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

HELEN NEARING ~

~

When homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing left their mark after  ground-breaking years in Vermont (Jamaica) and re-settled their homestead and work on the coast of Maine, they met a salty old timer by the name of Jarvis Green. Jarvis taught the newcomers some things, starting with cats. . .

This is Helen's story, with photographs, and an afterword by Nearing scholar Greg Joly

$15

with Free Shipping in the USA

until December 31, 2012  

 

WASTELAND ~

Had a kid come up to me today on the street (I may attract them: the guy in town once a week), my height, and say, "Hi, you're Carson's dad, right?" (pause). I nod, smile say, "Right". "Yeah, well, uh. . . do-you-remember-me?" I do but for some reason I say I don't. I'm trusting my instincts. So he goes into a whole song and dance about how he's hit hard times, and I can see it, it actually hurts me, too. I remember him vividly, or it seems the vividly is rushing to me and into my eyes and head as I listen to him talk, from some years ago when I was reading on the street in town for Katrina Hurricane relief. Making money with Greg Joly and we'd read a few hours on the street, at least once a week, and everyone thought we were preachers. Of course they never got close enough to us to hear actually what we were saying or doing, but that didn't stop them from having their forthright inaccurate opinions. We sent that money earned while reading down to New Orleans. None of the poets of the town would step near us, whatever poets there were. Greg told me they didn't, or wouldn't. I didn't care, who needs poets when you have street people, kids, children, dogs, bums, stragglers, smiling strangers. An ideal audience. We read this way for over two years. This kid coming up to me today was one of them and he would come with two of his buddies out of high school and the boys were beautiful boys, bright eyed and active, dreaming, sweeping with doubts and stumbles and hearts alive. They listened to us talk and read poems and the next day or the next day after that one, who knows, they came with money in hand to buy books. Wanted a signature. Left to go read. I could watch and feel their dedications. It was there. Today I see the best looking one of the three boys, actually handsome with a boldness Carson also once had, come to me bleary-eyed, rheumy in spots, hair dismissed to a gaudy henna something or other. He tells me he cuts his hair himself. Asks me how does it look? I say, not bad. "Chicks like it longer," he tells me. He says he figures you learn how to cut your hair by the shape of your face. He has a war torn and blitzed Kurt Cobain satchel over his shoulder. Hates it when people call him Kurt Cobain, because of the satchel and because, well, he does look a little bit like the dead grunge rocker. Now he asks me for money. Says he hates to do it so he asks the people he thinks he knows. I give him some money. Tell him I do remember him from some time ago. He has a Walkman in hand and the headphones are over his head. He can still hear me. Thanks me for the money. I move down to the door where I'll wait for a store to open. I watch him bum a cigarette from a bum. The bum takes out a packet of Bugle, they roll cigarettes and talk. Fifteen minutes later he is with me at the door, cigarette no longer lit flouncy in his mouth, about to talk more with me. A half hour's worth. He's looking half-baked. I'm just to listen. Sweetheart is with me, sitting on the concrete eating her brought from home breakfast pocket sandwich. She's taken her lovely shawl off to sit on it. The little crowd that usually comes to the store on this day is there and listens or watches me listen to my new friend who is unraveling. He situates between making perfect sense, even some brilliance, and absolutely no sense at all. Asks me like an eight year old girl again and again if he looks all right with his self-cut hairdo? Needs to know. Finally tells me he wants to be a writer. He's actually related to T.S. Eliot, and his middle name is "Eliot". He tells me his fully elegant and royally rich name. There's something about it all that I believe. There was one sentence he said during the whole visit of over a half hour of unadulterated bullshit that was indeed brilliant and could remind me of Eliot.

photo : young ts eliot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-pop-music

EARTH ~

We're on the home stretch of rebuilding the roof, setting on the spruce purlins for nailers, and getting the last leg of steel roofing up and anchored on. I'm curious to see if between Sweetheart and me we can rig up a ramp system to slide the seventeen foot sheets six-feet up the ramp and then climb onto the scaffold and pull the sheets up and onto the roof. More husband and wife team stuff. We do it all the time with stone, logs, and snow, why not steel? Seven years ago on the back roof we pulled up 18 footers, but we had boy wonder Carson with us then. Nothing like a young lad. I'll have to see after I build the ramp, and lock it in at a comfortable angle onto the scaffold, then watch how the material slides and how well we can maneuver ourselves ground-to-roof. We're still pretty quick. If it becomes obviously nuts, Greg will come down and help give us a lift. Nothing like a friend. I've even thought of grabbing the first stranger going by: walking, bicycle, scooter "Hey, want to help us a moment and give this sheet a lift?" The ever grounded feeling of common community.

Getting up high with the last pieces of 16-foot spruce purlins. It's a Sunday morning, maybe nearing on 11AM and the roof asphalt must be 110 degrees. I mean hot.

I love the new jiffy handsaws, so I keep mine close by hung on a temporary nail. As I need to lop off a short end piece to fit in the purlin I do it from the high staging with my trusty handsaw. No nailguns on this job.

The old steel ridgecap we'll remove from the house roof I'll be putting right onto the stone hut's ridge. You can see it needs a new one. I built this hut 25 years ago, all laid up dry except for the gable end. I started on it the day our son Carson was born. The stone all came off our land, hauled by old jeep and wheelbarrow to the site. The windows came from a friend stopping by before moving to Arizona. He unloaded what he owned to lighten his load for the journey.The old barn board door came from barn boards I found in a barn and brought home and built as a door. The chapel style window came from a chapel. That's a second run of cedar shingles on the roof. The first were white and worthless for roof work but what are you going to do when no money? Years later bought red cedar from British Columbia and cut in that star. So many basics in New England. It's only when you head down to Baltimore and remember that Edgar Allan Poe termed the Transcendentalists "frogpondians", it's all together perfect. I chuckle way high on the roof staging thinking of this.

Here's old friend white pine seen from the scaffold, directly east of the house, over the river. No one lives anywhere near it. The land over there has been heavily logged twice since we've been here forty years, and no one has taken the tree. Looking now at the tree it seems to have two out stretched arms, an arched back, and it's singing.

This is what a day off from the roof job looks like. Fellow worker Sweetheart.

At the west gable of the house, where the steel roof will finish up.

The safe passageway, kept mainly clean, of an obedient scaffold.

We're working through two layers of asphalt shingles and setting in 3/4 inch spruce strapping. I've even stripped the first layer of shingle tabs to get closer to solid footing. You want a 3-inch screw to go along here and there with the regular ringshank nails, and you want to try to remember where the chestnut 4 x 4 beams are below. Sink a screw or a nail into one of those as much as you can. At best they were set in where the setting-in was best. Farmers built this place. Otherwise, it's a full one inch softwood deck under the shingles. It'll grab.

There's always a place to hang a saw.

photos © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

Since we last saw the roof job came four days of steady raininess ~ which means a half inch one day, then drizzles the next, followed by a good inch of nice rainfall which splashed up the river a notch, juiced the gardens, grew the grass, and kept us off the roof.







By Tuesday we figured we could play between the rain drops. Overcast all day, ideal for hunkering up at the chimney where I could tear out the old and rebuild new flashing and lead escarpment, and with Greg slide on two more sheets specially cut to work around the chimney. For awhile there it was Greg on one side of the roof where I had built in roof brackets so he had a landing to perch. And from there, the letterpress man could hand me hammer, drill, caulking gun, metals with the same grace and delivery of handling his type, fonts, ink and special papers. All with a certain deckle edge, graceful. I made the chimney water-tight. Sweetheart was up on the scaffold tending to any loose ends, checking the guys' work, putting that ever wondrous woman's touch to things. I wouldn't want a house without it.

A day off for another rain day Sweetheart and I got many town errands done. This means two weeks of groceries, two weeks of laundry, paperworks for printing at Longhouse and, an ice cream cone (shared).







Thursday was pitch perfect ~ not hot, not cold, not real windy, but a breeze ~ Sweetheart and I started the day and finished it building the rest of the scaffold across the face of the house and it would be one we think Michelangelo would have climbed up there with us. Had a look around.

Now we have 42 feet wide scaffold and we can walk like a stroll in a park (almost) down the whole edge of the roof eave and get at everything. Put up the ladder and hook and climb to wherever. Work either side of the roof.

I still have a day ahead of me to level off the old roof and set in the last of the spruce purlins for screwing the steel into. I'll work that alone with my one board helper who holds one side of the long and flapping sixteen footers.

When the purlins are anchored, we go with more steel.

Mr. Nonchalance up there has actually gone to the trouble of building all this wood scaffold because for once in his life he's doing a roof job with complete safety in mind. It must come with age. I'm also a traditionalist and remember as a boy working on hardy work crews where guys in simple cars and trucks arrived at a job and nothing stood in the way — need to get over an impasse? grab some 2 x 4s and build a bridge, a scaffold, a tower. Take it all down later, use it again, or bury it into something else. Plus I'm wanting everyone dear to me, and helping out, to feel safe. Plus halfway across with the steel, and a closer look at the chimney, I've gotten it into my bandanna skull that maybe it is time to rebuild the chimney while we're at it — either stucco and fully seal it, or maybe even rebuild the outer frame in slate. Yes, slate. I know, I've never seen one either, but no one gets anywhere interesting without first a dream. Or two.

So far we have found two damaged sheets and await two new ones from the lumberyard who awaits from the steel supplier in Pennsylvania. Everything connects. It's a map.

Our wedding anniversary is on Saturday.

photos © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

Hot? Up on the roof I've been broiled alive. I get up there early and work hard until 11, then break for breakfast and maybe deal with mail and a short film. Rossellini's film on St. Francis this morning. Then I go back to work from 12:30-2:30 and broil, take a break and bicycle with Sweetheart where we dunk in the river work clothes and all. I go back to work at 4:30 and I work steadily up there until 7:30, or real dark. Late supper. Start all over again the next day. Until the roof is done. This old roof is causing all sorts of surprises and tricks to hurdle. An old roof is three times the work of a new roof or modern house. But it has stages and angles and each inch is a discovery. Good poetry.

I'm finding light dips and slumps in ye old roof, my buddy. I've just ordered longer screws to go along with my regular artillery. I once worked on an old house where I had to build the middle of the roof up 8 inches! When the job was done, from the ground, one would never see the skirmish. All buried. A bridge under the steel.


I'm tearing off layers of shingles this morning and have reached the bone of 1790. The age of this house. Timber that hasn't seen the light of day for maybe a half century. "Hello in there", I say, as John Prine once sang those words.

O what a day. I mean O What A Day. We got 5 sheets of steel onto the roof and things are coming up roses. Bountiful. We are over the hurdle of what the roof will look like, the imagination runs wild. Even after all the years I've put on roofs. I don't know everything. I'm proud of that. Greg Joly came down in his newly rebuilt Toyota truck (re-call and Toyota gave him a whole new frame) and climbed the roof and worked with me, like when he got this job for me in his neck of the woods to rebuild an old country cabin falling into the ground. I did it. I hired him as a helping hand.

Think of it, Greg has also published two of my books of poems, each letterpress, each put together like the awls and screws and hammers in our hands. Thoughtful. Deliberate. Type that bites into the paper.





The day strung beautifully, low humidity, and Sweetheart ran between taking many photographs and some movies of the work, plus always there to help lift the steel sheets from the ground to us on the scaffold. What a pal!


In the stack of roofing, sheet 5 came up damaged. Bad news of the day. Took three photographs and emailed them immediately to the lumberyard. A new sheet expected late next week.


Neighbors wave to us on the ridgetop as I screw on the new ridgecap. Shiny. I wave back. Greg saddle rides the ridgecap to keep it all down tight as I move along.






Sweetheart and I go for a swim at 3:30 when work is done. Drench off the work grime. Sweetheart sits like a wood nymph on the ledge of stone inches from the water splash. Her hair all light. Then she is up to her knees in the water. Pants sky blue.

photos © susan arnold

EARTH ~

idea: Bob & Greg when reading on the streets for Katrina; next for Gulf miseries
graphic design: Greg Joly at Bull Thistle Press

LABOR DAY!




Greg Joly came down this week for part of a day and we hauled out two cord, or ten truck loads, of different size firewood. All two years dry and some extremely small to move by hand. Pick up six at a time. Ideal for the small firebox in the kitchen wood cookstove. It's all worth the effort. Oak, beech, ironwood, some maple, even hemlock, and hornbeam turning a little punky. White birch gone all to punk. Those will go in the camp fire tonight Susan and I will build at dusk to make supper on a grill and watch the damp night fall down around us river sound and last of the insects and all. We asked the worker in the aisles of the town food co-op yesterday just where were the marshmallows; we knew we had seen them once upon a time when we didn't want them. With a campfire tonight we'll need marshmallows. Too bad we don't any longer have a child or friends of the child around. They go well with marshmallows. Hearing the giggles and firelight in their eyes as the white coated soft marshmallow turns maple syrup brown. A shriek when one bursts into small flame. Anyway, the wood has been pulled out of the woodlot just in time.

Yes, the mosquitos, the spider webs! in the woods. With the truck we made tracks up into this part of the woodlot where tracks haven't been for years. Once upon a time I made tracks there with my Willy's jeep all the time. Now it's by wheelbarrow. We built the wood into a two cord wood cairn and I'll share a photograph that Susan snapped. I'm up on a ladder peering over. Greg's posing for the pretty photographer.

We sold our Ford Taurus to my brother in Boston after I bought for Susan a used Subaru for our 35th anniversary. It's got what they call a "moon roof" but so far it seems to work best as a "sun-roof", though we've only driven it two times in the daytime. Never owned such a fancy car. 2001. My mechanic friend who sold it to us thought he was giving us quite a feature, but we almost didn't want it, when we heard the seats actually heated up! Yesterday, while driving, we both noticed two buttons near the seats and no idea what they were for. A few miles went by then it dawned on us. The heated seats. Truth be told it was the moon-roof that sold us the car even before we lifted the hood and checked the oil.

The silly hard working days of late summer.

A NEW BOOK BY BOB ARNOLD FOR SPRING



New! from Bull Thistle Press
Greg Joly, printer & publisher

Bob Arnold's Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky, letterpress printed and published by Greg Joly at Bull Thistle Press in Jamaica, Vermont, has an interesting background.

To begin with, Greg drew from 35 years of Bob's poetry. What fascinated him was how the poems he wanted, all written simply with square lines, could in fact be printed backwards.

Bob showed Greg how this worked when they were reading together on New England roads, streets, bridges & byways, earning money for Katrina victims in New Orleans, and one of Bob's poems "Dogs In Snow" came up and Bob read it, and then as a lark he read it backwards. Greg perked up at that event. Bob shared how a letterpress printer and publisher, Michael Tarachow, once upon a time while setting the poem for Bob's book Habitat, revealed how the poem could work forwards and backwards. Maybe it is a quirk with letterpress hand-printers but they love this sort of thing. No surprise, Greg did too.

He went home that night and began to work over Bob's poems. When they were together the next week to do another reading, Greg arrived with a handful of papers all typed of Bob's poems from many books. He had arranged the poems as a backwards method. Bob put on the finishing touches.

Sure enough the poems were rebuilt nearly without missing a word, and there was a new sense and delivery and meaning to the poems. Not a different meaning — the subjects stayed intact — just a whole different song and sound and suspension on the page. Almost an immediate language experiment, dare we say? This is what Greg and Bob followed with, and over the next three years the book was formed. We don't think there is a selected poems out there quite like this one.



HOW TO ORDER

Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky
by Bob Arnold

Unsigned edition ~ $25
Signed ~ $32

Shipping & handling $3.50
International mailing, please inquire

Payable by credit card, Paypal or check
Available exclusively through Longhouse

Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers
1604 River Road
Guilford, Vermont 05301
802-254-4242