The Stones I Carry

Abstract

The Stones I Carry Reg Darling (bio) The stones in my pocket help keep me honest by being stronger and truer than my words. They tether me to places that seem radiant with spirit and resonant with truths that cannot be uttered. [I don’t know what “spirit” fully means, but in the absence of a better word, I accept its ambiguity. The difference between a mossy, water-smoothed and -shaped marble boulder in southwestern Vermont and a paved parking lot anywhere transcends both semantics and philosophy. That difference is what I call spirit, and it keeps me alive. Spirit’s manifestations are many, and I can’t perceive them all, which is why I decline the violent exclusivity of belief. Instead, I try to live in the confluence of my heart’s strange mysteries and the land’s implacable wildness.] In a sense, I carry those places in my pocket, and that helps me to carry them in my heart. Weminuche Wilderness Area Schoodic Peninsula Rio Grande Gorge [End Page 135] Arches National Park Taconic Range Green Mountains [Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont.] One morning in the mid-1990s, when I was getting ready for a busy office day and had to teach in the evening, I was suffering from a lingering cold and felt harried and overwhelmed. My weary distress was pretty obvious. As I was leaving, my son Oren, eleven years old then, gave me a white pebble. “Here, carry this with you. It’s from Gifford Woods,” he said. And through that weary stressful day and many days to come, it was a comforting presence. [Gifford Woods State Park, near Killington, Vermont, was a favorite camping place on the summer wanders that gave me lifesaving respite from a stressful career, and rendered Oren’s vision of the world both broader and more intimate.] I carried the stone Oren gave me in my pocket for a dozen years. Its sharp edges were worn smooth by coins, keys, pens, and the smooth, rounded quartz pebble from my ancestral territory that soon joined it in my pocket. [The Tionesta watershed of the Allegheny Plateau.] Once, I left Oren’s stone in a special place in the woods (where the resident ravens knew me and I became acquainted with a large, ghost-like coyote whom I regarded as brethren) for most of a summer. [Nowadays one must hike through an oil field to get there.] When I retrieved it, I imagined it to be somehow infused with the spirit of that place mingled with the spirit of the Green Mountains. [End Page 136] [It became poetry made of stone.] When Oren was fifteen, a floatplane carried us far out into the tundra of northern Quebec, where we hunted caribou with longbows and homemade arrows. Sitting near a well-used caribou trail on a large island in the Pons River, I felt an unexpected wave of deep, childlike homesickness. [We were so incredibly far from everything known and dearly loved in a staggeringly beautiful, but also incredibly harsh, land.] Holding the quartz pebble from the beloved landscape of my ancestry and birth transformed poignancy into comfort and fond nostalgia. The pastoral gentleness of my native Alleghenies seemed alive in that smooth, round piece of white quartz. After I killed a caribou on the island a few days later, I left the pebble there. It seemed intuitively necessary. [We brought home our winter’s meat and through it took the tundra into our blood, muscles, and bones.] The pebble I left on the island was soon replaced by another that was, in turn, left in a faraway place. I began gathering pebbles on my wandering hikes (often retracing routes gleaned from my great-grandfather’s journals) for the purpose of leaving them on my travels beyond my homeland. There are quartz pebbles from the Tionesta watershed in Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ontario, Quebec, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, [End Page 137] Virginia, and West Virginia. There are stones from all those places...