You Gotta Dig Rock
If you don’t like rock, you’ll never love this island.
Rock’s the star in our bold shorelines and ledges, our snug harbors, coves and fingering inlets. Indigenous granite bulwarks wharf pilings, sea walls and breakwaters, is the stuff of walls, steps, benches and fence posts. Dig just about anywhere and shovel or spade tings against rock. Once, after early farmers cleared much of the island and before they figured out our underlying granite in cahoots with thin soil yielded some mighty meager results and so turned to other trades, most having to do with the sea, numerous rock walls bordered fields, corralled livestock, marked property lines. Many elegiac remnants still exist, speaking to a long gone way of life.
In each tidal cycle, at the ebb, it’s as if a curtain has been pulled back. Almost magically, large rocks and boulders appear, some that, at all but the lowest of spring tides, are routinely concealed. These days, with GPS and other electrical gadgetry, maneuvering these waters is easier, but not so once. I’m reminded of the story about the captain of one of the steam ships which, pre-bridge, carried passengers to the island. After negotiating the harbor and docking at the wharf, a tourist exclaimed, “Why Captain, you must know where all the rocks are.” To which the Captain replied, “No, but I know where they aren’t.”
In The Coast of Maine, Charles Wadsworth observed, “Rock here has no plan to be sand.” A panoramic view suggests he may be correct. Were each convoluted inlet and cove stretched taut and measured, Maine’s shoreline would extend more than 7,000 miles and yet possess only about 60 miles’ worth of sandy beach, a ratio that seems about perfect for those of us who love rock. Not that I’d deny the allure of a stretch of sandy shore. How it invites bare feet. How it is more forgiving. Years ago, had I fallen on sand rather than a slippery tide-exposed rock while hiking with a friend, I might not have a sensitive, lingering lump on my knee.
But sand shifts, dunes undulate. Cape Cod’s shoreline and North Carolina’s Outer Bank, among the burlier cousins of our island’s small pocket sand beaches, are highly dynamic places and subject to constant movement and rapid, extreme change. Though geologists identify our rocky coastline as “high energy” environments, rock appears to stay put. And that’s part of what some of us find attractive and dependably reassuring about rock. That it doesn’t move. Chances are that any large boulder upon which you park your bum while resting on a long hike is likely to be there next week. Next year. Heck, next century.
But rocks are moved. Have been moved. Indeed, the history of our planet’s rock is a long one of movement. And what a turbulent ride. Rock’s been extruded, thrust, heated, cooled. Pulverized by glacial weight, drowned by ice melt, driven by seething storm surge, gnawed by lichen, pelted by rain, compressed by ice. Also covered, sucked under, hatched anew by who knows how many sequences of cyclical heave and collapse. Ground, scraped, polished. Excavated, blasted, hammered and hauled. And that’s just in this neck of woods since the last glacial dunking 14,000 years ago, one of the more recent and brief chapters when considering the earliest known rocks of the unfathomable-to-our-human-minds span of the Archaean period, a geological pre-Cambrian eon some 4 ½ to 2 ½ billion years ago. (Yes, with a b.)
Just as a botanist can translate a lichen’s hieroglyphic script splattering a boulder, a geomorphologist studying Maine’s rocky islands and coast can interpret much about the earth’s surface, its restless movements. According to Island Institute president Philip Conkling, after only a half hour of pick-plinking, a particular rocky shore expanse relinquished one of its stories to a geologist who paraphrased: “This is a third-order fold of an ancient mountain chain and is good evidence of a continental collision.” Had the rocks themselves been given voice, they’d undoubtedly have offered a livelier version of things.
Indeed, so many stories rocks would tell if they could. I’d love to hear from the moss-matted remnants of a stone wall bordering our property on its northern edge. I’m hungry for the testimony simple headstones might provide, like those Charles found in his woods, how more than 100 years ago they bore witness to a sea captain’s grief when he carried home the illness that killed his two young children. And what else might I learn of the fire on the Holmes property if the rocks of a chimney, all that remain, could find voice? How about the glacial erratics, some of them as big as compact cars, which appear almost mysteriously and in the most unlikely places, as though the earth had burped and out they popped. But of course, they, too, were moved.
One of the better known of such rocks is mid-island, at the road’s edge on Route 15. It’s a very large upright boulder hard to miss. Geologists have identified it as a part of an end moraine, transported here by meltwater from the last ice sheet, the edge of which was many miles away. But at least one island elder rejects such a notion. Offering up no scientific evidence, she has proclaimed, “Why that rock couldn’t have come any further than Little Deer Isle.” Meaning, of course, such a familiar and important landmark couldn’t have come from off island. From away.
Maybe only the boulder itself could set the story straight – just as, after all these years, Stonehenge is still trying to. But most folks don’t seem interested. It’s the human story that matters here, rock mere backdrop. Known as Carman’s Rock for as long as most old-timers can remember, its sort-of-billboard-purpose, according to historical archives and photographs dating to the 1890s, was to advertise a particular brand of soap. Of more recent vintage, one island son, now in his 60s, recalls Carman’s Rock as the finish line in middle-of-the-night drag racing along Route 15. Now, come each June, this boulder is where the graduating high school seniors make their mark, freshly painting it with colors unique to their class, emblazoning the surface with their names. Not so much graffiti as announcement. An island tradition. As though giving voice to this rock, the layers of paint proclaim: Here we are. Here we go. Sailing into the bright future with our stories and dreams. And carrying, too, hopefully, like ballast in the hold, the knowledge of where rocks aren’t.
