An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [57]
The study of minerals reverted alarmingly to the classification of crystals, which in turn smacked dismayingly of math. I was in this, as it were, for my health. Nothing compelled me to finish reading a sentence that began “The macro-domes become, for obvious reasons, clinodomes,” or “Remember this: b-pinacoid equals the brachypinacoid.” Yet even the mumbo-jumbo had its charms. It sounded like Sid Caesar. Pough’s Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals included a diagram of what looked like an angular inner tube or a corduroy hassock. The caption explained the diagram: “Rutile sixling.” Here also was a line drawing of a set of penetration twins, and a meticulous side view of a pinacoid, labeled “Side view of pinacoid.” Chrysoberyl, I learned—a blue-green aluminum oxide—has the exuberant-sounding “habit” of trilling.
The awesome story of earth’s crust’s buckling and shifting unfortunately failed to move me in the slightest. But here was an interesting find. Only a quirk of chemistry prevented the ground’s being a heap of broken rubble. I hadn’t thought of that. Why isn’t it all a heap of broken rubble? For the bedrock fractures and cleaves, notoriously; it uplifts, crumbles, splits, shears, and folds. All this action naturally shatters the crust. But it happens that the abundant element silicon is water soluble at high temperatures. This element heals the scars. Dissolved silicon seeps everywhere underground and slips into fissures and veins; it fills in, mends, and cements the rubble, over and over, from age to age. It heals all the thick wounds on the continents’ skin and under the oceans; it solidifies as it cools, uplifting, and forms pale veins of scarry quartz running through everything; it dominates the granite bedrock on which we build our cities, the granite interior of mountains, and the beds that underlie the plains.
No one has ever found a rock as old as the earth. All the old rock went under. The age of the earth is 4.8 billion years, and of the oldest rock, a Labrador greenstone, a mere 3.8 billion years. The rock we see is mostly a mishmash of scar tissue and recent rubble. If there were no soluble silicon, how many feet thick, or miles thick, I wondered, would the sterile rubble be?
Many of the rocks in my collection were veins of some bright mineral in a matrix of quartz. The round stones I gathered along Lake Erie’s shore were striped with bands of white or tinted quartz. The planet was all healed rubble, rubble joined and smoothed as if a god had rolled it over in his hands like snow.
People who collected rocks called themselves “rockhounds.” In the worst of cases, they called their children “pebble pups.” Rockhounds seemed to be wild and obsessive amateurs, my kind of people, who had stepped aside from the rush of things to devote themselves to folly.
A collector would be foolish, one book advised, to sell to a gem dealer a fine crystal of, say, ruby or sapphire, when it was obviously of much more value to the collector uncut—a brilliant stub growing from a rough matrix as it was found, a prize specimen in a beloved collection. One book cautioned me against refining any gold I found—any nuggets, dust, or gold-bearing quartz. For I could own or transport all the raw native gold I wanted, but if I refined it in any way I was “obliged by law” to sell it to a licensed gold dealer or the U.S. mint.
These, then, were books which advised, in detail, how to avoid making money, right here in America. Right here in Pittsburgh were people who dug up the nation’s mineral wealth, played with it, stored it behind glass, looked at it, fled in a flat-out sprint from anyone who threatened to buy it for dollars, and ultimately gave it to