The Daily: 22 May 2024

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Wednesday Word

for 15 May 2024

pebble

I have always been an inveterate rock collector. Most people are looking up when traveling someplace new. I’m looking at my feet. I had a boot box full of interesting stones from the Rockies and the Sierras. That collection began so long ago, I don’t even remember a time before it. But it didn’t stop in childhood. I have always picked up rocks and still do. I once packed a five pound hunk of vesicular basalt laced with pea-like olivine crystals out of Hawaii, quite illegally… but… I have it still. Similarly, I have crates full of random scraps of samples from various research sites. One is a perfectly football sized and shaped lava bomb with mineralogy so dense it weighs close to fifteen pounds. (My specialty was mantle rocks; all my research was dense…) I’d like to see a quarterback chuck that thing.

I also have a corvid tendency to pick up sparkly things. I have tumbled semi-precious minerals everywhere in my house. You’d think I was some sort of crystal faith healer, but no, I just like shiny rocks. And when I go hiking or to the beach, I invariably come home with pockets full of stream-rounded stones and shells. Here in New England, among the ubiquitous granite, I find marbles and slates and schists. I really like the schists… they do glitter so, you know… but Vermont schist is blue, that is, so old it was laid down as mud before the oceans were oxygenated and iron became rust. So… pre-photosynthesis mud from the youthful days of this planet. Out West, my specialty was rounded moons of quartzite or marble. Most were egg-shaped. I use them in spring decor still. Some were heart shaped. They seemed to find their way to me when I needed a reason to smile. In the Midwest, I could hardly walk a half mile without finding an interesting trilobite or brachiopod ghosting out of sedimentary rocks. I was particularly good at uncovering what I called beach rocks, layers of mud or sand riddled with the detritus of ocean life in a jumble of bones and shells and exoskeletons. On the other hand, I have an entire whole perfect crinoid that looks like some sort of night-dwelling flower turned to stone in the morning light.

So it was inevitable that I would be drawn to geology eventually. I still get caught in the gravity of a road cut as I’m driving down the highway, wanting to stop and read the rocks. It’s a mania, really. Like solving puzzles. Or reading mysteries. But the stories of the stones are so much more interesting, so much deeper and broader and riddled with drama and quirk. Because the surface of every layer of stone is an ending. Usually not a pleasant one. Here is the garbled pile of volcanic glass and dust and jagged broken rock that crazy talks of a pyroclastic eruption, super-heated fluid rock blasting down the mountain at hundreds of meters per second. There is the tell-tale irregular wavy bedding in layers of sedimentary rock left in the wake of violent flooding, perhaps a tsunami or a sudden breach on an inland sea that leaves genetic memory in folklore.

And when you look very close at red sandstones with their lovely sinuous dune bedding, now and then you find a razor sharp line of grey cutting off the time of sand followed by thin layers of pale mudstones that tell the story of life struggling for survival. If you take those stones back to your mass spectrometer lab, you find a story so ancient and alien, our sun looks like a drooling infant by comparison. There are extremely strange words in this story, iridium isotopes that do not exist anywhere else in our experience of the universe. Lean in and you can almost hear the echoes of the dying cries of species and stars. I expect future geologists will muddle over the thin grey line of our times, wondering what to make of the toxic chemical signatures of an apparently suicidal wee beastie run amok.

So I collect stones. Mostly pebbles because those fit in pockets and boot boxes. I also collect the stories of stones and can sit with a good rock exposure, contentedly reading for hours. I find this soothing. I also find that it takes me quite out of myself, quite out of human concerns and foibles, quite out of time as animals experience it. Geology is the humbling science. If you ever need to feel both completely insignificant and yet completely enveloped in this whole world story, pick up a stone and learn to listen to what it has to say. The rocks are great gurus, you know. Stalwart and steadfast and stolid stewards of truth in shifting times.

And then, just to make it all that more amazing, pick up a handful of soil. Here is the story of stone melded with the story of living things in perfect harmony. And this is what feeds you… Nothing is more beautiful or inspiring!

So… if you choose… you can respond in the comments below or go visit the All Poetry contest for May. Your response can be anything made from words. I love poetry, but anything can be poetic and you needn’t even be limited to poetics. An observation, a story, a thought. Might even be an image — however, I am not a visual person, so it has to work harder to convey meaning. In the spirit of word prompts, it’s best if you use the word; but I’m not even a stickler about that. Especially if you can convey the meaning without ever touching the word.

Even if you don’t choose to scribble, at least I’ve made you think about… pebbles.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024