It may surprise you to learn that I once was a Boy Scout, though it’s probably not as surprising to learn that I wasn’t very good at it. I stuck with it long enough to go to Camp Daniel Boone, in Canton, North Carolina, which is a good nine hour drive from Canton, Mississippi, where I lived at the time.

It was a month long camp, twice as long as any other camp I’d been to, and the only luggage I had large enough to carry everything I’d need was a huge duffel bag.

We left on a bus early one morning, and I spent the month swimming in an ice cold lake, taking cold showers, washing dishes, and getting a cartography badge. During downtimes I wandered up and down creek beds and followed maps around the campgrounds.

A month later, I returned on a bus late at night. My parents were there to pick me up, and there was the matter of the duffle bag. While I had been able to easily shove it under the bus going there, on my return, it weighed a hundred pounds. It almost killed the poor over-eager eagle scout unloading the bus. My father and I had to struggle with it, cradling and cursing more like hitmen than boy scouts, lugging it like an unconscious and lumpy body that we unceremoniously dumped in the trunk, causing the car suspension to sag for a second.

My dad unzipped it, looked inside and started cussing. He was always cussing. Farming is like that.

The bag was full of rocks.

Not beautiful gemstones or rare fossils. Not tiny agates or slips of petrified wood or moonstone or even striking white quartz. The bag was just full of rounded river rocks, big things, the size of your fist or head, sometimes with a glistening pattern of pyrite or vein of white.

I had never seen rounded river rocks of that size and symmetry. Most of the creeks I spent time in were things of mud, sand, sometimes gravel, concrete and bricks. Mountain streams full of picturesque egg-shaped things? That blew my easily short-circuited mind.

We kept them, of course, they’re still scattered about the old yard and garden. They may end up as some curiosity to a future geologist or archeologist, because they’re not going anywhere, anytime soon.

I was reminded of this when I took my daughter on a rock-hunt in a local creek. Unlike the creeks of my youth, this one has a lot of gravel. I don’t know if it’s natural, or from some old roadbed, or what, but there are big piles of water-polished gravel from a lot of sources.

Mid Mississippi doesn’t have a lot of rocks. For most of Earth’s history, this area was an ocean that slowly filled in with miles of sediment. Massive logjams would become buried on the shores, creating the extensive spread (and occasional concentration) of petrified wood found in the state.
For hundreds of millions of years, though, water has flowed through here, depositing gravel ground down during ice ages or washed out of mountains. Beneath the soil in most places in Mississippi is a layer of gravel, a continents’ worth of gravel, sometimes exposed when a ditch or gully cuts too deep, sometimes spread out in the hills, washed down into ditches as the hills erode. Gravel mines dot the countryside.

Those hills, called the “loess hills, “ cover much of the middle part of the state. They were products of the most recent ice age, ending twenty thousand years ago.

During the ice age and directly after, massive dust storms blew from the western plains. They blanketed parts of Mississippi with 90 feet of dust over thousands of years. Each crop of dust would bury local leaf snails, leaving a fossil (and carbon dating) trail that told scientists the story.

The small creek we visited cuts through loess and clay and goes deeper, churning up beds of gravel whenever a curve makes the water speed up, and when the water is low, it exposes those ancient bits of stone. The rock piles are small enough to make a great hour or two for a five year old - though god only knows how long her father could remain down there.

I seek out certain types of rock: agates, petrified wood, hag stones, jaspers, clear quartz, and fossils of any sorts, from corals to shells to tooth and bone.

If you’ve ever wondered what all the gravel you find is, exactly; the Mississippi Office of Geology has a handy little booklet.

But while I seek out these things, a child has a different sorting process. She wants BIG rocks, rocks of a single interesting color. One that’s smooth. One that’s round. One that has a glint to it. Usually she selects them for qualities she refuses to explain.

I think about finding that creek full of big rocks, rocks I thought cool enough that I lugged them from creek to campsite, that I dragged from campsite to bus, , whenever she presents me with her tiny bag of rocks that I, personally, wouldn’t have picked. I wash them and she puts them in her little display.

Her rock collection, technically 14 rocks and 1 mussel shell.

I understand that. I have lots of rocks and fossils and artifacts on display. I always have, though most of the big river rocks never made it indoors, my mom put them in her herb garden. But at age 7, I quite ceremoniously took over the family dining table - the nice one, that only got used a few times a year - and turned it into a MUSEUM. Each “exhibit” had a construction paper placemat/marker, where I wrote what it was, and when and where I found it. I invited my grandparents. I showed the kids in the neighborhood. They were not impressed.

It probably would have gone over better if one of my exhibits hadn’t been a cow skull I dug out of the old ravine where my family had dumped dead cows for years. And put it on the table we got from my grandmother, with a helpful label saying ‘cow skull.’

They tore up that cow graveyard to build the Nissan Parkway, that leads from the Nissan plant to the Amazon Fulfillment facility outside of Canton. They filled in the pond next to it, where the cows drank. They planted over the old grazing grounds with pine tree plantations. They filled in the pond, now it’s an empty field, kept for hunting deer.

All those places I remember are gone now. Not all of them are buried, but they are no longer what they were. I no longer have the cow bones or skulls, or the rounded river rocks from Canton, North Carolina. The rocks are still there, somewhere lost, probably buried, buried like the cow pond.

The farm where the cows lived and the pond was, where I found a blackberry bush with no thorns and big berries, also had a sharecropper’s shack nearby, and the old man lived there until the 90s. He kept a shotgun full of shells loaded with rock salt, right by his door, so we didn’t get close to it until after he died.

His family tore down the shack and I went through the rubble. I found old snuff tins and squat ceramic hair cream jars, beautiful blue glass vicks vap-o-rub jars, marbles and old glass bottles and even some moonshine, buried under a stack of neat bricks.

Everything there was so old, I thought. Things like that didn’t exist when I was a kid, except in ruins.. I started combing hillsides where my dad said old homes had once been. Usually I’d find jars of cold cream, which I understand were repurposed as snuff boxes, but sometimes there were coins or glass or mysterious objects.

As I got older, what I was looking for from my rocks changed. I started finding spear heads and petrified wood, fossils of impossibly old sea creatures,, and agates with beautiful concentric layers.

I don’t know why I used to collect rocks just for being big, or smooth, or shaped like something else. I could never explain why I picked one rock over another, and neither can my daughter.

The first time I took her rock hunting, it was in a little pile of gravel on the side of a parking lot. She picked out three pretty quartz pieces and gave them to me, she said that they were the kind of rock I liked, and she was kind of right. She was two then, and not quite as stubborn as she would be later, when she grew out of collecting rocks for daddy, and grew into collecting them for herself, selecting those rocks for reasons neither of us will understand.

But she still wants to show them to me, even if they’re very much “her rocks,” now. They aren’t the rocks I would pick, that’s for sure. Maybe one or two. But they’re not my rocks. I didn’t pick them.

There’s something so innately human about showing someone a cool rock. It feels right, like something going back three million years can. A child shows a parent a rock, and they approve. A friend finds a rock, they bring it to you. Those things were very important for the vast majority of our species’ existence.

“Cool rock” is all you have to say.