Future Perfect

Vermont's State Geological Symbols

All of the U.S. states have elected to choose "state symbols." This is because state legislatures would like to have a fun thing to be working on when elementary schoolers visit, rather than laying bare that they exist purely as a mechanism for resolving the conflicts of monied interests in a manner that further calcifies the existing social order.

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The Vermont State Rock

Through a time-honored process known as "cheating," Vermont¹ chose three rocks as its state rock:

• Marble is what you get when the Earth decides it doesn't like some fossils and would like to turn them into vast featureless ribbons of calcium carbonate and other stuff. Consider stealing some from an abandoned quarry; or, if you're brave, an operating quarry.
• Granite is kinda like the ice that forms beneath the surface of a lake, as opposed to the frost on its surface. Or like rock candy as opposed to sugar glaze. Or it's kind of like a cake as opposed to a cookie, or maybe like a cookie as opposed to a cake? Or it's kind of like a magma composed of at least two-thirds silica cooling and consequently chemically and physically altering in a manner dictated by being under several thousand atmospheres of pressure. Unlike certain other states, Vermont mostly doesn't make big ostentatious mountains out its granite.
• Slate, the famous flat mud, can be put on top of houses to keep rain from getting in. Thankfully, in 1903 we invented a way to do this with petroleum instead. Rather than going all the way to the Bennington area to find fine exposures of slate, why not just climb on people's roofs until you find some?

The Vermont State Mineral

Vermont's state mineral has the chemical formula Mg₃Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂. Can you guess its name?

That's right! The Vermont State Mineral is talc, an alarmingly slimy choice. Chemistry-knowers will notice that talc has an awful lot of magnesium in it. Where does that come from? The answer is probably "the bottom of the sea." I'm not going to tell you where I found talc, because I don't want to get caught.

Vermont came relatively late to its state-rock-naming-fervor, making these selections in the years 1991 and 1992--an unfortunate delay compared to many other states, as thirty years earlier the legislature almost certainly would have chosen a different but chemically and geologically similar state mineral: namely, asbestos. For more information, please consult the future chapter entitled "Exciting Terminal Illnesses for the Vermont Rockhound."

The Vermont State Gemstone

The "pomegranates of metamorphism occurring around the 500°C/1.7kbar isozone", Vermont selected garnets as its state gemstone. Let me tell you, I'm looking at a list of state gemstones right now and I'm seeing a lot of like, topaz jade emerald diamond so I'm on board with this, it's good that it's a gemstone that's relatively abundant in the state. Want to find some? Then park on the side of Route 131 immediately to the north of Hawks Mountain, a ridgeline marking the fault following the northern edge of the Chester Dome. Proceed to cross the Black River in the Hawks Mountain Wildlife Management Area, a task that should be relatively manageable in late summer or extremely dangerous in mid-spring. This zone of relatively higher metamorphism in the Connecticut River Basin yielded relatively large and well-formed garnets, prominently exposed on the gentler northern flanks of the ridge.

Fig. 3.1 Hawks Mountain, viewed from standing in the Black River. Fig. 3.2 Garnets in rock on Hawks Mountain.

¹ The monied interests.