Not yet 7 am and I’m already stoned, if that’s the right word for having both of my pants pockets and the one good pocket on my jacket bulging with beach pebbles as I walk the Cat Island sand spit. Maybe it is just the angle of this early morning light - the color of honey - dripping just so through the thin veil of dawn clouds highlighting the beauty in every wave-polished stone on the beach. Maybe I am still dreaming from the night barely passed but I can’t seem to walk more than a few strides without some small rock calling my name to be picked up and admired. I swear I can almost hear them over the whisper of the waves.
There are stories in the stones, “sermons” perhaps as Shakespeare had in mind in the lines from Act II, Scene 1 of As You Like It — “And this our life, exempt from public haunt/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks/ Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
In the big book of Apostle Islands geology, those sermons speak of northeastward-flowing streams braiding themselves out like windblown hair 660 million years ago and sand flats laying down grain by grain the bones of the islands in three layers of sandstone — Chequamegon, Devils Island Formation, and Orienta.
We could speak of the unfathomable forces that bend and fold those layers of rock like crepes on the skillet of time and the dizzying 1.1 billion year-old Midcontinent Rift System. We could dive deep into the ebb and flow of ancient ice sheets, glacial lobes with names like “Vanders” and the wave and wash of Glacial Lake Duluth. We could stumble over multisyllabic tongue twisters like Pleistocene and Precambrian and geomorphology and Superior Upland Physiographic Province. But as Warren Nelson says at the beginning of “Take It To The Lake” under the Bigtop, “Let’s skip those ten thousand years.”
There are tomes written on the geology of the Apostle Islands gathering dust in the basement stacks of academic libraries, stories for another time perhaps. This morning, I would rather be gathering stones in the clear air of this new day.
I want to walk with John Muir whose ear was tuned to the voices of the stones saying “....all the rocks seemed talkative, and more telling and lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and seemed to have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship."
I want to listen to the voices that Robin Wall Kimmerer hears in Braiding Sweetgrass when she deplores calling the natural world “it” and saying “Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget—even the language we speak.”
But mostly, I am kept company by the words of Mary Oliver as I walk the beach slowly with my pocketful of stones. In one of her final books of poetry, a delightful collection called Blue Horses published in 2014., there is a hidden little gem of a poem called “Watering the Stones.”
WATERING THE STONES - by Mary Oliver
Every summer I gather a few stones from
the beach and keep them in a glass bowl.
Now and again I cover them with water
and they drink. No question about
this; I put tin foil over the bowl, tightly
yet the water disappears. This doesn’t
mean we have a conversation or that
they have the kind of feelings we do, yet
it might mean something. Whatever the
stones are, they don’t lie in the water
and do nothing.
Some of my friends refuse to believe it
happens, even though they’ve see it. But
a few others – I’ve seen them walking down
the beach holding a few stones, and they
look at them rather more closely now.
Once in a while, I swear, I’ve even heard
one or two of them saying “Hello,”
which, I think, does no harm to anyone or
anything, does it?
What better companions for a walk on a wave-washed beach in such morning light?
I walk slowly back to where I’ve nudged the Little Dipper up into the sands, every pebble-filled pocket jingling as though I’ve knocked over a laundromat, each small stone warm against my skin and the rising of the sun.
Just before I step back into the water to pull anchor, I realize I couldn’t and probably shouldn’t take all these beach rocks home for only me to see. That would be like plucking stars from the night sky. They belong here, not on some dusty shelf away from these islands, out of the wind and waves and out of context.
Carefully I empty my pockets, setting the stones a few at a time gently back on the beach each time bending in a gesture not unlike a bow. As I set them back at the water’s edge, I may or may not be whispering a hopeful “hello” which “does no harm to anyone or anything” does it?
Once as I turn to leave, I even go so far as to shut down the engine for a moment, listening, half certain I’ve heard a kind of whispered response sounding just below the syllables of the waves.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted)
Think of these essays like a pocketful of beach stones, they are best when shared. If you want to share them with others, click below:
Don’t know why I have this passion for stones and rocks . Perhaps growing up mostly in the flats of North Dakota , but pining for the rocky out cropping of Eastern Ontario , my mother’s home territory .
Yes! And here are the words from the lovely little song by Donovan:
Little pebble upon the sand
Now you're lying here in my hand
How many years have you been here?
Little human upon the sand
From where I'm lying here in your hand
You're to me but a passing breeze.
The sun will always shine where you stand
Depending in which land you may find yourself
Now you have my blessing, go your way.