Limestone

Once, this entire area used to be submerged beneath a vast inland sea. Crinoids, fish, trilobites, and bi-valve creatures called that water home.  Their bodies are still everywhere I walk on the land, preserved in vast layered sheets of limestone. As a child I loved scouting the abandoned quarry just down the road for buckets full of fossils and would arrange them on my science shelves in my bedroom, along with pickled fish and mudpuppies, deer and racoon skulls and models of dinosaurs.

The rain and snow have sculpted some of the layers into tiny caves, canyons and sometimes just tricky foot-sized holes waiting beneath the bracken. Moss covered and cool, the network of exposed rock, with cedar clinging their vast open faces, runs along the front edge of our property.  We’ve heard stories of bobcats raising families in their depth.

This past summer, I started to trim up the cedar tree branches so I could sit overlooking the miniature canyon system.  The moss absorbs my footsteps and interestingly, the mosquitos tend to leave the grotto alone, perhaps because the smell of the trees rises like incense in the heat.  What is it about the depths that so fascinates me?  I crane my neck to follow some small passageway into darkness, resisting the urge to drop down into one 8-foot hole with a flashlight to see where it goes.

Truth is, I’m not sure I could clamber out without the help of a ladder. Limestone is fragile, like most sedimentary rock. The plant life has dug into its surfaces with ease, sending up everything from slender grasses to cedar and maple trees. A vaster circle of life, from ancient sea creatures and silt to soil to treetops can be read in a single glance. I often look too close to home to see resurrections and rebirths. Crinoid to sugar maple to pancakes to human to…?

In one bowl of the land, a low-branching maple holds court over stone and a half-moon curve of apple trees. The rectangular slabs of rock crop up in strange angles, while one has stretched itself out over the roots like an altar.  Juniper has taken hold, softening the edges, and I will probably go in with nippers and cut it all back just to see the formations more clearly.  Yeah, I like rocks that much. It’s a prickly place, though—even wild raspberry bushes love the low area and grab at me when I walk there.

Where our driveway enters the camp, a slab of limestone perches like a grave marker.  I’m painting an old sawmill blade with our camp name on it, and my husband will install it on the rock.  Metal, drawn from the earth, leaning back on stone again. More circles of life. I like my participation in that—human creativity and stone mixing together.  The land doesn’t care it’s owned.  Considering we spend around five hours a day working on it, I’m not sure it doesn’t own us.  The sign will rust, decay, mix with soil and probably shoot up willow sapling from the tree that shades it just to annoy my husband.  Willows are messy trees, always waving their arms around like divas. He can complain at great length why a homeowner should never have a messy willow in their yard.

I like them, of course. So guaranteed, I’ll be there, too, waving ribbons of light for folks who want to look close enough.