In Iowa: Rockin’ in the free world

My friend Mike Jacobs rocks, both figuratively and literally.

I've known he rocks figuratively for a long time, based on his skill with a fly rod and his generosity in sharing secret smallmouth bass lairs on our many fishing excursions.

He underscored his literal status last Sunday in pursuit of his latest passion - the beautiful and elusive Lake Superior agate, pushed south into Iowa over eons by ancient glaciers.

I have been an agate admirer since fifth grade when our teacher, the late Marie Marling, a borderline obsessive collector, based much of our grade on the quality of our assigned collections of rocks, insects, leaves and other wonders of nature.

While my rock collection consisted mostly of quartz, granite and other leverites - 'Leave her right where you found her,” Mrs. Marling liked to say - it was graced with one perfect agate about the size of a fifth-grader's fist that I found in my grandmother's garden.

That specimen put my collection into the 'A” range and instilled in me an appreciation of the pretty if not necessarily precious gem stones.

Though I have stumbled across a few dozen agates over the years, mostly while walking river banks in pursuit of fish, I had never engaged in a systematic agate hunt until Sunday, when Mike invited me to accompany him.

Mike, who has floated thousands of miles of Eastern Iowa streams in pursuit of the smallmouth bass, put his knowledge of stream banks to further good use when he became addicted to agate hunting a year ago.

The stream we floated Sunday - which I cannot name because rockhounds are hypercompetitive - was what Mike called a 'target-rich environment.”

Mike, who does things fast rather than half so, has designed a tool to expedite the finding of agates - a stainless-steel dipper cup bolted to the shaft of a golf club, with which he scoops likely looking rocks for closer examination without having to kneel or bend over.

To distinguish agates from the millions of surrounding leverites, Mike walks toward the sun, with his shadow out of the way behind him, and looks for the glow the translucent agates emit when struck by the sun.

Not every rock that glows will be an agate, but the rocks that don't glow almost certainly will not.

Having never been disappointed in a Jacobs-led expedition, I expected to find agates, but I was surprised at the weight and bulk of the rocks that accumulated in my pockets during our four-hour hunt.

When I finally emptied them, a relief to my sagging pants, they contained 80 agates, many of them small chips without the lines, eyes and other intricate features that make agates so appealing, but agates nonetheless.

Mike, who had found many of the stones I collected, had in his pockets another 40 agates, their colorful bands and waxy texture still pleasing to the eye and hand a billion years after their fiery formation several hundred miles to the north.