The Loneliest Road

In 2007, I fell in love with Elephant Rock, which juts out of the North Sea, crouching the perfect distance offshore and large enough to feel like a separate world. Each day, after my host left for work, I began my private walking tour of tiny St. Andrews, birthplace of golf and the oldest university in Scotland, where Prince William met Kate. I always ended up back at Elephant Rock, drawn close by its gravity.
I was ripe to fall in love with a geological feature because my heart had recently been crushed and I needed to love something that felt permanent. Before selfies were a thing, I took self-portraits at Elephant Rock, my arm wrapped around an outcropping as if slung across the shoulders of a friend. I tended the rock, observed others enjoying it and, before I knew anything about meditation, found peace there.
It’s been almost eight years, but I think about my time at Elephant Rock often. Recently, I discovered that my old friend is not the only geological feature so-called, not in the world and not even in Scotland. There is an Elephant Rock in the Highlands that is more clearly elephant-shaped. But then I found Kevin Reid’s Spinattic 360 view of Elephant Rock at St. Andrews, taken just a few months ago, and as I scrolled past the parking lot, restaurant and aquarium built at the edge of the beach, I recognized it all. When the scrolling view came around to the rock, a sob wrenched out of me. I still don’t think it looks like an elephant, but seeing the rock after all these years was unexpectedly like seeing the face of a dearly beloved and long-lost friend. Since 2007, every cell in my body has renewed and yet, I'm also my essential unchanged self. I wonder at the changes the rock has undergone. Is it still covered with graffiti—hearts and initials carved into it—and litter? Has it lost mass, as I have, or has it picked up sediment and gained gravity?
If you go to St. Andrews, visit the beach, where the juxtaposition of history and our modern age is stark and somehow, harmonious. Our human endeavors, both ancient and recent, are built into the natural landscape, following the slope of the hill, ending at the beach where Elephant Rock sits in the North Sea, a monolith sturdy enough to withstand the mercurial changes of human emotion, something more permanent than a human lifespan to cling to in the midst of individual evolution.