Fixed By Hand with the Materials At Hand.

Joe Mitchell who works with me quite often, exclaimed yesterday "Man we redo nice work!" We laughed. I noticed he posted his comment on facebook that evening.

We were doing a small repair on an installation that members of the Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada had built last year in a municipal park in Port Hope, Ontario. It was a dry stone sitting-area around an historic memorial dedicated to Joseph Scriven. A circular enclosure had been created around the monument to bring more attention to the fact that it was there, commemorating the famous hymn writer's accomplishments and the fact that he lived in Port Hope, Ontario. That we merely 'redid' a section of this very nice looking circular wall, (which had been purposely damaged the week before) made the statement 'Man we redo nice work' seem like a harmless, yet still very poignant comment. In fact, it was absolutely fitting for what we had done (or rather, redone) but the more I thought about it, the more the significance of this remark struck me.

For sure, this was not a slogan that you would want to have printed on your business cards or your truck. And I don't think we need to confuse people by telling those who ask us, that we never advertise for work, because most of it is 'repeat business' (even though apart from referrals, it's absolutely true). Our 'repeat work' of course is for clients who want us to do more nice work, not keep fixing things we've built badly, but in this case it was a good honest repair needing to be done on a vandalized section of well built wall, and it was done at no cost to the town. I wonder how many other things in the park get fixed at no cost to the town?

But I digress. The fact that a construction company comes back to fix what they do, seems like the kind of thing they wouldn't necessarily want to advertise. Most people dont want to think about, or have anything to do with the idea of something needing any maintenance. That's why municipalities love concrete.

But concrete fails too. And often it has to be redone or sawn out at great cost when there has been damage or changes needed to be made, or more often than you would think, when it has been poured in the wrong place. We built a dry stone wall next to a parking lot being built where we saw a municipal construction crew working for weeks surveying and forming and pouring concrete curbs that all had to all be painstakingly jack-hammered out afterwards and redone, because it was all built to the wrong grade specifications. When concrete has to be torn out or fixed it usually isn't what you would call redoing 'nice' work.

As we unceremoniously rebuilt the section of dry stonewall at the Scriven monument, the mayor and a council member came over and watched us. They just happened to be there to be filmed by a TV crew doing a news segment about the new playground that had been recently installed in the park. I sensed they only saw that our 'wall' needed fixing, not that it was getting repaired without delay, without any fuss or bother, without ordering in expensive replacement parts or materials, and all of this done without having to take a lot of damaged material away to the dump; which is where the old busted steel, wood and concrete from the previous playground had probably been trucked off to.

A public school playground in Ambleside, Cumbria UK

enclosed on all sides by a free-standing (easily repairable) dry stone wall.

There's a hole in the bottom of the Cement industry. Hold on !

Stone emerging from concrete - a photo I took in California last year . The image communicates the victory of nature over industry gone off the rails. It is a cap on the insanity. Perhaps they can find one big enough to drop on the hole BP drilled in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, which is continuously spewing out black blood.

Perhaps we can still find enough 'real looking' ones not to have to keep making substitutes and fake ones. Perhaps architects and engineers can source out suitable ones, and masons skilled enough, to actually design buildings that incorporate natural stone structurally; strong stones that can support wooden beams and heavy floors and beautiful peeked roofs. Maybe they can discover a way of getting them to hold together which doesn't involve huge amounts of glue, threaded rod, rebar, steel cages or tons of cement.

There may come a time when old barn and house foundation stones are not just pushed over with bulldozers and buried in the ground, but reused. A time when the big 'freezer-sized' ones are no longer quarried just to push up against the sides of buildings as the only solution to holding terraced earth back. Or maybe they wont use all the random truckloads of rip-rap to merely dump it along ditches as quick fix to erosion. Then again they may consider not quarrying all of them just to ground them up into gravel and various grades of crushed aggregate. Maybe they wont need to burn it all at incredibly high temperatures predominantly to make concrete and unappealing concrete products.

Maybe natural stone, just as it is found in the ground, could be part of a much needed solution for this planet. There may in fact be hope. It might be a gradual change, or it may come along like a big bump in the road.