Star Rock

I've written earlier about my efforts to landscape my yard with rocks -- putting borders around trees and so on, making natural areas (and reducing the space needing to be mowed). Not terribly hard to do here; this was near the furthest reach of the last glaciation period, so the topsoil conceals a lot of glacial till -- the pieces of rock broken off from Canadian mountains and pushed along by the glaciers. So most excavation turns up quite a few rocks.

I sometimes haunt construction sites -- in the early stages, before they put up the "no trespassing signs," and I found one place where contractors seem to dump soil and rock debris. I've found some pretty good stones, including a couple agates. Various sizes too, from medium chunks to a couple as large as I could carry. All sorts of colors and shapes and chemical composition.

These last few weeks the utility folks have been replacing the gas lines on our street, which has required them to do a lot of directional drilling, a cool technique in which a drill tunnels along a few feet underground, controlled by a guy with a computer screen, trying to work the drill bit between obstacles. Sometimes, though, they run into something they can't get around, usually a large rock. Then they dig it up.

Driving by one day I saw a very large rock sitting where none had been before, and even I could figure out they had pulled it out of the ground. After some asking around, I learned that I could indeed have it, if no one else had claimed it first. The foreman gave me a can of white spray paint and told me to paint a large "X" where I wanted it placed. So I did.

That afternoon I came home and found the rock -- boulder really -- up in my yard. My, it's big. A bit more than 3 feet high, 3 feet wide, and 4 feet tall. I can't quite tell what it is for sure, but I think it's granite. If so, and if Google is right, that means it's approximately 6,120 pounds of rock -- more than three tons. No wonder the foreman told me I could have it, but once it got placed it would stay put.

So no room for buyer's (asker's) remorse. It's my star rock and it's here to stay. now I have to figure out how to landscape around it. I suspect from now on my house will be "the one with the huge rock in the yard." There are worse descriptions.

And I am fascinated with it. Those last glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, so this rock and its cohorts were left behind 100 centuries ago. Over the years they were covered with topsoil, the land became the forested home of Native Americans, then farmland, then housing developments. Until this year, a month ago, when my rock was excavated. Now, after eons of darkness, it's exposed to rain again, and I look forward to seeing what those rains reveal.