WE FOUND THIS STONE on the beach at Cape Meares, Oregon. We’d flown to Austin, rented a car, driven to LA to see friends, then headed up the coast as far as Portland. Two thousand miles in two weeks. Desert, mountain, forest, and ocean. Mile upon mile of empty, potholed, arrow-straight roads. Our headlights cutting the night. Giant birds looming through our windshield. Unknown animals darting recklessly under our wheels. Trees, tumbleweeds, cactuses, all a shifting blur. Our pictures are hallucinations.
We drove through the Southwest, spent a day at Taos Pueblo, most of another at Meteor Crater, visited the Petrified Forest, and stopped to gaze at the vast fact of Shiprock erupting from the New Mexico desert. Stone. A planet of stone.
At Cape Meares, we walked along the beach in the early evening. The stone lay on the pale sand among the driftwood. One out of thousands, hundreds of thousands. The one that stood out in that light at that angle at that moment. It had unusual colors and textures. It was heavy and sat firmly in the hand. It had been worked by the Pacific but wasn’t smooth like the rest.
A small black-and-white dog
