Day 45: Yesterday was a long day for me. I had business north of Seattle in the early afternoon with an open period of five hours before Morris practice. I am not one for going shopping, so I'd mapped out a couple of "earthcaches," geology-themed containerless geocaches. Both required visits to glacial erratics, large rocks which were transported to the area by glacial action. It was too slick to climb the biggest one and I didn't have a hand lens to help identify the lichens on the smaller, but I was reminded of an event from my childhood by these boulders.
While my father was alive, we lived in this general area. It was rural then, unlike its present suburban sprawl, and my dad decided to dig a garden at the edge of our orchard. He hadn't dug far before he hit the point of a problem rock. He kept digging, digging, digging, but he wasn't finding any particular slope to the rock's shoulders. He dug some more, the hole getting ever wider and marginally deeper as he tried to find the boundaries of the boulder. It became something of an obsession, and dinner conversation frequently rolled around to how he might get it out of the hole once he could get a chain around it, but fortunately for our old Ford sedan, that day never came. Daddy gave up after exposing a Volkswagen-sized portion of the offending object and simply shovelled all his hard-won dirt back in the hole. It may still be there for all I know, waiting for someone to dig it out and make an Earthcache out of it.
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