Listening To Stones

Desert Rose Labyrinth

Some years ago, I discovered the work of Dan Snow. He builds with stone things practical and artistic. He builds stone walls without using mortar or other binding material. They call that ancient method “dry-stone.”

A few decades ago, I built a twenty-foot stone wall along my own driveway with the help of one of my sons. It is nothing like Snow’s work and I make no claims to “art.” I bought my stones;in six unnatural sizes. I secured them with adhesive cement.

It took me more than a week to dig out the bed for the wall from a small slope. Then I had to create a base. The most enjoyable, frustrating, and almost artistic part was arranging and rearranging the stones for balance, aesthetics, and strength.

It was the kind of process that some people might describe as a “Zen” experience. I have spent some time studying Zen, and I don’t really like it when people attach the word to other practices, such as the Zen of tennis. But I know why people attach Zen to certain experiences. It means that they find some mindful, insightful, almost spiritual connection to the practice.

This gives us the Zen of: writing, gardening, running, building a wall  etc. John Stewart had The Daily Show’s “Moment of Zen” video clips. CBS Sunday Morning does a concluding ambient sound video minute that might be described as a moment of Zen.

I bought two of Dan Snow’s books. In the Company of Stone is full of photos of his landscape projects. Many have an “ancient” look, and if you passed by them, you might think it had been there for a century or more. I couldn’t find any images that I can reproduce here but look at the gallery on his website.  His “Star Shrine” recognizes that people in the past sometimes made places for the worship of celestial objects that had fallen to Earth. I like some of his phrases like “heaving and hewing” stone and “gravity as glue.”

My friend, Hugh, has a cabin in Maine on a pond (in New Jersey it would be a lake) that he bought decades ago. I remember the first time we visited the place many years ago (before I built my driveway wall) he showed me a winding stone wall he was working on that led from the cabin down the slope to the water. He had been working on it for several years and it was still far from done. He told me he worked on it every summer while they were there – collecting stones in the woods and from the pond and river. I didn’t understand at the time why he was making so little progress. I understand now. Hugh is a real artist and I doubt that Hugh ever wants to finish that wall.

Dan Snow is a good writer too. He writes about the natural world and our relationship to it well. His prose is sometimes compared to John McPhee and Annie Dillard. I like both of those authors and they are worth posts of their own.

Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is still in the top five on my non-fiction list, but the book of that comes to mind today is Teaching a Stone to Talk. I read it more than 25 years ago and I found the meditations there both enlightening and frustrating. It contains essays written about the arctic, the jungle, the Galapagos, and one of my favorites about a cabin in the woods. For me, Annie Dillard’s writing is all about close and mindful observation. Take this excerpt:

“The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head and blade shone lightness and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th century tinted photograph from which the tints have faded… The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver.”

Writing is like building with stone. You set the words one against the other trying to create the strongest structure and still have some beauty. I find writing poetry to be much closer to that mindful building than writing an essay or a blog post. Still, I hope my essays and posts occasionally enter that place.) Revising is like sculpture where you subtract and carve away at to reveal the form.

Dan Snow likens his process to alchemy. I find his second book,   Listening to Stone, more poetic and thoughtful. His work goes far beyond walls – stand-alone sculpture, fences, pillars, staircases, arches, grottoes, pavilions, and causeways. He also combines stone, wood, and metal into many of the sculptures.

Snow started back in 1972 working on an Italian castle restoration, and his stone wall career began four years later. In 1986 and 1994, he apprenticed (a sadly lost word and practice) with Master craftsmen “wallers” in the British Isles. It took thirteen years fo him to achieve his Master Craftsman certificate.

I may need to have some formal study in all this. I definitely need to listen more often to the stones.

Further Reading
Dan Snow’s “In the Company of Stone” blog
Annie Dillard’s quirky official site

Building in My Dreams

A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan has two subtitle versions: “The Education of an Amateur Builder,” and the one I used for a previous post in 2010, “The Architecture of Daydreams.”  That this book has sat on my bedside book stack for all these years is not an indication of the quality of the book or my enjoyment of it. I bought it 7 years ago, started it, put it aside, and then started back into it again last spring and have dipped into it on and off and between other readings. I finally finished it on New Year’s Eve because I didn’t want it to remain unfinished into the new year. A small, doable, New Year’s resolution. It works reading it in parts as a story and as instruction. Think of the chapter as courses in a very long meal, or as occasional visits to Michael’s little place for another lesson. His place wasn’t built quickly, so why read it all in a weekend.

I was attracted to it because, like Pollan, I have long wanted of a room of my own. Okay, not a “room” but a separate building, albeit a small one. For me, it has been a small log cabin that has been in my head and sketched on many sheets of paper ever since I read Walden and a host of other books where people escaped and wrote in some cabin isolation. You should not need a cabin to be a writer, but it still seems Romantic (capital R) to me.

In the snow…

He wanted a “shelter for daydreams” and I identify not only with that, but also with his lack of skills needed to build such a place. Pollan writes that “Apart from eating, gardening, short-haul driving, and sex, I generally prefer to delegate my commerce with the physical world to specialists.”

So,  I read the book for both of its subtitles, as instruction manual about how to actually build such a structure, and as an armchair-dreaming builder. As instruction manual, it had its limitations. I’m not in a place where I can hire a real architect and custom builders to make my cabin. Plus, my plan has always been to do it myself. I also don’t have the land to build on, so it is astill “armchair building” for now.

But as an armchair building adventure tale, the book is kind of a Moby-Dick reading experience to me. I learned about building a little place and how to place it on a piece of land, and also about the history and meaning of all human building. It is about finding your place in your environment in the same way that you need to place your cabin to take advantage of views, sunlight, and to deal with drainage and winds and weather. In Melville’s book, you learn about whaling, whale and the sea, and about your own place in and away from this world.

In the spring

Will I start building this spring? Well, I still don’t have that piece of land or all the skills to build a place on my own or a set of blueprints that I would use yet. But over the years, I have learned some of the building skills by repairing my home, building a rock wall and a garden shed. I have collected plans for cabins and one-room sanctuaries, though none feel like “the one” that is floating somewhere in my brain.

Perhaps 2018 will be the year the daydream gets built.

Building a Cabin in Paradelle

Cabin with Northern Lights

On a chilly night that opens December here in Paradelle, I catch the scent of wood fires in the air tonight and when I step into the front porch of my house I smell the pine branches my wife is soaking to make a wreath.

It is not winter officially and the weather is still flirting with autumn, but my mind has turned again to the idea of building a cabin in the woods.

When I first started this website, I had been reading a series of articles by Lou Ureneck about him building a cabin in the woods of western Maine. In the one called “Building a Home for Another Life,”  he had not finished the foundation and he had already had two snows.

I have wanted to build a cabin since I read Walden in eighth grade. I had sent for plans, read articles on it. I had even sent away for brochures about buying cheap land in Montana that I saw in the back of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life magazines. All this was before I had graduated high school.

But, I never bought the land – I probably should have back the late 1960s because it would have been a good investment – and I never built a cabin.

I agree with Ureneck that you build a cabin for “the satisfaction of making something with your own hands and the joy of living simply and close to nature, even if it’s just on weekends.”

In my adult home-owning life, I built a stone wall along our driveway. It took me weeks to do. From clearing away piles of dirt by hand with a wheelbarrow hauling crushed stone and fitting together the stones one by one to fit correctly.  I enjoyed it very much. I especially liked figuring out how to make the squares and rectangles form a smooth curve as it neared the house, and building two stone steps. I stared at those stones and that imaginary curve for hours. Very pleasant.

Other people have chronicled this kind of cabin dream online. I found another site by Mark van Roojen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, who teaches  ethics and political philosophy who was building a timber frame cabin in the Sierra Madres.

Mark’s site directed me to Bob at wolfcreekcabin.blogspot.com who was beginning a timber frame cabin project in Montana and another in Idaho that was well on its way.

Everyone seemed to be building a cabin but me.

Some people call these photo site “cabin porn” and I find it is easy to fall into these sites on a cold winter night. A cabin in green leafy woods is very nice, but there is something about a cabin with a wood fire on a snowy night…

I concede that I don’t see myself doing any chainsaw milling, and the more I look online, the more complicated this gets. Check out Timber Framers Guild ,and www.HouseBlogs.net, or the more ambitious Housebuilding Illustrated, Cedar Ridge Farm, this Bungalow Blog and the Massie House Timberframe blog.

Maybe all I need is just a little 16 x 24 Michigan Cabin

I wanted this as a way to help me simplify my life, Thoreau in those Walden woods. My real weekend escape to go with this virtual escape. Not a retirement home. Not fancy.

My friend Steve told me years ago that I should think more about a tipi and had sent me some  links for them and some look bigger inside than the first floor of my house. Or maybe I should buy a yurt.

But I don’t want portable. I want permanent. And part of all this is that I want to build it, not assemble it.

What would a modern-day Thoreau do?

Build a Log Cabin for $100

Oh, if only it was so…

The article was titled  “Build a Log Cabin for $100.”  That would be a worthy summer project. It has been a fantasy of mine ever since I read Walden. An Oregon couple combined love of the land, native materials, traditional hand tools, and hard work to build a log cabin for $100.

“Living in a cozy little cabin nestled in the woods is part and parcel of the classic Thoreau-inspired lifestyle most folks dream of now and then. But the romantic vision of log-home life is shattered — for many people — by the sheer cost of such structures, which can be as high as that of equivalent conventional homes.

That doesn’t have to be the case, however. My wife and I kept down the cash outlay for our “Walden” by gathering most of the materials from the land where our house was to stand, and then building it ourselves, using only hand tools. As a result, our small home cost us only about $100 to construct … and the project was so simple that we’re convinced anyone with access to a few basic implements and a good supply of timber could build a log cabin too…”

Read more  http://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/build-a-log-cabin-zmaz81mjzraw.aspx

The Architecture of Daydreams

There is a book by Michael Pollan that mixes several of my interests.  Perhaps the title alone gives you some clues as to those interests – A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.

The primary reason he wrote it was to chronicle his experiences building a little “writing house.” Readers of this blog know my interest in  building my own little cabin.  He also references one of my writing and cabin gurus – Henry David Thoreau and his Walden home.

Thoreau is an inspiration for Pollan, but more unlikely is a connection to a corny movie that I like a lot.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a 1948 American comedy film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy based on a novel by Eric Hodgins.

Michael Pollan is best known for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. That book changed a lot of  its readers’ way of thinking about the food they buy and eat. It looks at industrial farming, organic food (both as big business and on a small farm) and also what it’s like to hunt and gather food for oneself.  He also examines meals for each area – a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald’s, chicken, vegetables and salad from Whole Foods, a meal from a sustainable farm and  mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild.

A Place of My Own has the same kind of detail about the actual construction process – maybe more than some readers want to know.  Pollan is good in all his writing about connecting our experiences – eating, gardening,  building – with the larger world. This book is an earlier book of his.  His “place” is a small, wooden hut that he wants as a “shelter for daydreams” and he wants to build it himself – and he’s not particularly handy.

I can identify with the wanting to build it and the not being particularly capable of building it too. I like that he discusses the history and philosophy of building. He also gets into place, space, our affinity for certain forms and materials, geometry, wood, and nails.

So, his little building brings in the history and practice of architecture.

And we all need a place for our daydreams.

Daydreaming gets a bad rap, but more recent research shows that daydreaming has positive effects. It can act like meditation and allow your mind to take a break. It can release tension and anxiety. Daydreaming can be a  mental rehearsal for future actual events.

Pollan’s book is a daydream for me about building that place of my own.

Building Your Getaway Cabin (or reading about it)

I went a bit crazy today with books I found on Amazon about planning to build that getaway cabin in Paradelle.

If cabin fever sets in this winter, I am ready.

If you’re dreaming in the same direction here’s the list:

1. A House on the Water: Inspiration for Living at the Water’s Edge
2. How to Build Your Dream Cabin in the Woods: The Ultimate Guide to Building and Maintaining a Backcountry Getaway
3. The Cabin: Inspiration for the Classic American Getaway
4. How to Build and Furnish a Log Cabin: The easy, natural way using only hand tools and the woods around you
5. Cabins: A Guide to Building Your Own Nature Retreat
6. Cabins: The New Style
7. Old Wood New Home
8. The Cabin Book
9. The Getaway Home: Discovering Your Home Away from Home