dudemanflab's Diaryland Diary

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Sara Rocks: a small fiction

Sara never really came into my life. Some people never do even when you've known them for years; they hover on the edges of you, pretending you don't notice them not moving closer but not evading their eyes.

We shook hands, Sara and I. We exchanged smiles and words, we ate food together, but I can't imagine being anywhere in her mind at this moment, this moment, except a place accessible by a winding corridor, or an inner room she falls into by accident while looking at a certain photo album of memories.

She worked with rocks. Not the kind you might border around a garden, nor the kind used for labyrinths. Heavy rocks. Large rocks. Hard k rocks. Boulders and stones sound round. Her rocks had edges, juts and jags, could rattle a human skeleton if not handled properly.

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12,000 years ago, says the natural historian, this entire corner of the world was covered with glacier. We're talking minutes ago in geological time. Mere minutes, and all that you see--the woods, the pond, the hills--was ice. But not stiff and obdurate. This ice was alive and moving. You have to remember the ground was frozen too. As the glacier thawed it would grab whatever it could find: stones, rocks, dirt, whatever its fingers could run across that wasn't water. Then it would freeze again and draw whatever it touched up into the glacier, heaving it closer to its heart like a treasure, year after year after year.

Look around you, he continues. Try to walk 10 paces in New England without a rock in sight. Over time, we're talking geological seconds, the glacier thawed for good. All its dearest, sedimentary, metamorphic, igneous, great and small, dumped, left behind and raw in the sun. So when you walk out into the woods and you see a boulder supporting a beech, its roots clutching along all sides down to dirt, you can look at that rock and think That is a glacial erratic: a really big rock left behind that was loved and lost by the glacier.

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We saw one of these at our work site. A glacial erratic. I think it must have been a birch though, or maybe its that the flaking bark looks more striking to my imagination. The day was rainy and we were handling 20 pound bars, poking at the dirt to see what would come up. By pushing or pulling at these rocks, Sara's rocks, we invoked the power of the lever nearly a hundred times an hour, calling upon the simplest of machines to work, so that our bones and muscles would not have to.

After lunch, Sara asked if any of us wanted to see the pool further up the trail. She told us it ran clear, with walls the color of turquoise, straight out of Tahiti. In Massachusetts, two weeks after the spring thaw, of course we wanted to see Tahiti.

We crossed over the hill to a slew of erratics. The pool was made by a steep rock wall, nearly thirty feet tall, that was dark grey and imposing. It held the water, so that the stream came down only from a tiny notch. Further down, a boulder, much too big to be rock, flanked the river and undergirded a sixty foot birch. The tree trunk grew from the rock's very tip, with roots descending down and back to the bank. I imagined the dirt that must have been atop the rock, now long gone, marveling how all those carbons and more went into making such a tree.

-Well, what do you think? Sara asked.
-It's beautiful.
-I don't think I've ever had a prettier work site.
-How often do you do this?
-Every day, in season. My husband's in the business. He's been doing it since he was twelve.
-Wow. Were you afraid to marry him to do this your whole life?
She laughed. I'm sure we'll do more than rock work throughout our lives. We want kids. She said this like it was the other of two alternatives
-So you want them doing rock work too?
-Possibly. What do you think of rock work?
-It's fun, I said. Everytime I loosen a rock, it's like a thought breaking free.
-Yeah, she said, You can feel it give from the ground, and all the forms you imagined it could be underneath the moss, the soil, and other rocks, all those shapes disappear.
-And all that's left is the rock itself, in its true and only shape.

This summer, I want to visit Sara and her husband in New York. They've worked in the same site in the Hudson Valley for three seasons. I want to meet him, to shake his hand, exchange words and smiles, share food with him. Mostly I want to see if he's a lump of muscle or if he's strung out like me. Form and function--hard to escape it. When will I know the shape of my own rock?

4:41 p.m. - May 22, 2008

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