Patience and Perseverance

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

“No way!” I said, unable to believe what my dad was telling me. How could water do this to stone, granite especially? I was about ten years old and we were hiking around The Basin, a short section along the Pemigewasset River in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. The river crashes down a steep slope and over thousands of years has carved great curving whoops and coves in the rock. There are places where individual stones caught in the current going round and round have drilled holes deep into the surrounding bedrock. It’s quite a place.

But I needed proof. Water cuts stone…

About this time we had moved into a new house. The basement opened to the ground level around back, with windows and a door and we used it as living space. In the summer it could get pretty damp down there so my dad set up a dehumidifier and attached a section of garden hose to it. He then plumbed it outside through the wall next to the door. Outside, water would drip from a short section of copper pipe all summer. This would become the site of my experiment. I found a granite stone about the size and shape of a baking potato and set it under the dripping pipe.

At the end of the first summer I brought it to my dad. “Look. No change.” He examined it carefully and ran his fingers over the stone. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Why don’t you put it back, let it sit for another year and see what happens?” I was doubting the whole business but put it back in the same spot. “Patience and perseverance accomplishes great things.” He said. My dad would say this to me at least a thousand times as I was growing up. We checked it the next fall. Still no change but I put it back. For the next six or seven years, the stone was forgotten. Along the way in science class it must have been one of the rare occasions I was paying attention when we talked about erosion. It all made sense and suddenly everyone knew that and The Basin became no big deal.

The time came my family moved out of that house. After all the effort of clearing out we were wishing our goodbyes to the place and my dad and I sat in folding lawn chairs in the empty garage and had a beer. “The stone!” I exclaimed. He looked at me, quizzically. “Under the pipe...” I was already out of my chair and sprinting to the back of the house. I reappeared with the wet stone now with dark green moss growing around it’s undersides and handed it to him. He sighted over the top of it and ran his fingers over it.

“Well, how about that.” He said. Sure enough, there was a very slight depression not even a sixteenth of an inch, worn into the top of it. He handed it to me. “You see, patience…”

“I know, dad.” I held up my hand. He stopped and smiled. The fact was, I really didn’t know. It would take over thirty years of life to begin to know. I put the stone back.

Gordon Bunker

Photo: Thank you, Christine.