An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [56]
You performed other testing marvels on your rocks—at least, the people in the books did. They dripped acid on them; they shone ultraviolet lights on them; they split them, sawed them, and set them on fire (diamond “burns easily”). They smelled and tasted them. Cracked arsenic smells like garlic. Epsomite is bitter, halotrichite tastes like ink, soda niter “tastes cooling.” Those ardent mineralogists who licked their chrysocolla specimens found that their tongues got stuck.
During these tests, the rocks behaved with scarcely less vigor than the scientists. Borax “swells into great ‘worms’ as it melts, and finally shrinks to almost nothing.” Other minerals “may send up little horns.” Some change color when you heat them, or glow, or melt, burn, dissolve, or turn magnetic. Some fly apart (decrepitate). If you should happen to place a hunk of gummite on film, it will take its own picture.
At the end of all these tests, especially if you knew where you found your rocks, you could learn what you had in the paper bags. Or you could, as I did, read the texts’ mineral descriptions a thousand times until you hit on something that sounded plausible. You could also go directly to the answers by studying the labeled rocks for sale at the Carnegie Museum shop.
Eventually I identified the rocks. The petrified roses were barite, probably from Oklahoma. The scratchy brown mineral was bauxite—aluminum ore. The black glass was obsidian; the booklet of transparent sheets was mica; the goldeny iridescent handful of soft crystals was chalcopyrite, an ore of copper, whose annoying name I loved to repeat: chalcopyrite. I had shiny green hornblende, rose quartz, starry moss agate, and dull hornfels, which was a mere rock. (A mineral is a pure inorganic compound; you can express its constituents in a chemical formula. A rock is just a mixture of minerals. Worthless, weedy rock is gangue rock.)
I had glassy drops of perlite called Apache tears, bubbly pyrite (fool’s gold), and—a favorite—brick-red cinnabar. I had speckly gneiss rock, a chip of crystal tourmaline like a stick of anise candy, and green malachite in a silky chunk. I had milky turquoise, opalized wood, two sorry stalactites, banded jasper, and a lump of coal.
From the book I learned that there was fine stuff hidden in the earth. In the rock underfoot, in the mountain roadside rock, were sealed pockets lined with crystals. You could break a brown rock and find a vug—a pocket—sharp with amethysts.
In Maine, someone with a hammer had discovered a single feldspar crystal twenty feet across. Other New England outcrops have yielded “sparkling blue beryl crystals 18 to 27 feet long.” Copper miners find peacock ore, a bronze mineral locked in rock, which tarnishes at once to “an astonishing royal purple” when it hits the light.
The rock I’d seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I’d never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite—big, coarse granite—and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen.
I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth’s crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was as it seemed.