The Dark Knight guards a small piece of the Canadian Shield, on the desk of the VSL Poltroon...
My mother used to have a rock tumbler. You’d throw in a bunch of ugly stones, add this polishing gunk, and let it go for about a week. Then you’d change the gunk and let it run again. You’d keep doing this until the rocks were rounded and polished to a shine. Not all of them made it. Not all had the wherewithal to withstand all that punishment. But the ones that did revealed an aesthetic quality that was not apparent to the untrained eye.
And so it’s my untrained eye that failed to detect the presence of the Redpath Musuem until a few weeks ago. Now I’ve been living here for, what, 6 years? And I’ve been working downtown since mid-June, and I worked in Westmount for 4 years, and that’s a 15 minute journey from McGill University, and this treasure chest of rocks and minerals, crystals and fossils, has been just waiting for me, less than 10 minutes away from here by foot.
I confess. I am a closet rockhound.
My wife and I visited the Royal Alberta Museum, in Edmonton, during the summer of 1984. They had, presumably still have, a geology exhibit that would melt the heart of any mineralogist. My wife couldn’t get me out the room.
In the autumn of 1997 I took a geology course at the University of Winnipeg, and in October we did a field trip that took us to Whiteshell Provincial Park on the Manitoba – Ontario border. Now Manitoba consists of farms; the only geology one is likely to encounter is the hard kernel of a germ of wheat – farms and trees, farms and trees, no hills or mountains and rock outcrops or mesas or canyons or…
But at the east edge of the province, it turns out the big slab of rock called the Canadian Sheild, which gets deeper as you go west, peeks out from the depths. And so, it turns out, it’s not so boring after all. I took my kid on the field trip, he was 10, and he made friends with the prof, who offered a beer to anyone who could explain a particular petrologic phenomenon, and my kid refrained from answering, although he knew the answer, because he didn’t want beer, but the prof said too bad, I would have gotten you a root beer.
I brought home a few pieces of a not-quite-granite rock called diorite, with bits of garnet in them, and some fossils contained in Manitoba limestone, and a few other odds and ends. And they sit in boxes, and we cart them from house to house, and I keep saying I will put them out on display, but I forget. But I do have a piece of greenstone sitting on my desk, just a little piece of the Canadian Shield to keep me humble…
When I was a kid I used to hunt around the train tracks, then later when we went on holidays I’d be on the lookout for cool specimens. My mother was always looking for rocks that she could polish; she would have polished a beautiful crystal sample if I’d have let her.
And so here is the Redpath Museum, with hundreds of samples of minerals I’ve never heard of, beautiful crystals, incredible fossils, entire dinosaur skeletons. And I didn’t even know about it.
It’s the geode phenomenon. A geode is a big round ugly rock from the outside, but crack it open…
Life can be a geode. We have treasures around the corner, great places and experiences a mile or two miles away, and we don’t know about it until we make it our business to know about it. Sometimes it means pulling ourselves away from our PCs for longer than we’d like to, or it means going out when the weather isn’t as nice as we’d like it to be, or it means having to stay up an hour or two later than we’d normally do, but then we discover fireworks on national holidays, and Irish musicians in downtown pubs, free classical music concerts, or just these incredible places where there are lots of trees…
Anyone for rock hunting?
And so it’s my untrained eye that failed to detect the presence of the Redpath Musuem until a few weeks ago. Now I’ve been living here for, what, 6 years? And I’ve been working downtown since mid-June, and I worked in Westmount for 4 years, and that’s a 15 minute journey from McGill University, and this treasure chest of rocks and minerals, crystals and fossils, has been just waiting for me, less than 10 minutes away from here by foot.
I confess. I am a closet rockhound.
My wife and I visited the Royal Alberta Museum, in Edmonton, during the summer of 1984. They had, presumably still have, a geology exhibit that would melt the heart of any mineralogist. My wife couldn’t get me out the room.
In the autumn of 1997 I took a geology course at the University of Winnipeg, and in October we did a field trip that took us to Whiteshell Provincial Park on the Manitoba – Ontario border. Now Manitoba consists of farms; the only geology one is likely to encounter is the hard kernel of a germ of wheat – farms and trees, farms and trees, no hills or mountains and rock outcrops or mesas or canyons or…
But at the east edge of the province, it turns out the big slab of rock called the Canadian Sheild, which gets deeper as you go west, peeks out from the depths. And so, it turns out, it’s not so boring after all. I took my kid on the field trip, he was 10, and he made friends with the prof, who offered a beer to anyone who could explain a particular petrologic phenomenon, and my kid refrained from answering, although he knew the answer, because he didn’t want beer, but the prof said too bad, I would have gotten you a root beer.
I brought home a few pieces of a not-quite-granite rock called diorite, with bits of garnet in them, and some fossils contained in Manitoba limestone, and a few other odds and ends. And they sit in boxes, and we cart them from house to house, and I keep saying I will put them out on display, but I forget. But I do have a piece of greenstone sitting on my desk, just a little piece of the Canadian Shield to keep me humble…
When I was a kid I used to hunt around the train tracks, then later when we went on holidays I’d be on the lookout for cool specimens. My mother was always looking for rocks that she could polish; she would have polished a beautiful crystal sample if I’d have let her.
And so here is the Redpath Museum, with hundreds of samples of minerals I’ve never heard of, beautiful crystals, incredible fossils, entire dinosaur skeletons. And I didn’t even know about it.It’s the geode phenomenon. A geode is a big round ugly rock from the outside, but crack it open…
Life can be a geode. We have treasures around the corner, great places and experiences a mile or two miles away, and we don’t know about it until we make it our business to know about it. Sometimes it means pulling ourselves away from our PCs for longer than we’d like to, or it means going out when the weather isn’t as nice as we’d like it to be, or it means having to stay up an hour or two later than we’d normally do, but then we discover fireworks on national holidays, and Irish musicians in downtown pubs, free classical music concerts, or just these incredible places where there are lots of trees…
Anyone for rock hunting?
1 comment:
I took geology in college... I struggled.
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