The Erratic Rock

Field Notes- Oregon

I hadn't planned to find anything that day.

I had simply taken a small detour, following a path up a dry summer hillside toward an ancient rock resting above the Willamette Valley.

Blackberries grew along the trail. I plucked a few as I walked, warm from the sun, Staining my fingertips with their sweetness.

And then I saw it.

The Erratic Rock.

Massive and weathered, resting beneath an impossible blue sky as though it had always belonged to this hill.

But it hadn't.

Long ago, ice and flood carried this stone here from another place, leaving it behind when the waters receded. It has remained ever since- through seasons and centuries, through lives arriving and disappearing around it.

I placed my hand against its rough surface.

There is something humbling about touching a stone so ancient.

For a moment, time became very quiet.

Around the rock, hawthorn trees grew among old fruit trees- remnants of another story, another time. Their branches twisted together at the edge of the hill, and I had the unmistakable feeling that I had wandered across a threshold.

Not into somewhere new.

Into somewhere old.

The kind of place that seems to remember more than we do.

A rabbit appeared nearby.

I stood beneath the hawthorn for a while, looking through the branches toward the valley below, wondering about all that had passed through this little piece of earth before me.

Ice.

Water.

Stone.

Seed.

Fruit.

Animal.

Human.

And still the hawthorn grows.

Still the old rock keeps its place on the hill.

I eventually walked back down the trail, eating blackberries as I went.

Nothing extraordinary had happened.

And yet somehow, everything had.

Perhaps some places aren't asking us to understand them.

Only to notice when we've crossed the threshold.

-Wild Hawthorn