Rocks in Our Hands and Hearts

This cold, rainy, foggy, misty, drizzly weekend (well, it wasn’t snowing, anyway), we have had a pair of daughters come to visit. Not the best timing, but you take what you can get. Mostly, we just stayed inside and entertained one another with fascinating repartee, but on Sunday, we did go out for lunch and a brief beach walk. It may not have been snowing, but the temperature felt not that far away from snow.

When people come to visit us, we often go for a walk on the beach. After all, the beach, the ocean, the sand, the shoreline, the birds, etc., are one of the biggest features of living here. The other major feature of a visit to the coast in this area appears to be an opportunity to indulge in a deeply-driven, human need to gather rocks.

Growing up in the mountains, we didn’t put that much stock in rocks, is my recollection. The soil was clay-ish and digging in it did not in fact produce a lot of rocks. Or, if it did, they were big rocks and were more of a burden than a feature. Southern California beaches had few rocks, as well. I lived for a few years on Venice Beach, and it was sand from the sidewalk to the water. In Massachusetts, I didn’t live near enough the water to get a feel for ocean rocks, but inland it was clear that long-time residents had a little native industry of digging rocks up and stacking them into walls. Robert Frost’s call that ‘something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ probably referred to people tired of uprooting the rocks from their soil in an effort to grow something, resentfully placing those rocks into the walls that snake all over the New England coutryside.

But here in the Northwest, the beaches are full of rocks, and when people come to visit, they immediately start filling their pockets, their purses, their backpacks, their suitcases with beach rocks. They bring them back from the beach to the house and lay them out on the deck. They clean the sand from them carefully. They feel bad that they don’t look as beautiful on the porch as they did on the beach, where they were wet and shiny. They think about buying a rock tumbler to recapture that beauty. Sometimes, they take them away in their suitcases, only to irritate the Transportation Security Administration at the airport. Mostly, the rocks just stay in our yard where I ultimately re-locate them in the ‘Visitors’ Rock Collection Pile’ in the yard.

So the visiting daughters gathered rocks in that great human tradition: one gathered greenish ones, one gathered reddish ones. Although I always swear I am not going to be dragging rocks home, I gathered a few caramel colored ones, and Ed spotted some lovely conglomerates, which are especially beautiful and plentiful on the Point Roberts beaches. Once home, we heated the rocks in the toaster oven (around 200 degrees) for awhile and then, when they were well-warmed, coated them lightly with a bar of paraffin. It’s not quite as good as the natural wetness of the beach, but it’s a lot easier than a rock polisher.

And then we had a great pile of beautiful rocks. They took theirs home (lots of luck with TSA), while I deposited mine on the Pile. Not just rocks: things of beauty and a joy forever. Really, given an abundant supply of rocks and an abundant supply of tree trunks and leaves, what else do we need? Perhaps just someplace to keep them, and where better than Point Roberts?