To fly, to defy gravity and with each kiss be sent further.
tich ……….. tiich …. tich … tich .. tich . tich tich tichtichtichtichtich.
The sound of those sweet kisses coming faster and faster as you fly.
You are free as you glide and each kiss tenderly propels you on.
The crowd oohs and ahhs as you keep on sailing, gravity is an after thought early on, but it does become evident as you tire … slow … the kisses are quicker but not as energizing.
These are the thoughts I impose on a rock skipper’s rock as it skims repeatedly across the top of the water.
The truth is – the rock doesn’t care really where it ends up. I’m guessing, of course, not really knowing a rock’s capabilities. But I can’t imagine it cares what we think, or that we hurl it or even break it in two, or whether it gave us a show as we used it for our entertainment. That is on us. That is our thoughts imposed on to the rock. The rock will be where it is a lot longer than we will. The rock is not a new thing, it has history much older than the person who wields it and probably much older than mankind. It may be a million years old. Yet, in all those years, it has formed into something that a rock skipper’s keen eye has deemed a good skipper. If the rock cared it might realize this may very well be its first and only chance at glory.
But it’s not about the rock, it’s about the ripples in the water created by how may times it reflects off the water back into the air and back down to hopefully reflect multiple times. And so on…
One rock hurled by a man who goes by ‘Mountain Man’ went further than any other skipper stone (at least counted and documented by the Guiness Book of World Records.) It gloriously sailed and skimmed and sailed and skimmed across the water surface 88 times before falling back under the surface of the water to perhaps never be touched again for another million years.
tich ……tich ….. tich …. tich … tich .. tich . tict tich tichtichtichtichtichtichtichtichtich ………….. and so on.
That’s the sweet sound of a rock skipper. The sound of a rock just skimming the surface. That is what a skipper wants to hear as many times as the rock has in it.
Splunsch …….. plopft is not. That sound is followed by dreaded calling out of ONE! Yelling out of the number one is a good-natured insult when it is shouted out by what could only be described as the equivalent of a dunking booth clown of the stone skipping world. The official who announces you will also announce the number of skips your toss received. Sometimes very sarcastically. The same announcer will often give you a nickname that may or may not be polite. Names like Pete “Bottom Feeder” Jones or Joe “skipped the class on how to do this” Peters. (OK, I made those up, but you get the point.)
Hearing TWO belted out isn’t any better you’ll find out. After you put all your effort into a toss you expected to skim across the water for at least 30 or 197 skips, you don’t want to hear a low number. Two being yelled out may even be worse than one. One is at least funny.
But nothing …. nothing … NOTHING is worse than hearing the dreaded Ker-Plunk followed by the announcer and all the judges hollering out as if they joined a chorus together Ker-Plunk. That is a stone that, for lack of a better way of putting it, you just tossed back into the water.
(Editors Note: All these spelling of sounds in this article are made up by this writer. Websites out there have determined their own spellings. Webster’s has washed its hands of most of these!)
Which is basically what you’re doing with each stone, throwing it into the water. Throwing it away. But you’re trying to do it in a way that is akin to art, akin to some zen meditation. It’s the fly way of tossing a rock back into the water. The cool way. The way a dancer walks away or a painter paints the last touches. It’s filled with bling and style. It’s poetry and its just downright fun.
Watching that stone you picked out of kabilliions of kabillions of stones to send into the air at a roughly 20 degree angle (some hot shot smarty pants physicist’s supposed optimal angle to create the proper trajectory to achieve the optimum skims across the blah blah blah) and create a trail of little circles as the stone skims across the water and travels about 80% less with each kiss (again, smarty pants … physicist … blah blah blah) and just keeps on going and going and going makes you feel like an athlete of LeBron’s caliber. It makes you feel like Cutch who saw the ball, gauged where that ball was headed, swung at the ball, connected with it and just watched it go where no one could touch it (except a fan of course). When you get a toss of more than ten your heart starts to beat with excitement to see where it stops….twenty you really are thinking you have something , 30 holy smokes I’m unbelievable, 40 lookout history books I’m coming your way, 50……ok only a couple folks have ever hit 50 but Guinness still doesn’t care anymore, but you’re probably going to win just about every event you enter. 88 was just an insane throw by the Mountain Man.
The sport of skipping stones is … well … not sexy in the way we have come to know sexy in sport. It’s just folks who find an interest in noticing the world many just choose to walk on and that’s all. The rock skipper’s eyes take note of the ground and when it’s right, become one with it, picking up rock after rock. Getting a feel for it in their hand and trying to figure out if there is a connection between that rock and their destiny together? That is what it is all about.
On Saturday the experienced rock skippers showed up with hundreds of rocks. Tink … tink …clicktinkclink … ttttcachinmkcacaclaptfaphhunk could be heard as they carried hand-made wooden boxes with stones carefully placed in almost OCD fashion, or sacks with jumbles of rocks just tossed in. One man had a bright orange plastic tool box that just about everyone wanted to look into. (That was the stone carrying satchel of the Mountain Man.)
These folks take this seriously.
At the end of the day with dozens of skippers, Dave Ohmer, of Titusville, Pa. took his love for a sport and with 40 kisses, hoisted a trophy up over his head along the banks of the confluence of the Allegheny River and French Creek in a park aptly named Riverfront Park in Franklin, Pennsylvania.
The annual Rock in River stone skipping competition for the Pennsylvania state championship.
Ohmer bested the Mountain Man and he bested another former Guiness record holder whose pre-game rituals seem to include peeing on the river’s edge behind some tall grasses (I do it every year, he said.) and walking in the river and picking up stones to throw skipping back toward the shoreline at other skippers who throw out towards him standing in the river. “I could’ve reached out and grabbed that one,” he told a friend with a smile. All in good fun. Possibly a rock skipper’s equivalent to smack talk.
This was my first time covering an actual stone skipping competition and I’ve got to say this, I love this idea of just being out and taking note of rocks, picking them up and saving them just to toss into the water in hopes to get the joy of watching it skip more times than I have made a rock skip before. I remember being pretty good at this as a kid, not 40 skips or, geez Louise, 88 skips, but I’d get into the high teens or early 20s on occasion. But I never thought of it as something to do beyond just over coming not having anything better to do.
This was a fun day with some interesting and very cool people. There were a variety of styles and you could see in the pros an understanding of water, wind and height of the bank. I could hear things like ‘that’s my best rock’ or ‘I can’t figure out how to hold this one to throw, but I think it’s a good rock.’
And I learned, I think, that you can’t go into it thinking the water is the enemy or the wind is an obstruction. You have to find that place within you where you acquire the zen of all things and release the rock in harmony with everything that surrounds you.
I won’t lie to ya, all day long I thought about Dead Heads and artisans, of poets and romantics. In my head I would hear long jams by the Dead that took me places my feet felt no ground and my soul shimmied like I was easy skankin’ with a Marley groupie or riding in the back of an open pick-up truck with no idea what time it is.
I did refrain from picking up a rock and trying it, but I have a plan to find 12 rocks in the next few days and on one of my days out looking for features, taking a little break for lunch by the river and throwing a few rocks back into the water.
Hopefully, in glorious fashion.
Maybe next year (If I don’t find myself deciding something else next week that grabs my attention -hazard of the job!) I’ll try to take on the Mountain Man in search of 89!
NOTE: This was a freelance assignment I did this weekend on my day off that I thought might be fun to share with our readers. (I know, I know … most people don’t do what they do for work on their days off, but photographers often do.)
