You had no idea stone skipping was a competitive sport until the day you ran out of stones to skip at your childhood lake. You have spent 30 years on the same lake throwing one rock after another. More of an escape than a sport.
You’ve gotten into the habit of telling people who visit you on the lake that everything you need to know about life can be found in stone skipping: Patience. Practice. Alone time.
Everyone has their own unique way of skipping: No two skips are alike, different people have luck with different stones.
*
The Guinness Book of World Records tells you: “The definition of a skip is a forward movement of a stone over the water, which sets off a visible series of concentric circles minus either the first or the last of the circles.”
You call the Guinness Book, and they give you a list of names of men who have held the title for stone skipping. These guys have names like Mountain Man, Rock Bottom, and Top Gun (formerly known as Batman).
Supposedly, they compete together once a year on Mackinac Island off the coast of Michigan.
*
Mackinac Island, Michigan (pronounced MAK-in-aw). Population 492. It’s a small island ten miles off the coast into Lake Huron between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of the state. Mackinac Island’s website claims to be an island “suspended in a forgotten, innocent time… where you can relive the simple pleasures in life.”
Their virtual-tour-guide calls the ferries that transport tourists a “fleet of time machines.” These time machines, equipped with life jackets, take anywhere from sixteen to thirty minutes to travel back to the late nineteenth century.
All vehicles have been outlawed on the island since the 1890s. Horse and carriage are the preferred mode of transportation. Besides being known locally for it’s biggest import, fudge, one of Mackinac Island’s big draws is its annual July 4th International William T. Rabe Stone Skipping Competition.
*
You buy round-trip tickets on a time machine to celebrate stone skipping at what seemed like the Super Bowl of stone skipping, on an island stuck in 1890. Not that 1890 was a particularly kind and innocent place––for one, it was the year the United States 7th Cavalry Regiment shot and killed over a hundred Lakota Sioux at the Wounded Knee Massacre for fear that their ghost dance might bring the Sioux enough power to defeat the frontiersmen.
*
Russ “Rock Bottom” Byars used to be a brick-worker in Oil City, PA. He’s a big guy and when he throws rocks across the water he kicks his left leg up and forward and stomps down hard as his right arm whips the rock. It could be a Judo move.
“I did not grow up skipping stones,” Russ says. The first time he remembers throwing a rock across a lake is when he took his dog to the river and the dog chased stones as he skipped them. He’d get ten to fifteen skips, but never thought much of it. In 2000, his wife saw a posting for the Pennsylvania State Stone Skipping Championship and said, “You should do that.”
He said, “Nope.” But she said the winner got a pound of Cottage Hill fudge. He said, “Sign me up.”
Russ’s rise in competitive stone skipping began in 2001 when he took second place to Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner in the Pennsylvania Amateurs competition. And Steiner beat him with forty skips in 2002, setting the then new world record. But that next year, Russ won the Pennsylvania State Championship Pro Division, qualifying for the first time to compete at the William T. Rabe International Competition. In 2004, he won his first William T. Rabe meet. Russ won again in 2005, with thirty skips and in 2007 with 33 skips. In July 2007, he was taped for the Guinness Book Record and by September the judges acknowledged him as the new world record holder with 51 skips.
“The next morning,” Russ says, “I was setting up phone interviews every 15 minutes. I was mentioned in Sports Illustrated right next to a parrot on roller skates.”
*
Jerry McGhee of Driftwood, TX, claimed the first Guinness Book World Record title for stone skipping in 1991 with 38 skips. McGhee founded the North American Stone Skipping Association, or NASSA.
“[Jerry] wrote a book,” Russ says. “The Secrets of Stone Skipping. I wonder if it just says: Ask Kurt.”
*
There are clips of Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner and Russ on Youtube, when CBS Sunday Morning’s Bill Geist visited Franklin, Pennsylvania, for the 2009 Pennsylvania State Stone Skipping Championship on the Allegheny River. Geist asked Kurt about the friendly rivalry between him and Russ.
“We’re such polar opposites… I’m more interested to find the scientific articles, the math that’s been done… I like to understand what’s going on, from a physics point-of-view.” Kurt studies papers on the science of stone skipping.
*
From Physics Today: “Optimal [stone] skipping is achieved with an attack angle of about 20 degrees, and the spin rate must be sufficient enough for gyroscopic stabilization to maintain the attack angle through repeated skipping events.”
*
“I’m more of a grip it and rip it,” Russ says. “Dude, I love skipping. Sometimes you throw a stone and it just keeps going.”
*
You wonder if Kurt is corrupting the tradition of stone skipping with his theories of hydrodynamics. If an asterisk should accompany his world record because his physics is the HGH of stone skipping. Most likely, you’re just jealous that there is a human who could hit 88 skips and had the video to prove it.
You can’t help but see Kurt and Russ as a kind of microcosm of Man vs. Science. And for once in your life, you’re rooting for man.
*
Your girlfriend takes your fever for stone skipping seriously. Remember the first night you two hung out in front of your car’s headlights beaming across the dark lake, showing her how you skip stones? It was a real Neanderthal way of trying to impress a woman. Hey, watch me throw rocks.
After you bought your time machine tickets, you convince her that you should both drive fifteen hours overnight from New York to Michigan to witness a stone skipping competition.
*
When you tell people you respect that you’re traveling back in time to witness a stone skipping competition, they look confused. They ask: “What does time traveling have to do with stone skipping?” You shrug. For whatever reason, it makes sense that a pastime of solitude intersects with the idea of an island that’s attempting to cut itself off from the world.
*
Years ago, you uploaded your own video to YouTube of yourself skipping two rocks at the same time. Your video has like seventy-five views. Kurt’s has half a million. You’re not sure if you’re mad because he has half a million more views than your video, or if you’re thrilled that half a million people care enough to watch one rock skip 88 times.
*
You’ve skipped stones your whole life, can even skip two stones with one hand at the same time. Even still, you can’t just walk onto Mackinac Island and compete because it happens to be invite only. You have to fight through the stone skipping circuits to play in the big game.
*
Your childhood lake is at the top of a hill surrounded by trees that bow over the water. At the far end is a rock wall built around the time of the revolution. You imagine the people who roamed the same forest over 200 years ago searching for the right rocks to build a wall with, the same way you grew up on the shore, hunting for the right rocks to skip, head down as if in prayer.
*
A consequence of skipping stones from the same spot for thirty years is one day you’ll run out of good, skippable stones. You wonder what your pile of stones must look like on the lakebed, close to thirty years’ worth, collected at the bottom like a tenement for snakes and eels.
*
Ovid wrote of lakes that drove men mad. Lakes that morphed grieving people into weeping lakes themselves or lakes that sheltered man-eating beasts.
*
You’ve asked your family many times over the years to sink you in the lake when you’re dead. “If I outlive you, sure,” your mom says. “You can’t just dump a body in the lake,” your dad reminds you. “We don’t own the lake.” This is still your dream funeral.
*
Nobody on your time machine was talking about the International Stone Skipping Competition. Nobody, for that matter, was talking about the fact that you were time traveling back to the year 1890.
*
When you boarded the time machine, a man slapped you on the back and said, “You look like the kind of guy that’ll light up the Pink Pony.” You don’t know what he was talking about, but get this sinking pang in your gut that you might have boarded the wrong vessel.
*
Through the porthole of your ferry, you see a lady in a plain grey 19th century Victorian dress and bonnet waiting for you on the dock. Behind her, Mackinac Island looks like a fake town torn from an old train set. She hands everyone a pamphlet that says, See History Repeat Itself Everyday.
When you look past the dock, beyond the ghost-town facades, you find something you hadn’t expected to find in 1890––a horde of people stuffed together, fanny pack to fanny pack, cigarette huffing, selfie-taking, squeezing through the large intestine of Main Street.
You push through the crowd where it reeks of hot dogs and sunblock and cigarettes and horse shit and the island’s famous fudge. It’s a claustrophobia that belonged to Epcot, the 3Vatican, or Black Friday, not a forgotten, innocent time.
A man dressed as Uncle Sam sees that you don’t have any selfie-sticks or tiny American flags and hollers at you to buy his tiny American flags and selfie-sticks. Tourists jump in and out of horse carriages as if they were taxis in Time Square.
“What the hell is this place?” your girlfriend asks. The fact that the island called their ferries “time machines” should’ve been a clue that this place might have been a gimmick, more of an amusement park’s perversion of the 1890s.
*
According to Wikipedia:
Mackinac Island is 3.776 square miles.
Its highest elevation is 890 ft.
15,000 tourists per day visit the island during peak season.
*
The 1980 movie Somewhere in Time was filmed on the island. There are plaques alerting tourists where specific scenes took place. In the movie, Christopher Reeve’s character time travels from 1972 to 1912 on Mackinac Island to find a woman he loves. A time travel theorist explains to him that time travel is indeed possible through self-hypnosis. All he’d have to do is go to Mackinac Island and convince himself that he’s in 1912. After a night of self-hypnosis, he wakes to the sounds of horse carriages creaking up the street. He looks out the window and, voila, it’s 1912.
*
The 492 locals must hate every single one of you, and you don’t blame them. Being someone from a small town, you try to take into account the fact that this might not have been the best first impression of another small town. When you all eventually board your ferries and leave the island for good, the residents might actually live in their own peaceful version of 1890. But this isn’t it.
*
“How do you even hail a horse carriage?” your girlfriend asks, dodging the horde and desperate to find your hotel. You make eye contact with one tired Clydesdale. If anyone hated the tourists more than you, it was that horse.
*
Your hotel room overlooks Main Street and you realize you are sitting right on top of The Pink Pony––a saloon in your hotel from which spills an ungodly gang of booze-fueled tourists in American flag and Captain America t-shirts. The sun hasn’t set yet. You fear what might become of them at nightfall. Might they steal the Clydesdales and ride through town with torches and raid every one of the hotels? Was anyone safe?
You close the windows and draw the shades, but there was no escaping the cacophony. They sing war songs––or possibly Bon Jovi. The time machines were bombarding the shore, unleashing even more time travelers hell-bent on destroying the innocent time you came in search of.
“Maybe tomorrow will be better,” your girlfriend says. You look at the pamphlet the lady in the bonnet gave you. How could you have any hope in tomorrow if history repeated itself here everyday?
You fear what might become of the stone skipping competition. All these rabid animals and all those rocks. You are surrounded.
*
You wake up early to the sounds of Clydesdales’ hooves outside your window. The street is empty. Just horses pulling wagons. The facades of the old buildings look authentic in the gentle, early morning sun. This was the closest you’d get to 1890. You just have to convince yourself.
*
You’re probably the only one who notices when Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner shows up with his greying black beard, fishing cap, camping backpack, and walking stick. He pulls a small box of rocks from his backpack. Each rock about the size of his palm, round, and flat as Florida.
He walks to the edge of the water and skips some warm-ups. He stretches his throwing hand over his head, hooked like a scythe, and releases each stone with a great snap. The time machines are not far off in Lake Huron. If he wanted, he could sink one with a good enough throw.
*
Russ “Rock Bottom” Byars unexpectedly didn’t show up to the competition. You expect Top Gun or Mountain Man to be the shoe-in crowd favorite, being the world’s past and current world record holders respectively, but in Russ’ absence, the crowd rallies behind another stone skipper. He calls himself Nate Dogg (no relation to the G-funk Era). His name’s written across the back of his bright red shirt. None of the other pros have names on their shirts. He’s a tall, lanky, twenty-something in Ray Bans, wearing American flag tights and an American flag bandana. His mom massages his shoulders like a cornerman on the ropes.
If you thought Kurt’s theories of hydrodynamics were any danger to the simplicity of stone skipping, then Nate Dogg’s Cobra Kai-sized ego was the deathblow to this pastime. He does the invisible-jump-rope move to warm up.
You think of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery.
You need Kurt to destroy him. Not just for you, not just for the sake of stone skipping, but for America––on Independence Day no less.
*
The announcer yells into the microphone. Hissing feedback.
“Here ye, here ye. All professionals should have stones to skip. God bless these United States, the state of Michigan, and the streets of Mackinac Island. Professionals, start your stones… This is America!”
*
Whenever you see people standing at the shore of a lake, throwing rocks out from under their feet and into the water, it reminds you of sailors throwing buckets of water overboard to prevent their boat from sinking.
*
Each contestant has six chances to skip. Rules are to skip along the edge of the shore against the waves, so the judges, standing knee-deep in Lake Huron, can count.
*
Kurt sends out his first skip and after a brief pause, the judges deliberate and call out a 19.
A lady in the crowd yells, “Woo, walkin’ on water!”
*
The beach teems with Nate Dogg fans. They wear red shirts with DOGG POUND written across the back.
When Nate Dogg winds-up, he stretches his right hand straight back behind him with the rock and stretches his left hand out in front of him towards the water, so that his arms go seesaw like he’s surfing as he gains power before he shifts his weight and throws. Four skips on his first go. A dud. You try to conceal a smile. But you also fear that you might be more like Nate Dogg than you’d care to admit. Didn’t you show the same kind of bravado on your lake amongst your friends or that time you tried to impress a woman, or when you asked your girlfriend to shoot video of you skipping two rocks at once to put on YouTube?
*
The actual competition.
Max “Top Gun” Steiner, 25-years-old, says he started skipping stones on Mackinac Island when he was about six-years-old. After years of training with Russ Byars, he realized he could skip in the 40, 50, 60+ range and got his moment to hold the Guinness World Record with 65 skips until Mountain Man snatched it back.
Mackinac Island seems like Top Gun’s home turf and you can sense something sinister bubbling under the surface with this Nate Dogg character and how he came in on the wind with his pack like strays wrapped in stars and stripes.
*
Bugsie throws for 13 skips. Sherriff throws for 12. Air-tight Alibi throws for 3. Lefty throws for 9. Chomper throws for 14. Top Gun throws for 16.
*
Nate Dogg raises his hands like a gladiator to the crowd, gyrating in the water when he hits an impressive 25 skips. Every time he approaches the water, the Dogg Pound next to you jumps up and barks at his rocks as they skip.
*
If there had to be villains at a Fourth of July contest, it’s fitting that they’d dress in red like modern-day Red Coats.
*
Nate Dogg wins the trophy with 25 skips––63 less than Kurt’s current world record. He waves the goblet stuffed with a hundred dollars cash over his head and the Dogg Pound disappears for the Pink Pony.
*
Kurt lingers on the shore, giving skipping advice to a young Japanese man.
You introduce yourself. You tell Kurt how you drove overnight from New York. He laughs and says, “This kid here,” he points to the young man, “he flew in from Japan!”
Turns out the young Japanese man is a rising star in stone skipping in his own country––where they call it mizu-kiri or cutting water.
He came here to talk shop with Kurt––though he doesn’t speak English and Kurt doesn’t speak Japanese, they communicate through body language, stones, and throwing techniques.
*
Kurt says he spent ten years preparing for his world record attempt. He’d collect 10,000 stones and set aside five. He did that until he had 500 of the best.
“I collected a quarter million rocks over a decade,” he says.
He can get about 300 pounds in a hard day’s work. Which is about four five-gallon buckets.
It puts your rock deficit back home into perspective. All you ever really did was pace around a small shore looking for stones to reveal themselves and sulked after you depleted the natural resources.
You don’t know it yet, but when you get home you’ll start walking deep into the forest to collect stones to skip.
*
“Would you have used a different rock today?” you ask Kurt, wondering if maybe his defeat was due to choosing the wrong rocks.
“You have to really think about the geometry of the water and the geometry of the stone. Then you have to know about the biomechanical method to make power – you want power, but you also want spin. I like to understand the forces,” he says, pointing at the waves lapping at your heels.
*
Kurt’s main goal now is disconnecting from the world. He doesn’t have a cellphone. Doesn’t have a landline. Doesn’t have a computer.
“I pretty much got into a rhythm the last ten years of making enough money here and there to get me through the rest of the year.”
“How minimal do you have to live?” your future-wife asks––as if to prepare for a life with you, this guy who could very easily shun the world and become a recluse in the woods who devotes his life to odd jobs and stone skipping.
“Well, I’m an old backpacker,” Kurt says. “So I kinda live at home like I’m in a campground. Which means I own one spoon.” The true minimalist, well, aside from his mountain of collected stones.
*
In Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes, “A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself.”
Kurt has the kind of face people think they see in the erosion of the side of a mountain.
*
In preparation for his World Record attempt: Kurt carried his hundreds of pounds of stones up a hill, and then thirty feet up a stairway. He stored them in three separate piles. An A pile, a B pile, and a C pile. The C pile consisted mostly of the junk––heavy, crappy stones––for strength training. Then he’d split the B pile into As, Bs and Cs. Each pile is designed to help improve his distance, finesse, or strength.
“It’s hard work, but it’s part of the exercise–and kind of the Zen to it.” It’s a Sisyphean image, no doubt.
*
“Are you happy having devoted so much of your life to skipping rocks?” you ask.
“I can’t afford to stay on this island,” he says, “I have no money. Given my lifestyle, this right now is an extravagance. Last night, I got to St. Ignace, hiked about a mile up the trail and toughed it out with the mosquitoes.”
He doesn’t seem bitter about it. You wonder how long $100 would have lasted Kurt and how fast Nate Dogg might’ve pissed it away. How fast you might have pissed it away.
“You know everybody’s heard of the Paleo diet?” Kurt asks. “Well, to me stone skipping is Paleotherapy. I even get the benefit of that… Paleolithic therapy. It’s basically the disconnect from the over-connectedness as a way of bringing it back to a kind of psychic health… I get worried when people don’t have access to that.”
*
You wouldn’t know it until later, but Russ didn’t make the competition that year because he was diagnosed with esophagus cancer. Doctors removed part of his esophagus and two-thirds of his stomach. He’s since lost a hundred pounds.
He did, however, show up to next year’s competition. “There were a few people there that I wanted to whoop while I’m sick as a dog,” he says.
Sick as a dog or not, Russ is gunning for Kurt’s world record. “I’ll only be happy with one-hundred skips for the record. So I’m going to have to reinvent my throw,” he says.
*
There is an old military fort on a big hill overlooking the island. Fort Mackinac. It’s the furthest you can get from the mob on the shore assembling to bathe in the ash of the July 4th fireworks.
At the top of the hill, past the gates of the fort, there is an empty field. No one is talking about time travel or stone skipping and it’s a relief.
War reenactors fire cannon blanks over the lake at the fleet of time machines.
Another soldier plays battle hymns on a harmonica.
You stop to listen.
They look at you like you’re from the future.
You read the small sign at the edge of the grass. It says, This Is 1890.
Shane Cashman’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vice, Catapult, Monkeybicycle, Salon, Entropy, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
STORY IMAGE CREDIT: main image Flickr Creative Commons/Chris Potako; secondary image, courtesy of the author.
