It is a Saturday morning in June and I am at the Bushy Hill Nature Center in eastern Connecticut. I am here because my 28-year-old brother asked me to help. The parking lot is filling up. Others have come, because Erik Becker asked us to. It is Bushy Hills’ 25th anniversary and Erik has an idea to commemorate the occasion. On a small rise to the south of a cedar swamp we will create a megalithic monument. The phrase that keeps coming up is “like Stonehenge, only smaller.”
To spend a day with Erik ’00 is exhausting. He approaches everything with the energy of a four-year-old and the drive of a renaissance genius. He works as director of Bushy Hill, a position he has held for three years. In addition, he coaches a freshman football team in the fall and a middle-school lacrosse team in the spring; he runs an after-school nature club at a local high school; and leads peer mediation training groups for teenagers two nights a week.
Erik ascribes his bottomless energy to the fact that he eats only raw foods. Organic kale makes up most of his diet, but he eats any uncooked vegetable or fruit he can get his hands on, and plenty of it. His appetite, like his energy, appears bottomless. He calls his diet the “gatherer diet” as in “hunter and gatherer,” but Erik has not eaten meat in a decade.
The concept behind the megalithic creation began a few years back. Since Erik was a boy, he was always in the woods turning over stumps and climbing trees. In his teens he started learning primitive living skills. At 15 he could make fire without matches. By 18 he began making wooden bows and primitive stone points. By age 20 he could do both without any manmade tools. At UMass Amherst, he designed his own degree, mixing coursework in psychology and education with the study of ecology and archeology. After college he became increasingly interested in primitive engineering feats. He saw it as a natural culmination of the stone tools he made. Megaliths were the next step.
Several summers ago we sat together on a stone patio. Erik had a bucket of sand and water and he was slowly grinding a piece of basalt into the shape of an axe head. He’d scoop out wet sand and slap it on a flat rock in front of him and grind the head against the grit. He moved methodically. The muscles and veins stood out on his forearms, and he sweated. We were silent for a long time, listening to the steady circular rasp of stone on stone.
“Do you know the difference between the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages?” he asked. I did not. “Well, at one point primitive man figured out that he did not need to break stones to make them sharp. At one point they would chip flint and other rocks like that into the shape of an arrowhead or a knife. But one day some cave man figured out that you could take a little sand and water like this and grind a stone to be sharp.”
He scooped more sand and looked again at the rock. “And with this he could sharpen much more durable stones. That’s the difference. That’s the difference between the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Just an idea some guy had. In books it’s called ‘ground-stone technology.’ That discovery marked the change between two major ages in our history.” Again, we are silent for a time. I look off into the textured hills. He nods at the work in front of him, “You know the phrase ‘cutting edge technology’?”
The day of the megalithic raising is rainy and cool. Erik learned of the weather the night before, but it didn’t faze him. In the parking lot that morning, I wonder if people will show. It is 9:30 a.m. when I start down the trail toward the cedar swamp. I can hear voices after a few hundred yards and Erik calls out a greeting from afar as I crest the hill toward the site. Standing in a clearing perhaps 45 feet across are about 10 people. When finished, eight stones will stand in the earth, each marking a compass direction along the edge of the clearing. It will be like Stonehenge, only smaller. The stones have been chosen, more or less, and they are strewn about the hillside, with the farthest ones about 25 yards from their destination. The north stone went up a few months back, when Erik was still testing the plausibility of his idea. Each of the other seven granite stones weighs between 700 and 1,300 pounds—erratic glacial leftovers now lichen-spotted and supine.
The entire site was cleared primitively, a fact Erik is eager to share or explain. When he chose this particular hill, the now-cleared land hosted three black oaks and numerous wispy red maples. The task of clearing the land began in earnest in late winter. Fires were lit around the bases of the oaks. The sapwood charred while Erik, or I, or another volunteer chopped at the char with a stone axe. The labor-intensive process was constantly set back by broken axe handles, chipped stone blades, or lack of manpower. But the trees came down, and their trunks were burned into six-foot rollers to help move the stones. Smaller pieces became pry-bars and digging sticks. Two graceful white oaks remain on the periphery and offer a vaulted canopy above the circular clearing.
When I arrive, the northwest stone is ready to be stood up. A few high school kids have roughed out the hole with digging sticks and piled a mound of dirt for backfill. Erik says that the giant stone men of Easter Island were “walked” into place. “This means that they stood ‘em up,” he pantomimes, “and rocked them back and forth, inching them forward to their holes.” Seems easy, I figure. Erik decides which end is down and which side should face in, but it takes five of us even to budge the stone. Up it comes, though, through our grunting and sweating, to stand erect. And stubbornly it begins to “walk,” with Erik calling out instructions and doing the lion’s share of the pulling and pushing. After 10 minutes the northwest stone is in, backfilled and tamped in place. It had to move only eight feet. I become aware that I will spend the day in awe of the incomprehensible weight of stone.
The Bushy Hill Nature Center is a field school and summer camp run on the property of the Incarnation Center—part of the Episcopal Church of New York City. The property housed America’s first summer camp in 1886 and is now a 700-acre green oasis in suburban Eastern Connecticut. Erik lives here all year, leading programs for school groups in the off-season. This is his home, and he loves this land with unbounded passion. To see my brother this day, white shirt soaked through and muddy, strong chin, and broad shoulders, he seems relentlessly heroic.
The number of workers swells as the day draws on, 30 people, 50, 70. There are trappers, soccer moms with brownies, football players from the local high school, well-to-do businessmen, college professors, and college students. There are summer campers and their parents, athletes Erik coaches, students, college friends, and coworkers. They are all here for his idea, and Erik circulates among them, greeting, hugging, laughing, smiling, and sharing stories. “Do you guys need a break? Go take a walk through the cedar swamp. The third big cedar on your right is the second-largest in the state. Did you know that after they cleared a cedar swamp in the old days, they would dig up the buried logs and those would be good for shingles too? Go see it, it’s beautiful.”
Gradually holes get dug and stones are raised. The two largest—east and south—require effort from the whole team and so we line up: five people with stout sticks prying the stone from its 1,000-year bed, one person calling out rope commands, three people in charge of the A-frame bipod through which the rope passes, and the rest—30 or so—on the rope. The stones, knobby and massive, are pulled to position, rolling on the charred trunks of oaks that once stood here. People cheer.
The day goes remarkably well. Our numbers shrink in the afternoon and our closing circle is 30 people—drenched, dirty and proud. The eight stones are all in place. Erik, the only person here for the entire day, has been working without break for eight hours. We are all silent for a while when the work is done, each person lost in thought, looking around. I am amazed that it all got done, as is Erik. He clears his throat, not far from tears. “I’m amazed at what just happened. We can all share in the joy of knowing that a group of human beings, singularly focused, can create something more lasting than themselves. Thank you. Come back and see this land whenever you can.” People hug and hold hands, walking away in the misty rain. Erik is euphoric and remains behind. He walks silently through the manifestation of his dream, until it is just he and I in the clearing. “I’m really glad so many people came,” he says. They came for him. He knows that, but does not say so. He turns back to run his hands over the rough stones.
