I was probably in the third or fourth grade in school when I first became really interested in rocks and minerals. It happened quite by accident. In school the teacher had been reading an adventure story about the “California Gold Rush” to us. Everyone loves gold.
I loved the story and the adventure and imagined in my mind what it would be like to be one of those families who packed up, left family and everything they owned behind to go into an unknown territory in search of GOLD. Of course in my mind I struck it rich.
Our teacher took us to a brook just a short distance from the school and let us try panning for gold. Of course we didn't find any, but we did find some other interesting stones and that something called “fool's gold”. We didn't find gold or strike it rich any more than most of the families who headed west in 1849 in search of their fortune. That was probably my real beginning as a “rock hound” and I've been rock hounding ever since. I still have a couple of stones I collected from that very first rock hounding expedition. They are among my treasured rocks, my souvenirs from days gone by.
From that point on I collected just about every rock that caught my eye and suited my fancy. I didn't know what most of them were then. All I knew was that they were rocks. I liked them. I liked their colors, their shapes, the way some of them sparkled and shimmered in the sunlight, how I could almost see through some of them. I liked the different textures of the rocks, the way they felt in my hand. I was completely fascinated by ROCKS, big rocks, little rocks, very tiny rocks and all those in-between. I had boxes of rocks. My father would throw them out, or most of them, and I'd just go out and collect some more. I seldom went anywhere that I didn't come home with at least one rock. More often than not, I had my pockets full of rocks, all kinds of rocks.
I began to learn about rocks. I love to read. I went to the library and borrowed books about rocks. I read adventure stories about rocks, stories about miners, geologists, petrologists, paleontologists, archeologists, people who went in search of ancient treasures from civilizations long since past. I read sea stories about men who went diving to find sunken treasure from ships that had been lost at sea and even pirates who also had a passion for rocks, gold, silver and gemstones like diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls and much, much more. I was hooked on rocks and rocks are everywhere around us. They are the commonest thing in the world. If it wasn't for rocks, we couldn't live here. There would be no place called Earth and no life upon it.
WHAT IS A ROCK?
Everyone knows what a rock is, well, most everyone. Most anyone can take you outside and pick up a stone from the yard and say “This is a rock” and they would be right. They know what a rock is but what they don't really know is about rocks. They know what a rock is but they don't necessarily know what is a rock. They don't understand rocks. They don't realize the priceless value of rock. Every rock is unique and special and every rock has a story to tell. No life could exist if it were not for rock. We would have no food to eat and no air to breathe if it were not for rocks. Rocks provide us with shelter and fuel, the glass in our windows, the foundations and roofs of our homes, the walls of our homes, the cars and trucks we drive, medicine to relieve and cure diseases and much, much more. Rocks are priceless and they are as common as beach sand or the cobblestones that make up your pathway.
When we think about rocks we think about marble and granite, sandstone, limestone, slate, shale and the rocks in our garden, stone fences, pathways, churches and houses built of stone, monuments made of rock, the rocks and boulders along a river's edge, cliffs on the side of a mountain. Indeed, they are all rock and they are all very different and came into being in very different ways.
A rock is a clump of various minerals, the earth's elements that have all been squeezed and pressed together, consolidated until they form a solid mass. A rock can be as small as a grain of sand or as huge as a mountain. There are thousands and thousands of different kinds of rocks depending on what elements the rock is made of but there are only three types of rock.
