Rocky Ground

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When I begin to lose my sense of wonder, the natural world grounds me.  I’ve been an amateur rockhound for many years and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I grew up poor.  The idea that you can just pick up something valuable on the ground has a treasure-hunting aspect to it.  Movers, I’ve discovered, dislike rock collectors.  My collection is quite small, and most of it not on display.  The danger is that I’ll be wanting to pick up more interesting rocks.  Like much of nature, rocks are amazing if you look closely at them.  And when the mania hits, it takes all my attention.  We all know that gemstones tend to be small, but perhaps it’s the fact that they look very little like their finished state in the wild makes them intriguing.

This interest was recently rekindled by a visit to the Lehigh Valley’s local cave, The Lost River Canyon.  As with most local attractions, it takes some time to get around to them.  We decided to go during the recent heat wave since caves maintain a constant temperature, generally in the fifties, and during the height of the wave the outside air temperature was double that of the cave thermometer.  Caves often have rock shops associated with them because being in a cave will trigger the rock-hounding gene.  And I suspect I’m not the only one to whom this happens.  Like many preserved caves, Lost River Canyon was an accidental discovery and was later purchased by a family that has been running it as a tourist attraction ever since.  I left inspired to find my rock tumbler and get it rolling again.

It’s difficult to say when or how such obsessions originate.  When my daughter was really into dinosaurs I started looking into geology.  The next thing I knew I was a member of the Wisconsin Geological Society and was going on field trips to collect.  When I lost my job at Nashotah House I seriously considered enrolling in a geology degree program, put off by the fact that calculus and chemistry were pre-requisites.  I was a hopeless humanities major and advanced math just doesn’t psit well in my psyche.  Part of me wonders if the fascination doesn’t go back to Genesis.  Geology was the science that tolled the death knell for any kind of literal six-day creation.  When this rock madness hits other interests can, if I’m not careful, be shunted aside.  It’s important to feel grounded.

Taking Time

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Good writing is hard work. One of the mixed blessings of the internet is that it makes publication so easy. Get yourself a blog and nobody has to approve anything! Ideas come tripping across your fingers onto some electronic substrate and, viola! You’re an author! The problem is that being an author’s not the same as being a good author. Writing well (and I make no such claim for myself—after all this is just a blog) is hard work. A piece has to be written, and then read again and again. I’m reminded of the story of a convicted murder whose name I’m forgotten (call it a defense mechanism). This was early last century. The murderer was caught, initially after having been found wandering, disheveled, in public. As a respectable man (he was a doctor, I think) part of his defense was that he’d never have left his house without being presentable. He would have on a collar and hat. People would see him, and he had to convince them of his presentability every single time he walked out that door. (This isn’t an affliction that I share, by the way.) Writing for publication is like that—you need to take care to look respectable every single time.

I can’t speculate about how other writers do their thing, but for me the main requirement for this is time. Any piece that I want anyone else to see, has to be written. Read. Edited. Re-read. And probably edited again. All before the public sees it. This is just for the informal stuff. I’m currently writing a book (which is pretty much a constant state with me). The draft was finished months ago. I started thinking about a publisher. Then I read it again. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought it was ready for a publisher. Several rewrites followed. I’m in the midst of another one at the moment. I think of it like my ill-used rock tumbler. You want shiny rocks, you’ve got to send them through with finer and finer grit. If you do it right, they’ll come out looking like they’re wet, and they’ll stay looking that way. Polished writing takes time.

Some things can’t be hurried. As a middle-schooler I had a summer job with the school district. One of my assigned tasks was painting bus shanties. Many of these were, as you’d expect, way out in the middle of nowhere. I’d be dropped off with a couple other teens and we’d paint the shelter inside and out. One day I got tired of the constant, boring, and repetitive task of filling a paint pan with white paint, carrying it into the shelter, using it up, and then doing it all over again several times. I decided to pour the paint directly on the plywood floor of the shelter. All I’d have to do would be to roll it out and who’d be the wiser? I only did it once. Little did I consider that the best painting, like the best writing, is a thin layer over the substrate. You need to go over it more than once, leaving time between layers. More importantly, I didn’t realize that you can’t gauge how much paint you need this quick way. The best thing is to run out and refill. Then you can pour the remainder from the pan back into the can. The floor took hours and hours to dry. Not only that, but the top surface dried first, so when I stepped in, I pulled up a thick layer of paint off on the bottom of my shoe. Tom Sawyer I was not. I had to redo it. What I learned that day, though, was a lesson about writing. Take your time. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I just write a blog.