WE WERE CURIOUS

Did you collect rocks when you were growing up?

I did. My junior high offered a geology course, and I thrived in the class learning about sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. I loved the long names of each type of rock, and I loved scouring the ground for good examples. As we packed our house recently, I wondered what to do with the rock collections that I had accumulated over the years including some I kept from childhood. I thought of bringing them back to the beach, hills, or pathways where I found them, but like introducing a foreign species, would I be putting a rock in the wrong place? Like salting a gold mine? I no longer collect rocks, just as I stopped collecting insects in high school and seashells when the beaches became depleted of shells. We've all learned of the damage people do to our environment and I try not to disturb the natural world as much as I can. I take photos instead of what remains.

Walking the Seacliff Beach, we discovered piles of water-washed stones brought up to shore by the waves. Further north is Bean Beach, so named because the sand is covered by bean-sized pebbles, again water-washed smooth. The piles at Seacliff didn't cover the entire beach instead they lay in drifts 20 or 30 feet apart on the sandy shoreline. We wondered why the rocks only washed ashore in separate piles instead of covering the entire beach. When a wave came in and then withdrew, we could hear the clatter of the smaller rocks as they bounced up into the receding wave and came down again. 

Among the smooth rocks were stones with holes where shells protruded after being abandoned by a crab or other sea creature that had made it home. Other rocks were compressed around slivers of shells. How did they form? Were they pieces of tar or cement still malleable enough to capture shells or part of the sedimentary process of thousands of years of compression? Many more stones across the sand were sandstone, fine sedimentary rocks that look like granite but with smaller particles of different colors.

The sand itself was pockmarked with tiny holes created by the wave action as it seeps down through the grains of sand. Small sand crabs and other tiny sea animals hide in the sand too. The seagulls made a dance of poking down into the holes before a new wave would come to shore and the gulls would run from the water. We watched their antics until we turned and walked up the stairs to our car. Our day at the beach concluded.

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August 18: a day to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women equal rights with the ability to vote. We need to hold on to those rights today.