Building ‘hoodoos’ feeds West Glenville man's spiritual side

WEST GLENVILLE — When you drive up the curving gravel driveway that leads to Nick Coupas’ home, you feel a little bit like you’re entering an outdoor sculpture park.

You pass rocks balanced on top of each other in unusual positions. You pass a winding stone wall built entirely without mortar. You pass a five-foot-tall pyramid, made entirely out of stones found on Coupas’ property, that greets visitors when they get to the top of the drive. A sculpture of a unicorn, made out of steel by local artist Paul Kant, grazes in the field.

Coupas refers to his balanced rocks, which look like the cairns that guide hikers in the mountains, as hoodoos. The word is a geology term that describes the tall, thin spires of rock that protrude from the ground in places like Bryce Canyon in southwestern Utah.

“I build a lot of stone walls and pyramids,” Coupas said.

During the summer, Coupas estimates that he had over 15 hoodoos scattered throughout his property in West Glenville. But now that it’s colder, he’s taken most of them down.

The sculptures have a tendency to fall apart, and he doesn’t want them to fall in the driveway during a snowstorm and cause problems for his snowblower.

“A lot of people assume that there are metal rods in there [holding the stones together],” Coupas said. But that isn’t the case. “They blow over in the wind all the time, but that’s what I like about them.”

Coupas said that building things out of rock has a spiritual dimension. “I have a Buddhist friend who said that it’s the best form of meditation there is,” he said. “If the only thing you’re thinking about is where the rock is going to go, you’ve cleared your mind.”

It took Coupas awhile to realize that he was capable of building a stone wall, but once he got started he found it was something he enjoyed doing, he said. “I thought there had to be mortar,” he said. “Eventually I realized I could just fix it if it fell apart.”

Building the pyramid took about a week, but that’s because building a pyramid requires more planning than building a cairn. “I had to dig out the topsoil and put a base down,” he said. With his cairns, “there’s no plan,” he said. “You just wing it as you go.”

During the summer, he spent a half day a week balancing rocks. Recently, he started making mosaics in his yard — taking pebbles and rocks and laying them out in an interesting looking pattern. He used stones collected from a beach in Maine to make a mosaic near his driveway.

Some of Coupas’ art is currently on display in the front window of SACC-TV on North Broadway in Schenectady. He hauled the rocks in and built five or six small cairns there. He recently returned to repair some of the sculptures because some of the rocks had fallen down.

Coupas said he never thought of his work as art, until Kant suggested that it was. “It’s interesting to me,” he said.

“People drive in and they laugh and they think it’s comical.”

Coupas said he got the idea to start building his hoodoos after visiting Sedona, Ariz., famed for its red sandstone formations. The city is a popular New Age attraction; some people believe that “spiritual vortexes” are concentrated at the rock formations in the area and erect cairns at the sites.

“That’s where I got the idea of building cairns and hoodoos here,” he said.

Coupas doesn’t limit himself to building at his house.

“I do this wherever I am,” said Coupas, 61, a social studies teacher at Mohonasen High School. “I don’t know what there is about piled stones.”