I am a collector at heart. I've had collections ever since I was a kid. I had a rock collection, a butterfly collection, a States' major products collection, baseball cards of course, marbles, a magnetic sand from iron ore collection, and a collection of autographs from tourists who visited Sunday Lake. An odd mix maybe, but this was pre-1960 in Wakefield, Michigan after all.
And I continued. All our married lives, Jeanne and I picked up rocks and once even boulders from wherever we went on our vacations. I even picked up a few smaller pieces when I'd travel for business. The craziest items were those boulders. We discovered them on a beach outside Marquette one day. I'm sure these ran somewhere around 100 to 125 pounds apiece. They were just off shore and under water their colours were beautiful. We had to have some. I think we hauled three of them back to our car that we had left on Big Bay Road. It had to be at least a quarter of a mile hike, uphill and through the woods. We must have been crazy. (No, just young and strong) We had 40 or 50 pieces from all over the country decorating the front of our house when we sold it not long ago. If the rocks could only talk. The new owners of our house would get quite the stories.
I'm still at it now. My photography is definitely a type of collecting. I pick up shells and rocks from the beaches or hikes in the bush. There are also stamps from the Post, an assortment of items from Hobbiton, and even two genuine 'beaks' from porcupine (a species of puffer) fish. Silly, maybe, but I like it. I must be in my second childhood.
Nothing I have is quite as cool however, at least in my mind, as what I found the other day in a new 'junk' shop that opened recently on Railside Avenue in Henderson. The place is not your average 'op shop,' where they sell pre-loved household items and clothing. It is mostly hardware items. Stuff like old lawn mowers, beat up Maori statues, well-used tools, electronic items from the last 30 years, and a few items I couldn't identify make up the product line in this store.
I was gazing in one of it's windows recently, killing a little time before my bus came, and I spotted a hunk of something that made my heart skip a beat. It was half hidden under a roll of black bird netting. I hurried in and asked the owner if what I saw was a piece of Kauri gum. "Yes it is,' he replied. My heart rate briefly fluttered and then increased. If my chest had a tachometer mounted on it, anyone looking would have seen that, although my beats per minute where no where near the red line, they were far above my normal cruising rate.
As I asked the price, I prepared myself to be disappointed. Years ago, during the heyday of the Kauri gum digging industry, tons of it was shipped away for all sorts of industrial uses. It has only been more recently that Kiwis realised what a treasure they had, buried in the soils wherever Kauri trees once grew. Today, the very limited supply of old Kauri gum is being used for jewelry or being snapped up and kept in collections of individuals or museums.
When I heard his price, I was relieved. It was not the couple of hundred I feared it might be. Still, my bartering streak kicked in and I feigned surprise at his figure and disappointment that I could not go that high. He countered by offering me a small tin pot filled with an assortment of very small gum pieces, together with the large piece, all for just a bit more than the large piece alone. "No," I said, "I'm sorry. I just don't want that pot of chips and I can't go as high as you ask for the large piece alone. Thanks anyway."
To save the sale he reduced his price by $10 and I snapped it up...
Read about Kauri gum here:
This piece weighs 480 grams. Yesterday, I watched a Trade-Me (NZ's version of eBay) auction where a piece that weighed about 680 grams sold for $611.00. Wow. I got a good deal. It also shows the value many people put on this stuff these days. There were 73 people who had added that particular item to their Trade Me Watch List.
I've been cleaning it up. Most of it is very hard but there is a sandy sort of stuff in some of the crevices that I've been chiseling out and saving. It's visible in the first picture. It smells like turpentine. I've heard it is possible to melt the gum. I wonder if the 'sawdust' gum I'm taking off would cool back into a better form? One way to find out.
I bought a much smaller piece while we on holiday that Jeanne is going to carve a little and polish. She'll be saving the dust that comes off her project as well. I'll have another photo for you when she completes it.
Since I wrote what you've just read, I bought another piece on-line, through Trade Me. I received it from the seller just today and it is a beauty. The seller called it 'young amber' and it definitely is. Here is a picture.
It's hard to tell from this photo, but you can see through it.
This pictures lets you see it's level of clarity and gives you an idea of its size as well. I'm very pleased.
I have yet another treasure to show you.
While we were on holiday and walking on a beach in Paihia, Arram picked up a shiny rock. Even after it dried, it stayed polished looking and Jeanne's first thought was that it was volcanic glass, also known as obsidian. What a find that would be! However, the back was dimpled and had a strange mark on it. I didn't think obsidian would look like that.
When we got home from our holiday, I measured the piece and then looked up the density of obsidian. I found that this was much heavier than a piece of obsidian that size should be.
Then, we considered that it might be New Zealand 'jade'.
I started the research into that hypothesis by looking up the density of jade. This piece of stone was not nearly heavy enough. However, the Greenstone or Pounamu found here is not a true jade, like that which is found in China for example. Maybe...?
Jeanne then had a brainstorm. She owns a pounamu pendant. Why not compare the pendant and the unknown stone and see if their densities were similar. A short time later we found that her pendant and the stone had nearly identical densities. Eureka!
We now believe that what Arram found is a real piece of pounamu. The amazing part about that, and what makes this little humble little stone a real treasure, is that pounamu is found only on New Zealand's South Island. Who knows how many aeons it took for this to be tumbled all the way from somewhere on the South Island to the North Island beach and to the very spot where an eight-year old's gaze would briefly rest. Given the action of the waves on the beach, this piece could have been covered and hidden away for ever, had not Arram chanced to be in the right spot at precisely the right time. How incredibly unlikely an event he was a part of.
(which makes me think of J.R.R. Tolkien's story, The Hobbit, and the hugely improbable way the ring was found in a river by Smeagol.)
(And that makes me think of the Infinite Improbability Drive described in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
(The infinite improbability drive is a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.)
(Sometimes treasures are not only treasures for what they are, but for memories they jog loose.)
Here it is....
With a Kiwi dollar and a U.S. dime for size comparison.
This is a close-up of the other side of the stone showing the interesting mark. We think it looks like the Kiwi fern leaf pattern. What a treasure.
BTW, I predict that if Arram goes into business someday, he will prosper.
He let me know one day that he would be willing to sell his highly valuable find to me, for the right price of course. He drove a hard bargain, but we eventually reached an agreement, money exchanged hands, and the deal was done. I assured him that I would keep 'his' stone safely stored away and would someday pass it on to my heirs. What a deal, huh?
Update:
Arram has definitely caught the collecting bug. When he came home from camp, he had something for me. "Ohhh Grandpa, you gotta see these," he said, and raced to zip open his duffel bag. "These might be millions of years old."
Here's the photo and story...
Summerland students in years 5 and 6 attend a week-long camp at Camp Bentzon. It's located on Kawau Island which is about 24 miles north of Auckland and about a mile off shore. One day, the kids were taken on a hike around a section of the island and learned about its natural history. They saw, among other things, an outcropping of 'mudrock or mudstone.' These two examples are the pieces Arram picked up for me. What a wonderful grandson I have.
Of course, it soon became clear to me that he would not be adverse to being paid for adding to my collection of NZ treasures. What did I tell you about his business acumen? We did business once again and both parties in the transaction were pleased with their gains. There's nothing like a win-win deal. And now that I have a business partner with a proven record of delivering the goods, well, my collecting bug may very well go viral. -djf
