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I first noticed the stone on a Monday. I jog on a route along the edge of the woods. I’ve been advised to run in the woods, but I can’t. I tried it once, during a visit years ago. I felt lost. Not physically lost, but spiritually. Or maybe chronologically. My synthetic mesh shorts and space-age rubberized shoe soles seemed like a futuristic intrusion among the trees and moss. It’s not that the woods seem old, though they are. They seem timeless. The plasticized present has no place here. Neither does the commodified, gamified self of running apps. The little voice in my headphones telling me how fast I was going pushed me to go even faster, while the nature around me beckoned to slow down. When we moved here, I chose a path to run that abuts the woods but never goes in. I also turned off the little voice. It never actually made me go faster.
For a portion of the run, farmers’ fields stand between me and the woods. Every day, I monitor the progress of the crops. The winter wheat grows green then almost blue before drying to amber. The canola grows tall and green then explodes into sun-bright flowers. The sugar beets grow leafy stalks before the tractors rip them up and set them in giant piles, fifteen feet high, waiting to be hauled away and refined to crystals.
After each rotation, the birds feast on the bugs and worms turned up in the till. Storks, crows, and the occasional heron stalk the fields and peck all morning. Someone looking down from the right distance could see striations of time, man, and nature. To my right is the road with cars and buses. To my left is the freshly-turned field where the birds, people, and plants work to their own goals. Past the fields is the canopy of the trees that no one could see through from above.
It was while I was watching the birds clean up after a sugar beet harvest that I saw the stone. It was about the size of a sugar beet, just a shade darker, and it sat at the edge of the field, a few feet from a pile of beets and just inches from my footfall.
Years ago, in a class on landscape architecture, the professor said Maine was once the leading producer of potatoes in the United States. The horse-pulled digging machines that came along in the late 1800s made the job faster, but raised a new problem. The Maine soil was full of rocks, which the machines dug up just as indiscriminately as they dug up everything else. The time the machines saved in digging went toward sorting potatoes from rocks. The professor then showed a slide with an old photo of a Maine farming family at work. To one side was a large pile of potatoes. To the other was a pile of potato-shaped rocks. In the middle was a pile of potatoes and rocks, waiting to be sorted by the smallest child in the family, who looked directly at the camera, nearly crying.
I thought about this photo when I ran past the stone. Was the soil here less rocky? Surely someone had invented a way to sort tubers from rocks in the last century. I thought about the farm equipment I grew up around—harvesters that could pick up dozens of corn stalks at a time, pick the ears, and strip off the kernels in seconds. One day, the fields around town were tall with drying stalks. Then a cloud of dust kicked up. When it settled, the horizon went on again for miles, low and flat, strewn with naked cobs.
The stone had slashes in it, like it had been cut by the blade of the tractor. They were dark red. I assumed this might be rust, a sign of iron in the stone exposed by a thresher blade. I don’t know if this is how rocks or rust really work, but it seems like a nice story.
Over the next two weeks, the stone became a kind of landmark. I knew I was just over halfway done with my run—just a mile and a half left until I’m home. I locked onto it as I approached and stared at it as I passed. Later in the morning, I would take a break from work and look up details on the geology of Switzerland, reading about the Jura Fold and how, even though we’re not near the Alps, their formation shaped the strata beneath us. Anything that big has ripple effects.
Then, one Friday, I decided to pick up the stone. Over the last few days, it had rolled into the path. Cyclists swerved to avoid it. I jumped over it. It was in the way and it needed to go somewhere. I couldn’t put it back into the field. I didn’t want to set it in the median grass, either. Work crews had been out mowing paths where they would dig to place pipes. Clearly the rock could stand up to steel, but I pitied whoever had the misfortune of dragging a weed-eater over a sugar beet-sized hunk of mineral.
Not knowing where to drop the rock, I kept on running. I don’t know why. I have no use for a stone, but neither did the farmer or the road crew or the commuters who passed it.
It’s not easy running with a big rock in your hands. It weighs you down. At first I kept it under my right arm like a football, until my hip started to ache. I moved it to the left and my knee flared up. I carried it in front, but this wore out my arms. I briefly ran a short distance holding it over my head, but I stopped because I probably looked like a maniac. Eventually, I settled on holding it like a football but alternating arms whenever I felt the weight in my step.
I passed about a half-dozen people on the way home. I gave them the traditionalgreeting of Grüezi and they said it back, nodding. A couple glanced at the stone. Nobody asked about it, for obvious reasons. We don’t usually make conversation with a greeting, I was jogging in the opposite direction, and, really, what would you even ask someone? What’s with the rock? I was glad, because I don’t have enough German to explain. I don’t have enough English, either.
I set the stone next to a pile of other stones outside our apartment. I looked at it every so often. It’s easy to identify from the scratches. After a few big rains and shortly after I turned forty, I carried it upstairs and put it in my office. I needed something to look at that was older than me.
It’s not really doing anything here, just sitting in a corner needing the occasional dusting or sometimes being employed as a doorstop. When I look at it, I think about the potato farmers in Maine, about wearing high-tech fiber shorts in the woods, and the way my body ached carrying a rock from a field to a spot just underneath a wi-fi connected laser printer. Those red lines almost glow sometimes. A reminder that no matter how sharp a new technology gets, there’s always going to be a rock in the dirt.
