By John Tredrea, Special Writer
LAMBERTVILLE — Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage to the landscape near Nick Cepparulo’s Lambertville residence on Curley Lane, near Swan Creek.
This spring, he began respond, and continues to respond, in a unique way — by creating “rock stackings” on his property near the creek that was changed by the hurricane.
”I’d seen stackings on trails while hiking,” he said. “I learned that doing these stackings is an old Buddhist tradition, in which each rock is a prayer for a family member of friend. As long as the stack was standing, the prayer might come true, the tradition said. If it fell over, the prayer wouldn’t come true.”
The flooding of the creek by Irene had an emotional impact. “It was like we had a river through our property,” he said. “The house next door took a lot of damage. There was water everywhere. Five or 6 feet of banks and rocks along the creek were washed away. I wanted to find a way to do some landscaping.”
So he took to making these primordial-looking rock stacks, which call to mind an image of a miniature Stonehenge.
”It was just an idea that came to mind one day,” he said. “The materials were already here. I use rocks from in or near the creek. There’s a lot of them around. I’ve done maybe a half-dozen larger stacks, 4 to 8 feet high, and another 40 or so smaller ones. I guess I’ll keep doing it until, you know, the thrill wears off. I like doing it — it’s a meditative kind of thing — and neighbors have told me they like the way they look.”
He goes out in the morning before work to spend time on new stacks and repair existing ones. “They’re temporary,” he said. “The wind and the rain, and sometimes birds, knock them down, or knock part or them down. I do some work on them after work most days, too.
” My work is in medical imaging, so I’m a computer all day. Being outside, near the creek, and doing these stacks is a good thing to do. It’s quiet and peaceful. It brings peace of mind. When I’m doing the stacks, that’s all I’m thinking about, so it is like meditation that way. I try to focus on balance,” said Mr. Cepparulo.
He says he likes to try to make the stacks as “unbelievable-looking as possible” by achieving effects of balancing that appear surreal. “It’s like trying to defy physics,” he said. “So, trying to balance them in that sort of way, I can’t go too high with them.”
Who knows? Maybe these stacks will ward off the next hurricane, will push it out to sea . . .

