Forbidden sleep is the best.

Then I heard a tap, tap, tap and slowly realized it was coming from my window. A wild-eyed man with red hair was peering in at me.

“Sorry to wake ya. Those are some nice rocks.”

I’ve fallen asleep on planes while idling on the runway before takeoff. Trains and buses have the same effect. Now I can add ferries to the list. It’s about an hour and ten minutes to cross from Rockland to North Haven, and I can’t read or write or even look at my phone without getting nauseous. A nap feels almost inevitable.

I rolled down the window. My new friend said he’d laid a few stones in his day and thought the rocks in the back of my truck would stack up into a nice wall.

I hope he’s right.

You fall for an April Fools gag. They are not, in fact, building a gondola to whisk people up Mt. Battie.

You’re finally done with the wall that took all winter. Time to pick up the leftovers.

You load every last stone onto the truck and realize too late you’ve overdone it. Spring is mud season. You’re halfway up your hubcaps in it.

Two hours later, with the help of the excavator and a tow strap, the truck is free from the mire. The lawn you were cleaning is more than a little worse for the wear.

It was warm enough to handle all those stones without gloves today. The button on your laptop that recognized your fingerprint doesn’t recognize you any more.

“No,” I said, showing a little more annoyance than I intended. “It’s up to me.”

They mocked me for sounding high and mighty, as good friends should. But they know me well enough to know I didn’t mean it like that. They’re right. It would be easier to ask the client whether we should exaggerate the serpentine curve of the path or move people more directly through the garden.

But that’s my call. That’s why they hired me.

It might work. It might not.

It’s a privilege to be on the hook like that.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those rocks lying there. They simply weren’t chosen.

I almost feel guilty leaving them out of the wall. With all the selecting and rejecting, the rejoicing when they fit and cursing when they don’t, you start to know them individually. If I pile these leftovers up and use them in a wall ten years from now, I’ll remember some of them. Oh yeah, I almost used that one in Manchester, on that tricky part on the north side, about halfway up the wall.

I’m not going to go home and weep for the leftovers. We all want to be chosen. They got left behind.

We started with a fairly small stone but at the last minute I decided to trim eighteen inches off the bottom. I was afraid it would overwhelm the wall beside it. As we fixed the straps to set it in place, some doubt crept in. Had we gone too far? But as we lowered it onto the steel pin drilled into the ledge and the stone locked in place with a thud, it looked just right.

When a site calls for scale, there’s something satisfying about moving and setting large stones. It’s intoxicating, which makes it easy to believe bigger is always better. Not every piece needs to announce itself. This stone isn’t the star of the show. It guides visitors into the space without competing for attention.

It’s just enough.

And then my phone rang.

“Potential Spam.”

A small interruption, the price of keeping my phone on me when I work alone. Instead of slipping the phone directly back into my pocket, I made the mistake of checking my texts and emails. I responded to two, neither of which were urgent, then got back to work. But something had changed.

The first stone I grabbed didn’t fit. Neither did the second. They were no longer marching themselves into the wall. Instead of picking them up on instinct, I was analyzing every stone in the pile, searching for the perfect fit. I’d tightened up. The work went on, but the spell was broken.

There’s nothing special about them. Just four average stones, set together well. They’ll go unnoticed when the wall is complete. While a finished wall is seen as a whole and not its individual pieces, it doesn’t usually feel that way while you’re building it. By the time you find a stone, move it into place with your body, and assess how it lives with its current and potential neighbors, it can feel like the most important rock in the world. It’s easy to get so hyperfocused you’re unable to see the wall for the stones.

But right now, these four stones feel important. At least to me.

I’m driving home with that satisfying kind of tired that comes from forward progress. After weeks of delays, the wall is moving again. So am I.

I started the prep work before the first frost. I’ve had months to think about the composition of antique granite slabs and round, weathered fieldstone. I’ve been itching to start building. And, if I’m honest, itching to make it feel like mine. I wanted to put part of myself into that wall. What would that be like with someone else working on it?

I pushed those feelings aside as we worked together for the first time on my wall. Unsurprisingly, Dave did beautiful work. My grasping for control eased up a little.

The next day, just before lunch, I picked up a rock and felt that unpleasantly familiar pop in my lower back. I knew right away what it meant. My day was done. Probably the rest of the week, too.

What happens to the wall now?

That night Dave sent photos of the section he’d taken over. It wasn’t exactly how I’d been picturing it, it was even better.

That’s all it took to break the spell.

My wall became ours.

I felt a little ball of anxiety in my stomach. This would mean taking apart some of the work we’d already struggled to do in the cold and snow. This would mean thawing frozen ground and redigging footings by hand to avoid a sewer line. This would mean sourcing and transporting more material, and moving it all up an icy hill. I tried to ignore all that and listen to his idea. I tried to picture the change in my head, and visualize how it would interact with the work we’d already done and the work still to come.

It was a good idea. It was the right call.

This interaction could have gone wrong in so many ways. I could have responded with a “how dare he question me” attitude. Afraid to offend “the artist,” he might have stayed silent and regretted it every time he walked past the wall for the next twenty years. I could have dismissed his suggestion out of pride or resisted it out of laziness. I could have agreed to the change but resented it because it wasn’t my idea. I could have hated the idea but gone along with it anyway, afraid to stand my ground, letting my vision for the project get diluted. He could have micromanaged the implementation, eroding the trust between us.

But instead, we moved forward with the idea that best served the project.

Two things from that trip still stand out clearly in my memory. The first: the audible gasps of awe I made walking alone amongst the redwoods.

The second: some sage advice from a master stonemason during the one day I managed to keep my butt planted at the conference I’d paid for and flew all the way across the country to attend.

Richard Rhodes has done some impressive things with stone. Among them, he apprenticed with an ancient stonemasons’ guild in Italy, salvaged a stone village in China before it was flooded for dam construction, and ran multiple successful stone businesses. It was a real privilege to listen to him talk about the craft. I think about his advice on pricing every time I’m about to hit send on an estimate.

That advice sounds simple. Don’t assume you know other people’s financial situation. Or, said another way, don’t let your relationship with money dictate the price of the job.

This is easier said than done. When you’re putting an estimate together, the numbers can get big pretty quickly. It’s easy to think, Wow, this is a lot of money. Is that too much? Maybe I should shave it down a little. Our hangups about money can lead us to doubt the value of our work. But, what feels like a lot of money to you may be exactly how much your client wants to invest in quality stonework. There’s no way to know until you hit send. The best thing to do, according to Richard that day, is to charge what the work actually costs and not what you think is too high or too low.

When I write it out here it doesn’t sound like earth shattering wisdom. But its timing and its source really hit home for me. It made the conference, even one day of it, worthwhile. The redwoods were ok, too.

Read more about the 3Ps (of which Pricing is one) here.

I’m carrying some guilt alongside my appetite as I look for a parking spot. How is it 9:30 already? How am I not at work yet? How did I convince myself to stop for breakfast? That guilt is amplified as I pass some electricians trying to wire new exterior lights on this bitter morning. They’re working. Shouldn’t I be?

I planned on getting breakfast to go, but when I see the scale of the “sandwich” through the clear takeout box, it’s obvious I’d better sit down. This is knife-and-fork food, not something you eat one-handed while steering. Definitely not with a newly acquired pit bull riding shotgun.

I sit at the counter in front of a large mirror and watch myself eat. Maybe it’s better Eliza and I sit side by side for dinner each night, sparing her this view. Beyond my reflection, I can see the electricians outside, their faces red from the cold.

I recognize one of them. It’s Lucas. Not someone I know well, but well enough to intensify the guilt I feel about sitting inside eating a hearty meal this late in the morning.

I stayed up the night before and watched the Patriots play and win their first playoff game in years. I don’t feel guilty about that. This morning I sat on the couch for an extra cup of coffee with Vim, that hungry mutt now waiting in the car. I don’t feel guilty about that. It snowed last night. One of my winter duties is shoveling out Brenda, our neighbor across the street. I don’t feel guilty about that.

I ate faster than normal. The fried chicken was surprisingly good at that hour. And I felt strange knowing Lucas was, unbeknownst to him, a witness to a less-than-best version of myself.

With one last dip of the biscuit in the gravy, it was time to go to work.

Last night’s dusting of snow hid the ice that had turned the steep driveway into a luge track. Somehow, Eliza pulled the car out of a slide toward a drainage ditch and got us back up the hill in reverse. We parked on the side of the road and walked in, trying to find the crunchy snow along the edges.

We navigated around the first wall and its surrounding satellites of rock piles, all covered with tarps to keep out the snow and ice. As we walked across the yard towards the next wall the flower farm came into view, hibernating beneath eighteen inches of snow.

“It’s so cold here,” she said.

“You get used to it.”

We uncovered part of the next wall so she could see some of what I’ve been building. I didn’t have gloves on and my hands turned red removing the anchor rocks from the tarps.

“The rocks are bigger than they look in the photos,” she said. “This is a big project.”

I don’t need her to think I’m tough or to be impressed by the scale of the project. But having her walk through the snow, shiver in the cold, feel the size of the stones and see what I have to do with them, turned into a nice little moment of connection. How often do the people closest to us actually experience what our days are like?

We made it back to the car without slipping on the ice and turned on the heated seats. We drove home and made pancakes.

Its shape allows its mass to run lengthwise into the structure. Textbook for building a strong wall. It’s just at the limit of what I can pick up safely and carry across the compacted snow and scattered stone chips without slipping or twisting something. I know this because I’ve tried to use this stone about a dozen times.

To borrow a phrase from Kevin Gardner in The Granite Kiss, this rock is a Cheap Seducer. A stone that seems perfect but never quite works. Never quite fits. Still, you keep coming back to it again and again, thinking this time it will be different.

It never is.

In the same book, Gardner offers more sage advice: look for a rock for the spot, not a spot for the rock.

Maybe there will be a spot in the wall that needs that stone. Maybe there won’t. Maybe it will end up buried deep in the back of the wall, never to be seen. Is that such a poor fate?

But there is one underappreciated efficiency boost: it’s too cold to talk.

Our jaws aren’t frozen. Dave and I are physically able to speak. We’re working on separate walls on opposite sides of the house. For us to talk, one of us would have to make the roundabout trek through the snow-shoveled path. Then we’d both have to stand there with toes and fingers going numb and no work getting done while we chat.

So we don’t. We keep working to stay warm. And to get the work done, but the cold is a nice bonus motivation.

We talk for a few minutes in the morning. Again before lunch, when we retreat to the warmth of our own trucks. And for a minute or two at the end of the day. That’s it.

I’ve seen more of the wall Dave is building from the pictures he posts on Instagram than I’ve seen in person. By the time I finish my section of wall and walk around to his, everything’s covered with frost blankets for the night.

I don’t know Dave very well. Actually, I hardly know him at all. And I haven’t gotten to know him any better on this project. But I know he does good work. And I know I don’t need to look over his shoulder. It’s one of the best parts about working with other wallers.

I can’t wait to see how the finished wall looks on his feed.

The man behind me had fallen asleep. He woke to water breaching the passenger cabin door, coming in up to the tops of our shoes. Startled, he yelled, “I can’t swim!”

All this, I thought, for a ten-minute meeting about prepping the base of a stone wall?

Twenty-something years ago, I was the one dozing off, this time on a plane. In that drowsy state between being fully asleep and fully awake, my mind created a beautiful little fantasy. I daydreamed that someone had hired me to fly across the country to build something amazing with stone. They hadn’t. I don’t remember where I was going or what for, but it wasn’t for that. But I remember the fantasy about traveling the world to build cool things with stone, complete with first class flights, fancy hotels, beautiful scenery, the prestige of being chosen. I suppose that was my idea of making it. Of being successful.

I’ve had opportunities to travel, but they’ve been…different.

Last night, after my nephew’s basketball game, I stayed in a hotel across from the ferry terminal in Rockland. After a quick walk through town to see the Christmas lights, I ate a prepackaged salad from Hannaford in my room with a beer from the kiosk behind the hotel’s front desk, and scrolled on my phone for forty-five minutes before falling asleep.

This morning, after the rough crossing of Penobscot Bay and the ten-minute meeting, I drank coffee at the North Haven Community Center, waiting a little nervously to take the ferry back to the mainland. Jingle Bell Rock was playing on the radio while a woman was making gingerbread houses. The graham crackers were giving her trouble and she took out her frustrations on the door the wind kept blowing open.

On the ferry ride back, the cabin was full of middle schoolers returning from a basketball game on island in the middle of the day, planned around the ferry schedule. Local artist Eric Hopkins stood at the front of the cabin as the boat left the dock, eating soup. Then he sat down and pulled his black cat from a travel bag to show the kids.

I chuckle now thinking about that fantasy on the plane. It was so vague and childish. It was all external validation and ego. The reality is so much better.

The design is complete. The estimate has been accepted. The material has been selected. Right now, riding the ferry across a rollicking Penobscot Bay back to the mainland, I’m imagining how those ancient stones will come together to form a beautiful wall.

At this moment, everything feels full of potential. Like waking up on Christmas morning to a world of freshly fallen stone.

I know better than to think this feeling will last.

Six weeks from now things will feel different. I’ll be tired of this commute. The stones may not fit together as magically as I’d hoped. The quaint community center where they sell coffee and donuts via the honor system may lose some of its charm. I’ll wish I was at home with our new puppy rather than out in the cold banging on rocks.

And that’s okay. It’s the natural progression of a project. The beginning, middle, and end all feel different. If your spirits aren’t as high three-quarters of the way through as they were on day one, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong. That’s the nature of any undertaking.

A few days before, Kate, a former competitive orienteer, had gone out and placed ten little flags in the woods and marked their locations on a map. Now, with Susan roasting a turkey back at the house, Eliza and I had to make our way from flag to flag. Many of the flags were close to the trail. We could have found most of them just by working out their location on the trail map. But for each one, we practiced the skills Kate was teaching us.

Keeping track of distance by counting our paces. Aligning our compasses, our maps and our bodies to North at each decision point. Reading the landscape for features that appear on the map. Finding guardrails to follow: trails, bodies of water, ridges. Features we could follow easily without constantly checking our compass.

Toward the end of Kate’s course, one flag presented the opportunity to leave the safety of the trail and bushwhack. I thought it would be easy. Just go around a little hill, course correct, and walk a couple hundred meters through the woods to a clearing where the flag would be waiting.

Almost immediately after leaving the trail, I felt lost. There was a flat, open area that was easy to traverse, and that ease of travel kept pulling me in the wrong direction without me realizing it.

It’s a trap I used to fall into all the time with my work: saying yes to the wrong projects. Projects that seemed easy. Projects that felt like they were taking me in the right direction. Projects that were taking me further and further from where I wanted to go.

Out there in the woods, we used a map and compass to get back on track. In my work, I had to create my own. The 3Ps, a framework I use to help me find the next waypoint.

We made it home with time to spare before the turkey came out of the oven.

At one point along the way, there was an informational sign about an artist from the late 1800s. I’m guessing he used to paint there. To be honest, I skimmed the details. I didn’t even catch his name. My first reaction was judgmental. Why would someone paint here, of all places? I mean, it was nice, but nothing dramatic. It wasn’t the kind of scene that stops you in your tracks. Nobody was stopping to take selfies.

But then I noticed the flowing river, the rocks, the sycamores and oaks with sunlight filtering through the branches. It was quiet. Peaceful. Lovely, even.

Why did I think he should have been somewhere else, painting something bigger, bolder, more awe-inspiring? What made me think a more impressive landscape would have made him a more impressive artist?

I’d fallen into a familiar trap.

I suspect many of us often feel like we should be somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. That something better is always waiting around the next bend in the river.

Not this moment, but the next one. Not here, but there. Not this project, but the one after it.

That artist painted what was in front of him. Can we learn to do the same?

This is one of the ways Steven Pressfield would say Resistance rears its ugly head. There’s something in me that will search for any excuse not to do the work, unless the work is slothing on a couch watching Star Wars for the four hundred and thirty-second time.

That part of me goes into overdrive whenever the work involves trying something uncomfortable.

Working on an estimate for a walkway I’ve built a thousand times? No problem. Working on a proposal for a project that I’m particularly excited about? Let’s pull out all the stops in putting that off as long as humanly possible.

Most of the time I’m aware of it and keep going anyway. But sometimes that Resistance wins.

It almost won this morning. I didn’t feel like writing because the conditions weren’t to my liking. Instead of admitting defeat and taking a scroll through Instagram, I tried an experiment. What if I wrote with headphones on and classical music playing? What would happen?

Well, Bach helped me get this piece together. Perfect? No, it was never going to be. But it’s done.