I enjoy spending time outside. So it’s no surprise that I like bringing the outdoors inside. And the best way to do so is with a few carefully selected objects accidentally found along roads, on out-of-the-way 
trails, at riverbanks and tidal wrack lines, or while bushwhacking over ledges and through thickets. Such odds and ends typically have little value except to the finder for whom they are infused the joy of discovery, the memory of adventure, and the intimacy of having had something in hand. I display these small wonders on shelves, mantles, tables and almost any flat surface I can find at home.
Many people collect stones and shells while strolling along the shore. Sorting through
nature’s own flotsam seems an almost universal habit from childhood through old age. As abstract painter Josef Albers observed, “pebbles are miraculous.” I have dozens of sea-smoothed stones, glass shards and shells. Selected for shape, color texture and overall beauty, they remind me of languid summer walks along the arc of Connecticut’s Rocky Neck, stormy Novembers on Block Island, and the pounding Pacific surf of southern Oregon.
I’m also someone who collects rocks lying beyond the beach, haphazardly so, when something strikes my fancy. Among my many treasures are a small but heavy chunk of siderite, an iron ore from a mining site in Roxbury, Connecticut; cream-colored dolomite from western Newfoundland; bog iron from the Jersey Pine Barrens; and Connecticut Valley traprock and sandstone. Of course, one must be careful about picking up even the most innocent looking stone. Those who take pieces of Australia’s Uluru, or Ayers Rock, a site sacred to Aboriginal people, are said to experience bad luck afterwards.
Because of their scarcity and the serendipity of a find, even more valued than rocks are items evidencing the lives of various other creatures in the places I visit. Oyster and other shells and the armored remains of horseshoe crabs are among the items I’ve recovered from the shore. Further
inland I’ve found a snapping turtle shell near a pond, and cut a large papery white-faced hornets’ nest off a bare winter branch. On one of my bookcases there’s a beaver bitten stick, pointed at both ends and chewed in the middle. About thirty years ago I snagged it from a hotel-sized beaver lodge sitting in the tea-colored water of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. Not many years afterward I plucked a caribou antler off the ground in the barrens of Labrador.
Nearer to home, I found a three-point deer
antler which shows remarkably little gnawing by rodents whose hunger for calcium makes such a find rare despite the ubiquity of deer. I’ve picked a robin’s and a blue-headed vireo’s nest off the ground during a recent December. I have pieces of driftwood and rotten stumps, turkey and blue jay feathers, even the wings of a large Luna Moth. On the most recent Audubon Christmas bird count I found a bleached crow skull in a field.
Fortunately, rambles in settled countryside with a long history do not limit one to finding natural objects. In a kind of ersatz and random
archaeology I’ve picked up old electrical insulators along railroad rights-of-way; found a Collins axe rusting at the edge of the Farmington River downstream of the old factory; and fished metal gears, nails, and iron strips out of old cellar holes. I have coal clinkers from long gone industrial boilers, slag from nineteenth century iron furnaces, and a tiny piece of bent and melted aluminum from a mountainside airplane crash half a century ago.
All these objects bring some fresh air and sunshine into my home on even the most glowering overcast day. They are evidence of past adventures in both unique and mundane places. Whenever weather or circumstances confine me to home, they remind me that further explorations await. There’s no telling what you’ll find when you look.
