THE EGG AND I

THE EGG AND I

Photos by Sarah Huntington

By Drew Babb

Lewis Whitesell stands by his cairn.

The egg is a cairn. No, not Toto, the Cairn Terrier in The Wizard of Oz. This cairn is an old-world-inspired pile of stones that commemorate or memorialize or just looks stunning on a Fauquier foothill.

The “I” (of the egg and…) is Lewis Whitesell, legendary in these parts for his stonewalls and chimneys and cabins. But for this tour-de-force he wielded a decidedly artistic sledge and trowel to build a couple of cairns for his patron, Mark Ohrstrom, on Ohrstrom’s farm near The Plains.

The Egg is eight feet tall. Took 28 days to craft. The core is hollow but there’s a center post to keep Whitesell (and his son Ryan, a co-creator), well, centered. The secret sauce may have been precisely sized cut-out templates fashioned from Pink Panther Owens-Corning insulation that guided his sublime gradating and undulating egg.

The long view of the cairn egg.

The Egg’s big brother stands on another slope. This beauty is 16 feet tall. It’s more of a tower. It was christened New Year’s Eve 2019 with a bundle of olive-oil soaked rags which shot out an ethereal flame to announce its arrival.

Whitesell has been hauling and hammering and nudging stone for 35 years. He came out of Virginia Tech with (of all things) a degree in forest management. But he kept seeing trees as so-many board feet and then remembered that he didn’t want to cut down trees after all.

He apprenticed with local masters Charles Wolfe and Fred Chamblin, then signed on with brother Doug Whitesell, who was already into masonry. Doug went on to be a renowned antique clock restorer. But that’s another story.

Whitesell is known for mentoring masonry newbies. And for staying out of their way so they can evolve the way he has. He passes along his thanks “… to the team who perfected ibuprofen because there’s pain in this trade…and it’s nice to have an alternative to the classic go-to analgesic: whiskey.”

Whitesell looks forward to more eggs and cairns and other dazzling whimsies. He declares, “My joints creak a bit. My workdays are shorter. But I’m not done yet.”

Me and my cairn shadow.