So it was that, millions of year ago, these agates began to come into my life.
But I remember, also, that June day when my love and I drove west from Eugene on a misty road, past pastures and barns and clear-cuts on the Douglas fir hillsides.
How we hung a right on Highway 101, curving through dunes and over headlands, until, from the precipitous heights of Cape Perpetua, we descended to a town far from anywhere and clinging to the shore: Welcome to Yachats: The Gem of the Oregon Coast. Pop. 600.
In the Chinook language, Yachats (yah-hots) means “dark waters at the foot of the mountain.” Just before town, we drove across the modest river, slow and tannic, overhung with maple and alder. Waters flowing out of the mossy Coast Range into a shallow bay.
All my life, it seems, I have collected places, looking, I suspect, for just the right one. Here in the Northwest was a pocket in which our eyes felt suddenly comfortable.
Yachats is all edges—mountains meeting river, meeting ocean, meeting sky—but ideally proportioned, charming, as if it would all fit beneath the dome of a snow globe.
Turn over these stones, and thoughts flurry.
As a child, I was given a small red plastic rock tumbler one Christmas, because I had the collecting bug: the impulse to hold, and possibly hoard, the world.
Or rather, it had collected me.
A tumbler mimics water. As the drum slowly rotates, it piles rock on top of rock, over and over. First harsh sand is added, and then polishing powder, so that, when the grinding is over and all is quiet, each stone shines like water itself.
Below the surface of our backyard, however, I found only crumbly sandstone, too soft to polish. So I had to look elsewhere for gems: In wildflowers. Flitting through oaks.
Spotted salamanders, glistening under pots.
Books.
Collections, I’ve read, often begin with a gift or serendipity. Rarely are they planned. But once that first item is in hand, others accrue as if by their own volition.
John Dewey: “No unprejudiced observer will lightly deny the existence of an original tendency to assimilate objects and events to the self, to make them part of the ‘me.’ We may even admit that the ‘me’ cannot exist without the ‘mine.’ The self gets solidity and form through an appropriation of things which identifies them with whatever we call myself. . . . ‘I own therefore I am.’”
Solidity and form: A collection is the silica that gradually fills some part of the psyche.
Usually my Yachats agates rest in a glass bowl, but sometimes I find them scattered across my desk, among my papers and receipts. Lately they sit in clusters on stacks of unread books as if to prevent me from working.
“I am unpacking my library,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “Yes, I am.”
Suddenly emboldened, I sweep them into the cup of my hand, let them go clinking back into their dish. There, I can keep an eye on them.
Such are the gentle tides of a rare day.
“Guard well your spare moments,” wrote Emerson. “They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”
The truth is diamonds are a dull choice: They serve as currency because none can be told apart. Nor are they actually rare. The market is only carefully controlled, and advertised.
No two agates are alike in design, and each has a chemical fingerprint, sometimes plainly visible, that an expert can trace to within fifty miles of its source.
The philosopher Theophrastus (372–287 B.C.), a disciple of Aristotle, was the first to write of agates in his treatise On Stones. “The achates is also a beautiful stone,” he wrote, “it comes from the river Achates in Sicily and is sold at a high price.”
Fidus Achates, friend of Aeneas.
But agates in fact come tumbling down streams and mountains the world over, and today are considered only semiprecious.
“Semi-worthless,” goes the joke.
Some of these rocks can offer a view, though, not unlike a kaleidoscope; a toy that, now that I think of it, houses bits of glass like those gleaned from a beach.
A word that comes from the Greek kalos, “beautiful,” and eidos, “form.”
Turn the tube, faintly hear the sound of the sea within.
We checked into the Dublin House motel, ended up staying three days. The woman at the rock shop down the street showed us several sample agates in a basket, whetting my appetite.
Below the highway, in the placid Yachats River channel, a giant log was beached like a whale, saplings and long grass spouting from its weathered back.
At low tide, we walked across the sand to dip our hands into the brackish water and found evidence that a forest had once lined the stream: the octopoid roots of trees knocked over by a rising sea, a sudden tidal wave, or a more recent wave of settlers.
Remnants, excavated by the same winter storms that bring agates to light.
At first my love hunted gamely with me. But she had no luck and, before long, gave up and sat down on a stump. She might tell it differently.
There, at her feet, she found an orange agate—I could hardly believe it—and, satisfied, went off to paint the landscape for which she has infinite patience.
My nature is to keep searching.
It’s believed that agate separates into bands because of electrical charges and slight chemical variations. Often these strata include mineral impurities of vivid color, iron oxides especially, blues and reds.
When cut or polished, an agate’s surface has striations that resemble tree rings, as if one could count back the years to see when drought occurred and civilizations fell.
Petrified wood is also agatized, each fibrous cell replaced by silica. In my bowl are several old-growth stones, which are common along the Oregon coast. Each is a piece of tanbark from a lost playground.
Inside the chamber of a developing agate, gravity sometimes pulls the chalcedony to the floor, forming a pool of horizontal layers called “onyx,” which means “fingernail.”
Expose these glassy interiors, and one can see entire landscapes: Anvilhead clouds hanging over desert buttes. Whitecaps to the horizon.
Turning my index finger in the window’s light, the fine keratinous ridges of my fingernail remind me of breakers as seen from a headland.
Pliny the Elder also wrote at length of agate in his Natural History, describing many varieties: “The Indian agate . . . on them you will find represented rivers, woods, and farm horses; and one can see in them coaches, small chariots, and horse litters and in addition the fittings and trappings of horses. . . . Those found in Thrace and near the mountain Oeta, upon Mount Parnassus, on the isle of Lesbos and in Messene, have the image of flowers, such as grow in the highways and paths in the fields.”
I’m new at agate-gazing, but so far haven’t encountered any equines.
As we drove along the Oregon coast, we were absorbed by the bands