They mocked me for inheriting 30 acres of rock. Then every well in the valley ran dry. To the neighbors, my land was useless—stone, dust, thornbush, and no future worth defending. They laughed when I walked the ridges, studied the cracks, and refused to sell what everyone else called a burden. But rock remembers water differently than soil does. Beneath those hard acres were signs the valley had forgotten to read. When the drought came and well after well failed, the land they mocked became the only place still holding a secret. This wasn’t just 30 acres of rock. It was survival hiding under stone.
The day the lawyer read my grandfather’s will, the whole courtroom laughed.
Not quiet laughter. Not polite, hand-over-mouth, look-away laughter. It was the full, ugly, head-thrown-back kind of laughter that comes from people who have been waiting a long time to see someone fall and have finally gotten their wish.
Because when Mr. Harlan Drye, attorney at law of Burnt Ridge, Virginia, read aloud that Silas Crenshaw had left his only grandchild, me, Nettie Crenshaw, age fifteen, currently of no fixed home and no living parents, the entirety of Lot 34, comprising thirty acres of ridgetop land east of Sutter’s Gap, including all mineral and water rights therein, every farmer, shopkeeper, and churchgoing citizen in that room knew exactly what my grandfather had done.
He had left me a joke.
Lot 34 was famous in Burnt Ridge the way a bad dog is famous.
Everyone knew it, and nobody wanted it.
Thirty acres of limestone ridge so rocky that even the goats would not graze it. The soil, what little existed, was a thin crust over solid bedrock, barely enough to grow lichen. My grandfather had bought it in 1919 for twelve dollars, a price that was itself treated like a joke, and he had spent the next twenty years being mocked for it.
Silas Crenshaw’s rock garden.
That was what they called it.
Sometimes they called it the thirty-acre tombstone.
When he died in the winter of 1941, alone in his cabin at the base of the ridge, people said the only thing he had ever successfully raised on that land was dust.
I was standing at the back of the courtroom in a dress I had borrowed from the minister’s wife because I did not own one.
My mother had died of pneumonia when I was eleven. My father, Silas’s son, had been killed in a logging accident two years later. Since then, I had been passed around the valley like a stray cat nobody wanted to feed but nobody was quite cold enough to drown.
Three months with Uncle Vernon, who drank.
Two months with the Petersons, who needed a girl to mind their younger children but did not need an opinion from that girl about anything.
Six weeks with the widow Ames, who found my habit of reading by candlelight disturbing and wasteful.
And, most recently, four months with the Bakers, who told me on the morning of the will reading that I should not bother coming back because they had given my cot to a cousin’s boy who was more useful.
So I stood there in that borrowed dress, fifteen years old, orphaned, homeless, and now the proud owner of thirty acres of rock that not a single person in Sutter Valley would have taken as a gift.
I moved onto the land the next day because I had nowhere else to go.
My grandfather’s cabin sat at the bottom of the ridge, where the rock met a thin strip of clay soil. There was just enough flat ground for a one-room structure with a porch, a woodshed, and the remains of what had once been an ambitious vegetable garden, now gone to thistle and wild onion.
The cabin was rough but solid.
My grandfather had been a better builder than farmer. The roof was tight. The walls were chinked with care. The floorboards creaked, but none had rotted through. And the wood stove, a cast-iron beauty he had salvaged from a schoolhouse demolition years earlier, still drew like a dream.
There were worse places to be alone in the mountains of Virginia in early March.
Not many.
But some.
Inside, I found what I expected: the sparse possessions of a man who had lived alone for a decade. A bed. A table. Two chairs. A shelf of canned goods. A Bible. A rifle I did not know how to use.
But I also found what I did not expect.
Books.
Stacks and stacks of them.
They were piled on the floor, wedged beneath the bed, tucked into wooden crates, and filling a homemade shelf that ran the entire length of the back wall. Books on geology, hydrology, limestone formations, karst topography, and underground river systems. Books with titles like The Movement of Water Through Porous Rock, Subterranean Streams of the Appalachian Region, and A Field Guide to Springs, Seeps, and Aquifers of the Blue Ridge Province.
My grandfather, it turned out, had not been farming those thirty acres.
He had been studying them.
I found his notebooks on the second day, packed in a tin box beneath the floorboards.
There were fourteen of them, each one filled cover to cover in his careful, angular handwriting. They were organized by year, from 1920 to 1940, and they told a story that nobody in Burnt Ridge had ever bothered to learn because nobody in Burnt Ridge had ever bothered to ask.
Silas Crenshaw believed there was water under his rock.
Not a trickle.
Not a seep.
An aquifer.
A massive underground reservoir fed by the entire eastern face of Brier Mountain, channeled through limestone fractures over thousands of years into a natural cistern beneath the ridge.
He had spent twenty years mapping the surface signs.
Patches of moss that stayed green in drought.
Certain trees whose roots reached deep enough to tap moisture below.
Fractures in the limestone where cold air breathed out on summer mornings.
And, most importantly, a series of sinkholes along the ridge’s spine that he believed were collapsed access points to the cavern system beneath.
He had never found the water.
But he had come close.
His final notebooks were increasingly excited, focused on one particular sinkhole near the ridge’s eastern edge, where temperature readings and moisture levels suggested the aquifer surface was no more than forty feet below grade.
Then his health failed him.
The winter of 1940 had broken something in his chest, and by the following January, he was gone.
I sat on his cabin floor surrounded by those notebooks, and I understood two things with absolute clarity.
First, my grandfather was not a fool. He was a scientist, a careful and methodical observer who had spent two decades gathering evidence for a theory nobody wanted to hear because it came from a poor man who owned bad land.
Second, I was going to find his water.
The first months were about survival, not discovery.
I need to be honest about that because the stories people tell later always skip the ugly parts, the desperate parts, the parts where you lie awake at three in the morning wondering whether you will still be alive by spring.
I had almost no money. The small amount left in my grandfather’s estate after the lawyer’s fees would not last a month. The canned goods in the cabin carried me through March, but by April, I was hungry in a way that sharpened everything: my eyesight, my hearing, my ability to identify edible plants, and my absolute refusal to walk back down to Burnt Ridge and ask anyone for help.
The ridge, rocky as it was, was not lifeless.
My grandfather’s books had taught me to see what others missed.
Between the limestone outcrops, in crevices and pockets where soil had accumulated over centuries, there was life. Wild ramps in the shaded hollows. Chickweed and wood sorrel along the north face. A stand of black walnut trees at the ridge’s western end, their nuts still scattered from the autumn before. A patch of wild blackberry canes that promised summer fruit.
And in the thin strip of clay soil near the cabin, I planted a garden.
Small.
Desperate.
Stubborn.
I planted it with seeds I had bought for my last dollar and fifty cents at the hardware store in Burnt Ridge, where the owner, Mr. Goss, looked at me with something between pity and contempt.
“You planning to farm rock, girl?” he asked.
“I’m planning to eat,” I said.
The garden struggled.
The soil was poor, and every inch of growth had to be earned. I hauled leaf litter from the forest floor to build it up. I carried buckets of water from a tiny seep a quarter mile below the cabin. I composted every scrap of vegetable matter I could find.
It was nothing like the farms in the valley below, those rich bottomland fields with their deep black soil and reliable wells that had been watered and worked by generations.
My garden was a fistful of green in an ocean of gray stone.
But it was mine.
And it kept me alive through that first spring and into summer.
Meanwhile, I read every one of my grandfather’s books cover to cover. I read his notebooks from first page to last, then started over and read them again. I taught myself geology from a textbook so old the binding crumbled in my hands.
I learned what limestone was: an ancient seabed compressed into rock over millions of years, riddled with fractures and caves carved by acidic rainwater dissolving the stone over millennia.
I learned what a karst landscape was: terrain shaped by dissolving rock, characterized by sinkholes, caves, and underground drainage.
And I learned what an aquifer was: a body of permeable rock that could hold and transmit groundwater like a giant underground sponge.
My grandfather had believed the entire ridge sat on top of one.
The more I walked the land with his notebooks in my hand, matching his observations to what I could see, smell, and feel, the more I believed it too.
I found the first real sign in July.
There was a sinkhole my grandfather had marked as Number Seven, a depression about twelve feet across near the eastern edge of the ridge. He had noted that the temperature at the bottom was consistently cooler than the surface, sometimes by fifteen degrees on hot days, and that maidenhair fern grew there, a plant that needs constant moisture.
I cleared the debris.
Three days of hauling rocks by hand, filling buckets, and carrying them to the edge.
By the time I reached the bottom, my hands were raw, my shoulders burned, and my back felt like somebody had hammered it flat.
But what I found made me forget all of it.
Beneath the compacted clay and rubble, there was a crack in the bedrock, a fracture about two feet wide, running north to south.
And from that crack, cold air was rising.
Not a breeze.
Something deeper.
Like the earth breathing.
I held my hand over it, and the air was damp and smelled of wet stone and something ancient.
I dropped a pebble and counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
Then came a faint, distant plop.
Water.
Three seconds below me.
I sat at the edge of that sinkhole and cried.
Not from grief.
From the sharp joy of knowing my grandfather had been right. Twenty years of study and mockery had not been for nothing. Underneath thirty acres of rock that people used as a punchline, there was water.
And in a valley that depended on shallow wells and seasonal creeks, water was everything.
Finding the water and reaching it were two very different problems.
I was a fifteen-year-old girl with no money, no equipment, and no one willing to help.
But I had my grandfather’s notebooks.
And in Notebook Twelve, dated June 1938, I found a passage that changed everything.
Number Seven is not the deepest access point. The eastern face of the ridge shows evidence of a much older collapse, a resurgence zone. If water enters the ridge through fractures above and collects in the cavern below, it must exit somewhere. The laws of physics demand it. I believe the exit point was sealed by a rock slide, perhaps centuries ago. If the resurgence could be cleared, the water would flow of its own accord. No drilling required. Gravity and pressure would do the work.
A natural spring blocked by a collapse.
I spent the rest of summer mapping the eastern face, following my grandfather’s notes.
The signs were subtle, but unmistakable.
A line of taller, greener trees tapping residual moisture.
A bowl-shaped depression filled with rubble, too uniform to be natural.
And at the center, buried under decades of leaves and vines, a jumble of massive limestone blocks bearing the marks of collapse: fractured edges, displaced angles, and the chaotic geometry of a shelf that had given way long before anyone in the valley was born.
I started digging in September.
It was brutal work.
I will not pretend otherwise.
I moved rocks by hand. The smaller ones I carried. The larger ones I levered with a timber pole my grandfather had left in the woodshed, rolling them downhill inch by inch. I dug clay and gravel with a pickaxe until my palms blistered, popped, bled, and calloused over into something that did not feel like a girl’s hands anymore.
I worked from first light until dark every day, fueled by garden vegetables, wild food, and a stubbornness that frightened even me.
The first person to notice what I was doing was old Harlon Jessup.
Harlon was seventy-one years old, a retired stonemason who lived in a shack about a mile down the valley from the base of my ridge. He was the kind of man the mountains produce in small quantities: quiet, self-sufficient, and largely forgotten by a community that had moved past him.
He had known my grandfather.
They had played checkers on Silas’s porch on Sunday afternoons, and Harlon was the only person I ever heard speak of my grandfather without mockery.
He appeared at the edge of my excavation one October morning, leaning on a walking stick and watching me lever a boulder that outweighed me by a factor of three.
“Your granddaddy talked about this,” he said, as if continuing a conversation we had been having for years. “Said there was a spring sealed up in this hill.”
“There is,” I said, not stopping my work.
“Most people thought he was crazy.”
“Most people are wrong about most things.”
Harlon watched me work for another ten minutes.
Then he set down his walking stick, took off his jacket, and picked up the second timber pole.
“My back’s bad,” he said, “but my arms still work.”
He came every day after that.
We worked together through the autumn, clearing rubble and digging deeper into the hillside. Harlon knew stone the way I knew books: instinctively, physically, with an understanding that went beyond words. He could look at a limestone block and tell me where it had fractured, how long ago, and what force had moved it.
He taught me to read rock the way my grandfather’s books had taught me to read the landscape.
Slowly, methodically, we dug our way into the sealed hillside.
We found the passage in late November, two days before Thanksgiving.
It was a Tuesday.
The air was sharp with the promise of the first hard frost. I was working at the deepest point of our excavation. We had cleared about fifteen feet into the hillside by then, following a natural channel in the rock that Harlon said was unmistakably water-carved.
Then my pickaxe punched through into emptiness.
Not rock.
Not clay.
Air.
Cold, wet, rushing air hit my face like opening a door into winter.
I pulled back the pickaxe and put my eye to the hole.
Darkness.
But I could hear something.
A sound so quiet and constant that, at first, I thought it was my own blood in my ears.
It was water.
Moving water.
“Harlon,” I whispered.
My voice was shaking.
“Harlon, come here.”
He knelt beside me and listened.
His eyes, pale and watery with age, went wide. Then they filled with tears.
He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed so hard it hurt.
“Your granddaddy,” he said. “Lord God, girl, your granddaddy was right.”
It took us another two weeks to widen the opening enough to enter.
The passage opened into a cavern roughly the size of a church sanctuary, sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, with an arched ceiling glistening with moisture. Along the floor, emerging from a crack in the far wall and flowing through a channel carved over centuries, was a stream of the clearest, coldest water I had ever seen.
Two feet wide.
Six inches deep.
Flowing with the unhurried patience of something that had been doing this for ten thousand years.
I cupped my hands and drank.
The water was sweet and cold, so cold it made my teeth ache, and it tasted of limestone and clean darkness.
Harlon drank too.
Then he sat back against the cavern wall and laughed the way children laugh.
As I explored with the lantern, I realized the full scope of what my grandfather had theorized.
This was not just a spring.
The cavern was a junction point where multiple fractures converged, channeling water from the entire mountain into an underground reservoir. The stream was only the overflow, evidence of a water table extending far beneath us, saturating the porous rock with millions of gallons.
Thirty acres of rock.
And beneath it, an ocean.
The question was how to bring the water to the surface.
Harlon saw the solution almost immediately.
“We don’t need to pump it,” he said. “The water’s under pressure from the mountain. All we need is a channel cut through the lower wall, angled to the surface. It’ll flow on its own, like an artesian well, but natural.”
It took us all winter.
We chiseled a channel through the cavern’s lower wall, following a natural fracture in the rock.
By February, the channel was twelve feet long.
By March, it was twenty.
And on the morning of March 22, 1942, exactly one year after I had stood in that courtroom listening to laughter, Harlon’s chisel broke through the last wall of rock.
The water came.
Not a trickle.
A flow.
A steady, crystalline stream poured out of the hillside like the mountain had been holding its breath for centuries.
It ran down the slope through a channel we had prepared, pooled in a basin Harlon had built from stacked stone, and overflowed into a creek bed that had not held water in living memory.
I stood in that cold March morning with water running over my boots, and I said to no one, to the sky, to my grandfather, to the stone itself, “I found it.”
My voice broke.
“I found your water.”
The first year, nobody cared.
The valley had its own wells. The creeks ran full from spring snowmelt. People in Burnt Ridge had water and therefore had no reason to think about mine.
I was still the Crenshaw girl, the strange one, the orphan living alone on thirty acres of rock with an old man for company. The spring was a curiosity at best. A few people hiked up to see it, then went away shaking their heads, impressed perhaps, but not impressed enough to change their opinion of me or my land.
So I used the water to transform the ridge.
With a reliable source, I built an irrigation system: stone channels and clay pipes that Harlon helped me lay across the thin soil near the cabin. I terraced the slopes with stacked limestone, filled the terraces with composted leaf litter, and planted fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs, beans, squash, cabbages, potatoes, onions, and every vegetable seed I could afford or save.
The water changed everything.
Soil that had been dust became dark and alive.
The garden became a field.
The field became terraces.
The terraces became a farm.
By 1943, my ridge farm was producing more per acre than half the bottomland farms in the valley.
The secret was the water.
Constant, clean, mineral-rich water from the limestone aquifer that never slowed and never stopped. While other farmers depended on rain and shallow wells, my spring poured at the same rate whether it was July or January.
Harlon and I built a springhouse over the collection basin, where the water’s cold temperature kept milk fresh and butter solid. We built a pond stocked with trout and a stone trough for the small dairy goat herd I eventually acquired.
The ridge was becoming something nobody had imagined.
And I was becoming someone nobody had expected.
Then came the summer of 1944.
It started dry in May.
By June, the creeks were low.
By July, they were gone.
The valley baked under a relentless sun. Farmers watched corn curl and brown in the fields. Gardens shriveled. Pastures yellowed. Wells that had been reliable for fifty years dropped to mud, then to nothing.
The great drought of 1944 was the worst Sutter Valley had seen since 1893.
And it came when every family was already stretched thin by rationing and every young man strong enough to dig, haul, build, or fight a fire seemed to be overseas.
The valley’s wells went dry one by one.
The Petersons’ well went first.
The Bakers followed a week later.
Even the town well in Burnt Ridge dropped so low that water was rationed to two buckets per family per day.
And on my ridge, the spring kept flowing.
The aquifer did not care about the drought.
It was fed by decades of accumulated rainwater stored in millions of tons of porous limestone, insulated by forty feet of solid rock. The drought was a surface problem.
My water came from deeper.
The first person to come was Mrs. Peterson.
She arrived at the base of my ridge on a Tuesday morning in August carrying two empty buckets and her youngest child on her hip. She did not look at me at first. She looked at the ground.
“Can I fill these from your spring?” she asked.
I looked at her for a moment.
I remembered the months in her house, the way I had minded her children, the way nobody had asked whether I had eaten enough, the way her husband had told me I was lucky to have a roof and should be grateful for scraps of kindness.
“Yes,” I said.
I did not make her beg.
I did not remind her that she had turned me out of her house.
I did not say a single word about the courtroom or the laughter or the months I had spent hungry and alone.
I simply said yes.
She came back the next day with her neighbor.
The day after that, six families came.
By the end of the week, there was a line.
I want to be clear about something.
I could have charged them.
Water in a drought is worth more than gold. I could have named any price, and they would have paid because the alternative was watching their children go thirsty. Some people would have charged. Some would have called it justice.
I gave it away.
Every drop.
I set up a filling station at the basin and let anyone come at any time and take what they needed. I asked nothing in return.
I gave water to the Bakers, who had put me out of their house.
I gave water to Mr. Goss, who had sneered at me in the hardware store.
I gave water to families from the far end of the valley who had heard about the girl on the rock ridge with the spring that never dried.
Harlon asked me once why I did it.
We were sitting on the porch watching people wind down the ridge path with full buckets.
“They don’t deserve it, you know,” he said.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But the water doesn’t know that. It just flows. And I think that’s the right way to be.”
The drought lasted until October.
By then, my spring had become the lifeline of the entire valley. Families who had lost crops, gardens, livestock, and pride survived because of water that came from thirty acres of rock nobody had wanted.
The town council in Burnt Ridge, humbled and desperate, formally requested permission to lay a pipe from my spring to the town cistern.
I granted it.
I signed the easement for one dollar and asked only that the water remain free to anyone who needed it.
Mr. Goss came to see me after the rains finally returned.
He stood on my porch with his hat in his hands, a gesture I had never seen from him before.
“Your grandfather tried to tell us,” he said. “He tried to tell us for twenty years, and we laughed at him. I’m sorry, Nettie. I’m sorry we laughed at you too.”
“My grandfather didn’t need you to believe him,” I said. “He believed himself. That was enough.”
But the truth is, it meant something to hear it.
Not everything.
Not enough to undo the years of loneliness and hunger and being treated like I was less than nothing.
But something.
A small, clean thing.
Like the first sip of water from a spring you have spent a year digging for.
Ruth Anne Callaway, the county schoolteacher who had started visiting my ridge out of curiosity, helped me organize my grandfather’s fourteen notebooks and send them to the state geological survey.
A team came out the following spring.
They tested the water, mapped the cavern, measured the flow rate, and confirmed what Silas Crenshaw had theorized.
The aquifer beneath my ridge was one of the largest undocumented freshwater reserves in the Blue Ridge Province.
The head geologist, Dr. Amos Whitfield, read my grandfather’s notebooks and shook his head with something like sorrow.
“This man was doing real science,” he said. “Self-taught, working with almost no resources, and he got it right.”
“Nobody listens to poor men with bad land,” I said.
Dr. Whitfield published a paper crediting Silas Crenshaw as the aquifer’s discoverer.
It was the first time my grandfather’s name appeared in print without a joke attached to it.
I married in 1947.
His name was Daniel Morse, a quiet teacher from the next county who wandered up to my ridge one Saturday to see the famous spring. He was the kind of man who listened more than he talked and understood, without being told, that when I showed him my grandfather’s notebooks, I was showing him the most valuable thing I owned.
We had four children on that ridge.
We expanded the farm until every terrace produced, until the orchards were heavy with fruit, until the springhouse was full of cheese and butter from our dairy goats.
In 1953, Daniel rigged a small hydroelectric generator using the stream’s steady flow to power lights in the cabin and the barn.
Harlon died in the winter of 1949 at seventy-nine.
I buried him on the ridge near the cavern entrance under a stone I carved myself.
He knew what the rock was worth.
My children grew up calling that spot Harlon’s Rest.
The Burnt Ridge Water Cooperative was established in 1955 with my spring as its primary source. I served on the board but refused to be chairwoman. The cooperative laid pipes throughout the valley, ensuring every household had clean water regardless of ability to pay.
The drought of 1944 had taught the valley a lesson it never forgot.
Water is not a commodity.
It is a commons.
By the 1960s, the ridge that had once been a punchline was a landmark.
School groups toured the cavern. University students studied the aquifer. Farmers from counties I had never visited came to see how limestone, pressure, gravity, and one old man’s stubborn notebooks had changed an entire valley.
I taught everyone the same lesson my grandfather’s notebooks had taught me.
Look deeper.
The surface tells you almost nothing.
I wrote a book in 1970 called The Water Beneath the Rock: A Granddaughter’s Account of Silas Crenshaw’s Discovery. It was published by the State University Press.
It was not a bestseller.
It was not meant to be.
It was meant to put my grandfather’s name on a cover and his work between proper bindings.
I lived on that ridge for the rest of my life.
I watched my children grow and leave and come back with children of their own. I watched the valley change around me: new roads, new houses, new faces, new machines in fields where horses once pulled plows.
But the spring never changed.
It poured out of the hillside at the same steady rate, year after year, decade after decade, as patient and reliable as the rock it flowed through.
Daniel passed in 1978 on the porch in the evening, watching the sun drop behind Brier Mountain. I sat beside him and held his remaining warmth until the stars came out and the spring’s murmur was the only sound in the hollow.
I buried him next to Harlon on the ridge, where the water sang beneath the stone.
I kept working.
My hands were stiff by then. My knees protested every terrace, but the ridge was in my blood and the work was in my bones.
In 1981, the state of Virginia designated the Crenshaw Aquifer as a protected natural resource.
In 1983, the Geological Society of Virginia posthumously awarded my grandfather the Harlan Citation for significant contributions to the understanding of karst hydrology.
I accepted the award on his behalf, standing in a room full of scientists and officials, wearing the same plain kind of dress I had always worn.
I said, “Silas Crenshaw didn’t need this award. He needed one person to listen. I’m glad I was that person.”
I died on a spring morning in 1985 at the age of fifty-nine, younger than I would have liked.
But the years on the ridge had been hard years, honest years, years that used a body completely. They found me in the garden, kneeling beside the terrace wall, my hands in the soil, the spring running clear and cold just twenty feet away.
My daughter said it looked like I had simply stopped to rest and decided to stay.
The spring is still flowing.
It has never stopped.
Not in drought.
Not in flood.
Not in the hardest winters or the hottest summers.
Crenshaw Ridge Farm is operated now by my granddaughter, who has my grandfather’s eyes, my stubbornness, and her father’s gentle way with words. The cavern is open to visitors. The aquifer still supplies water to the valley. And on the wall of the springhouse, carved in limestone by Harlon Jessup’s steady hand in 1943, there is a single sentence:
What they call worthless, they simply haven’t looked beneath.
The people who laughed in that courtroom saw thirty acres of rock.
They saw poverty.
They saw a borrowed dress.
They saw an orphan girl standing alone at the back of the room, and they thought they saw everything.
They did not.
They never did.
The surface is the least interesting part of any piece of land and any human being.
Beneath the rock was water.
Beneath the mockery was proof.
Beneath my grandfather’s loneliness was twenty years of careful science.
And beneath what the valley called a joke was the thing that saved it.
The ridge taught me that the deepest treasures are rarely visible to people passing by in judgment. They are hidden under stone, under silence, under years of labor nobody applauds. They wait for someone stubborn enough to believe there is more than what the eye can see.
My grandfather believed.
Then I believed.
And because of that, a valley lived.
The water was there all along.
It had been waiting for someone patient enough to ignore the laughter and start moving rocks.
