I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to own an amber pendant, preferably one with a fern frond trapped inside. Air bubbles are considered major finds, scientifically speaking, but air holds no interest for me. I’d happily take a tick wrapped in spider’s silk or a few tiny, hundred-million-year-old flowers. In the last few years, pieces of amber with spectacular inclusions have been found. One holds a dinosaur’s feather. Another holds a microscopic sixteen-million-year-old tardigrade. I had always assumed that only the smallest and lightest objects could be trapped in tree resin, but now scientists are unearthing fossilized amber remains of creatures as large as geckos and frogs.
I am wishing. These amber fossils are in museums. If they aren’t, they should be. They offer us a glimpse of the world without us, one we would never otherwise see. None of these are going to be hanging around my neck anytime soon.
Amber might be my favorite gemstone. Unlike emerald or sapphire, amber was made by something that once was alive. Amber is not even really a stone. It is the fossilized resin of a cone-bearing tree—something along the lines of a pine or a cedar—an ancestor that no longer exists. Amber comes in up to two hundred colors, but most often it’s the warm color we think of when we say “amber”—golden to honey-colored, warm brown to red—and that is also my favorite color for amber to be. If you hold a piece to your nose, you can smell the incense of the tree it first came from. If you hold a piece in your palm, it’s warm. It still seems a little bit alive.
Amber came to be in primordial forests near Scandinavia millions of years ago, when the trees began to uncontrollably release enormous amounts of thick, sticky resin. No one knows what the trees were trying to protect themselves from: a thick cloud of volcanic ash, a new insect, a disease. Writer Victoria Finlay imagines that “resin would have hung from the branches like great toffee apples, spilling onto the forest floor in honeyed pools and even oozing under the bark of the trees like coagulated butter.” The resin solidified over time, and the hardened pieces ended up in the Baltic Sea. Amber is lighter than sea water, so it floats, and in the early spring it is harvested in nets or gathered on the nearby beaches in the same way that I once looked for Petoskey stones on the beaches of Lake Michigan.
Petoskey stones are the amber of Michigan, heaved up from the ancient past onto the beaches, most often in late winter and early spring, the time of storms and strong waves, and it’s easiest to find them at that time as well, before vacationers descend to pick them over. Petoskey stones are far older than even amber, part stone and part fossilized remains, imprinted with the faint hexagonal pattern of the coral reef that existed here four hundred million years ago, back when the first coral reefs were formed, and Michigan was part of a shallow tropical sea.
In the summer after ninth grade, my friend Jenny and I spent one perfect week together, along with her brothers and parents and grandparents, at their cottage on Platte Lake in Michigan’s Leelanau peninsula, near the dunes at Sleeping Bear and Lake Michigan. We swam and paddled and climbed the dunes. She and I sailed a little Sunfish dinghy with a bright red-orange-yellow sail while admiring a sleek and expensive-looking catamaran docked at the lake’s far end. Show a lot of leg, Jenny would say, and we would extend our skinny fourteen-year-old legs toward the fancy faraway boat in invitation, but the boat remained unmoved.
Did we look for Petoskey stones? I am sure of it.
Her grandparents affectionately called me by a different name at every meal without ever once getting it right. The grandmother conjured from the makeshift kitchen three sit-down meals a day and insisted we clean every plate—eat every sugared tomato slice, every spoonful of mashed potato—if we wanted there to be fine weather. On the one day it did rain, Jenny and I played an old cassette of Carole King, where you lead, I will follow, writing letters as we sang along to “So Far Away,” though we’d only been up north a few days and would certainly get back home before our letters did.
Translations of a few of the names for amber: Petrified light. Protector. Sea gold. Freya’s tears, sun tears, congealed sunlight, captured sunshine, the surname Bernstein (“burning stone”). The names contradict each other, focusing on both sun and sea, suggesting both the power of gods and their limits.
Here is how I remember Jenny: She sat on the floor outside the high-school art room, hunched over a long sheet of paper unscrolled from a wheeled cart as she painted and cut out giant petals, fitting them into enormous flowers to decorate the gym for a dance. Between classes she passed me notes in the hallway, notes that were mostly cartoons of people who looked amiable and befuddled. I visited her one summer when she was away, working as a lifeguard at a scouting camp, and found her perched on a high white chair, wearing a no-nonsense swimsuit with a whistle around her neck. At her house we sat on her bedroom floor, and when one of her brothers annoyed her, she would yell his name and then yell knock it off! When I was with Jenny, my insides felt buoyant and light.
She was the kind of person who could say or do anything with a perfectly composed face, and I would laugh until I couldn’t breathe and my stomach hurt. We once baked a horrible-looking cake for a close friend, squeezing every bottle of food coloring we could find in our mothers’ cupboards into the bowls of icing and batter until both turned the color of mud. We decorated the whole thing with plastic flies, and when we presented it, our friend laughed until tears ran down her face and said that it was the ugliest cake she’d ever seen.
A few more names for amber: Hardened honey, stone of immortality. Tiger’s soul.
On my own birthday Jenny gave me six chicken nuggets in a Styrofoam clamshell. She had shellacked them and glued on faces with googly eyes. Her father the scoutmaster had gotten in on the project, she said, taking her to his basement workbench where he had helped her brothers build cars for the pinewood derby, using toothpicks to fully submerge each piece of breaded meat in flakes of shellac he had warmed until they turned liquid. Her birthday gift stayed in the bottom of my school locker for months, until the end of the year, when I finally threw it away, though it had never smelled bad or changed its appearance at all. Finally it seemed unnatural to be holding on to something that should rot but did not.
Tree resin turned out to be the perfect material to preserve insects and leaves for millions of years. Coniferous trees like pines make resin near the center of their trunks, in what’s known as their heartwood. When a tree is injured, ducts secrete resin onto the tree’s surface, and the resin seals off the bark, healing the wound and protecting the tree from further attack. And ever since people first became curious about amber, back in the Stone Age, they have intuitively pulverized it to make medicine and worn it in protective amulets. The Egyptians used it to embalm their dead.
When I approached Jenny in a school hallway, she sometimes said hello by jumping back a few inches and shouting, Get away from me, you weirdo! I did the same to her. The only fourteen-year-old girl in America with a picture of Mother Teresa taped to her closet door, I shook my head sadly. Little creep, she hissed. Remembering a million tiny details no one else cares about.
Who doesn’t have a lost childhood friend, a perfect week that disappears into the dunes, a memory that, when you rub it, sparks fly out? Yet what I remember most about being a teenager is laughter—laughter, and the ever-present pitching waves of strong emotions, crests of excitement and troughs of fear and angst that I had not yet learned to manage. While driving to pick up my daughter from her after-school program the other day, I heard a radio interview with a scientist who said that people laugh together in hopes of bonding to each other. Maybe that’s why Jenny and I laughed so often. If we had been another species under observation, say, shore birds studied by an ornithologist, perhaps that scientist would have said that our shouts and chatter translated to something like Ilikeyoudoyoulikeme? Ilikeyoudoyoulikeme?
I was talking with my mother on the telephone: it was Mother’s Day. My mother has dementia and does not remember much, but on that afternoon my father took her on an outing to the local grocery store, and they ran into Jenny’s now-widowed husband in one of the aisles. That must have been what did it, heaved Jenny back to the surface of my mother’s consciousness. “But I thought you already knew about that,” my mother sounded surprised when my voice broke. “I thought you knew.”
During the winter Jenny wore a peacoat and no hat. Snowflakes shimmered in her hair.
Amber was widely believed to be the tears of gods and goddesses. The Norse claimed that the goddess Freya wept over her husband’s long absences and searched for him. As she cried on land her tears turned to gold, and when she cried at sea her tears became amber. In some variations of this myth, her husband has left her because she has been unfaithful, and she cries in regret. The Greeks believed that amber was the tears of the grieving sisters of Phaeton, who had been killed by a thunderbolt hurled by Zeus. The sisters had been turned into a stand of poplar trees as punishment for helping their brother steal the sun chariot of their father Helios. A different story said that amber was made of the tears that Apollo shed for his young son Asclepius, who was renowned for his abilities to heal and even raise the dead; it was not normal, Zeus decided, for people to think they could live forever. In a Lithuanian story, the sea goddess Jurate is punished by the thunder god for bedding a mortal. The god hurls a thunderbolt, smashing Jurate’s amber castle at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. She too weeps amber tears.
Jenny must have been five foot ten by age fourteen, and she lamented to my mother that she would never have a boyfriend. My mother said, You are beautiful in ways that you cannot yet even begin to imagine.
Now I am thinking about Jenny’s body, and the day a group of cells in her breasts, seemingly without reason, believed that they were something else and began to
multiply wildly, faster and faster. How those cells interfered with the work of her body until cancer became her breasts, then became her lymph nodes, bones, and brain. And where was I? Jenny had been dead for two years before I learned that she was gone. She left behind two teenage children, a boy and a girl.
I can’t find a myth about the creation of the Petoskey stone. But the First Peoples’ story of the creation of the dunes, near the lakeshore where Petoskey stones are found, is also a story of grief. It goes like this: A great forest fire started in the land we now call Wisconsin, and a mother bear and her two babies fled. To save themselves, they had to swim across Lake Michigan. The mother was strong enough to swim all the way across to what is now the Leelanau Peninsula, but her cubs drowned on the way. When the spirit Manitou saw the mother’s grief, she turned the mother into a sand dune, then created two islands in sight of shore, to honor the babies. Their grieving mother still looks upon them; yearning is all-encompassing and unsolvable.
Amber as a substance defies logic: It bobs to the surface of an icy sea but glows like an ember. It rises from the water with the earth’s plants and animals trapped inside, plants and animals from another time, another place. Amber can be burned and smell fragrant, like incense; it can melt; it sparks with static electricity when you rub it. Amber made no sense to ancient people, but they did know about love and death and loss, and myths are stories created to explain what we don’t understand, using the things that we do.
Or maybe these stories simply acknowledge that we die, especially the most vulnerable among us, and that the ones left behind grieve. I also wonder whether the existence of such stories reveals our wish to be consoled—to have the universe acknowledge our loss and make meaning out of our suffering. The living will never see the dead again, but in the meantime, Here is a beautiful jewel-like stone, golden and ruddy, that light shines through, scooped from the sea. Look at this sunset over the Manitou Islands in Lake Michigan as you sit on a fallen tree, fourteen years old, with your best friend and her dog.
The truth is that Jenny and I had begun to drift apart by junior year. She had transferred to a Catholic high school in the next town, and we no longer saw each other every day. We lost each other long before she died; I didn’t even know where she had gone to college until I saw the name in her obituary. When we were in our twenties and thirties, we would occasionally resurface in each other’s lives at an odd moment. As my grandfather lay dying, Jenny walked into his hospital room in her nursing scrubs, and they recognized each other. She cared for him so well, he told me in our final phone call. Sisters, he wheezed over and over, she said you were…like sisters.
After my daughter was born, Jenny surfaced again, sending what I now realize was a strangely brief message through Facebook, to ask whether I would be coming home anytime soon. I wasn’t, I wrote back, and she disappeared again. I was overwhelmed, grading papers between diaper changes and feedings, teaching entire classes before I realized that my daughter had plastered my sweater with dinosaur stickers, so I thought nothing of Jenny’s there-and-gone-again note until much later, when I heard about her death and put all the dates together. That’s when I realized that she had sent that message because she was about to die, and that she had wanted to see me, and tell me, then likely she had decided not to say more over social media, not when it had been so long and I had just had a baby.
Every time I think of that, I feel a squeezing in my chest and wonder what I could have done differently, so that I could have noticed what was happening. Where you lead, I will follow. How had I come to be unfaithful? It would have been hard, but I would have liked to have said goodbye.
That’s when you know you’re old, when you know more people in the graveyard than you do out, quips my father whenever we drive past a cemetery. At the midpoint of my life, I have known and sometimes loved a lot of people who have died. Not just grandparents and pets, but family, teachers, a choir director, neighbors, the children of friends, famous people I admired, colleagues. It turns out that, after some time passes, grief is no weight around one’s neck. It is never light, but over time one learns how to carry it. Jenny has been set like a seal upon my heart.
One more.
Jenny and I canoed the long canal that ran behind her house in the afternoons after school. The water was shallow and still, the paddling so easy that we never bothered to decide which of us was power and who would steer. The way I remember it, it is always early spring—season of icy mud and waiting. It was too cold to spend the afternoon outside, but I had a younger sister and she had a younger brother, and both of them liked to spy on us. We were too young to drive; the canoe was the only place we could be alone and talk without being overheard. So we floated along, letting our hands grow ruddy and chilled as we chattered and paddled under the naked trees.
When the canal’s water began to quicken, it was time to turn back. We were getting close to the place where the canal emptied into a busy channel in the Detroit River, full of speedboats and lake freighters carrying slag into the mouth of Lake Erie, no place for a couple of kids in a canoe. Instead, a little before dinnertime, we would be lifting the boat from the water at Jenny’s house. My mother’s Buick might already be idling in the driveway, waiting for me, the sky now honey-gold and shot with streaks of red.
I loved Jenny. And Jenny loved me.
The Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan, with its sand dunes and lakes and beaches and northern light, is the closest place I know to heaven on earth. Except that I’ve never believed in heaven, have only ever thought that heaven is now, a perpetual act of becoming, that all of the stardust and electricity and whatever else we are made of is part of everything else—that what is Christ, meaning universal, is far bigger than even a paradigm-shifting teacher like the Nazarene, who after all did not walk on the earth as long ago as the coniferous trees grieved, much less when there were coral reefs in what is now Michigan. That means that Jenny and I remain connected, no matter which of us is living or dead. We both are erosion and evolution, ancient glaciers and coral and white pines and Loon Lake, Crystal Lake, Platte Lake. They’ve never found a bottom in some parts, Jenny whispered to me that week up north, as we stood on the shore of Torch Lake.
Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poetry, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World
and Atlas (both from Milkweed). Her essays have been recognized as notable by the Best American Essays series and have won a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
