Hello Walls!

February 21, 2024.

Nothing relieves stress better than good old-fashioned physical labour. Tackling 15 tons of boulders sure does take your mind off your problems at work, and gives new meaning to the term, "getting stoned". When we bought our cottage on Sleepy Hollow Lane in 1989, it was a year of extremely low water. The previous owner, Ken Hunt, had been out mowing the weeds about 20 feet offshore with his lawnmower. The next year the waves were lapping up against the shore in the spring, undercutting the sod. By mid-summer the water had receded 30 or 40 feet and the weeds were exposed again. Over the next few years, with this spring wave-action, we noticed that the willows and trees along the shoreline were falling into the water and we were losing our lawn.

With pictures and sketches in hand, I paid a visit to the environmental folks in Pembroke to get a permit and they said I could build a rock wall to protect the shoreline as long as I did it by hand with no heavy equipment. Being of Slovak heritage, I had stone-wall building in my genes, so I took up the challenge. A call to Ken Pilatzkie brought a truck load of boulders and a load of sand. With 175 feet of shoreline and only a two-week vacation, I had my work cut out for me. I noticed that the contractor working on the bridge at Golden Lake had a pile of used filter-cloth to dispose of after his job was completed. With a bit of bartering, I now had more heavy-duty filter-cloth than I needed for my project.

Making use of a wheel barrow and a dolly, my son and I made short work of that pile of stones and a week later I was back on the phone to Pilatzke ordering another load. His only comment was "Holy Jumpin". My wife was not big on hauling stones but she did an admirable job with the sand back-fill.

There is no shortage of rock in this area as every farm is bordered by stone fences. Brenda Lee-Whiting's book, Harvest of Stones, paints a clear picture of the annual chore that local farmers faced as the frost pushed stones up in their fields. I once asked Alex McGrath if I could buy some stones for a fire-pit and he said "you want to pay for stones?" in an incredulous tone.

Over the next year I had recovered my lost shoreline and extended the wall along the full 175 feet of our frontage. I was able to move on to other stone-wall projects.

My wife had built a shed in 1995 from plans she had seen in Cottage Life magazine. For the base, we had put down a load of gravel the year before and allowed it to settle. I was on a business trip to Yellowknife in the spring of 1996 when she called me in a panic, saying the water was up to the pad and she was afraid her shed was going to float away. The gravel pad was saturated and she could not walk on it. I said there was nothing to do but wait until the water receded. So, later that spring, another call to Pilatzke brought another load of stones for another project – this time, building an apron around the gravel pad. Our neighbour, Roy Rutland, lent a hand and we reciprocated later when he was building his own stone-wall shore protection.

The walls always needed topping up as they settled in their sandy base. Everywhere I went there were road-side stones for the picking and I collected rocks from all over Ontario in my travels. Large square pieces were the best, since they were easiest to place. One day, I brought home four or five nice block-like stones from Northern Ontario, and my wife suggested they would make a nice accent feature at the side of the driveway. I agreed, but I should never have committed to a project without knowing the scope. I asked how big a wall she wanted and she said a corner eight feet by eight feet would be nice. So, it was back on the road looking for stray rocks for the rest of the summer. My mother had a habit of bringing home a stone from everywhere she visited, labelling them and keeping them in the garage up in Hearst. Like mother, like son, I collected them but I did not label them, just added them to the wall.

I must have built and rebuilt that wall ten times as I found better stones for the base. Round rocks are very tricky to balance and required staggering like brickwork so they supported each other. I finally finished that corner wall, when a friend at work told me about a development in Almonte where they were blasting the limestone to make foundation excavations for a shopping centre. There were mountains of nicely squared pieces of limestone for the taking. Unfortunately, my corner wall was finished. "Not so fast", said the bride, who now wanted another corner wall at the other end of our septic bed. A few trips to Almonte with my trailer brought all the rock I needed for the second wall but I think I wore out my van in the process.

After building 175 feet of shoreline protection, 32 feet of corner walls and aprons around two buildings, we finally had all the stone walls we needed. Over the years I brought in, and placed, five or six truck-loads of fieldstone, weighing about 65 tons. Who needs a gym membership when you have walls to build? I always keep a pile of rocks in reserve, which came in handy when the culvert down the lane washed out.

Another day at the cottage brought another challenge in the form of mature balsam trees that were crowding the lane, scratching passing vehicles or threatening power lines. The Ontario Hydro Forestry Department was good enough to cut down the trees and buck them up. I now had a new way to channel my energy and vent my frustrations.

Being an old farm-boy, born with an axe in my hand, I took up the challenge, but that's another story.