Oliver D. Place continues his journey, looking for a purpose in his life by checking in on a geologist. Oliver wonders if this career might rock the boat and become a passion.
Ever wanted to be a rock legend? I’m not talking about a guitar hero, I’m talking about a hero among the stones we kick around on the street. Yes, actual rocks that come from the Earth. I decided to find out if rocks lined the path for me.
A friend put me in touch with a geologist. I never actually got the guy’s job title—his name is Carlos. I already had an inkling of what the job would be like. I had a rock polisher when I was a kid. And while we never kept it plugged in long enough as a family to actually polish the rocks, it was still a fun thing to try.
On my first day, I showed up with a shovel and got ready to do some rock exploring. However, when I arrived, Carlos took me to his computer. He started to show me some projects he was working on and how the layers of the Earth told us different things about the planet’s history. I didn’t listen too much and got ready for us to leave.
We never left. Carlos just kept talking about his model and what he was learning.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “When are we going to go find a new category of rock?”
Carlos stopped and looked at me. “There are only three categories of rocks.”
“There have to be more,” I said.
“Well, there are also some categories of meteorites, but I don’t deal much with that.”
“How about a new species of rocks?”
“There was a rare kind of basalt discovered a few years ago, but they dug almost five miles into the ocean to find that.”
“So I’m not going to find anything with my shovel?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” Carlos said. “We’ve been mining for a long time. We know what’s going on near the surface.”
I thought about telling Carlos that his job did not, in fact, rock. Instead, I took the polite path. I grabbed my shovel and went home.