Losing track of the English language at the Dorset Quarry.

Conversation with my therapist:

“But, Carey, did you ever think to tell Rob: ‘I apologize, and I think this is a great conversation, I’d like to continue it some time, but right now I just want to look at the water…’?”

“I guess, I just… I assumed… I mean, that’s how I am. The way I am. I space out in the face of that much beauty. I can’t react.”

I mean, can you blame me? Look at this place.

For some inexplicable reason, I’m getting tears in my eyes looking at these again. Those sleeping blocks of marble under the water—just laying there, for God knows how long. The grooves and wounds, new and old, mark this ancient place in a way I could barely stand to be near—it was taking all of my strength to hold it together.

Rob instinctively backed off while I walked around and touched things, pulled birch bark from trees, saw how far I could put my foot in before the water leaked into the leather, and tempted fate peering over the sheer edges.

“Just a few seconds in there—you’d seize up ‘n drown,” I heard him say between shutter clicks, as if he’d read my mind.

[Spelled wrong, but some pretty cool and coincidental graffiti, if you ask me.]

We ate a little lunch surrounded by names carved in rocks; I got a few waves of goosebumps in the breeze. It was hard to chew and gape at the same time, looking back.

There were a few of these ghostly onlookers:

‘Think I can jump it?”

There was this magnetic pull to dive in I had to keep voicing. Only the iPhone in my pocket was keeping me from hopping off the side.

As someone who always grew up with swimmable water nearby, it took me until my second Upstate New York summer to realize how sorely I missed swimming. I just wanted to be submerged, to get my body wet and float. Rob took me down to Saratoga Lake once and, after trying to flap around in the weeds for an hour or so, I sat myself on a picnic table, wrapped in a beach towel, and started to cry.

Here’s hoping this warms up to non-lethal temperatures before we skeedaddle from this joint.

[Caught futzing.]

I hope pictures are worth more than words, because this place—at this time of year, I imagine—harbors such a haunting, peaceful beauty, I don’t think I could ever do it justice.

-Carey