A portion of my garden is reserved for herbs. I grow Italian and French oregano, two types of thyme (nice alliteration), rosemary, and sage. The poor sage plant gets moved occasionally, as I make room for other plantings, but it doesn’t seem to mind too much. While I seldom use its leaves in my cooking, I do enjoy their strong scent, which always makes me think of Nevada.
Nevada may mean many things to many people, but for me it means rock hunting. And since I started when I was too young to drive, it means rock hunting with my father. Our favorite time to go was after a rainstorm, which were frequent in the late spring. Rain meant that dust would be washed off the exposed rock outcroppings and little streams might reveal unweathered treasures. It also meant that the desert was coming to life and sage brush was the first to make itself known, releasing its heady aroma into the warming desert air.
Our guide was a small well-thumbed paperback book (actually more of a bound pamphlet) titled Gem Trails of Nevada. It was neatly divided up into any number of possible rock-hounding expeditions, each with its own hand-drawn map and a sketchy description of how to get to the mother lode. A typical one might read something like this, “Follow this dirt road till you get to an unmarked fork, then drive in an easterly direction for four or five miles, crossing two dry river beds, until you see a large boulder on the hillside.” It always sounded simple enough, but we spent a good deal of time back-tracking and getting lost. That was okay, too.
Finally, we would arrive at what we guessed was the right spot and set out. I shouldered an army satchel that carried my rock hammer, protective goggles, gloves, magnifying glass, and my Guide to Minerals, which was full of beautiful pictures of specimens that looked nothing like what we saw in the field.
What were we looking for? Well, certainly not gems; we found precious few of those. However, anything that we could readily identify and that might look good in the collection we kept on the porch window sill was perfect. Snowflake obsidian, rose quartz, mica schist, sulphur, galena, hematite, tourmaline, feldspar, opal, iron pyrites – they were all hunted by my dad and me. Sometimes we would find lovely samples in mine tailings; at other times we would be “skunked” and return with nothing more than dirt in our cuffs and a healthy tan from having spent a satisfying day in the great outdoors. It was all good. I especially liked when we came upon miners’ claims. We would find the actual written document stashed in a rusty can nailed to a post on a hillside where someone had been optimistically digging for gold in years past. Some of them were quite old and it was pretty evident that the miner’s dreams had been given up long ago.
Not all my rock-hunting was done in the vast expanses of Nevada. There was also Tommy Heick’s driveway. Even as a young boy, I understood that the kind of rocks you might find depended on the geologic formations in the region. Obsidian was always absent from sedimentary rocks and vice versa. But in Tommy Heick’s driveway, you could often find them lying side-by-side, defying all logic of strata and tectonics. Of course, that was because Tommy’s father was a very serious rock collector and would discard his less-than-perfect specimens into the driveway. (BTW, if you happen to be living in our old family home at 38 South Knoll Road, in Mill Valley, that also explains the unusual rocks surrounding the grapefruit and lime trees below the living room window…) But, as a rock collector, I was not discerning – driveway rocks were just as good as any other. I would cart them home, attempt to identify them using my less-than-helpful Guide to Minerals, write out the common name and chemical formula of each, and add them to the collection.
Many years later, as a freshman at UC Davis, I talked my way into an upper division course in Mineralogy, something I needed as a prerequisite to Geology of the Oceans, my real goal. The lecture portion of the class was way over my head and I think I earned a B minus in it. But the lab was a different story. We started off by measuring, testing and identifying simply enormous museum-quality crystals that were as big as your fist. Then, each week, we moved on to smaller and smaller samples until we had to use magnifying loupes to correctly identify a miniscule smudge of minerals on a specimen.
Thanks to my rock-hounding trips in the hills of Nevada with my father and Saturday afternoons spent exploring the wilds of Tommy Heick’s driveway, I earned an A+ in Mineralogy Lab. I knew about smudges. In fact, I should publish a book that would present a more practical approach to rock identification. I could call it Clark’s Guide to Mineral Smudges of Nevada.
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