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Last week, down the road from here a piece, over in Alexander County, a miner named Terry Ledford pulled a 310 carat emerald out of the dirt. It reminded me of The Big Rock Show.
I am not sure exactly when Dan and I curated The Big Rock Show. I suspect it was the summer of 1958, our tenth summer. I pick that particular summer because in the summer of 1959 my family moved to Vienna, Austria, and shortly thereafter I became smitten with Patricia Miller – a green-eyed, fifth-grade temptress whose father had just been transferred in from Paris. Hence, I choose 1958 because I recall a languid summer on the calmer side of adolescence, when girls were minor irritations on the road of life.
The Big Rock Show capped an extended exercise in suburban fieldwork. Dan and I started out excavating promising gullies in the alley and exposed ravines in a local park in search of, well, rocks. This entailed digging and other forms of manual labor that, as our later lives have made clear, were not skill sets destined for either of our futures. Hence, the enterprise lagged. However, we soon discovered that a local church had just resurfaced their parking lot with the very artifacts we sought – rocks. Truckloads of rocks; flints, granite, maybe jasper, and the much-prized rose quartz with enclosures of garnet. I do not actually recall how we identified the stones – but we were enchanted by the rocky rhetoric.
We hosed the dust off our finds, polished them as best we could with rags from the basement, and glued them onto large pieces of cardboard. These we displayed in the garage, appropriately labeled and priced. The pieces too small for display were heaped in a plastic dishpan next to a sign: Free Samples. I believe we priced the larger pieces in a range from a nickel to a quarter, with the truly grand samples marked “Not for sale.” I do not recall if we sold any. Entrepreneurial success has also eluded us.
But, we too, unearthed an emerald that summer. One that came from sunlight streaming through deep green leaves of maple, from fresh cut grass, and from time that meandered endless and forgiving. We won no ribbons, no one videotaped our endeavors, and there was no “after The Big Rock Show pizza party.” We just rode our bikes all over town in pursuit of the rare rocks of Springfield, and ended the days drinking Frosty root beer as evening faded into night and lightening bugs lit The Big Rock Show.
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