More Than One Way

Stonemasonry evokes remembrance in our genes of something old and genuine. The imagination conjures up images of men and women with tough hands clearing fields and stacking rocks in sturdy rows so that farmers can till the ground. Stonemasonry recalls the toil of building cities from scratch and a change in what was meant by tribe and community.

I feel the weight of my trade in my bones in the winter cold. I feel the joy of stonemasonry when the weather is good and the Balsam Root is in bloom around me in the spring. I feel a reverence for my trade when I step over natural rock covered with lichen. When I am outdoors building stairs of stone I try to blend in. I think there is a lot to say for subtlety. It may be a value that has been too long forgotten.

I love to do the heavy work that I do. I’m going to keep doing it for as long as I can. I hope continually to become a craftsman. It is all I ever remember wanting. Well, that’s not really all I ever wanted, but you know what I mean. Strangely perhaps I feel that I have more in common with family farmers than many of my peers in modern masonry, as if rock setters and seed sowers are still natural partners. This is why I felt confident to impulsively marry a gardener. Difficult appreciation for this old partnership is in my blood, in this era of anonymity, cultured stone, generic tract housing, and genetically enhanced dairy, grain and meat products.

My dad is religious for a living, and that’s hard work too, building doctrines and herding the flock, but both of my grandfathers were family farmers. My father’s father, Ben, grew a relative few bushels of hard wheat on dry ground. My mother’s father, Leo, grew handsome "red delicious" apples in his irrigated, scenic orchard. One of my brothers, a really good guy and a chemical salesman, makes the apples even bigger than Leo ever imagined, on a schedule better than nature ever conceived. Success for him is measured in volume, and demand for his expertise is high. I am even closer to the ground than Grandpa Ben was. The more I do what I do, the less I want to project myself into the air. The more I work with heavy stones the less I regard heaven. I am chronically tilted against a wheat field wind, braced and bent the way a dry land farmer lights a cigarette, cupping a little thing that he loves right now while the stalks wane in the same downward direction of his frame.

I wonder why Grandpa Ben farmed, and whether he loved it. I wonder what he thought about at the age I am now. I wonder if he was certain in his Catholicism or whether he had some doubts. I wonder if we were peers, what would he say at age 35 of his wife, my grandmother I never knew. My work is pretty solitary too, though my companion is working with me full-time now. We’ve been together long enough that there isn’t much to say anymore. It’s still pretty quiet at work, but warmer, with some softer things than stones and tool handles to touch sometimes, like those lovely hips that bore our two children, that shake at me all day at work. I think Ben would understand what I just said, and who knows where our conversation would go from there. I’ll never know. I only met him once that I remember.

One story of Grandpa Ben has left a lasting mark on me, the wildfire started by his five children tossing matches into the seasonal creek that leaked across the thirsty wheat fields. As my father tells it, no more than a few words were said that night when Grandpa Ben sat the kids, my uncles and aunts, down on stools in the living room facing a bathtub full of water and handed each child a full box of matches. Gramps told each of them to burn every match in their box, one at a time down to the fingers, and then toss the used matchsticks in the tub. He knew that if you do something you love too much, with no variety, eventually you will hate it. There aren’t a lot of ways to strike and burn a match, but I bet the kids found more ways than would occur to the rest of us. Of all the ways to discipline his children, on this occasion I think Ben chose one of many possible good ways.

Even at that green age my dad pointed his sights not to the ground his father tilled, but to the Church. As he tells it, all he ever wanted was to be a Priest. Well, that’s not all he ever wanted. In fact, he wanted a life while he was at it, and found both Priesthood and marriage in the Mormonism of my mother’s family. Since then, for a full-time career my father explains that there is only one way to be saved in the Kingdom of God: the way he chose. And Salvation is impossible without obedience to Authority, which is half of his official title. Now thousands literally sit at his feet while he assumes his position above the worshippers as one of the seventy-four Elders in the Mormon Pantheon of Permanent Authorities. I find his certainty to be as absurd as pretending there is only one good way to make a concrete countertop or an outdoor fireplace. I am one of those seeds cast into the stones and I like it here.

There are a thousand good ways to make things, tens of thousands, overlapping and intertwining. There’s more than one good way to do everything, but even cement tossers can build a religion with narrow dogmas on what they know. I hope to never be that kind of mason. I hope to offer that imagination can be as good as knowledge. I propose that the mistakes and growth of personal experience are better than reliance on an expert’s description. Breadth with materials saves my mind while I live in this narrow valley that early hunters, gatherers, farmers and rock folk called Methow. I think Methow means beauty that is rugged and precious, delicate and dangerous, a paradox that must be preserved and only reluctantly improved.