Rose Rocks and the Kayax

Long ago, there lived in the land giants known as Kayax. We don’t know how many of them there were exactly, maybe three, maybe more. They were here before humans and even before trees, so the stories we do have are told by the cicadas and birds, redcedars, rivers, and stones, as passed down to them from their grandfathers. Stories tell that the Kayax generally keep to themselves because they like to arrange the land exactly to their own liking, and no two like it exactly the same. They spend their days carrying rocks, stirring the wind, and sifting the rains organizing everything just so. One such Kayax lived in the hills just east of here during a time when a sea stretched all the way almost to her door. The dry land was rocky with ferns and grandfathers of redcedar, but it had not ever seen grass yet nor even a flower. The Kayax piled up their gray rocks into the eastern hills and carved the creeks in the west to keep the high tide’s red mud in its orderly places. One day, a sea giant swam in with the tide and saw the Kayax on the shore. He was shy and unused to talking to the land-dwellers, so he watched from behind a distant wave. He watched her for days upon days, never getting the nerve to interfere, and in her focus she never noticed him off in the water. He admired her dedication and her hard work and eventually fell in love. Not knowing how to get her attention, he decided to leave her a gift. He went deep into the red mud at the bottom of the sea and created the first Rose Rock. He snuck up near the shore at high tide and left it for her.

When the Kayax came, they immediately noticed there was a rock where they had not put a rock. It was small, and curiously shaped. No one had ever seen any flower before, much less a rose, so this rock was especially interesting. They picked it up carefully, squeezed it a little, shook it a little, tasted it a little (all solid geological investigation methods still used today), and tried to decide where it needed to be. Tucking it into an apron pocket, they went back to work carving a nearby creek and thinking about the curious rock. The sea giant watched all this and was delighted that she seemed to like his gift. So he began making more. He left them here and there, under the moonlight just a giant’s arm’s reach up the shoreline. The Kayax gathered them up one by one, but piled them in a secret storeroom because their odd shape and curious properties made them stand out awkwardly in her rock arrangements.

The Kayax never noticed the Sea Giant. He made thousands upon thousands of gifts, but the Kayax never cast their eyes out to sea to wonder where they came from. Eventually the waters themselves decided to concede the land to the Kayax’s arrangement and the Lonely Sea Giant slowly sought his friendship elsewhere. As the waters receded, the drying mud began to crack. Larger and larger cracks along the former seabed. With more land to hand, the Kayax had more work to do and, still not knowing what to make of the Rose Rocks, she began using them to fill in some of the cracks, and sealing them in with red sand. Eventually the Kayax forgot about them all together. And that’s why, today, if you search in the right places you might still be able to uncover these mysterious gifts from a lonely sea giant.