The year 2005 was another world for me. They were about to make a movie of “A Dog Year.” I had lots of money in the bank, and I was spending it as quickly as I could, almost all of it on Bedlam Farm, its barns, sheds, foundations, wires and pipes. I was possessed. The farm was being reborn. I was the God of it. There was an ugly dirt ditch behind the farmhouse, a scar on the hillside, gouged out when the farmhouse was built. In 2005, two years after I bought the farm, a stone mason named Kathan Dupuis turned up. He said he could build a stone wall for me. The trucks – I think they came from Pennsylvania – started pulling up the next day, dropping huge loads of big rocks. Nathan and his workers began sorting them, fitting them, stacking them. More and more trucks came, the days stretched into weeks.
People from the town would walk up the hill and look at the wall being built, and shake their heads in wonder and guess what it might cost.
Honestly, I don’t remember what it cost, can you believe that? All I remember was the brutish work of moving these huge rocks, the giant trucks coming in and raising their beds and seeing these huge bounders slam into the ground as everyone ran and ducked. It was thousands and thousands of dollars.
My own Wall Of China, and was I the emperor? The wall looks as if it is introducing the mountain behind the farmhouse, a beautiful thing, a monument to beauty, hubris, drive, passion and insanity. It rings the back of the farmhouse and is growing stylish moss and markings. A beautiful flower garden rings the top. There are many tons of rocks in that wall, so much sweat. It is so natural, it looks as if it grew there. I was so proud I asked Kathan to chisel his name and the year into the wall, and I stood and studied it today and wondered who the man was who would undertake such a thing in the modern world? He had to be a grandiose man, an impulsive man, the kind of man who can get things done but you don’t want to be around.
A few months ago, a woman came to look at Bedlam Farm, possibly buy it. She walked past the wall and did not seem to notice it, a pride and joy for me. I pointed it out, it runs about 50 feet in a beautiful and dignified arc behind the farmhouse. I had no doubt she would swoon with appreciation, love the farm even more. “Do you see it?,” I asked, “it is only seven years old?” I had no doubt she would gasp in wonder at such a thing, so well done, so graceful.
“Can you get a truck around here?,” she asked, surveying my wall. “Where is the septic?,” she asked. “My husband and I would like to know where the septic is.”