one
Ivy
Themountainmanhasn'tmoved in two minutes.
He's standing on the hillside looking at the ground and I'm standing twenty feet away watching him not move. Somehow I understand exactly what he's doing. He's trying to find where to start. You can't start until the land tells you where to start.
I drove up from Vancouver yesterday for eight hours with my sketchbooks wedged between my laptop bag and checked into the Silver Lodge at the edge of town. Vernon Cooper handed me a key and told me the Bird memorial site was the hillside above Ridgeline Road, and that the stonemason had likely already been up there. He said it the way people in small towns say things: offering information, not sure if it's welcome.
The morning is cold for early June in the interior. Silver Ridge sits in a valley between the mountains, whose peaks still hold snow and the light comes in sideways and a little blue.
The town below is visible from here: the main street with its wooden building fronts, the steeple of the church, the silver flashof the river through the Douglas firs. Someone's burning wood smoke. I stood at the edge of the road for thirty seconds when I got here and understood immediately why the town wanted the memorial on this hill. The view holds everything they love.
The problem is that a view isn't a memorial. A view is just a view.
He still hasn't moved.
I know who he is from the file the town sent with my consultation contract: Flint Matthewson, Matthewson Stoneworks, winner of the stonework commission for the Jamie Bird memorial. Photo attached was a headshot someone had clearly taken at a community function — he was looking slightly away from the camera with the expression of a man who had agreed to the photo as a concession and was already done with it. Dark hair going gray at the sides. The kind of face that's been outside for decades. Six-foot-something with the build of someone who lifts stone for a living. He’s the sort of bearded hero that makes me curl my toes at night when I’m reading spicy books.
Flint’s in work boots and canvas trousers and a flannel that's been washed so many times the color has gone its own direction, and he's standing about twelve meters from the proposed memorial site marker the town planted with a little orange flag on a wire and his hands are in his pockets and his eyes on the ground in front of his feet.
I walk up the slope. He doesn't register me for another thirty seconds, and when he does, he doesn't startle. His head comes up slowly, like he'd already calculated someone would arrive eventually.
"Ivy Carter," I say, and hold out my hand.
He looks at it, then at me. Then he takes it. His hand is enormous and the shake is brief and specific.
"Flint Matthewson," he says. His voice is low and unhurried. "You're the landscape architect?"
"That's me." I turn to look at the orange flag, then at the slope around it. "You were figuring out where to start?"
"Yes," he says.
"Same problem I have." I pull out my sketchbook. "The town sent me a site plan with the central installation three meters northeast of that flag. Formal approach path from the road. Concrete pavers. A commemorative plinth." I look at the slope again. The grade is uneven here, soft with meadow grass and small wildflowers that have come up through the soil now that the snow is retreating. "They want grand."
"Jamie wasn't grand," Flint says. He says it matter-of-factly, like he's noting the weather. “He was just a regular guy.”
I write that down in the margin of my sketchbook."Tell me about the site. What you've found up here."
So, he does. He’s a stone mason, so he understands these things more than the average client.
We spend the next two hours on the hill. I sketch; he walks. Occasionally he comes to look at what I'm sketching and he doesn't say anything, which is its own form of response — he'd say something if something were wrong, so silence means keep going. I work out the bones of a layout that uses the natural drainage to its advantage: the central installation lower on the slope at the rich soil pocket, the approach path curving along the grade rather than cutting across it, the planting designed to hold the slope rather than ornament it. Living things that will move and change with the seasons. Stone at the heart of it that won't.
"I want to put the path material in question," I say at one point. "The town wants concrete pavers. I want something that reads as part of the hill. Decomposed granite, maybe, or local gravel."
He looks at the proposed path line. "Local stone crush," he says. "I can do that. Same material as whatever we put at the center. The path and the installation come from the same place. Same hillside."
I stop sketching. "You'd source it from the same quarry?"
"Same vein, ideally." He's looking at the sketch now, not the hill. "There's a granite with a gray-green in it that comes from the east face of the quarry. It's the stone this valley grew from. Put it back in the ground up here and it makes sense that way."
The way he speaks in short bursts makes me want to hear him say more things. That's new. I've been on consultation sites with contractors who talk too much. This one talks exactly enough.
"What's your timeline from the town?" I ask.
"They want it ready for the first anniversary of the fire. October."
Four months. It's manageable if the design doesn't fight itself. "I'll need time to develop the full planting plan. I'll work around whatever the stone tells us." I look at the orange flag. "And that flag needs to move. The installation goes here." I tap the rich soil pocket with my boot.
