Natural Essays

When the car swerves but the road is straight

By Richard Phelps
Posted 1/21/21

I don’t think anyone was killed.

It’s hard for me to follow the particulars of the accident. I’m not sure even the participants know what happened. There was a postal carrier, a …

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Natural Essays

When the car swerves but the road is straight

Posted

I don’t think anyone was killed.

It’s hard for me to follow the particulars of the accident. I’m not sure even the participants know what happened. There was a postal carrier, a car, maybe a third vehicle. In the end, the car swerved and the road was straight and the stacked formation of my orchard man’s stonewall was scattered across the mown grass towards the staked and pruned apple trees.

I built the wall two decades back. I have checked it a few times over the years: not a stone out of place. Until now.

Roscoe Crist was as thin as his pruning shears. Like any good orchard man when you drove past Roscoe’s house you could see the pruning shears leaning against the side of the porch near the front door he went through to have lunch. He came driving up to my house one day. “I’d like to build a stone wall in front of the orchard,” he said. He knew my work from the time I repaired the stone wall and gates to the Wallkill Valley Cemetery on Route 52. He had helped me land a job repairing the stonewall around the Berea Cemetery, as well, as he was in contact with Orange County Trust which holds a long standing trust account for upkeep of the property of the Resting. Over the years, Crist Brothers Orchard has done a lot of volunteer work, mowing, picking-up, trying to keep the cemetery presentable. It needs work again as the tin roof covering the stonewall is going to rot and ruin. Once the 19th Century tin roof is weakened and leaking, the wall it protects will deteriorate at ever increasing speed. I see a tree has fallen on part of the north wall. Roscoe’s feeling was having another hand-made stone wall along Berea Road would not only accentuate the entrance and exit of the pretty orchard land, but also add a certain balance to the rustic, country, town road.

To start a project of repair, it is first important to finish the destruction, the demolition. We took the wall apart piece by piece. First I laid out the end stones -- the corner stones -- in a pile separate from the rest and from an old photograph organized the stone in mirror order on the ground. We took down the rest of the damaged wall and faced all the face stones towards us, in back of us, so when we turned around from the wall, the faces of the old wall were facing us, easier to choose. All the center stones, and the chink stone, were thrown in piles in between the face stones. Everything was within two or three paces of the original wall. We could cover everything with a big tarp supplied by the orchard. Snow was in the forecast.

Once the disassembly was complete, we reset the footing stones and realigned the base of the wall where necessary. The footing of the wall, as I recall, is 18 inches deep, made of gravel from the orchard gravel bank, and “tamped” with the double wheels of their old dump truck. The footing would not need any tinkering.

I turned to my helpers. “All we have to do now is pick up each stone you see here on the ground one more time and our job is done.” “Oh yeah, sure, right,” was the common refrain. But if things went well, and the eye was sharp, there was little need to make it more complicated than necessary. I don’t do dry stone walling every day and my eye was NOT sharp, and dull, too, my stamina!

The orchard wall was built with some substantial capstones from quarries up near Hancock, New York, and I set them aside in the beginning. Then when we got going, they went back on, one three foot stone piece at a time. Check the batter, check the level, and check the stone spacing and the lapping of the joints. The top of the wall is not level, rather it follows the general contour of the land underneath it, and, too, follows the elevations of the road above it.

So with a little perseverance (very little) and some cold feet (very cold) we got the job done, if a little later in the winter than the owner was hoping for -- but ready for longer days, and the pruning, and spring.

Take a ride up Berea Road someday and tell me if you can see where I’ve been.