Pebble
By Craig Carey
I threw another pebble into Lake Michigan. It skipped twice and plunked. I tossed another up as high as it would go, end over end, and like a sharp knife through a thumb it sank into the rolling water without a splash. I felt the pebbles under my shoes, too, like lint stuck in my beard, which had grown thick and shaggy and, had I cared to look myself in the mirror, might either fit with the blue sweater, or stand out against the memory of the barista in Eugene who called me homeless.
The rocks I threw into Lake Michigan I aimed away from Eugene, in time and place. I threw east from the dunes of Kohler-Andrae State Park, where, back in high school, I ditched prom senior year and spent the day rolling around in sand and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with my feet in the water. Those were decent times. Those were decent people. Memories like that come now and then, with a little spark. Like the spark of a hammer glancing off a nail during a backyard game of stump.
Had that barista thrown me out of the coffee shop, I might have continued to the coast. But I sat there for a few more hours thinking about her, the one with curly brown hair and black eyes, whose face went red when I explained that I was not homeless and had bought breakfast from her twenty minutes before she told me I needed to buy something to get the code for the bathroom.
The sky above Lake Michigan, dark clouds folding into dark water so the whole façade seemed like all the color in all the world disappeared behind my back, turned darker. The next pebble I skipped into the water. Once, twice, three times before the finish. Listening mostly for the last splash, I turned up the beach and trod my way over the rocky part of the shoreline.
Sand used to bother me when it got in my shoes. Now, though, after so much sand, it became more a fact of life, like waking up to the neighbor’s dog barking at morning walkers back in Colorado. We had a nice place for those two years, in a quiet neighborhood two blocks from the liquor store and ten minutes from groceries. I tossed that house, with the broken toilet in the only bathroom and the dusty kitchen, into the lake of memory, listening for a splash. Could have been more a home than I’d ever known had I cared to stay, had I cared to pick up some pebbles there and keep them in my pocket.
Lake Michigan feels like an ocean when one stands on the shore and looks across trying to make out their grandmother on the Michigan side waving to them. It consumes the horizon, commands it, closes off the rest of the world as if to say, “Here you go no further. Through Canada or Illinois, no other option.”
Senior year we pulled a picnic table down the beach and into the lapping water and sat with our feet wet while we ate. That day in early spring the warm weather hadn’t yet come and we shivered against the heat we lost to the water through our feet. Warmth seeped out of our toes and into millions of gallons of fresh water that wouldn’t feel a difference either way.
I stopped under a tree whose roots jutted out from a small hill and looked like it could house a thousand birds huddled up against the greying sky and approaching water. Or just me tucked into the soft wood. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater down to my wrists and bent down for another stone. Flat and smooth and rounded and grey. Maybe five skips before the finish. The branches of the tree above me, leaves long gone from the October turn, seemed to shudder in the dying day. I kept walking, turning the new stone in my hands.
When I finally left the coffee shop in Eugene and decided not to continue to the ocean, I forgave the barista. She had every right to assume, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. The ocean, I figured, would say the same things as Lake Michigan, with higher consequences. At least at Kohler-Andrae, I could drive the forty minutes south and find more familiar stones at the park my friends and I used to spend some Friday evenings in the summer sitting on logs talking at the water and to each other. Familiarity, though, comes with a price.
The evening I left Oregon, I slept in the panhandle of Idaho outside Coeur d’Alene on some no-services exit off interstate 90. In my car I slept like I had a home, waking up to condensation in my beard and on the windows. I drove the almost twenty-four hours straight through to Kohler-Andrae, never once thinking of going straight to the city.
A few hundred feet further on from the lonely tree on the side of a hill, sagging into the sand and dangerously close to sinking so far into the beach as to become a relic, was the picnic table from that early spring day. I sat down on the low side looking at the greyness, water indistinguishable from the sky, turning that last stone in my hands. I felt my moustache on my lip and reached with cold fingers to brush the hair to the side like I would if I were about to sip beer.
The little flat pebble in my hands boasted no importance. Chance drove me to pick it up. There were many others flat and smooth and perfect skipping stones just like it on the beach. All grey and all nestled up against each other like friends on a couch in the middle of a long night of drinking. Chance brought me to Eugene, too, as I toured the northwest. Through the Cascades and Walla Walla. I found peace in the sunrays poking through storm clouds and onto rolling green hills. And in the Redwoods, I found a solitude granted as though God were a businessman flipping a quarter to a beggar on the street. And up through Oregon, to the coffee shop and the barista who convinced me to come home.
The picnic table shifted under my weight and sank another inch into the soft sand. I stood and walked further north, away from that city I once knew and away from the uncertainty of going back. I slipped the pebble into my front pocket at felt the weight of it, lighter than a phone but just as slim, against my thigh.
Forty-five minutes from home and all I could think about was the pebble in my pocket. All I could see was grey. All I could feel was the breeze on my cheeks and the hairs in my nose starting to freeze. Forty-five minutes from home, and I walked north along the beach, wondering if I had already crossed the park boundary.
I looked back at the picnic table and the tree.
Those old friends vanished into the tide of time, eroded by miles and miles of highway and years and years of looking forward. So much looking forward that the city forty-five minutes south seemed emptier than it had in years. Emptier than an almost homeless man in a coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon. Emptier than the desert. Devoid of those people, of all those people, who once beckoned with open arms for me to come crawling back to the Midwest, short on cash and showers.
I tossed the pebble up and caught it in my palm. Insignificant.
When the lake would freeze in the deep winters of my youth, my friends and I would sometimes wander out to where the ice stopped and cold waves would come crashing onto the rolling dunes of solid water. We wouldn’t speak to each other, just listen to the waves crashing around us and pretend we were somewhere more dangerous. The artic tundra, the top of K2. We used to think summer would never come, that hot cocoa in the basement with a movie and a laugh would be forever. How little we looked forward then, how little we thought of home.
The air turned proper cold, no longer biting at the nose but penetrating the soul. I turned south and set my course along the shore. Back past the picnic table, the tree, back past the sand dunes hardened by the changing season, back toward the car that had taken me away from that place so many times before, back towards that city forty-five minutes south that held nothing for me anymore. Nothing at all except a hard goodbye to a wreath-framed picture next to a coffin that housed a face I treasured, a faced eroded by miles and years, but still with vitality and happiness in the ocean of memory. Like a single sailboat wandering the horizon of Lake Michigan on a sunny July morning seen from the bluffs above Milwaukee. A hard goodbye, no chance of return. A barista in Eugene, Oregon, of all people, to convince me back.
I stopped when I was almost in the parking lot, having forgotten the pebble in my pocket. I took it out and felt the weight of it against my palm.
I heaved it into the grey. With all my strength, with all the thoughts of the coast and Eugene and what awaited forty-five minutes south behind my arm, I threw that little pebble to the water.
Before it splashed, I turned to leave.
THE END
Author Bio: Craig Carey is a writer, climber, and outdoorsman who lives in Colorado and spends his days in the mountains.