STONE HUT ( 15 ) ~

"Cinch"
stone cairn by
Bob Arnold

Finally this book comes down to a little dog. Of course, a little girl, too, our granddaughter Layla, born as I write these last chapters, while this book started off with the birth of her father, Carson. 

Now this little dog is right before us in a hidden sort of cul-de-sac parking lot in a town where we were the other day visiting, and I’m guessing this very small dog’s owner — the man my age in the worn jeans — has parked his pickup truck and trailer with heavy lawnmowing machinery into a corner lot like he knows this town, like we know this town as well. He has the little dog out on a walk with him, and the dog is smaller than a cat. Our house cat Kokomo is larger than this dog, and mainly small dogs turn me off, until we pass by the man and his small dog, and the dog turns to us like the tiniest and bravest of souls, and it’s then I see its white muzzle and shaky legs, and I can see this dog is quite old. He’s done everything within his power to turn away from his incessant sniffing of the small lawn he is on, like a momentary island, with the man who is just giving the dog a little run, and the dog spots my wife and me and wants to know who we are. The dog’s eyes are searching, brown and beautiful; whereas his owner’s eyes are vague, distant and noncommitted. We decide to pass the dog by so we don’t cause any discomfort for the man. He’s on his routine. 

We leave the parking lot and cross the easy street into a park and find a bench and sit awhile as a couple just looking around. There’s some kids over there under a large maple tree playing, and nearby three young girls sit in a grassy circle of conversation. By the time we have the immediate area pegged, here comes the man and his little dog. They’ve also crossed the street the same way we have and now the dog has a wider grass spot to fidget and sniff and investigate. He appears quite excited, even if he looks like he is close to dying. The man doesn’t look close to dying, but he does look like he is alone and this dog is his complete affection. He stands patiently and waits for the dog to go through its tiny tour. On short legs the dog won’t cover any wide ground. The man only has to turn this way and that, make a few steps, guide the little dog here and there, and the little dog is so immensely easy to please, old as it is and happy as it is, that the dog begins to bring tears to my eyes. Here I am falling for a little dog, which yes, may be my granddaughter, may be my son, may be myself, may be just a little dog in the world making its way. 

After ten minutes or so of nose in the grass scavenging, the man picks up the little dog with its little legs going a mile a minute, and as soon as the dog is lifted those little legs stop and the dog is obedient and still. He looks up to the man and his face who is busy walking back the same way he came, and he crosses the street exactly the same way, the little dog held against his chest. I notice as the man gets away from the park, the street, and is walking alone up the solitary driveway into the parking lot, he brings the dog closer to his face and they kiss. He takes the little dog to his pickup truck in the corner and sets him in the cab. He rolls down the window a few inches and proceeds to add more money to the parking meter to lengthen his stay. He’ll walk away from the truck and twelve feet away turn and walk back to the truck and look into the passenger window where the little dog is. Who knows what he says, but he says something. He then walks back in our direction, crosses the street again, walks up the shady pathway of the park, crosses a busier street, turns up the sidewalk and walks a short distant where he stops and takes no time to choose a table at an outside cafe where he will have supper. It seems he has been there before. I stand up to have a better view of the man and see him sitting there and feel content for him. He’s alone on a Saturday evening, in his work clothes, his cap still on, staring into a menu, and we can forget about him. 

An hour later we will come back to our car and see the man’s pickup truck still in the corner, the passenger window rolled down a crack. We walk closer to the truck and suddenly see movement as the white of the little dog’s eyes gaze out at us. He’s tucked into a compact car seat all his own, waiting, acutely aware, with those searching eyes. He’s changed my mind forever about little dogs.

Stonemason — you’re probably wondering what is all this talk about a little dog? What’s the importance of little? Look in your hand at the all important stone shim you hold — how with this little stone it balances what’s big.

Bill Porter (Red Pine), Bob & Susan Arnold, Vermont

52

Today we drove north to an orchard we haven’t been to in decades and walked the soft farm path a quarter-mile out to their blueberries and picked twenty pounds on a gentle hillside of blazing sunshine cooled with an intermittent breeze. It couldn’t get any more ideal. And I’m not asking for it to be any more ideal. Here it is. 

After blueberries, we stopped at a used clothing store where the proprietor was very pregnant. We overheard her tell someone she has had a child every seven years, and now she’s forty-four; this rings more in our ears a few miles down the road when we stop at a farmstand we like and pick up a half-dozen ears of corn, the first of the season. It will most likely be hard yellow and tough, but we don’t care — it’s been eight long winter months since we’ve tasted fresh corn.

We run into an old acquaintance while there and share mutual recent news like her son has finally moved out of the house, and that we were just made grandparents. This delights the woman to congratulate us but she doesn’t quite understand we can’t jump for joy with her since our bellies are sloshing with fermented blueberries we’ve gobbled like good bears a half hour earlier, and we also have the very pregnant woman back at the used clothing store on our minds. We want the woman, now somewhat old for an expectant mother, to be able to have her baby, safe and true.  

In another hour we’ll be in a northern Massachusetts town, quite old, Colonial and actually a little eerie, bicycling the region six, seven or eight miles, we can’t keep track, because we’re simply exploring and looking and poking around. You can get into places all over America on a bicycle where you aren’t permitted on foot. Would you rather see someone roll into your driveway on a bicycle, or wander in on foot? Right, on a bicycle, it looks friendly and usually is friendly, and on my bicycle I can get into backlots, back streets, backyards, and see where stonework is best at play as old barn foundations, mill cribbing, boundary lines, fences, steps that turn, and disappear into foliage or flowers, grand slate on house roofs. I’m wheeling by, having a look.

Bob carrying out logs cut on the river after
Hurricane Irene

The stone builders are going to take care of themselves. They don’t need a book to learn how to handle, move, and place stone. But they do need a heart for it, and the stone will follow.

I always liked what William Saroyan had to say, “Take it as it comes — soon enough the past, the present, and the future will be the time it is.”

Little Layla will now keep Carson in clover for the next twenty years. When he’s fifty, he’ll again look up and around. She’s his eyes for now.

Colleen & Michael Hettich

Gerald & Lorry Hausman

Mike Luster & Otis

An Afterword

The original book On Stone, published in 1988, is now out of print and I figured there is no better time to reissue both the original text of the book, along with an expanded text and many dozens new photographs — and may as well change the title for this new edition while I’m at it — then when having a granddaughter come into the world out of the life of our son, Carson, the little critter running around throughout the first book.

So there we have it.

It’s Fall 2013 and we’ve just torn apart the porch I built thirty years ago. The pressure treated lumber on that framing is as sound as the day I notched them into place, but the PT used on a staircase between a lower and upper porch turned out to be bad stuff, from an entirely different lumberyard, and maybe I should have known better. I took the staircase apart. And with everything clear on the original deck of the first floor porch I’m slowly devising a sun room idea…it seems almost common sense to now have this constructed. It’ll buffer the northeastern wall of our already challenged old Colonial house, which means both the living room and the small cellar. It will also shorten what snow shoveling we’ll have to do when we step out the door. Nothing like a roof. Maybe steel. In the summer we like red cedar shakes or shingles on a new roof plan; by winter we sure like our slippery and sliding steel roofs. Let’s watch to see who wins that argument in my head. Susan is building this structure with me.

J.D. Whitney, Lisa Seale, Jonathan Greene

Kim Dorman

The work over late summer~fall is to find used materials — primarily casement sash or tall sturdy barn sash windows with many panes. The room will remain as a sun room with no extra headache of heating the space. Like the small kitchen library I built off from our kitchen a few winters back we enjoy the room eight or nine months of the year and then simply shut its door and let it hibernate winter away. We live in two rooms downstairs with whatever heat drifts from the first floor woodstoves into the upstairs, while the rest of the house has become overgrown by our bookshop and personal libraries. The books don’t mind the cold. I continue to work in an unheated tool room where you can’t even swing a cat, but I can still dance a few steps in there with Susan. I carry my table saw outdoors to work, a roughened up Makita on legs.

some photographs by Susan Arnold
& others

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013

STONE HUT ( 14 ) ~

The cairn Bob built for Janine Pommy Vega in our woodlot

48

When our close friend, the poet Janine Pommy Vega died at the age of 69 outside of Woodstock, New York (Willow), she had left a defined Will, and in that Will she made me the executor of her estate. She also stated that Susan and I would receive the copyright to her name. In short order, I met what was left of her immediate family: brother, nephew, and two nieces, and also some of Janine’s great extended family of friends around the world — many of them poets, singers, teachers, musicians, hustlers, working-class joes and janes, outsiders, professionals, publishers, neighbors, and mountain climbers, like Janine, who had scaled peaks from the Catskills, up into the Andes, and the mysterious reaches of Nepal. Yes, quite a woman.

I’m not ready to write extensively about Janine, that will come, but more about a stone cairn I built for her in our woodlot in Vermont. It would be ten times the size of the stone cairn we laid up for another poet friend Cid Corman — that was made at the summit to our Vermont land, a few steps into the twenty-first century when Cid died, and we made that cairn by hiking the trail up to the summit most every day and any good stone we found along the way on the trail, we picked up and added to the slowly formed cairn that would be for Cid. Think of each stone picked up as a haiku poem, which Cid was a master at writing and translating from the Japanese, and you’ll quickly get an image in your head how some stone structures can go up: line by line/stone by stone. The only odd stone away from the path we hiked on that came to the cairn was one a friend brought, round granite solid, and we set that down into the center of the cairn. The cairn’s been up there now a decade catching leaves, taking snow, slowly but ever surely disappearing like the best of stumps. That’s Cid.

Susan and Janine in Vermont

Janine was different. Janine was an activist, teacher, performer, raconteur, and maybe not as easily understood for her learned discipline and hidden charms. I found a location for her cairn that took the morning sun in the woodlot at the ease of a eastern slope, around the tallest maple trees and where plenty of old stone wall had fallen away, but the stone was there, you just had to dig and find it. Over a few August days I did just that and built a cairn in, what I had hoped would be, the shape of something familiar in Nepal or Ireland, two places on earth Janine was drawn to. For a few years now we’ve watched the stone cairn season with its surroundings, take on the light, the snow, rain, leaves falling, and chipmunks and squirrels passing over and through. It may be finally her birthday coming in February when we’ll put some of her ashes there.

49

If you want to know about stone, when Hurricane Irene came to Vermont in late summer 2011, it left us in stone.

We were returning from northern New Hampshire the night before the hurricane and already we could see military and National Guard convoys moving south on the interstate. What is this all about? we thought. In an eerie lighting and swirling fog. The sky was already messed up, but it wasn’t raining, just spooky. 

"Split-Rock" in our front yard

The next morning we rose early as usual, it was our wedding anniversary, and it was raining heavily and it only became heavier. We could hear the river rising, then roaring. The roaring part concerned us enough to go have a look, and that’s when we saw a river we’ve never seen in our lives. It was no longer a river, it was a water mass grown up and out of its form, speeding into the woods, rising up and over the road, gobbling the road, and rising many feet by the minute, so it could be — there was nothing that was going to stop it. It was only raining heavier. We were in rain gear following the river along the higher edges of the road, and the river was now a tidal wave. Maybe fourteen feet higher than we ever knew it. We met a neighbor we also never knew we had wandering like the young father he is asking us if the river would reach his house. It turned out I built this house decades ago and tried to assure him, not knowing anything myself, that the river wouldn’t get to where he was, huddled upstairs with a family. Rain pelting off our faces. River louder and louder, overpowering the woodland, going anywhere it damn well pleased. As humans, visitors to planet earth of land and water, we simply got to watch and wait.

The next day we all crawled out of our caves. Much of our dirt road was gone. It was obliterated the further south you went and where the river always widened and was wilder. The road wouldn’t open for months, and it took all those months to first realize what had happened and what is it that had to be done, and then all the stone started to get moved back into place; the stone that made roads. Neighbors teamed up and helped one another. Town laborers scratched their heads and tied together town-to-town to assist. We hiked down four miles from our house south into Massachusetts only to find all the road gone away, not a speck left, not even a hint. All we had was bare ledge from the mountainside the road curled around and hugged, and this is where stone would be brought back in and river banks were painstakingly rebuilt from scratch, large flat stone and cube rock after rock, days on end, and dumptrucks were the norm for weeks into months. Bringing stone. A life moved on stone.

Susan and Eleanor the day after Hurricane Irene

When we eventually got north up into our Vermont village, I met up with the two oldest residents who grew up as children here, and I knew both to be practical and hardworking folks. The woman said she had never seen anything like this ever in her life, and certainly not in our village, and the old man listening, a worker, quietly agreed nodding his large head. “The river was this close to the covered bridge,” he said to me, squinting his serious eyes, as he held his two large hands up and apart eight inches. Whoever designed and whoever built the covered bridge should now be complimented for laying in maybe one more height of stone beneath the bridge. It stood standing when many other bridges in the state went away.

Bob & Greg Joly putting down another steel roof.

50

Oscar Weatherhead, and in fact, Hap Weatherhead — there’s two names for you. Old timers I once knew or worked with. Last names from the earth and sky. They’re disappearing on us. At the age of fifty I was also seriously called “an old timer” by another old timer, much longer in the tooth than I was. I was always drawn to the old timer, the worker, ever since the age of ten and I was working in the family lumber business. There was “Slim,” Jim Duffy, Freddy Zarek, “Big John,” Frank Lazarczyk, Max Lebech — all builders. They didn’t read much, but for my sake they would pick up this book you’re reading. They were curious, keen listeners, devoted to their life and work. They’d take off their own shirt for you to wear. Out in the gardens and farmland were both “Weatherheads,” plus Harvey Cutting, Lee Stone, Alden Bell, Don Squires, Carl Eckhart, Lester Clark, Anna Carey, Ted Enslin, Richard Levasseur, Dudley Laufman, Gerry Hausman, Jonathan Greene, Greg Joly, and Peter Wilde. Pete turned a tractor over on himself causing a terrible mishap that took his life. One winter we built the swinging footbridge over the Green River together. In the sawmills were Bing Denison, Fred Miller, and Chuck Lynde who would consider himself too young to be an old timer. With repairing old vehicles were Ronny Barton, Denny King, J.D. Whitney, and Larry Croiser. I also met the Chinese scholar and translator Bill Porter (Red Pine) who came looking for me in Vermont as what I consider a prime old ways traveler, definitely with all that grace, bark and tumble place where all old timers settle…like Eleanor vanWaveren,  Alan Belville, Pete Higley, and Bill Barker, who, like me, aren’t even close to hanging up their tool belts yet. 

all photographs by Susan & Bob Arnold

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013

STONE HUT ( 13 ) ~

Helen Nearing

47

Something unique happened years after the first edition of On Stone was published and the book was floating along the edges of going out of print. A friend was in Maine and had access to some of the private library of author and homesteader Helen Nearing. This was on the coast of Maine, where Helen had gone after leaving years of homesteading in Vermont with her pioneer husband, the social and political activist Scott Nearing. Both Helen and Scott Nearing were stone builders. When On Stone appeared, I sent Helen Nearing a copy and in typical barter trade-off, she sent me back her book Our Home Made of Stone. Scott Nearing had now been dead almost ten years. She inscribed the book to me and also thanked me for the copy of On Stone. I had no idea until twenty years later, how extensively she read my book when my friend found Helen’s copy and sat himself down with the book and went through every page, jotting down by hand all of Helen’s notes and underlining she made in the book. About this book you are holding. The first forty chapters. Here are her notes.

“Dear Bob…I ran into HN’s (Helen Nearing) copy of “On Stone” and she underlined things — so for your archives”:

page 5 — “Otherwise, the hut is laid dry, the way I liked to work with stone.”

page 14 — “The big ones you tip the wheelbarrow on its side …to move,  carefully.”

page 18 —  

a) “A stonemason gets enjoyment looking at stonework, it’s in the blood.”

b) “stone for the right stone to fit that crack.”

c) “From looking for the stone…selecting another.”

page 18 — “After awhile it becomes a coordination…like nothing could.”

page 22 — “I was sitting in the car and he was about to follow …into the house that summer.”

page 26 — “Dirty yellow russets still grow on those trees.”

page 27 — “Since I’m not a purist and needed stone…I had to harvest stone.”

page 40 — “The hut is now a personality…and it will return the favor.”

page 50 — “…instead of a part-time labor of six months.”

pages 51-53 — HN has underlined THE ENTIRE PAGES from: “Books. …It keeps the appetite whet.”

page 56 — Helen’s “ ! ” next to: “light blue windows” (Scott Nearing and Helen Nearing used blue between the rafters in both stone houses, I’ve tracked this to Ernest Flagg’s Stone Houses, ed.)

page 57 — “In the woods I was taking from walls other men built.”

page 60 — 

a) “a third of that time was spent in the woods finding the stone to build.”

b) “loads of flat, wonderful stone, with at least two good faces on the stone.”

c) “It was boring to look at.”

d) “surprise of a flat stone, with even one good face, and save that for a corner stone in the hut, or a stone pad under the windows.”

page 61 — “the stone was spread on the ground…and basic stone being the largest pile.”

page 63 — 

a) “Maybe it is the work, but stonemasons seem an independent bunch. Most, like myself, work alone.”

b) “There is much picking up of stone…Work runs smooth.”

c) “I searched the places out and continued to return for longer looks, enjoying new detail in the work at every visit.”

page 64 — 

a) Helen’s “?” next to: “I won’t tell you where this happened.”

b) “Stone talking to stone.”

page 65 —

a) “I can wear gloves loading stone onto the Willys and then unloading, but often I have to feel the stone I am working with and gloves get in the way.”

b) “I used that broken stone and know right where it is in the hut, buried between the outer and inner walls.”

page 65 — “almost enough for one day”

page 69 — 

a) “The stone floor would be a special hunt of locating the best large stone, and very flat.”

b) “I would wait awhile for new stone to roll down…piling them on the shore.”

page 70 — “Flipping the stone down the hill to the Willys parked close to the hill…— they were rare enough.”

page 72 — “A chalkline”

page 80 — 

a) “More stone was quarried in France during this time than all of ancient Egypt.”

b) (Bob on Knut Hamsun) — “Knut Hamsun writes about the same thing in his own life…He wrote that it gave him the opportunity for his mind to think — write in his head  while becoming one with his hand.” (HN wrote “SN” next to this. Something she commonly did when a sentence illuminated Scott Nearing’s character, ed.)

page 81 — 

a) “If I go with stone, it will have to be padded with mortar…I don’t want to worry about a high stone tipping away and beaning them.”

b) “I decide on using stone and packing mortar behind the stone…then use the stone left over from the sidewalls piled away in one corner of the site.”

page 82 — “Eight years later has them looking out of stone.”

page 83  — “…laying stone against the boards from the outside.”

page 86 — “What he saw was a structure built for the ground, out of the ground. Naturally he understood.”

page 88 — “I waved to Scott who didn’t have to use the Willys. The tree gave us a cord-and-a-half of firewood…There is a photograph of Susan, with Carson in her lap, sitting up on it.”

page 89 — “…cut firewood for the following winter, order garden seeds, shovel lots of snow.”

page 94 — 

a) “It is now late September…Mortar the edges.”

b) “…I wheelbarrowed the two yards of gravel…as a pad for the stone.”

c) “I feel pretty secure. When the pond is dry you can see where the ledge pops up…  —  the old timers knew when to stop digging.”

pages 94-95 — 

a) “I spread and tamp the gravel inside the hut…level with my eye.”

b) “Every stone has a use.”

c) “butter it around all the edges”

page 96 — “battening whatever scrap lumber I had horizontally to the interior”

page 98 —

a) “A ladder had to be built to reach from the stone floor to the loft. I went into the wood lot…saved from the roof job and rounded the edges.”

b) “There would be no lock on the door.”

page 99 — “I hadn’t planned it that way.”

page 101 — “Susan terms ‘junk jobs’…digging an underground electric line…Like Carson I was willing to look only a few feet around me and enjoy it.”

page 102 — “Save the hardwood for the house. One other job was to flash the rear corners of the roof where it met ledge.”

page 102 — “Sweeping the stone floor was my gift to the hut at each visit. It was an exercise between us.”

page 107 —

a) “I wanted to hold my fork that way but my father wouldn’t let me. The soda bread mixed with egg yolk on the plate.”

b) “He bought a bicycle and like his Belfast days…all through the Berkshire Hills.”

pages 110-111 — “My father liquidated his lumber business in 1985. Given another three years…distinguishing a 10-common nail from a 12-common nail.”

page 112 — “I tucked a book in my lunchpail and when others broke for lunch I would listen to the chatter, eat, and read.”

page 116 — 

a) “The town of Carmel, California…the granite from the coastline to build his home.”

b) “made the Jeffers home…The house and tower are rock, not pretty,”

pages 116-117— 

a) “The Jeffers house is squa …Better known as Hawk Tower,”

b) “landscape where he carved out the life poem.”

c) “You need to have the ocean in your ears…the poems, the life were true.”

page 123 — “Firewood was cut with a bowsaw and all three bowsaws were kept sharp, clean, hung on a nail out of the weather.”

pages-123-124 — 

a) “Susan taught herself gardening and weaving. I taught myself treework and stonework.”

b) Helen’s “!” next to:  “a pair of chain saws and bowsaw.”

c) “I have never worked along aside a better worker than Susan, she has few complaints…and sometimes helping me lift a stone that weighs more than both of us.” (I think HN sees some of herself in this portrait, ed.)

d) “What is important to me is that we have done it together.”

Bob & Susan Arnold at
Saratoga Battleground, NY.
1990s
photo by Carson

some photographs by Susan, Carson & Bob Arnold

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013