Some Days are Diamonds, Some Days are Stones

After dealing with the rocks in my head yesterday, I got to dealing with the rocks in stone walls this morning. A dear friend sent me a link to an Atlas Obscura article https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls-science?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e5ec3288ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_04_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-e5ec3288ff-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&mc_cid=e5ec3288ff&mc_eid=24e72b3137 about the uniqueness of New England’s stone walls. I enjoyed reading it, and it evoked quite a few memories – as well as images of the amazing stone walls we’ve been seeing when we watch PBS’s All Creatures Great and Small.

I had never considered that there were classes of stone walls – only that some stone walls are construction masterpieces and others appear to be more like piles of rocks. But, as you may know, Bob and I have more familiarity with stones than the average person. Our first building project was a 12’x20′ slip-formed outbuilding inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing. I can still recall with fondness the Halloween night I was up on a ladder troweling off the very last pour by the light of the moon before cleaning up a bit and going to a friend’s Halloween party.

Granite dominates our local stone, and an 1863 map shows a “Marble Quarry” on our back forty. There are places not far away where sedimentary and metamorphic rocks are found, often ‘softened’ around the edges by streams or by their glacial relocation. ‘Sad to say that my rock knowledge has been eroded by time, so I’m not guaranteeing the correctness of what I’m writing, but I do remember some of the on-the-job learning: Rounded stones are difficult to stack, so that is probably a factor determining what sort of wall is constructed/piled. After building that 12 x 20 outbuilding and then using it as living and dining room space attached to a mobile home, we realized it was not a good idea to build an entire house that way. Every winter morning, the woodstove’s first task was to melt the frost off those walls. We did love our stones and our slip-forming, and so the basement of our house and two interior walls were built that way.

Early in our time here, stone walls and gardening had a collision. As we dug up the ground for the planting of a small garden, we came upon two 12″ x 48″ x 6″ blocks of cement. What the heck were these?? We also had encountered a gazillion small fragments of rock… I think it was Harold – a ‘local’ who connected our mobile home to the electrical grid – who mentioned that there had been a stone crusher on the spot where we were trying to plant asparagus. It had been used to crush all the stones in the stone walls that once lined our road, and the crushed stone had been used to build the straighter, less up-and-down road we were now using.

There is only one remaining stone wall on our land. When the road was being reconstructed it must have still been in use to corral cows, or perhaps it was saved by being on the far side of a swampy area. (It’s also near the flattest stretch of the pavement, so maybe it wasn’t needed}. I never saw those old 1800s stone walls, but I miss them here.

Michael Mack

As I sat in the dermatology waiting room, a man entered to check in. The receptionist asked his name, and he replied, “Michael Mack.” I snapped to attention from my phone game of Solitaire.

Michael Mack. I was working in the Rochester Community Services office of Berkshire Farm for Boys, a juvenile residential ‘treatment’ center. The kids came to us after being adjudicated a PINS (Person In Need of Supervision) or a Juvenile Delinquent by Monroe County Family Court. After referral by a Probation Officer and an interview with my boss, a decision was made to accept a kid or not. We didn’t take arsonists or kids that had done violent harm to someone, but we did accept the worst of the teenaged car thieves and petty larcenists. Once accepted, a kid would be transported the 250 miles to “the farm” in the Berkshires near Canaan, NY where he would spend the next 14 months or so. It had a school and a chapel and dormitories, there was a routine and there was counselling.

Meanwhile, back in Rochester, our social workers would make an effort to work with their parent(s) in an effort to change some of the circumstances that had contributed to the delinquency. To be honest, it rarely worked. In fact, when you met the parents, you could pretty much guess why the kid had acted out.

When released from The Farm, these boys would be returned to Rochester either to their prior home or to a group home that we operated. I saw a lot of depression and kids with very little parental love or guidance, but now and then one seemed a bit smarter and a bit more likely to “make it” to some sort of un-incarcerated situation. Michael Mack was one of those kids.

This middle-aged, white man in Dermatology answering to the name of Michael Mack was not the black, street-wise kid from Berkshire Farm. This man was alive, and Michael Mack who had been at Berkshire Farm was not. That Michael Mack had thought he was smarter than the mafia, and that Michael Mack ended up at the bottom of the Genesee River. I had thought about him plenty those many years ago, but time passed and I forgot him… until last Tuesday.

Two of the Artists in My Life

I belong to a wonderful gardening group on FaceBook. (Gardening in Northern New York). Yesterday one of its Admin’s posted some facts about the goodness of skunks, along with a very cute photo of one. This brought something to mind…

My mother had always been a woodworker and craftsman, but in her older years arthritis in her hands worsened such that handling heavy lumber and tools became painful, and she gave it up – and took up painting. She sold work in Rochester art shows and did commissioned paintings of people’s homes.

As an artist, one becomes part of the local “art scene” and enjoys the friendship of that group of creative folks, and so it was that my mother connected with a painter of wild animals. (Because I can’t remember that artist’s name, let’s call her ‘Sue’).

Sue had wildlife in her neighborhood, and she lured them to her with food. As they came and got comfortable, she would paint their portraits.

And so it happened that Sue befriended a skunk. Like the others in her menagerie of tamed wild critters, the skunk accepted her invitation to come inside the house. All went well until Sue decided that Mr. Skunk would be a better model if he were cleaned up a bit. To that end, she filled the bathroom sink with warm water and plopped the little darling into it. Need I tell you more?

Going to the Dog(s)

I decided to take a run up to Ottawa yesterday. I wouldn’t have done it if my car wasn’t electric, but it is, so I did. The trip was allegedly to sort out and wash last weekend’s bedding. It seems as though we have enough pillows, inflatable beds, and sheets of various sizes there to house a small army of overnight guests – and we managed to return south with half of several sets.

The truth is that I’m struggling with depression, and I was hoping that being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the Byward Market might give me a lift. Mornings are hardest. Too often I spend the night sleeping on my stomach, and that has consequences. Bending to put on my socks in the morning gets more and more difficult. It’s AGEING, dammit.

Chez Lucien did not disappoint, although the bartender commented that she’s happy to have a little warm weather without the wildfire smoke that will likely fill the air in a couple of months. I hadn’t even calculated that into the causes of my despair. On the bright side, I enjoyed a long and interesting conversation with a young biologist who took the seat next to me at the bar.

And now here I sit in my corner of Planet Coffee, sipping good coffee and munching on a rhubarb square, watching a National Capital Commission EV back in to the alley beside The Sidedoor and thinking how good a sign that is compared to EV driver hatred being stoked by my self-serving Congressional Rep. at home. (Yes, seriously, driving an EV in the U.S. is proof-positive that one is a libtard).

There. That last paragraph stirred me up, and anger definitely crushes depression. And how can I not laugh at the leashed dog just outside the window who is taking a crap in the slightly raised garden bed? I choose to think what he’s doing is metaphoric. Good dog! Give a crap!

Our Back Forty

It was a beautiful day to be in the woods. Because my back screams at me if I walk very far, I get out there by 4-wheeler (named Trigger) and then hike some. February has never allowed me to do this before.

You could make track soup from all the paw and hoof prints, some old, some new. There were walkers and bounders and amblers and straight-liners: deer, fox, coyote, rabbit, fisher, grouse, mouse, and one rather big-footed ‘galumpher’ that I can’t identify. Below (right) are deer tracks between the tracks of two coyotes on one of our woods roads. On the left are the tracks of a Ruffed Grouse.

Lately we’ve been drawn to Mrs. Wheelock’s piece. She and her husband, Otis, lived on the western-most part of the land we now own. They settled there in the late 1850s and began having children. By the time he enlisted in the Union Army on December 22nd, 1863, they had two boys and three girls. Fifty-three days later, Otis lay dead in a Washington, DC soldiers’ hospital.

Susan Wheelock would spend the next 47 years eking out an existence on that rocky and steep land that is currently ours. Her youngest son, Cyrus, lived with her and worked ‘out’ on a nearby farm to support them both. The other son moved west and eventually died of “Not wanting to live.”

Part of the land was quarried for marble, and maybe that also generated some income. It could not have been an easy life. The 1910 census notes that Susan Wheelock was blind. She died a year later.

By the mid-1920s, Cyrus had moved up over the hill to the house that once stood about 100′ from the log house that Bob and I live in. He was in his sixties, and he was a hired man for Oliver and Abigail Carey who farmed the 90 acres we bought in 1976,

Both Susan and Cyrus are buried in Pierrepont Hill Cemetery.

This Flight Tonight

Last night was one of those sleepless ones. The sleep gummies and the amitriptyline must have gone on vacation for no reason I could put my finger on. Yet sleeplessness has its pleasantries, and maybe that is the gummies at work.

In an arena some three time-zones away, 80 year-old Joni Mitchell was singing ‘Both Sides Now’. I didn’t know this at the time, but I have to wonder if some cosmic force was bridging those miles, bringing her voice and words to my sleepless self.

But it wasn’t ‘Both Sides Now’ that was romping around in my head last night, it was ‘This Flight Tonight’. I liked that I could remember the whole song. I’m such a sucker for her words. I’ve always spontaneously sung ‘Marcy’ whenever I drive down NYC’s West Side Highway: “Down along the Hudson River, past the shipyards in the cold; still no letter’s been delivered, still the winter days unfold like magazines, fading in dusty gray attics and cellars… red is sweet and green is sour… red is angry, green is jealous,..red’s for stop and green’s for going… “

But I wasn’t on the West Side Highway, and this is what Joni gave me:

Look out the left the captain said

The lights down there, that’s where we’ll land

I saw a falling star burn up

Above the las vegas sands

It wasn’t the one that you gave to me

That night down south between the trailers

Not the early one

That you can wish upon;

Not the northern one

That guides in the sailors

Oh starbright, starbright

You’ve got the lovin’ that i like, all right

Turn this crazy bird around

I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight

You got the touch so gentle and sweet

But you’ve got that look so critical

Now I can’t talk to you baby

I get so weak

Sometimes I think love is just here to go

Up there’s a heaven

Down there’s a town

Blackness everywhere and little lights shine

Oh, blackness, blackness dragging me down

Come on light the candle in this poor heart of mine

Oh starbright, starbright

You’ve got the lovin’ that i like, all right

Turn this crazy bird around

I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight

I’m drinking sweet champagne

Got the headphones up high

Can’t numb me out

Can’t drum you out of my mind

They’re playing “goodbye baby, baby goodbye,

Ooh, ooh, love is blind”

Up go the flaps, down go the wheels

I hope you got your heat turned on baby

I hope they finally fixed your automobile

I hope it’s better when we meet again, baby

Starbright, starbright

You got the lovin’ that I like, all right

Turn this crazy bird around

I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight

    Songwriter: Joni Mitchell. For non-commercial use only.

Keneewah, Fury!

NOTE: This is a bit of history. The references to “Indians” are made because in those days we didn’t know better. I intend no insults to First Nations, Native Americans, or Indigenous People. In fact, from the age of 4, I idolized them.

In the days before television there was radio, and two evenings of every week my father and I would tune in to the broadcast of a program called “Straight Arrow”.

The basic plot centered on a mild-mannered rancher named Steve Adams, a Comanche Indian who was taken in by ranchers very early in life. He kept a beautiful palomino steed named Fury hidden in a secret cave, and every episode told the tale of Steve sneaking off to that cave and then emerging astride the horse in war paint and “Indian” garb while shouting “Ken-ee-wah, Fury!” a supposed Indian war cry. He would then right the wrong and “disappear” without a trace, leaving the beneficiaries of his rescue or good deed to wonder (as the beneficiaries of The Lone Ranger wondered) who he was. The only one who shared Straight Arrow’s secret was his trusty “whiteman” sidekick, Packy McCloud. I began calling my father “Packy”, and I continued to call him that until he died a few months shy of his 90th birthday.

In 1949, ‘though my father was never very “crafty”, he obtained a good quantity of lightweight canvas and made two tents: a small wall-tent for himself and my mother, and a teepee for me. He then painted “indian” designs on on the teepee. On my first camping trip, we slept in those tents in a campsite at Eighth Lake in the Adirondacks. That was my introduction to family camping and to the Adirondacks, the love of which I never outgrew.

Here’s a link to the first episode of Straight Arrow: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Straight%20Arrow%20radio%20show&mid=B7345D9BF1A1185646ADB7345D9BF1A1185646AD&FORM=VIRE&fbclid=IwAR3bkj2G0Q518e2za3W_CBBcUwfuB8qYp6r5uVOUIGWqSgqny1vAB_V_WdU

Aunt Lil

When I was a kid, Lil, my grandfather’s sister, was my favorite aunt. She was a tiny, wiry little thing with long hair wrapped up in a bun on the back of her head. She lived in Canada but occasionally visited my grandmother (whose house we shared).

It was about 1947 that my mother had some kind of surgery that necessitated the use of a pair of crutches for some time post-opp. I was a bit over two years old at the time, and Aunt Lil came to give my mother some help. Because we lived in the upper half of Grandma’s house, negotiating the outdoor stairway on crutches was difficult, and so my mother would watch from our living room window as Lil and I entertained each other in the front yard.

At that time we had two Irish Setters, a sweet and docile one named Brownie, and a young, large, and enthusiastic fellow named Fibber. Fibber would bound energetically to ‘play’ with toddler me and Aunt Lil, and from here upstairs window my mother could see Aunt Lil ‘shoo’ him away with a gesture of her hand and a couple of words.

Eventually my mother was back on her feet and Lil went back to Canada. One sunny afternoon shortly thereafter, my mother and I were enjoying the front yard. Fibber bounded to us and I made the same shoo-ing motion my mother had seen Lil do… and little me said, “Outta here, bastard!”

My mother called Lil… “Why I NEVER!” said Lil. “Lil…” said my mother. “I never did!” insisted Lil. “Lil…” said my mother. “Well I might have once…”

Yukon Jack

As I was walking from my car to the door of Tractor Supply, I passed a man who had gotten out of an old pickup truck and was having a hard time convincing the large-ish dog inside the cab to stay there. The dog obviously wanted to accompany him. I often speak to people I don’t know, and I commented, “He really seems intent on going in with you!” The man succeeded in closing the truck door, and we walked together towards the store.

“He’s a rescue. ‘Got him from the shelter about a year ago, and he was a mess. His fur was all matted, and I tried to clean it up until I finally got him good enough to take to Bandanas and Bows. They shaved off the mats, and he was a new dog. He was so happy.”

I replied, “Good on you for saving him. He’s a lucky dog.”

Tractor Supply had the tractor-sized cotter pins I needed, and I happened to check out at the same time as the man who owned the dog. We picked up our conversation again.

“Ya know how ya just can’t get yourself up and out to walk? I don’t want to walk, but he does, so now I walk too. Ya know, I didn’t save HIM, he saved ME. Would you like to meet him?”

I said I would, and we walked to his truck – his truck with the images of a variety of guns on the rear window – and there I met Yukon Jack, a half-husky-half-malamute with one blue eye and one brown eye. And ya know, it was the high spot of my day.

Train of Thought

The crossing barriers were down and the red lights were flashing this afternoon as we approached the train track on our way to Woodchop Shop. One car on the opposite side of the track was stopped; in front of us a long-haul trucker with a huge excavator on its trailer waited. And we waited. And we waited. A pickup truck dodged the crossing barriers and continued on his way.

* * * * * * * *

When I was born, my parents were living in an apartment that was the upstairs of my grandparents home. There had once been a stairway connecting the two floors, but that was blocked off and an outside stairway built up to a new second story door so that the households were separated.

Exactly one month after my birth, my grandfather had a massive heart attack and died. Gramma had always been a very independent sort, having taken over the role of woman of the house when her own mother died of tuberculosis. She moved her bed out onto the porch to get the benefit of as much fresh air as possible, and by doing so, she was able to arrest her own active TB. She raised her younger siblings. She carried on.

As I was about to start kindergarten, my parents found a wonderful house on a 2 acre lot in a small village suburb of Rochester, NY, and we – Gramma included – moved. The master bedroom became Gramma’s studio apartment; the rest of us used the smaller bedrooms.

Gramma had her own car and became the most sought-after babysitter east of the city, and it was as such that she drove to a sitting job on New Year’s Eve in 1958. En route, she stopped for the flashing red lights at a railroad crossing. It was a blind crossing, so she waited, but no train appeared. A pickup truck coming in the opposite direction stopped at the signal and then proceeded across the tracks. Gramma figured the signal must be malfunctioning and she drove onto the tracks. The freight train hit her car broadside, crumpling it and dragging it well down the tracks. She suffered more than a dozen fractures, but incredibly she recovered.

* * * * * * * *

So there we were at the tracks. Woodchop Shop was just on the other side, so with no train in sight, Bob walked across to it while I stayed with the truck.

After awhile I got out and struck up a conversation with the trucker. He was on a haul to Syracuse and had to stay on a prescribed route, so there was no way he could turn around or go ahead and maneuver through those crossing barriers. Another pickup coming toward us crossed, and I told him the story of my gramma’s encounter with the train.

The trucker replied, “Back in 1939 my grandfather was killed by a train. He was on a trestle.”