The Heart That Let Go

I was maybe a hundred feet from camp, on my knees in front of a boulder, photographing lichen. That was the whole plan for the morning. Orange crusts on red rock, the kind of thing I'd walked past a thousand times before I started carrying a camera.

The boulder, a hundred feet from camp. The heart is around the back.

I stood up to stretch and walked around the back of the boulder, and there was a heart in it.

Not carved. Nobody had been at it with a knife. The rock had split along its own seams until one piece was left in that shape — a clean point at the bottom, two lobes at the top, lichen working the edges, the paler stone showing through where the surface had worn down. It looked deliberate. It was the opposite of deliberate.

What was around the back.

Here's what actually made it. Water gets into a seam in the rock. It freezes. And unlike almost everything else on earth, water expands when it turns solid — about nine percent — so the ice pushes the crack wider than the water ever filled. Then it thaws and drains deeper, and freezes again. In this country that cycle runs a few hundred times a year at the surface. Do that for longer than anyone has been alive and the rock comes apart along whatever lines were weakest to begin with.

So the shape isn't a message. It's arithmetic. Ice pried at that boulder for longer than anyone has been alive, following seams laid down when the rock formed, and the pieces happened to land in a shape that means something to human beings and nothing at all to the rock. That's most of what I photograph, honestly — the meaning is ours, the work was somebody else's.

I went back the next season to shoot it again in better light.

It had let go over the winter. Same process that made it, finished the job. There was a gap where it had been and a piece of red rock down in the scree that I couldn't have picked out of a hundred others.

I'm glad I stopped walking that morning. I nearly didn't — I had the shot I came for, the lichen was good, and going around the back of a boulder for no reason is exactly the sort of thing you skip when you're ready to head back for coffee.

This photograph is the only thing left of it.

Stop. Look closer.

The photograph

Rock Heart is available on metal, on canvas, and on archival paper. It belongs to Weathered Time — the work where you can see how long something took.