A warm day, in early August, 2023.
Sedge wrens trill in alarm at my presence. Sunning garter snakes scatter at my feet.
Intruder and wanderer, I walk a not-completely-solid path between marshes, where edged grasses spear high above my head and the ground yields underfoot.
Wild cucumber flowers cascade their sweetly scented stars like a net over an intensely green landscape, hazed by humidity.
I round a curve, where the trail and sky open out. There, in the distance, like a prehistoric bison, reclines the massive granite boulder I came to investigate.
A singular immensity that geologists call a glacial erratic (from the Latin errare, “to wander”).
I approach slowly, reverently, like a pilgrim, measuring the scale of this wanderer against my own. Four times my height, and perhaps twice as wide as tall.
Riven with its own stories of glaciers and breakings, in the midst of the wide, grassy river valley, the boulder stands alone — a seemingly solitary character composed mainly of dark gray granite, speckled by white-and-black quartzes, striped with soft orange veins of feldspar.
Like no doubt every other human who has ever passed this way, I am pulled into its charismatic orbit. Close up, its bulk displaces air and sound, emanating a frequency of silence like gravity.
As if the boulder is a fire, or a wellspring, or a megalith, I circle it, this reclining stone that long ago chose its own ceremonial site.
A diagonal fracture, from which broken rock has tumbled, marks its body. Struck by lightning or the hammer of the gods.
I place my hand upon its rough, cool surface, trying to sense my way into this material manifestation of deep time … feeling nothing but a calmness, which is not nothing.
Here is time, embodied ... time that I can touch with my hand.
Couched by mosses and flecked by pale lichens, the boulder hosts its own ecosystem. Secret caches of water seep from deep folds, where green plants take root.
I observe flecks of gold pyrite, and what look like tiny, embedded garnets, reminding me of the raised cherry marks on my own flesh. I brush my fingers over spherical holes, then lean against the boulder as if it is a father.
What I could find of its story is this: Many thousands of years ago, this erratic traveled hundreds of miles southeast, carried to the Minnesota River Valley by a glacial ice sheet.
Born of plutonic fire and molten rock, the granite grew slowly, over thousands of years, at the root of mountain ranges that have long-since crumbled to dust. An estimated two billion years old: a fiery, igneous stone.
In geological time, the rock is old beyond my imagining; made by the Earth long before the earliest humans. Here, in this relatable, human-scaled being in front of me, the distant past of the planet has been embodied. An encounter with deep time.
Robert Macfarlane wrote, “For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. . . . Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. . . . Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.” 1
I am a small woman. I easily fold myself onto a boulder seat near the ground, inside a triangular stone alcove shaped like a shrine.
I am an offering, contained in deep shadow.
I rest here and try to imagine the many, many generations of human ancestors who have lived and died since the glacier retreated and left its footprints on this land.
How many have pressed their hands to this boulder’s surface in communion, or even kinship, with a fellow wanderer?
What did this witness to time mean to the original peoples of this continent … and those who followed? Did its field-loving, bison spirit evoke reverence?
Was it a place for ceremony, a place for gathering, a crossroads, or simply a waymarker — isolated in holy simplicity against a blue sky in a field of green?
Encountering a magnetic being such as this in the landscape, maybe we begin to see more than an object — more than a rock, to be graffitied or climbed upon.
We may think how extraordinary that which we tend to see as ordinary really is.
Perhaps we begin to sense a subject. A stone person, alongside a human person. Both of whom, in some way, chose to travel here.
A stone is a being impervious to human understanding; yet still, in some way, akin. Which is to say, kin.
Boulder or human, we experience a world that is nothing but change. We share an ancestral lineage as descendants of Earth’s story. Our blood, like granite, holds traces of iron. Our bones contain crystal formations … our DNA carries, perhaps, a predisposition to wander.
My billion-year boulder measures time in changes wrought by ice, wind and water. By Underworld cataclysms. By the angle and force of the sun that strikes its face.
By breakings and crackings, shiftings and slidings, morphings and even, in a trickster-ish turn, by its own meandering across deep time, in search of a home.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane, 2019.
Beautiful piece! It always boggles my mind to think of boulders like yours that weigh tons "floating" within layers of ice in a valley glacier or ice sheet. Or on the slurry of meltwater mud released by a melting glacier. There is something about the idea of rocks as wanderers, representatives of a time span we humans can only barely imagine, that is sacred.
This is a marvel. This: "...its bulk displaces air and sound, emanating a frequency of silence like gravity." I see the old ones have spoken to both of us, as well as to those others you invoked when you laid your hand on the stone's skin.