Geologic Fragility
Be careful, he said. Those rocks are fragile.
We were hunting geodes in the West Desert of Utah. Only an hour and half from the Salt Lake City metropolis but surrounded by desert basins interrupted by gently folded purple mountains. They were just far away enough to allow you to believe could walk to their edges and be back by lunch. We left plumes of dust behind the wheels of our cars on the way in, stopping respectfully for the herds of sheep. They were being guided by men on horseback and kept moving by fluffy white dogs that wouldn’t have been out of place in the French mountains.
“Were the shiniest parts of me also the most fragile?”
How can a rock be fragile? I asked. It’s taken so long to form. It’s had eons to grow stronger.
That so much time could create something easily breakable is disconcerting on a molecular level. It’s as if my femur wasn’t as strong as I thought it would be. As if my good knee buckled.
He applied the sharp point of a metal hammer to open one of the rocks. It didn’t have an air bubble and quartz at its center but striations of smooth, layered colors composed the inside.
I pinged another possible specimen carefully - not smashing, but handling it the way I would if something might collapse under examination. After all, the stone in my hand might have been one that preserved its glamorous interior until a sharpened point of steel released a puff of prehistoric molecules. If this were a horror movie I’d get some strange disease but all I smell is the white, powdery dust that smudged my face and coated my pants.
I sat back on my heels and surveyed the surrounding basins and ranges and rocks and sheep. In this place, the breaking apart is the act that reveals the astonishing beauty.
What would be the just-right place to hit in order to break me apart? The crack that would open to things that hadn’t been shown to the outside world in years? The pockmarked surface of geodes are the reason that the inside is preserved. But the thing is, that when that interior is revealed, it really shows its stuff. It twinkles and glints and sits comfortably with its position as an object of wonder.
That day in the desert taught me that rocks can be fragile and they can be epically strong. The same is true of you, and me, and the little boy next to me. And his grandmother and hers as well.
We can have both and we can be gentle enough to wonder at each as we discover them while turning them over in our hands.
Inspired by events in Dugway, Utah.
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