I didn't know I would be taking so many pictures of rocks when I first started this biography.  It started as a way to visually demonstrate the authenticity of the effort.  Now, it is a ritual, and every time I go to the beach, I look for interesting rocks and interesting settings in which to photograph them.  It has become a kind of language or code.  I have not deciphered the code, and I don't know what the patterns of rocks mean.  It probably means nothing, but the patterns feel like the communication of an essential truth.

I have been searching for a particular type of rock that would speak of the deep history of this land.  I keep checking for fossils as the land opens up before it falls into the tidal zone.  So far, that mammoth tooth or arrowhead has escaped my notice.  I did find one piece of petrified wood, although it does not say anything specific about this forest.  It may have come from far away, brought here by the glacier.

The stones are new every day, even though they are always the same.  When you look across the gravelly beach, it seems the same as every other day.  When I hunt for that particular stone that will star in the day's picture, I see just how varied and beautiful they are.  So many are unique, created in processes I don't understand.  The stones with perpendicular lines seem like that couldn't have been made by any sedimentary process I can imagine.  If each stone could tell its story of millennia, I could learn of the fire and ice, rain and wind, accretion and erosion.  Some rocks bear the scars of sudden dramatic events.  Was one of them blasted out of Mt. Rainier the last time it experienced a major eruption?