I would love to watch a time-lapse film of the hill where we live from the day the first settler decided to farm its sunny southern slope to the present. I know our house was built in 1790, but what about the barns? Was a shelter for animals built first? Who cleared the land of trees, and whose poor back strained to build the five-foot by five-foot 300-foot long stone wall along the west side of the property? When did the crossing paths in the woods become the crossroads at the southwest corner of our dooryard? And who were the characters who cobbled together the various hodgepodge constructions that constitute our barns today. I have a lot of questions that a two-century fast-forward film would answer.

These questions arose for me as our back porch fell. Not of its own accord – though that day was near – but with the help of a couple of carpenter brothers who show up at our place periodically to keep things upright or, in this case, to pull them down when the cause is lost. The screened-in porch was the size of a living room. It was attached to the back of the house, I’d say sometime 40 or 50 years ago, and it sheltered innumerable summertime porch suppers over the decades. Its wobbly wooden underpinnings had rotted with the help of poor drainage behind the house, and it had to come down.  We replaced it with a much smaller and simpler open-air overhang that returned the house to its original profile and created a terrace for plants and people in the footprint of the old porch.

Russell Clark and the boulder.

There is a hitchhiker standing off to the side of Route 34 in Sandy Hook who has been waiting for a ride for the last 13,000 years.

It was dropped off on a bedrock knoll on state land about 50 feet northeast of the rock cut near Mill Road by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which had come down from the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec at the time to build Long Island, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod.

Newtown, and all of New England for that matter, is thickly populated with these ice age travelers — boulders torn from the bedrock by a crush of ice a mile thick and pushed, carried, or rolled southward until the ice retreated north about 13,000 years ago, leaving them without a ride.

The Ice Age in Connecticut began two or three million years ago, and geologists believe there have been several glacial advances and retreats in that time. Because 13,000 years represents just a quick pit stop in geologic time, some experts assert we are still in the Ice Age, global warming notwithstanding. In a few thousand years, the next glacial advance may once again sweep the surface of New England southward so our stranded friend on Route 34 can continue on its way again.