Cast in Stone

I have had a project in mind for some time, and this week seemed like a good time to start it.  The weather is still unseasonably mild, but soon it will turn rainy and cold, so I realized if I wanted to complete it this year I just needed to go ahead with it.

During our trip across the country in 2016 in our Mini Cooper, I collected rocks in three special places out west and brought them back with us, thinking that I could incorporate them into a wall or column somewhere on our property.  I have done this in the past; the patio and walkway to our back door contains three rocks from the top of Mt. LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountain, carried five miles down the trail in a small backpack.  The rocks from out west sat on a shelf in our back room all that year until our trip to New England in 2017, where I collected two additional rocks.  Perhaps I was waiting all this time to see if we might be traveling somewhere else.  (I actually collected three rocks from England, Scotland, and Ireland last year on our trip there, but they are so small that they are pebbles, really, and as I write I can see them lined up on top of my roll-top desk.)

There they stayed, lined up on that shelf, waiting for the stone mason to get to work!  The first one, on the left, is a piece of Cadillac granite from Arcadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, just outside Bar Harbor, Maine.  Cadillac Mountain is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and the first place to view the sunrise in the United States from October until March. 

That was a chilly day in April in Maine!  Here was the view from the top of Cadillac Mountain, not far from where I found this rock along the side of the road.  It is probably illegal to take a rock from a National Park, so I did so surreptitiously, and I hope that if some Park Ranger should somehow stumble upon this blog he will look the other way.

The second rock from the left was lifted from the very cold waters of the West Branch of the Little River, just behind the Innsbruck Inn near Stowe, Vermont.  The river flows under this beautiful covered branch at the beginning of the Stowe Recreation Path, a famous Greenway Trail that we followed all the way into the Village of Stowe four or five miles away.  I remember that there was still snow on the ground here and there along the trail.

The next three rocks are all from out west.  That one in front is a piece of the red rock we saw everywhere near Sedona, Arizona.  This particular one was found alongside the road to the Meteor Crater.  I wrote about it in this blog on August 1, 2016.  "We stop at Meteor Crater National Monument, a crater left by a meteor that landed here 50,000 years ago.  It is here that I find a nice stack of that red rock known throughout the area, and I fit one into the boot of our Mini."  The mountains around Sedona are that same color.

Just behind that is another reddish rock, which is actually a piece of petrified wood.  I collected it on the same day as the previous one, and wrote this about it in my blog:  "Our next stop is the Petrified Forest National Park, where I watch an interesting film on the creation of petrified wood, how cellulose was displaced by silica (sort of the way vinegar replaces water in a pickle, I decide).  Unable to find any petrified wood along the side of the road, I break down and actually spend $25 in the gift shop for a largish chunk of petrified wood."  It occurs to me that this may be the only rock that I have ever paid for. 

Finally, to the far right, is another rock fished from water, this time not from a cold New England Stream but from the Pacific Ocean behind our hotel in San Simeon.  We had been to Las Vegas a week before that and renewed our marriage vows in the Tunnel of Love, accompanied by an Elvis impersonator, which sounds cheesy but was actually very touching.  We were given a rose during the ceremony and Martha had carried it with us since then.  I wrote:  "Our hotel in San Simeon, the Cavalier, was directly on the ocean, a big wide lawn and then a steep bluff, and then the cold Pacific Ocean, into which we waded.  Martha left her rose there, given to us at the renewal of our vows in Las Vegas.  And I took away a large rock, worn smooth by the Pacific (which I somehow managed to lodge in the boot of our Mini), which will go into a stone wall I am building in Highlands."  Here we are, our bare feet in the waters of the Pacific Ocean for the very first time.

As I went back through my blog, looking for those photos I posted long ago, I remembered all of those places so clearly, as well as all the other places in between.  I remembered that chilly day atop Cadillac Mountain, that frigid Vermont stream, the rock formations towering in fantastic shapes all around Sedona, that hot day in the desert when we stopped at the Petrified Forest, and the cool Pacific Ocean into which we waded after a day of driving down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to San Simeon.  

What wonderful memories!  And now, when this little stone column has been completed, I will see these rocks every time I come out our back door - all those memories literally cast in stone.