‘Beach Stones’ a tribute to the coast

BEACH STONES, photographs by Josie Iselin, text by Margaret W. Carruthers; Abrams, New York; 2006. $17.95.

Has anyone ever walked along a rocky beach and not picked up a stone to look more closely, perhaps to bring it home?

Who can resist? White-and-black flecked granite cobbles, grey-green hunks of hornstone, heart-shaped gray pebbles and translucent pieces of quartz – you can’t hear the ocean when you hold them up to your ear, but beach stones have an uncanny way of taking you back to the sea and the gentle rumble of thousands of pebbles rolling back in forth in the surf. They are little treasures direct from the crust of the earth and the beginning of time.

“Beach Stones,” with photographs by Josie Iselin and text by Margaret W. Carruthers, is the first book I’ve ever seen that not only showcases these ocean gems, but also explains how they came to be. Iselin’s gorgeous photos turn the stones into works of art, while Carruthers, a geologist by training, places them in scientific context.

I collect stones, just like my father before me. He marked his with dates and place names. Sometimes he would rub them on his nose, intensifying the color with his body oil. I like to think I can remember where I found each rock. Usually, I do. Like snapshots, they take me back to a time and place – a summer picnic on a Penobscot Bay island, or a walk along a really windy beach in Australia years ago. But it doesn’t really matter if I forget. The soft edges, textures and colors and the weight in my hand are comforting and lovely, even out of context.

Some of my favorites are round, grey stones encircled by white stripes. My father told me those ones were lucky. I’m not sure why. But I tell my children the same story. The small round ones that fit just right in your hand so you can rub them with your thumb while thinking – he called them love-and-feeling stones.

Iselin must like stripes, as well. Fat or thin or running across multiple stones, white lines star in several of her photos. One wonderful shot shows a white line running through two beach stones from opposite coasts, Vinalhaven, Me., and Point Reyes, Ca. Carruthers tells us the California pebble was formed 150 million years ago, while the one from Vinalhaven came to be when the Appalachian Mountains heaved into being some 250 million years earlier.

While she does not explain the origin of the lucky stripe myth, she describes how the white stripes form. Sand and mud on the floor of an ancient ocean metamorphosed into rock under pressure from many layers of sediment piling up on top. When the ocean was thrust upward to form continents, the rocks fractured, allowing white calcite to seep into the cracks, forming veins.

Most beach stones don’t come from the sea, but are washed down from mountains, or up from the earth’s core. Many date back to the earth’s beginning more than four billion years ago. I always thought the smoothest rocks got that way from rolling around in the surf. Their rounded shape, however, is a result of the distance they traveled from bedrock to the beach – the longer the distance, the smoother the stone.

Iselin creates her clean, uncluttered images by arranging rocks on a flatbed scanner. Because stones in the scanner sit right next to the lens, the detail and clarity of the images is extraordinarily intense. And the rocks are the stars here, with no props around them.

Iselin first got the idea for using a scanner to make photos when she moved into a house with no darkroom. Her first scanned image was of the circular lint trap from her drier. She quickly progressed to anything she could find around the house: toast, watermelon slices, shoes and then the rocks.

It’s no accident that Penobscot Bay beach stones take up a disproportionate amount of space. Iselin, who lives in San Francisco, has spent summers on Vinalhaven since she was a child.

But while this small, intense book features rocks from beaches thousands of miles apart all over the world – places like Thailand, Scotland, Cyprus, Greece, Denmark and Nicaragua – they all look familiar. Anyone who always looks down while walking along a beach, scanning for rocks, has seen each type before. Those people will appreciate this book. It is an ode to perfect beach stones.

Polly Saltonstall and Josie Iselin learned how to sail together as children in North Haven and later taught sailing together.