It Died & Took the Rock With It
This vignette is based on a phrase I spoke somewhere on the trail during the ten day hiking trip.
The words stuck with me although I didn’t remember the context.
I liked the phrase and this prose poem photo essay is the result.
It died and took the rock with it.
Rock being unforgiving, inconceivably heavy, and unimaginably abrasive. Unless worn by the waves and knocked against other rocks until so smooth they couldn’t even be used as sandpaper.
It died and took the rock with it.
What has the kind of power to take a rock along with it on its final fall? Could anything do that except another rock? One on a planetary scale, maybe. Volcanic, pyroclastic, or another term with consonants and clipped endings implying power in their very sound.
It died, and took the rock with it.
But what if it was the opposite. What if “it” was a feather fallen from the mouth of a loud gull after it had stolen a puffling to eat for its breakfast? What if a feather took down the rock?
Maybe that feather sat in a cleft of rectangular-faceted shale and the central rib of that feather, the strongest part of the lightest object, settled in just so. When the ice came, it collected along that rib and they melded together. When the melt came, their presence widened the crack, summer and winter by the hundreds. What if this particular spot of this particular rock was the basis of stability for the entire face?
It died and took the rock with it.
So that widening meant the entire stone kept unhinging itself bit by molecular bit. With assistance from the feather’s rib and the loneliness of ice in winter. Lonely because it began from water and returned there in between the frozen times. Being within two states of matter meant difficulty relating to those who existed fixed in one. Then, one warming day, the cleft became a cleave and the point of connection between the rock face and its foundation severed.
The feather died, and took the rock along with it.
It did so over time not measured in days but in icy millimeters and years worth of seasons with change not visible but potently present.
That’s the kind of dying that takes rock with it. The kind with time hanging around its neck as a glinting, ticking, silver charm.
