The Denver Mining Club had its annual auction of mining paraphernalia yesterday and though my house is lined with rocks, fossils, and at least ten thousand maps, I felt I couldn’t part with anything. Not one breccia nor one jointed cobble. If my field equipment wasn’t buried by target load shells and gun cleaning stuff, I might have given up some protractors and acid bottles. My little plastic cases of assorted (and redundant) precious mineral samples are wrapped in kleenex and stuffed deep into stacked shoeboxes under suitcases and backpacks. I have way too many rock hammers but each one is sentimental (this one was for the Yucca Mountain Project, this one I lost in Mexico and found again, this 2-pound sledge is best for cracking granites, this rusty one without the leather handle was my first, this flat one is for sedimentary rocks, this pointy one is for hard rock) – forget giving up a rock hammer: they all stay.
I thought, ‘My huzbun has a lot of old junk! I’ll ask him!’ (My stuff is not old junk but his is?) So, I asked him if he had any mining paraphernalia to donate to the auction. He looked around at the rocks piled on window sills, at the books stacked on top of each other under the coffee table, the rolled up maps and stacked journals and said,
“No. Nothing.”
I looked deep into the closet in the spare bedroom, shoved fly rods out of the way and looked way way back to where only the cat can get, where unknown small animals hide, and where I store my many many Halloween costumes and maps of Sonora. Back in there was a box of hard hats – new ones. They were donated to me by a hard hat company at some mining symposium hoping that I would wear them in Grasberg when I went there for FMI to train staff for geotechnical core logging with software. I accepted the hats after making sure they were adjustable to my peewee head and had the clips for a headlamp, but I knew upon seeing them that I would never wear them – NEVER because there were, after all: BRAND NEW. Who is going to wear a brand new hat to a mine??? And White ones at that?? Only a visitor or salesman, of worse – a corporate boss would wear a new white hard hat.
Perfect! I donated the hats and some young people (where did THEY come from?) bought them. I wondered what kind of weird esoteric stuff other geos had in their collections and how long (and deeply) they have stored their junk? There is a wise old saying, “Never help a geologist move.”
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