Rocks
By Foy Valentine
A few shriveled souls I know are not crazy about rocks.
They are to be pitied.
The depths of their deprivation boggles the mind.
If good manners allowed, they should be discreetly shunned.
As for me, I just love rocks.
Always have.
At least I can`t remember a time when I was not smitten by rocks, charmed by rocks, enthralled by rocks, fascinated by rocks.
`Where I grew up as a boy in East Texas, there were no rocks. Oh, there may have been some deep down in the earth; but where I lived, God covered them all up with fine sandy loam and immense deposits of splendid red clay.
I was, well, rock challenged.
When I went away to college at Baylor, I was drawn, like a moth to a flame, to a geology class. It was love at first sight. I was so pleasured with all those glorious rocks that I knocked the top out of the curve in that class, much to the consternation of the several geology majors in the class. I meant them no harm. It was just that I couldn`t help myself I liked geology so much that I pretty nearly ate it with a spoon. I loved it with an agape kind of love, as everybody in church now says…especially those who don`t know Greek. No matter that I had a triple major in Bible and English and Speech, I would gladly have added a geology major too if my meager resources had allowed.
Since college, my work has taken me on travels far and wide and I have hardly ever gone anywhere in the world without bringing back some wonderful rock as a memento. There are hundreds of these fantastic treasures. Altogether they could not possibly be worth thirty cents. But by each, there hangs some marvelous tale.
Let me illustrate.
Here on my desk is an ammonite, a limestone fossil some 200 million years old which our Number One grandson, John, and I chiseled out of a deposit of fossiliferous limestone from a dry creek bed behind our house. What a wonder.
On the corner of my desk is a rock I gouged out of the stony bank completely encircling the town of Nordlingen in southern Germany. When that area was a very shallow sea covered with primordial muck, a huge meteor came swooshing in, at some two or three thousand miles per hour, made a great splash and a huge carter which subsequently filled in so that the marvelous little Bavarian city in due season could be neatly built in it, and the surrounding wall was thrown up in an instant, in a perfect circle. My fist-sized rock is composed of hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny sea shells which come into fascinating focus under a strong magnifying glass. It is enough to elicit a hallelujah chorus, with trumpet flourishes no less.
Then there is this piece of jasper which I picked up at the very top of Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in New Mexico. As one of the highest mountains of the Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ) range, it yielded from its very summit this glorious bloodred piece of jasper. The rock was a thing of beauty before my brother Jim, a devoted rock hound, polished it to perfection. It is now exquisite.
I particularly like this aa, a broken and jagged chunk of black lava from a recent eruption of Kilauea on Mauna Loa`s leeward side on the big island of Hawaii. It has a yellowish tinge and still smells of sulphur, which the ancients, with good cause, called brimstone. And just think: it comes from the side of the biggest mountain on earth which from the bottom of the Pacific to its snow-covered peak is some 32,000 feet. Now that is a pile of rocks.
Good memories are attached to this smooth stone which I picked up at the very end of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska at the uttermost tip of the North American land mass, hard by some calving glaciers. It still feels a little cold.
Then there is this small piece of basalt which some straw-hatted laborer long, long ago worked into the Great Wall of China. I honored him, I recall, as I walked in awe along the top of his handiwork, the only human construct which the early astronauts could make out from their orbits in outer space.
The red coral piece comes from the beach at Bali in Indonesia. I picked it up at sunset. What a memorable walk; what a view; and what a rock.
The ten-pound stone, black but chock full of small white fossils, I found in the Rocky Mountains where one shifting tectonic plate pushed another plate up from sea-level to 12,000 feet, a little while ago. To get my specimen to its present round, smooth, and beautiful shape required quite a vast amount of time and tumbling which it would take a Jules Verne on peyote to conjure up.
Time would fail me to tell
- of the small rectangular stone which the Roman Emperor Hadrian had his workmen incorporate into a 73 1/2 mile sentry beat, Hadrian`s Wall, across northern England to keep the savage Norse invaders out of the then only slightly less savage Roman province of Britain,
- of the cannon-ball sized piece of quartz with moss still on it which I found recently on the banks of the River Wye in Wales,
- of the small smooth flint rock I found in Israel like one David could have fitted into his sling shot for , as his faithless detractors imagined, his foolhardy face-off with Goliath,
- of the piece of one of the great pyramids of Egypt which some ego-crazed Pharaoh ordered as a memorial for his own royal, he believed divine, self,
- of the old slate shingle which some rustic mountain man long ago fashioned with his ancient zax, for a part of a roof for his cowshed in the shadow of Switzerland`s Matterhorn just a short walk outside of Zermatt,
- of the shiny chunk of mica I picked up in Colorado while waiting to ship home the body of my good friend, Charles Trentham, killed in a tragic car wreck on his way to our cabin in Red River, New Mexico,
- of the fist-sized chunk of conglomerate composed of pure white coral sand and coal black lava pebbles ground down by a pounding Pacific surf on the windward side of Kauai to a perfect goose-egg shape,
- and of the neat paving stone from the Appian Way just outside the city of Rome with the marks of a thousand Roman chariots well worn into the surface.
I really want to go on and on.
But I have to stop.
Every rock holds the memories of a lifetime. Too, as Shakespeare in As You Like It has the Duke to say about the good life in Arden Forest, there are "books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." Indeed, there are "sermons in stones." Although I`m sorely empted, I`ll refrain from preaching them since this essay is dedicated to whimsy and things unsubstantive. My specialty.
No wonder Chevrolet has stuck with its immensely successful sales pitch, "Like a rock. Um-m-m. Like a rock."
And especially no wonder that our great and wonderful God who is himself the Rock of Ages is also the Rock of our salvation.
Hooray for rocks.
