The Sand Quarry: Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man

       On the bus to the abandoned quarry, I sat next to V., who has some of the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They were green and brown and blue, with specks and splodges of colour like a shimmering tidal pool or a piece of lovely marble. I could have gazed into his eyes all day. Too bad he's only twelve years old. Too bad I'm a frumpy middle-aged parent accompanying a school science trip.

       Someone passed out Carambars, a kind of caramel that comes in different flavours. V. took one. He unwrapped it, examined the yellow baton from all sides, sniffed it, picked up the discarded wrapper and read the writing, sniffed the candy again, then turned to me.

       "Do you want this?" he asked, offering me the Carambar. "I don't like lemon flavour."

Carambars, wrapped, from Wikipedia.

Lemon Carambar, unwrapped, from V.

       Twelve years old is a funny in-between age. Too old to indiscriminately chomp down on any old candy just because it happens to be sweet. And yet, too young to even suspect that an unwrapped, pawed over, pre-sniffed candy might not be so enticing to his adult seatmate.

       "Sure, thanks," I said, taking the Carambar to be polite. I tucked it discreetly into my handbag. At least it wasn't gooey.

The abandoned sand quarry, now used for 4x4 adventures and occasional school trips.

       The quarry was a big sand pit. The sun shone down through birch trees just starting to put out soft green leaves. Great tits (Parus major), a common European songbird, sang out. There were sedimentary rocks, where you could see wave and ripple marks on the sand before it hardened into rock.

Sedimentary rock with ripple marks.

Shells in the sand.

       There were lots of little shells in the sand.

       The kids were divided up into groups. My group had to lay out a 10m long measuring tape. Every metre, they had to set down a 10 cm by 10 cm red wire square, count and note the appearance of the shells in the red square, then dig up and collect 1-2 cm worth of sand from within the red square to bring back to school for further analyses.

Counting shells.

       The group started out fine, so I wandered off to look at the other groups. When I came back, everyone was busy, but the group had splintered into two:

Girls, counting and noting physical appearances of shells, collecting sand samples.

Boys, digging a hole, playing with bits of rock and shell.

       I am making no judgements. After all, I firmly believe that play, and the idea of "playfulness," is seriously undervalued in general.

       There was a great podcast this week, about the Dawn of the Iron Age. Apparently it was not at all obvious how humans discovered how to smelt iron ore around 3000 BC in Europe. Unlike copper, a light coloured malleable metal, iron is dark and thus difficult to distinguish from impurities, and difficult to work. It has to first be heated to melt out impurities, and the remaining ugly, irregular lump of iron has to be hammered repeatedly to make anything interesting. If I could travel back in time to the Dawn of the Iron Age, I'm sure I would see some humans hanging around a fire with some chunks of iron ore, wondering what would happen if they played around a bit and heated them up, or smashed them up, or both. Civilization has evolved not only because of hard work and discipline, but also because of play and serendipity.

       Back in the bus on the way back to school, I asked V. what his favorite subject was (Math) and what he wanted to be when he grew up (Architect). Someone passed him a piece of red string licorice. He didn't eat it right away. He dangled it from his fingers, studying it. Then he tied one end of the licorice to the seat in front of him, and put the other end in his mouth.

A new way to eat licorice

       "This is good," he said, chewing away. "I still have two hands free." I have no doubt he will be a fine architect some day.