Pebbles underfoot on this beach are confused. Or maybe they’re amused. They have an uncertain identity. They’re like migrants stopped at a border, where an expended welcome from a country fled from is violently met with unbidden entry into a new one. It’s a tenuous hold. Uncertainty reigns.
They’re stuck in the mud.
All pebbles were once rocks, crags, erratics, chips of cliffs, and some even mountains. But through sculpting by unyielding, sharper rocks, weather and wind, erosion, and the swirling force of oceans, they’ve become what they are — neither mountain nor sand. Just pebbles.
It’s far easier for them to turn to sand than to re-form as mountains. They move away from what they were to something they’re not yet. Becoming sand is their destiny. On the beach they mix with bits of mollusk shells and surf‑creature carcasses. The beach is the mortar, and dynamic earth the pestle doing the grinding and milling. Living creatures excrete liquids, juices, and chemicals that quicken the pace to reduce pebbles into, eventually, tiny grains.
Pebbles and their source materials are borne from volcanic strata; others from slivers of land riddled with vibrant quartz flashing through them. The rudimentary elements emanated from the deepest recesses of the planet when they existed in liquid form. This occurred before life clung to surfaces here. Therefore, the end product — sand — features variations in pleasing natural colors. These range from snow white to azalea pink, wedding‑band gold, earth‑tone brown, and wolf gray, depending on what part of the grid a visitor occupies. The visual return is informed by the unique composition defined by location and what lay beneath the ground to produce it.
Sand manifests at various points in the continuum of millennia. Because of this, there is variation in the sensation underfoot, ranging from powdery‑fine to coarse. It depends on how long it has taken for the pebbles to be degraded. The younger sand produced from them is crude; the older, refined.
Regardless, all pebbles are relegated to smallness.
Because of their inexorable transformation, pebbles are holders of unnoticed truths. They are part of the matter that enabled living things to tentatively grasp onto surfaces to initiate their proliferation. They bear testimony to time being the principal conductor of the symphony of creation. They provide evidence that their formation, spanning eons, ushered in our own genesis.
Therefore, no opportunity should ever be missed to hold them in high esteem — even if crushed underfoot while ambling on the edge of a surf.
Joe D’Amore, who lives in Groveland and has a family home in Onset, leads contemplative hikes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on Cape Cod. He writes “The Outward View” for North of Boston Media Group. You can reach him at damorecos@gmail.com.