(Or the 3rd or 5th)
There’s so many
places I didn’t go on the 4th of July 2015.
In fact the only
place I did go was up “on top of the world,” as two of my grandkids call it, up to
a vantage point on Hard Hill Road where we watch fireworks from a distance,
some legal, most illegal, bursting in the air.
But the day
before and the day after, my wife and I drove down to Westbrook where my mom
lives so we could hang out with family visiting from far away, my son’s family
from California, my brother’s from Kansas City.
I was going to
slip out to the stone wall behind my mom’s or maybe down to the river and the
salt marshes but I never did. I was going to look again at some of the stone
features or hunt for a clam garden in the salt marshes, but I didn’t have shoes,
I forgot to bring the tripod and the tide was extra high, all those same old
excuses.
Mostly I looked
at the new stone wall the neighbor across the road is still in the process of
building in front of his house:
I took a couple
more shots of it, my only “stone” photos except for two other ones. I had to
pull over to take this one, which isn’t much of a photo, but it shows the
aftermath of the selling off of a beautiful row of stones, some of which ended
up at the neighbor’s, and putting up a plastic privacy fence by a new housing development that just sprung up while I wasn't paying attention:
The best I can do
is to show you “before” is this lousy google earth street view capture before the pillaging took place:
And sure, I got a
couple old aerial “befores” from bing bird’s eye view:
The above might be the best,
showing an undulating row of stones, perhaps representative of a Serpent
Petroform…
The biggest
problem with bringing Stone Features of the Indigenous Landscape into an actual
scientific “big picture” of a remnant of a Cultural Landscape is the mountain
of documentation that has been built about “stone walls” without any real true investigation
into stone walls.
I’ll give you a
piece of a little bit of this from a 1995 newspaper story, published just a few
years after I began to seriously doubt just about everything I’d ever heard or
read about stone walls:
“Many New
Englanders view them as beautiful monuments to the industriousness of our
ancestors, enduring remnants of a dying agricultural way of life. They believe
all walls are like the carefully constructed jigsaw puzzles at estate entrances
and roadsides.
(Robert) Thorson
doesn't see walls that way.
``They're simply
linear piles of refuse,'' he says…
Thorson, a
geologist at the University of Connecticut who has written a book about stone
walls, is no romantic. He has the eyes of a scientist.
``We use them as
a touchstone to the past, almost a yearning past,'' he says of walls such as
the one in his backyard woods in Mansfield. ``I see walls as eco-facts rather
than artifacts.''
The traditional
story of how walls came to be is too simple, Thorson believes.”
But still, I’d
like to take a look at the stone’s in Thorson’s backyard – to look for some
artifacts contained in his stone walls design - pretty far from the view that most stone walls are refuse. Indigenous Cultures inhabited the North East for far longer than that brief agricultural period of plowing fields, using fire as a tool to maintain the Landscape they were creating, perhaps using these stone constructions as fuel breaks in the more densely populated places.
Maybe something
like this, not too far from that Westbrook Stonewall Massacre by North Hammock
Road, just across the street from that new wall in my Mom’s neighbor’s yard,
out behind Mom’s barn where the stacking of stones is far from accidental,
where the artwork of Indigenous stonework shows in some obvious zoomorphic
effigies, especially Stone Turtles, are included in a stone wall:
I’ve written
about them elsewhere and at other times:
And a few miles west along CT Route One, in a well-known
state park that retains its Indigenous Place Name, is a fine example of a
Species Specific Stone Terrapin, perched on and included into a “stone wall:”
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