the West.⁶ Generally speaking, the open-range grazing of cattle for which the cowboys are best known contributed little to the nation's gross national product, and was restricted to the southern high plains between Texas and the railhead towns in Kansas and Oklahoma. The cowboys' great overland cattle drives lasted less than twenty-five years, from the 1870s to no later than the early 1890s. Much the same can be said for the hardscrabble, stone-hauling, ax-swinging hero-farmer, here dubbed the "eastern cowboy." In the West, the cowboy's natural enemies were outlaws and Indians. In the East, the Indians had been vanquished before much of the forest was cleared. So, in the final stage of mythmaking, the Yankee farmer fought not against Indians but against a perceived excess of stone.

A few eastern cowboys did exist, blowing up enormous boulders and building a few monumental walls. But most of the early American stone walls, those that once bounded countless pastures and tillage fields, were the logical, almost knee-jerk, response to the farmer's need to define his own territory and contain waste stone. Most stone walls have more in common with the mounds of ants than with the trials of a hardscrabble life or the excitement of the open range.

The final myth is that stone walls will last forever. They cannot. The fate of nearly every mineral crystal on earth is to dissolve, to be washed to the sea, and to be recycled back into rock or some other organic form. And the fate of every object raised above the level of the ocean floor is to fall back down. Mountains come and mountains go. Stone walls raised up must tumble back down. All stone walls must dissolve back to the soil, and thence to the sea.

An old stone wall disintegrating back into the soil in the author's backyard.

Geochemists precisely measure geological time with the steady decay of radioactive isotopes-—uranium, lead, rubidium, potassium, argon, carbon. But measuring time and understanding it are not the same. I think that to understand how long time actually is, we must have physical contact with the earth's crust. We must be able to feel our way through time.

One night last spring I placed the palm of my hand on a lumpy granite boulder on the derelict wall surrounding my property. It was still warm because the heat of the day had not yet left the massive stone. It was rough because the quartz grains were raised higher than their less-resistant neighbors. As I was touching the stone, I felt a tiny seismic impulse, followed quickly by a faint, almost metallic clunk in the distance. Puzzled at first, I siiddenly realized what had happened. A stone in the wall had shifted its position, falling down slightly, to the underlying stone. Perhaps a tree root had finally thrown the wall out of balance, or a mineral grain between two stones had given way to a century's worth of pressure, or the soil was shrinking back from the heaving of winter. Never before had I heard and felt the chink and shock of stones moving in a wall.

Hearing, feeling, or simply knowing that stone walls are falling apart made me ponder the fact that even the oldest stone walls are quite young compared to how long Earth has existed.

In spite of their relative youth, old stone walls are ancient enough to help make the modern world more tranquil. They encourage us to slow down. Charles Fish, writing of his Vermont family farm, said:

Walking east along the edge of pasture and stream, I come to the big rock meadow where an abrupt outcropping provides a place to climb and picnic. Even to my mind as a boy, the rock suggests permanence or, as I will later think, an anchor binding the shifting surface of the farm to the earth's core:⁷

Like old ledges, abandoned stone walls can anchor our "shifting" lives to something rock solid, something natural. But unlike ledges, there is a human component to every stone wall.

When I place my hand on one of the sun-warmed stones of my wall, it's easy for me to conjure up an image of the farmer who placed the stone there: his trousers muddy from the knees down, his shoulders locked for strength, his arms toughened by a thousand liftings, and his bruised hands gripping the skull-size cobble. By touching it, I can bridge the separation between my "ruburban" present and his rural past, at least for the moment.

In every human brain, ancient or modern, is a mental package of instinctual feelings, something the psychologist Carl Jung deemed the "collective unconscious." One manifestation of this instinct is an affinity for stone, especially when it is weathered, as on a natural outcrop. Perhaps early mankind saw stone outcrops as material for a tool, a rock shelter for a home, a cliff for an ambush, a cairn to drive game, a place to escape, or a cache for hidden food. Later, human hands placed one stone above the other to form a hunting blind, to bank a fire, or to make a bench.

Loren Eisley, a literary paleontologist, said of our fascination with stone, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:

I see an old, old shape bent to the fire while north winds blow, snow gathers, but the man worships in his own way . . . , stirs fires, places a stone and goes on his own path down into the dark from which our kind emerged. Rough elements created him and he creates out of the selfsame need. Ask nothing more for there is nothing, no answer, none. A stone-caressing animal paused here, in a lost century by a little fire. Say that I saw, and set a stone, one more Neanderthal, in the vast dying of the evening sun.⁸

Knowing that human antiquity is part of something as old as the Earth reminds us of the dimensions of time. Stone walls hold time like a set of Russian dolls. The smallest doll, the one farthest inside, contains the oldest things in the universe, the elements. Outward dolls, in succession, are the minerals composed of elements; the stones composed of minerals; the wall composed of stones; and the modern, weathered surface, which is a blend of everything. All of this time is contained in every stone " . . . whose coat of elemental brown a passing universe put on," as Emily Dickinson wrote. A stone pulled from an authentic New England wall speaks, all at once, of ancient seas, glacial mud, and the tip of a scythe being broken during spring mowing a century ago.

Colonial farmers knew practically nothing about why and how rocks formed deep within the Earth or how frost heave and other natural processes brought them to the surface. In fact, most farmers blamed the devil for the fieldstones of New England, which appeared as if by black magic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fields.

Generally speaking, New Englanders banished Satan from their psyches during the early to mid-nineteenth century, during the Transcendentalist movement, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott were reshaping an intellectual climate appropriate for a new nation defining its identity as separate from that of Europe. They shifted the focus of explanations away from the spiritual domain to the natural world. In the process, Americans began to view their world more scientifically.

Although the stone walls of the Transcendentalist era have often been viewed in quasireligious terms, stone walls should be seen for what they are—landforms. This scientific approach to stone walls need not and does not undermine our appreciation of them. Science can only add to the pleasure that comes with greater understanding. As Walt Whitman wrote:

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet but always his encouragement and support... The sailor and traveler . . . the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian, and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem . . . there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science.⁹

Henry David Thoreau said in what is arguably his most famous quote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Thoreau did not use the word "wilderness," a geographic place untouched by human hand, but "wildness," which connotes a condition in which nature has the winning hand. It is here, in the semantic gulf between the two words "wildness" and "wilderness," that stone walls become especially evocative.

The wilderness of New England was lost when the first humans arrived more than twelve thousand years ago, probably from Asia, across the Bering Strait. But the wildness of the place continues. Given enough time, wildness will reduce the greatest human efforts to rubble, then to soil, then to sediment, then to aqueous solutions, sending them back to the sea where they will be reconstituted, once again, into rock. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. These evocative phrases might more accurately include a middle phrase like "ashes to trees to ashes" or "dust to stones to dust."

During American settlement, there was collective joy in watching the wilderness disappear. When the last of the frontier had been explored, however, there was a feeling of national melancholy mitigated only slightly by the surge of industrialization, which translated the craving for open space into a craving for power. New England could no longer be a "wilderness." But, with industrialization, the joy of wildness began to return.

The value of wildness is both ancient and pervasive. In Exodus 20:25 it is written, "And if you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones; for if you wield your tool upon it you profane it."¹⁰ Natural stones are un-profaned. Each can be a personal wildness. The mortar-free fieldstone wall satisfies our need for the primitive and the civilized in one convenient package.

The architectural historian Simon Schama digs especially deep into the tension between wildness and civilization in landscape and Memory. Throughout his book, he laments that Americans are more detached from their landscape than are Europeans, with their revered ruins of past civilizations. Curiously, he ends his magnificent discourse on architectural history not with a cathedral, but with the humble stone wall.

There are places woven within the boundaries of a modern metropolitan sprawl where the boundaries between past and present, wild and domestic, collapse altogether. Below the hilltop clearing where my house stands are drystone walls, the remains of a vanished world . . . From the midst of this suburban wilderness, in the hours before dawn, barely a fairway away from the inevitably manicured country club, coyotes howl at the moon, setting off a frantic shrieking from the flocks of wild turkey hidden in the covers. This is Thoreau's kind of suburb.¹¹

The stone walls of New England stand guard against a future that seems to be coming too quickly. They urge us to slow down and to recall the past.

Each stone fallen from a wall is a gift to the soil. Roots and moisture below the forest will eventually wedge the stones apart. Then the minerals within the fragments will dissolve, wash to the sea as salt, and leave behind nothing more than a yellowish-brown clay residue. Fallen stones, broken stones, rotten stones . . . all are symbols of organic redemption. Nature is busy, like Whitman's "noiseless patient spider" reclaiming her crust, reminding us that all of history is paradoxically as eternal and ephemeral as a simple stone wall.