Talking to the wall

by Paul Kandarian

If you walk the New England woods, you know what stone walls look like. Stone walls around here are as common as short summers, bad drivers, and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Our stone walls are a jagged jumble of large granite rocks fitted together as a natural and resilient fence by our forebears to mark property or keep farm animals confined, and farm-animal eating critters out. Building a stone wall was a skillful, backbreaking bit of architectural necessity, decidedly an art form in that it takes many disparate glacial remnants and fits them together to effect useful purpose, and has for centuries.

I hike in the woods a lot around here and am amazed at the enduring solidity of so many of these structures, withstanding the crash of giant trees with nothing but a couple stones dislodged.

Every stone wall has a story to tell, and since they can’t talk, it’s up to the observer to fill in the blanks. And that I do. I will often stand near a long, meandering stone wall in the forest that snakes up and down dips and swells of the earth and imagine the purpose that created it, where farm animals once grazed, where a house once stood, where children once played and danced carefree atop them.

I was raised in Seekonk when that suburban town was farmland and little else; I grew up in a time before Route 195 was there. When built, it cut several hundred yards in front of my house, replacing large fields and trees. But out past our backyard, lacing the edge of the forest of land that connected our house with my grandparents, was this majestic old stone wall. Back in the day, long before me, this was farmland. My immigrant great-grandfather toiled here, raising animals, building a barn in which I would play many years later imagining what was.

As I did with the stone wall of my youth, skipping along the top for as far as I could before I’d be stymied by thick growth, a fallen tree, missing stones. I visualized what land looked like on either side of the wall, farm on one side, forest on the other. I wondered if my greatgrandfather created this structure. That stonewall never failed to capture and cultivate my imagination.

For many years, I thought New England stone walls were the end-all and be-all of stone walls. What else could they be but a wonderful jumble of stone, thick and oddly shaped, fitted together with care and purpose. It wasn’t until years later I realized all not all stone walls were created equal.

I was on a film shoot in June in a very rural section of New York, about an hour and a half west of Albany, in the bucolic environs of Bovina Center, population 500 or so. This is land of cattle and farm and a verdant, rolling beauty that is just mesmerizing.

And there in the Catskill Mountains were walls made of flat slabs of easily stacked stone that seemed a cheat to my New England sensibilities. Our ancestors worked long and hard to create walls of not-one-size-fits-all stone. But I’m sure they would have preferred this smoothly square-and-rectangular geologic jigsaw puzzle any day of the week. Except, perhaps, Sundays, they being the Puritan sticklers for that day of rest and all.

I couldn’t imagine what these stones were, but Google came to the rescue: the Catskills are made largely of sandstone, which conveniently formed evenly whereas our New England rocky underpinning is a mad mix of granite chunks that take considerably more rock wrangling to conform to our needs.

And as always, my imagination wandered, visualizing mooing cattle roaming the windswept pasture before the 19th century farmhouse that was now an Airbnb in which we stayed; in an adjacent and marvelously ramshackle old barn, we also filmed. It was a barn like the one of my youth and behind every giant timber beam, dancing in every shadow, thick on every crumbling plank were untold stories of the people who once lived and loved and toiled here.

Not sure why I find stone walls so fascinating. Technically, I guess, there is no reason for a stone wall to exist anymore. Except that these rugged odes to long-ago days delight the eye and tickle the mind and respect those who built them.

Which, I guess, are pretty rock-solid reasons after all.

The Old Stone Wall

By Laurie A. Chandler

We wander, both, the crisp clear slopes of autumn, Through scattered leaves of faded, fallen color. For me, a carefree hour, or maybe two. The stone wall, though, has twice outlived its builder: He who plucked the granite from heavy, stubborn soil. Dragging, rolling, hefting the puzzle pieces into place.

That wall and man shared much in common, in their struggle to tame nature’s endless march. Rugged, stalwart, they took the character of an unyielding land, framed fields that winter buried deep in drifted white, that spring sprinkled with tender newborn calves, and summer balanced barefoot children on the winding way.

In time, the passing years gathered up the man and crusted stone with olive moss and lichen gray. Stumbling with age and witness to a different time, still, there are stories harbored here, meaning to be found in the wall’s enduring presence, if only that, when I am gone, the silent stones will stay.

Reprinted with permission

This poem is by Laurie A. Chandler of Maine, author of Upwards, an inspirational story of solo through-paddling the 740-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail and her new release, Through Woods & Waters: A Solo Journey to Maine's New National Monument.