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MOUNTAINLIFEBLUEMOUNTAINS
SUMMER2016
on a counter, or even the side panel of my
car, a fairly predictable place for loose objects.
Plucking a memento from amidst the bricolage
of bobby pins, maps, scrunched-up Kleenex,
and non-functional pens is a second-discovery
treat that inevitably leads to a forensic geology
session over the rock’s type and potential origin.
Sometimes I fail to remember, which is odd
given the rocks inmy life are carried home for
their intrinsic, aesthetic or souvenir values as
reminders of outdoor travels and adventure. In
my living room under the glass of a display table
can be found elegant crystals, rugged chunks,
and polished pebbles collected on beaches,
benches andmountains around the globe.
Fossils like trilobites and ammonites abound,
along with nondescript brown-grey shards of
Ordovician and Silurian coral reef, some fetched
from the climbing cliffs of Ontario’s Niagara
Escarpment, others plucked from the depths of
riverine gorges hiked on Anticosti Island in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Which are which—and fromwhere—may have
been lost in the shuffle of moving, dusting,
arranging and rearranging that comes with any
display, but the collective memories of those
adventures and
the nature around
them remain
vibrant. Take,
for instance, the
bright yellow
sulfur, pink salts, and other minerals that
accompaniedme home from a trip to Chile’s
Atacama desert, a memorable sojourn that
included excursions through phantasmagorical
canyons of 1,000 year-old cactus, across salt
lakes filled with flamingos, and to the thin-
aired, lichen-coated summit of a 6,000-metre
volcano. An unusual number of my wayward
rocks, in fact, come from volcanic landscapes—
whether rubble ejected far from the cone in
a cataclysmic explosion, or myriad lavas in a
spectrum of colours that variously flowed down
volcanic flanks under the cooling regimes of
air, water, snow or ice. Most were gathered on
ski-mountaineering trips in lands as diverse
as Mexico, Iceland, Greece, Canada, Chile and
New Zealand. Though fetched from disparate
continental and cultural locales, they nevertheless
form a collective trope of adventure volcano
skiing that also conjures intrinsically interesting
plant and animal regimes.
I know I’m not the only one with a diverse but
undifferentiated rock collection from a career of
travel. Some have them spread around window
sills, or parsed away in bags; one friend—who
cottages on Georgian Bay—has a giant bowl in
her kitchen filled with rocks from every single
one of 130 global locales in which she has
worked as a cinematographer for the National
Film Board of Canada.
In the end, the rocks remindme that memories
of outdoor adventures are also reminders of the
special and connected nature encountered in
those locales. Though the rocks’ identities may
become scattered in time and space, admiring
this quality will always remain grounding.
Theaccumulationof rocks inmy lifeoften feels
likeageological processunto itself.
GrandTrunkRailwaymap, circa 1905.
