It's not elves exactly

You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you …

When my wife found some big rocks in the garden last summer, she asked me to move them. I lugged them away and placed them at the bottom of the slope in our yard by where the exposed roots stuck out from the shrubs the previous owners had planted in an effort to keep the hillside there from washing away. The shrubs weren’t working. What we really needed was a retaining wall.

Then I go to thinking about all those big rocks back in the woods behind the house and, well, things kind of snowballed from there.

The eroding slope is now a terrace, hemmed in by a rock wall about 3½ feet high and more than 40 feet long. No mortar, no chiseling, just dry field stone. Got about 10 feet left to go on the north end. (This picture, of the south end, is from back in May, when that end was still a work in progress and I’d only just started filling in the dirt behind the wall.)

It’s kind of fun. A bit like playing Tetris, except with really heavy puzzle pieces that have to be searched for and then hauled into place. Few things are quite as satisfying as coming across a lovely 50-pound rock shaped like a backwards Idaho and lugging it home to fit it snugly into place in the backwards-Idaho-shaped gap in your wall.

Plus it’s solid. The really big rocks were too heavy to lift and rolling them into place took a bit of doing, but once I got those BFRs where they belonged they were there to stay. The way I see it, that’s far more rewarding than, say, the Sisyphean task of trying to keep up with the laundry.

The important thing is that the Slacktivixen likes our new terrace almost as much as the chipmunks do. And I’m pretty pleased with it myself. It’s lumpy, uneven and only occasionally plumb, but it has a certain rustic charm.

And it was a lot cheaper than paying for therapy.

Anyway, some wall-building songs.

“And It Stoned Me,” Van Morrison
“Back to the Wall,” Steve Earle
“Behind the Wall of Sleep,” Smithereens
“Build That Wall,” Aimee Mann
“Chained to the Wall,” REM
“Climbing the Walls,” They Might Be Giants
“Climbing up the Walls,” Radiohead
“I Didn’t Build It for Me,” Daniel Amos
“Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
“Peggy’s Kitchen Wall,” Bruce Cockburn
“Stone,” Adam Again
“The Walls Came Down,” The Call
“Wonderwall,” Cat Power
“Wonderwall,” Oasis

The audio on that Adam Again video is pretty terrible, but since I was there for this concert at Cornerstone ’97, I couldn’t resist. That’s the Prism magazine stage, and I hung that banner by the drums. It sounded a lot better live. (Better audio at this link.)

And once again, my iTunes library is missing the obvious songs from Pink Floyd, not to mention the appropriate John Cougar Mellencamp tune. What else is this list missing?