A good friend of mine prepared for a visit to his doctor by compiling a thorough documentation of his medical history.  His doctor took one look at the spread sheets and the columns of numbers, and said something to the effect of, “I’m not interested in data.”

My friend—a doctor himself— was shocked. For him, as a member of a scientific and medical tradition stretching back to the ancient Hellenic philosophers, empirical evidence is the basis for knowledge. But my friend’s doctor probably already knew what specific data he would need to make a diagnosis and design a treatment. He wasn’t interested in seeking knowledge, but in solving a problem.

Unlike my friend’s doctor, I have no plan or methodology for finding the clues I need to pierce the enigma of the cross carved in stone I found on the bluff overlooking the Potomac River. For the most part, I just stumble around in the forest, happily finding clues, many of them intriguing, but none that have actually brought me closer to understanding anything significant about that odd carving. This is hardly surprising, because it would take the training and the skills of an archeologist to know what to look for and how to make sense out it, and I’m not an archeologist.

But through it all, I have found something important that goes beyond the enigmatic rock. As I write in my main article:

Here was a patch of forest overlooking the Potomac, lovely in its own right, but otherwise seemingly unremarkable. Yet, as I discovered through the bits of glass and flakes of stone, the circles of rocks and odd bits and pieces of human detritus, that spot has a conscious dimension that stretches back—who knows?—decades, centuries, maybe much longer. Even on a silent winter’s day, when nothing moves except the river, there are voices here.

Here’s a visual summary of what I’ve found.

Just a mat of dead leaves and a piece of rotted limb. But something lay underneath.

At last revealed to a curious world (at least to me).

From far back in time comes the crack of a rifle.

Its just a pit filled with dead leaves. But what about the apparent circle of stones around its perimeter?

An ordinary chunk of conrrete in an unusual place.

A mosaic of remembrances, of good times, bad health, and everyday life.

Artifacts or trash? Maybe a little of each.

Could a battered old brick mean that a house once stood here?

A scrap of metal that used to be part of– what?

A lens reveals that the post is made from a mash-up of marine fossils.

Whats a corncob doing miles from the nearest cornfield? A wandering band of Indians?

Shaped like a sharks tooth, this flake of quartzite could be an Indian scraping tool.

It looks like a rock, but hard and brittle like porcelain. I’ve never seen anything like it here or anywhere.

Cleanly cut piece of post looks like concrete, only it’s not.

Section of pipe, pounded into the ground.

A scrap of copper.

An odd metal disc with a flattened spike in the middle.