Swaths of tidal marsh. Bluffs and chasms. The pavement the thinnest of lines.
Wreathes of beach cobble, too many stones to fathom. Mountains.
Holding this one, I remember how islands rose out of the sea, and how lava flowed into the ocean in a hissing swirl of steam, leaving hills of lumpish pillow basalt.
How the Juan de Fuca plate offshore collided with the North American plate, lifting the entire smoldering mass between sixty-six million and thirty-six million years ago, forming the Coast Range and this gorgeous drive.
This layer of continent is now disappearing: Sea stacks stand as pillars to a former coastline, and the basalt of the shore is riddled with coves and inlets that funnel waves furiously into blowholes, as if in homage to a volcanic past and the migrating gray whales.
Cruelly, the coast dumps its agates directly in the sea. But I have salvaged a few.
Whenever I’m distracted, one of these agates tends to find its way into my hands, turning over, and over, as if in an eddy. It seems to look into me.
Here I hold an opaque blue agate, one of my best. Slightly wider than my thumb, but shorter, it has what seems a wart on its pale bottom. That, or the dark eye of a hurricane.
Many agates do have “eyes.” These are thought to form when stalactites or burls of chalcedony, hanging from the rind of an unfinished agate, are enveloped by more crystallization. When the agate is eventually worn or cut, spots stare out.
The other side of this blue stone has a groove that reminds me of a narrow lake surrounded by elevated terraces, or a reservoir with bathtub rings along its tiny shoreline.
How I found this blue agate I can no longer quite recall. The minute I did, my mind filled with excitement and scattered. I wanted to show her this keepsake up on the bluff.
But I think I was on my knees, and by writing this line, I make it so.
It’s true that people become hesitant to collect after childhood for fear of being seen as simpleminded or self-indulgent. Unproductive.
To engage with rocks is a pretty silly business.
Annie Dillard tells of a man on the Washington coast who, several times each day, took down a beach cobble with a white band (“a wishing stone”) from a shelf to teach it to talk. But she views it charitably. “I assume,” she writes, “that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well.”
Transparent and hollow: a state of mind quite like what’s required to find a beach agate, though luck is also involved. Probably that man could have used some luck as well.
My professional opinion is that the mere discovery of a stone gives it voice.
Such as that voice is. As Dillard argues, “Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”
Yet the sound of stones being tumbled by the waves is remarkable. It is a thousand knuckles rapping softly at a door.
Monstrous in heavy surf.
“Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin . . .”
You can identify beach agates by the innumerable crescents, indentations, on their surfaces, as if imprinted in clay by a fingernail. These are the strike marks they leave on one another.
“Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god,” Carl Jung laments in Man and His Symbols, “nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear.”
Once it was thought that the Thunder Spirits threw agates raucously among the snowy peaks of Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson, where they lived. Now these “thundereggs” are the state rock of Oregon. Their surfaces look pimply, but once cracked, their centers reveal brilliant patterns: star shapes, imagined galaxies. They are mainly found inland, in the sagebrush ocean beyond the Cascades, in rhyolitic lava.
I don’t talk to my rocks, but I have sometimes tossed them in my hand or let them rattle musically among the loose change in my pocket.
My back began to ache as I stooped at low tide in the Yachats Bay for more hours than I’d like to admit. My pale neck burned in the sun. It seemed the right price to pay.
Looking for agates, I’ve found, is as much an exercise of the mind as of the eyes. You must block out most of the world and let in only a particular glint.
By ignoring everything, at least we can see something.
This one is tinted orange and has a ruddy skin-like layer that’s almost gone, as if another rub or two of the thumb would separate the stone from its chaff. It is sculpted smooth, but pocked here and there, revealing the mold of the ventricle in which it was formed.
I’ve learned that the small cavities in the lava of the Oregon coast, those in which agates coalesce, are known as “amygdaloidal,” from the Latin for “almond.”
Which explains why I have a strange desire to place this stone on my tongue.
“It is believed that to look upon the agate is to rest the eyes,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “If held in the mouth, agate quenches the thirst.”
Not surprisingly, the amygdalae are those lumps of brain matter, one buried in each hemisphere, responsible for long-term memory consolidation and the sense of smell, among other things. They let us remember the ocean air.
Here’s one that reminds me of a lima bean. It’s what’s known as a “fancy agate,” creamy and nontransparent, but laced with a web of orange lines: broken, and then refilled.
The act of collecting is often a psychic pleasure or necessity, but of course it can also be a genuine investment: You can spring for paintings, antiques, cars, and diamonds.
To collect semiprecious fragments would seem an act of protest, then, of withdrawal.
But if collecting springs from a wish to gain control, to possess, then perhaps to gather unique stones is to coerce the earth by holding some of its finest specimens hostage.
Walking below the wrackline in Yachats, I snatched up a perfect, glowing agate. Nearly pellucid, with a hint of green. The size and hue of a peeled grape at Halloween.
But inside drift gauzy clouds.
It is like a glass fishing float washed in from Japan, where they adore the miniature. Where they build pedestals to cradle their “viewing stones,” which pose as mountains.
The original crystal ball clearly must have been agate, for it already contains visions within. Rorschachian shapes. Lifelines.
Coincidentally, it’s been found that those people who respond unusually to inkblot tests tend to have larger amygdalae, suggesting those regions are central also to creativity.
In agates, people imagine tiny wings. Insects in amber.
When I found that smooth, sea-green stone and turned to show her, a step behind, she gasped, took it into her hands. “It’s yours,” I said, and immediately I was jealous.