Astronauts on Planet Polar Fleece: Whither the Backcountry Proletariat?

When I lived on Mt. Hood, there was a bar room legend that used to circulate amongst the dives in Government Camp about the second ski descent of Cooper Spur. The spur is a 50-55 degree shoulder that drops off the north side of the mountain with a whole lot of open air on either side. By today’s standards, it’s not the steepest descent around, but what makes it still a rare trophy is the wicked fall onto the Eliot Glacier awaiting the unwary. Hit a patch of ice up there, and it's 2,000 feet straight down.

The story went like this. Supposedly the first descent was made by a famous French skier in the late fifties or early sixties. At the height of his glory and fame, this skier, who had done all sorts of crazy things in Europe, hires a helicopter (this was before the Wilderness Act) to deposit himself and a crew of photographers on the summit. After making something of a self-important speech, he clicks into his skis and trailed by flash bulbs and wearing the latest in designer fashions, he does the job.

The second descent was conceived the next day when a farm boy in the Hood River Valley read about the events in a local paper. Deciding he could ski the chunk of mountain he had looked up at probably every day of his life, the boy lugged his skis to the south side. And, without fanfare and experience gained mostly as a high-school ski racer, pointed his wooden boards down the north side and repeated the descent.

Is it true? I have never been able to find out, and the truth is I don’t really care. The point is why the story gets repeated with such pride in the Ratskeller and Charlie’s and over Nalgene bottles of whiskey at Silcox Hut. Skiing, as it was practiced in earlier days in America, was an adventure that required imagination and cojones. In Europe, it was a sport that emphasized glamour and athleticism. The thought of an apple orchardist’s son careening down Cooper Spur in flannels and leather boots, hay in his pockets and wind in his hair, is an image of pure freedom, one that made me want to ski the spur. Until, that is, I watched a climber headed up Cooper Spur fall to his death.

But the European spirit has now thoroughly invaded backcountry skiing in America, turning it into a sporting event dominated by affluent jocks the way it sanitized rock climbing in the 1980s. Unlike sport climbing, which after all doesn’t require much more gear than a rope, shoes, and a rack of quick-draws, there are a lot of expensive gee-gaws for the aspiring skier to buy and lots of resorts to practice up at. In fact, the way telemark gear has evolved into a bloated, overweight near-Alpine style it’s only a matter of time before people realize that if they just strap the heels of those Scarpa Terminators down they’ll get a lot more power out of the turn; it’s not like much of that stuff actually gets used to go uphill anymore anyway.

Personally, I trace the whole yuppification of backcountry pursuits to the glossy Patagonia catalogues of the 1980s. On one side of the page were beautiful shots of hacky-sack playing climbers on Half Dome and back-of-beyond mountain bikers enjoying premium beers beside Alaskan streams. On the other side: sexy, well-made outdoor clothing with eye-popping price tags. The Patagonia catalogues equated the buying of expensive gear with a life of charismatic backcountry exploits in the same way Nike ads equated buying $100 sneakers with world class athletic feats. It’s the same model Martha Stewart uses to sell leisure time projects to people with no leisure time.

By the time Patagonia added Deep Ecology to the mix, symbolically marrying the purchase of high-end polar fleece duds to committed environmental activism, it was clear that the market for outdoor gear had become one for people who don’t actually spend much time in the backcountry. After all, someone who believes that buying clothing made entirely from petroleum products is an act of ecological defense is clearly not getting out much.

Now we have advertising campaigns like North Face’s “I’m an Astronaut on Planet Earth.” What a sad attitude; to equate the living, wild backcountry of our planet with the sterile, inhuman expanses of space. As if the best we can do is swaddle ourselves in high technology and head out of the cities, groping in the unfamiliar ether like weekend Neil Armstrongs riding full suspension mountain bikes across the surface of the moon.

But the farm boy’s tradition is still out there.

For awhile, I taught cross-country skiing on Mt. Hood to groups from Portland Parks and Recreation, mostly middle-aged folk with little experience in the snow. One cold winter morning, an older craggy looking couple showed up before the rest, getting out of a beat up old station wagon wearing cotton jeans and sweatshirts. As they looked dubiously at my ski equipment and the wife confessed her bum knee might not be up for a full day of this, the instructor part of me was thinking that they were going to be students from hell. When other people began showing up, they quietly walked off to smoke cigarettes.

As the morning warmed and they shed a few layers of clothing, I could see to my relief that they were wearing good quality synthetic long underwear and I began to think they might know a little about what they were in for. Taking the man aside, I asked if he had much backcountry experience. “Well,” he replied, “I like to build boats, drift boats mainly.”

I told him I was learning how to build skin on frame kayaks myself, and he said, “Oh yeah, I’ve built a few kayaks.” Becoming quickly animated, he started to relate how he too had become fascinated with the Tlingit culture of Southeast Alaska, and had conceived the dream of building his own boat and paddling around Glacier Bay.

“Well, good luck,” I said, turning to greet the rest of the day’s clients.

“Oh,” he said. “I already did that, a few years ago.”

“You did?”

“Sure, it was a great trip. Except for when I flipped over crossing back across the bay.

“What did you do?”

“I rolled back up and paddled across,” he said with a laugh, and wandered off to have a last smoke before getting in the van.    

Down in My Heart

 (book review, Source weekly, early 2000s)

In the war years of 1942-1945, the man who would become Oregon's Poet Laureate and one of its most beloved writers, William Stafford, was interned in various labor camps as a conscientious objector for his refusal to join the U.S. Army. Down In My Heart is his account of those years, particularly his fellow conchies (conscientious objectors), their labors and moods as they build bridges, put out fires, and struggle to maintain what he calls their "landmarks", or ties to normal life.

Written as Stafford's Masters thesis at the University of Kansas, Down in My Heart was first published in 1947, and was reissued last year as part of OSU Press's Northwest Reprints series. It is an enduring book on several levels and will hopefully gain a wider appreciation with its inclusion in the fine Reprints series.

On the surface, the book is a witness to the c.o.'s life during World War II. Scorned by society and alienated from their families, moving from irrigation project to Forest Service camp like ghosts, trying mainly to stay invisible amongst the suspicious populace of the South and the West. Trying, often with a quiet heroism, to make friends of the trail bosses and camp directors who oversee them.  

In a larger sense, Down In My Heart is a remarkable struggle and triumph within Stafford himself. As his fellow c.o. George descends into a kind of blind rebellion, escaping from the camps to become imprisoned and embittered, Stafford maintains his purposeful vigil. Always looking for bridges rather than drawing lines. The result is a portrait of radicalness that is more poetic than capital P Political, a stubborn refusal to dehumanize or simplify either captor or captive, soldier or resister.

The reader looking for ideology or easy answers will be disappointed. In some ways, the spirit of Down In My Heart is old-fashioned, evoking as it does the discipline, humility, and loneliness of pre-Vietnam pacifists. There are no villains and the hero's creed is disarmingly respectful: when asked by the head of his draft board, a retired military man, where he had come by his objection to war, Stafford replies, "You were my Sunday School teacher, sir, when I was a child. You taught me not to kill. I never forgot."  

It's a testament to this book's endearing modesty that the above statement is found only in the introduction, recounted by the author's son long after Down In My Heart was written. As a historian, Stafford opens a small, forgotten window into the tribulations of an overlooked people and a difficult time. But this simple, powerful book is worth reading even if only to understand where Stafford, the poet, came by his skill at building bridges of all kinds.

Steve Turner: An Inquiry

A couple of months ago, I applied for a scholarship to the Surprise Valley Writer’s Conference, a scholarship given in the name of Steve Turner, a journalist, novel writer, and raconteur whom I knew nothing about. I thought I knew about Steve Turner, because I mistook his name for that of a totally unrelated poet. So I introduced myself with effusive praise for my mistaken poet rather than researching just who this Steve Turner fellow was. Lazy and ignorant in one fell swoop. Somehow I received the scholarship anyway.

In the weeks that followed, I have done my best to make an acquaintance with Steve’s (and I have come to think he was the kind of person who would not mind me being familiar) work. But, as these things go, the impetus for honoring the man was the passing of his life. Which made it necessary to work backwards in time. 

Thus I began by reading mostly memorial remembrances. Mostly from other professional writers whom he had aided in his role as a founder and grievance officer of the National Writer’s Union. They bespoke a bulldog of a man, beloved by his union brethren (And sistren—he was from Santa Cruz after all.) and a reliable champion in their efforts to be paid justly.

I have to admit, though, that as a writer alienated from making my daily living with words, the language of unions, their process, is opaque to me. It is a matter of not possessing the proper ear for the dialect. But what I did understand was the reflected impact of a man who insisted upon the dignity of labor. The butt in chair, notebook in hand, contract fulfilled, mechanics of the writing life.

My own cash-in-pocket work usually involves my hands and my back, as I know Steve’s once did; I cleared brush, hauled garbage, and installed solar panels to make gas money from Big Sur to the conference in Cedarville. I got on food stamps to scrimp a few more dollars away and I left the coast with fingers crossed that the fuel pump in my truck might not fail yet again. But I brought an extra just in case. 

I read through Steve’s study of the eastern Washington dry wheat culture, Amber Waves and Undertow: Peril, Hope, Sweat, and Downright Nonchalance in Dry Wheat Country, as I went about my chores. And here I began to connect in a direct way with his word craft, his skill as a writer. The passage below is one that I came back to again and again:

So the lineup of old trucks so neatly parked out on that Providence Road place testified to a family’s mode of thriftiness—wear it out before you replace it—as well as affection for favored equipment that transmutes into a mechanized form of pethood. But the Providence Road display also measured a crucial development in the changes that have made modernity what it is.

It’s an obvious fact that those trucks, and the vehicles that preceded them, needed roads. And it is roads—dirt, macadam and rail, and their precursors, the trails—that have changed this land so completely: the roads and what they’ve brought, what they’ve enabled, and what they’ve killed—right up to the present.

One could argue that the best way to preserve some sort of purity in human communities is to isolate them. But that doesn’t happen. The flow of people and goods from one place to another—for trade, settlement, or conquest—has been a primary component of recorded history. So also in the Big Bend. For many hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, colored beads, flints with durable cutting edges, and other valued goods were moving in slow exchange from as far as South America to the native tribes in the Columbia Basin.

What I love about this is the sly, sinuous way that the writer expands his lens from a farm equipment boneyard to its context with warmth but not nostalgia. It strikes me that the sensibility here reflects a man who both drove trucks and cared about what he was hauling. Who moved his mind, in some fashion, like the land he was writing about. Plain wrought, but filled with contour; visceral yet saturated with the sweep of time.

I have worked among eastern Washington wheat farmers, and found them a particularly leery and laconic people. This was exacerbated in that my job there—mapping the power grid of entire counties from the cab of a truck—might have been custom designed to elicit suspicion. And the fewer power connections a place might have (a dryland farm has not even the three-phase transformers needed to move irrigation water) the greater the hostility I was met with.

In other words, there are a lot of people whom dryland farmers don’t want to explain themselves to. And merely driving a truck to their door doesn’t unlock much in the way of insight. So it is no small thing to me, the reportorial skill within Amber Waves. But it is the reporter here who impresses me.

I’m told that Steve was a champion of the little guy, the working folk in general. But there’s a tough love in his reporting, a compassion rather than a mere sympathy. An absence of the privileged nostalgia that distorts many do-good portraits of rural inhabitation. These qualities inform a righteous politics rather than flow from it. They are, in themselves, a solidarity.

I am reading Steve’s Night Shift in a Pickle Factory as I finish this essay, mulching the reading and writing together. Let me mention a few things about the little book itself, green as a dill spear and sized to fit in the pockets of ordinary workaday clothing. It reminds me of that era—the late 70s and early 80s—when a crop of earnest small presses arose to slake the thirst of a generation thirsty for pragmatic, hands-on knowledge. Be it how to cut firewood, grow vegetables, repair one’s car, build one’s own home. A time when books could be more revolutionary and when revolution was understood to involve both muscles and words.

Pickle Factory is both hilarious and stomach turning; I don’t think I’ll be heading down to the store for a jar of relish anytime soon. A reluctant ode to the day in and day out of factory labor, the idiocy of The Boss, and the ways in which human beings adapt to being treated as pieces of machinery. A slice of life in a little package sound on the inside and out.

So my inquiry into Steve Turner’s work leads me, for now, to this place: a factory floor slick with pickle pulp and broken glass, rendered by a writer both at odds with and in tune to his surroundings. As it began with an act of sloppiness, I’ll refrain from offering an ill-digested conclusion to my incomplete investigation. I will say, though, that the process itself has been a second reward after first receiving the scholarship.

Reflecting on his time packing pickles at the Brogan’s factory, Steve writes: But not liking the place hasn’t meant not liking the experience. I can tell you I saw that coming. That this was a man who reveled in labor shared with others even as he refused to be anybody’s fool. A writer whose good name has recently filled my stomach and improved my own tool box of word craft. A life and work I would offer my solidarity to. 

Old Woman Riding Home

It is my habit at night to walk the six miles to Pacific Grove and back. Something I have done in sporadic bursts for twenty six years, whenever I am in Monterey. It is a kind of going home, over and over again. 

I have been walking the bike path over to Lover’s Point for most of this winter. The weather has been good for it, at least since the early season rains blew themselves out. It is a steady routine, perhaps my steadiest. When I start out the door of my mother’s house, I know I will not turn around until I am under the cypress trees and the fluorescent lights at the trail’s end, just past where the harbor seals have given birth to their pups.

Not long after I started this winter, I noticed the same older lady would pass me on her bicycle at about the same time. I could see her slightly weaving progress from afar, her yellow wind jacket and blinking reflectors when she neared. Shortly after, she began to say, “Good night!” when she passed, without looking up.

It startled me at first. And then it made perfect sense. We two people often occupied the same place and we ought to greet each other. But I thought too long and gave a muffled you too! to her distant back.

I began to look forward to this little salutation. Sometimes she would not see me, or I would wear unusual clothes, and she would be silent. I would feel neglected but it would not occur to me to say good night first. I got better at preparing for her somewhere between Pacific Grove and Cannery Row, so that I could wish her well before she was out of earshot. You too old woman riding home!

It is spring now. The nights are foggy and warm, a breeze blows in from the ocean. The tourists are here, the flowers are up. And I find myself thinking that soon this habit, like all of my good habits, will come to an end. As soon as possible, I need to be somewhere else, doing something else. The reasons change. I pay less attention to the cypress trees and the sea lions barking on the pier. 

I was walking along in the gravel tonight, counting the reasons I am a shithead, nearly to the mural which turns sepia under the sulfur streetlights. I heard the sound of tires behind me and knew without thinking it was the old woman riding home. I turned to greet her, it was in my reflex to say, “Good night!” first this time. But before I could, she called out softly and smiled as she passed. All I could do was wish her along, her bike bobbing from side to side, the red light flashing on the back of her wind jacket. “You too!” I said with as much feeling as I could muster. Maybe too much feeling, maybe I sounded like I was mocking her. 

I invented a story for her as she pedaled away. That she is a docent at the aquarium on Cannery Row. After closing time, she walks among the tanks of undulating kelp and sardines flashing in the dark, on the way to her bicycle. She checks on all of her familiar creatures before saying good night, gets on her bike, and says it one last time. To me, her jellyfish drifting along beside the way home. 

Whales Big as Submarines

When I got to Strawberry Valley, the only water was a green algae filled puddle in the creek bed. Flies buzzed around. All the water I was carrying in my pack was gone, and it was very hot. I had screwed up.

There were several thousand feet to climb and maybe ten miles to go before a big spring on the coast ridge. I scooped a bottle full of the green muck. Then I soaked my tee shirt in the water and rung it out over my head, started up the trail.

I passed through the pine and sandstone of Indian Valley, but didn’t pay much attention. Every few minutes I stopped, closed my eyes, and stood still until the spinning in my head died down. Switchback after switchback, but not sweating much. I stopped to pee but couldn’t. Somewhere I had heard it was bad not to be able to pee every hour. So I pulled out my stove and set the green muck to boil.

It smelled like tea, even strained. It was so hot it burned my tongue. But it didn’t make the spinning stop. The hot water ran right through me and wafted away as sweat. I began to stop at each switchback, the dizziness making me panic which sped me up then made me dizzy again. No thirst anymore, and the spring ahead was abstract, an idea of water. I picked flecks of algae off my shirt with my fingernail. 

At the top of the ridge, the Pacific Ocean breeze blew into my face. I sat beneath a conifer drinking in the feel of it on my eyebrows. But my head would not stop spinning. The water below beckoned, impossible. I tried and failed to get up and put my pack on several times before succeeding. It was still a ways to the spring.

After a bend or two, I came upon a man sitting on the porch of a cabin. The cabin peaked out above the road, its windows facing south toward the sun and the water. He looked at me for a moment then asked, “You want a beer?”

I didn’t but it felt rude to ask for water first. So I sat upon his deck drinking a beer and looking down on the ocean with him. His name was Pete and he was short and his hair was black. He wore sunglasses, metal rimmed with dark lenses. He said, “Down there, sometimes I see whales as big as submarines. All the way down there.”

I told him where I had been and he asked about Indian Valley. 

“I remember,” he said, “riding through there in the forties on a mule. The pines and the cedars were everywhere on the ridges. But now.” He waved his left hand toward the backcountry.

He had been here when the Marble Cone fire, the biggest in California history to that point, had started nearby. He had seen the lightning striking and knew what it meant. And then watched what he believed was the Forest Service’s neglect as it expanded. 

He believed they had wanted to burn him and others off of the road, to let the fire get into the wilderness where it would expand and their hands would be tied. He feared the Forest Service encroaching upon him in various ways. He told me these things without malice, without persuasion. They did not seem to inhibit his ablution, his sitting on the porch with the ocean at his feet. 

“My kids don’t like this place. So it’s just me.” He opened another beer and stood up. “I remember all those pines, and the Santa Lucia firs too. We were on mules.” He chuckled about it.

Pete stood there with his nose jutting into the wind and his eyes on the ocean. He was not just looking at the scenery, he was looking into it. Like a bird. 

The beer had gone straight to my head but I felt ashamed to have empty bottles on such a day. And I didn’t want to interrupt the sitting there, smell of the porch wood in the sun. But finally I managed, “Say, could I trouble you for some water for the walk to Cold Spring?”

He poured it for me, right into my mucky water bottle. I didn’t care. I sipped it slowly at first, then faster. Finally in big gulps. 

let's get a look at it

I am watching birds. American Avocets, meadowlarks, black-crowned night herons, red-head ducks, shovellers, perhaps a least bittern. 

Northern pintails, immature marsh hawks, barn owls, red-shouldered black birds, California gulls, mallards, egrets of some sort. Plenty of Canada geese. Killdeer. 

But mostly, the curlews. In the marshy grasses north of Borax Lake they scream at the dogs and me, protecting their nests and searching around for who knows what on the white salt flats where nothing but black greasewood grows. In the distance, the wind blows down off Steens Mountain and whips up dust devils on the Alvord playa. The dust devils spin, shimmy, and die before reaching the Wildhorse Ranch country to the east.

The dogs vie for a thin patch of shade by the wheels of the truck, and I huddle in a cheap lawn chair with them. The sun burn squares into the tops of my sandalled feet as I peer through binoculars. I contemplate getting up and putting more sunscreen on. Instead, I drink water from a plastic jug. 

A white Isuzu Trooper turns off of the main road and, a half hour later, pulls up to the rusted borax refining vats by the lake and stops. The dogs start up a rolling bark which I do not discourage. The driver and I talk while he waits for a trailing van full of high school students from the Willamette Valley to arrive.

“Aren’t there some hot pools around here for the kids to see?” he asks. 

I point to where a faint road heads out past a series of boiling water potholes and marshy pools. I volunteer, “There’s also the chub in the lake here.”

“Fish? In this lake? Tell the kids when they come along, they’ll want to see that.”

I tell the sweaty kids about the famous Borax Lake Chub. A two-inch long fish whose habitat once stretched out across a vast inland waterway. Then that water dried up and the fish’s range shrunk and shrunk until it learned to make do with a ten acre pond. A pond filled by a hot springs and what a BLM sign warns is twenty-five times the safe level of arsenic for human consumption.

One of the chaperones says, “It only lives here and you might never have a chance to see it again. Let’s get a look at it. Let’s go.” The kids shuffle to the bank and stare out at the water. One or two think they see something.

The kids and the other chaperones wander about while the driver of the Isuzu makes an assessment of the southern sky. “I think,” he concludes, “that I might be able to get the Blazers' game from here.” He gestures to a satellite dish tucked in the trailer behind his Trooper. I agree that he might. 

But now I wish he would leave, so I walk back to the edge of the lake and stretch out on the ground. I ease my chin onto a patch of sedge and focus my eyes beneath the water. It takes awhile, but a minnow-sized chub darts by. And then another. And then another. 

mostly built by slaves

The man who met me at the Lexington airport was driving a new diesel truck with two chainsaws and some firewood in the bed. He was talking on his cell phone and when he finished he apologized and said he was a tree contractor just finishing his work day. He didn’t look like an arborist; his clothes were clean and his hands were soft. “I just run crews now,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a comfortable job. And I don’t miss being in the tree.” I believed him. He had a placid way of talking, like someone who had come to a still point after a lot of turbulence. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it now.

We drove along and didn’t actually talk about the reason I had come, to retrieve the Volkswagen van I had bought from him on the internet. The plane ticket had been a pot sweetener, an incentive to get more money for his vehicle. “I must confess,” he said, “I thought I’d get more for it. But my son said ebay was the way to go.”

I got the feeling that selling the van was about more than money. It can be that way when one has lived out of a Volkswagen for awhile. So I told him I planned to drive the van down to Tennessee, to an old commune where midwives would deliver my child, that it would be our first home of sorts. 

He nodded a bit but said nothing, and I watched the edges of Lexington slip past the window. As we got further from the city, the country became filled with horse farms, and the horse farms were often bordered along the road by old stone fences. We came to a turn and he pointed to the stacked limestone and said, “Those were built by Scottish immigrants. They didn’t use any mortar. A couple of years ago, some people came all the way from Scotland and were able to tell us where the builders had immigrated from, which area they came from, because each had a different style.” He stared at the stacked wall in silence, and I did too. It is the kind of moment that happens in the South, the kind where the past asserts itself. 

After the turn, there were huge pastures, a few horses in the dappled winter light, and it made me think of bourbon labels. There seemed to be an impossible number of horse farms, and I was relieved when the man’s house turned out not to be one. It was old though, a narrow two story colonial with peeling paint, surrounded by a yard of very big trees and a barn that looked like it could have been a livery. The house was small but fronted with an enormous columned facade, the way it was done on plantations. 

The man explained that he was part of a barter co-op, a group of people who traded their labor for scrip with which to trade for other people’s labor. He had cashed in some of his scrip to have the van detailed for me. A crew of young guys with buzz cuts was still blasting away with a pressure washer. So we went inside to sign papers. 

When we were done we looked the van over but I was reluctant to get inside or open the hood. It seemed the man did not want to be drawn into the details, the mechanics of the thing. But when we opened the sliding door, he nodded at the stove and said, “I cooked a lot of good meals in there, the year I lived in the van.” He shook his head, “I saw a lot of things that year. A lot of things.” 

We opened beers and he told me that he had bought the van when had gotten divorced. He had sold everything he owned, and bought it from a nurse. His kids, everyone really, had thought he had come unhinged. He had installed an expensive stereo, packed up some food, and headed west to see the national parks. “Sitting at night, eating the same old spaghetti at that stove. It was just always that much better with the top up and the wind coming in. I saw some things, I really did.”

I asked him where his favorite place had been, and he said, “I went to Big Sur and ended up living there for awhile.” 

I told him I was from that area, that I knew Big Sur well and he had probably met people I knew. He became animated, nodding his head with recollection. He leaned close to me and asked, “Do you know Partington Ridge?”

I told him I did. How one could be there and see the coast stretching out like a curtain along the sea. And how Jaime DeAngulo had danced around there naked and my friend Roland had tried to live up there without money and mostly succeeded. The man couldn’t get over the fact that I knew this place where he had lived in the van. There were tears in his eyes.

His cell phone rang and he took it in the kitchen. It was his girlfriend and he told her, “I can’t believe it. The guy who came for the van knows Big Sur. I know, I know, it’s amazing.”

We drank more beer and waited for his girlfriend to arrive. After awhile, she called back and he made baby talk to her in the kitchen. I felt like an intruder and told him I was anxious to get on the road back to Oregon anyway. I took a long look at his old house, with its heart pine floors and warped window panes, got in the van, and drove away.

Before I was out of horse country, I pulled over to have a look at what I had driven off with. It was a cold evening and already the water from the detailers had frozen into one of the door locks and shorted the yellow check engine light on. But I felt it would be a good vehicle anyway.

I could see a section of rock wall in the sweep of the headlights. The top row of stones was stacked diagonally and pointed up like dragon’s teeth. I made a note to find out whether my own family had come from somewhere in Scotland that was known for its masonry. 

So I looked it up when I got home to Oregon. Evidently the Scottish and Irish first brought the style of masonry to Lexington. But most accounts I read quietly noted the fences had mostly been built by slaves.