By Jane Kurtz
(Jane Kurtz graciously gave us permission to repost her story. She is an award-winning children’s book author who was homeschooled as a child in Ethiopia. http://janekurtz.com)
It was one of those steamy summer afternoons and the four of us were playing basketball. Grandpa and Logan made their lay-ups and ran around grunting. I backed up and shot a three-pointer. Swish. “Yes!” Grandma shouted. She tried one of her famous bucket shots. It rolled around the rim and bounced off.
“Come on, girl,” Grandpa said. “Where’s your firepower?”
Grandma plopped in a lounge chair and fanned herself with yesterday’s newspaper. “Too hot.”
Logan plopped down beside her. “I feel like a French fry about to be eaten by a giant,” he said.
Grandpa tickled Logan’s toes with a piece of grass but Logan didn’t even move. “Tell us something interesting,” I said to Grandma.
“Well…” she fanned faster. “Speaking of firepower, have I ever told you the story of the time my friend Rocky decided he just had to find his roots?”
“Nope,” I said. Logan flipped over and got into listening position. Grandpa stuck the other end of the grass between his teeth and started to chew.
Grandma closed her eyes and started right in.
Sooner or later, everyone gets to wondering about roots, and Rocky was no exception. He wondered more and more just where he’d come from. Since he was hanging around volcanoes a lot, anyway, he thought he might learn something by striking up conversations with the rocks there. “Howdy,” he said to a piece of obsidian one day.
The obsidian sat there looking so shiny it was almost transparent around the edges but it didn’t say a word. Rocky looked at the sleek rock and started feeling, well, dull in comparison.
“Don’t worry about her,” a piece of pumice whispered. “It isn’t personal. The memories haunt her.”
“Memories?”
“There was a time obsidian was as important as metal is, today. People couldn’t do without it. They could make their best, sharpest tools out of glassy, black obsidian.” The pumice sighed, a sound like air going out of a balloon. “Think of it. Obsidian trade routes across Europe, knives of the Aztecs, jewelry of the Egyptians–my cousin carries the memories of it all.”
“I find it hard to believe you and that obsidian are cousins.” The very thought set all Rocky’s crystals jiggling. “You aren’t anything alike. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but, hey, you’re a bit lightweight.
“So light I can float in water.” The pumice gave a frothy giggle that sounded full of soda pop bubbles. “Obsidian was used for the eyes of King Tut’s mummy. Pumice is found in bath tubs.”
Rocky couldn’t help it–he started to laugh.
“But we’re cousins,” the pumice said quickly. “We’re made up of the same chemicals and we came from inside the same volcano. But she was erupted quietly as part of a thick flow of lava. I was blasted out.”
“Well…” Rocky shifted. “I’d better be on my way. I wish I knew as much about my roots as you do.”
“Wait.” The pumice’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Tonight the moon will be full and there will be a campfire. My cousin has been known to tell stories on nights like that.”
“Wow,” Logan said. “A rock that tells stories?”
“Not very often,” Grandma said. “Only on nights when the moon is full and when you’re sitting very quietly by a campfire late at night.”
“Did Rocky stick around?” I asked.
“You bet.”
Late that night, the obsidian began to hum, a thin, sharp sound like cactus thorns scraping together. Rocky sat still and listened. Finally, he could make out some words. The obsidian sang of the center of the earth, a dense core of iron and nickel. As she sang, Rocky could almost see it
Then she sang of heat. “About 40 miles below us,” she sang, “in the mantle of the earth, the rocks are so hot they are melted and runny like over-easy egg yolks. The crust we sit on seems like one piece, but it’s really made of huge plates that float on the hot liquid mantle.”
“All very interesting,” said Rocky. “But what does that have to do with me?”
“Shhh,” the pumice said.
“The plates move in all directions,” the obsidian said in a low voice.
“I could ride one like a surf board?”
“No, no. They don’t move very fast–about as fast as fingernails grow.”
“That sounds as exciting as watching grass grow,” the pumice said.
“Ah,” the obsidian said, “but there’s excitement under there. Some of the plates slide sideways past each other without a fuss. But deep under the ocean, plates pull apart from each other and hot magma rises from inside the earth to fill the crack. And things get really dramatic when an ocean plate crashes and rubs against a continental plate. Continents sit on plates made of thick, but light, crust. Oceans sit on thinner, heavier crust.”
“Light things, like me, go up,” the pumice said. “Heavy things like you guys sink.”
“True. The ocean plate is forced down and under. As it slides, it starts to melt. Melted rock pushes slowly up through the crust. That’s how you and I and the pumice all got here.”
“Really?” Rocky felt his crystals crackle with excitement.
“Of course. An ocean plate somewhere dived and ducked under some continental plate, and you rode up to the surface of the earth with the magma.”
Rocky stared into the fire. He was closer to knowing where he’d come from than he’d ever been before. “How do you know I came from an ocean plate rubbing against a continental plate?”
“You’re not dark and dense enough to be a basalt–so you didn’t come from ocean crust. And you’re not a light colored granite from the crust under continents.”
The fire crackled. Rocky shivered with excitement. He wasn’t basalt. He wasn’t granite. What was he?
“Your color is halfway between basalt and granite and you have small white crystals,” the obsidian said. “So I know you’re an andesite. The magma you were once part of was made of rock from ocean crust mixed together with rock from continental crust– with mud and ooze that happened to be sitting on top of the ocean plate mixed in.”
“Then am I a cousin of yours, too?”
“No, no.” The obsidian’s voice got hard and splintery. “The pumice and I are rhyolites.”
“She can’t help being the way she is,” the pumice whispered. “She and I have more acid than you do.”
“Tell me more,” Rocky begged.
Instead, the obsidian began to sing again. “My lava was splendid, splendid. It oozed up from the vent like toothpaste. The lava’s outer skin became cold so fast that glassy, black, lovely obsidian was formed there. La la la.”
“Rhyolite lava is rare,” the pumice said, a little sadly. “Most rhyolite magma is exploded out of the volcano, like I was.” Then he said kindly, “Don’t worry. Andesite lavas are rather rare, too, compared to basaltic lavas.”
The obsidian fell silent.
“She probably won’t talk again tonight,” the pumice said.
But he was wrong. As the moon traveled high into the sky, Rocky heard the obsidian whisper, “This is for you. It’s traveling dust I once got from a toothless street vendor in Singapore. In your travels, maybe you’ll find your roots.”
Logan spun the basketball on his finger tips. “I’m glad we know our roots,” he said. “You and Grandpa are part of our roots, right?”
“Wait,” I said. “What about the traveling dust? Did Rocky use it?”
“Ah,” Grandma said. “That’s another story.”
Notes:
trade routes–In the earliest times, obsidian made the sharpest tools people could make–so it became a highly prized item for trade. Obsidian from the Lipari islands was traded all over the Mediterranean area of Europe. In Central America, civilizations such as the Olmecs and Mayans and Aztecs set up elaborate trade routes for the obsidian that came from places like a mountain in what is now Guatemala.
King Tut–Obsidian was also used in much of the jewelry found in King Tut’s tomb. Egyptian jewelry makers traded for the black rocks and treated the pieces of obsidian like semi-precious stones.