I actually said that this morning: “I’ll believe it when I see it”, after our instructor Chris told us that we were going to break rocks into useable tools, using other rocks. I had already dubbed this day “caveman day” when I heard we were going to be banging rocks together. As much as I laughed about it, as much as I doubted, I found yet again in this program that I was pleasantly surprised. Mid-day today I looked around to see my fellow students squatting by the river banging rocks together, smiled at the sight of it, then went back to my own effort. As any two year old will tell you as well as s/he can, banging things together is fun, but even better was the satisfaction of using our adult understanding of geology and physics to choose the right rock and the precise angle to shear off a razor sharp shard big enough to use as a tool. Caveman day wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Theoretically. By the end of the day a few people were binding their blades to scotch broom branch handles to create carving axes, while others had regressed to just throwing rocks on other rocks to see what happened. Amazingly, we all walked away from this primal day with all the appendages we’d started with, holding a new skill to tuck away in our toolboxes, just in case.

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