‘The Floating Rock State Heritage Site’ represents the wedding of a mystery area’s gimmick and a State Park’s credibility into an attraction that somehow manages to be a little boring. One can only think so long about what anomalous forces must exist to levitate the site’s boulder before remembering that the world is a big, strange place and that small, strange things happen here all the time.’
It takes me no little time to piece together the scene at ‘Floating Rock’ and, as I do, a bitter wind rolls over the landscape. It is winter, somewhere, and that somewhere’s winter has blown all this long way. I pull my jacket tight and huddle into myself.
This is a dry stretch of the earth and very flat, flat until I began to see the boulders which signaled my nearing the site. The floating rock is smaller than its kin, brown and roughly oblong, a meter at its widest. It is not floating, which is why it took me some time to identify the thing. If it weren’t for the signs and folksy illustrations put up by absent rangers, it would have been just another boulder among many.
‘Alex’ is the name carved into the side of the once floating rock where it lay. As far as I can tell it was this act of vandalism that also grounded the rock. I sit, in the dirt, and grow smaller amongst its sisters and brothers so that they can bear the brunt of the wind.
Lethargic ants wind aimlessly, sparse in number and disorganized by the autumn chill. Between them they carry the carcass of some larger insect, a thing I don’t recognize but that fits well enough within the realm of normalcy as to be easily forgotten. I pluck it from them and set it up on a stone like some tiny statue (in memoriam) but then I feel bad and I return it to the ants. They’ve begun to panic and seem unforgiving of my change of heart. They avoid the carcass, rightfully superstitious.
As dusk begins to thicken there is a sound ahead of me. The floating rock wobbles in place, shedding dust from its wounds. Moved by some unknown force, it tilts, slightly, and drags a half-inch before becoming still again. It is quiet for nearly ten minutes when, as before, it begins to shift. This time it rises, wobbles to an impossible balance and then falls over. A few minutes later it lifts again and maintains a tenuous standing position.
Over the course of an hour the floating rock rises and falls several times, never by more than a few inches but far enough, always, that pieces of it crack and split off. It struggles to remember the easy flight I see in the pictures around it, the days when it would float four feet in the air and spin lazily in the wind.
After a long time, I leave the floating rock to its work and find my way back to the truck. I wonder at the writer’s dismissal of the place and I wonder if I would have felt (or did feel) the same way seeing the rock untouched by the vandal. Is there value in struggle and, if so, is it inherent to struggle in all its forms?
I struggle, reader, but I do not know toward or against what. Already I feel the struggle has reshaped me and I do hope it is a refining and not the same blind crashing that splinters the rock, that may reduce it to dust before it joins the wind once more.
-traveler
