She’s had a wonderful time, but I would need therapy.
My wife is in Atlanta, where today she went to two great-nephews’ baseball games today, among other outings. Life in the suburbs involves a great deal of driving, and she’s well & truly tired. (How gloriously sane that I stayed here.) I’m tired too, but I’ve been digging in the dirt. New Mexico dirt, not the ordinary kind. Actually, I was turning over what passes for soil here in Llano Quemado to plant some chard, and lo and behold, I dug up a nice big crystal, a chunk of quartz:
How often does this happen?
The only other time I saw a piece of quartz like this was when I bought a hunk from a Tarahumara woman at the Copper Canyon stop on the Chihuahua City to Los Mochis route of a fine Mexican railroad that probably doesn’t run any more. That was during the summer of 1968, when the cops rioted in Chicago. I didn’t see any of that, because I was on the train. It cost a grand total of $18 round-trip at the time, and it took two full days to reach the coast! (Try that today, if you can find a goddamn train.) Anyway, at the Copper Canyon stop I also bought a hand-carved unfinished pine fiddle that I wish I still had, and that one chunk of quartz. The price for anything you bought was whatever you wanted to pay: the Native women didn’t speak English or Spanish, apparently, and simply muttered “si” to any number of coins you offered. For the same pittance, I could have bought a Coca-Cola can with a chipmunk inside (“chichimoco”), but that was a little over the top, culturally speaking. I still have the quartz, though.
So where did this piece come from? Someone could have bought it in a rock shop, I suppose, and then lost it 10 inches underground for me to dig up a few years later. But how likely is that? Maybe it was just lying there with all the other rocks, or maybe it jumped out for a reason. I bought a Seth book once because it jumped off the shelf right in front of me in the old Grok bookstore in ancient Austin. No shit, it really did: I was perusing other titles, and all at once it popped right out and landed in the middle of the room.
I still have the book, the Tarahumara crystal, and the piece above I found yesterday. No sign of anything getting ready to hop, but I’ve got my eye on all of ‘em.
Related posts:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a beautiful specimen! From the photo it also looks rutilated (tiny thin hairlike inclusions of rutile (titanium dioxide)). Very, very nice.
Your portion of the Sangre de Cristos is volcanic, of course, but you’d probably see a lot more crystalline quartz if that piece had occurred in place. It’s more likely to be a healing stone buried next to the house as part of a ritual some time in the recent past.
Kate
I think your take on this is quite accurate. I didn’t dig any deeper, because I was gardening, but there weren’t any other specimens in the immediate vicinity. And being where I am, and where this house is, AND the kinds of folks who’ve lived here over the years, the intentional burying of a healing stone makes perfect sense. The tenant before us was a heroin addict, for example…
I don’t think I’ll put it back, however. I need it where I can see it!
On that late summer day in 1968, while you were stepping off that train from Chihuahua City, I was sitting arms locked with kids on either side of me on Michigan Avenue in front of the Chicago Conrad Hilton. We could look up to the hotel windows and see folks holding martini glasses and gazing languidly down at us as we swayed in one another’s arms. The guys tried to link up with girls, naturally, figuring rightly that this was going to be a kind of sexy experience. We shouted stuff like “Dump the Hump” and “Hell no, we won’t go”, and we sang freedom songs. Ralph Abernathy was there with his mules. We heard Norman Mailer say something like, “this is an existential moment”. Jean Genet uttered something unintelligible about solidarity with guys in prison.
After several warnings to disperse delivered by an officer with a bullhorn, a blue wave of Chicago’s finest abruptly charged the street in what was subsequently called by a solemn commission a “police riot”. We sitters got to our feet and ran for our lives, several of our number dropping to the pavement with blue-shirts standing over them and roughing them up – honorable wounds dined out on for decades. Later we could see those wounded folk being frog-marched with bleeding heads and being shoveled on to arriving paddywagons.
The martini-sippers (I subsequently read) were aghast, but we on the street found it all kind of fun, not unlike a higher-stakes game of dodge-ball. We kept regrouping in the little park across the street from the hotel, and the police kept charging and culling the herd. It was thrilling in a primitive communal way. That part of the story was completely missed by almost all the journalists. Maybe that was because many of them were among the martini sippers. Their aghast liberal piety was a middle-aged reaction. In some ways we on the street had more in common with the young Chicago cops than we did with them. The cops were working-class guys who had been taunted mercilessly (by us) all week. They had stayed cool despite everything (verbal) we had thrown at them. Now it was pay-back time. They were ready to bust a few heads of – in their eyes – privileged suburban kids and long-haired hippies. I think they were likely also a bit excited by the lovely girls who seemed so obviously to be sleeping with the unmanly guys. They were making a cultural point in the way the inarticulate customarily make such points – with their nightsticks. The whole affair was not unlike a dust-up between two warring tribes, fighting with different weapons. Some us had an unacknowledged respect for that reaction in the police. It proved they weren’t mindless automatons. It was human in some basic way.
Whatever the general truth of that reflection, the events on the ground on that long-lost summer day were exhilarating pure and simple to those swept up in it all. All of us – police and demonstrators – were likely a bit crazy. If I had held in my hands that day the same piece of quartz you were holding, I might have done something quite different from what you did. I might have sent that little bloom of the earth’s innards rocketing through the air, probably not at the police but at the martini-drinkers making their solemn observations and waiting for their limos behind plate glass.
A glorious and sacred tale! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for adding this. I think you’re very rooted in the cosmos, sometimes in spite of yourself.
Let there be more smashing of glass…