Every foot taken by hand.

John Henry replaced the long wooden fence he had taken down on the neighbour's side with a long dry stone wall. He started the great Rappahannock wall as he calls it early in 2007 and called me in to help him get him 'over the hill' early in October of that same year.

It was like military assignment. He told me he needed reinforcements because the task was starting to look so daunting and he couldn't see how he was going to get it done without help. I told him it might have been a little less of a Marathon if he hadn't designed it to be so freakishly wide. He replied that he liked the proportions and wanted the wall to be different from any others in the area. We worked for seven days side by side on it together.

He recounted later that having us come and help him to give him a hand 'over the hump' turned out to be a clever strategic move, as John by then had acquired the momentum as well as the skill he needed to go on and finish the rest of the wall the next year. I forget how many feet the wall actually is in total, but you get some sense of the scale of it from the photo.

Too much stone not to handle.

John Henry obviously loved stone and was beginning to get excited about what things he could do with it on his new property in Virginia. Having me build a dry stone wall for him was an option he began toying with.

He had one very old crumbled down dry stone wall there which I had admired when he first showed me around his the re-landscaped landscape. ( John had already done some major earthworks on the property)

I was really surprised and excited to see dry stone walls at all in this part of the country. I had known about and seen many of the dry stone walls of New England and Tennessee but had no idea how many there were in Virginia. It was amazing. They were all over Rappahannock county, beautiful old walls made of local stone and with lots of interesting styles and features. It seems strange that so few people seem to know about these walls and that to my knowledge no books have been written about them.

It wasn't long before John started really really appreciating the beauty of traditional looking dry stone walls as well. He wondered how much stone he would need to build the nearly eight hundred feet of wall he had decided to build along south side of his property. I told him we need a lot. A lot!

At first he was sure he could get it cheaply from somewhere locally but after realized there was not enough stone available except if he trucked it in from another state. He came up with another idea. He began digging again.

After several months of having an excavator full time on his own property he wrote to tell me he had uncovered and dislodged enough bedrock and loose stone material to do the job. It turned out he had not only enough to replace the 800 feet of fence but also two other massive stone projects on the property as well.

I kept getting cryptic email messages about how it was going.

It went something like this. - We have tons and tons of stones. We've started building a practice wall through the forest along the northern boundary of the property. I don't want to do the south wall until I get better at building.

The next letter went - The wall is coming along fine. It has started to get wide. I kind of like it.

Another letter left me wondering what was going on. - The wall is about 10 or 12 feet wide now in parts and is taking up a lot of material. It's a good thing I have lots of it.

I checked with him if he didn't mean 10 or 12 feet long?

"Nope , in fact it must be nearly 30 feet wide now along one part and I figure that I wont fill it in but sort of let it have a kind of rounded open area in the middle of the wall. The wall has a few of these enclosed areas now along its length.

I couldn't imagine what he was talking about.

Then he showed me pictures.

I was amazed.

Angle of repose

My first contact with John Henry was over the phone. He called out of the blue and was looking for perfectly rounded stones. He was calling me from Washington DC because he'd found the DSWAC on Google and figured being a Canadian organization we would know where there were big round glacial dinosaur egg stones for his wall he was building behind his house. I had actually that day come across a whole quarry pile of them, and had thought to myself ''well, I dont think I'll be using those in a wall any day soon." I told him about them.

To make a long story short, we we met up about two months later when he flew in to Toronto for a visit. We hand picked a truckload of the smoothest roundest ones we could find and he sent them back to the states. He told me he wasn't into flat stones or traditional battered walls. He focused on fitting these more rounded stones into pyramid shaped walls stacking them at the 'angle of repose'. ( The 'batter' or 'grade' that piled stones or dirt or sand settle at naturally. I had to admit his walls looked beautiful.

Most of his round stones came from rivers and oceans and later ( with my assistance) from glaciers ( the glaciers themselves, he pointed out seem to have favoured Canada and were too stingy to drag them all the way down to Washington where he needed them).

His garden in Washington DC (seen in the top picture) uses these bigger round stones, mostly glacier boulders from the Canadian Shield. The boulders weigh between quarter of a ton to more than a ton. John explains that "Frozen rivers (glaciers) can make much bigger stones round than rivers or oceans " which were all he had to work with in his area.

By contrast most of the stones in this beautiful semi-circle wall in Rappahannock County (above) which I photographed when I went there to do some stonework, he had built later on his newly purchased property. They were all under 50 lbs.

John has since 'got religion' as he explained it, and moved on to doing some magnificent steeper battered, more traditional dry laid work, using gritty random shaped local Blue Mountain stone. Apparently after having worked alone, and then with me for a while, he then got the bug to push the envelope even more and has gone on to some amazing stuff. I hope to have an opportunity to tell you about that, later this week.

Beyond Lego

Lego structures are fun to build. Part of the satisfaction comes from their fitting so well due to their regular patterned shapes and their snapping together so easily.

It would be quite another thing to have to build something with the very random-shaped plastic pieces in the picture above. The irregularity of each piece (certainly the fact that they would no longer snap together) would make it a difficult challenge to stack them together at all. For a dry stone waller, using these warped-shaped pieces would be closer to what it's like working with real stones.

Using these 'morphed' legos as representative of stone shapes, let's try to analyze what we can do with them.

Any attempt at wall building might better be accomplished by orienting the distorted plastic lego pieces on an angle or clustering similar shaped pieces together in less common curved patterns perhaps. Coursing along straight rows, in the typical lego fashion, might not be the way to go at all unless of course you filed them all down or melted them back to flat and boxy shapes again.

Thinking about having to build using this extreme kind of building material puts the emphasis on the fundamentals of 'what is structure'. Rather than reducing things to snap-together shapes or standard configurations, we have to force ourselves to think about how random three-dimensional objects can be arranged in order to build with them and why certain 'rules' don't always apply.

Jake Sandison

April 24th 2010

Fall 2010

Jake Sandison is a professor at Loyalist College in Belleville Ontario. He has taken two or three dry stone wall courses with me and is now an avid fan of building walls without mortar.

His main project is a folly he has been building on and off for the last two years in his back yard.

He writes...."This is a garden wall feature that is in the form of 2 "L" shaped walls, joined in the middle with an arched opening. It is west facing to block the prevailing winds (which we get a great deal of) from the garden plants. It is made from a variety of local fieldstone. The dimensions of: height, width and the various inside and outside lengths of both the long and short segments of the walls correspond to months and days of our family's (myself, my wife and 2 boys) birthdays and anniversary. It is truly a family wall. There is currently crushed brown limestone that continues the footprint of the wall to form a rectangle. I will bed flat stone into this limestone so that it looks like a foley perhaps...that this wall and arch is the remnant from an old building.

I am not overly happy with the cheek ends in the arch way opening... I was trying to do little to no shaping of the stone - but I am going to disassemble down to a course or two off the ground (just at the opening) and shape the stone all the way up (including the voissors and keystone). It may not look quite as natural...but I will sacrifice the look in this case for safety.

I think one of my next projects will be a stone school bus shelter for my boys out at the end of the driveway… I think I will be using limestone for that one"

Nov 2010

Jake emailed me a photo (above) of his nearly completed project yesterday. It just needs an arch and vertical coping. He goes on to tell the story of the amusing super-hero who is building the wall and despite evil foes ( not to mention old man winter ) he intends to complete it sometime in April 2011

"When we last left our hero... he had been battling his "arch" enemy, the evil Corporal Concrete and his sidekick, Private Pressure-Treated from the planet Fakescape. It has been a gruelling battle... if it wasn't for the assistance of Dr. Fieldstone... our hero might not have made it this far (strictly a "plutonic" relationship). He still has not been able to "cope" with the circumstances completely. However, it is a common "sediment" that Concrete and Pressure-treated will not prevail here and it would be "igneous" to think otherwise. With "heart" and determination, our "battered" hero will be the "keystone" to a "metamorphic" revolt against the powers of manufactured Fakescape everywhere. Tune in April 2011 for the season finale... check your local listings

The previous has been a sad example of just how long this winter is going to be for those of us who like to drystack stone... hang in there everyone."

Handling the essential.

Andy Goldsworthy wall in Palo Alto California. ( with sawn copes)

There is an expression that 'speed is of the essence'. In walling it means you may on a rare occasion, say on shaping a piece of thick coping, have to put down your hammer and chisel and get out the gas powered stone saw. Its not nice but sometimes you have to do it. It's noisy. It's dusty. It's hazardous and if you do too much of it you start to lose 'affinity' with the stone. To have to be in a position where you are having to resort to the saw a lot leaves a person numb to the 'essential' nuances and pleasures of working with your hands with stone. The essence of your work even if measured merely in productivity is not just an inverse function of how little time you had to do it in. Meanwhile the 'essence' of time or lack thereof, must not be replaced by the smell of gasoline. The French curiously enough seem to have sensed a bit of a connection here as their word for gas is essence.

One should not have to get in a mode where rushing is the only option. Walling is not only about economy of movement and maintaining quality of workmanship, it is about keeping your options open. As you get faster at walling you still maintain a diversity of choices and movement. To become more proficient at your craft and faster at it is certainly part of the pleasure. The whole thing becomes something like a dance. Sometimes it is a slow dance but other times when you're in the zone it is dazzlingly fast. It is efficiency, but the speed is not obtained out of desperation nor the effectiveness measured in compromise. If I am confronted by a stone that's not right, or that is giving me a problem, I may choose to fix things by bringing out my hammer (and chisel if necessary) and shaping it or breaking it up for hearting. I have the option too to think of it as a 'problem-solver' and put it aside and trust there is somewhere else later I can use it. Or I might not use it at all. The essential thing is appreciating what I do isn't all about speed.

Lego to the rescue.

Using Legos for repairing stonework

Like the dry stone method, building walls or repairing walls with brightly coloured Lego might not be that crazy. It makes it possible to build with a certain amount of flare and flexibility. More importantly, if you have to, you can take your work down whenever someone in authority comes along and tells you it's in the wrong place or that it's a safety hazard.

Concrete cement is less useful. It smears, cracks and is more dangerous when it falls off . And if it doesn't fall off, it clings so hard to surfaces that to chip it off (to repair the damage it's done to brick and stone) is almost impossible. , Plus, if those in charge were really honest, compared to Legos, it is really much more of an aesthetic 'hazard'.

Re-moving a hazard

Some friends of mine have decided to move from their old place in the country to a newer place, but still in the country. Last year we built them a beautiful 40 foot wall, so when I heard they were moving I jokingly asked if they were going to take it with them. He wrote back to say.

"As a matter of fact, the wall is coming with us! Had a running argument
with the roads crew @ the county in the late summer that culminated in a
written demand to remove the "hazard" or they would have it removed at our
expense. By that time we had an idea that we would be moving, so we
decided to take the wall down and store it. A couple of young lads and I
stripped it down one day in September. Sometime in the next two weeks I
will be moving the stones to the new property. We will rebuild it next
year. Very discouraging work to take down such a beautiful wall (kept
thinking of the opening lines in that Clash tune: "Breaking rocks in the hot
sun/I fought the law and the law won"), but we're giving it a much better
home."

It seems appropriate (and perhaps ironic) to post this moving wall story on the anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down Nov 9th 1989.

'Knuckle'-brained/cracker of an idea.

Where do crazy off-the-wall ideas come from?

Do they come from associations? Or do they come from disassociations?

Do they come from having a positive outlook, or a really critical mind?

Do they come from experimentation, or merely returning to the same predictable process?

Are they the result of maintaining and appreciating relationships, or just ignoring them?

Are creative ideas merely frivolous concepts unless they are utilized and exploited?

Are they any more likely to come to people who let things go than to those who hang on to hurt feelings and brood?

Are they gifts, inspirations that we are thankful for and acknowledge, or just something we steal from somewhere else and don't bother mentioning?

If ideas come from within, what effect does our own personality have on how they come out?

White Magic

The famous white squirrel who has been a resident of Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto for many years was spotted at dawn admiring the new dry stone bell over by the park bench.

There was barely a 'footprint' left.

He couldn't believe his eyes when the wallers dutifully took down the beautiful structure only hours after members of the DSWAC had built it, the night of the Nuit Blanche event, just last October. Luckily white squirrels have magic powers, so Whitey McRedeyes reversed time and made them put it all back up.

A Handy Tool

Have you ever wanted to build walls like a REAL dry stone waller?

Are you TIRED of trying to shape stones all the time with one of those heavy metal chisels and a clumsy clump hammer?

Well now you don't have to bother time-consuming, labour-intensive 'swinging and smashing' of stones by hand any more.

With the revolutionary easy-to-use 'Chis-ALL' ® you'll never have to split stone the old fashioned way again!

Just press the trigger and GO ! Rocks and stones can be instantly transformed into uniformly modular, blocky looking shapes at the touch of a finger.

Plus ....

IF you order your new Chis-all® today, you'll also get the amazing Heart-o-matic Stack-o-lator®, absolutely free, that's right, Ab-so-lut-ly Free!

Yes in deed, you'll want to get packing right away with this handy-dandy Heart-o-matic Stack-o-lator® and start filling your walls in half the time it normally takes to do the job.

You'll have more time to do the things you really want to do like go to the pub or take up bungee-jumping.

So go ahead, go to your phone right now and call this number 1 800 CHISALL, that number again, 1 800 C H I S A L L

and get your special FREE Stack-o-lator® at no extra charge.

And if you act now we'll throw in a set of amazing battery-operated Super-String Liners® at no extra cost. This is a regular 60 dollar purchase, and you get it free

AND the Sack-o-lator®, just for ordering the magical stone shaping and walling tool, the sensational Chis-All®, that's C.H.I.S -.A.L.L®

Dry Stone Wall Festival Epilogue and Epi-Blog

Hi there,

I had a great time watching people from the association build the stone
walls, arches, the bridge and brick oven at Landon Bay over Thanksgiving
weekend. I blogged about it; see the link below, which includes a YouTube
video of the form removal - a terrific moment!
Jessica Ross

http://www.homemakers.com/blog/ecologic/2010/11/04/building-on-eco-tourism-destinations-literally/

Stones Being 'Handed' a Supporting Role

Welcome to Thinking With My Hands where a picture is worth a thousand hand-thoughts.

Stone is such a lovely medium. It not only stands alone as a highly practical and beautiful building material, when used in conjunction with other things such as glass, steel and concrete it compliments them and accentuates their good qualities. The contrast between stone and more modern elements of construction make for very interesting visual effects.

Unlike these materials however, most stonework completed on a site, at any stage of the rest of a construction project, exists as the 'final product', in that the plaster, steel or wood and most of the other elements of a building project or landscape installation require covering, painting, preserving or protecting in some way before everything is finished, and this by contrast is done usually quite near to the end of a project.

Stonework, on the other 'hand', will get bumped and knocked by contractors, fireplaces and benches will get used during construction, new walls will provide support for other less finished elements of the project, and outside dry stone retaining walls will provide the finished 'base' for plantings and other landscape features, which otherwise could not be introduced on site . Any number of decorative functions are accommodated and assimilated by stone, which then humbly goes on doing the job while these things get finished, and it still goes on looking good after everything is done too.

This dry stone platform was completed yesterday. It will be the base for a special steel sculpture which after being fabricated will be installed on top. The sculpture will need to be welded together on site, secured properly, and then touched up so that it looks good.

Afterwards people will come and admire the sculpture.

Canadian Dryscaping Award

Sam Bauman was flattered, and a little surprised to be notified he won this year's Dryscaping Award. Sam was awarded a cheque for the amount of 300 dollars from the DSWAC as the Canadian winner in this year's category - Dry Stone Sculpture - for his 'floating teardrop' submission. The details of the competition, which ends each year on Thanksgiving Weekend at Roctoberfest was posted on the website explaining that the work had to be a dry stone sculpture of material, of any size, made of any natural stone material. It must have been built and/or completed in 2009 or 2010. The dry stone art installation had to be permanent.

I had an opportunity to see this sculpture in person when Sam and I worked together near Cambridge early last spring. He invited me back for dinner one evening. His unusual teardrop limestone structure which he built last year was sitting in the back yard suspended on a disk attached to a strong iron bar. The half ton structure actually sways in the breeze. I was quite amazed to see how strong and permanent it is but also how 'dismantleable' ( is that a word) it is as well. Sam was pleased to show me how it came apart.

Sam's experience in walling has come through trial and error and with working with other skilled wallers. Taking the typical route of landscapers, Sam started a lawn maintenance company at 14, with a $500 oil burning lawn tractor. His goal was always to get hired by a landscaping firm, which happened during his co-op term through high school. After working for the company for his first couple years out of high school, he had an opportunity to start a company with Mark Schwarz, which was about 5 years ago.

Since then, they have been pushing themselves to do better designs and use better and more creative construction materials. Through this process they have been incorporating drystone walls into some of their designs, and the clients have always been in love with the finished project. He finds great pleasure in working with such a rigid and stubborn material, because as he says, "when it's shaped the way I want, I am usually quite pleased with the unique look that is created."

Fox Shots

A while ago I revisited Hill and Dale B&B to take some better shots of a dry stone ruins we built during Rocktoberfest, back in 2005 in Port Hope Ontario. This clever fox knew there was a great photo op possibility if he just hung around long enough and looked casual. I couldn't get a shot of this structure, called 'Vestiges' without him in it. He climbed on the walls and in and out of the window and the gothic arch until he must have figured I had at least one good shot of him to put in the paper. I think he wanted to be on Fox News. This blog entry will have to do I guess.

Sphere of the unknown.

How's this for an innovative approach to thinking about public art installations?
The concept is best understood as an 'interactive' dry stone structure - a sculpture that is evolving and can be rebuilt again and again in an ongoing interaction between the audience and the creator.

The artist is committed not only to its conception and creation but also caring for his or her work over the duration of its 'life' in the park. This is not normal maintenance. This is adaption.

In that it is created of random common stones merely laid in a certain arrangement, the material in the sculpture like that in a dry stone wall can be reused and relaid. The few that go completely missing are simply replaced.

The structure yields and transforms within a larger definition of what art is. - There is growth and decay, injury and healing taking place throughout the work. It absorbs the impact of time, weather and even public mischief as part of an artistic/holistic event. The influences upon it are not resisted as much as assimilated.

Decomposition is the 'plot' of the composition. Part performance art, the work is interpreted not just through the artist, but through the hands of the participants who's desire to change or even deface it. The art merges into something else and our understanding of what the piece represents is broadened. This is a 'sphere' of public art that deserves to be explored.

The Hallowed Wiener

When you are building a dry stone wall you often need to find stones with certain specific shapes. It helps to have names for these shapes so that you can ask the wallers you are working with if they've got a 'triangle stone' or 'hook stone' for instance, for using in a certain difficult section of the wall. The obvious name/shapes that come to mind are ones like 'flat one', 'square cornered' (or what we call a 'ninety' ), throughstone , builder stone , and cope stone. There is an elongated shape stone we have had to give a special name to because we often end up looking for these as we are building, in order to fill in certain irregular slots in the wall. The main attribute of these kind of stones are that they have to have length, so that when inserted into the wall they aren't going to fall out, but they can be of any height or width. They can also be any size. Eighteen inch ones are as valuable as six inch ones. These 'hotdog' stones, as we call them, turn out to be pretty valuable. You save them as you're going over the pile of stones, because you can be pretty sure you are going to need quite a few of them in the wall before it is finished.

Today, on 'Thinking With My Hands' it seemed appropriate to honour the humble 'Hotdog Stone', or as it is more reverently called, - 'The Hallowed Wiener'

My Garden Sheds Its Ugliness

This challenging little hands-on project we built on our property, one that we came back to work on every now and then between dry stone jobs, was actually completed just yesterday, and deserves showcasing here. The short slideshow video documents the various stages of this hare-brained idea of mine, from its inception to final execution.

This was an dream I have had for some time now, after having completed a dry stone sauna for some clients, teaching two 'blackhouse' workshops up in Holstein Ontario, doing another black house at our 2009 Roctoberfest, building a French dry stone cabanne in 2008, a stone boat house at another festival, a dry stone cladding of an ugly concrete icehouse, and of course the small 'sentry box' we built as a dry stone demonstration at the green fair in Port Hope, which is shown as the opening slide of this video.

Having built these things on other people's places and loving how yummy they looked, I really really wanted to have a dry stone hut on my own property, and more importantly I also wanted to get rid of the flimsy Canadian Tire shed that was handed down to us by some kind neighbours when we first moved to Port Hope, which though it was useful initially for storage, always seemed to spoil any photos we took over the years of the walls and gardens we had created around the house.

So killing two birds with a lot of stones, (actually no birds were killed in the making of this hut, maybe some slugs and worms and small trees), I decided to 'clad' the annoyingly ugly tin building in order to have our very own dry stone toolshed right on our own property. Everyone should have one.

Im seriously thinking about living in it.

Balance is Everything

Who hasn't had their tires balanced? It's quite a trick, really. I cant imagine how you would do it with an 18 wheeler.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to think about 'balance' today.

It is an amazing thing.

Balance is the activity of being.

It more often than not involves slowing down and waiting, rather than constant activity.

Balance requires that we learn how to 'be', and 'not to be' always rushing around.

It necessitates 'tuning into' something so subtle that, for the most part, it can't even be taught.

All areas of our life require balance. It is the reward of constant experimenting and the gentle positioning of weighty matters (and ourselves) so that gravity and all other pressures (good or bad) work on our side.

Balance is the equalizing of the pull of opposite poles, charges, pulls and pushes.

It is the 6th sense. We can not stand without it.

We know when we are off balance without any of the other 5 senses.

Balance is symmetry.

And balance is a dance, a reflection, a repeated phrase, a pleasingly proportioned design and space in time.

Balance is a comparison, a relationship, it is seeing the connection, the ratio, the give and take of a situation.

Life is a balancing act in a topsy turvy world.

Unlike balancing stones, (where rocks are precariously positioned utilizing the sparsest network of contact and the least means of support ) building permanent walls, by stacking stones structurally, is really an exercise in learning to maximize all the balance available to us in the material we have to work with.

Rehashing the old dry stone wall concept.

Mechanized wall-building and landscaping is just around the corner, in fact it's coming down the street right now. Incorporating the wonder of modern science and technology, random truck loads of raw wall material are magically transformed into beautiful free-standing road-side 'stone fences'.

These stunning additions to any neighborhood are manufactured right on site using up leftover material from excessive quarrying and massive extracting operations. The whole concept is clean, efficient, green and ecologically friendly. The walls which are built, are straight and natural looking. They not only look like the real thing, they are the real thing, and they last for years and years! If they are broken or knocked over they can be repaired by an efficient wall rebuilding-machine which comes by and actually recycles the same wall material without any fuss. These new walls protect those loved ones who live on your property , soften the impact for speeding vehicles, while beautifying the neigbourhood.

Why put up with concrete barriers anymore? Why waste money on pressure treated fences and rotting railway ties? Why should you look at ugly metal chain link fences along the road? Make the modern choice - Move to stone.

But then again, dry stone wallers have simply been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, haven't they?