Collecting and Stacking Rock

It's hard to reckon the precise tonnage of rock that I have gathered from the inner bluegrass region these past four years. I have no scales, so instead I tend to measure such things in minor back aches and fall fires around rock fire-pits.
But irrespective of the precise number, here's what that tonnage has built in Lexington: four small guerrilla gardens atop drainage ditches and astride fences in places like the Rupp Arena parking lot (all of which are waiting to be re-inhabited); two separate rock walkways (approximately 40 feet in length and partially adorned in creeping thyme); a rock fire-pit surrounded by rock patio that was built into a double terraced rock flower bed (all this more or less a 120 square foot thing that reaches a height of 3 feet); a 40 foot section of a partially-raised-bed garden that backed up to a fence/property line; a terraced 200 square foot garden built atop what was previously an unusable steep incline of weeds behind my former house; a 30 foot long rock fence (as yet only partially completed) at my current home; and sundry other projects taken on alone and with friends.

The list could go on were I to include into my figures things built in Jessamine County, but I think you get the point. I like to collect and stack rock and do it quite frequently.

My attraction to rock is both practical and aesthetic. Moving here in 2000 for school, I have been continually struck by the power—aesthetic, historic, racial, economic—of the inner bluegrass region's rock fences. When we first moved here, my wife and I would take long rides in the country, both by ourselves and as part of those weekend tours we gave visiting family and friends.

As I have lived here longer, my fence experiences have become more tactile. I have scraped my boots and jeans hopping an eighteenth century rock fence that divided land near the Kentucky River that Daniel Boone helped survey, and more recently I have periodically helped re-stack an only slightly newer fence in Keene, KY. I have now walked enough Kentucky ground to know that my interest in rock fences lies mainly in the rock: Limestone mostly, and shitloads of it, all over the region, used in the construction of beautiful fences, terraces, mills, bridge bases, houses, garden and flower beds, retaining walls, and culverts, to name a few rock creations old and new I've come across and marveled at.

This last learned attraction,the historic multi-functionality of rock, is also practical. I first experienced the practical use of stones when trying to figure out what to do about the dirt and mud path created by our two dogs that stretched across the back yard of our former home. Grass seed did not work, discipline and (later) pleading did not work, and the pea gravel I paid to get dumped there to make a walkway was messy and stuck in my barefeet when I walked in it.

When friends in Carlisle offered us the rocks strewn across their property that had been ripped up in the making of their new home, I began gathering rocks for a walkway. By the time I finished the firepit and terraced garden, I realized that in addition to its utility as walking surface, rocks can raise garden beds, separate areas of my yard, level uneven land, provide a building beam to perch my canoe upon, and otherwise create an aesthetic “hardscape.” I also learned that I didn't need to go to Carlisle to get it. As I began to look and see how much was available, gratis, at ripped up construction sites, interstate cutouts, water-main projects, and excavation sites in our own yards, I saw the economic and aesthetic practicality of choosing homegrown rock over Lowes-bought faux-rock.

As with most things, collecting and stacking rock is both infinitely easy and gloriously nuanced—an activity for both green beginners pulling a one-off project and craft tradespeople getting paid for their enhanced skills. Here's the easy version, which is restrictive to the degree that it assumes automobile access and physical ability to lift things weighing between five (5) and one thousand (1000) pounds: Get in your vehicle and locate rocks accessible to said vehicle. Load rocks. Drive home, unload product by stacking it. Repeat as necessary.

It gets more nuanced, of course. First,trucks are better vehicles to use than Cooper Minis, though I find it instructive to note that community gardener Michael Marchman, “Notable Neighbor” for the August issue of Chevy Chaser, used the trunk of his stepfather's Buick Park Avenue to transport the rock grabbed for his public sidewalk garden located on the corner of Hart and Ridgeway. Commuting to Northern Kentucky University where he has found adjunct work as a teacher of geography, Michael grabbed rock off cutouts on the sixty mile stretch of I-75 he drove twice a week. It took about fifteen minutes per excursion as he selected and then moved the chosen rocks to his trunk. All in all, this took Marchman less than a semester of 15-minute respites from his car to build a garden now in its second year of harvest.

On the collection side of things, there are other nuances I've learned. Nearby rock outcroppings are easier in both the arrival and the departure. I'd suggest to stay within twenty-five miles, mostly because it's ridiculously easy to do. Sunday mornings are good times to hunt rock since most of Lexington and its police force are engaged in various religious activities. Home construction sites often result in mounds of rock upturned from the earth; rock mounds are preferable in that you can roll heavier rocks down them and into your truck bed rather than heaving them into it.

If you are collecting rock from ground torn up for active construction, stay out of the way of workers and visit when you will not be in their way. If you collect from other sites, make sure that your taking does not negatively impact the physical and cultural environment in which it sits. Thank friends and acquaintances who offer their rocks. And finally, go travel the road to Galilee: the ripped up stretch of Harrodsburg Road beginning past the great Christian megachurches and ending at the turnoff to Wilmore and Asbury Seminary. I don't know if it's legal or not, but my hunch is that rock gleaning is supported by at least some part of Christian thought.

On the stacking of stones, I'm more a practitioner than a craftsperson. But I have found that wider bases seem to make more sturdy structures. So does stacking to avoid long running vertical joints. This happens when you put two ends together on one level (making a joint) and then put two ends together at the same place for the next set of rocks stacked on top. Vary the joints, and make level stacks of rock. Having level stacks gives you a much easier base to work your next layer of rocks. Use small rocks as backfill for support or as shems. Rocks want three stable points of contact to help be steady and the backfill helps keep it in place.

These are some basics of collecting and stacking, and they are from someone who has not spent much time learning the finer points of the craft. I collect and lay rock for a variety of reasons, so my things are not perfect. I am not an expert. I update, I fiddle, I repair, I move, I tend, I learn. I get a little bit better and then the simple process gets a few new fun wrinkles thrown into it.

But at its most democratic and simple, all you need to do to collect and stack rock is this: Look and think. Drive. Act. Go home. Tailor as you can and need.

Some Definitions and Precepts

Last year an article appearing in the New York Times, a shortened version of which also appeared in our Herald Leader, caught my attention. The headline read, “Russia makes return to the barter system,” and was followed by the rather ominous subheading “Critic says it's a step backward.” The article noted that Russia's local iteration of the global downturn had resulted in a minor uptick in bartering for goods—up to 3 or 4% of all sales, as reported by the Russian Economic Barometer. I say minor because in the 1990s, when Russia embraced capitalist reforms and sent its economy (and people) into a tailspin as the government transferred its wealth to well-heeled capitalists who unsurprisingly grew richer at public expense, the paper reported that “barter transactions...accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of sales for midsize enterprises and 75 percent for large ones.”

The critic of bartering was Vladimir Popov, who teaches at the New Economic School in Moscow; I am sure that he had good reasons for critiquing the barter system, which seems to have arisen as a way to cope with massive inflation, but they did not appear in the article. Instead, the paper reported that Popov called Russians “arrogant,” and claimed that the minor uptick in barter meant they were “hiding [their] head in the sand.” What the Russians needed to do, the article implied, was to cut costs and reduce inefficiency, normally euphemisms for firing workers and mechanizing production.

The article stood out to me because at the time I had just finished reading an online essay by Charles Eisenstein entitled “Economics of Fermentation.” In his much more developed article, which originally appeared in Wise Traditions Magazine, Eisenstein essentially makes the opposite argument of Popov. Rather than increasing our reliance on exchanging dollars for services and everything else, Eisenstein calls for a return to a much older form of economy, what he calls an “economy of reciprocation and social exchange,” based in human contact and the establishment of social connections. For Eisenstein, what bartering does for us socially is something that gets left out of our money transactions.

Money is, he notes, “an anonymous form of energy.” Anyone can go into Wal Mart and buy a TV or food with it, and we need not know how it arrived there or who made it. In barter and social exchange, however, the emphasis is more intimate, on things we make for and with each other. One household makes cheese, another beer, another clothes from wool. Needs and transaction prices are determined primarily by a community rather than anonymous people from afar who cannot or do not conceive of us.

I'll not go any further into Eisenstein's ideas here, as I'm sure a discussion of them will play into future pieces, but needless to say that such ideas are at the center of how I would define a basil economy. The following bulleted points make a stab at an opening definition and guiding principals.

A basil economy will:

--take non-monetary transactions seriously. This is not an argument for the abolishment of money; rather, it is a realization that money as a form of economic exchange has usurped other useful modes and overcrowd our thinking. In short, a basil economy seeks to put the exchange of money in its place as one among a number of possibilities. Though your financial analyst may tell you that you can “grow” your money, such growth is entirely unnatural and mostly unearned: unlike basil, tomatoes, wool, wood, or a host of other things we need, money does not grow from the sun, the soil, or our water supply. We should figure out how to use better these living trinkets of exchange that we ourselves might produce from our own labor.

--be based first and foremost in small, community-based transactions centered on need: food, clothing, water, shelter, pleasure, health, transportation, education. This is not an argument against the flow of needed outside goods or people into the community; rather, it is a re-commitment to ourselves as able producers. This should help restrict the accumulation of too many things while at the same time to allow for a natural diversification of such needs into localized art, shelter styles, etc.—things all communities used to have and do.

This means that a basil economy will

--flourish to the degree that we produce things. We must begin to think of ourselves as producers once again, makers of things, rather than consumers. For the most part, what we make need not be “perfect,” only “good” and “committed.” (Perfect tends to marginalize interested parties and also to increase value for products that many cannot afford.) Currently, 70% of our GDP is based in consumption, which means that our current solutions to our economic moment lie in us purchasing more. This is a false answer and it makes us poorer socially and economically in hock for the one thing we cannot produce: money. When credit becomes our lifeblood, the answer is not to feed that beast by generating more money to buy things, but to have us scale down to need less money.

In other words, a basil economy will

--assume a scaling down of economic activity to something approaching a subsistence economy. As Americans, we have been perched at the top of the economic world order. As we emerge out of our current economic moment, this will no longer be the case. We should recognize that and pare down our outsized and destructive expectations.

It will mean a renewed focus on

--seasonal and cyclical growth and death rather than on the unnatural capitalist model of permanent accumulation and permanent growth. Cancers grow exponentially; economies, like our earth, should experience periods of growth and decay, of work and rest, of relative abundance and scarcity. By focusing on these sort of growths, by desiring them over continual 3, 4, 6, 8 percent returns, we will better prepare ourselves to be resilient and communally self-sufficient.

What I'm describing requires a lot more work from us, from you, from me. It will mean that we necessarily spend much less time watching television and playing on the computer. These contraptions let us off the hook, make us fat and lazy, and waste a lot of our time that could be better spent doing and making things, generating ideas and meeting people.