Skipping Stones

THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2010


Skipping Stones

From Wiki: “Stone skipping is a pastime which involves throwing a stone with a flattened surface across a lake or other body of water in such a way that it bounces off the surface of the water. The object of the game is to see how many times a stone can be made to bounce before sinking.”

Hopefully, nobody will think I was referring to Mick or Keith or the Wiz skipping on down the road.

Since I was little I always loved rocks and stones. I used to take my Tonka Toy bulldozer and front end loader and dig holes near the house to mine for really good looking stones. Because it was a Tonka Toy most of the stones I unearthed were not overly large. I took great pride in finding new kinds of stones.

The word "quartz" comes from the German word "quarz", which was imported from Middle Hochdeutsch "twarc", so now even DakotaDawg knows what I am talking about.

As a kid I lived on the northern shore of Long Island. We learned in grade school geology that Long Island was what was being pushed by a glacier and was left as a pile of dirt and rocks when the glacier receded. Because of that there were stones and rocks all over the place. The glacier was like a giant ice Tonka Toy pushing all the rocks in its path and leaving this treasure for me to find.

There were all kinds of rocks but one I was particularly interested in was quartz.

I kept large collections of quartz… clear quartz, white or milky quartz, smoky quartz, rosy quartz and some others I don’t remember so well. I always liked rosy quartz best since my mom’s name was Rose. It was pink and translucent. Most of the quartz stones on Long Island were not too big and were nice and smooth and roundish. A really treasured find was a flat one. I think my grade school teacher told us that the stones were round because they had gotten pushed so far in the sand in front of the glacier and got smoothed out that way. I suppose the flatter ones did less rolling and more skidding along.

I found an awful lot of other types of stones in my excavations around the house. There was a lot of granite and some really black hard stone I never was quite sure what it was. The black stone was just like hard black sand. I think it was Gabbro and it came somehow from magma or lava. Other stones there were a lot like the black stones except the color was barn red. It seemed a little softer than the black stones which were a little softer than the granite which in turn was somewhat softer than the quartz. Granite often had fool’s gold specs in it and some the granite had white stripes in it and was banded gneiss. The white bands looked a lot like quartz to me.

We didn’t find much flint or some of the other really cool rocks that the nerd that lived on McKinley Terrace had in his collection. He was a fragile boy who had a younger mother married to a really old geezer. His dad bought him a rock collection and a butterfly collection too. The butterflies had pins through their heads and bodies and all of his rocks sat in neatly organized boxes with partitions in their own beds of snow white cotton. I kept my rocks on the dresser, in the dresser and just generally scattered around my room.

Back then I did not know what every stone was. I looked at one… if I liked it I added it to the collection. If not, I usually pitched it at a squirrel or threw it into the woods so I would not discover it again. I never spent a lot of time trying to figure out how a rock was made or what its mineral composition was. It was either one for the collection or it was discarded.

Who cared if a rock was igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic? For us it was either pretty or not. As time went on we separated out the non-collectible rocks by size and function. Smaller rocks were destined as ammo for the sling shots. Unusual rocks were saved to be split open to see what they looked like inside and when dipped in water or rubbed with spit. Big rocks became hammers or walls for some of the things we were building with the Tonka Toys. We never could get enough rocks.

Hermie built a large retaining wall out of some of the really big rocks that were dug up when they sliced our home site into the side of a hill above the harbor. I remember my first swear word from when he lost control of a huge one and ended up with a black fingernail and sore foot.

Rosie convinced me to make a rock garden on a hill behind the house with some of the larger stones that I could carry that did not meet the ginormous size spec Hermie had for rocks he needed for the retaining wall.

We had a slate walkway and the bottom floor of the house had flagstones before it was popular. Dad found out that this was not such a good idea because they were freezing in the winter and always had a condensation problem. Downstairs got a new layer of concrete over the flagstones. It was then covered with cork tiles. The tiles were a little warmer and did not sweat all the time.

Thanx to my collecting activities and that wonderful glacier we had rocks everywhere.

Then Hermie introduced us to skipping stones. He showed us how it was done and most importantly what the rules were and what kinds of stones worked best. When we went down to the beach on Centerport Harbor we scoured it for exactly the right kind of stones. They had to be fairly heavy stones but it was best if they were round shaped and pretty flat.

We spent hours and hours skipping stones. I even found a nice stash of just the right kind of stones where a gully washer gave us a new area to explore. We began saving up and stashing these stones in marble bags for the trips down the hill to the beach.


We found another rock throwing pursuit. It was a lot more dangerous than rock skipping. There were some kids that lived across Harrison Drive from our neighborhood. We didn’t care too much for them and they felt exactly the same way about us. Every afternoon we gathered on one side of Harrison Drive and those horrid kids gathered on the other. I am not sure how it started but we started pitching rocks at each other.

They held the high ground but we could still reach them with a well thrown rock of the right size. We hid behind the trees on our side and they were behind the trees on their side. We would jump out from behind our tree and let one fly. The object was to do this when there was not an incoming rock headed our way. Bobby Reilly found this out the hard way. I watched him cock his arm and jump out to throw his rock. Just as he was ready to let it fly a well aimed granite stone hit him square in the mouth breaking off his two front teeth. There was a lot of blood and crying before a cover story was put together about how Bobby fell down a hill and hit his face on a big rock at the bottom. That put an end to the rock wars. We figured that skipping stones off someone’s teeth was not so much fun. I saved that rock and the pieces of Bobby’s teeth and planted them in the rock garden.


I then started throwing stones exclusively at squirrels. I threw thousands of stones at squirrels that were on a branch or running across the top of one of the split rail fences that separated most yards. We practiced throwing stones at cans to sharpen our aim. Nothing seemed to help because those squirrels were a lot more elusive than Bobby Reilly. I always kept a few stones in the pockets of my jeans incase I encountered a really stupid or feeble squirrel.

One day Bobby Reilly, Jeff Steves and I were walking through the neighborhood. An especially quick and erratic squirrel leaped down from an oak and started running along a rail fence. I grabbed in my pocket and pulled out the perfect stone to throw at him. I told Bobby and Jeff that I was going to knock him off the fence. I squared up, closed one eye, took careful aim and let 'er fly. Sure enough a miracle happened. I hit him right in the head. He fell off the fence and landed on the ground.

We went over to poke him with a stick. After several timid and some more aggressive pokes we determined that he was not ever going to jump up and run away. I felt really awful.

We decided that we had to bury the squirrel so we put him in Jeff’s handkerchief and went up behind Jeff’s house to dig a grave. We borrowed Jeff’s dad’s shovel and got a Keds’ shoebox from his house. We dug the hole right under a huge oak and thought the squirrel would be as happy there as he ever would be after having his brains smashed in by that beautifully shaped rosy quartz stone. We wrapped the squirrel in the tissue paper that had lovingly held the Keds, put some flowers in the box and put it in the hole and covered it with dirt. We made a stick crucifix and put it on the grave. We said a prayer.


We made a pact to stop throwing stones at animals unless we encountered a bear.

We decided to go down to the beach and skip some stones. Jeff was the biggest kid and Bobby was the smallest. Jeff always managed to get the stones to skip the most… except on that day.


The flat round quartz stone skipped across the glass smooth harbor ten times. I was really on my game that day… except for the squirrel.
© 06.17.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg had little to do with this.