I’ve built walls of different sorts over the years. Walls of different shapes and sizes. Some were more successful than others. A successful wall serves its purpose and lasts a long time. Most of the walls I’ve built are intended to hold back Dirt. Usually, the wall is embedded into the side of a hill to keep the hill from eroding or deteriorating onto the surface below. By definition, a hill is Dirt that is flowing on a downward slope. Even though it moves very slowly, the weight of Dirt on a hill is in motion over time. To be successful, the wall has to stand up to the combined forces of gravity, water and time. These are some of the most powerful forces in the universe. When I look at a wall, I see the invisible hand of the earth pushing on it from behind. So when you build a wall, be aware of the long slow push of Dirt and design your wall to counteract it. The first major wall I had a hand in building was a railroad tie wall. I was college kid at the time and had a summer job working on the township road crew. They had the summer help kids stand in the back of the truck while the regular guys rode inside.

Riding in the back of the truck was one of those rites of passage that the older road crew guys imposed on the summer college guys. While they were riding inside with the heater on and sipping on a cup of hot coffee, we were outside freezing our asses off, getting rained on or swallowing bugs. In addition, there was usually some oil, tar and asphalt back there. Sometimes there might a little raw sewage, left over from a manhole clean-up done the day before. On a frosty morning in April or May, the cold air could cut right through you. It would burn your eyes and freeze your face.  We’d climb down out the truck looking like zombies with our eyes and noses dripping and our faces gone numb. We had tar on our clothes, sewage on our shoes and our hair was blown in the wind. In addition to being hung over, we were flash frozen. There was no end to the delight the older guys took in torturing us this way. It was all in good fun of course.

But there were also advantages to Riding Outback, as we called it. Sometimes we’d pass a joint early in the morning on the way to a job site and the guys riding inside never knew. It took the sting out the early morning cold and let the insults from the older guys roll off our backs a little easier. Also, if you were Riding Outback, you didn’t have to sit in between Butts and Chuckie listening to them talk about having an extra pork chop for dinner like it was a gift from heaven. The sheer repetition of details from their humdrum routines, day in and day out, was enough to depress you. Occasionally Butts would fart on command (which is how he got the nickname Butts) and Chuckie would analyze the aroma trying to guess what Butts had for breakfast. Of course, Chuckie always guessed the same thing – eggs, toast and bacon – and Butts always had eggs, toast and ham. Somehow each time they had that conversation they found it new, exciting and hilarious, as though they’d never had it before. Jamais vu. (It’s the opposite of déjà vu!)

Unfortunately, the summer help guy was usually trapped between them and could not get to the window to clear the air. To a college-aged kid, these guys were leading the life none of us wanted to envision. So Riding Outback was the preferred mode of transport for us. One particular morning one of the summer kids, Kenny, hopped up on the part of the truck bed that extended over and above the cab. Kenny was acting like a monkey, jumping up and down as the truck headed down Grace Street. He would actually leap into the air and be flying above the truck until landing back on the cab. Lots of physics involved, not much brains. More on that later.

In the hierarchy of the local government, the Borough Manager was three rungs from the top. First was the Mayor - a Polish monolith named Joe Podgorny. Next was the Solicitor -the ever sharp attorney, John Buonfigli. And then came the Manager - Wilson Clinkinbeard. Clinkinbeard was a fussy, quirky man. He would have made a good old lady. But he was one of the finest borough managers in the region. He kept track of money, kept up with legal mandates and knew how to listen to the municipal lawyer and the senior citizens.  Clinkinbeard smoked a pipe, wore a bowtie and fidgeted with his glasses incessantly.  When things were running smoothly, he was all smiles and jokes, but when things went wrong, he got nervous. If you saw Wilson Clinkinbeard’s pipe puffing like a smoke stack, it was a sign that things were not going well. He lived an unassuming life in an unassuming house on Grace St. A man of detailed habits, he woke at 5:00 AM sharp, boiled water for tea and poured his first cup at 5:11 AM exactly. Everyday.  At precisely 6:30 AM, Clinkinbeard stepped into the bathroom to shower, shave and get ready for the day. He enjoyed seeing the sunrise out of his bathroom window; pausing a minute to admire the pinks and blues and whites of clouds on high lit by the first rays of the sun.  He associated shaving with the start of a new day. You get a new start every day.

One morning in May, as Clinkinbeard set to scraping the shaving cream from his chin, he turned to look out at the sunrise. Imagine his surprise when he saw Kenny Kowalski at eye level, airborne above the truck, literally flying down Grace St. He nearly swallowed his Barbasol. When word got back to our foreman Chester, he swore at us in Polish and then laid down the law. For the rest of the summer, all of the summer guys had to sit down in the back of the trucks. It was miserable. That summer also included my introduction to wall building. One morning we were sent out to build a retaining wall underneath a small bridge. The bridge itself was in good shape, but over the years, the stream had eroded the supporting earth on one side. A wall was needed to stop further erosion. Our job was to build a railroad tie retaining wall under the bridge. We used the old type of railroad ties, the ones full of creosote, not weather treated ties you see today. The old ties were very durable and resistant to bugs and water.

This wall required pouring a concrete footer into the creek. To do it, we drove posts into the creek bed and then attached boards forming a box. The walls of the box deflected the water, leaving it almost dry inside. It worked pretty well. A small amount of water leaked in but when we poured the concrete footer, the weight of the cement pushed all of the water out. After a few days the footer cured and dried, leaving us a solid base for the tie wall. It never occurred to me that you could pour a concrete footer in a creek. But when I saw it done it was simple and obvious. The bottom row of the tie wall rested on the footer above water level. The secret sauce in any wall is the base. If the base is solid and level, everything above will be solid and level.

The wall was built in a U shape with the front resting on top of the footer. The front face was 12 feet long so 1 ½ ties were needed. The side walls were 4 feet long, therefore requiring only ½ tie. It was a long and skinny U, I guess.  This is also where I first learned how to add tie-ins to a wall to make it stable. To cover the full 12 feet on the front side, each row had a ½ tie (4 feet) and a whole tie (8 feet). Where they met, another tie was placed between them perpendicularly, creating a T-shaped design. These tie-ins kept the front face from being pushed forward by the weight behind the wall.  The side walls achieve the same purpose, but do so at the end of the row. The half and whole ties were alternated from one row to the next as follows: first row = half tie, tie in, whole tie. Row two = whole tie, tie-in, half tie. In this fashion the tie-ins were not stacked up vertically creating a seam. Vertical seams in walls are potential points of failure. The ties were all spiked together with big steel railroad spikes. Inside the wall was back-filled with stone and gravel.

The railroad tie wall was easy to build and cheap. A single tie covers 8 linear feet. The disadvantage is that after 20 to 30 years the ties have rotted and the wall needs to be replaced. I built railroad tie walls for a number of years, but over time they all decayed. Now I try to build out of stone whenever possible.