Category: Stories in Stone Blog

Seems like cairns are all over the place right now. First, they appeared in a New Yorker article (Feb 11 & 18; unfortunately the story is behind a pay wall) by Ian Frazier titled The Toll. The story focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In the story, Frazier reports on zookeeper Doug Schwartz, who erected cairns on the beaches of Staten Island, and has been doing so for many years. Sandy had destroyed Schwartz’s “sculptures or cairns or whatever you call them” but like many devoted to cairns he had vowed to rebuild. You go Doug!

And then in the March/April issue of AMC Outdoors the publication of the Appalachian Mountain Club, there is the article, Stone on Stone: A Natural and Social History of Cairns by Michael Gaige. Like the publisher of my book, Mountaineers Books, the AMC focuses on the “protection, enjoyment, and understanding” of wild places. In their case, it’s the forest, mountains, and trails of the northeast. Gaige’s article nicely weaves together many of the issues that concerned me in my book, Cairns: Messengers in Stone. As he writes “the tradition of stacking stones came not from building a monument to one’s self. It was to build for others–a memorial or a navigational aid. The intent lacked ego; it was just the opposite, an act of service.” It is always a pleasure to find someone else interested the deeper stories of cairns.

An interesting study on how brownstones would perform in an earthquake was posted recently on NBC Science. The study shows an unreinforced brick wall falling apart during a typical earthquake. In contrast, a reinforced brick wall remains standing. The only problem with the study is that the brownstones referred to were not typically made of brick. Those rowhouses in New York, and Boston and Philadelphia, got the name brownstone from the 200-million-year old sandstone used in many of the buildings. That stone, quarried most commonly in Portland, Connecticut, is a sandstone with a small amount of oxydized iron, which gives the rock its brown, or rusty color. (It’s the same type of rock that is found in southern Utah, where it’s known as red rock.) In addition, brownstone was often used as curtain wall, or a thin exterior material that served little structural purpose. Also, how often do earthquakes hit New York City? I am guessing that there is more to the study than reported on NBC but it does make me question its importance.