New England's rocky heart and soul

TAKING A walk in the Gloucester woods, I find a beautiful young woman kneeling on the autumn-carpeted ground, trying to pick the reddest of the fallen maple leaves. Her movements are precise and repetitive. She aligns each new leaf, stem to stem, with the bunch in her left hand, then stops to sweep her hair, which doesn't really seem to be obscuring her vision, back from her forehead. Leaf, sweep, leaf, sweep, a growing packet of bright red in her hand. Hypnotized, I watch for a moment. Then, a little embarrassed, I turn back to my own concern.

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I have come out to look, not for leaves, but for rocks. Not that they are hard to find -- there is granite everywhere on Cape Ann, an embarrassment of stone. As any local gardener will attest during glum moments, there is more stone than dirt. Of course, that is literally true anyplace, if you dig deep enough, but New England wears its rocky heart on its sleeve, and here the granite ledges burst through the earth. The boulders are scattered everywhere; the rocks roll between the tree roots and glisten in the streams.

It might seem that nothing could be so self-contained and irrelevant to human concern as a heap of boulders. But this is New England, and these stones have been dragged into, and inscribed with, human activity for centuries. The initial harvest of Cape Ann's waters was fish, but the first, persistent harvest of the land has been granite.

It was New Englanders, perhaps despairing of any more ordinary crop, who devised the processes to work and shape granite and free it from the earth. When the granite blocks for King's Chapel in 18th-century Boston were hewn, the workers built fires on boulders to heat them before dropping iron balls on the stone to crack it open.

There had to be a better way, and eventually there was. With drill and hammer, chisel and wedge, Quincy and Cape Ann quarrymen learned how even giant ledges could be grooved and split into even, useful shapes.

Less than 50 yards from where that lovely woman is hunting for leaves and I'm searching out boulders, 19th-century schooners used to slide into Lobster Cove, off the Annisquam River, to load on blocks of granite for the cities of America. Paving stones for Manhattan, foundations for San Francisco, archways for suburban mansions in St. Louis, even a breakwater for Havana: they all flowed out from Cape Ann quarries.

What was left behind was not quite so grand. When I lived in rural Kenya, near some of the world's finest coffee trees, you couldn't find a decent cup to drink. All the best beans were saved for export. Similarly, granite architecture is oddly scarce on Cape Ann, though the artist Fitz Hugh Lane's historic house, tending watch over Gloucester harbor, is a noble exception.   Continued...