Free Stories in Stone by David B. Williams Page B

during the Great Depression. World
     War II sealed the industry’s fate, and in 1942 the Granite Railway Company folded. The final large quarry, Swingle’s, limped
     along until 1963.
    With the industry shut down, the Granite Railway Quarry and other nearby quarries filled with water. They became notorious
     as unwatched places for dumping cars, trash, and the occasional dead mobster. At least thirteen people died swimming, diving,
     and climbing in them. In the late 1990s, the police officially declared the Granite Railway Quarry a crime scene while divers
     searched for a young woman who they suspected had been murdered and dumped in the deep water. Instead, they located an Irish
     teenager, who had been missing for three years. Divers thought they saw another body but never found it despite draining the
     quarry. With the quarries finally dry, the land owners, the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), decided to fill the hole
     and prevent water from seeping back in.
    Coincidentally, workers in Boston were digging an even larger hole and needed to dispose of their dirt. The MDC gladly accepted
     five hundred thousand cubic yards of clay and lightly contaminated soil from the Big Dig, as well as seven hundred thousand
     dollars in tipping fees. An additional 12 million tons of Big Dig dirt were used to fill in other quarries around Quincy and
     to make a twenty-seven-hole golf course, four Little League fields, two soccer fields, and luxury homes, complete with granite
     countertops. By 2002 the Granite Railway Quarry was safe, grass was growing, and 174 years of history were buried.

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    POETRY IN STONE—
CARMEL GRANITE
    Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
    granite sea fang it is easy to praise
    Life and water and the shining stones.
    —Robinson Jeffers, “Meditation on Saviors”
    A CENTURY LATER, at the opposite end of the continent from Bunker Hill Monument, another transformation occurred because of
     granite. This time,however, the stone affected just one man—the poet Robinson Jeffers. The granite so infused his life that
     it helped transform him from an insecure, mediocre writer to one of the great American poets of the twentieth century.
    Jeffers used granite to build his private residence and a forty-foot-high tower. He called the structures Tor House and Hawk
     Tower and referred to the granite as “sea-orphaned stone.” 1 The rock came from the beach below his house, which stands on a low hill that rises from the Pacific Ocean in Carmel,California.
     Jeffers placed each granite boulder by hand, generally in the afternoon after he had spent the morning working on his poetry.
    In describing the changes in him, Jeffers’s wife, Una, wrote, “As he helped the masons shift and place the wind- and wave-worn
     granite I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths in himself unknown before. Thus at the age
     of thirty-one there came to him a kind of awakening such as adolescents and religious converts are said to experience.” 2
    I first saw Tor House and Hawk Tower in 2002 from the road that runs along the water below them. Light green grasses, gray
     green shrubs and a few light gray boulders covered the slope leading from the road up to the stone buildings, behind which
     stood a row of wind-shaped Monterey cypresses. The house was squat with a narrow line of windows just below a small triangle
     of brown roof. The tower was square, about half the width of the house, and topped by a square turret with two eyelike windows
     opening out to the ocean. The structures didn’t appear to have been built so much as to have emerged geologically from the
     hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.

    Hawk Tower, built in 1920–1925 by Robinson Jeffers, Carmel, California.
    Up close, the buildings sustained my first impressions of geology manifest as home. No two stones were alike and rarely did
     stones of