Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.
The first time I wrote a Facebook post about one of my morning walks around Contoocook was the day I built a tiny cairn on a mailbox post. Rocks have been an important part of my walks ever since.
The rocks for my mailbox cairn came from the newly built gravel parking lot by the high school softball fields. It is full of smooth little stones, more than I needed for my mailbox project, so I started setting some aside in case another project occurred to me. One did.
Beside the driveway to the high school, the town installed a low fence with flat-topped wooden posts. One day I started decorating the fence posts with smooth stones from the parking lot. Soon, every fence post had a capstone. Occasionally one went missing, and when that happened, I replaced it. Then something wonderful happened.
As I approached the first fence post one morning, I saw an unfamiliar flash of color. When I got closer, I discovered that someone had replaced a few of my capstones with rocks they had painted. Some had holiday themes. Some had inspirational messages. Some just had pretty pictures. Eventually, a couple of dozen painted rocks were installed on my fence posts, along with a tiny replica of the monument that marks the southernmost point in the United States, down in the Florida keys. Someone once installed a rock with the word “Why?” written on it. The next day, I left one on the same post that said “Why Not?”
Judging by stylistic markers, it looked like several different artists installed decorated rocks, but I never knew who the artists were, except for one, the owner of one of the dogs I walk, whose painted rocks depicted scenes from his homeland, such as the Sydney Opera House. Over time, all of the decorated rocks went away to good homes I am sure, but to this day, I love having had five or six collaborators on my fence post project.
About a year into that project, fence post capstones started going missing more frequently and in greater numbers. I suspected that the decapitators were high school students out taking their daily mask-break walks, and once I actually saw a student systematically pluck ten or twenty rocks from their posts and toss them into the grass. I didn’t get upset. I figured that whatever motivated the student was just as compelling to her as my project was to me. Sisyphus-like, I persevered. I ended my fence post capstone project the morning when I discovered a decapitation that was thorough enough to suggest that it had been performed by the people who cut the grass next to the fence line.
But before I pulled the plug, this happened. A day or two after a particularly comprehensive student decapitation, I arrived to find every fence post wearing not just a single capstone but a beautiful little cairn of three or four stones each. I later learned that a boy who lives along my walking route spent three or four hours building all those cairns. My first sight of them gave me goosebumps.
Another day, while walking through the gravel parking lot, I met a little girl and her grandfather. The girl was collecting rocks, and we spent some time talking about the kinds of rocks we each liked. From then on, I called her “The Little Rock Collector” in my Facebook posts, and when I saw a rock I thought she’d like, I’d leave it in a special place for her. Whenever she sees me, she thanks me for the rocks I leave her.
In addition to stones for cairn building and specimens for the Little Rock Collector, I also pick up lucky stones. Lucky stones, I once learned from an artist who once made an etching about them, are stones of one color that have a stripe of another color that goes all the way around. I’ve found hundreds, and I give them as gifts for birthdays and other special occasions. You learn a lot about someone when you give them a rock, and every recipient of my lithic largesse has responded with a smile and a sincere “thank you.”
The parking lot also gives me heart-shaped stones. One night last winter, a player on our high school girls’ basketball team had a scary health situation on the court. I gave her a heart-shaped stone to let her know that all of us on the sidelines were rooting for a speedy recovery (which she had). Her mother has told me that the stone I gave her daughter is now a prized possession. A prized possession for her, a prized memory for me.
When I started writing this piece, I thought it was going to be about my mild fixation on gravel, but in the writing, I’ve come to realize that my real topic is all the people who have shared my interest in the rocks I find. I like my rocks; I love my friends.