Big Rocks and Sheep

I had a close, personal encounter with a sheep the other day. Yards behind me was a circular formation of massive stones dragged hundreds of miles by ancient persons sometime before history began. Nevertheless, here I stood, transfixed by a sheep less than half my age and with as much ancient mysticism as a peanut. Simple things for the simple minded, I guess. It cocked its head at me, and I ended up making unusual faces at it in the hopes of luring it toward me. I didn’t have a plan after that, really; perhaps I’d poke it and see what happened.

That, in a nutshell, was my experience at Stonehenge. Anyone else notice the lack of, oh, Stonehenge in all of that? Kassie and I stumbled out of the taxi at 7:45 in the morning, our wallets twelve quid lighter and our brains barely functioning in the early morning hours. We trudged through the entrance and through the plains toward the formation of which I’d only ever seen photos. Granted, it was a fascinating sight. The sheer engineering prowess involved in creating such a masterpiece is bound to wow someone who can barely operate a microwave. My travel buddy and I expected to be floored by some sort of religious awakening, some deep emotional jolt to ebb through the very chasms of our souls…what we got was a large wooden sign that read, “Welcome to Stonehenge.” Well no shit, Sherlock. It’s not as if I randomly encountered the damn thing and asked myself, “What on Earth is that?”

“What exactly is a henge, anyway?” Kassie asked me as we approached the monument. I said I didn’t know, and that maybe it meant “circle.”

“So it’s called Stone Circle? Couldn’t they have been more creative than that?”

To stand next to one of the numerous legs of Stonehenge, the sixteen-foot pi symbols that look as though they could bend down and scoop me up, is an intimidating experience. When one looks at photos of modern homes being flung about carelessly like a child would angrily toss a toy across a room by whatever natural disaster is tearing through, one may wonder why sound architectural talent was weeded out during humanity’s evolutionary process. Despite its inevitable wonder, as I stood there freezing my ass off, I couldn’t help but think, “I paid twelve pounds to see stacked rocks.”

Why did I go? Why did I spend the equivalent of 200 dollars to see something of which I’d already viewed hundreds of photos? This question was posed to me. “Why in the hell did you go to Stonehenge?” a random Englishperson asked of me. I was very near berating him for not having an appreciation for history, for his people, for mankind, for chrissakes, and a how dare you question me, sort of thing, or why HAVEN’T you gone, you silly Englishman! Until I attempted to answer his question myself, and all I could muster was, “Well, it’s…uh…it’s Stonehenge.” Just one of those have-to-see things. For most Brits, Stonehenge is just outside their proverbial front door, but it’s as good as on the moon to an American.

It was then that I realized that nobody visits Stonehenge for the right reasons. Or at least, nobody visits for the same reasons. Does anyone on this planet have half an inkling of knowledge as to what Stonehenge was actually used for? For all we know the ridiculously beefy men that created it could have put it there simply to confound future generations of humans. They won’t have a clue what all these rocks mean, but they’ll still spend twelve quid to see them. A practical joke spanning hundreds of years--ha ha, very funny guys. It’s as though it is our duty as humans to slap a gift shop and a queue in front of anything more than five hundreds years old. Surely it used to mean something; now it just means revenue. The hippies that slather themselves all over it in the hopes of some spiritual revolution felt something, but is it something fake? They got their deeply religious one-with-the-Earth costumes at a cheap second hand shop. Nothing is real anymore. The cheap plastic replicas in the gift shop aren’t real, the pitiful rope barrier dividing Stonehenge and its teeming fans isn’t real, the hippies and I aren’t real. Only the stones are real. I am a passing thought, a fly buzzing around its face, a minor spasm of a muscle of Stonehenge. God, how it must laugh at us. “Your species built me, you twits! How can you allow some people to charge other people just to SEE me?” The sheep must laugh at us too, because they get to see it every damn day and we don’t make them pay out the nose to do it. I wanted to climb up on top of the stones and scream in a dramatic sort of way, “Take back your history, England! What’s the point in buying a fifteen inch replica when the real thing is right the hell here?!” But the 24 hour Stonehenge guards, probably in full battle mode specifically to deal with nutters like me, would come galloping up on their besaddled guard sheep and taser me. They get enough of that crap from the pre-wrapped hippies. There is one thing we as a collective species have accomplished, and that’s our depressing ability to crap all over anything wonderful.

Stonehenge was not a disappointment. Giant stacked rocks that offer all too many opportunities for wisecracks and druid jokes just can’t be. But I couldn’t help but wonder if each and every tourist who purchased a ticket onto the field was somehow contributing to the death of its mysticism. Perhaps viewing only a photo of Stonehenge, seeing it only as a distant, almost mythical entity, is the only way to truly preserve the mysteriousness and wonder it so deserves.