I soon learned that a dam had been built there on the Crooked River in the 1820s. A few years ago, after falling into disrepair and blocking salmon from reaching Sebago Lake, it was removed. And the locals had feelings about it.

One of Ken’s neighbors told him, “I’ll never forgive you for removing my dam.” Another angrily exclaimed, “That dam has been there forever!”

Two hundred years is hardly eternity. But I get the sentiment.

When I was a kid, I used to love driving by those old decaying wooden ships rotting beside the Wiscasset Bridge. Growing up in Boothbay, that was about the only thing I liked about Wiscasset. And I’m glad they didn’t tear down the Carleton Bridge in Bath when they built the new one. That’s the bridge we took to get to my grandparents. We grow attached to the things that surround us. We develop a personal history with them. Our lifetimes do feel like forever.

When the Edes Falls dam was torn down, the town salvaged the granite. We built the wall from those same granite blocks, their old drill marks and stone-dog notches still visible after two hundred years.

For those who remember the dam, I hope the wall honors their connection to it. But what about those too young or too new to Naples to remember it? For them, this wall, so new and unfamiliar, will someday feel like it’s always been there.

Before we started, the public works crew warned us not to leave tools lying around. Cars come and go. Sometimes they sit in the driveway for hours. Dave and I keep an eye out for the unneutered Cane Corso that occasionally wanders over like we’re spotting for grizzlies.

Across the river are some remnants of an old stone dam and a sandy spot where you can wade in up to your knees. After a particularly long day of work last week, and no time to drive home before meeting friends for dinner, it seemed like a good place for a river shower.

I don’t know how clean I got, but I stood there in the river in just my shorts, scrubbing the dirt and rock dust off with a washcloth, watching it make little cloudy pools in the water before swiftly dispersing. I imagined this was how the first settlers cleaned up while building the first homestead in Naples on this site in 17-something.

My brain pulled me out of the moment, as it often does. I wondered what the scene looked like from the other side of the river. Probably just some guy who’d wandered over from the sketchy house.

The river carried that thought away too.

Even though we can’t see it from where we’re working, the river has a presence.

For a couple hundred years this granite held the river back.

The river won.

If we were south of the Mason-Dixon, I’d think he was being respectful. But we’re not. I think the honorific implies he forgot my first name. That’s ok. I forgot his too.

It’s a little uncomfortable trusting someone you’ve just met with the foundation of your wall.

“Have you been to the site yet?” he asked, a little chewing tobacco pressed between his lower lip and front teeth.

That made me feel a little better. Almost every equipment operator I’ve ever worked with likes a little nicotine. The poor guy probably couldn’t get away with smoking on the job.

“She’s all prepped for you.”

Before he started, I communicated my needs for the base as best I could. Then I left him and his crew to it, taking a leap of faith that we had understood each other, even though we couldn’t remember each other’s names.

When I got back to the site, it was clear we had.

When building with stone it’s wise to use the forces of gravity and friction in your favor. I’ve gone a different route.

I plan to tear this down when I’m finished. If I don’t, nature will do it for me.

And then I’ll build it again. And likely again after that.

And then I’ll wheelbarrow the stones out of our backyard, load them back onto the truck, and haul them away to be part of some future project.

The only traces of the structure will be the lessons I learned building these rough drafts.

I’m used to long drives for work. But today, my commute is about forty feet, on foot. I’m building a stone feature in the backyard. And traffic is brutal.

Just as I was heading out the door to get started, I remembered two emails I had to write, right now. I’d better make another cup of coffee first.And maybe a second breakfast once Eliza's done with the kitchen.

I finally made it through the bottleneck to the back door, where I picked up a four-legged hitchhiker. He said he wanted to work but we ended up played fetch until he settled into the lawn with a chew toy.

I got my hammers out. Before I could take a swing, Vim was on the move again, munching his way across the backyard like a billygoat. A mouthful of grass. A stick. A chunk of woodchip. The little dude is still feral.

I figured I should step in before he got to Eliza’s new plants, so I took him back inside.

And while I’m in here, I’d better make one more coffee.

She appeared from the vestibule, glanced at her clipboard, and called, “Joe.”

I followed her silently into a stale little room furnished only with a padded chair. She swung the folding arm down, locking me in for the world’s most boring rollercoaster.

“Which arm?”

I told her and she pushed up the corresponding sleeve.

Her face changed. A smile appeared. Then she laughed out loud.

“I didn’t know if you were rich or worked outside, but there’s my answer.”

I laughed too.

“I guess rich people don’t have farmer’s tans,” I said.

“Neither do nurses,” she replied.

We kept joking until she had all the blood she needed.

As she walked me back to the lobby, she asked if I had to go to work now.

“Yeah. My boss is an a-hole.”

Eliza’s brother and father helped us design and build the panels with cedar and wire mesh. That’s an understatement; we never would have tackled it without them. In one heroic weekend we assembled the panels, dug countless holes, many of them twice after realizing our initial math was wrong, and installed the posts and panels everywhere except along one stretch bordering a neighbor’s property.

That neighbor planned to put up her own fence soon. It made sense to tie into hers later. In the meantime, we threw together a temporary fence out of chicken wire and metal stakes.

That temporary fence lasted the rest of Sasso’s life.

It was still standing when Vim showed up a few years later. He’s a little more curious about what’s happening on the other side of it, and we’re a little more concerned about keeping him safely contained. When Eliza suggested replacing the old janky thing with something more secure, I realized I’d stopped noticing the fence years ago.

Once my attention returned to it, I couldn’t believe how rough it looked. Bent stakes. Sagging wire. Random reinforcements added over the years.

I build fences for a living, only they’re made of stone. Walls meant to last generations.

One of the most important fences in my life was thrown together as an afterthought, meant to last a month or two.

Instead it held together an entire chapter of our lives.

I set the last stone an hour before the boat home left the island. I took down the batter frames and packed up my tools: shovels and rakes, a cutoff saw, a transit in its big clunky case, a dolly, two long lining bars, insulated tarps that never got used, and a large assortment of hammers and chisels. All of it stuffed into the Subaru along with workboots and raingear, dirty clothes, leftover food, coffee-making contraptions, and seltzers. Lots of seltzers.

Scott, the caretaker, waved goodbye while blowing oak leaves.

I got my parking spot at the ferry terminal and wolfed down a sandwich as the boarding process began. A few hours later I was home again, eating Friday-night-pizza with Eliza and Vim. A whole temporary world that had occupied my mind so completely for weeks suddenly disappeared.

And now it’s on to the next one.

What was I supposed to do? Not wave to that friend of a friend of a friend’s uncle I met once at a birthday party when I was seven?

When I go back to Boothbay now, there aren’t many waves. In Brunswick there are none. But I found a place where that tradition exists.

I know one person on North Haven. But for three weeks, everyone I passed on the short drive between the inn and the jobsite waved at me. And I waved right back.

I didn’t realize until then how much I’d missed that.

Two men and a woman step out of the ticket office in safety yellow jackets and hats. They huddle together and look out at us, lined up in our cars and trucks, waiting to get on the ferry to North Haven. The woman points at me in my one-ton and says, “That’s our twenty-six footer.”

After finishing my first job on the island two years ago, I sat up on the open deck for the ride back to the mainland. The Fox Islands faded slowly behind us. The Camden Hills grew larger ahead. These waters are some of the most beautiful in Maine, and I wasn’t going to be one of those guys sitting in his truck staring at his phone the whole time.

Now that the trip has become more routine, I realize I was too quick to judge.

Today I’m one of those guys. Sitting in my truck on a boat on the ocean. The twenty-six footer. Making my morning commute with a load of rocks.

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.