Stone
Retaining Walls
It’s cool that I came upon this topic, stone retaining walls,
for one of my assignments. Like many of us in colonial and
rural America, I have a penchant for because I have fond memories of
old stone walls. Granted, those that are used in more urban
or suburban areas nowadays for sound barriers and flood buffers are
prefabricated, simulated, and anything but the kind I refer to here,
though they are useful, economically sound, and ecologically apt.
I remember, though, the stone retaining walls we used as crude land
border markers. They were amalgamations of local rocks and
stones found near the property at the time the walls were getting
built. We were kids—hundreds of years after the
walls were built—and would walk along, balance on, sit atop,
or occasionally dismantle these wonderful stone retaining
walls. The moss on the rocks was deep green, dark, and moist.
Because many were made without grout, spackle, or bonding of any kind,
the rocks were shaped differently and fit with the adjacent rocks to
make a neat stack or row; when we overturned a rock, instead of
artificial glue, we found bugs and worms and even small garden snakes,
those delightful creatures that prefer the dark and dank over the
direct sunlight. Such creatures, along with the musty, rich
soil smells, sent us into a focused reverie of imagined earlier ages:
the beetles with their armadillo cases, the centipedes, the pinch bugs
and stink bugs all contributed to what we thought was an ancient
microcosm belong to the fossilized.
We also helped build such walls, lugging choice stones, watching dads
and uncles negotiate the bends and twists and fits of each rock in
conjunction with the previous and the one to come. We stayed
on task for hours, from dusk till buggy dawn, then looked back at our
progress as we hit the hay for a quick night’s rest, only to
rise early enough to continue the construction the next day.
After a few decades, I had forgotten about stone retaining
walls, save when I went home to visit or went on a trip on a
superhighway where those new models threaten to make our outside world
into an inside product. But a few months ago, my then
roommate was considering some amateur landscaping, and asked me what I
thought of a stone wall and whether I was familiar with them.
Do I? Am I? Did I? I got out the old
photo albums, the New England coffee table pictoral books, the tourist
pamphlets…and not only showed my friend the originals but
went back into memory mode, walking down dirt roads, hiking along the
power lines, and building, climbing, and enjoying the old stone walls
that are, for the most part, still intact.
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