Shattered Thunderegg
My perfect agate shattered with a sharp plink on an unseasonably hot October day. I’d been reaching up to a high shelf and knocked a necklace off the edge of my dresser. At my feet lay the fractured remains of a slim translucent gem pendant my great grandfather had fashioned by hand in the middle of the last century.
I sat on my bed ugly crying and fingering ruined slivers of craggy geode which appeared to me as a puzzle. My husband wandered in to find me and applied himself to a wholehearted attempt at restoring something he absolutely cannot fix. “I wish I could go back in time to when it was all whole again,” I sobbed.
I have worn this rock pendant for most of my adult life. A large flat slice of thunderegg from the Priday Agate Beds, my stone was a luminous pale blue with inclusions toward the bottom of a large perfect oval. Thundereggs are geological wonders — nodules that form inside of another rock. In the case of the unique thundereggs found in Central Oregon pockets of highly variant chalcedony are embedded into volcanic rhyolite lava rock. Modern science disagrees on precisely how thundereggs were formed, but I have read Native American legend attributes the geodes to angry thunder spirits who hurled the geodes from nearby mountains to lay dispersed across the landscape.
“Maybe we can repair it”, my husband says. I am not a lapidary but instinctively I know that trying to epoxy a half dozen slender pieces of agate is fool’s gold. This wasted effort would leave behind a fragile mess serving only as a reminder of a watershed moment in time.
My great grandfather Herb was born in 1905 in Washington State. A day laborer and odd jobs man by trade, Herb spent much of his adult life as an amateur geologist — a “rock hound”. Traipsing around the Pacific Northwest gathering minerals, he would return to a small basement shop where he cleaved and then delicately polished semi-precious gems. Herb dug up thunderegg, including the one from which he made my pendant, in the 1940s through the 1960s. They came from the Eastern edge of the Deschutes Basin, near the town of Madras, Oregon.
Chunks of geology claimed from the Pacific Northwestern earth served as fine jewelry in my working class family. Rock hound heirlooms were more precious than diamonds to my people, and each woman held tight to her gems until passing a few pieces to another steward. Often set into pot metal findings and glued with dubious epoxy, Grandpa Herb’s pieces have a beautiful luster and lasting magic.
Dangling from a chain around my neck, this agate had accompanied me through the most excruciating days of my life. My pendant was there to support me when I need courage to sign my divorce papers, during frightening medical appointments, and when I walked away and left my daughter at college in a faraway place with starkly different geology under her feet.
This particular agate was handed down to me by my granny, who allowed me to look through each piece of her jewelry during visits as a child. In stories whose shape I already felt deep inside me, she would explain precisely where each piece came from.
In the summer of 1969 only days after the lunar landing and while a dairy farm in New York geared up for Woodstock, my grandpa Herb died. I was a few months old and my mother grieved this death so painfully that she would lament for years that it was unimaginable I would never know Herb. I grew to understand the impact her grandfather had on her life and to treasure the stories behind each piece of carefully polished rock. Embedded into a randomly discovered geode slice formed 40 million years ago was the imperative that a family lasts beyond the simple act of death and that it is a perennially human rebellion to create something meaningful from nothing with your hands.
In an unexamined form of magical thinking I now realize this agate affirmed my identity, extending my Pacific Northwest feet below my soles and deep into the Earth. A mineral deposit worn around my neck grounded me just as the tall cedars that are in my bone marrow, the salmon I eat, and the sour huckleberries gathered in childhood summers. Provided the mineral gemstone remained intact, so my root connection to my past also seemed undisturbed.
Irrationally I wonder will happen to me now that my thunderegg is broken. Will I float untethered to another place? Am I still of this place? Peering down at the shards in my hands I consider a dark question: Am I still physically whole?
The family I was born into is scattered to different parts of the country today and yet I remain in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to a global viral pandemic which impacts our ability to see one another, we have found ourselves on different sides of a widening political chasm. Each of us continues to be forged by the modern American sociopolitical environment as surely as the ancient agate beds at Priday cast chalcedony into cavities of volcanic rock.
The truth is that some of my most elemental relationships were on a ventilator before this pandemic hit.
Was the remarkable grounding property of this geode present in the moment my great grandfather pulled it from the Earth where it lay for eons? Perhaps as this piece was honed by his hands, a powerful love was passed through the stone to my grandmother? It occurs to me I could simply polish the edge and leave it broken, a jagged representation of this new form I take with me into the future.
Perhaps I shall glue the shards together. Imagine how I could muse later — remembering how upset I was! We thought this something precious was lost forever, but it appears to be as good as new. A person would never know this agate was shattered into so many disparate pieces.
A jeweler who is also my dear friend texted some tender advice, “We could shape a different and new pendant out of what is left — an oval like the one you have only smaller, and perhaps a second in the shape of a teardrop?”
I know the real allure of my slice of Oregon thunderegg is that it spent over a half century nestled close to the people I love. Its fracture represents an enduring lesson that even in geologic terms, change is constant. And, so I sit with the idea of a teardrop and perhaps opening myself to a smaller magic, recast from a previous shape.
Turns out, some things cannot be superglued.
