The Avant Garden

hopefully to stack a rock or two and meet some nice people. I will take some photos, no doubt. Here is a photo (this past Saturday, 0624) of The Original Bent Serpent (or TOBS as we call him around the rock pile). I like this one because it looks like one of those Loch Ness Monster photos in which I was taking a picture of something else and the Monster appeared in the background:

TOBS is over a year old now ...

 TOBS has really changed since the day he was born:

For one thing, he has put on some weight ....

High water came and took down almost all of the Where Rocks Come From display, so when I get back I will have a clean slate. Anyway, we're heading west tomorrow. We'll be back around July 11. In the meantime, stack 'em high, stack 'em well and most importantly, stack 'em safely.

To the best of our knowledge, this is The Avant Gardener putting the finishing touches on the 13th rendition of Rob's Arch:

Actually, we are quite sure about the Avant Gardener bit, but the number 13 is just an informed guess.

It had to be rebuilt, and this eyewitness account of its demise comes from Rob himself:

"A couple of teen boys were rafting the river &
one knocked over the arch with a piece of driftwood.
I saw the bugger do it and yelled "Did you really mean to do that?"
He said yes, he was sorry, he did not know there was a house here.
At least he said "sorry" ...
I shoulda got my BB gun & popped a hole in the raft.
Then again, I understand the temptation to listen to the rocks fall.
Well, this is now bad karma for them.
They will reincarnate as dung beetles."

That's pretty poetic for a man of Science, aye?  I heard bongo drums and jazz while reading that.

Somehow I got locked out of this damned thing, but now I have Firefox, which I highly recommend. I have mostly been busy on the Meditation Garden lately, and have been doing more flat earth stuff than avant gardening. Which reminds me -- this is a new entry for the Lexicon: 

Gardening -- using natural and other objects to make something attractive to the eye

Avant gardening -- using natural and other objects to make something interesting to the eye.

This is the most grandiose stack I have done in a while:

While Rob and I were standing there looking at it, a small rock fell out of the second arch from the left, but the arch put itself back together without falling. We've seen that happen twice now, as if the arch knows better than me how many and which rocks are supposed to be included in its formation and rejects the ones that are unnecessary. I keep telling folks that rocks are smarter than we think, but no one listens to me.
 

the weather has been too nice to blog, and the River like tumbling bathwater. Indoors has been a tough place to visit.

I have not yet used the River as a force in balancing rocks, but this rock had three points of contact on another and fell upstream:
River-dependent balance, I call it ...

I think that's way-cool.

The past two Sundays have found me in Bent Creek. This past week I did this:
I love this guy. Hope someone else saw him before he fell...

This is
Not spectacular, but unique ... something I did at Rob's a few weeks ago that is still standing:

This is something I did at Rob's a few weeks ago that is no longer standing:
Interesting rocks make for interesting balances ...

It's so cool I was thinking it was close to Bill Dan quality, but probably not.

I have a bunch more photos, though mostly I have worked on the Where Rocks Come From thing, of which I am quite proud. I also built a set of five stairs into the River in a place where we used to scramble in the mud. My backache finally went away.