David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Teaching Stones to Talk: A Craze for Cairns

You can teach a stone to talk. Pile one atop another and you have a cairn expressing an intention of its builder. It proclaims something to passers by. We only need to understand the dialect, a kind of geological sign language.

Cairns can take on a variety of forms from relatively shapeless piles to carefully articulated towers or pyramids. Individual stones can be stacked one on top of the other as simple markers or designed artistically with purposefully considered shapes and colors.

Cairns have been used to memorialize events or people, as property and political boundary monuments, as waste piles in early farm field clearing, or to mark a hiking trail. They can be decorative in gardens and landscaping. Sometimes they are built out of whimsy or as a spontaneous creative expression just because rocks are at hand.

Castle Craig in November (New England Trail Haibun)

I carefully consider each step on the sharp traprock ledges and slippery scree covered with leaves. Far below, the emerald waters of Merimere Reservoir sparkle through mostly bare hardwoods. Some oaks and beeches still cling to desiccated leaves, casting a gilded light and rustling with applause in the gusts.

Perched on the precipice atop East Peak, the stone cylinder with crenellated edge looks like the remains of a fortress battlement. Built by an industrialist long ago with equal parts ego and philanthropy, this is every person’s castle. Hurrying up the steel stairway inside, I stand with wind on my face as if on the bow of a ship at sea.

From Long Island Sound’s glimmering swells to the blue-gray humped Berkshires, the countryside is arrayed like a map. Interrupted by jagged massifs of basalt, the broad Connecticut Valley is gridded with streets, crowded with houses and metal industrial structures, crisscrossed by transmission towers, patched with field and orchard, host to airport runways, and dotted with irregular ponds and swamps. The towers of New Haven and Hartford are but puny toys. Irregular highlands roll to the horizon east and west.

everyone a king
vistas from peoples castle
the eye’s ownership

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

Outside Art: Hunting for Murals

While walking downtown in Connecticut’s cities I’ve seen a whale, a long ago demolished factory, a twenty-foot tall violinist, and a cabin deep in the woods. The images weren’t alcohol or drug fueled mirages or caused by sleep deprivation. Sure, I was intoxicated, but with the colors and shapes of murals painted   on blank walls and building façades.

On Middletown’s Main Street not long ago after lunch at O’Rourke’s Diner, I stopped to smile at a brick building adjacent to Bob’s Auto Service. Between windows on a sidewall was the image of a man painting an uneven streak of yellow while supported on the shoulders of several other men as an amused woman gazed up at them. Just down the street at the corner of Glilletti Way was an even more elaborate mural. It featured bold striping and included people sitting at a table, a nearby bridge, sky, and a street scene. Entitled “Color Nourishment for All,” it was the work of artist Marela Zacarias sponsored by Wesleyan’ University’s Green Street Art Center. Fully nourished with color, I continued down the street discovering other pieces of public art I’d never noticed before.