This was originally published to Substack on 9 August, 2023. It is an original short story by me. Copyright (C) Cliff Hansen, 2023.

The joy of the search for the perfect rock and what to do when you’ve found it.

When you’re a kid growing up in the rural Inland Northwest, there are few things more valuable to you than a good skipping stone. I suppose I should make that previous sentence past tense, since stones don’t have screens and therefore a modern kid wouldn’t know what to do with them. Of course, if the technology we now take for granted existed when I was a child, I too would have spent every moment I could get away with playing video games, but then I would have never learned the pleasure of a simple flat stone.

There’s no contest, a video game is way more fun than a skipping stone, but that’s because often millions of dollars have been spent to make the game deliver the maximum amount of addictive dopamine as it can. Perhaps “fun” is the wrong word, as games are more “desirable” in that many of us feel a sense of loss or anxiety when we’re not playing them. I love a good video game, but sometimes when I’m out in nature and I watch as the perfect skipping stone bounces along the still waters of a lake, I wonder if we’ve gone too far.

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. I have treatment-resistant double-depression, which is the extra fun kind. When I wake up each morning, I’m already in such a state of despair that most people would find rehabilitating. That’s my baseline. That’s normal. Then, I often have depression on top of that, which is like falling into a well inside a basement. It’s fantastic.

A lifetime of struggling with this has lead to an overflowing toolbox of “coping mechanisms” as if I’m a hoarder of the tools of the wellness industrial complex. I’ve explored so many different ways of keeping myself sane as I’ve struggled to accomplish the bare necessities of life in a society that seems custom designed to be the worst environment possible for me.

Which brings us back to my Grandpa Potter. He was no Luddite and always purchased the newest in film-making or radio technology that existed in his time. But he would be the first to tell you that our use of technology was going in the wrong direction. If you thought you were being clever and accused him of hypocrisy with his shop full of modern woodworking tools and scuba gear, he’d explain how those things were designed to connect him from the world around us, and not remove him from it. Which brings us back to skipping stones.

Potter never knew it, but he could have been a professional mindfulness coach. If you were to put a dollar sign on the love for nature he instilled in me—as the wellness industrial complex is keen to do—the education he gave me would be worth millions. With the skill of a Buddhist master, he taught me to notice and feel the breeze on the hairs of my neck, to observe the currents of the water, and to work with the grain of wood instead of against it. He taught me to let no good skipping stone go wasted.

I’d find the first flat rock I could and give it a good huck. I got pretty good, and a good fifteen skips wasn’t unheard of, though I’m lucky for three or four now. Grandpa, however, would take his time. He’d spend an hour or two looking for that perfect rock while we kids played. Sure there were a million good skipping stones, but he wanted the perfect one. He explained to me that there is only one best stone at any given river or lake at any given time, and it was always his goal to find it.

So I would join Grandpa in his search. I’d find stones that were flat and round and felt perfect in my hand. I was good at finding rocks I knew from experience would get the maximum number of skips when thrown at the perfect angle. Usually he’d shake his head and so I’d give it a good throw across the surface of the water, counting its bounces. Sometimes, he’d take enormous interest in a stone I brought him and study it carefully. He’d test its weight in his hand and hold it up to the light to see the way its quartz or mica shone. But then he’d hand it back to me and say “This is a good one, make the best of it.” And I’d throw it into the lake, taking extra care to aim it as best I could to get the most bounces. Sometimes it would flop and sink without a bounce or only one or two and we’d both laugh.

Without fail, Grandpa would always have found that perfect skipping stone before it was time to go. He’d show it to me, and I’d look at it with a sense of awe, like I was looking at the numinous veil of the universe itself. Of all the stones on the beach, he’d found the perfect one. Then, mission accomplished, he’d put it in his pocket and whistle as we walked away. You see, a perfect skipping stone is too important to waste actually skipping.

I never found out what he did with all the stones he took and I never saw them again. Unless he was showing us how to skip stones with the lesser skipping stones we’d found, I can’t recall ever seeing Grandpa actually skip a stone himself.

Was it wrong to remove the perfect skipping stone from the beach, I asked. Grandpa told me _his_ theory of relativity. Once the best stone was removed, it meant that the previous runner up was now objectively the best one on the beach and it was good to give that new stone an opportunity to step up and shine.

Years later, I found myself living in Africa, on an island in the Atlantic. I’ll explain the circumstances of that in other narratives, I’m sure. But there was far more down time than I expected and often I struggled with boredom. I would fight this boredom with wine, and while that usually worked, I knew it addressed the symptom not the illness. Boredom became my enemy, and I reflected to the lessons Grandpa Potter had taught me to relish stillness.

Whenever I noticed myself feeling bored, I’d reach out and touch the sand or a tree. I’d try to consciously notice the wind or heat on my neck. I’d pick up a stone and weigh it in my hand as Grandpa would, and think about its possibilities when it came to skipping.

Once, I was helping a friend deliver polio vaccinations far in the “fora” which would translate best to the “outback” if you pardon my use of Australian English. My friend was volunteering with the Red Cross and had been appropriately trained to provide the vaccine and I was coming along to assist and provide him company, but mostly because I wanted to see what life was like further away from the trappings that even my village had. A family in one remote clump of houses took issue with having a Black man give them the vaccination, and said they’d prefer it coming from me, the whitest of the White guys. This was strange to me, because they were themselves Black, and gave my friend and I much to talk about regarding the complicated consequences of colonialism.

Although there was nothing complicated about the vaccination and I’d seen my friend deliver it countless times, I refused to play ball. He was the trained volunteer and I was not. I removed myself from the equation and left the house. Sitting outside was a teenage girl. Her hair was matted and her clothes were dirty and ripped from the hard work it takes to be a subsistence farmer in the Sahel. She was poor and had lived a hard life, but she smiled at me warmly.

Between her thick folk accent and my poor language skills, we were never able to talk. But she squatted down on the ground across from me and began a search for the perfect stone, just like grandpa had always done. After a while she found a few that suited her fancy, and picked the first one up in her right hand. She tossed it a few times and caught it again the same hand. Satisfied, she added another stone to her hand, tossing one and while it was still in the air, tossing the other. When she was satisfied, she’d catch them and stop. She’d add another stone to the handful, and start again.

I’d seen juggling before, but it was always with two hands, never one. Juggling also has a performative aspect, and I had no sense this girl was showing off, she was just using what she had available to entertain herself and to keep herself sane in a difficult life. I sat down with her, mirrored her actions, and found it much harder to do than I’d expected. She laughed as the rocks fell or hit my hands. She was well-practiced and I’d never be able to get more than a few rocks going and even then not for long.

Years later, I found myself bored on a different part of the world, this time on an island in the Pacific. I was sitting at the stoop of my house, enjoying the climate, but trying to not let boredom take me as there were a million wonderful ways to appreciate the moment. Seeing a small rock, I reached down and picked it up. My kitten Loki, watched me with keen interest a few feet away. I tossed the rock to her and she jumped and caught it with her hands. She was thrilled! I grabbed another one, but this one she watched and made no effort to catch. I selected another rock, and this one she jumped to catch. To this day, I have never figured out what makes a perfect stone for Loki, nor to my Grandpa.

It’s hard to slow down. I’m always being demanded to meet productivity at work, to find a way to monetize my every free second so I can make my medical copays, and being constantly inundated with electronics or life tasks which scream for my attention. Sure, often when I’m feeling my head spinning from all this I’ll jump into a video game as an escape. But often, I’ll sit down outside and see if I can juggle small stones with one hand. I’ll toss rocks to Loki and laugh as she joyfully jumps for some but completely ignores others. Or, when time and gas money permits, I’ll drive to the river or lake and look for the perfect stone there, but unlike Grandpa, I believe that you can’t know if a skipping stone is perfect until you’ve seen how it actually skips.

Grandpa is no longer with us, but at his funeral, I made sure to put a stone on his grave. And I made sure it was the most perfect one I could find.

The Perfect Skipping Stone by Cliff Hansen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0