SCENE ON THE STREET : The Stone Age

In the fields of the foothills, the rounded boulders tell the story: the wild rides on great hillsides of mud after a rain. If tidal waves of mud can fold cars around telephone poles (as author John McPhee describes in “Control of Nature”), mashing rocks the shape of trapezoids into potatoes is no challenge.

Their young days of mud wrestling over, the boulders sit placidly in the pasture, ready with the patience of the ages to be put to use. And so they were, especially in decades past, all over La Verne, Claremont and Upland.