Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Last fall, my wife and I drove up the Northumberland coast of New Brunswick north of Miramichi. Beautiful country – gentle rolling hills, forests, peat bogs, marshes filled with tall grasses and rushes, flocks of seabirds overhead and dozens of lobster boats in the strait.
Driving along, enjoying the day, I began to notice a strange phenomenon: huge boulders embedded in the ground in front of every house, plunked down as if they had fallen from the sky and lawn had grown around them.
My thoughts first went to the Perseid meteor shower last August, but clearly these boulders were not meteorites. The odds of them burning through our atmosphere, reaching Earth and landing at the end of every driveway between Miramichi and Lamèque were slim.
The precise and repetitious placement of these massive igneous lumps of granite suggested a superior intelligence at work.
I searched for a more logical explanation: cults.
Cults can be insidious. Born in the shadows, they maintain secrecy behind a veil of exclusive codes of behaviour, handshakes and passwords, slowly adding converts to their vision until the day they burst into the light like dandelions in spring (or boulders at the end of a driveway). I had discovered the Cult of the Lawn Rock.
Aerial photography would, no doubt, show that these rocks were arranged as a giant calendar like Stonehenge. On full-moon nights, Druid descendants must gather on the lawn and dance around the sacred rock, bright-eyed zealots worshipping the rock of eternal youth.
Though my wife had her eye on the beautiful scenery, she took a moment to stare at me incredulously. "Idiot! People put them there as decoration."
This unforeseen insight, brilliant and unimpeachably logical, sent me on a new train of thought: Lawn Rocks offer many advantages. One: We get some monumental snowstorms on the East Coast. Hitting a five-tonne boulder buried under two metres of snow is an unmistakeable message to the snowplow driver that he or she is off course. Two: The family pooch always has a spot to mark territory. This opportunity can be extended to all males in the vicinity, whether canine or primate, drunk or sober. Three: A random rock surrounded by an acre of lawn has a vaguely Zen garden feeling about it, and could encourage meditation and reduce stress. No need to water it, trim it, cut it, rake it in the fall or shovel it in the winter. Just cut down all the trees, plunk down a rock and – voilà! – hassle-free landscaping.
There is also a sociological angle to this story that cannot be ignored. Lawn Rocks may be a more grandiose expression of the Pet Rock craze from days gone by. Some people like chihuahuas, others, Great Danes. Some people like a stone that can fit in the palm of your hand, others a three-tonne megalith that has to be hoisted into place by an industrial crane and delivers a 4.3-magnitude earthquake when it hits the ground.
At first I believed this new cult to be a localized eccentricity. Since that day, however, I have seen meteorites throughout the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario and Maine – always in exactly the same place, on the corner of the property where the driveway meets the street: plop!
We live in Shediac on the New Brunswick coast about 20 minutes' drive from Moncton on terrain that's essentially a sand dune. If I want a rock for my lawn it will have to be imported from Nova Scotia at great expense. So, due to financial considerations, I won't be joining the cult. At least, so I thought …
My new gardening catalogue for 2015 recently arrived in the mail. Imagine my surprise to discover that Lawn Rocks have graduated from cult status to the mainstream. Marketers have identified a new retail opportunity.
Among the pages of bulbs, seeds and roots, shovels, rakes and tillers, and several pages of squirrel feeders cleverly disguised as bird feeders, I discovered an entire page devoted to Lawn Rocks. Not the old-fashioned granite kind forged in the bowels of the Earth, but new, improved, vacuformed plastic megaliths resembling giant hollow walnut shells. They looked substantial enough to appeal to my inner Druid, yet light enough to take with us when we move. I'm ordering one today.
Some day, many years from now, I will place my rock in the hallway outside the door of our new condo.
Colin Thornton lives in Shediac, N.B.