Walk Upstream and You Will Find It

The blue pebble did not come from the sea. For a long time people here thought that it did.

Rivers carry stones. If you find a pebble at a river mouth, it has come down from somewhere higher up. So if you want to know where it started, you walk upstream. That is what two men did in nineteen seventy four. One was Dominican and one was American, and they followed the blue stones up the river into the mountains. The loose pebbles stopped, and there was the rock they came from: dark old volcanic stone with blue inside it.

One of the men was called Miguel Méndez. His daughter was called Larissa, and the Spanish word for sea is mar. He put the two words together and called the stone larimar.

He was not the first person to see it. In nineteen sixteen a priest in Barahona found the same blue stones in the same river. He asked for permission to dig. The answer was no, because nobody in the country knew what the mineral was. Polly turns the pebble over and looks up at the green ridge above her.