Melting Hearts Made of Stone

There aren’t many mementos sitting on my desk. Clutter weighs me down, and material things are immaterial to me. If I’ve been out in the desert, there might be a fresh sprig of sage or some juniper on my dash, but in general I believe in letting things lie where they lie.

To this, though, there are two exceptions. If I’ve had a particularly notable experience in the field, I might gather a bit of dirt or sand from the spot, looking for symbolism from the place I collect it. On the border of Morocco and Algeria one night, as the stars swirled above, I lifted the foreleg of the camel I’d been riding and scooped some Sahara Desert from beneath its foot. In Muizenberg, South Africa, at the very end of the continent, the wind blew the sea into a green froth and deposited a small white dune into my towel, which I shook into a baggie. Alongside the lapping waters of a Chilean fjord, my friend Caroline tucked her hand into the sand and gathered up the footprint of a Patagonian fox. Back home, I store these tiny moments in small glass lab bottles—times and places borrowed from the larger world and kept here for just a while.

The other thing I collect is heart-shaped rocks. When my daughter was just a wee thing, so young that her crayon circles looked more like hearts anyway, I started sharing the joys of the treasure hunt with her. At first, anything that looked even remotely heart-shaped in her tiny hands would count, but as she got older and her eye grew more discerning, she became a connoisseur, attuned to symmetry and curve, to form and not just shape. The “hey, Dads” became less frequent, but then when she did have something to share with me, it was truly special.

About a decade ago, when my kids were still in middle school, I loosely plotted out our paths on the calendar—when my son would start college, when my daughter would, when he’d graduate, when she would. I wanted to have a sense of our financial commitments, but also to imagine what our lives might look like at each of those stages. I also made a note that as soon as my daughter, the younger of the two, went to college, I’d get in my rig and head out into the field. Not sure what I was thinking exactly—maybe, in the middle of soccer and homework and teen dramas, I was envisioning the freedom of the empty nest.

That day, which once seemed a lifetime away, has come. My son is a semester from graduating and my daughter just started her freshman year in San Francisco. On the last Saturday in August, her mom and I left her there, trying not to embarrass her with our tears, and we returned home to a house whose silence I’d never truly heard. The next morning, I got in the truck and drove to Colorado—just as I told myself I’d do all those years ago, but reluctantly, and with a heavy heart. If I hadn’t made promises to friends, I’d have stayed home, where her room still smelled like her. To hell with an empty nest.

Well, the traveling was good for me. Finally had a chance to climb a via ferrata, in Telluride. Developed deeper friendships with old friends, made some new ones. I slept up high in the San Juans and down low on Cedar Mesa. And through those long hours in the car on the way home, I thought a lot about my kids, about the relationships of lifetimes, and about how what we picture when we’re younger turns out to be so radically different when we’re older, but richer and deeper and better because it’s built by two and not just planned by one.

It took me a day to unwind, unpack, clean up, and stash the gear. I got the garage in order and then, rather than spraying the mud off my truck, I decided to clean up my daughter’s car instead so when she came home in a month for her birthday it would be sparkling. Inside, I found a vanilla-scented pine tree hanging from the rearview, lip gloss and nail polish bottles scattered on the floor, her high school parking pass still stuck to the windshield. I picked up the trash and then went to clean out the center console, but it was stuck closed. I tugged on it a few times and then it came flying open. Looking inside, I saw that it was filled to the brim with more heart-shaped rocks than I could count.