my apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines
mood: 
exanimate
exanimatemusic: Weekend Edition Saturday
Today is National Trails Day, and I went out with a bunch of other Ragged Mountain Foundation members to repair trails on (go figure) Ragged Mountain, Connecticut's best-known climbing face. We hauled a whole bunch of traprock up slope to use as trail edges and erosion stops, moved a rock roughly the size of a coffee table to make a step on one of the staircases up to the clifftop, and (while quoteing Robert Frost at each other) built a dry stone wall to reroute traffic around an eroded trail section.
And then I came home and ate some yogurt and a meatloaf sammich bigger than my head. Next project today, slushing.
I was the chief wallbuilder. I rather like building walls.
The hand-built stone walls all over are one of the things I really love about New England. You go walking in the woods and run across a random stone wall and realize that this marked the boundary of someone's farm, 300 years ago. Wow. I'm always disappointed when I see a stone wall that has been built from stones all the same size, substituting cement for an understanding of how the stones should sit on each other and support each other, and the use of small stones in filling the chinks. Such walls look and feel... unnatural, in a way a hand-built wall doesn't, despite both being the work of human hands. A good hand-built wall is a work of art.
trails
D
Edited at 2009-06-07 02:20 am (UTC)