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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A Super (Bowl) search outdoors
Wild Side column: A need to get outside results in quest to find agate and more in rock bed
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It was Super Bowl Sunday, and I needed a fix.
For several days I’d been inside buildings or vehicles, and I needed some exposure to nature for my personal well being and (for the sake of others) to keep a grumpy old man from getting grumpier.
Pheasant season had been closed for a month. Thick ice enclosed the river. Persistent cold weather had foreclosed the tapping of maple trees.
I could go for a nature hike, but I have never been one to hike without a specific objective. I opted to look for pretty rocks in a spot I’d long been saving for just such a sunny day.
The rock bar lay beneath a creek bridge I often drove across. A flood several years ago had deposited a thick layer of golf ball-sized rocks that stretched 50 yards downstream of the bridge.
Every time I crossed that bridge I slowed down to admire the rocks and to imagine that among them were agates and petrified wood glowing like embers in the sun.
I waited for the sun, still slung low in the southern sky, to align perfectly with the rock bar, its rays illuminating the translucent stones I hoped to find.
My hopes soared on the first pass across the rock bar at 3 p.m. Surely among all those right-sized specimens of quartz, chert and jasper — frequent companion stones of agates and petrified wood — I would find some pretty keepers and maybe even a trophy.
Bent at the waist, looking down, I saw lots of stream-polished smoothies that looked pretty and felt good — but none of the billion-year-old agates that, pushed south by glaciers and flowing water, had likely never been touched by human hands
Reality imposed itself after my second futile pass across the rock bed.
To avert the skunk, I was going to have to get down on my hands and knees and make eye contact with each individual stone. It’s a tedious technique but one that had never failed me.
Nor did it on Super Bowl Sunday. Agate specks and chips that I’d overlooked soon popped into focus, encouraging me to look harder for larger specimens.
I soon noticed the chuckling of the nearby stream as it flowed over its rock bed and around remnant ice had overtaken the stillness of a winter afternoon.
Still on my hands and knees, I found a keeper agate and then another, neither even approaching trophy status, before clouds moved in and shut off my spotlight.
With creek music playing in the background and a cold, waxy stone between each thumb and forefinger, I stood up and headed for the bridge, feeling refreshed.
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