Green New York

New York is so much more!


I was awakened at 6:30 a.m. by a telephone ring. No one else heard it. Outside, the rain was lingering. Sally and I decided we would like to go to Howe’s Cavern. John and Jeff were always agreeable. Breakfast at the Waffle house and then we were on our way, this time with Jeff and John leading. They took us off the toll road at exit 29A.

“It’s too green. New York is too green. You don’t think of New York that way,” said Sally. “When I told Kristen and Karl that I wanted Taylor to come they didn’t like the idea of my taking my grandson to New York. We’re going rock hunting! You don’t go rock hunting in the city!”

The road, route 10, followed the curves of the Adirondack. It was green. The soft minty green of May apple mottled the roadside, contrasting with the meadow’s Kelly green, while the deep emeralds of the pines formed a backdrop and ecotone to the mountains. The meadow was lightly brushed with the yellows and whites of the wildflowers, while cattle and sheep punctuated the hillsides. Missing were the silvery hues of willow trees. Occasionally there was the intrusion of purple lilac, a reminder that this was a populated area. We both agreed on the spectacular beauty of the valley against the mountains. That day, we were ascending into low hanging clouds

“Stratus clouds.” Sally was instructing Taylor about the relationship between clouds and fog.

“It would make a nice entry for your journal, Taylor. We ascended into the clouds,” I said dramatically. “T” was lost in his Gameboy.

“Turn that music off,” said Sally, several times.

We were treated to the awesome formations inside Howe Cavern; stalactites, stalagmites and flows.

“C tight,” said Sally speaking about the difference between stalactites and stalagmites and how to remember the difference, “C for ceiling, sticking to the ceiling tight.”

“Oh,” I said, ”m for mound.”

“Mound to the ground. I love it, Lori, “Sally replied referring to the “g and m” in stalagmite.

At dinner that night, John would remark that with three teachers, Taylor didn’t have a chance.

The guide paused at one point to share a story about a boy scout who brought a pet mouse with him. The mouse got loose and everyone did what they could to catch him but he jumped into the wrong place where he slid down a flow hit the water and jumped back up and he said as he pointed up to a small stalactite, “stuck to the ceiling!” It did look like a mouse hanging from the ceiling.

On the boat trip through the caverns, the guide remarked that there weren’t any living things in the cavern except an occasional bat. I could, however, see a mossy growth and occasional small weak vine where the floodlights provided energy for photosynthesis.

Jeff, in his usual way, went on to explain the possibilities of penicillin spores being transported by the lungs of travelers through the caverns. When the tour ended, “Papa” John bought “T” an $8 bag of sand.

“I don’t want pyrite,” said T to the salesclerk. “We’ve got lots of those at home.”

“T” took the bag to the sluice and sifted the sand. There was a mineral chart for identification. The bag yielded various mineral specimens such as periodot and garnet and the pyrite, T said he didn’t want but seemed pleased to find. Since the guys had lost our way into the mountains, it was Sally and my job to find our way out. However, we didn’t do any better than they and managed to get lost between Cobbleskil and Schohare. We stopped and ate at a restaurant. By this time, we knew to position ourselves so the waiter or waitress wouldn’t be confused about the bill. Sally, John and T sat in a row while Jeff and I sat opposite each other. Jeff said that he and John had written a song.

“Sing it for us!” I said.

"Not here!”

We got our bearings and proceeded to Foxinhill Falls at Berne. “Schohare, Schohare…da da de da,” John and Jeff were singing over the walkie-talkie to the tune of Volaré.

“It must have taken an hour for them to write those lyrics!” said Sally.
There were trilobites, echinoderms, and brachiopods at Foxinhill Falls; evidence of an ancient sea. Jeff said it was Devonian and Ordovician rock.
“Platyceras,” said Jeff, “heavy ribs,” as he pointed to a brachiopod, an ancient shell creature.

Taylor got tired of looking. I could hear John trying to teach him how to skip stones across the water. Occasional Sally would lose her temper at T. John would take T aside and when T came back, he would politely apologize.T was a very polite child. He was, however, a child.

The rocks were beautiful and some were strange and some were beautifully strange. The gang all helped me carry rock back to the car. On the way to the motel, we stopped for ice cream. Sally was on a hiatus from her diet. She was intent on enjoying her vacation. She had lost 40 pounds. We made our purchases and went outside to eat. Jeff and I both had the peanut butter chocolate chip frozen yogurt.
“Lori, look!”

Sally was motioning to the wall of a bermed area. Dark grey patterns lay locked in stone. “Gastropod,” said Jeff, “and look, that is the thorax of the trilobite.”
It never ceased to amaze me how exciting it was to find a fossil. I asked the ice cream man where the rock came from. He said he just worked there. The rock could have come from anywhere in New York or adjoining states.

Back at the motel, I thought about doing some work but it wasn’t long before sleep came. I dreamed that I was teaching at Eastern Michigan University. I was late for class and my hair turned patchy white.

The next morning was overcast. Outside, the day had already begun for the workmen who were busy doing repair work on the motel building. It was breakfast at the Waffle house for us and then on to Crystal Grove. We headed East through Little Falls and on to St. Johnsville. There was no sign indicating Highway 114 but luckily we stopped for ice at Stewart’s and saw an advertisement to Crystal Grove. On the way, I quizzed T on his multiplication table and tried to teach him some shortcut math. He wasn’t that enthused.

Crystal Grove had 2 major pits and a gully. I tried the pits but not much luck. I would probably have done better to sift through the sand. I did find a pocket. It was bleeding orange sand next to the spot T and a new found friend had reserved. I dug out some tiny crystals with a $1 pocket knife but couldn’t get deep into the pocket. Jeff came over with a much larger sledge hammer and cracked the ledge above. I removed enough rock to dig out one larger crystal but none of them were the perfect specimens I hoped for. Quartz had a hardness of 7 and instead of cleaving will shatter. Many of the Herkimer “diamonds” I found had broken off a matrix or been shattered by the hammer blows. Sally had been busy meeting the other rock hunters and let me know that the group next to John had been at it for 3 days. I kept hearing their ejaculations at finding wonderful specimens.
“No rhyme or reason to where they’re at. I think it’s the streambed,” I heard them say.

“I’m glad for them,” said Sally, “I don’t feel badly about it when you know they have been working so hard for so long.”

T disappeared. He had gone back toward the office but failed to return. Sally and I went for a walk to the outhouses. She spied T and followed pursuit. It seemed that the office was conducting a workshop where anyone could make mineral trees. It occupied T for some time. Brass wire was twisted and glued to a rock to form the trunk and branches of a “tree”. Small peridot stones were glued to the wire to represent the leaves.

Sally and I looked for crystals until four o’clock. I wanted to quit early, while I had daylight, to take pictures. We lost the light on the previous day and I hadn’t gotten the photos I wanted. Sally and I both wanted to retrace our steps to find the road cut at 29A. We stopped on our hunt to take pictures of Beardslee Castle and old bridges. Their old concrete arches were overgrown with vines and crumbling with decay. At one bridge, we found a rock with ancient worm burrows.
“Watch, Lori,” said T as he tried to skip a stone across the river.

Soon, we were back on the road. “Oh no!” said T holding up his mineral tree. “One of the minerals came off.” I took the small stone and wrapped it in Kleenex and put it in my shirt pocket. T, at Sally’s direction, created a nook in the pile of stuff we had on the back seat, and carefully laid his prize creation down.

“They said I didn’t do the wiring very well.”

“Why is that?” Sally and I both asked.

He didn’t quite seem to know why it wasn’t right. Neither did we.
At exit 29A, we paid the toll and pulled over to take our photos. There it was; a spectacular site of thirty foot high walls of shiny, black shale. When we saw it for the first time, it was awe inspiring, perhaps accentuated by the greenness of the rest of New York. I looked at the shale and it seemed too hard and sterile to hold the promise of any ancient evidence of life. We took photos and continued on.

There is only one place in Jackson, Michigan that has anything close to rock viewing. It is a roadcut on I 94 at the Cooper Street exit. Michigan has hills. They are moraines and eskers left when glaciers retreated and dropped what they were carrying. The only thing I ever found in a Jackson quarry was a torroid. A torroid is sandstone evidence of how the water swirled.

Back at the motel, we showered and then John and Jeff arrived. They had stopped at 29A and collected rocks with tiny trilobites they found in the shale.

“T!” yelled Sally for the third time,” What did I tell you?”

T had been in a hurry to put on his shoes and laid a foot on the railing of the second floor just outside our room. The work crew had unbolted the railing in several places and it was swinging slightly loose from the walk.

I must have said several times that trip,” He’s ten!” as if to say that I understood boys that age had difficulty with behavior.Sally must have said several times, “T, You need to learn to listen the first time.” This was a trial trip for T and if he didn’t behave, he would not be going again.

“That,” I said to T as I pointed to the railing, “is dangerous.”

We ate at Pizza hut. Sally and Jeff argued as usual.“It was Custer,” said Sally. Jeff insisted they had one of their adventures elsewhere. Later Sally explained in more detail. I turned to T who was supposed to be writing, “That’s why you need to journal. Everyone forgets details.”

The following morning we watched some news on Iraq while waiting for the men to finish packing. We ate at McDonalds. I drove for about 2 hours. Much as I tried to stay awake, sleep came as an enemy to interfere. I no longer got car sick; I just got sleepy. Sally took over and did most of the driving back to her house in Grass Lake. John kissed Sally and told her he loved her. John took Jeff back and we stopped at Belleville to drop off T. Later, I cleaned the rocks and separated out the ones that would serve well as classroom specimens. Using a whiteout pen, I labeled the specimens with the place of origin.

The next day, I took some samples to Baker College and became known as “the rock hound”. The Learning Support Services Center where I worked was less like a computer lab and more comfortable looking with the addition of plants and crystals. I had a request from the massage therapy department for one of the large crystals. It seemed that one of the machines was giving off static charges. The crystal seemed to do the trick – no more static.

At home, I cleaned some stones with SIO and placed them around the backyard pond. They mixed well with the Lake Superior Coral fossils. I downloaded the photos from the Olympus 3030, put them on a CD and made copies for Sally and John, and Jeff. John had an Olympus 4000 and Jeff had an Olympus 4040. Eventually we could probably put together a good slide show.

There is much more to New York than Manhattan Island or Broadway. It was a small reminder of how vast a country we live in, and how beautiful. Places still exist where we can be children again, looking for buried treasure and finding it.