After 20 Years of Searching

Every summer, the Gig Harbor History Museum hosts a round rock contest. The winner receives $100 for submitting the most perfectly spherical stone.

I’ve been trying to win it for 20 years.

I’ve searched beaches, Penrose Park, forests, playgrounds, parking lot medians, even the woods behind my house. I’ve found egg-shaped rocks, flat skipping stones, rocks with missing chunks and lumpy appendages. Never the perfect sphere.

Sometimes, I’ve carried a promising rock in my pocket all day before casting it away.

You’d think a perfectly round rock wouldn’t be so hard to find.

With an endless supply of rocks, Puget Sound, and an eternity of time, it seems nature ought to make more perfect spheres.

Apparently, it doesn’t.

That may be what’s kept me hooked on this contest for so long.

In a year and a half, I will be 50, a milestone that feels inconceivable. My husband and I have raised a well-rounded daughter: smart, hardworking, kind. She’ll be off to college next year. Me? I’m still rough around the edges. I hold grudges. I envy the success of my peers. Worst of all, I’m a quitter. After two decades, I’d almost come to believe that the round rock contest was something I simply could not win.

Almost, but not quite.

One afternoon last April, I was walking my black lab, Rudy, on Mahncke Road in Longbranch. Mahncke is not a road many people walk. Bookended by two huff-and-puff hills, sections have been clear-cut and now sport stubbled regrowth. Aside from an occasional glimpse of Mount Ellinor, there are no vistas, no noteworthy destinations within its 1 1/2-mile length. But Rudy and I like quiet places.

On that day, I was not looking for a round rock. I was looking at the horsetails; the roadside weeds I used to mark the progress of spring. We were slow-climbing the first hill — meandering, doggo feeling extra sniffy — when I spotted what appeared to be a round rock. Speckled gray and just larger than a ping-pong ball, it lay half-buried in dirt.

I was wary at first, given my many close-but-not-quite finds. But I kicked at it, then bent down and shimmied it loose with my thumb.

Well.

It was astonishingly round. The roundest rock I’d ever seen. It felt good in my palm, cool and weighty. Had I set it on the pavement, it would have rolled all the way down to the Mahncke-Reeves Y. I grinned. My heart went “kah-LUMP!” I may even have uttered some enthusiastic curse words.

When I got home, I washed the rock and set it on the sunny windowsill by the kitchen sink where I could admire it while making dinner.

Then in July, when the contest opened, I plunked the rock into my car’s cup holder, drove to the museum, filled out the entry form, and handed it over.

As I write this, I do not know whether or not my rock will be crowned winner. When I was younger, that would have provoked anxiety. But so much of life is lived without knowing how the story ends. Now there is freedom in not knowing.

Instead, I’m struck by something else. When I was younger, winning would have mattered most. But for 20 years, this contest has kept me paying attention. It’s made me notice roadside gullies, gravel shoulders, and ordinary places I might otherwise have walked right past.

If my rock is victorious, I look forward to visiting it in its display case, seeing it commemorated with a tag: “Alice Kinerk, Longbranch.”

However, if mine is not 2026’s roundest rock, I’ll gladly bring it home again. It will go back on the sunny windowsill by the kitchen sink, where it can remind me that 20 years of looking led me to the roundest rock I’d ever seen.

Alice Kinerk lives in Longbranch and teaches fourth and fifth grade at Purdy Elementary School.

Editor’s note: The 2026 Round Rock contest was won by Grady, a Gig Harbor elementary school-age student.