Rocks Unlimited

Thanksgiving, so the legend goes, is based on a the gathering of Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together to celebrate the harvest. What is remarkable about this story isn't the fact that the Pilgrims and the natives were getting along, but, rather, that there was plenty of food for the feast. I suspect the natives were largely responsible for supplying the meal because, if the land around my house is any indication, the only thing the Pilgrims were growing were rocks.

If there is one thing in Maine that is even more abundant than double-wides and lobster, it is rocks. Maine is famous for it's rocky coastline, but what a lot of people don't take the time to think about is that the rocks extend far beyond the coastline. This becomes readily apparent when one tries to plant a garden or, for that matter, a lawn. When one speaks of "topsoil" in Maine, one is generally referring to the finely crushed rocks that serve to keep the bigger rocks spaced apart.

My dog, Jasper, is a Maine dog and as such has always had a certain fondness for rocks. When I had a garden, one of the frequent maintenance tasks was to plod through the soil and toss out the rocks that invariably found their way to the surface. As I found a rock, I would gingerly toss it over the ravine at the edge of my yard. Jasper would just as gingerly race down the ravine, retrieve the rock, walk it back to the garden, and await the next rock toss. It was one of his favorite games and he has the chipped and broken teeth to attest to it. I finally convinced him to deposit his retrieved rocks outside the perimeter of the garden, but even so, the continual appearance of rocks in the garden continued unabated. I was always amazed, come spring, that the garden seemed to actually sprout rocks over the winter.

If you've spent any time in the Maine woods, you know that rocks aren't a recent geographical phenomenon. Most hiking trails contain a healthy supply of rocks and boulders. And old rock walls can often be found deep in the woods, a testament to the fact that the forest in which you are now walking was once farmland. Remnants of rock walls abound on and around the property where I built my house, which I find quite curious since the land itself is composed nearly entirely of rocks. I can't fathom how someone could have farmed this land. But who knows, the land is sloping and perhaps over the course of the last 100 years or so, topsoil that was once there washed away.

Although rocks do not make for the best base upon which to grow things (other than moss), they are rather useful in general. In addition to the aforementioned rock walls, rocks make quite the versatile landscaping material. Rocks can be used for paths, boundaries, decoration, and barriers. And unlike garden Gnomes and gazing balls, rocks always blend into the environment quite tastefully.

A carefully crafted rock wall is, indeed, a work of art. It is no easy task to take a building material that is not at all uniform in shape and size and assemble it such that collectively, a level and straight wall, devoid of any mortar, is formed. One of the prerequisites of such a wall is a large collection of relatively flat stones, something which can't be found on my land. That's the excuse I'm using anyway - I don't think I have the patience to construct a proper rock wall.

Despite the abundance of rocks all around us, we manage to find reasons to import even more of them. The gravel that constitutes my driveway, for instance, is just a bunch of small rocks that I had to pay real money for. Larger rocks were trucked in and used to line one side of the pond. Yet another different size of rock was used to cover the area under my deck. Other than the gravel, which comes from the many gravel pits around, I'm not sure where, or how, this other rock is gathered. Where does one find a large collection of approximately 2-inch diameter rocks, for example? Somebody, somewhere, is hiding the fact that you can breed rocks.

I am told by people involved in such things, such as landscapers and excavation folk, that there people who are actually paying for the types of rocks that I was paying to get pushed out of the way. Ornamental rocks, it seems, have become big business. Of course, a big part of that business is transporting the rocks to the places where they are wanted. That's why I'm pretty confident that nobody's going to be sneaking in in the night and taking off with my rocks - it's not something one can likely do without being heard.

Sand, also, is just another form of rock. Very small rocks, but rocks nonetheless. Well, actually, here in Midcoast Maine, our "sand" really isn't very small at all. The "beaches" are very clearly composed of not-so-small rocks. It doesn't make for very comfortable walking, but it does make for a happy rock-retrieving dog.

Perhaps the most widely distributed rocks here in Maine are in the form of "sand" that is spread on roads in the winter after snow or ice storms. Again, the term "sand" is just a euphemism for small rocks. As nearly every Mainer can attest, road sand is anything but "fine," as evidenced by the many cracked windshields that bloom in the winter and spring. When I bought a new vehicle a few years ago, it didn't even make it through it's first winter without the need for a new windshield.

The rock, or more properly, the boulder, in this picture is the largest rock on my property. It measures approximately six feet tall, by 12 feet deep, by 10 feet across. It weighs, I'm sure, more than you and me combined. It is, no doubt, part of the litter of the last ice age, unceremoniously left behind by the retreating glaciers. A silent reminder that as heavy and immovable as rocks appear, water, inevitably, beats rock.