Chapter 1: The Long Days of Summer

My name is David Alan McKesson. I can't remember how old I was when I first saw the lines. They were one of those 'peripheral vision' kind of tricks anyway - never where I was directly looking, always at the edges of what I could see. They were faint, shimmering lines, always two or more twisting crookedly vertical, but always parallel to each other, like the edge of a piece of shale. Their appearance was infrequent and peripheral to my awareness as a child, and I did not wonder at what was just a barely noticed part of my world. Later, I learned how to touch them, and where they led me, and the way they changed my life, and allowed me to change the lives of many others remains a true wonder, and the true story of my life.

The summer of my twelfth birthday, I discovered the wonderful word of rock collecting. Mostly it was Ginny Parkin, and her sudden subtle promise of curves and ... differences. Ginny and her blue-eyed sparkle and quick smile who captured my interest, but her dad owned a sporting goods store which included a small rock and gem shop, and I conspired to require frequent trips to the shop to contemplate buying books, tools and supplies. At first of course my sham interest meant I was not really there to buy. I was there to visit Ginny, who worked the gem shop counter while her Dad worked the main counter.

Later it occurred to me that Ginny must have been aware of my true purpose. I discovered within a few years that girls just saw things in ways I didn't, and behavior designed to mystify my fellow adolescent boyhood buddies was, to the girls we grew up with, as obvious and open as a road flare at night. It should have come as no surprise to me then, when after a couple weeks of my 'casual' visits to that back corner of Parkin's Sporting Goods, Ginny asked to see the rocks I'd been collecting.

"What?" I said in what must have been a confused and trapped tone.

"Your rocks?" Ginny giggled. "Will you show me the rocks you've been collecting?"

"Ahh ... okay..." I managed to stammer. Ginny told me a few years later that my deer-in-the-headlights look as I spoke then was one of her favorite memories of me. Only because of the apparent earnestness with which I said "I'll bring some the next time I stop in," after which I spun on my heels like the good little soldier I was and marched out the front door of Parkin's Sporting Goods, never intending to return. I was in full retreat from my first encounter in the war between the sexes. A war it took me several more years to even realize I was engaged in.

As is often the case with boys and young men, as soon as I was halfway home, the strength of my fascination began to outweigh the urgency of my fear. By the time I arrived at my front gate I was determined to make my rock hound facade a reality, score some rock samples worthy of Ginny's attention, and return to the scene of my recent debacle in triumph. All I lacked, after all, was knowledge and skill. These could be acquired. The other ingredients to success were already mine — time and the boundless energy of the young.

As I entered the house, I heard the radio in the kitchen playing. My mother considered the fact that through some trick of space and time, KDFC Classical 102.1 FM managed to make its way from San Francisco through the mountains to us, a gift from her guardian angel, because the local stations were all country music and talk radio. Mom always talked about her guardian angel, but we all considered it her method of dealing with the move to Angel's Camp from San Francisco which, she claims, my father 'brutishly forced' her into undergoing.