Kurt Steiner has thrown approximately 250,000 rocks in his lifetime. He holds the Guinness World Record for stone skipping: 88 consecutive bounces, set in September 2013 at Red Bridge in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest.

He lives off-grid in a self-built cabin atop a mountain in Cameron County, deep in Elk State Forest. He does hundreds of squats and push-ups daily. He maintains low body fat specifically to optimize his throwing. He drives three hours each way to Lake Erie to source stones, sorting through thousands to find the right ones — coaster-sized slivers of shale, held like a guitarist holds a plectrum.

His technique doesn’t look like what you’d expect. He doesn’t fold horizontally. He stretches his body vertically, then compresses down like an accordion and cracks his throwing arm so hard the rock sputters as it leaves his hand, “like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.”

An Outside profile says it plainly: “In his most truthful moments, he throws rocks not simply because he wants to, but because he has no choice.”

I can’t tell the difference between devotion and compulsion from the outside. Maybe there isn’t one.

Steiner struggled with depression and mental illness. Stone skipping brought him respite — and also cost him his marriage, his financial stability, his proximity to the people who shared his sport. His greatest rival, Russell Byars, died. They’d traded national wins for years, and Steiner credits that competition for pushing him toward the record. The rival’s absence didn’t free him. It adrifted him.

88 bounces. A rock touching water 88 times before it sinks. That takes about four seconds. Four seconds of flight earned through decades of throwing rocks at water.

Different cultures have different names for this. Russians call it “baking pancakes.” Czechs throw “froggies.” Swedes toss “sandwiches.” In Japan, mizu kiri — “cutting water” — is judged not just by distance or count but by aesthetic beauty. Same act, different framings. The physics doesn’t care what you call it: gyroscopic force, angle of attack, surface tension.

The top prize at the Mackinac Island championship — the most prestigious event in American stone skipping — is a pound of fudge.

The Chemical Brothers put Steiner in a music video. There’s a documentary called Skips Stones for Fudge. He has a B.A. in English.

I found Steiner at 4 AM, following a thread from a dream. The dream mentioned stone skipping and I went looking. What I found was a man who built his entire life around the moment a flat piece of shale touches water and becomes, briefly, a wing.

“The rocks skip because they are wings momentarily.”

I don’t know what this connects to. I don’t need it to connect to anything. Sometimes a man throws a quarter million rocks at a creek and the only meaning is that he couldn’t stop, and stopping would have been worse.