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.

Writ Small

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I have a loupe on my desk.  Two, in fact.  I bought them for examining rocks up close, but they have other usages.  The other day I wanted to post a comment on a friend’s blog.  Of course, WordPress still doesn’t recognize me after thirteen years, so I had to enter my password.  I write small.  I couldn’t make out my own scrawl, so out came the loupe.  Problem solved.  (But WordPress, please!  Don’t you remember me?)  Here’s a true story.  When I was in college I had very little money.  In fact, losing three dollars one day sent me into a week-long depression that I still remember.  I bought college-ruled notebook paper for writing reports (before typing them up).  And I wrote three lines per ruled line on the page.  I dearly wish I’d kept some of those symbols of my extreme frugality.  Growing up poor will do that to you.

Thing is, I never outgrew writing small.  My handwriting is minuscule and my eyes aren’t as young as they once were.  The loupes date from when I was teaching and I was free to pursue my love of rocks.  The glacial til of Wisconsin brought up interesting things and some locations in the state (I joined the Wisconsin Geological Society) had wonderful possibilities for collecting.  I’ve never told any movers, since what happened at Nashotah House, that, yes, those boxes do contain rocks.  I’ve always had plenty of interests outside what my career happened to be.  Even now what passes for a career is just a job.  Life offers too many other things to explore to limit myself to one.

Indeed, if we had a Universal Living Wage or something like that, my job would be “writer.”  At least in this phase of my life it would be.  Of course, if justice were anything but a joke I’d still be teaching.  And I’d probably still be hunting rocks.  My wife puts up with me bringing home unusual ones that I find.  The earth is full of gifts and it seems a shame to squander things.  Even paper.  Especially paper.  It takes a lot of resources to produce it.  I may not write three lines per line anymore—wide-ruled pages look absolutely criminal to my eye—but I still write small.  The things we learn when we’re young often come back to us as adults, reminding us of the freshness with which we first faced the world.  It seems our initial assessments may have been correct after all.

Rock Solid

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Old interests don’t die so much as they become sublimated.  As a child I picked up a cheap “gem display” in a small cardboard box at a yard sale, probably for a quarter.  A couple of the samples were missing, and those that remained were tiny, but I was fascinated that rocks came in such varieties, especially since the ones I tended to find on my own were all shades of gray.  Science education wasn’t especially great in my small town, and besides, I had a massive interest in not going to Hell, so religious study took precedence over my predilections toward scientific studies.  Still, as a child and later, I read a lot about science and I never doubted that it could teach us about the natural world.  Years later I rediscovered my love of rocks.  I joined the Wisconsin Geological Society.  I bought a rock hammer.  I began hounding.

One of the first truisms you learn about life is that movers don’t like heavy things.  Seems that if you are in the business of helping people move (for money, no less), you might be stoic about such matters.  But I have yet to move and not have the guys complain about all those boxes of books.  Well, the rock collection is even heavier.  I discreetly marked the boxes “heavy collection,” hoping nobody’d say “What you got in here, rocks?”  Because, well, yes.  I like rocks.  While in Wisconsin the collection grew—we lived in a house at Nashotah, and we had space.  I had a rock tumbler going in the basement.  We attended rock and gem shows.  Then we moved three times in three years.  I became embarrassed of my petrine peccadillo.

On my way out the door yesterday, I spied a fossil I’d picked up in Ithaca.  Immediately my old inclination to rocks returned.  I don’t know why I bought so many books on geology and seriously considered changing professions after my academic position fell apart.  Perhaps in a life so unstable rocks seemed solid, reliable.  Or maybe it was nostalgia for my young days when a cheap white box of neatly labeled specimens provided hours of transfixed wonder.  I still pick up interesting rocks, and even go to places where collecting is permitted.  This whole world under our feet is full of surprises and an interesting stone can send me into a reverie that is, if I’m honest, as spiritual as it is scientific.