An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [59]
I wanted to find these things. I also wanted to find wulfenite crystals the color of cranberries, from Chile, and big transparent cubes of Iceland spar. In Durango, Mexico, I might find rosy adamite, tabular orange sulfenite crystals, mimetite in yellow mammillary crusts, or light green pyramids of scorodite. In Paterson, New Jersey, I could find great pearly crystals of phlogopite, or radiating splinters of white pectolite, or stilbite in bundles like cauliflower. People made extensive mineral discoveries in Tsumeb, Southwest Africa, in Haddam, Connecticut, in Westphalia, Germany, and in Westchester County, New York. Every day for the past two hundred years, one book said, someone has stumbled “on a brand-new outcrop that nobody before has explored.” “A lifetime of study,” another book said stirringly, “would not make you the master of every phase” of mineralogy.
I thought to specialize in interesting names. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, collectors found a mineral called sillimanite, named for a Yale professor. My specialized collection would feature sillimanite, radio opal, yowah nuts, and agaty potch.
Rock collecting is pleasantly simple for a bookish child, for it scarcely matters which rocks you actually have and which you only imagine having. I might as well throw into my future collection some clams that had turned to agate, too, and some carnelian shrimps. Similarly, field trips don’t take much gas. You never think, How could I get a jeep? You forget your condition. You do not see yourself as a figure; you see the world.
From what box canyons have you not extricated yourself, hand over hand, hauling your pickax and Geiger counter in your knapsack? Sharp eyes—you spotted that rattlesnake. I knew you would. You could write a book: the fiery raw glare of the alkali flats, how it shrivels your eyes and blinds your brain in two holes like gimlets, whatever gimlets are, and your jeep tracks crumble over it white on white; and how, when you finally got to the hills you held your hot hammer by its wood handle, planted your big-booted feet in the hillside and felt the hot hill rock through your coarse pants on your thighs. And you broke rocks, hit rocks that cracked like ice in your palm, with your buddy beside you, both of you seeing what you could see. Doubloons, maybe, again, or uranium.
There were now 340 rocks in my room. I labeled them. On November evenings alone in my room while it rained, on February nights while snow piled in the buckeye boughs outside my window, when the paper on the Panama Canal was out of the way, and the Latin memorized, and my friends talked to on the phone until there was nothing left of the schoolday to analyze; while Margaret ran water in the kitchen and Mother talked Molly into going to bed and Father poked the fold from his section of the evening paper and Amy sat silent on the floor with her spelling book and played with the bows on Father’s shoes, I played at my maple desk with books and rocks.
From stiff index cards I cut tiny squares, an eighth of an inch by an eighth of an inch. Holding the squares with tweezers, I printed numerals on them, never thinking to print the numerals before cutting the paper. In a dizzying meticulous mess I slid the wee numbers against the drippy rubber slope of a mucilage jar, and wiggled them onto flat faces of the rocks. When the glue dried the next day, I dabbed a brushful of varnish over rock and number. I was cataloguing the collection.
As the books advised, I listed by number in a notebook each specimen’s name, date, and locality. “Locality,” when it wasn’t Mr. Downey’s grocery bags, was often the Carnegie Museum shop, where I bought trays of thumbnail minerals glued to cardboard sheets. I soaked the glue from these and labeled them with my own compulsive little numbers. When one day I discovered I had, characteristically, lost the notebook catalogue, I discovered simultaneously that I didn’t need it. I knew them by sight: that favorite dry red cinnabar, those Lake Erie ruby granites and flintstones,