Houston was not a place we yearned to visit, but it’s the main place you go to fight back cancer.
I’d already been there twice, though always on the way to somewhere else, like basic training or Fort Polk. I knew the airport was bland and the land was flat and distinctly Texan, in that the buildings outside the city center were often too far apart, like every chain restaurant needs a fiefdom of pavement. Space City.
We were there to visit one oncologist in the M.D. Anderson Building, which was tucked within the Texas Medical Center, a sprawling campus of skyscrapers and nearly as big as Portland’s whole downtown. We were there for answers, on a quest for hope. We left only marginally more informed. That’s not what this is about.
We did our research and had time to explore while we waited for the appointment, and we were hooked on Treme, and Houston was where all those Katrina refugees fled the floodwaters, so we sought out Cajun food. We had chicken & waffles at the Breakfast Klub and tried Indian pizza at a spot near our hotel. We met up with friends in town.
But my favorite place was the Natural History Museum.
I was hungry and moody when we went but Mindy wanted to see some science instead of eat banh mi. We glanced through the Hall of Palentology—saw the bones of mastodon and triceratops—and were disappointed the Cockrell Butterfly Center was closed. Eventually, we made our way to the second floor, where I wandered away on my own for a shred of solitude and to look at taxidermied wild dogs in an ancient Texan landscape. Texas stretches and the state has varied ecological zones: hot and cold deserts, riparian and subtropical regions, and hills. They make a big deal out of Hill Country in Texas, but here I’ll take a moment to remind us all there are plenty of hills all over the world, and the rest of us don’t act like they’re the only paradise on Earth.
“Jor?” Mindy tracked me down by the wild dogs and my moodiness was lifted by the softness with which she said my name, and she asked me to follow her and together we entered the Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals.
The hall was lined with cases containing glittering stones: baby blue microcline; a massive cracked crystal amethyst; columns of tourmaline spiking from smoky stone; clean cubes of pyrite embedded in boulders; a poofball of mesolite; a star of selenite; sulphur the neon yellow of a highlighter; and the Dragon, an uncanny ribbon of gold uncoiling from a fist of quartz.
We moved down that hall toward the dark, the black deepening, and we marveled at the brightness hidden within drab stone, at how this beauty had to be mined and sometimes cut open to be revealed.
Only we can find these.
Mindy’s hand found mine as we walked on along the cases, through the dark, and in the last room we reached the Gem Vault, which showcased those of Earth’s treasures which were processed into Fabergé wonders, made in Saint Petersburg by the hands of French Protestants fled east and given blood-drenched land to ply their trades, to craft baubles for Tsars: cigarette cases decked in emerald and diamond; ruby-topped scepters, jeweled boxes, treasures arrayed and fashioned to store more treasure.
The vault was the blackest room, and away from the displays we couldn’t see even each other. Columns of focused light cast down on the artifacts so as not to glow up the room, to show how those stones deep in the Earth could be found and cut and faceted, and arranged into exquisite beauty, to hold and refract the light even within the dark.
We all know how silver seams the rocks, we’ve seen the stuff from which gold is refined, We’re aware of how iron is dug out of the ground and copper is smelted from rock. Miners penetrate the earth’s darkness, searching the roots of the mountains for ore, digging away in the suffocating darkness. Far from civilization, far from the traffic, they cut a shaft,and are lowered into it by ropes. Earth’s surface is a field for grain, but its depths are a forge Firing sapphires from stones and chiseling gold from rocks. Vultures are blind to its riches, hawks never lay eyes on it. Wild animals are oblivious to it, lions don’t know it’s there. Miners hammer away at the rock, they uproot the mountains. They tunnel through the rock and find all kinds of beautiful gems. They discover the origins of rivers, and bring earth’s secrets to light. Job 28:1-11
Thanks for this remembrance, Jordan. I was touched with the bit with Mindy wanting to go to the science museum, rather than eating Vietnamese sandwiches. Treasures, indeed.