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  • StonesTurning Points
  • Barbara Hurd (bio)

Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world?

Henry David Thoreau

The shore was my mother’s favorite subject, but in the foreground of her paintings I can’t recall a single object—never a boat or bird, not even a rock or shell. If my mother were here on the Maine coast with me this afternoon, easel in the sand, she’d be painting the wild skies and disheveled ocean, but there’d be no broken oar in the foreground of her canvas, no daughter rearranging stones on the beach. Even the grasses would seem less like singular blades, more like elongated blurs—inconsequential, a means of getting to what preoccupied her more: what was above or behind, even beyond.

In one of her paintings, the sea seems to be rising into the sky, an uplift of metal, lit up from within, reaching into the clouds’ swirling grains. I used to wonder how she achieved that combustion of platinum and silver and how old she was when she discovered which compelled her more: water and fog or the people and things that traveled through them. Were there failed seascapes somewhere in the attic, their foregrounds littered with spars and brown kelp, the handle of a child’s broken shovel, maybe even a clam digger bent over his bucket? Or did she know from the start it was distant possibilities that commanded her attention?

Without her on this mid-July late afternoon, surprisingly cool and storm-imminent, I pile rocks on top of rocks with the intention of watching them fall down. I haven’t consulted a chart but know from the narrowing exposed mud that the tide is on its way in. I figure I have a couple [End Page 1] of hours. Working without a plan, I stack and ring, balance and wedge, glancing now and then at the water, which eases toward me almost imperceptibly. The stones take on personalities—one so quirkily jagged and unstackable it needs to be its own monument. Another just right for a rampart; a few flat ones, perfectly shaped for a threshold. In the spaces between large, lined-up stones, I press pebbles into mud, like cobbles in an alley. On the tops of flat rocks, I steady smaller ones, and on top of those, even tinier ones. When I stand back to study what I’ve done, the array resembles a foot-high city of alleyways and towers, nothing my mother would ever have assembled.

The Pueblos believed the sun wouldn’t rise if they weren’t there to watch it, and though I know better, it seems suddenly crucial to stay here and see the exact moment this tide turns. It should be easy; I know tidal charts are marked in minutes: high tide, say, at 11:43 or 4:16. Even without a watch, isn’t that an observable moment? The water will approach and approach and then, as if there were some lever pulled, some click that reverses the direction, the water will halt, begin to recede. I’ll know it will come up no farther. I’ll be able to mark the line of high water with a stick, do what I’ve never been able to do in my life—say, here, this is the turning point. Things—my routines, work, relationships, whatever seemed unsatisfying—would be different from then on. How many times have I made that pledge? Here at least there’s a chance, and I can hype the symbolism for a little pleasure. A small pine branch from just up the bank serves well; I study high-water marks on the shore, make a guess, and lay it parallel to the shoreline, fifteen feet inland from where the water now sloshes.

Meanwhile, in my hand: a chunk of granite the size of a chicken egg. Formed over 300 million years ago from magma in the volcanic hotbed that ringed what’s now the Maine coast, it cooled below the surface for millions of years—cooled unevenly, spottily, certain minerals crystallizing first, others intruding later, speckling the molten rock with black mica, feldspar...

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