Wednesday, May 04, 2016

It’s easy to make a snake (part two)

     Well maybe there’s really a big difference between that little stone snake my granddaughter once made and that second suspected stone snake or serpent I later showed her, asking for a second opinion.
    It would take a whole bunch of granddaughters just to move that big boulder, wouldn’t it?
     And could my granddaughter – or anybody’s granddaughter – do a little sculpting (pecking and polishing) to somehow get that effect of the appearance of an eye?
    Not that I know for sure that someone, somebody’s granddaughter or grandfather, actually worked on that stone, that boulder, to make it look like it does. “It’s too complicated for grandpa,” I once overheard my granddaughter say to my wife one time. I don’t know how to properly identify human made marks or distinguish them from natural ones on a boulder that has been sitting exposed to Connecticut climate conditions for an unknown number of years.

    I recognize that it’s much easier to spot a stone that already looks like a snake head with an eye, which perhaps is the case here, a reddish inclusion in a cobble stone:
    And perhaps somebody did recognize those snake-like ophiomorphic (or at least zoomorphic) qualities of that stone (and still, here again, I don’t know for sure if there was some human manipulation to this stone to get it just as it is), placing it just where it can still be found in a zigzag row of stones – you know, one of those rare “traces” of unintentionally made stone walls you’ve read about that are merely the stone remains of field clearing stones randomly tossed up an early post-less wooden fence that has a lot of different names that includes “Snake Fence” and “Worm Fence.” There’s a joke in here about them somewhere, since they are so common in the area: You could say they are actually “medium rare” – and rather than just haphazardly constructed, many are “well-done.”
      It’s the placement that counts, manipulated or not, I believe. The stone was chosen and placed at the outward “point” of the zigzag, smaller and smaller stones laid down in a “course” of stones – just as other possibly ophiomorphic/zoomorphic stones are as well, illustrated sort of simply here, along with a wider view of the zigzag, looking sort of southeast from the edge of a road that was probably a trail to what the locals call “The Indian Fish Camp” on the “backside” of Lake Quassapaug:
Here’s an even more “complicated” overlay from an older post, where a few other “point” “Head-like” stones also appear:

Here’s just a “trace” of a linear and zigzag, with more either astute observations of variations of a repeating pattern or just some further illustrations of why I should seriously consider taking medication:
 The above is possibly an uncompleted row or maybe a row that has been robbed of stones, causing it to appear so sparse. A few miles away from this spot are some “well-formed” and still quite intact zigzag rows, where there seems to be an entwined snakes (or serpents) theme going on:
2022 revision:



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