Bam Bam

As usual, something always reminds me of something else, and it's happened again when @Coreykilgannon retweeted an image of a mortarless arch in Central Park, designed by Calvert Vaux and  Frederick Law Olmstead a scant 150 years ago. Impressive. No one can do that any more, can they?

Yes, they can. And a practitioner, no master of mortarless stone masonry can be found in Vermont (where else?) in the body of Thea Alvin, a women who was born to play with stone and not dolls. The NYT did a piece on her in 2013.

Thea inside her Venus Gate arch

 That Ms. Alvin is a master dry stone mason is no question. On   the left is a photo of her sitting inside Venus Gate, an arch she   constructed. It's not 150 years-old, but come back in a few   decades. 

 Thea grew up in the most eclectic of circumstances, and sports   a family biography that might be written by Jack Kerouac.   Michael Tortorello's NYT piece stitches true references to Jerry   Garcia, The Grateful Dead, LSD, a commune called the   Brotherhood of the Spirit founded in a treehouse, a father who did time in reform school and prison for teenage arson, raw bacon to cure the mumps and a mother who enjoyed a relationship with the Dead's lyricist, Robert Hunter. 

Thea worked with her father who was a mason. She says she learned how to mix mortar "really well." She hauled 72 pounds of bricks to him as he worked, and she has given names to her hammers, which she has three to four dozen of. One 7 pound hammer is named Bam Bam (The Flintstones, what else),

another 12 pound hammer, the Convincer.

Ms. Alvin runs a sought after business building dry masonry works. She runs a summer workshop, and has been just about all over the world.

Pictured on the right is a cairn, "a beacon to travelers" she has in her front yard just off Route 100 in Morrisville, Vt, an even more than usual rural area in north central Vermont, near Stowe ski resort.

Thea is a woman I'd most like to meet, but I doubt I'll ever be getting to that section of Vermont.

Anyone who can work with a 12 pound hammer and carry 72 pounds of bricks has to be strong. Her grip alone must be vise-like.

I read a recent obituary of Gerrie Coetzee, a South African heavyweight fighter who just passed at 67. It was said that Gerrie's right hand could "punch a hole in a brick wall," having been reinforced so many times by fused bones from being broken so often.

I doubt Thea would take up boxing, but I wouldn't want to be caught by a right hook of hers.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com