Collecting Rocks 02

We all know that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. This short essay is an exposition of what that old saw can mean in a person’s life. But a few words are required before I hit the ground running.

No one can know what roles “things” play in a person’s life. Not unless those roles are made explicit. Even then, uncertainty rules for many reasons. To clarify, I don’t mean “things” as in the number and brand of the suits hanging in your closet. Or what kind of car you drive. Or how big your house is. Or if you own a vacation house or three, one in Kennebunkport, one in Gstaad, one in Palm Springs. No. I’m referring to the little things at clutter your life with memories and meaning. Little artifacts collected from almost every stage in your life and that you keep close to you because somehow they are part of who you are, on the stuff real treasures are made of. And since this essay is a continuation of yesterday’s rumination on rock collecting, that’s what my focus will be.

Today, on my desk not much more than a foot away as I type at my computer, sits a treasured artifact retrieved from Marco Island in July 1977, collected during the land use/environmental planning course Drew N. and I were teaching in southern Florida. It was my last year at EMU and the last university course I taught as a full-time professor. It’s an old seashell, a Busycon contrarium, according to one of my marine scientist friends, or a left-handed whelk in everyday language (also known by many as a lightning whelk). Thousands are found on beaches throughout southern Florida every year. Here’s what makes this one so special to me: it is a Native American artifact that an unknown Calusa took a rock and knocked a hole in the wide, upper body of the shell, into which she stuck a branch an inch or so thick and probably three to four feet long, thus creating a rudimentary hoe for digging in the sandy soil. Handling it now, I feel an ineffable connection to that unknowable person and to the day I first spotted it. This simple implement is even more treasured since I retrieved it from a rubbish pile at a new home construction site in a subdivision near the old fishing village of Caxambas, where it was waiting for the trash man to haul it away.

Next to the whelk is a rock of hematite iron ore I bought in Quibor, Venezuela, at a street vendor’s small craft stand. Quibor is well-known throughout Venezuela for its craft vendors and uber-cheap goods. Hundreds of their little stalls line both sides of the road leading to Cubiro. Most of the vendors sell junk. I managed to buy a domino set, which we still have and the grandkids play with to this day, and a never-opened hummock in its original cardboard box in our moldy basement. As well as the hematite rock priced at 1,000 Bolivares, or about $1.75. The instant I saw it I knew I would buy it, no matter what the asking price. A little description first.

The rock has two very different sides. The one side features a hollowed out, elongated cavity surrounded by almost concentric, alternating light and dark jagged-edged layers of different types of iron ore. Its garish rusty, orangey-red coloration is certain to attract attention. It is that side I present to first-time viewers. My guests nod sagely and smile, trying to humor the geo-geek who stands before them, so obviously proud of his rock. It would be hard to miss the looks they give each other, thinking, “Jesus Christ, who let this guy out?”

Then I turn it over so the second side is visible. And what a shock. That side has been carved and smoothed into an easily recognizable human face that is vaguely Oriental, perhaps because of the red-orange color of the rock itself. The smooth head has one ear, defined hairline, full set of facial features, and a beard. It is an astounding piece of art. I can’t believe it was carved by anyone in Quibor, or perhaps even in Venezuela. My guess is it had been stolen and then sold for a pittance to me. Naturally, when I showed it to my Parsons friends they looked at it with a mixture of incredulity, astonishment, and pure envy. It was the absolute score of the trip. Linda B. offered me twenty dollars for it but I just laughed. How could I possibly sell a treasure of a lifetime?

Sitting on top of my old steamer’s trunk, itself a treasure from my 1961 trip to Marynook, the Marianist Novitiate in Galesville, Wisconsin, is a rock from the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. It is shaped like a very large canine tooth. I spotted it in a driving rainstorm half buried in the mud as about sixty people were running up the stairs from the open boat dock to the shelter of the Frenchman’s Reef Hotel, where we were staying. Because the stairs were so narrow and the crush of people behind us, I had no chance to stop and smell the daisies, so to speak. And it continued raining heavily all that evening, curtailing a night-time raid. But early the next morning I all but ran down those stairs, leaned over, and grabbed the rock/tooth. I also have about four or five other rocks collected from St. John but that one is my favorite.

Keeping my rock/tooth company on the trunk are two igneous rocks, both similar in appearance though not in size. They are a faded, faintly bluish gray (perhaps from glaucophane) with veins of whitish (feldspar) and pinkish coloration (probably iron) running through them. I found the smaller rock in 2002 in the Pecos River, in northern New Mexico, just north of the town of Pecos. I was on a lark, taking time off a project I hated in El Paso, and had spent the night in nearby Albuquerque. I drove north on State Highway 63, pulling over at a small State public recreation area on the River. A short walk brought me to the stream, which I immediately started prowling, looking for a collectable. After perhaps ten minutes I found a beautiful rock that looked to be largely basalt that had been injected before it had frozen completely by an iron-rich volatile, accounting for the colorful veining. In 2010, when on my way north to pick up my grandsons, Taylor and Kyle, at Philmont Scout Ranch, I took the same highway again, hoping to find the rest area and score several attractive rocks. To my surprise and pleasure I found a rock of the very same type, only that one was about five times larger, about the size of a football. On both occasions I looked diligently for similar rocks in the river and along the bank. No luck. On the days I searched those were the only ones of that type all along the stream. Today, both are displayed proudly on the trunk. Also on my desk are the following treasured rocks.

• Conical white seashell embedded with tiny red dots and a small fragment of eroded staghorn coral shaped exactly like an erect penis and testicles, both of which were found on the beach in Tucacas, Venezuela, in El Parque Nacional Morrocoy.
• Rocks collected from various locations:
• A white, fist-sized feldspar tinted with red streaks from Catalina State Park, Oro Valley, Arizona. Beth and I were walking up the Romero Canyon Trail at the beginning of the hike when I spotted the rock half buried at the edge in the path. Not wanting to carry the rock uphill for several hours, I dug it up on our way down.
• Greenish rock (apatite?) from the Sanctuary Resort in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
• Greenish basalt from St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. My granddaughter Sophia says it looks like a little castle. She’s right, it does.
• Olivine (?) rock from a road cut near San Jose de Ocoa, Dominican Republic.
• Flint from the grounds of St. Andrew’s Church in Sonning, England, in the Thames River valley near Redding. I was staying nearby at Bull’s Inn and found the rock while exploring the church grounds and cemetery.
• Fired clay piece featuring a textile impression taken surreptitiously when I was on a group tour of Gyeongbok Royal Palace, Seoul, South Korea. It was illegal to remove ANYTHING from the palace grounds. But when I spotted the clay fragment in a pile of broken rocks I bent over to tie my shoe and scored it. Shameless.
• Green piece of serpentinite (California’s State rock) collected from a road cut on State Route 132 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada west of Coulterville.
• Two pieces of limestone collected from Bonhomme Creek in western St. Louis County near Babler State Park, one rectilinear and the other oval shaped. In the first, the limestone surrounds a smooth, hunk of red-brown chert (jasper) whose natural color is caused by hematite or goethite impurities. In the second, the center is a pale greenish material, which is either iron or chromium.
• In my desk drawer are pieces of apple-green serpentinite from northern Venezuela (I “found” them in a rock garden in Choroní) and two very dark gray “worry” rocks from Bonhomme Creek that I used to carry in my pants pockets.

Under the window in my den are two short file cabinets. On top of the cabinets are five of my favorite rocks.

• Large colorful hunk of meta-limestone with inclusions of crystalline quartz and pockets of iron ore weathered to orangey-yellowish limonite collected from a dry creekbed in Franklin Mountains State Park in El Paso, Texas. I was working for Jacobs in 2008 on the Fort Bliss project and had several morning meetings cancelled. Instead of going back to the hotel and laying around I dragged one of the landscape architects with me and we toured the nearby Franklin Mountains, ignoring signs as we strolled around the Park warning that removal of natural materials would be punished by Texas-style torture and painful death. Well, not quite but close. Of course, I paid no attention and stole the rock without an ounce of compunction or regret.
• Beautifully layered, fist-sized hunk of reddish rhyolite mixed with whitish feldspar. While working in Abu Dhabi on the Das Island project, members of the planning group visited the offices of ADNOC, our client. As we walked back to the car we cut through the grounds of the Abu Dhabi Hilton. A very attractive rock garden formed part of the landscaping on the side of the resort. Naturally, as I strolled along I searched the garden for interesting rocks and spotted that stunning specimen. After glancing around to see if anyone was watching, I stepped over the chain and scooped it up, much to the consternation of my colleagues, who worried I would be arrested by some alert security guard. No way.
• Three rocks from Paradise Valley, Arizona, from the Sanctuary Resort. The first is an olive-green, massive (non-glassy non-crystalline) rock, probably a member of the olivine group. The second is a pretty pinkish-tan rock I have not been able to identify but it is almost certainly metamorphic. The third is a bluish igneous rock with surface joints/striations that have been filled with weathered iron, forming an attractive webbing of orangey-red offset by the light blue ground mass.

In my son David’s old room, now unoccupied, is a rock unusual even for my collection. It is shaped a little like a flying saucer, thicker at the center than the edges. But even more unusual is its coloration, characterized by light and dark stripes, sort of like a varve but not. The rock is brown, with the darker, thin stripes a darker brown. It looks somewhat like horse flesh but only somewhat. I found it in Bonhomme Creek, along with a number of my other favorites. A friend who is a professional geologist had no idea what it was either.

Sitting in the same bookcase is a rock that looks a little like the cartoon character Snoopy or like an early Beetle. It was collected on a beach in Maui, not far outside the village of Lahaina. I spotted it from about thirty feet and headed straight for it. The rock consists of cemented white coral fragments onto which a hunk of dark gray lava became fused. It is visually so distinctive even visitors who have little interest in rocks marvel at it.

Artifacts, environmental treasures, memories all intertwined. Perhaps that’s why I love rock collecting. It allows me to connect my love of geology and rocks and minerals and the landscape in an environmental context that is both physically enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. While rock hunting I wind up paying almost as much attention to the birds (I’ve been a bird watcher almost all my adult life) and the condition of whatever environment I’m in, whether it’s a stream-course in the humid Midwest or a dry creek bed in the arid Southwest. I love reading the signs of native bedrock, soils, vegetation, animal activity, erosion, and deposition while trying to decipher how human occupancy has affected the landscape.

Connections to the Earth, that’s what rock collecting means to me.