Rock Love

Iowa has a fossil gorge. I was very excited about this. I have a long history with fossils.

When it was time for me to go to college, I did what my parents encouraged us all to do to save money and get acclimated to the college life—I went to Kaskaskia College in Centralia, Illinois. I took a Geology class there and fell in love with rocks. It was the only class I truly aced, but I did not pursue it because I am not a confident math person. I decided to keep it in my life as a hobby.


 In that class we had to identify rocks and I got a 100% doing that. It changed the way I looked at rocks when I hiked around Carlyle Lake in Illinois, the largest man-made lake in Illinois. I could suddenly identify flint, mica, shale without the flint having to look like an arrowhead. It was empowering. I understood that glaciers has cut into Illinois and stopped; it was an end line of a glacier for a while, at a place we called Pelican’s Pouch, near my hometown. It was hilly there and rockier. My parents would drove through it every spring to see the dogwood and redbud on the hills. We loved that place and it explains why we love Northwest Arkansas and the Ozarks. It is a bigger version, with a different geologic history. I was hooked on the stories rocks could tell.

  I learned all about Illinois, but I was moving to Arkansas. Since I was transferring to Arkansas, I am a proud Alumnus of the University of Arkansas, I had to take Geology again. Again, I loved the class, though it was harder for me because it was a large section (200 people) and I was used to my class of 20. I loved the smaller lab though. I learned that I had a natural talent for reading satellite maps and I learned even more this time about rocks, about Arkansas rocks and Arkansas geology. The story of two states became known to me and I loved the additional knowledge I gained from having the class twice in two different states.


 Fossils litter the rocks and river beds of Arkansas. As I got out and hiked more often, or stopped at an enticing river on my way home, I found lots of them and other minerals too like quartz. I loved the idea of how perfect the chemical equation of quartz is—SiO4, silicon oxygen tetrahedral. And I understood chemistry only when it was presented to me in geology—as rocks and minerals. I meet a, eighty-year-old, local, self-taught geologist in the hills of the Boston Mountains who gave me many rocks and had large quantities of them he had acquired over the years. He told me that when the Arkansas Department of Transportation paved roads and blasted mountains to make roads, he would go there and collect fossils the dynamite uncovered. I will always remember his huge collection of rocks, so big he had old library card catalogues in every room of his house and on his back porch filled with samples of rocks, minerals, fossils that he had collected since his twenties. His stories were magnificent.

 I discovered Edward Abbey and understood the sentiments he expressed about rocks and nature in Desert Solitaire. He writes about the patience of rocks. They sit it out and the weather works on them, as it does on us, even though we will see little evidence of that since our lives are so short and theirs are so long. He writes about the slow thoughts they might have compared to the flash of our thoughts and other animals’ and insects’ thoughts, since we live longer than some of them, but not nearly as long as rocks.

 He has a perspective of place that Geology gave me. The land has a story, whether we are aware of that our not. Rocks have a long, slow story. So do trees, sand, rivers, dirt, continents, oceans, fish, dogs, cats, humans, coal, malls, and us. To name a few.

 Fossils are a record of one thing’s history—something that probably no longer exists on this earth, as someday humans will no longer exist on this earth. Geologic time is not kind or mean. It is indifferent. It marches on with or without us. It is a long, interesting story and fossils are a part of that story, one small paper thin slice of it.

 I am hooked on this story.


So, when my eldest brother and his family came up to visit, we took the kids and us adults, to the fossil gorge.