In the Colorado Rockies veins of quartz hold glittering metal. Some of it has value. Some is left on tailings piles to weather. Streams of boiling iron and sulfur pushed their way through the rock, reacting. Yellow, roughly cubic crystals formed as the torrent cooled.
A chunk of glittering rock found its way to a gift shop. A couple in their fifties, visiting the woman’s sister in Denver, bought a few keepsakes for their grandchildren. Back east, the man handed the rock to his grandson on his fourth birthday.
“Gold!”
The man chuckled. “It’s not gold. It’s fool’s gold. They call it that because it fooled prospectors who were looking for gold. Its scientific name is iron pyrite.”
The next gift, also from Colorado, was a delicate plaster sculpture of a grizzly, lifelike and in a walking pose, with a thin layer of brown felt fiber sprayed onto the plaster. There was also the usual assortment of clothing, books, and toys, all welcomed and used and destroyed and, ultimately, forgotten. Even at four, the boy regarded the ore and the sculpture differently from the other gifts. They went onto a shelf in his room. He spent hours gazing at them, wondering over the existence of opaque and exotic places like Colorado.
Three years later the boy’s grandfather was dead. His sister broke a leg off the bear a year or two after that. He held onto it for a few months, until a layer of plaster dust covered the headboard of his bed. Into the trash it went.
The hunk of iron pyrite stayed on his shelf, though the shelf itself moved from house to house.
At 22 he hitchhiked west. His twenty-dollar frame backpack held a few clothes, a book by Bradford Angier, a buck knife, a flannel sleeping bag, and the iron pyrite.
Heat a chunk of pyrite until the sulfur volatilizes, and the iron becomes magnetic. He felt an odd pull in him watching the Front Ranges coalesce above the Plains. He walked into the canyon of Boulder Creek one morning, climbed a hill a mile off the road and sat atop it on a fallen pine. The pyrite was heavy in his pocket. He pulled it out, watched it glint once more in the Colorado sun. A rattlesnake moved out from beneath the log, flicked tongue, fell amiably asleep in the sun.
It was a hard decision, but he put the rock back in his pack. On the way back into town he watched rounded stones rolling down the creek toward Boulder.
