American Childhood (13 page)

B
UT HE SAID UNTO JESUS
, And who is my neighbor?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.

And he said unto him, Who is my neighbor?

But a certain Samaritan came where he was.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And he said unto him, Which now, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?

And he said unto him, Who
IS
my neighbor?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.

Who
IS
my neighbor?

Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

This was my “Terwilliger bunts one.” This and similar fragments of Biblical language played in my head like a record on which the needle has stuck, played at the back of my mind and moved at the root of my tongue and sounded deep in my ears without surcease. Who is my neighbor?

Every July for four years, Amy and I trotted off to a Presbyterian church camp. It was cheap, wholesome, and nearby. There we were happy, loose with other children in cabins under pines. If our parents had known how pious and low church this camp was, they would have yanked us. We memorized Bible chapters, sang rollicking hymns around the clock, held nightly devotions including extemporaneous prayers, and filed out of the woods to chapel twice on Sundays dressed in white shorts. The faith-filled theology there
was only half a step out of a tent; you could still smell the sawdust.

We met all sorts of girls at camp. There were a dozen girls from an orphanage, who had never been adopted. Among these I admired an older girl named Liz—a large-framed, bony girl with dry blond curls and high red cheekbones, who wore a wool lumberjack shirt. Every Sunday night, gathered in our bare old rec hall of a chapel, we children could request a favorite hymn if we could recite a Bible verse. Year after year, big Liz returned unadopted to camp and, Sunday after Sunday, requested “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus.”

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk. And he said unto him,
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR
?

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.

Every summer we memorized these things at camp. Every Sunday in Pittsburgh we heard these things in Sunday school. Every Thursday we studied these things, and memorized them, too (strictly as literature, they said), at school. I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn’t find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. Later, before I left Pittsburgh for college, I would write several
poems in deliberate imitation of its sounds, those repeated feminine endings followed by thumps, or those long hard beats followed by softness. Selah.

The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

In Sunday school at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, the handsome father of rascal Jack from dancing school, himself a vice-president of Jones & Laughlin, whose wife was famous at the country club for her tan, held a birch pointer in his long fingers and shyly tapped the hanging paper map, shyly because he could see we weren’t listening. Who would listen to this? Why on earth were we here? There in blue and yellow and green were Galilee, Samaria itself, and Judaea, he said—and I pretended to pay attention as a courtesy—the Sea of Galilee, the river Jordan, and the Dead Sea. I saw on the hanging map the coasts of Judaea by the far side of Jordan, on whose unimaginable shores the pastel Christ had maybe uttered such cruel, stiff, thrilling words: Sell whatsoever thou hast.

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, he made them fishers of men. And he came to the Lake of Gennesaret, and he came to Capernaum. And he withdrew in a boat. And a
certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. See it here on the map? Down. He went down, and fell among thieves.

And the swine jumped over the cliff.

And the voice cried, Samuel, Samuel. And the wakened boy Samuel answered, Here am I. And at last he said, Speak.

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 “Remember 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.