The Avant Garden

and the blog portion of the Garden has been neglected. Until tonight.

The Avant Family (four of the five, anyway) went to Mt. Desert Island, Maine, which is also the place good rockstackers go when they die. Our "beach" consisted of wonderful stacking stones as far as the eye could see. This was my first arch:

and this is it at high tide:

I hurt my finger (left, bird) a bit on that one, and with the bascom exhibition coming up, I got a little cautious. I needed an extra push to go on, and found it in "Never mind the Bollocks, here's the Sex Pistols" again. The result was this stack atop one of the larger stones in our back yard:

Who'd a thunk that 32 years later, the Sex Pistols would still be relevant to me? Weird ... but there's something about that album. It makes pain irrelevant and rocks lighter.

I named this one "Anasazi" for some reason:

and then the Sun set and it looked like this:

 When I read this sign:

I read, "DO NOT BE THE AVANT GARDENER" 

so I was merely an Avant (and eventually exhausted) Hiker for about 4 hours of hell, involving a 1300-foot elevation loss and 1300-foot climb back to the top of Mt. Cadillac.

And finally, one of my favorite places on all of Mt. Desert Island was Seal Cove Pond, where this happens almost every day:

Back in good ol' Western North Carolina, I came home and went to work-work on Monday and then started the installation out at the bascom on Tuesday.

I loaded what turned out to be about 4,000 pounds of stone in the rented truck: 

and drove the 78 miles to the bascom (Rob drove out separately) to do this pair of Rock Ness Monsters:

and then today we added these three Arches on Pedestals:         

I didn't know about it and didn't plan for it, but they asked me to do something right in front of the main building on the very beautiful campus, and this resulted:

We had a buncha rocks left over and were too tired to take 'em home, so Rob arranged them in a "we-meant-to-do-that" kinda way. He's good at that.

My favorite thing of all was the arch-on-pedestal near the bascom entry point:

The trailer hitch thing is something I have never done before, but this AOP is trying to lean the other way and fall, so I built in a counter-weight to help.

No one else has one quite like it -- only the bascom.

I have a bit more tidying up to do out there, but am finished with the heavy lifting. I'm going out one more time, either tomorrow or this weekend. Yesterday evening I was more exhausted than the day I climbed New Zealand's Mt. Pirongia.

Longest blog entry ever? Maybe ...