A few years ago, on Washington Island, in Door County, Wisconsin, the police department received a cardboard box. Inside was a note on blue paper that read: “Please return to Schoolhouse Beach.” The box contained three smooth grayish-white rocks, exactly the kind tourists routinely take from Schoolhouse Beach, touted by locals here as one of best beaches in the world composed entirely of stones.
If you are caught taking even one of those rocks, you could receive a $250 fine. Presumably, whoever mailed these rocks — there was no return address or signature on the letter — faced $750 in fines. And yet the simple fact that someone took time to return three rocks that look just like every other rock on Schoolhouse Beach suggested a more existential concern was nagging.
Their conscience spoke to them. They felt guilty, perhaps worse. That’s why Ryan Thompson, a 43-year-old Forest Park art professor, has made the study of such acts a specialty.
He thinks of them as “conscience letters,” small acts at grace, and in the past decade he’s assembled two art books showcasing the correspondence and the stones, sand, bark and more that tourists have mailed back to national parks. He sees these letters not just born of remorse and fear but as, in a subtle way, small nods to the impermanence of man, tiny recognitions that nature continues on long after the modern world passes through. “Some people who write these letters say stuff like ‘This was so beautiful, I couldn’t.