I do remember my grandparents telling me that their parents were rock hounds, and my grandfather gently showing me how to use his rock tumbler. Being from California their geology was more exposed than our east coast upbringing's habitat. I do have some grainy black and white photos of my great-grandpas up on some slope in the Eastern Sierra with rock hammers, hands full of pebbles of some sort. I used to stare at the photo and wishing so hard they would share with me their favorite spots, and that I must be related because I was obsessed with rocks. I bet these long lost great grandpas would understand me, and my weird love of rocks, I built a narrative in my head around this for a long time, it made my reality a bit less lonely, and seemed a lot less strange than an imaginary friend. A dead great grandpa that my grandmother always reminded me that I had a lot in common with seemed like a good person to talk to in my head. I was obsessed with not only rocks but whales. Good thing I'm a capricorn, half mountain goat, half fish because that really is my personality. I'm a dual purpose obsessive weirdo, and my two passions collide when I'm combing the beach for smooth stones while trying to spot whales or dolphins, or when I would hunt for good shark teeth fossils while working on the boats, in the cliffs surrounding our dive sites.
I did spend a lot of time in the summers and Christmas break with my father and stepmom, tooling around the California and Nevada desert in our Land Cruiser, looking in to old mines (before they were mostly fenced off) and finding moon like landscapes of pink pumice. Most of these adventures tinged with the danger of the back country, and my Dad's poor road choices. He had a knack for finding the one road that our vehicle could not clear and doing it anyway, putting us in peril over and over. But it was glorious fun. We would find weird vertical mine shafts where big, white owls flew right at us out of the gloom when we dropped stones down to see how long before we could hear them hit the bottom. Like a ghost of some dead miner warning us that our searching was futile, and I don't even know what we were actually looking for. We never found much of anything, but I do think that was also because we didn't know how to look.
My favorite room at the Natural History museum where I grew up in DC, was the geology and gallery of gems. Of course I liked the dioramas of dinosaurs and the giant squid, but the rocks....the giant crystals that looked like filaments of some old lady's white hair. The glow in the dark opals from far off places, and the amethyst logs so big you could almost curl up inside them completely. The HOPE Diamond! The magic and mystery of it all. I had some internal fantasy of finding one of these masterpieces, born of pressure and persistence. I imagined being some young Indiana Jones type woman out in some jungle digging up giant crystals for reasons that only made sense to a child.
The truth is, I just liked being outdoors and I liked earth science. When my Stepdad would go up to the Blue Ridge Mountains to putz around our little cabin, and I would tag along, I would walk down the wash behind it. I had discovered a few trips earlier that there were citrine colored crystals covering some blue slate rocks. If you stared at the ground for long enough, in the right sun, you could sometimes find the magical little shapes all alone. Especially after a rain, then you could find whole gardens of them. I would be out there for hours, alone staring at the ground. My hands would go numb, my pockets filled with shining earth-made glitter. None of these were museum pieces, but to me they were treasure. Magic in a physical form. The time spent in that ditch was quiet in my head, I never worried about the bullies or the kids who made fun of me constantly. I didn't hear my mother's constant criticisms repeating in my brain over and over, I only saw the gravel and the glint of the next crystal. Time was meaningless, I didn't need to be entertained or told to sit still.
My stepdad never paid much attention to how long I was out there, and I know he was just grateful to have me out of his hair. He never spoke to me much anyway, but I do remember one day being gone down that wash all the way to the lake, it was off season and a weekday, so it was empty. I remember looking up from the dirt and mud and seeing a bobcat, I was so quiet that it hadn't even noticed me either. I stood super, stock still. Frozen in observation. The bobcat was drinking and it did turn around and see me finally, but did not start. It silently walked back into the bushes, and I remember thinking how fantastic that silent encounter was. I slowly made my way back up the wash, light getting dim.
When I got back to the cabin, hoo boy was I in trouble. They had been about 5 mins from calling the police. Nobody had thought to go down the wash and look for me, because my endless rambling about rocks and crystals had gone in one ear and out the other. I tried to tell them about my pockets of treasure and the bobcat. It was all lies, I was just being bad. Hiding from them, making trouble as usual. The bobcat story was added to some of my fishing fibs over time and I had forgotten it until I started writing this story. I had lost track of time because of the quiet in my brain, and caused panic in my mother. Panic and my mother went hand in hand, it was her comfort zone. An unfortunate family trait she left to all of us in varying degrees.
Over the years as I settled in the west, I never lost my passion for staring at the ground, wasting time my eyes moving from stone to stone eyeballing details everywhere we went. I lived in the Eastern Sierra for a tumultuous time, but was not in the right frame of mind to collect anything very good. My luck was not there, nor was I very serious about hounding. When my husband and I decided to move back west after languishing in the south for a while, the first thought I had was "ROCKS"! I have started showing my almost-grown daughters how to find the good stuff, where to look for soil changes, what glints are false and what makes my heart speed up.
I am not a scientist, nor a geologist. I am a lay person. I am an environmentalist and activist, and I grew up surrounded by scientists and artists, with all their flaws. I was lucky to have the forays into the wilderness that I had, which made the biggest impacts on me. I tried to study it in books and learn about it via the usual challenges, but I'm not built that way. My journey is as a hobbyist, and my next journeys will be what I decide to do with my various specimens. I am taking classes to learn lapidary, and if I have any talent to take my rough rocks and bring out what I see in them internally. I can't explain what grabs me about certain specimens, but living here in the high desert is like being at a buffet every single day. There is so much to choose from, and the conditions here are exactly perfect for rock hounding. I have traveled to some pretty cool places all over the world, and each place I go, I bring back rocks. Always rocks, and my luggage fees are always protesting this fact. I can grab a certain rock from my shelf and tell you where it came from and what was happening when I found it. I have bowls of rocks all around, and even the tiny ones, I can tell you the same thing. Ireland used to be a tropical rainforest, and I have a slab of fossilized riverbed from that ancient rainforest that now make up the immense Cliffs of Moher. Who needs a keychain, when that lowly piece of slate rock tells such an incredible tale, and was part of the Princess Bride. I mean, I did say I was a rock "nerd".
I may share locations, but mostly I wont. I may take you with me to look if you ask nice. But you have to find your own rocks. I found what turns my brain off, for me it's out there...in the desert, the forest or on the beach. I will be wrong a lot, I wont know what things are a lot. I have guide books and access to the UNR geology department where I can bring things in to ask them, "what the heck is this"? My tools are crude and I forget them a lot. My eyesight fails as I have advancing Glaucoma, and I want to see all the rocks and formations, cliffs and mountains I can before the blur and dark creep in too much to allow detail searching. I want to see that glint and grab that shiny crystal, or the unmistakable milky of the true opal. I forget to take good pictures, they never do any of it justice anyway...but as this journey goes, it might veer into self discovery or quips on aging, parenting or the environment. My husband and I might share videos on camping or wildlife or flowers, but I am a rock nerd. It all comes back to my love of walking down a wash, with a quiet brain, staring at the ground. My brain quiet, my hands numb and my pockets full of treasure.
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