Mover of Rocks

 

I move rocks. I read a short story once about a geologist who presents a paper to an assemblage of peers. He proposes a novel theory: the only reason humans are on earth is to move rocks. I could be Exhibit A.

By the time I returned home from my 2025 journey, there was a stack of rocks lodged between the cook box and the back passenger seat. Every coat—raincoat, featherdown, midweight, and lightweight—had a stone or more in each pocket. It was as if I had been selected as a cross-continent Uber driver, hired to be a transporter of pebbles and paperweights, each chosen to represent rock formations from across the continent. I can reason that if I transport rocks, I am human.

And as such, I am wont to be romantic, thoughtful, curious, and sometimes now, as I am older, pathetically forgetful. It is winter now, and I wear my heaviest coat. I’ll go to retrieve gloves, a doggy bag, a hat, or a cellphone, or nestle my hand in the warmth of the coat pocket. I’ll bump that night-black, Nova Scotian, sea-worn chunk of basalt. A rock in a pocket is a mnemonic device. For a moment, I am no longer wherever I am. 

Instead, I will be squatting on a hard-scrabble beach with an incoming tide, pebbles swishing subtly on its leading edge. The smell of the ocean is fresh and pleasing. It is the evening of my seventy-sixth birthday. I am alone except for Chester, who eyes me as he gingerly wanders among the black stones, avoiding the water that confuses him and causes him anxiety. He is no water dog. I search for the rocks that moments before I set aside as mine. But I can’t find them among the many look-alikes. I begin again. Chester stops to smell a rock I pick up. Maybe it smells of a fish carcass or a Nova Scotia dog. He wanders off. I finally chose one small rock and a larger one. Calling Chester, I take a photo of us to commemorate the occasion. Leaving, we clamber back up the path to the road, where I then notice a “No Dogs on the Beach” sign. I smile; here I am at seventy-six, breaking the law again.

I move rocks for an odd lot of reasons. To push the hill away from my cabin’s wall. To make the yard’s wooden archway appear to have a more substantial footing. To remember my husband, Gary, by keeping a bowl of the million- and billion-year-old rocks he collected on a field trip shortly before he passed. To make a pleasing mantel display. To remind me to pray.  

Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of moving rocks on the first day I left home. When I was waylaid at the news that Mila, a four-year-old, a child whom I had babysat when she was one, had just been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and was at a Spokane hospital, I missed my border crossing, stopping to see the family. Fortuitously, a hill near the roadside turnout where I then camped that first night yielded a jumble of pastel-colored rocks. I pocketed a mica-flecked, girly-pink granite specimen, a prayer stone fit for a child. Throughout the journey, it nudged me into remembering to say a  Bahá'í healing prayer for Mila.

Genetically, maybe I am predisposed to move rocks. Afterall, my cousin Captain Cornelius Dunham hauled ballast hither and yon across the seas in his tall ships. In Maine, I visited his gravestone, a substantial boulder marked with a metal plaque stating “1748-1835 Capt. Cornelius Dunham who was Father of Isaac Dunham, The First Keeper of Pemaquid Light.” The stone was located in a small cemetery on a hill overlooking the ocean near that very lighthouse. A chance encounter with a neighbor led me to another grave nearby, that of a nameless shepherd. His mound was covered with a layer of smooth stones. No marker. The woman noted that someone had bothered to collect the rounded stones from the base of the cliff rather than using the rough rocks the shepherd had used for the foundation of his long-abandoned hut close by. Grief moves rocks. 

Unless it can’t. 

Last summer, I went looking for the grave of my Swedish-born great-grandfather, Charles Bord Peterson (1855-1883). According to the Find a Grave website, he appears to have no gravestone or burial site listed. I didn’t know if he might be buried in the oldest private cemetery in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or in a pauper’s grave in the same city. Researching in an old, beautifully bound record book at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, I found his name in looping script, the first on a page recording plots purchased by an Andrew Johnson, whose name I recognized as my great-grandmother’s brother. 

A groundskeeper took me to the burial location, where there was not one sunken and unmarked grave, but a heartbreaking stretch of many. My Swedish immigrant ancestors were mostly laborers (shovelers of dirt and rock), bricklayers, and miners, the cornerstone of a welcomed nineteenth-century workforce and rock-movers all. On their death, they were too poor to mark their passing in this new world. During this trip, I commissioned the moving and engraving of two stones—one for Charles and another for Andrew’s family, including his first wife, their infant son, a child, his second wife, a niece, and himself.  

It is no accident that I ordered gravestones. I love a good cemetery, stone, and inscription. Rocks tolerate us chipping away to make our final mark. My favorite inscription was in Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont. The memorial was a large dog lying on a granite arch, inscribed: “My dog taught me a valuable lesson—shed a lot.” In some parts of the world, the only rocks around are memorial markers. In Roseville, Illinois, an old cemetery butted up against a row of grain silos. The silos appear to squeeze in close, dominating the scene and erasing the usual sense of the stones' glory. They seem to say, “Your greater mark was to farm this land. We stand to testify to this fact.” 

Roseville, Illinois

The rocks I gathered and stashed behind my car seat came from Washington, Maine, Vermont, Nova Scotia, and, lastly, a heavy one from Wyoming. Like a logbook, their origins marked where I dallied and where I hurried; they explained why I crossed the Canadian prairies in a two-day rush and, on the return journey, my state-a-day passage through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and into Iowa. I loved those lands for their sun-clock vistas, the multitude of backroad travel options (chosen to ease Chester’s fear of eighteen-wheelers), and the charm of farmhouses set neighborly distances apart. What kept me moving was the dust plumes trailing behind the tractors—nothing to collect but vials of dirt. 

At their cabin in Maine, Andi and Parke (long-ago founding parents of my childcare center in Walla Walla) and John (a Bozeman transplant to Vermont) were friends who became hauling advisors. My luck in having them as friends meant I hiked to extraordinarily lovely collection sites—Pigeon Hill (a striped wishing rock and a slice of mica), Winter Harbor (more wishing rocks), Putney Ridge and the Appalachian segment of the Vermont Long Trail (granite and marble), and John’s driveway (Vermont white granite). 

Pidgeon Hill, Maine

John, in particular, understood my task. I don’t know what to call someone who piles rocks on side tables, on the floor where they take off their shoes, or on their deck. The two of us are a small contingent of collectors, distinct from those who acquire a pet rock or a single painted rock. We are lovers of a bounty of rocks for their beauty, their touch, and their capacity to hold thoughts or memories.  

John's Collection from Kansas, Montana, and Tanzania

***

Traveling is an adventure dense with potential. Moving rocks and then reflecting on why I do it is only one aspect that gave this journey depth. A trip can be more than a shorthand list of places one has visited.

Now, I ask you, “What rock might you move next?” You are human, after all, yes? 

Affected by Ice

 

This is my first selfie for the year of 2026. I think it indicates that this will either be The Year of the Brain Freeze or The Year of the Mouth! I am hoping for the latter. 

The past few months I have not been writing on the blog, silenced by the task of mulling over my fall’s continent-wide travels. I am often asked if I worry about traveling and camping alone. In the coming weeks, I am hoping to post a more thoughtful answer than the one I often give to that question. I also want to describe how wandering the world with an open heart and wide intentions lifts mere sightseeing to another dimension.

In the meantime—within a hundred yards of my doorstep, I am grateful to find the natural world carrying on with its diverse cycles of water-nourishing missions. One waterfall and one stream’s work. Enjoy!

"We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions."

                —Written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, To an individual (Bahá'í) believer, 17 February 1933

Finding the Snag that Will Capture a Viewer's Eye

 

Font names—cloister black, baby italic, and undertaker—names found on an old printer’s cabinet in the Deer Isle-Stonington Museum on Deer Isle, Maine, had indicated to the typesetters how a particular kind of story or advertisement could be set with a font to create the right atmosphere. (“Undertaker.” A font stalking a grim finality.) By the time the typesetters laid rows of words with inky hands, the story had been gathered and written; the ad worded and illustrated. Their job was a simple one, almost like the placing of a period at the end of a sentence. And yet, it was the snag that could catch a reader’s eyes. 

When I take photos, I work the opposite way. I look for the snag in images, the detail/s that will make a viewer think they might know the storyline, even when there is no one in the image. I look for what is incongruit, silly, evocative of a feeling, a character, a story.

Dock End, Stonington, Maine

Did you imagine yourself gripping those ladder ends and with a mite of trepidation while descending unsteadily to a boat bobbing far below or did you find yourself waiting, thinking someone or something was going to throw a leg over the last rung and come toward you? Were you confused a moment by the water being the sky? I took the photograph of this dock and bay a dozen different ways, but the main snag ended out being the viewpoint, the intimacy of being at arm’s length to the ladder. The wooden beam across the edge of the dock is just visible, a tripping hazard. The ladder handles are gray cold metal, unpleasant to the touch. The water seemingly sky-wide boundless, could swallow you. All snags.  

Here is another photo. End time at the dog park?  Dog gone. Leash remains. Last supper, bowls empty. The high view of this scenario from the Grand Bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota, places the viewer at an omnipresent vantage point. The snag is the lofty viewpoint.

I loved that someone had a great sense of humor, putting a “Pull first with Dry Hands” sign on a paper towel dispenser. But this is serious. In order to dry your hands with one of those paper towels, you HAVE TO DRY YOUR HANDS or the paper tears as you try to pull it out. So, sheepishly you dry your hands as told—on your pants, on your shirt, on your jacket—before pulling with dry hands. The snag in this photo for you, the viewer, is that you don’t see anyone, so you go through your reactions to the sign alone like in a typical gas station bathroom. The clerk who wrote the sign isn’t there, you don’t see me. You get to experience this thought process all on your own. The mirror adds to the image with its no-no signs; in this restroom you are expected to follow the rules. I could have taken a photo of just the paper towel dispenser, but the mirror and the sink add to the feeling of reality. Do “Pull first with Dry Hands.”

Church in a Small Town in Nebraska

Wandering back roads, I saw many abandoned churches or ones reinvented as historical societies, antique stores, or an occasional house. This one stumped me at first. No church spire. A side door that upstages the boarded-over original main entrance with its funny bleacher-like steps. Had it been a school or the home of a fraternal organization? As I took the photo, I tried to capture the bulkiness of the building, its former grandiose facade. When I edited the photo, I pulled the building closer so the reader could more clearly see the two bikes leaning against the wall, the blank T.V. and the mattress on the lawn. The last iteration of this church was as a home of an evicted tenant. Many transformed churches have fallen from their mission of tending to the poor; this one has fallen a couple of bleacher steps further.  

Chester's Welcome—A Lovely Reprieve

 

The first dog my dog Chester encountered in Chester, Nova Scotia, was named… Chester. We had arrived minutes before and while I gathered bags to carry up to our lodging above a mercantile, a bulldog and its owner sashayed by. Chester met Chester in Chester. It’s silly to select one’s holiday destination by the name of one’s dog, but I knew nothing about any of the small towns sited up and down the outer shores of Nova Scotia, Canada. They were pinpricks on a map to me. Chester got his first whiff of the two Chesters and it set his butt a-wagging.

The town of Chester is a fishing village with an annual sailing regatta and a summer tourism season. Late September was the “tail-end” of its season. Some shopkeepers spoke of closing up in the coming week. My dog and I were there for the last wag. I was in need of it.

View to the southwest across Back Harbor

I had been traveling for a month. I crossed the North American continent with the first half of the trip in Canada and the second half in the United States. My travels would extend into late fall or early winter, so I prepared for a slew of worrisome conditions: ticks, rain, snow, and ice. I worried about encountering smoke from the fires in mid-Canada; I even bought a dog’s respirator mask for Chester. The evening skies in Chester were colored by the smoke from a fire in a nearby Nova Scotia forest, but the fire was almost contained and one couldn't smell smoke. 

But then that dust storm was still blowing across the United States—causing grief everywhere, lasting far too long. No state left untouched. Dust storm? You might be thinking how did you miss that news? So, here is the gig. 

In the Bahá’í religion it is said that when a person uses his words to harm another person, they put dust on the heart of the person whom they intend to hurt and likewise put dust on their own hearts. In the U.S., listening to broadcasts, podcasts, or casual conversations—any political side or persuasion, this “dust” gets scattered with abandon. Uncivil signage on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and flags flicks it intentionally at any passing targets. We seem to be a country of civilians suffering from self-induced heavy hearts—insulted, angry, and unhappy. We are a country under duress, capable sometimes of dealing with it with humor, but so often instead with offensive language. Although the portion of my travels through the United States had been delightful and I had been with interesting and gracious people, I was feeling the effects of the unavoidable incivility. I arrived in Chester hoping for a dustless respite. 

Chester in his doggy way had no expectations beyond all the dogs he might meet be good dogs. Neither of us quite expected the reception we experienced. 

Sign outside The Rope Loft restaurant

First off, I rarely passed anyone who didn’t speak to me. If they were walking in my direction, the conversation would be an extended one. Gracious. Casual. Friendly. Only twice, unsolicited, was there first an expression of sympathy about our American plight and then untoward disparaging remarks. 

The Kiwi Cafe was the epicenter of my Chester visit. Its kiwi green walls and welcome to all who entered made me feel warm-hearted. After hearing I had a dog, one waitress hurried out to meet him when later she saw me walking Chester. Another advised me to take the commuter ferry to the Tancook Islands. On said ferry, an older island resident, a fisherman, engaged me in a lovely conversation; something that potentially in my country might have led to comments putting someone down.  

My birthday gift to myself—lobster eggs Benedict at the Kiwi Cafe

Chester's welcome for Chester was the best. He was offered a treat at every counter, even at the post office where he got a handful of bites from the postal clerk, who then proceeded to call the other clerks from the back room to meet the new Chester. He developed a habit of heading for any counter in sight. Chester taught Chester the way of a civil world. He noticed the difference; his heart singing at every counter encounter. No disaster in Chester. No dust on his heart, nor mine.

Chester and I

Photo Journaling: Barrie, Canada, to Maine

 

Even with the distraction of a gull sitting atop the head of a Canadian WWI infantry man, one cannot ignore the soldier's mournful look. His downcast gaze seems to express regret. We ask too much of men during war. In our sorrow for their fate, we glorify them by turning a likeness of one military man of any particular war into stone, an act oddly reminiscent of the plots in grim-ending fairy tales. 

After I entered the United States at Niagara Falls, I wandered east along the Erie Canal through formerly prosperous industrial towns. Most towns hung banners with photos of their "Hometown Heroes" of all who who had fought in American wars from their communities. So many men. A few women. We Americans are good at war.

***

I admired centuries of glorious house styles across New York, traveling south down through the Hudson Valley, eventually across Massachusetts, and into coastal Maine. The ingenuity of man was everywhere. 

Women were less in evidence. A muted pink in a garden reminded me of a color known to be favored by the female sex. A "scarlet A"—in actuality a half of a barricade hanging on a wall at Buttermilk Falls Park—made me think of women accused in that earlier time of adultery and where were the men then?

Essence of pink at Cornell Botanical Gardens

A new New England's version of a "scarlet A"

Henry Thoreau's Walden Pond...  reinvented as a swimming hole. 

I walked around Walden pond. I watched swimmers crossing and tykes a playing. Apparently the pond has been a swimming hole for some time. I was told it was once closed due to too much pee in the water. Now a bathing house is under construction at one end. A sensible solution. Still, I was expecting a meditative space. If one walks to the far side of the pond, one can stand by the original location of Thoreau's cabin; it is marked by four upright stones. There, it is quiet.

Men—once prosperous—leave tailings of rust.

Rusted factories in Amsterdam at abandoned Erie Canal mills.

A print of President Garfield hangs in the hallway of a house at Schodack Landing in Hudson Valley. 

This Second Empire or Mansard style house was built by a man running an ice house at Schodack Landing.

The house was built in the year Garfield became President of the United States. Tom, the current owner and caretaker of the house, has thoughtfully filled it with period furniture and memorablia related to President Garfield and his Cabinet. Staying there was a wonderful historical journey. 

 

Isaac Dunham, the first lighthouse keeper at the Pemaquid Lighthouse, was a distant cousin of mine.

I wandered the lighthouse's neighborhood looking for the grave of Isaac's father, Captain Cornelius Dunham. He had sailed the world before dying while visiting his son at the lighthouse. I had sketchy directions to his burial site. Although the lighthouse docents weren't sure where it was, one of them sent me off where he thought it might be located. I was thrilled to find it and returned to let the staff know where the little cemetery could be found.

A painterly-like view from Pemaquid, Maine shoreline. Rosehips and seagulls.

I visited various friends on the Maine coast. Each enthused about living in Maine and took me a wandering or directed me to sights. I could leave my heart in Maine. It tempts one to become an artist.

Shells at Carolyn and Tim's house.

View of lobster boats at sundown from Andi and Parke's couch. 

Ladder descending fishing dock in Stonington.

A Stonington view that would make a good painting.

 

In Gouldsboro, Maine, this lobsterman once held a sardine can.

The Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Museum explained that when sardines had been over-fished on the Maine coast and tuna became popular, the sardine canneries closed and were replaced with lobster fisheries. Although only men worked as sardine fishermen, women worked in the canneries. The museum has a delightful film about how much the women loved their work and the friendships they found in the canneries. 

Another statue of a man:

Quarryman statue in Stonington, Maine. Quarries nearby provided stone for numerous famous buildings.

 There is still a working quarry on an island in the area. A beautiful, strong statue.

And finally a woman's "statue." A scarecrow in a community garden in Milbridge, Maine. It seems fitting it is a female. The garden gives vegetables away for the picking to anyone in need of fresh produce. When women have more sway in the world, nobody will go hungry. 

A beautiful scarecrow.

Canadian Travels

 

This is a Canadian morning: sunny-side-up, dressing of mist, and a lake which is not optional. Crossing Canada west to east, I camped by water most nights. Even the Alberta prairies had cow ponds. On one of the two long days it took to cross those prairies, I moved in tandem with a thundercloud running ahead of me as if it were the gingerbread man calling out, “Catch me if you can.” The vastness of the land under an uncatchable cloud made me meditate on larger things—of men unrestrained by wilderness, of women following, and the courage of both. I camped that night on an island in a lake with the sun dropping red through smoke from fires further north. 

When I prepared for this Pacific coast to Atlantic coast trip, I considered a plethora of hazards and emergencies. I packed foul-weather gear, bought two brands of tick and mosquito repellants, and even purchased a smoke-repellant mask for my dog. But I was most worried about the hazard of not “seeing” the country I was to cross. Of fussing about the miles clicking by on the odometer and of arriving each evening weary and late at a reserved campground. I waylaid this worry by advance study. The Lethbridge train trestle (highest and longest train trestle of its kind in the world) is an example. 

I camped that night on the edge of Lethbridge in a most unremarkable campsite, but with a host, who when I mentioned my interest in the bridge, enthused about the it and how to access it. I might have been tempted to go to bed early and see nothing remarkable, but instead I headed out to find the trestle. 

The trestle’s construction reminded me of those antique Meccano child’s construction sets but upscaled to a giant’s play. The train trestle fit the range of the land and welded with my pondering the willingness of humans to go into difficult terrain and make things happened.  

The endeavor to connect eastern to western Canada with train tracks and a highway were engineering feats. Later in the trip, as I passed rock walls with their evidence of blasting, I wondered how much dynamite built these corridors. And how many lakes they avoided. And how many trees were felled.

Although most of the trip was seen at a large scale, I also looked at the eye and macro level. The wider vistas needed something to ground them. Some days I stopped to hike with Chester and some evenings, I wandered campgrounds and took photo shots. I especially loved the curls of white birch bark. And the bird in the bark.

Short hikes brought me other views. Whispy grasses on the edge of a lake.

Chester’s view of Canada was mostly by smell. His nose led him to a Newfoundland, who was also named Chester. Their connection brought me to a most wonderful Canadian. Hearing him speak of playing hockey, of his cabin near a lake, and his devotion to his now deceased wife—who had endured a long illness, tallied with my image of Canadians—of their tenacity and grace under difficulties.

I am sure this leg of my journey will remain in my mind fondly.