An American Childhood

by Annie Dillard

  Hear O Israel, the Lord is one.

  And Peter said, I know him not; I know him not; I know him not. And the rich young ruler said, What must I do? And the woman wiped his feet with her hair. And he said, Who touched me?

  And he said, Verily, verily, verily, verily; life is not a dream. Let this cup pass from me. If it be thy will, of course, only if it be thy will.

  I GOT MY ROCK COLLECTION from our grandparents’ paper boy. He handed it to me in three heavy grocery bags; he said he had no time for a rock collection. Amy and I visited Oma and Company every Friday; while Mary cooked dinner, I roamed their solemn neighborhood, where our family would, as it happened, soon live ourselves. The indigenous children kept mum inside their stone houses; the paper boy—having pedaled his thick black bike, plus rocks, up from an Italian neighborhood down the hill—was the only sign of life.

  The paper boy got the rock collection from a solitary old man named Downey, who until recently had lived just up the street from my grandparents. Mr. Downey had collected the rocks from all over. He had given them to the paper boy, in the grocery bags, explaining that he knew no one else. Then he had died. The paper boy, who was kind but very busy, did not remember the names of any of the rocks except the stalactites; he recalled, not helpfully, that Mr. Downey had found them in a cave. The stalactites were sorry-looking at their broken ends: sharp, yellow, and hollow, like fallen deciduous teeth.

  Now I had these rocks. They were yellow, green, blue, and red. Most were the size of half-bricks. One small white wafer had blue stone stars. Some were knobby, some grainy, some slick. There was a shining brown mineral the color of shoe polish; its cubed crystals made a scratchy chunk. There was a rusty cluster of petrified roses. There was a frozen froth of platinum bubbles. It was a safe bet all these rocks had names.

  From the Homewood Library’s children’s books I could learn only the vaguest, overamazed stories of “the earth’s crust,” which didn’t interest me. What were all these yellow and blue rocks in my room, and why did I never find any rocks so various and sharp? From library adult books I got the true dope, and it was a long story, which involved me in a project less like bird-watching or stamp collecting than like life in a forensic laboratory. The books taught me to identify the rocks. They also lent me a vision of things, and informed me about a bizarre set of people.

  You got Frederick H. Pough’s Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals. Using this and other books, you identified your rocks one by one, keying them out as you key out plants with Gray’s Manual, through a series of diagnostic tests.

  You determined, for instance, where your rock fit on Mohs’ scale of hardness. Mr. Mohs (Herr Mohs, actually) had devised a series of homespun tests for rock hardness, much as Mr. Beaufort had dreamed up homespun tests for wind force. Does smoke rise straight from the chimney? The wind is not blowing. Is your house falling over? It’s blowing force ten. Number one on Mohs’ scale was soft rock, to wit, talc. Can you crumble it in your fingers? It’s soft. What you have there is talcum powder. Can it scratch a fingernail, a copper penny, a pane of glass, and a knife blade? It’s quartz. You can scratch quartz with topaz, ruby, and diamond. If it makes your diamond saw clog, it’s a meteorite.

  You subjected your rocks to scratch tests. You procured a piece of bathroom tile (always, in the books, hexagonal, such as you find in old New York bathrooms and nowhere else) and stroked your rock across its unglazed underside. What color was the streak?

  Yellow pyrite drew a black streak, black limonite drew a yellow streak, and black hematite drew a red streak. (Some minerals, Pough explained, to my mystification, are “not truly black…but only look so.”) The streaks were brilliant pigments, richer than crayon strokes, deeper than pastel strokes; they were powdery pure pigments bright as grease paint. It was a wonder the earth wasn’t streaked like a Van Gogh landscape, and all the people streaked like warpath Indians.

  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. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother’s not dead, dear—she’s only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones—maybe only the stones—understood.

  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 “Rem
ember 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 the paper boy. I applauded this with the uncanny, exultant, spreading sensation you have when you realize that your name is really legion—but I wasn’t so persnickety that I wasn’t inspired by a 1953 story of two Western collectors. These men found two petrified logs that made their Geiger counters click. Uranium-bearing silicates had replaced the logs’ wood. The men sold the petrified logs to the Atomic Energy Commission for $35,000.

  Some rockhounds had recently taken up scuba diving. These people dove down into “brawling mountain streams” with tanks on their backs to look for crystals underwater, or to pan for gold. The gold panning was especially good under boulders in rapids.

  One book included a photograph of a mild-looking hobbyist in his basement workshop: he sawed chunks of Utah wonderstone into wavy, landscapy-looking slabs suitable for wall hangings. Here was a photograph of rockhounds in the field: Two men on a steep desert hillside delightedly smash a flat rock to bits with two hammers. Far below stands a woman in a dress and sensible shoes, doing nothing. Here is their campsite: a sagging black pyramidal tent pitched on the desert floor. A Studebaker fender nudges the foreground. The very hazards of field collecting tempted me: “tramping for miles over rough country,” facing cold, heat, rain, cactus, rough lava, insects, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and glaring alkali flats. Collectors fell over boulders and damaged crystals. Their ballpoint pens ran out of ink. They carried sledgehammers, chains, snakebite kits, Geiger counters, canteens, tarps, maps, three-ton hydraulic jacks, mattocks, gold pans, dynamite (see The Blaster’s Handbook, published by Du Pont), cuff-link boxes, gads, sacks, ultraviolet lamps, pry bars, folding chairs, and the inevitable bathroom tiles.

  Getting back home alive only aggravated their problems. If you bring home five hundred pounds of rocks from an average collecting trip, what do you do with them? Splay them attractively about the garden, one book suggested lamely. Give them away. Hold yard sales. One collector left five tons of rough rock in his yard when he moved. The books stopped just short of advising collectors how to deal with their wives.

  The problems of storage and display were surprising. A roomful of rocks was evidently as volatile as a roomful of baby raccoons. Once you commit yourself to your charges, you scarcely dare take your eyes off them.

  If you have some sky-blue chalcanthite on a shelf, or gypsum, or borax, or trona, it will crumble of its own accord to powder. Your crystals of realgar (an orange-red ore of arsenic) will “disintegrate to a dust of orpiment,” which in turn will decompose. Your hanksite and soda niter will absorb water from the air and dissolve into little pools. Your proustite and silver ores will tarnish and then decompose. Your orange beryl will fade to pink, your brown topaz will lose all its color, your polished opals will craze. Finally, your brass-yellow marcasite will release sulfuric acid. The acid will eat your labels, your shelves, and eventually your whole collection.

  On the other hand, rock collecting had unique rewards. For example, the thinner you sliced your specimens when you sawed them up, the more specimens you had. In this way you could multiply your collection without leaving home.

  When you pry open the landscape, you find wonders—gems made of corpses, even, and excrement. In Puget Sound you could find fossil oysters and clams that had turned to agate, called agatized oysters, agatized clams. In Colorado you could find fossil shrimps turned to scarlet and precious carnelian. People have found dinosaur bones turned to jasper.

  Petrified wood is abundant in every county of every state, because soluble silicon seeps everywhere. In Southern states you could find petrified leaves and twigs. There are often worm borings in petrified wood, and inside the opalized tunnels you might find gemmy piles of petrified worm excrement. Dinosaur excrement fossilizes, too. Bird and bat guano petrifies into a mineral called taranakite, which a book described as “unctuous to touch.”

  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.