Marking Place

For the Ecotone wiki’s joint topic on Stones and Rocks.

Ever since our paleolithic ancestors started painting on stone, it has been the material of choice for marking, in a more or less permanent way, a geographic location of particular significance. The art of Scottish sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay explores this neoclassically (a commission at UC San Diego shows a 1987 example), but cairns on mountaintops are as interesting in their way as the Trajan column. Stone: permanence. Human interaction with stone: human attempt to project permanence.

Gravestones are the markers most of us will encounter, but even they are less than permanent what with acid rain and ordinary erosion. When my father was cremated, my mother scattered his ashes to the waves from the northern California clifftops by their home. At the time I missed the lack of a stone that would give me a place to visit, to mourn. A series of rocks guards the inlet where the ashes scattered five years ago. They are bigger, more imposing, than most gravestones, and during our visit there this weekend I was able to touch my father’s memory by a visit to the cliff and the rocks below. The pelagic cormorants are coming into breeding plumage; California gray whales are migrating north. The surf pounds the rocks and the cycle continues. One day these rocks will be sand.