Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic, author of “Lost Without the River,” continues to share stories about this region in her ongoing series, “Tales of the Whetstone River”.
Over the last few years I’ve spent many days researching and writing about the Pleistocene glacier in South Dakota and the Lateral Moraine, the huge bank of boulders and rocks the glacier left in its wake when it receded over ten thousand years ago, more days verifying that what I’d written was scientifically accurate, and yet more time still revising when whole paragraphs had to be cut to fit the required length of my book. And now, right outside the window of our car, were chunks of that moraine, ancient bits of our geological history. How could I not hold one of those geodes, touch it with my fingers?
In a few hours I’d be on a plane heading back to New York. My older brother Bob had taken a slight detour as he drove me from Ortonville, Minnesota to Watertown, South Dakota. He’d casually mentioned that the stones in the piles along the road were geodes. They’d been raked up from the fields so they wouldn’t damage farm machines. Geodes! Actual bits of the moraine.
“Stop! Pull over. I’d like to hold one.” I told him.
In the space of an hour and in true South Dakota style, what had begun as a cloudy winter day with a few snowflakes drifting down, had turned nasty with sleet whipping through the air.
Patient with my frequent requests to stop along any kind of roadway, Bob pulled onto the shoulder, zipped up his jacket and grabbed his work gloves. He hurried to the pile, picked up a rough round glob, and dashed back to the car. I rolled down my window.
“Careful! It’s surprisingly heavy,” he said.
My hands sank into my lap with the weight of the rock.
“Can you find a smaller one? I want to take one back with me.”
Bob is used to these requests too. On my terrace in the city I have a hunk of Dakota granite and one of Alaskan jade, both of which he helped me find along the roadside during our other travels together. He climbed up onto the pile and returned with another two geodes.
“Do you think you can find one that’s better?” I asked.
“Better how?”
“I can’t see any glints of mica in these.”
“Probably not here,” he said as he got back in the car. “We’ll drive a bit farther.”
We went a few more miles, stopping twice with no luck.
“It’s okay. We can head back to the highway,” I said, disappointed but conscious of the time and my plane reservation.
Bob continued to drive another mile or so. “There might be something you’d like in that pile,” he said, pulling off again.
He got out and slipped on the icy gravel, but found his footing. While we’d been searching, the sun had appeared, melting the ice so that now a thin top skin of water made the rocks slick. I rolled down the window and yelled to him that a geode wasn’t worth a broken ankle, but he couldn’t hear over the wind.
I began to worry. If he did fall and break a bone, how would I get over to him without falling down myself? And, if I did manage to make it to the rock pile and scramble up to him, how could I possibly pull him to his feet and get him back to the car? I watched helplessly as he lost his balance, righted himself and teetered to the top of the pile, trying over and over to grab a geode with one hand while holding onto the slippery pile with his other. Then he let go, grabbed a geode with both hands and skidded, zigzagging down the pile and back to the car.
We were once again on the highway headed toward Watertown, but now we had one more stop to make before the airport. Bob shut off the cruise control and we sped to the UPS store. The clerks didn’t seem all that surprised when I declared “rock” on the shipping label. Days later when the heavy package was delivered to my apartment in New York, I pulled the geode out and placed it next to the hunk of granite on my terrace.
They are distant members of the same family found within sixty miles of each other, the granite unearthed by that ancient glacier, the geode formed by it, both products of imperceptibly slow activity thousands of years ago. Kissing cousins of a sort.
To buy Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic’s book, go to any major online retailer or independent bookstore. To read more of her writing, including previous installments from “Tales of the Whetstone River,” visit her website: barbarascoblic.com.