The spirit in the stoneBook captures rock faces that smiled on couple's healing process after Columbine
By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News
August 25, 2007
In the long, sorrowful aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, burdened by the horror of the event and false accusations that his son was involved, Randy Brown sought escape on the hiking trails near his home.
Then one day he stopped to rest and found himself staring at a rock. Amazingly, it seemed to be staring back.
A deep slash in the stone created the illusion of a forehead and eyes. A tiny nick below carved out a nose. Another slash passed for a mouth.
"Oh, I love that guy," Randy says of the stone. "He just seemed so brave and full of strength."
Maybe it was because it reflected qualities he'd been searching so hard to find in himself. Or maybe it was the simple joy of discovery. Whatever the reason, the face somehow added up to more than the sum of those parts.
Randy took a photo, and something clicked inside him as well.
Years later, Randy and his wife, Judy, have a veritable quarry of others, and their book Faces in the Rocks: A Spiritual Journey is hot off the press. The winsome coffee-table book, full of rocks brimming with personality, makes you smile - and just as quickly sets you to wondering: What could possibly be so winning about a bunch of stones?
The question isn't lost on Randy.
Who would have guessed, after all, that when you're in a hard place, you might find comfort in a rock?
Sticks and stonesJudy and Randy Brown live in Jefferson County near the infamous high school, in the kind of development that leads some to envision residents stamped out like widgets on an assembly line. It's a thought that might bring the Browns comfort. Instead, the couple will be forever defined by what makes them stand out: Columbine.
Even now, the tragedy seems as close as the kitchen table where they sit. "We were devastated by Columbine. Our children lived through it," says Randy, a big man who often runs his hands over his face while talking of the 8-year-old event, as if wearied by the very thought.
His son Brooks had been friends with Dylan Klebold from the time they were in grade school. "Dylan stood right here for play rehearsal, for parties. He was in our house for years; he was a nice little kid," says Randy.
Brooks later grew apart from Klebold and had run-ins with Eric Harris, who had posted death threats toward Brooks on the Internet. The Browns reported Harris to the police, but by the time of the shootings, Brooks and Harris had reconciled. That fact would cause Brooks no end of misery in the aftermath of Columbine, as police wrongly suspected him of working in consort with the killers.
Meanwhile, Judy and Randy stirred up further animosity by claiming that the shootings might have been averted had the police followed up on their earlier report. They were cast as liars by the police and ostracized by other parents. Finally, they were vindicated two years later when the draft of a search warrant for Harris' home, generated from their report and other events, became public. The warrant had never been executed.
The experience was embittering for the couple. "It ruined the American dream for me," says Randy.
"Our trust in the system," adds Judy.
"When we reported Eric, we did it conscientiously, knowing it would put our son's life in danger," says Randy. "On the day of Columbine, I stood by that wall" - he points to a spot with a view of both the front and back doors - "with a pistol, waiting for Eric and Dylan to come to the house." He'd heard that the two were involved and feared that Harris would eventually seek out his family for revenge. "I was going to have to shoot them," he says.
When it was over, "we were just so sad," he says. "Literally, we did not eat for three days. I drove over to Taco Bell and I was standing in line crying. I could not stop."
As sorrow settled like a shroud over their daily lives, Randy and Judy took to hiking. On the paths of Deer Creek Canyon, not far from the Klebold home, they tried to make sense of it all.
"We would talk the whole time about what made them do it and why, what the truth was," recalls Randy.
It was the sort of conversation that twists in on itself, not straightening the problem out so much as working a knot that's impossible to loosen. "We would come to the end conclusion that it doesn't matter what happened to them (to turn them into killers)," Judy says. "It's murder; it's wrong."
When winter set in and Judy decided it was too cold for her to hike, Randy continued. He bought crampons for his boots and headed out, listening to the crunch of snow underfoot and little else.
Then one day, he found the rock he now calls Shadowman. "It was so snowy and icy, and I was tired," he recalls. He stopped for a moment, and then "I saw a face in the rock. . . . I took its picture."
He began looking for other faces in rock to photograph. "I felt kinda stupid. I did that for three weeks, then I had them developed and showed them to Judy," he says.
Judy laughs now at the memory. At first, she squinted to see what her husband saw in the rocks. But soon she, too, was hooked, and the two of them started searching for faces together.
"He would come home and I'd be in a depression. . . . He's driving around in the car crying and I'm laying on the floor crying. It was really pretty horrible," she says of their state of mind at the time. "And he'd say, 'Let's get out of here.' "
They would head out. "It would take about five or 10 minutes to get in the mode, and you know what? All the problems of the world would go away. . . .
"We'd be gone for two or three hours, then we'd come back and (again) it was hard to breathe."
The price of truthColumbine, it turns out, was a room without air. Far from the community knitting back together, the sinister poison of the event began to seep to all corners. Secrets mounted, the Jefferson County sheriff stonewalled and the Browns became consumed with a search for the truth of what had happened that day - and before.
"We filed Freedom of Information requests, we did hundreds of hours of research, . . . analyzing ballistics till 4 in the morning for six months," says Randy. They attended hearings and commission meetings.
"You wanna see the Columbine room?" he asks, then leads a visitor to the basement.
There, the extent of the Browns' quest becomes obvious. Randy opens a closet to reveal more than 60 carefully labeled white binders stacked side by side, each filled with copies of government documents the couple virtually memorized. Post-its stick out from random spots, tagging various pages.
"Somebody'd call (and ask about some piece of information), and Judy would say, 'Page 10,612?' "
Nearby, maps of the high school are taped to the wall. And near the maps sits a stack of books boasting titles like When a Child Kills and Gone Boy, the story of another school shooting - evidence of the Browns' continued fervor to understand the tragedy.
The couple gave dozens of interviews, hoping the press would force out the truth. But their vigilance came with a price. After every interview dragging them back into the tragedy, "we'd be depressed for days," Randy says. "You really can't get out of it. It brings you down every day.
"And then we'd go to the mountains and look for rocks."
A perfect fitThese craggy faces, photographed everywhere from parking lots to mountain pastures, are far more touching than you'd expect. Some look as if they're remembering a joke, grinning slyly to themselves; others seem troubled, their foreheads lined with years of weather and geologic compression. They've become like friends to the Browns.
There's Morphing Guy, who grows from beneath a ledge. ("It looks like he's morphing out of the rocks," says Judy.) Randy perched on the edge of a cliff and strained to catch the shot.
"I go, 'Stop the car,' " recalls Judy. "I see this guy. 'Look at him. He's gorgeous up there.' "
There's the wise-looking man, eyes crinkled with amusement, whose face can be traced among the tops of the mountains on Guanella Pass. Other photographers have taken his shot and apparently never once saw the man outlined in the rock.
And the Browns are still awed by Jesus, a soulful rock with eyes closed, as if in prayer.
"We drove a long ways out of town. We stopped at this place and there's a face. I take it - I take two of them real quick - and the second one looks like Jesus. It's really cool. The Jesus photo is one of our favorites because he's so sensitive," says Randy.
In the end, the couple stacked up 5,000 photos and compiled the best in a book. After eight publishers rejected the idea, they bypassed the frustration of looking for a company to take it on and published it themselves.
Judy learned new computer programs. She scoured books for quotes to use. "I was doing this," Judy says, mimicking a person dealing photos like a deck of cards, "just like a nut. I spent a long time matching the faces with the sayings to give it more depth."
The result is stacked in the Browns' garage: 12 tons of books where their two cars had once been. Judy, who describes herself as spiritual though not religious, finds it serendipitous that all 6,000 books fit in the small space.
"It didn't even occur to me (to worry about the space) until the truck was here and I'm out in the garage measuring," says Randy.
"But - and this is the spiritual part of it - it fit perfectly," adds Judy, "with a little path so we can take the trash out."
Faces of hopeWhat's so healing about a pile of rocks?
If you leaf through the book, it soon becomes apparent. Even if you try to rush through the pages, you find yourself stopping to make out the eyes, then maybe a slash of a mouth, and where's the nose?
When you finally see the face, it's like being let in on a whimsical and wonderful secret.
"You have to slow down completely and get in the mode," says Randy. It's like hunting for fossils, he notes. At first you can't see them. "And then you find them everywhere."
"It's so funny," says Judy. "It's almost like it happened when we needed it. It really was therapy for us."
The photos, they note, have brought joy to friends and relatives, who have become addicted to finding faces in rocks themselves. Often, people point out other things they see in the granite: frogs, camels - rock as Rorschach test.
"I wish every time we gave the book to people, we could watch them (leaf through it)," says Judy, "because it's fun. It's just been fun. That's what's so neat. There's nothing negative about this book."
As she talks about the project, she seems worlds away from the intense woman featured in newscasts years ago. Randy acknowledges that the Columbine experience has often left him bereft - "My motto now is, I get more cynical every day, and it's still hard to keep up," he quips. But Judy is more of an optimist by nature.
There's little that's happy in relation to Columbine, she says, yet:
"I gotta tell you, you have to have hope. You have to have hope and you have to think things will get better, for our kids and for our kids' kids. I think every generation has its worries. There's always been sadness. There have been wars since the beginning of time. If you don't have hope, what's the reason for living?
"Believe me, if I could go back and change it, I would. I would change the outcome. But it is what it is, and what can I learn and take from it? I used to tell my kids, if you just go down the halls and smile at someone, you might be the only one who smiles at them all day and you will give them a moment of happiness, and that's what we want to give people - a moment of happiness."
In the book, there's a stone mottled with lichen and pale with age. It has a slit for an eye and a slab of a lower lip that protrudes, as if set in unalterable despair. Judy has chosen to pair it with the most hopeful of quotes - from a teen who endured tragedy a half-century before Columbine.
With words as timeless as the stone itself, Anne Frank wrote: "Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."
How to find three faces in the rocks that the Browns have found:
• Guanella Pass: Take U.S. 285 South from Denver. Go past Bailey and Santa Maria to the town of Grant. Turn right (north) on Guanella Pass Road to the Mount Evans overlook. Look north for the mountain ridge with the face looking skyward.
• Red Rocks guy: Go south out of the Trading Post parking lot on Trading Post Road to Red Rocks Park Road. Turn right and go 0.35 miles. Pull off on the right side of the road and look west. The face is on the red rocks in front of you.
• Deer Creek Canyon Park: Take Wadsworth south past C-470, then west on Deer Creek Canyon Road to Deer Creek Canyon Park; turn left to the park and park in the lot. Go south on Plymouth Creek Trail about 0.9 miles until you come to a rock wall on your right and a small waterfall on your left. Face away from the rock wall and look down. The face is on the ground (looking left) on the south side of the trail.
• Faces in the Rocks: A Spiritual Journey ($62) is available at the Tattered Cover or through the Browns' Web site: FacesInTheRocks.com
