On a Sunday afternoon in April 2022, while driving home from a conference in Storm Lake, my truck crashed on Interstate 35 north of Roland. When I called my mechanic Kenny and explained the symptoms, he said, “It's probably the fuel pump. We'd better tow it to the shop.”
Kenny knew a lot about trucks. He sold it to me in 2018 or 2019 and it was the best $2,000 I ever spent. This truck is now 24 years old and has only 175,000 miles on it, most of which I have put on it.
Getting it towed to Ames, finding a mechanic, spending the night in a hotel room, and then getting there in the morning because there's no good mechanics in Ames or very few people I know can cause confusion. I thought about towing it to the mechanic again. So I decided to have it towed to Kenny's store in Knoxville, about 90 miles away.
Towing cost was $700. I vowed that the next time I was going far from home, I would park my truck and rent a car.
So I was at a car rental store in Pella around 9am on a Thursday a week ago to rent a car to go to an event in Iowa Falls. I also thought it would be better for him to pay $70 for a rental car than for him to pay $700 in towing fees. There was a sign on the door that said, “I'll be back in 5 minutes.” I didn't bother as I had time to look for fossils in the landscaping gravel next to the store.
A few minutes later, two women got out in a black SUV. I think one of them was in his 60s or 70s and was wearing gray clothing, from his hair to his running shoes. She was thin and stiff like a rope of dried leather. When I told her the store clerk would be back in 5 minutes, she became enraged and started swearing at me and the world in general, before backing out when she realized I wasn't the problem. She explained that she was angry because they were late and had somewhere to go “right now.”
While others may have been offended by the tongue-lashing, I found it fascinating.
The young woman was probably around 35 or 40 years old, had beautiful red hair and freckles, and was wearing pajamas. I thought the older woman was her mother because she was acting as if she were a relative of hers. While the older woman was scolding me, the younger woman was looking at me with her kindness and her caring eyes.
After maybe 10 minutes, a young man walked up, stuffed with a Casey's breakfast burrito, apologized for taking so long, and welcomed us. The old lady listened to him and helped me fill out the paperwork since I was at the front of the line. . A few minutes later, I was out in the parking lot with the keys to my toy-like Kia. I was so low to the ground that I was worried that the hem of my pants would fray on the asphalt before I'd even covered a mile.
When I came out, the young woman was still staring at the gravel.
“Did you find anything good?” I asked.
She smiled widely and said, “Can I show you?”
“of course!”
She trotted up to me with some stones and said, “I'm just looking for something pretty!”
She put a rock in my hand and told me she was from Arkansas.
“Oh, this is beautiful,” I said, turning it over in my hands. “It's all quartz.”
Her eyes widened and she tilted her head at me with a confused expression.
“What is a crystal?” she said. “How do you know?”
I was surprised. How did you know the rock was quartz? How could she know that the stone was quartz? Why didn't she know what crystal was?
“I think I learned about it in school. It's a crystalline igneous rock that primarily forms in volcanoes.”
She gave me a surprised look and picked up another stone to show me.
What is this? “
“This is another type of igneous rock, chert. It has a dense molecular structure and was used in the past by cultures around the world to make stone tools. By crushing it with harder stones, it is made into arrowheads, spears, etc. It can be shaped into the shape of a spear tip or other sharp tool.
Her jaw dropped. She looked at me like I was saying something great, wonderful. “How do you know?”
I didn't know how to respond.
But I knew she was eager to learn, so I started by picking up a random rock and figuring it out.
“Look at this, it's petrified wood,” I said as I handed it to her.
“How do you know?”
“You can see that it looks exactly like the physical structure inside the tree. See the ring? It took millions of years to fossilize.”
“How could that happen?”
“Water contains minerals, and over millions of years the minerals replace the cellular structure of plants, turning them into rocks.”
She looked at me as if I were the smartest person in the world and that I had just explained something as important as the origin of the universe. To me my knowledge seemed mundane, but to her it was amazing. Although what I said was certainly nice in that, in fact, the knowledge that has been passed down to me is what scientists and other scholars have worked and learned over generations; We don't think about it much. That's true for everything we know, but perhaps we should appreciate it more.
I heard the car rental company door open behind me, and my girlfriend's mother came out and started making a fuss. “Let's go,” she said angrily, walking away to her rental car.
The young woman began to walk away from me and backwards towards her mother and her car.
“Can I keep this stone?”
“of course!”
“How can I learn more?” she asked almost desperately. She was six feet away from me at that point, but she was still retreating, and she yelled again, “How can I learn more?”
She held out her hand to me, even as she continued to back away.
“Come in!” her mother yelled.
I reached into the gap between us, trying to save her from drowning in the raging river, but to no avail.
I thought of many things I wanted to tell her. Textbooks, fossil field guides, university classes, and the Internet. All of that was swirling around in my head as I searched for the right words to say to someone so eager to learn.
For those few seconds I was fumbling for the right answer, but finally I found it.
“Let's go to the library!” I shouted. “At any library! Librarians are here to help you learn! They'll be happy to teach you. They know how! Ask a librarian!
She gave me a big smile, got into the car with her mother, rolled down the window and stuck her head out of it, smiling and waving at me until the car was out of sight.
As we drove to Iowa Falls, I thought about how an obviously curious and intelligent person could know so little about rocks and fossils, and how we might learn about them. I realized that she probably didn't have her public education. that her mother cruelly isolated her;
I know people who homeschool their children and they do a great job. Their children are well-educated and integrated into the community. I'm not worried about these kids.
Gov. Kim Reynolds and Republican lawmakers have worked hard to dismantle Iowa's public schools and prioritize private schools by issuing vouchers that funnel public money to private schools. Out-of-state online companies have also emerged that offer homeschooling curriculum in exchange for voucher payments.
I hope I'm wrong, but perhaps Mr. Reynolds' next step will be to directly check in with those homeschooling their children without supervision. Unlike my friend who is passionate about homeschooling her children, many would think that Reynolds would be giving thousands of dollars per child as an incentive to keep them home.
Some of these children will go unnoticed and abused or neglected, and there will be more children like Natalie Finn and Sabrina Rae. Others will no doubt enter the juvenile justice system.
And there are many children, like the woman I met from Arkansas, who never reach their full potential.
