The Joy of Soapstone

Last night I read about a hike scheduled for today to a now defunct soapstone quarry on Bear Mountain. I love soapstone. Dad always had it around and made cool things with it: lamps mostly, and an elaborate tunneled mountain about 18 inches tall for my brother’s snakes to crawl in. Whenever one of my pet mice died, he’d give me a piece to carve for a gravestone. I still have Minute Mouse’s headstone from 1965. Minute Mouse was small and black, and just the nicest mouse you’d ever want to meet, but his name was an embarrassment. I inherited him, fully named, from a friend. In contrast, my own mice had original names — you know, like “Stuart Little.” Stuart saved me from a spanking one day by dying, but that’s another story.

Anyway, soapstone reminds me of my childhood so I’m sentimental about it. I don’t suppose many people are sentimental about stones, and stones have suffered in consequence.

Soapstone is very difficult to find these days, so I was hoping I might get to score a chunk if I went on this little adventure. I drove the back roads to The Nature Museum at Grafton (about 45 minutes north of my barn), crossing the Dummerston bridge en route. Expect to see a shiteload of covered bridge pictures here in the next year. Vermont is crawling with them.

When I arrived I realized I’d forgotten my wallet and thus didn’t have the seven-dollar fee. This being Vermont, they trusted me to mail it later, which I will.

In the parking lot I met an old Vermonter who’d brought with him one of his soapstone creations. It’s a bit odd, really: a water buffalo being attacked by the mountain lion on its back. I asked where he got the idea. “Well, I have a water buffalo carving someone gave me, and one of a mountain lion, so I just copied them and put the two together.” Unfortunately their liaison is not peaceable. That water buffalo is toast.

Here’s what I learned about soapstone: It was excavated in the 1800s to use as sinks and kitchen counters and sills for windows. But it’s costly to mine here, and cheaper to import from South America, so the quarries we visited closed down a long time ago. In Vermont, if not everywhere, soapstone lives in outcroppings of granite. Miners chopped it out with long, steam-powered chainsaws. Now, where there the pits used to be, there are black ponds of various sizes, covered with floating leaves and duckweed.

Opposite the cliff you can see the ghosts of the cables that ran the saws, over time cutting right through the hardrock.

We got to dig around the tailings in the ruins of an old mill and pick out a sample. I got carried away. You should’ve tried to pick up my backpack. I barely could, and then panted the mile or two back to the car.

Meanwhile, the man with a grudge against water buffaloes hit the motherlode: he found a beautiful, huge piece of soapstone that hadn’t been sawed into a slice. He wanted it. He wanted it badly. So badly that he flipped it end over end up the steep and slippery hill to the logging road, from whence a vehicle would fetch it.

One of my hiking mates, Deborah Lazar, took a picture of me leaning against a rock and examining a piece of birch bark at the quarry. Though I look yucky, I’m putting it up because it’s a cool photo. Thanks for sending it, Deb.

This is what I brought home — much heavier than it looks:

As if that outing weren’t excitement enough, I went bowling with the MAT41s after dinner. (MAT41s are my classmates.) It was Psychedelic Night at Brattleboro Bowl. That means they turn on blacklights and strobes. You have to supply your own psychedelics. I scored 69 the first time and 96 the second. Lauren was the surprise of the night. I’ve never known a real person that I’d actually want to talk to, who can also bowl over 200.

When we were finished, Curtis offered to use my camera for a group shot. Just before he snapped the shutter I realized we were missing something. —“Wait! Wait! We should all be holding our balls!”