ROCKING ON

I like rocks.  I don’t know much about them but when I’m out walking and I see a rock at my feet and I like the look of it, I tend to pick it up.  

Of course the question of what it means to ‘like the look of a rock’ is a strange one, and I’ve thought about why one rock appeals more than another. It’s obviously got something to do with general aesthetics but it’s also about personal taste (I’m especially fond of flint and obsidian) and maybe it’s also to do with pareidolia - everybody likes a rock that looks like an animal or a face, or not wholly like a rock.  

No doubt John Ruskin had a lot of say about it.  These are some of Ruskin’s rocks, though not picked up while walking, as far as I know.

Now, if you’re on a long walk and you pick up every rock you like the look of  you can end up carrying half a ton of geological samples in your pockets and rucksack.  So my technique (call it that) is to pick up the first rock I like and carry it with me until I see another rock that l think looks better, then I pick that one up and drop the first.  It’s not a very sophisticated process.

I never made any great claims for the originality of this practice but I also never met anybody else who did it until I was in Quartzsite, Arizona, one hell of a town, a centre for rock and fossil hunters, and depending on the day and time of year, you may find any number of dealers there selling rocks, most of which I think they’ve picked up in the desert.  I understand this is perfectly legal in those parts, though by no means everywhere in America.

Buying a rock from a dealer always seems like a bit of a cheat, but of course if the dealer is a hands-on kind of a guy he has all the time in the world to go hunting for them in the desert, whereas I’ve only ever been a tourist in those parts.  So the dealer has much better stuff.  And I got talking to one of the dealers, and without any prompting from me he said sometimes when he was walking for pleasure rather than business, his method was just the same as mine – go out there, pick up a rock, keep it until you find a better one, then swap it.  I can’t say I felt like I’d found a kindred soul but it was somehow cheering.

And then, blow me down, I was reading Richard Long’s Walking the Line and there it is on page 53, a text piece titled “Walking Stones.” This is what it looks like:

Walking 382 miles in 11 days strikes me as pretty good – over 34 miles a day - but I do wonder how he selected the stones he picked up.  Was it based on aesthetic choice or random selection or something else?  You might also wonder when does a stone become a pebble, or a rock.

Of course Long ended up with no rocks in his pockets or rucksack.  I, on the other hand, always end up taking at least one home with me.   In due course I get rid of them.  Over the years I must have got dispersed hundreds, some of them a very long way from where they started, but a few always remain.  This is the current selection (definitely not a collection) lined up in the Nicholson atelier:

Here's Richard Long at work: