The Stele

The book is in the library, an old book in an old, empty concrete and glass library exemplifying the brutalism movement in the rain. I return there, and to other libraries in the area on quiet days alone, new in town, but forgotten otherwise. I forget myself.

The stone is carved with spirals and other patterns that seem to be part of a picture. I learn it is relatively long and straight, like a car tipped onto its driver’s side, but the ridges along the raised profile are cut with regular, deep, purposeful notches. It is a calendar, then. Where is this rock?

I lose track of it, but somehow find myself filming an eerie video at an abandoned Quaker meeting house a few months later on the Eqinox. The hills are draped in mist that rays of sunlight drive out, and the footage is enough to send me off looking at some other long lost lore. I train for marathons, so I go everywhere. I forget about the rock. Five years go by.

I pick up a gig as a liaison for a museum, and I find my most useful attribute is my ability to carrying to affiliates magazines printed periodically that feature events large and small. I read up on the regional history, but upon topics unrelated to prehistory of Pennsylvania. However, a local heritage collection member told me there was a photograph of the rock, she knew of it. I was skeptical.

The rock, according to her, was a large flat rock with lots of carvings on it. It looks like a hockey puck. People started visiting the rural property. They parked on a field at the foot of a ridge and climb up to photograph it, carve it, picnic and party. The farmer got tired of the damage and the garbage, so he blew it up with some dynamite. It was about 120 years ago, so that seems legit. Boom, no more tourists. The problem is, I am not looking for the rock she shows me. I tell her it is the wrong rock. She looks at me strangely.

A week goes by. A local historian writes me repeatedly over the course of the following week that she has the photograph o the rock, the one I was looking for, and I cold meet her at the museum. I go, feeling sure I am already on a wild goose chase, and I fall asleep in my car and sleep for almost 90 minutes with a cold in the winter, and wake up sicker. No one arrives. I go home and recover from illness. When I recover, the historian writes me and tells me the photograph is lost. A week later she says someone in a town twelve miles away has a photo of the rock.

To get the name and address of the person who has a photo of the fallen stele, I have to visit another historical society site, where a representative telephones someone, and I am given a phone number. I call it and the person who answers is pleasant and, in fact, invites me over to see the photo for myself. I oblige. It is not the rock. It is the same one I have seen already. She shows me a photo of the same dynamited pancake rock with the drawings cut into it and brightly painted white. It looks fake. I cannot help it. I roll my eyes.

Her husband joins her to give some information. He tells me Native American carvings are common up and down the river, but the Archaeology department disappeared long ago from the local college. He tells me he knows a retired professor who knows much more about the subject. He gives me the number, and I thank him, but I lose the slip of paper a day or two later and never contact him.

I go back over my notes. I pinpoint the likely location where the mysterious rock is. I use 3D mapping platforms to visit and study the location virtually. From studying the location on foot and on the map, I decide the only safe way to approach it was with a drone from a nearby park. It is on a narrow hill that has been chopped away to make way for a railroad and bridge. The slopes are steep and loose.

I test my drone, and it crashes and slides down the road upside down like a crab on meth. The drone repairs take time, and I forget about the rock.

Meanwhile, I paint hundreds of small round stones to sell as paper weights. They are all rounded and fit snugly in the hand. They are skipping stones. I sell a few, not many, at a gimpy craft fair. I lug all of the rocks home and stow them in a cabinet where the sit for years.

It becomes clear I should try to climb the hill myself and locate the likely spot where the stele is. From studying the landscape, I come across the ruins of a shack on the crest of a ridge overlooking the Monongahela River from a couple of hundred feet up. There is a remnant of fieldstone floor and wall. I get my drone back, but it malfunctions in the snow and is kaput.