Date: Fri 13-Feb-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

stone-walls-essay

Full Text:

An Essay: Wild Stone Walls

(with cuts)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

After a light snowfall is the best time to see them.

While driving past a stretch of forest, slow down and look back through the

trees. Scan the wooded slopes and valleys.

Most likely, you will notice them snaking up hillsides or dipping down into

stream beds. They are like signatures scrawled across the Connecticut

landscape by men long gone.

The wild stone walls were built long ago - over a period of two centuries or

more - during the time when New England's virgin forest was being cleared for

fuel, building materials and farmland. The stone walls served to mark

boundaries or helped a farmer keep his cows at home.

Besides, what else could an early settler or countryman do with those frost

heaved stones but make a wall? Especially since every spring a new crop rose

out of the ground to fill up his pastures and snap his plow blade.

Now, our farming way of life has mostly disappeared. Any unplowed fields left

vacant have turned back into forest. As the decades go by, seedlings of birch,

maple and cedar are reclaiming the land.

Now, the wild stone walls are barely holding their own under the alien

onslaught of bittersweet and barberry that threaten to overwhelm them. Gaps

between the stones are softening, filling in with ferns, mosses and leaves.

Intruding roots and tree trunks fight for space, shoving aside even the

biggest foundation stones.

Ever so slowly, the oldest walls are tumbling down.

If we want, we can tame a wild stone wall. We can haul away the vines, clear

off the underbrush and call in a crew of Italian stone masons. Bring in more

stones.

With the help of backhoe, crowbar and plumb line, those old walls can be made

handsome and new, but then all traces of the first builder's touch will be

gone.

Sometimes, I wonder about him.

What were his thoughts as he wrestled to make the stones fit? Was he

preoccupied thinking about a loved one or worrying about how to pay his bills?

Was he concerned for parents or a friend fallen on hard times?

Did his family help him or did he work alone, cursing the stubbornness of

stones?

I would rather believe that he found contentment and purpose in the work, that

his mind was fully engaged in solving the immediate problem of where the next

stone should go.

What I do know is that those first builders lived long ago and their way of

life has vanished.

I love a wild stone wall for the things it reminds me of.