Standing Stone

  It didn't take much effort, just planted one end of a long piece of granite in the ground and positioned an egg-shaped stone on top of it, but it sure looks great in the front yard.

Finished Drew's Wall

  Yesterday, Damon and I finished the wall, back-filled it, straightened out the steps on the left side, and built a small set of steps on the right. Damon also set the bird-bath he made and gave to Drew as a gift. Filled with water and positioned atop a large upright boulder near the wall, it seemed to somehow add a feeling of naturalness to our backyard project.

Getting To Cap Height

  Damon and I decided to go ahead with a round-rock cap, which he has been working on and which looks amazing thus far. The round-rock cap is always more difficult to place than flat cap, but Damon is rising to the occasion, as usual, with wonderful results.

  The stones we are using in this wall are particularly round and sometimes hard to lay, but having hand-picked each one, it is worth the effort when you stand back and see them all together.

The New Wall

  Damon and I had a few good days on the new wall we started in Camden. It was nice to spray it down with the hose at the end of yesterday and see the colors pop out in the stone.

Pratt's Island

  Congratulations to Dan Ucci, owner of Ledge Hill Creations, on the completion of one hell of a big three-year stone project. The landscapers, stonemasons, carpenters, and designers were all there last week putting on the finishing touches before the Down East Magazine shoot on Monday, so I sneaked in for a few shots of my own. I only worked there for a few winters--the majority of the credit goes to Dan's full-time crew; Danny Harrington, Richard Ware, Lance Carlezon, Joel Oyer, Jesse Casas--but I felt privileged to have the hand in it that I did.

   Richard Ware

   And Danny Harrington

Last Summer

  Just a shot of the wall we built at the Turner Farm on North Haven last year.  This is only about a third of the structure.  I think we would need a small plane for some good aerial photography to get the whole thing.

127 Seconds

  And then there are the obvious hazards of stonemasonry... I was working on carving out a large corner stone for an outdoor fireplace on Saturday, very large--it was about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle.  The stone was sitting awkwardly on a smaller stone as I chiseled, so I reached down to remove it, whereupon the whole mass just keeled over rapidly and slammed down hard on my left hand, pinning it to the ground.  I screamed like a baby and tried to pull it out, but it would not budge.  That's when I realized I would have to cut my arm off in order to be free, just like in that movie.  However, I could not find a dull pocketknife or can opener, so I just screamed some more for one of the other masons to release me.  They were all sleeping, as it was Saturday morning and most of them were hung-over, and so no one could hear me whining.  I was then forced, and aided by some kind of adrenaline-fueled panic, to pick the stone up with my good hand, which I succeeded miraculously in doing. That's when I saw my finger and the horrible bloody mess it had become--it was doing that weird squirting thing that usually happens just before you bleed to death.
  Damon was good enough to drive me 30 minutes to the emergency room at Miles Hospital in Damariscotta, where they did a fine job of sewing me up and reassuring me that I would get to keep my arm.  I was the only person in the ER, so my wait was relatively short. The nice lady at the front desk kept telling me about the wonderful cheeseburgers they were serving in the cafeteria, though, which was quite upsetting, as I was bleeding to death and had not yet eaten lunch.  "I'm going to go get one," I told her.
  "No," she said.  "You are not allowed to eat."
  "Why not?"
  "Because you're bleeding to death," she said.
  "Then why did you tell me about the cheeseburgers?" I asked.
  "Because they are delicious," she replied.
  She wasn't the only one.  The nurses kept talking about cheeseburgers and one of them even said, "It's a shame you can't eat, because the burgers today are excellent."  Even my doctor, who was otherwise quite professional and careful with the stitching, kept leaving my room intermittently to go eat cheeseburgers out in the hall.  I think they should change the name of the hospital from Miles to McMiles.  They're lovin' it, I guess.

Moving Out

  Well, we finished installing the third and final hearthstone, and we are heading outside to work on the patios and veneer with Mr. Jesse Casas.

  Jesse is a second-generation stonemason and has been in the business for something like twenty years, or half his life. Here, Damon and Jesse are laying some of the fabled Belfast Heritage blue-stone, with some very tight 3/16 joints.

Hearth Under Construction

   I am making a hearth stone out of this mountain. I had to split and saw and chisel it down to 68" x 20" x 3". It is currently resting in place after many laborious hours of grunting and cursing, with just a small amount of adjusting to do before we set it, which will happen Tuesday.

North Haven Farm Wall

 
  Some shots of about one-third of the wall we build last summer on North Haven, which was 1000 feet long when it was finished.

The Top of the Heap

  This top stone will come down and become the starting point for the rest of the stack, as we take what we have thus far constructed down to Boothbay and install it. A simple red level-line drawn across the face will let us know where to properly position it on the ground.

Boom Time

 Damon deftly handles the controls of the boom-truck. We also like to point out to Dan that his White GMC is actually yellow. (Note the logo above the grill.)

Sawing

 Thank God for Grundens.

Stone Shapes

  I am reading an interesting book by Robert M. Thorson called Exploring Stone Walls, A Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls. I thought I would share this bit about the shapes of stones from pages 25-26. There are "eight categories of basic shapes common to stones found in New England Walls:
Blocks are equant and angular.
Balls are equant and rounded.
Prisms are columns that are angular.
Rollers are columns that are rounded.
Books are tablets that are angular.
Disks are tablets that are rounded.
Slabs can be either angular or rounded, but are normally subangular.

Blades are usually angular."

Fire

  Here are a few shots of me using the acetylene torch to "thermal" the exposed cut edges of the stones to give them a more natural look. Soon after these shots were taken I tripped, fell onto the torch, and became engulfed in flames.  Now, much like the stones, I too have a "more natural look".

Curtis Fields

  Earlier this week my lovely and thoughtful fiance brought me home a couple of books on stonemasonry from the library, one of which was a thin little volume called The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall by Curtis P. Fields. A Yale graduate and retired director of the Yale University Alumni Fund Association, Fields and his wife spent their last years on Penny Wise, their 200 hundred-acre farm in Vermont, where he learned to rebuild the miles of stone walls that snaked around the property.
  The book is touching in Fields' genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the craft of stone wall building, but otherwise uninformative and at times, misleading.  His knowledge of stone wall construction basically came from the teaching of an old Vermonter, one Mr. Littlefield. This Mr. Littlefield taught him to split stone using wedges and how to stack flat rocks on top of one another, but that is pretty much the extent of it. Fields recommends the use of flat stones and doesn't even approach the art of round-rock wall building.
  I was intrigued by the descriptions and photos of the hand-tools they used to split stone with in the fields, particularly the long chisel used to "drill" holes with. The product of the modern age that I unfortunately am, I have never drilled a hole in stone with anything other than a hammer drill; and I am now on the hunt for a good drill chisel. All in all, it was an enjoyable one-hour read--being a short, illustrated 61 pages in length--but I wouldn't run out searching for a copy or add it to my personal library.

Postscript
That being said; Mr. Fields, (who passed away shortly after the writing of his book and who may be up there somewhere reading this) your passion for stonework is noted and appreciated, as is the effort you put forth in the writing of your guide. I hope you are building stone walls in the great beyond and I hope the stones are lighter there than they are here.

Ready For The Mantle

Mending Wall

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The Last Lintel

We finally put up the last lintel yesterday, after much measuring, hoisting up and down, and notching out the right-hand jam stone. The notching was particularly tedious because it had to be done with a grinder, instead of a rock saw, which would have filled the entire house with dust and carbon-monoxide and incurred the wrath of carpenters and electricians alike. We hear enough complaining from them as it is, about our noise and our dust and rocks always in the way. Still, we are not loathed nearly as much as the insulation guys. Everyone hates them and the clouds of noxious particulate matter they create. Yesterday I said to Garrett, the head insulator, "You know, I used to think we were the most despised people on every job site, but I was wrong. Now I realize it is you. Everybody hates you."

  "Yes," he said. "It is true."
  It goes on my list of jobs I don't want to do: roofer, insulator. There. There's my list.