The Recycle of Life

Stones have definite seasons. They are all about rebirth too. They wait every day just like the plants until their time comes.In spring they peek out from their wintry homes where they've laid nestled in the ground and begin to warm themselves in the protracted rays of sunlight.

They eagerly anticipate being picked up and put back into the wall or taken off somewhere close by to be used in a new wall.

Fieldstones are the wingless harbingers of newness, they are like stone eggs, the eggs of some stone Phoenix perhaps – humble tokens in the 'Re-cycle of Life'. I can hear Elton John singing a re-cycled version of the song already.

I remember picking stones out of the fields every spring on the farm.

We loaded them in the tractor and carried them off to the side of the field and just dumped them.

I'd ponder the variety of shapes and couldn't convince myself they were all useless.

As each one passed through my hand I'd ask myself "What can I do with this one?"

I found out slowly that stones 'know what they are about'. It took me even longer to find out what my relationship was to them. Even then it took years of doing stone and brick restoration, years of working with them until I ended up becoming a waller.

It's not the money, not the honour, nor the pride of workmanship even, it's the being close to such sane loyal undemanding, totally inspiring parcels of matter on a day to day basis.

It's about the genuineness of the relationship between the animate and the inanimate.

Hours of picking stones off the land makes you peaceful, keeps you simple and ever contemplating. Stones teach you to wait for change.

They teach you tolerance too.Just the pleasure of gathering rocks alone and the knowing you are going to be able to find ways for you and them to work together– this can be the best part of your day.

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.