The Avant Garden

... I've gained the cooperation of quite a few rocks over the past week. My new most favoritest thing is this balancing driftwood beam with arches on it:

I started out just building arch-type things for fun, then started playing with counterbalancing rockstacks on the far end, then thought it would be interesting to have it balanced and see-sawing up and down. I stacked arches until it was closely balanced, then placed a small rock on the end, and moved it back and forth until I had the balancing point. Just a little breeze would cause it to see-saw. Today I went back (I did that Sunday afternoon) and it was still slightly see-sawing in a constant breeze supplied by the Swannanoa River rushing through the spillway. It had been rocking for 72 hours ... as I have mentioned before, given that in 99 percent of the things that I do, a little motion means gravity wins and rocks fall again, to have something that moves without falling is really cool. In an Avant Garden sort of way, that is.

This is my first nude rockstack:
I was going for a sexy-shadowy kind of shot ...

It's in the backyard Avant Garden. You can't tell from the photo, but she has a heart-shaped belly button that is really cute.

Speaking of the backyard Avant Garden, I pulled this piece of driftwood out of the River last year and it has become part of the furniture, but on Thursday, looked like a head-n-armless torso with a shawl on:
Nice shawl, but no head ...  bummer.

The upper stone in what used to be my "K-T Stack" rolled down the hill and before I knew it, became one of the Rocks A in the stone boobs sculpture. So K-T had to have a bigger, better rock:
because she has grown a lot and is a great kid. Also on Sunday, I went to Gashes Pond and did a Serpent:
Right interesting head, aye?

The GashPondSerpent was the fifth thing I had done there -- out in the (gulp) semi-public. Urban rockstacking feels different from the other places I play. There's a sense of urgency, as if to get out of that place quickly or something. It doesn't feel as clean as Bent Creek, for example.

Tuesday evening at Rob's we did these two:
It's an invasion ...

and today I went back to Gashes Pond and did this thing:
Those reddish rocks are rust-stained ...

I love the rockpile down there, but am not too wild about the area otherwise. On Monday I went down to the Pond and there was a honeymooning couple down by one of my stacks and she was taking a picture of him standing beside it. It made my week. Christmas is basically here, so I don't know how much time I will have to play-n-blog in the coming days, but I'll try. Rocks always seem to find me. 

and running low on rocks as well. I've had to go out in public lately to play. I feel strange playing where people can watch. There's an extra pressure to succeed, and not to get hurt. Not that  a crowd gathered in the 32F temps. Anyway, there is a circlish/squarish section of the Swannanoa River near my house where the River goes under Gashes Creek Road and I went out early
Looking through 12:00 at 18:00 (that's 6 p.m. to you and me)Saturday morning and did these two in this first photo.

It was so cold as  I worked on the one in the foreground that I could use the frost on the surfaces as a cheat. I just held the rocks -- frosted or wet surface to frosted surface -- in place and they defied gravity for a rock-searching moment. Later, the sun came out and warmed it up and it fell.

On the following miserable Monday, a dark 33F rainy day, I visited those two and decided to do two more ... later. I tossed this one:
It survived its first 24 hours ...

(in the 15:00 position) up on Tuesday and went this afternoon and did 21:00:
Not my most beautiful arch-on-pedestal ...

So now there are four of them all sorta facing the center of the pond, as equidistant from one another as I could make them. I hope to see snow on them tomorrow. 

On Sunday, I did this thing I call "Harp," though I am open to suggestions for a better name:
For some reason, this was risky ... I was scared, anyway.

 and gave him this thing as a companion piece:
Not spectacular, but the only one in Oteen ...

Sunday morning I went to the Bent Creek Sculpture Walk  with my friend Jill and we fixed up some things. We fixed the Roadside Serpent:  first. The tree that knocked The Original Bent Serpent (TOBS) down last August washed further downstream, so TOBS was down again, but he rose to jump back over the tree:
One of my favorites ... 

We also fixed his betrothed, Bonnie, but didn't have time to work on anything else. Next time. We have an ice storm warning in effect, so I may be out of commission for a day or two. But I'll be back. Those dang rocks just keep calling me ...

I've reached a point where I write so much at work that I just have nothing in the writing tank when I get home. All I want to do is play. So I am going to convert this blog thing into a Web site somehow or another. But first, let's take a look at some of the things that have happened here lately ...

the Sunday after my last blog entry I went to Gatlinburg, Tenn., which I consider hell, but my family wanted to meet there, so I did.

As I walked this trail near Gatlinburg (avoiding having to go have lunch at a super-crowded restaurant where I would have had to wait in line a long, long time), I noticed it had a Nature Trail, whereby visitors take a map and stop at these numbered places and read about the flora and fauna. Stop number three on the Nature Trail featured a post with the numeral "3" on it, which cried out for me to do three stacks so that when hikers approached and saw the three they would think the three stacks corresponded somehow. And besides, it was Sunday, and I often stack in groups of three anyway. Why is that?

I met some Hurricane Katrina refugees from Baton Rouge, Louisiana while I did this:
It's tradition to stack in threes, especially on Sunday ...

One asked me the eternal question, "How do you balance all those rocks?"

"Lotsa practice," is always my answer.

Thanksgiving I worked off my meal by restacking mom-n-dad-n-grandma's stack:                                                                                            

and that got me in the mood to stack some more, so off I snuck off to a nearby construction site and did this thing:
I wonder how long the Georgia red clay will stick?

among others. It was a pleasant way to digest.

This past Sunday I went for a walk with the family and made this crown:
This rockpile at Warren Wilson College is pretty nice ... 

On Monday I was goofing around in the local park and one of my favorite neighbors walked up and asked me to come build something for her. She asked so nicely I couldn't say no, so I started building something for her the next night. Tuesday night I gathered material and stacked one arch and came back the next evening to finish:
My most favoritest thing in a while?

I was pleased with the result, and explained to MariJo that this was a reflector meant to help her navigate her driveway. But really it was just a fun thing to do. Aren't they all? Now I am rock-poor and the weather has crapped out, but I have high hopes for the weekend. I went to the Bent Creek Sulpture Walk on Saturday to find almost everything down, but I was too ill to fix it in the cold weather. Will try again this weekend.