“Welcome to the Surface”

Why Shannon Bedard rescued a ‘glacial erratic’ for Peaceful Valley.

Because sometimes you get what you ask for, the City of Spokane has been making improvements of late in order to keep leaks from its sanitary sewer system from reaching the Spokane River. In mid-November it was time for a contract crew from Newman Lake, Washington to seriously dig into the combined stormwater/sanitary sewer problems just at the bottom of the Main Avenue hill, just down the way from the Spokane Club.

Up came a very big rock.

Shannon Bedard could at first only tell that it was something quite large. She was walking home from the Center for Justice, where she does practicum work to earn a Masters degree in Social Work. She lives with her partner, realtor Sali Combelic, in a large, century-old house at the eastern edge of Peaceful Valley, really only a stone’s throw from where all the digging was taking place. Even as she reached the bottom of the hill, she still didn’t know quite what was sitting there.

“I couldn’t make out what it was,” she says, “except that it had ‘4 Sale’ painted on to it. So I walked up and realized it was this giant boulder. And I was so touched by it that I just went up and put my hands on it, and then put my arms around it and said, ‘welcome to the surface.’”

This is no ordinary rock, and not just because it is so big. It’s palpably hard, extremely dense and unlike anything Shannon had ever seen in Peaceful Valley where, in her extensive gardening and other projects, she’s actually combed through a fair amount of earth. Basalt is everywhere, and chunks of granite carried in by the river. But she could see that this was no chunk of cooled lava or river stone, even though it needed a shower.

“It had like a sandy, gritty gray coat on it,” she remembers, “and the sand was slowly drying, almost like one of those cookies where you take the dough and rub in cinnamon and sugar.”

“Having worked with a lot of rocks in the neighborhood, I’m familiar with the ones that are typical, and this one was so atypical, I knew it was something special.”

But so did the crew, Shannon said, and even though she was never told how much the rock would be sold for, she was told it would be expensive. She knew she didn’t have that kind of money.

The good news, for Shannon, is that the corner of Main and Cedar, for those weeks, was a terrible place to try to sell anything, let alone an enormous rock. The excavation that exhumed the remarkable boulder had also closed the road to traffic. The bad news?

“One of the road crew members told me they would crush it into gravel. Which totally crushed me.”

“So, I started talking to Sali about it and, before I knew it, I was obsessing about the rock. I couldn’t sleep and then when I would sleep I would go to sleep thinking about the rock and I would wake up thinking about the rock. And I knew it was only a matter of time that something was going to happen to the rock because they had to finish their job. And so Sali, fortunately for me, she realized how much it meant to me and she said, ‘well every day that you’re at school, I’ll just talk to the crew. I’ll just talk to them and tell them we’re happy to give the rock a place to be. And they won’t have to carry it far. We’ll take it off their hands.’”

This was no casual endeavor. As part of her communication with the crew, Sali began preparing a place for the rock on their property, where she quickly cleared a spot, even uprooting a precious red-twig dogwood patch in the process. But there it was, a home in waiting.

And it worked. On Friday the 21st of November the cooperative crew used its lunch break to move the boulder down the street. It wasn’t easy. A front loader couldn’t even budge the rock and when a huge backhoe tried to carry it in the bucket, the big rock kept sliding off. The weight of the load was off the scales of the equipment, although Shannon said they estimated it was between four and five tons. The rock was finally chained into the bucket of the backhoe and eased down the block, finally landing in the spot Sali cleared, like a dinosaur dropping a big egg into a nest.

Within minutes Shannon noticed something splendid as she began removing the “4 Sale” paint with a wire brush and some water. As the grit came off the surface of the rock, beautiful colors and shapes emerged. The boulder is basically a big jewel, with naturally polished surfaces that are as smooth as they are hard.

Suffice to say, Shannon’s story of how the rock was saved drew a round of cheers when she shared it the following Monday at the Center’s traditional Monday check in ceremony.

“I was just so pleased with how it turned out,” she says. “It just feels like a victory. You know, we haven’t had many victories in this neighborhood and I really do think of it as a victory, where we’re saving a little piece of Peaceful Valley and being able to preserve it.”

One tantalizing bit of serendipity is that when Shannon and Sali continued to clean up around the rock, they uncovered a short but elegantly shaped concrete slab that leads from the sidewalk on Main Avenue right to the nose of the rock. They had no idea the curved walkway extension was there but it serves perfectly their hope that people will feel invited to step up to the rock and check it out.

Where the rock came from and how it got to Peaceful Valley is a mystery but when Shannon shared her story with some photographs at the Center, CFJ attorney Rick Eichstaedt asked if he could send some to a friend of his who’s a geologist. As best the geologist could tell from the pictures and Shannon’s descriptions, the boulder is a “glacial erratic,” and a metamorphic rock high in quartzite and silica. It was most likely delivered during the last ice age from the Purcell Trench (a glaciated valley between Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry) by a glacier, as a “drop stone,” or brought in on the catastrophic floodwaters of ancient Lake Missoula.

“We can get metaphorical with it if you want,” Shannon said Friday as the lustrous rock shimmered with the moisture from a misty, cold rain. “I was born in Missoula and I feel like when I arrived in Spokane that I came to my surface. So, I was thinking about it, and it reminds me of my journey and what it took for me to get here, for me to come to the surface and be in my heart. And it just kind of looks like a heart in a way, coming out of the earth like that, it’s shaped like a heart.”

“Did you ever think, being from Missoula that maybe you followed the rock here?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s like it landed here and so did I. If that rock was crushed into gravel it would have been heartbreaking, like someone cutting down a redwood, or damming a river.”