Foraging for stones

[VisualThinker7@zzzzzzz]

I get all my rocks from construction sites. At a recent massive excavation
cutting through the Harbor Hill Moraine in Queens NY, the construction
personnel  began leaving piles of rocks and boulders on the side of the site, for
anyone to  take. I saw 2 other men gathering stones once when I was there,
otherwise I've  always been alone.

An odd note: the neighborhood where the construction took place is  inhabited
exclusively by immigrants, mostly east asian, but some western asian  as
well.
Many of these people have glared at me with expressions of undisguised
hostility.
The staring was appallingly rude. One person called the police on me, while
I was gathering stones from a pile on the side of the road.
The police showed up, pulled up behind my car, saw me loading rocks  into my
trunk, then backed up and drove away without speaking to me. Now  when these
people stop and stare at me while I'm working, I stand up and stare  back at
them.

I have been careful about the tools I will bring to the site to dig  some of
the stones out of the piles of dirt, because someone could accuse me of
stealing tools from the site, when in fact they were my own. I've had to dig  soil
out from under some of the boulders I've collected, and used a bottle jack  to
lift them, and a long bar to pry them up and get them rolling towards my
handtruck, at the bottom of the mound.

I have never used any of the tools that the workers have carelessly left
laying around - if someone else steals or uses them, that's their business. I
won't even touch them.

One morning I was pulling out of the 711 parking lot and saw a truck  hauling
a dumpster full of rocks and soil from the site. Out of curiosity I
followed. He took the material to a site in Corona, near Shea Stadium,  where it is
loaded onto barges and taken away to a landfill somewhere.

Twenty two thousand years underground since the glacier arrived here;  twelve
thousand since the glacier melted back; and as soon as these beautiful
stones are excavated, they're hauled off to a landfill. I'm glad I was able to
rescue some of them.