Rocks in the Head

Rocks in the Head

I have always had a thing for rocks. I collect geodes. Lots of geodes. My favorite antiquities are pre-Columbian art, especially the pumice stone statues (one standing woman and two heads) and the pumice stone footed dish. The sculptures I have preferred to collect are usually a composite of rocks and metal. I have my Socrates in Ithaca and my buffalo here in San Diego. I think the reason I favored this place was because it is set amongst giant boulders, so again it is all about rocks.

The first vacation house I ever bought was in Hillsdale, New York up in Columbia County, across the border from the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It always amazed me that on the New York side of the border the surroundings were hardscrabble existence farming with bare necessity gas station stores and auto repair shops. As soon as you went across into the Berkshires you entered a very different world. It was the world of Norman Rockwell, who had lived and painted in Stockbridge. It was the world or croissants and scones as opposed to Egg McMuffins. We had a little three acres of a pine-forrested hillside where a local builder had bought a set of plans from a DIY catalogue and built a spec house that had a sort of A-frame look and feel to it. It had three bedrooms and two bathes and a broad deck where I placed a wood-framed hot tub spa.

The biggest challenge to having a weekend house in Hillsdale was finding people to care for the place and do certain things like gardening and cleaning. I’m sure the people over in the Berkshires had this all sorted out, but the bumpkins in Columbia County hadn’t figured out yet how to make big money from the City folk like us. That meant that we did most of the work around the place ourselves. I did have a three-brother team from the local towing garage that would come over seated three-across in their old pick-up. I used to call them Daryl, Daryl and Daryl in honor of the then-popular Bob Newhart Show. They had a specialty of mowing lawns in the summer and shoveling driveways with their truck and plow in the winter. When I would ask if they would do some brush cutting on the hillside they just said they only cut lawns. This limitation gave rise to my learning how to rent a brush-cutter and almost kill myself trying to use it on a steep hillside. I was gaining new respect for the Daryls.

I was always looking for things to do to improve the house since the builder had done the bare bones, but had left everything else natural. I got it in my head that the hillside running down from the deck would be a perfect spot for a rock garden. I had spent two summers in college working at the Cornell Plantations, the massive arboretum attached to the world-renowned College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. For those two summers I worked about 50-60 hours a week (most days doing a shift and a half or twelve hours) engaged in every imaginable form of outdoor landscaping work. The permanent staff did all the major motorized work and we of the summer student brigade were assigned to the more manual labor. There was lots of trim mowing and edging, lots of hedge trimming and picking up debris and weeding. Lots and lots of weeding, mostly with a little handy tool called a swivel hoe. This sort of hoe very efficiently ran a five inch blade an inch or two under the surface of the ground and disconnected weeds from their roots, making their removal very easy. We also did lots of rock work.

In an arboretum with great lawns and specimen plantings, especially in an area like the Finger Lakes of New York, where glacial moraines and Devonian sedimentary rock formations abound, there is always a suggestion for a rock garden here and there. We spent a lot of time planting thematic perennials and annuals in the existing beds and also several times each summer, building a new rock garden from scratch. This involved lots of hefting and moving rocks into decorative formations that created small multi-tiered beds artistically interspersed throughout the garden. We would generally build these gardens in groups of three with one permanent staff and two of us laborers. It was grueling work which was very rewarding for years to come. I have walked by many a rock garden on the Cornell campus and remembered the days of installing it during those summers.

So when the idea of a rock garden on the hillside in Hillsdale came to me, I was undaunted. I located some nice rocks around the property and went about designing the tiers I would be installing. What I had failed to remember was that this had been a three-man job at the Plantations and we had all the mechanical assistance one could imagine. I, on the other hand was alone and with no more than hand tools. I did have a shovel, a wheelbarrow and an pickaxe, but little else. At that time I was about ten years older than when I had worked those twelve hours per day, but I felt I was robust enough to handle the heavy lifting. After a very long day of rock repositioning, I crashed. I had seriously overdone it and remember a sleepless night with my heart racing to the point of worrying me that I might just have given myself a heart attack. I survived, and the next day I took it easier with the plantings and the admiring of my work. The good part of the mission was unchanged, but I knew that the days of thinking I could build rock gardens on my own were long past.

Today, on day thirty-eight of this lockdown, I got it into my head that there was weeding to be done. I had bought a great driveway crack weeding tool which I deployed on the expanse of the drive. I also bought a swivel hoe and put that to work in a few of the beds and in the pea gravel path around the north side of the house. It was harder work than I was used to, but it all felt very rewarding. Truth be told it was a fraction of the amount of weeding I used to do during a Plantations day, so its little wonder that it spurred me on versus wearing me out. That is when I got it in my head that I needed to get back into some rocks.

I had noticed that several of the beds needed some stone adornment. We had a good deal of it here and there, but there was clearly a need of some more. So off I went to the stone company, where I bought about a half-ton of small, medium and large black river stones, all in 75-pound bags that I loaded into the back of the SUV (probably maxing out the rear suspension while I was at it). I got out the wheelbarrow, shovel and hoe (this was feeling very familiar) and gradually unloaded the SUV and spread the stones in the appropriate spots in the garden. It took me the better part of the day, because I worked very much at pace so as not to repeat my sleepless night.

When I finished I was pleased to put the tools away in the shed and rushed to sit in the hot tub for an hour to try to forestall the soreness I was sure would be finding its way to my back and joints. Everyone has their weaknesses. Mine happens to be rocks. I think I have cured myself of my obsession for the time being. I will sleep well tonight but I am sure I have not completely rid myself of the rocks in my head.