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fixing a stack of dangerously-stacked stones
Wednesday, June 17 2026
I took a recreational 120mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning just to see what would happen. I ended up feeling somewhat energized for most of the day, but by 9:00pm I was feeling slightly ill, and all I wanted to do was crawl in bed to read Flannery O'Connor short stories. (The main one I read being "The River," told by a narrator relating from a perspective just outside the experience of a very young boy who finds the ultimate escape from his unserious, neglectful, hard-partying parents.)
First thing this morning, I returned to the Chamomile Wall to deal with a safety issue that had been troubling me. The thing about my stone walls is that they tend to be high, steep-walled, and fairly fragile. This has all the prerequisites for dangerous conditions if a creature such as Charlotte were to start pawing rocks away from the bottom in an effort to get at a chipmunk. Usually stone walls are structured in such a way that a rock coming loose is then lodged against a another rock nearby. But I often skimp out on materials in such a way that there is no other nearby rock, particularly in buttresses designed to shore-up weakened sections of the wall's main spine. The location on the wall that was haunting me at the time was a place where a large rock at the bottom of such a buttress ended in a sharp vertical peak above which hundreds of pounds of rock were stacked. If that sharp peak were to fail, the whole heavy pile would come falling in seconds, and anything smaller than a bear standing in the way would be either injured or killed. The structure was so unsafe that I didn't really want to get close enough to work on it, and I even considered perhaps leaning temporary logs, perhaps with wire mesh stapled to them, against the high part of the wall to protect me while I worked. But in the end, I just worked carefully, always ready to get out of the way should I see indications of an eminent collapse. I carried other bulky rocks over to the wall and piled them around the one with the fragile peak and then filled in the space around the peak with smaller rocks until the peak was not the only support for the heavy stack of rocks above it. I then filled in all the voids on either side, ending up with a curving wall that looked something like that of a castle. This is very satisfying work, and the results speak for themselves.
I had some errands to run late this morning, beginning at the Brewster Street house, where I needed a second look at that gas stove to definitively determine its model so that I could order a replacement igniter. While I was there, I spoke briefly with the now-presumably-divorced tenant and her father, a tall wiry grey-haired man. As I was looking around (but not finding) the decal showing the model number, I was snapping pictures, telling the tenant and her father that ChatGPT likes lots of pictures. I eventually found the model number on a plate visible once I'd pulled out that drawer that stoves often have beneath their ovens.
I had the dogs with me, mostly because my next stop was at the Pretty Pet Parlor so that Neville could have his nails ground down again, though I had a little time to kill, so on the way there, I briefly dipped into Harbor Freight to see if they sold things like lag bolts. They do not. Then a long freight train came rumbling down the tracks, cutting me off from Pretty Pet Parlor via the most obvious route (Boices Lane), though it was easy enough to get there via Ulster Avenue, which crosses the railroad tracks via a bridge, not a grade crossing.
My last stop was at Home Depot, which I would normally avoid due to Gretchen's dislike of their politics. But something in my brain made me go there anyway, perhaps because it is closer to Pretty Pet Parlor. There I bought some more 16-foot treated lumber for a south deck repair project here in Hurley that I have yet to commence. I also bought the longest half-inch lag bolts and some half-inch-by-six-inch carriage bolts to take to the cabin. As always, I let the dogs loose while I strapped the long pieces of lumber to the Subaru's roof rack, though this time I made sure Charlotte didn't run off. It helped that a woman working at Home Depot was taking a cigarette break and was very excited to pet and coo at the dogs nearly the entire time I was strapping things down.
Back at the house, I went to get some photos of the wisteria vines that I'd initially thought were bittersweet, and while I was doing that, I noticed several excited cedar waxwings up in the canopy of a large (and, in this area, not particularly common) pitch pine on the edge of of the strip of forest between our yard and the Farm Road. I waited patiently to get a photograph, but they were difficult to get in focus against the sky or when they were back in the tree behind tufts of pine needles that my camera assumed I wanted to focus on.
Later I took Charlotte (Neville didn't come) on a walk down the Chamomile Gorge Trail nearly to Dug Hill Road. Then I dropped down into the mostly-dry creekbed of the Chamomile itself, and hiked back. I took lots of pictures of a green frog in a pool shaded by a rock, but none of them turned out.
This evening, we had a enough leftovers that I didn't have to make anything for dinner. After Jeopardy!, we watched the first episode of a comedy-horror series entitled
Widow's Bay that I'm not yet loving, though I do like its take on the comedy-of-errors trope.
These flowers demonstrate that this vine northwest of our parking area is definitively wisteria. Click to enlarge.
Not a great photo of a cedar waxwing in the large pitch pine northwest of our parking area. There were a group of them at the time investigating the cones. Click to enlarge.
A woodthrush along the path connecting Crazy Dave's cottage to the Gullies Trail just south of the Chamomile gorge. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte with cairns on either side of the Gullies Trail connector as it crosses the (currently dry) Chamomile. Those were erected by Crazy Dave, though the cairn to the left (and partially obscured by a small tree) is one I recently added. Click to enlarge.
Large bluestone slabs in the Chamomile not far above the old bus turnaround. Click to enlarge.
A pool in the lower Chamomile, most of which now runs below the surface. Click to enlarge.
Probably the shell of a woodthrush egg. Click to enlarge.
A dead hemlock with a prominent shelf fungus growing out of it. This fungus typically has a glossy dark-mustard-colored upper surface. Click to enlarge.
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