The Rock Tumbler
magic pebbles + a mini-course
You know how an object in childhood given to you at the right time and invested with value and importance by the person who gave it to you can take on a huge role. Well, even if you don’t know what I mean, can we talk about rock tumblers anyway?
I remember mine. It was a short yellow tube with a screw-on cap at one end and big rubber band around it. The container part was made of some kind of thick plastic and it fit into a dark blue machine with a heavy motor, built strong, like a miniature clothes dryer that plugged in. My rock tumbler felt serious. I think it was the first present I’d received that did not feel like a kid’s toy. It lived in the garage that smelled like tool box and tar and cement and it made the unmistakable gravelly rolling sound that a rock tumbler makes all night long. It was calming. And sturdy. You put sand in it and water and a few beautiful rocks and plugged it in and then you had to wait a long time and keep adding finer grains of sand. Over a week or so of the turning and tumbling, it sped up nature itself and made a rough chunk of rock into a marble smooth gem— a thing of rare value that you could crazy glue into a pendant and thread onto a chain and make into a real piece of jewelry.
What did I do with the real jewelry I made? I can’t remember. Maybe I gave one to my mum, or Angela our neighbour and sometimes-babysitter that I had a crush on ever since I saw her blush at the front of the school bus. From the school bus window I saw her distant figure leaned up against the brick wall at the edge of the parking lot fully making out with an older boy. The bus honked its horn and she rushed up the steps and the blush flushed her cheeks but also spread mottled pink to her neck and collar bones. I didn’t get a good look at the guy she kissed, but they both had jean jackets and feathered hair, and he was one of the long-haired jean-jacketed highschool boys that could be found in packs out back of shop class where there was a kind of loading dock. The boys surrounded and jumped up on the hood of an old car that was no longer worth working on and they would break it down, the front windscreen glass spiderwebbing, and sideview mirrors torn off, and even the doors ripped right off their hinges with sledge hammers and crowbars, climbing all over the wreck the boys reduced to a pile of scrap. Anyway, it was one of those boys that Angela kissed and I was jealous because I’d made a necklace with a rock that had been smoothed all night to sit like an amulet in that spot where her jean jacket opened and her t-shirt began. Did I give her this necklace? Given that this is where my memory kind of fizzles out, the gift couldn’t have had the impact I’d been hoping for. All this to say I have been thinking about rocks.
Not the kind of rocks soft enough grind into finer and particles that suspended in water and binder will make them into paint or ink. Not the giant boulders that rock but do not move, called logans, that I have a personal interest in. Not the moving stones of Death Valley. But the classic, beach-smoothed pebble that you can’t help but pick up and dip into the waves to see its full colour and show to someone walking with you and then put in your pocket. The kind of magic pebble that palaeolithic wanderers might have picked up and carried with them with a kind of urgency that can’t be explained by any sort of necessity. Did humans and whatever came before humans pick up rocks because it just felt right in the hand sometime, way before they picked up rocks as tools? Was the first rock carried like a bottle of ink, an intensified, compacted, memorialized souvenir of place and time?
In the Colour Lab this week: SCHOOL OF ROCKS
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