Had you stood with your back to our old, two-storied clapboard house in Stephentown, NY, you would have heard before you saw the tumultuous, adolescent exuberance of a little brook, surely not more than twenty feet across, if that. Strewn with rocks and a ready current, the splashing was of such acoustic moment, it gave the stream its name: Roaring Brook.
I walked along that creek many times in search of firewood or adolescent mysteries. In fact, at one point, I even ‘ran a trap line’ consisting of mouse and rat-traps. As God’s grace would have it, I never snared anything, which is just as well as the dead bodies would present themselves to me even today, indicting at me with accusatory paws: “J’Accuse!”
My trips were not unrewarded – at least as reckoned by my currency of those long-ago days. I found an abundance of firewood and nature. And I found an old stone dam…
Now lost to time and purpose, that dam traversed Roaring Brook. That rowdy current had long ago burst through the mid-section of the structure, leaving two anchoring halves, one on the near bank, one on the far. Their task of buttressing the middle span of that dam had been rendered irrelevant by some years-ago flooding, yet they remained steadfastly at their posts despite their lost command.
It lay perhaps four hundred yards up a narrow draw through which the brook traversed. No rotted foundations or rutted trails did I find; no clues as to why anyone would have elected to build on this particular point, likewise no hints as to its usage. It was constructed of pitted grey, lichen encrusted stones set in place generations ago by calloused, now-forgotten hands.
I learned later it was a ‘dry’ rock structure, meaning no cement. Were you to fly at low altitude over Scotland and Ireland, you would note a profusion of walls which virtually cover the landscape even today. They were intended as boundary markers and pasturage sectioning.
The fathers taught the sons this dry wall construction. More than simply piling up stones, broad at its base, narrow at its top, it had to be constructed as a puzzle where one set stone interlocked with another.
And no cement!
The son having finished his job, the father would stand back, take a running start, and side-kick the structure. If the wall fell apart, the boy had more training coming; if it held stable, he was now able to build on his own walls. Such an honor may have meant much to Scottish lads, but I doubt I would see it as much of an up-grade, considering all the rocks I would now be ‘qualified’ to quarry, load, unload, and place.
So, that old dam of mystery hangs yet in the recesses of my mind, and I am none the wiser for the why and how than I was when, as a young lad, I first made that discovery.
– Lucky Garvin