Rocks and Stones

For a long time, when I was young, I really wanted to someday have a stone house to live in, and I think that thought started somewhere between our home in northern Virginia and the National Zoo in downtown D.C. I vaguely recall that we drove by a particular stone house while going to the zoo, or to other places downtown, and it became my favorite, something I aspired to live in someday "when I grew up." As for pictures, because I didn't spot anything while driving around here locally, perhaps my stone house or cottage would look something like Moore's Station, or maybe it would look something like this hobbit home.

My original stone cottage was made of large, gray, roundish stones of unknown rock type, and it had large stone steps leading up to it. I can't say for sure whether ivy grew on the walls, but tall, thick trees partly hid it from view, making it appear mysterious and even more enticing. It was in the middle of a city where I would no longer want to live, and probably wasn't as colorful as this painting.

After moving back to the west, I gradually learned to stop wanting to live in such a building because I consider Nevada to be earthquake country, with stone and brick houses just sitting there waiting to fall down in some next future earthquake similar to whatever one created the nice fault scarp on the eastern range front of the Carson Range near Genoa.


Old buildings like this one at Pritchard's Station, made of ash-flow tuff and sitting out in the middle of nowhere, are probably as close as I will come to having a stone cottage or cabin, though we would like to have slate or other stone siding on lower exterior walls when we build, maybe some slate walkways through garden areas, and it's always possible we'll have some slate as part of the floor near an entryway.

In the meantime, I realized this morning that I prefer to have most of my rocks outside, and that our building plans are pretty vague. Also, my few indoor rocks are messily and non-photogenically lying scattered through the house, and my yard rocks are out in the mud, currently getting re-covered by the latest snow shower (a relatively miniscule thing compared to the snow dump of April 7th and 8th).
I also realized that we have all the rocks we want on the hill above our house, along the roadside as we drive to work, and everywhere we go out in the field.

Written April 13th and submitted to the April 2011 Accretionary Wedge at Geological Musings in the Taconic Mountains.