At Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, there are two small boxes full of confessions.
They’re letters from those who took home a piece of the park’s wealth of petrified wood, despite the many signs making it clear that’s illegal. Most of the letters reveal personal tragedies from those who believe that the theft left them “cursed.” By returning the rock and clearing their conscience, they hope to change the trajectory of their lives.
These letters are the centerpiece of a simple but effective short film that was published on YouTube over the weekend after premiering at several small film festivals over the last year. Filmmaker Brian Bolster made the film after receiving access to the letters, which blame the “curse” for deaths in their family, violent relationships, or illness.
The film is mostly melancholic vistas of the Petrified Forest, accompanied by actors reading aloud the lamentations sent to the park — along with the rocks they stole.
Most of them include versions of “please take this rock back” or “please return this rock back to the rest of the Petrified Forest, where it belongs.”
But the rocks can’t be returned, as a park ranger explains in the documentary, because Petrified Forest National Park is a scientific site. That means preserving the area as much as possible. So the rocks sit, along with the letters, in park offices, where they’ve become known as “the conscience pile,” from which the documentary takes its name.
“There’s no curse. It’s people having a guilty conscience about what they did,” Park Ranger Bill Parker says in the film. “When you’re stealing from a national park, you’re stealing from everybody.”
Runtime: 14 minutes
