STONE HUT ( 12 ) ~

A stone tower I like somewhere in the White Mountains, N.H.

43

One day, after being my dentist for thirty years, he said to me, “You need a crown, and I need a stone wall rebuilt at my house, can we work something out together?” I had always heard of this professional-barter set up from a few other friends. 

I had a poet friend who exchanged her books with her dentist for what he could do for her. I felt it made the most sense in the world for people who had very little money, but they knew a craft or had a talent to share where money could disappear. It’s a refreshing moment. I immediately felt this when I said, “Sure, we can work something out…what do you need for stone work?” And he told me. And afterwards when I had the crown work done because it took two or three sessions, while I was at the same time laying stone up at his house, I noticed how relaxed the dentist was at preparing the crown work in the same office where he was normally efficient and professional. He now seemed more at ease, one might say maybe too at ease, talking with his wife on the phone while shaping my crown when he got that first fit all wrong. Which only put a chuckle in my head since that’s how I worked on his stone wall — picking up one stone and knowing it wasn’t quite right and trying it anyway and then tossing the stone to the ground and trying another — that beautiful trial and error.

I even had a younger stone loving friend, Greg Joly, stop by one day while I was at work, way off in the countryside, up near one of the apple orchards where this dentist had a house tucked into the brow of a hill with towering shade trees and a comfortable home, and this friend worked with me while we visited for some hours and the stone wall I was mending, rebuilding, lengthening from scratch, built up steam. The dentist was home that day and he invited us both in for tea, and we sat in the man’s den where he had been housecleaning while his wife was off at her job as a school teacher. This dentist was now working only three days a week and was open to new pleasures: like helping out a stone builder and his dental crown, inviting into his house that worker and a complete stranger who’s just dropped by to be with the worker — a break in the day and why not have the two guys in. All the stonework got finished. The last time I saw the dentist at his office, I was there for a third session having the crown filed down into proper shape. Little tweaks and shavings. He wanted to make sure it was just right. He then asked me, “Are we all squared away between the stone wall and my work on the crown?” I thought for a second how the stone wall had reached from the furthest part of his yard up to his house and how I had pretty much run out of stone, even using what I could pull from an old foundation the dentist had on his property that he said was okay to go after. With my tongue I felt the crown and its smoothness. I smiled and said, “We are.”

Bob at work on the house chimney top, Mexican tiles in their temp frame

44

When I look at my stone tool pail of over forty-five years it’s barely changed at all — black metal old can holding stone chisels, star chisels, many-size trowels, pointing tools, hand brushes, measuring tape, old gloves. That’s it. Wait! don’t forget the two or three stone hammers. I keep my sledgehammers and pry bars and crowbars off to one side. Now two wheelbarrows. One handcart. That’s the extent of my hardware. I’ve been able to do what I had to do. The old Willys Jeep that pulled out most of the stone for the stone hut is now on the opposite corner of the yard from the hut, balancing that end with the hut like bookends, and it’s rusted into place while sinking into the ground. The tires are all rotted and flat. The back oak bed of planks is shot and collapsed. The frame is still painted the silver I painted it but it won’t ever work again. The cab doors both open with a yelp. The windows are shocked. The double-paned windshield is vintage and classic, and the floor of the cab that I rebuilt as a young man is tough as ever. The hood lifts to the engine and the works, a flathead six, but nothing’s turning over. It’s no longer a jeep. It’s structure, a monument, a companion, old glory. 

A sawmill I liked once upon a time in Newfoundland

45

I like to take my bicycle and bicycle around, and I like to take my bicycle when Susan takes her bicycle with me. I like this just as much as sitting in a rocking chair on a porch in the evening, or on the step stoop and listening to the day close up. Watch it and feel it. It’s all happening. And when we’re bicycling around I like to find other folks in their rocking chairs doing exactly what I also love to do. I can see they do, too, except there aren’t as many as there once were. A dying breed.

When I was a little boy, no more than five or six, there were two sisters who lived next door to my family, and one of them had hair that reached to the ground. I saw that hair reach to the ground one summer day when she was outside and had just washed her hair and she came outside to comb it and dry it, and it’s still the longest hair I have ever seen on anyone. I had already been strolling over in the evening to be with our wonderful neighbors who I had no idea, then, would later remind me of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, but that’s who they were. They had two grand rockers on their wide berth front porch that covered the entire front of the house, and the interior of the house was always with that old lady mauve and lace and shadows and cuckoo clock. I could often be found on the porch rocking with my friends, my feet never close to touching the floor, and they seemed to love whatever it was that came out of my mouth sharing with them the tiny exploits of my day. Where they got the third rocking chair I’ll never know but they got one, and it was for me or some other visitor. In a five year old’s mind it was my chair. 

I see houses that remind me of this house when I bicycle small towns in Vermont and Massachusetts with Susan. We lift our two bikes onto the back of the car or into the old pickup truck and just go. Old Deerfield is a wonderful place for this sort of thing. And usually where one sees someone rocking on a porch, most often always an elder, one also sees a tidy house. A house with trees and flowers and gardens. And around those flowers and gardens and leading many times to their place, it is stone. Walkways, borders, stone walls, pinnacles, totems, breaks to the eye, but it’s stone. The free stuff that can be found at a cost of knowing how to move its weight where someone wants it. The ones rocking and watching and listening know well just how to place the stone. They’ve had good practice.

Carson and Bob building an addition onto the house;
the new rafters are staggered working off the old original
house beams

46

There are two things about stonework — at least two things — but the two essential ones are your physical back and injury to it, and money. 

Now in my early 60s my back has had a lifetime of being grumpy, often shot to hell, one or two months in a row out of commission completely. A lot of the problem was not taking care of myself and just working all the time because I was of a young age and vigor where I could go on forever. Believe it or not, I still have the vigor and stamina and work many long days, but the body listens, as I say, and payback is hell, as someone has certainly already told you. I began yoga exercises far too late, but I did begin ten years ago and it has facilitated remarkably. I’m also steering away from stonework and jobs that make no sense for one man and his wheelbarrow to attempt, which doesn’t mean I’m not fearless — I am — but I’m hopefully not stupid. I’ll still move large rock out of the woodlot with a handcart or wheelbarrow, but instead of hauling all day and driving myself down, I’ll move two dozen large stones and tell the pile, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And I do. 

Money will help you now make these decisions. If you’ve made enough, you can do just enough. Because I come from two families with completely opposite histories and incomes: one was the big Irish friendly bunch from Belfast, Ireland; and the other was the New England business players, all in the lumber business, and the earlier family members were roughshod loggers and sawyers, but the later twentieth century members were money-driven building contractors or lumber suppliers, overseen by a lumber magnet, my grandfather, who worked the woods as a boy, but I only knew him in a long black coat with two different looking Cadillacs; and I guess he picked which one to drive depending on how he was feeling. One pure white, the other tail-finned, olive green.

Someone would make a big mistake if they thought I had anything to do with this supposed money bonanza, when in fact I had left home at eighteen and struck out for the Vermont woods wishing to make my living at the building trade. I didn’t see a dime from this family. Only recently I found out our grandfather had in fact left a sizeable financial trust to each of his grandchildren, equal amounts, that my father managed to usurp from one child after another, through poor financial management  and schemes. Some more removed grandchildren he ran this trust by were privy to his shenanigans, and I believe they got their share, but his own children were robbed. This doesn’t mean our father was a bad man, or an evil man, he was simply a businessman and businessmen often get into binds and fixes they can’t fix. They get cursed. I can only imagine what my two younger brothers did about their situation — our older sister died too young — while I’ve been in the Vermont woods getting a bad back, loving a long marriage, raising a child, building as well a bookshop and publishing business tiny as a fruit stand and just as sweet. It took believing in a dream, each other, gaining a step at a time at each opportunity, and learning to not push against the river, or the stone. They shape themselves, they shape one another. If at the age of sixty you told me what the kid, called “me,” at age twenty planned to do, I’d have to ask, “Is he nuts?” But good luck to him.

An old flat stone seat I built long ago that slipped off and I
liked how it looked and re-built stone around it

all photographs by Susan Arnold

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

LOUIS MICHEL EILSHEMIUS ~

The Dream

Approaching Storm

Girl in the Moonlight

Rose Marie Reclining

Afternoon Wind

E I L S H E M I U S

O LIBRARY ~

R E A D      M E

Yale 2018

IN THESE TIMES ~

In These Times


Happy New Year . . . Today you who have

my land on both sides of you, how happy you are, brother.

I am the wandering child of all that I love.

Answer me, imagine that I am with you,

asking you, imagine that I am with you,

asking you, imagine that I am that January wind,

Puelche wind, ancient wind of the mountains

that when you open the door visits you

entering, airing its swift questions.

Tell me, have you gone into a field of wheat or barley,

is it golden?  Speak to me of a day of plums.

Far from Chile I think of a day, circular,

purple, transparent, of sugar in clusters,

and of thick blueberries dripping

into my mouth, their cups filled with delight.

Tell me, did you bite into the pure flank

of a peach today, filling yourself with immortal ambrosia,

until you too became the fountain of the earth,

fruit and fruit arriving in splendor to the world?



———————————

Pablo Neruda
Canto General
song of the Americas
translated by Mariela Griffon
Tupelo Press, 2016

BUSTER KEATON RIDES AGAIN ~

POLARIS ~

     

Polaris


There is a woman

in a room,

her white dress

pushed and pulled

by the ocean.



The moon stains her arms gray

as she stands perched

in the window frame,

waiting for what,

I'll never know.

More night?

Some sort of midnight eclipse?

A black illumination?



Morning will shake me again,

back to chasing those balloons

I lost as a child,

so early burned

by that Texas sun,

dreaming in the desert,

never having slpt in forest

or at sea.



So yes, I am a balloon chaser,

my pockets full of seeds

and photographs,

maps of the Persian Sea,

or Berlin,

nautical charts,

sketches from a dream I had

of the Northern Lights.



—————————

Jonathan Simons
Songs of Waking
Analog Sea
2016

WOODWORK FOR WILLIE ~

STONE HUT (11) ~

"Villa of Souls" built by Bob in our woodlot

39

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, as far as one’s power reaches.          Robinson Jeffers

The town of Carmel, California can be easily bypassed, but the coastline can’t. If you do, you will miss what surf and stone is all about. There was a stonemason who once lived in Carmel, who worked around that surf and stone, who gathered the granite from the coastline to build his home. House, garden walls, and even a tower he shaped with his hands. All of it looked back at the Pacific where it came from. Robinson Jeffers looked like he came from the Pacific, just like his stone. His wife Una’s favorite poet was Yeats and when standing on the shore staring up on the bluff where the stone property is encircled by cypress and eucalyptus trees you can hear and feel Yeats’ lines “hammer your thoughts into unity” all over the stonework. When Susan and I were searching for the house, we knew this place was it by its location with the sea, the wind, the long grass blowing from the coast road up into the yard. We stayed away. Walked the road around it, connecting with a street bunched with wealthy houses which made the Jeffers home appear more of a survivor. Everything in its landscape was interesting: being a forester Jeffers had planted trees all over his land only to have them chopped apart as progress advanced. But some have withstood, enough to give the land ocean breeze movement. The house and tower are rock, not pretty, but they have the lasting appearance of being from the land. There is another stone house nearby which I didn’t give a second glance to — it was built I’m sure by a crew of masons, and while it is massive and correct, it is devoid of feeling. It’s too correct. The Jeffers house is squat, like an animal on its haunches, many small windows give it eyes that look to the Pacific. The tower, better known as Hawk Tower, is a signature to anyone who must see it for the first time that some different kind of people must be living here. “Here” was known as Tor House, and different Jeffers was. Called eccentric, loner, hermit, antihuman — people read his poetry too much and don’t visit his landscape where he carved out the life poem. The poems really live on the land he loved with his wife and twin sons. You can see a lot of humanity on that land, and where the eyes look up and down the coast that’s where the long poems came from — the legends, the stone, the combined rhythms of surf and stone. There is a tour during the week into the Jeffers house but we were there on the wrong day. Besides, the house is enough to watch from the outside, and if Jeffers were still alive that’s where most of us would have to stand to see it. You need to have the ocean in your ears. I had been reading his work for years before we arrived there. I studied the photographs of the house, read his letters, but nothing prepared me for the real thing. It is a quiet location, almost unnoticed, having lost its face long ago to nature. We were up at Fort Ross a day before looking at historical redwood log work. At Tor House it took only a minute — a long swallowed look — to know the work, the poems, the life were true.

Susan with her first grandchild, Layla

40

When I build, I have someone in mind. I lived for two years in the woods before meeting Susan. Before we met I built for myself, or for the job, if I was working for someone. In the cabin I built what was needed — the essentials — woodshed, privy, bookcases, front step stoop; a place to sit in the sun while sharpening a bowsaw. There was nothing else needed. The cabin I built was enough for me, the roof didn’t leak, water was drawn from the river. But after I met Susan it seemed everything built into the cabin had just begun. The privy got a window. The ladder to the upstairs became stairs. Kitchen shelves were added. The old fallen stone walls on the property I discovered behind years of brush, and they were repaired. The work we did in the cabin was for ourselves. The work outside, in the garden, on the stone walls, was for the land which returned its gifts to us. But without Susan, I might not have seen those stone walls for awhile. She never pointed them out, but she inspired. A worker has to follow those inspirations, there aren’t always that many. Those five years in the cabin were a coordination between the pleasures of love and the work to be done. Firewood was cut with a bowsaw and all three bowsaws were kept sharp, clean, hung on a nail out of the weather. We hauled all of the trees out of the woods by hand, either on our backs or with a sled. The river was watched a day ahead of time: rain would wash up mud, so we drew extra water and stored it in a twenty gallon pail in the kitchen. Snow was shoveled immediately. Susan taught herself gardening and weaving. I taught myself treework and stonework. Working alone it takes twice as long to learn, but what is achieved is never forgotten because it has become one with your life. You’re here to stay. I cut trees for five years with a bowsaw because I knew nothing about chain saws until a friend visited and showed me. Now part of my living is made with a pair of chain saws, but the bowsaw is still used. That was the first woods rhythm of my work, it won’t leave. Firewood is split with the woman you love in mind. If she cooks with a cookstove the wood has to be right, and Susan learned her trees by watching what wood cooked best. I have never worked alongside a better worker than Susan, she has few complaints — blonde Californian with good teeth and here she is living in the woods, drawing water, cutting her firewood to cook, sitting in the privy, driving crummy cars, and sometimes helping me lift a stone that weighs more than both of us. Others have done it, I’m simply sharing our story. What is important to me is that we have done it together. A week after the stone hut was finished, in early November, I started on a low garden wall that Susan was thinking about, and I liked the idea too. Together we gathered the stone, and I laid it, and we dug out flower beds in front of the wall and planted over 100 bulbs for next spring — just beat the frost. We give each other things, gifts, and expect nothing in return but the nature of the giving allows a sensation to return. I built things for Susan and she gave me everything. I built this hut for the birth of Carson.

Bob with Carson on the way to the stone hut

41

Almost thirty years ago I began building the stone hut for the birth of Carson, and now on this day July 9, 2013, his first child is born, a daughter, Layla Rosemary Arnold, with his partner Jocelyn, and I begin to etch in a few further chapters to expand the first edition of the book to showcase just what sort of life and stone work happened after the book was published and Carson grew up from being a very young boy — where we left him in chapter 40 — to now a full grown man, husband, lover, father, and provider. All through his childhood and long string of teenage years he worked with me on stone and wood building jobs. Heavy stuff, too, like building a few small houses. I’ve covered many of those years in another book titled Sunswumthru A Building. It takes the reader through the channels, love, and nitty-gritty of working with a young son who is not exactly gung-ho about doing this sort of work, but he’s doing it, trying his best. Learning about tools, purpose, safety, craft, balance, partnership, care, uses and abuses, and many other facets of what comes to the mind and hand just carrying a tool from one location to another. Handsaws always act like handsaws, nothing else.

But to a musician, which Carson is, a handsaw even while we were working could have been a musical instrument, a sound as tone, a different rhythm from the worker’s, yet another worker’s, a musician’s. Better yet, a drummer’s. Each hammer blow, each sledgehammer crack, all stomps of feet and pounding of lumber and drop of stone and thud of earth went into this young drummer. Whatever he would make of it was all up to him. Of course he wasn’t even aware of any of this as a youngster, he was simply enduring and making it through. But the body was listening, always listening.

So when we came to see Layla Rosemary, eleven hours after she was born, snug in bed, cradled at her mother’s heart, we grabbed some things at home that caught our eyes that we thought might work perfectly for a newborn’s heart. An old stuffed giraffe which was Carson’s and one of his favorites. A thin, beaded bracelet that Jocelyn clasped without a moment’s hesitation around her baby’s ankle. And then a painted egg — turquoise and other festive flecks of color — and smoothly oval-shaped like the prettiest of stones. I placed that at Layla’s hand.

Carson when home schooled
building a house with Bob

42

The stonemason might keep in mind, that unless he or she can lay up stone as handsome and postured and deftly set as the Incas, it is best to be keenly aware of the surroundings where one works the stone. You want the stone to fit in, to make sense, to be likewise spectacular and practical at once.

I’ve seen a crew of stone workers go at it all day and cover lots of ground and leave at the end of the day with a holy mess of squared and dressed stone that doesn’t look at all right in its rural habitat. The rural is mined by hidden streams, deep springs, centuries old woodlands and a darkness that has only seen natural light. Think about that a moment — no other light in this darkness but daylight and moonlight. It makes for amazing moss, lichen, stone coloring, and solitude. It wants stone looking and feeling the landscape this way, too. It’s up to the stonemason to adjust, to know where one is.

Some of the best stonework in New England I’ve ever seen has been off the beaten path in New Hampshire — some eight-foot wide walls that one could drive a tractor on top of if one could get up there. I’m not sure if these walls were on a ride wayward to Nelson, or around outer Monadnock, or further north into the White Mountains, and in a way I just don’t want to remember where. I want to remember what I saw. Put my hand to. It’s like the two young workers I came across on my bicycle one day in the Berkshire hills building a new wall for a mansion and estate out in the hills. The stone weaving in and out of the massive maple trees and these guys were young but they already had the knack of how to make that world their majestic. I stopped and visited with them and felt the majestic.

Where we were married in the small, white church by a waterfall in Vermont there are stone sills and outer steps to this church wide enough so I can lay down my six feet across it. The stone tablets were pulled there onto the knoll by oxen; no doubt the same team that would have yarded all the squared stone in what makes the buttress under the covered bridge that takes you across and down to our house…stone walls hidden and shown all the way down the almost two miles of dirt road, and I’ve built some of these stone walls you’ll see coming here. It’s what a stone builder does. Works where he lives.

All our married life we built what had to be done. No one had been married in that chapel in the village for years, and the height of the grass showed that. We went up a few days before the wedding and scythed down the four-foot height of grass, then mowed it closer to a somewhat lawn, and got ourselves a good dose of poison ivy while we were at it. Then we opened the doors to the church and tall windows and aired the place out, swept the joint, put flowers in the windows along the pews. People came. The night before the wedding my bride-to-be and I cooked a meal for everyone visiting, and the night of the wedding we did the same. Quite a honeymoon! We bathed in the river before the wedding ceremony and asked everyone to be there at 7 a.m. They were, blinking their eyes awake.

And it’s been all the same ever since. If we want something, we build it. Whether transplanting by hand over many years thousands of daylilies, or building the stone walls, gates between stone walls, stone stairs, stone floor, skirting stone foundation for a house, stone seats four feet wide, stone bulkhead, stone well house, circular stone beds for flowers and bee balm. Build it all, and make it fit the eye, the landscape, the overall. 

Bob atop a backwoods New Hampshire stonewall;
back home laying up a new wall; the top side of that
New Hampshire stone wall — wide enough to
drive a tractor over the top.

all photographs by Susan Arnold

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

FAREWELL, TOM CLARK ~

T O M     C L A R K     S T R U C K

T O M     CL A R K

Photograph by Juliet Clark

JUKE BOY BONNER ~

DAVID McREYNOLDS ~ WAR RESISTER ~

D A V I D      M c R E Y N O L D S

David McReynolds, right, explaining plans to protest the draft at the University of Denver in 1970.

Credit

Denver Post, via Getty Images

WAR   RESISTERS   LEAGUE   (WRL)

BRUCE CONNER ~

ELVIS ~

GUY BIRCHARD ~

The Green Mountains in high summer haze

                             invisible.



Dirt roads lead toward them

                             regardless.



Vapors cling like wet silk.



The woods,  

                             creeks and brilliant

                    blue

birds alarm

the casual walker.



The ready hiker

holds a steady

course

through obfuscating heart



approaching the near

mountains

                                   invisible

through haze.




———————————

Guy Birchard
from AGGREGATE
: RETROSPECTIVE
Shearman Books 2018




thank you, Guy!

ARETHA ~

MARTIN RAMIREZ ~

M A R T I N     R A M I R E Z