Adapted from Jocelyn’s newsletter, originally sent June 5, 2026.
There's a stretch of I-5 coming north out of Seattle where the fields give way to forest and the speed limit drops from 70 to 60.
The road starts curving in slow S's through a cut, Lake Samish on your left, a cliff face on your right. Phone service drops here. The world goes quiet. You could be going anywhere.
And then you'd see it. Up to the right of the freeway tucked into the trees.
A rock.
A big one.
A glacial erratic, a hundred-some tons, dropped in that exact spot by a retreating glacier and sitting there longer than there's been a freeway.
Longer than there's been an us.
People had been painting it since 1969, when a kid named Dan McNamara climbed up there and spray-painted his high school on it. Sealth '70.
I’ve driven that stretch of freeway at least once a month for twelve years, and every time I came back from Seattle, two hours of cities and strip malls and little farm towns all bleeding into one another, I started looking for it. Because you can be anywhere in that cut. The rock told you exactly where you were. Seeing it was an exhale. Phew. Almost home.
And it was never the same rock twice. Marriage proposals. Memorials remembering the dead. Birth announcements. A new album, a Seahawks win, a class reunion, HAPPY BIRTHDAY in letters four feet tall.
Nearly sixty years of people climbing up there with spray paint and probably a couple beers and something they needed to say badly enough to say it on a rock next to a freeway.
It's gone now.
They broke it apart in May. A salmon project, pulling the old culverts out of the creek so the fish could finally run again. And look... I get it. I do. Salmon matter. Habitat matters. But they promised they'd move it, save it in a few big pieces.
Instead it broke apart into hundreds of pieces too small to be anything, and now it won't be moved at all.
I still drive that freeway. The phone still drops. When I come around the curve, my eyes go up to that open space above the freeway out of pure habit. The looking hasn’t stopped.
Was that rock magic on its own, sitting up there for ten thousand years before any of us showed up with a can of spray paint?
Or did we make it magic, fifty years of painting our weddings and our dead onto it and driving past to watch it shine back at us?
And now that it's in pieces, did the magic die with it, or did it just go… somewhere else?
Somewhere new. Or back to something old.
Jocelyn
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