Fieldstone Walls

"Boston is an old city. Walking its roads, it’s difficult to imagine that not a single one of your footsteps fall on virgin ground."

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

Parking in downtown Boston is a dubious proposal even on the days when fortune finds itself comfortably in your favor. Charles street, a curious segue as city streets go, cleanly bifurcating Boston Common is particularly special. One side of the street holds a prized host of metered parking. Each spot chaperoned by deciduous trees, offering seasonally appropriate levels of shade to those blessed few who land one of those spots.

Boston is an old city. Walking its roads, it’s difficult to imagine that not a single one of your footsteps fall on virgin ground. Every moment of history stylized in steel or bronze. Or captured moment in photograph where lighting, topography, and smiling faces align, quite possibly is likely shared with someone else.

Eventually though, you’ll find yourself inside your car, most likely heading towards Storrow drive. Your journey out of the city an experience that you also share with countless others. The only variable being the individual perception of the memories brought along. Though fairly dense, Boston itself is not particularly large. It is not long, traffic aside, that you can find yourself in the suburbs, and sooner yet that civilization begins to thin. In the eves and nooks of the landscape barely observed, often taken for granted as we speed towards our respective destinations, the New England that once was, has ways of melting out of the background.

If you look closely… you can see them. No, not the elderly barns that have gone to seed, wizened grain silos with improvised sunroofs, or other generic countryside fare seen as almost stop motion blurs as we whiz by at 65 mph. I am talking about the stone walls. Those steel grey boundaries that snake over, through, and across the little hamlets and spaces reclaimed by nature.

The last ice age is what laid down the working material for these constructs. About 12,000 years ago, endless tons of granite, gneiss, and schist, were scattered prolifically across New England, to the bane of early farmers, courtesy of the Laurentide ice sheet. In an early version of the Lemons and Lemonade proverb, I suppose when ancient ice age glaciers give you a stupid amount of rock… build rock walls.

Yes, they were used for land boundaries, demarcations, navigation and the like, but there’s something special about them. 2-4 foot high walls, no mortar, just… stone. Lasting hundreds of years, undisturbed, marking things that may or may not still be relevant. Likely an afterthought in the lives of their builders, names lost under the patina of time, their works a subtle legacy that something was here before.

Not quite a couple pairs of initials inside of a heart carved into the craggy bark of a sugar maple tree. Perhaps instead an ode to purpose and function, barely heard, just above a whisper, more at home as part of an aesthetic. I don’t think everything needs some deep or profound meaning though. I think there’s enough dignity in just being a part of the before, and still being around to quietly ride into the after for as long as it’ll let you.

-KC