When my granddaughter was here visiting awhile back, she spied the pond, and her first impulse was to immediately run down and start tossing stones into it. At first, she tried skimming small ones. Failing that, her selections got larger and larger, perhaps in keeping with the increasingly dramatic plops they rewarded her with as they hit the water. The eddies quickly overlapped until I called her in explaining to her that she’d better save some shoreline or we’d have nothing to stand on the next time she came.
Later, after she’d gone, I noticed other stones she might have harvested and wondered how they’d gotten there. I spent many years in former lives preparing gardens whose soil seemed to contain more rocks than dirt and digging for hours to unearth one only to find out that, after all that sweat equity, I’d only managed to expose the narrow end of a huge boulder ”“ one that I wouldn’t live long enough to excavate. And rock walls ”¦ of course they didn’t build themselves, but how did those millions of stones in their myriad shapes make themselves available to the ancients who labored long to construct those weathered mossy lines of demarcation, some of which have stood for centuries? Walls made of rock held together by nothing more than good planning and gravity have, unlike many other monuments, stood the test of time. It seems to me somehow sacrilegious to topple one, a sentiment shared perhaps by others, which may in part account for why they are often found not far removed from new construction.
Rocks, like the trees and plants and birds of the air, are living things. While they don’t grow visibly before our eyes like daffodils lifting their bright, yellow faces in spring, the crystals from which they are made are continually evolving, from their formation to their status as the parent material for soil. Most of the Earth’s surface is carpeted in soil, and it is this medium that supports all the vegetative life that we see around us. This carpet is broken only by the seas, lakes, rivers and mountains, and we get a first-hand glimpse of what lies beneath it when we come upon a large rock outcropping protruding from the side of a hill or banking a river. For under that carpet lies a solid base of stone created by cooled magma, produced at the Earth’s hot core, and it is the constant upheaval of these large plates of stone that push rocks to the surface.
The weather plays an important role in the movement of rocks as well by washing away the soil that clings to their surface and, in many cases, polishing away their rough edges. This is most evident along a low riverbank or a beach at low tide where the constant movement of stones pushed up through the sand and tossed about against each other buffs them smooth.
The rocks with which we are most familiar are classified as metamorphic. Deep beneath the Earth’s crust, they may once have been sedimentary or igneous rocks, the former being composed, as the name implies, from tightly bound sediment and the latter the result of the crystallization of magma, or the molten lava that issues from the Earth’s core.
In all cases, rocks ”“ from individual stones to outcroppings ”“ are formed beneath the Earth’s surface and emerge by way of tectonic uplift, or the upward motion of the solid plates of rock, and erosion, or the washing away of any material above them. Rocks hold the landscape together, prevent erosion and serve as the substructure upon which we all live out our lives. And if these weren’t examples enough of how alive rocks are and of how crucial they are to our survival, they also form what is known as the parent material for all the soil that exists on the planet.
So the next time you set about hurling a rock into the sea, use it to edge your flower beds or to hold a corner of a tarp down, take a moment to ponder where it came from and how it got here. For like all else in nature, its evolution involved a multitude of complex processes, and its journey was no less eventful.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.
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