They say that there are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want, and after that, to enjoy it. And only a very few people achieve the second. Well, I don’t really know our stats when it comes to achievement, but I have to admit that we made it a point to enjoy the time we spent together. I was in the seventh grade back then in Saudi Arabia, and the other part of the we, my cousin Gina who lived in the next city, was in her tenth.
We often spent a lot of quality time together. The once-in-a-blue-moon sleepovers (when we went to visit them or they came to visit us) were often spent staying up late and having long chats or looking for adventures (inside the house), and almost every time, there was something to remember forever. One such occasion was the most memorable, and, just in case age and loss of memory do affect us in the long run, I’ve decided to take this precautionary step to record everything I remember about the best time we ever had together.
It was in late August during our summer break, and Gina’s family had come over for a visit. They were staying over the entire weekend, so Gina and I started to get busy preparing a list of things to do while they were here. Well, plans changed, and soon, our parents decided to take us sightseeing to a bridge nearby. We dined at a restaurant, and the entire day went by as uneventfully as any other outing we’d had. Since we were both very devoted homebodies, going out was not on our list of having fun. We did enjoy going out together, but we didn’t enjoy it as much as we did staying home.
Consoling ourselves that we still had another day to look forward to having all the fun we expected to have, we went to bed. The next day, after an early lunch, we set out for the beach. The weather was mildly sunny when we got there. We took pictures, had some ice cream, and strolled around for quite some time. It got cloudy as time passed, and Gina’s father suddenly noticed something spectacular about the tides.
“Hey, look at the sea,” he said, pointing. “The water’s receding!” The water hadn’t just receded to the low-tide level, but it had gone farther in, so we could see the sand bed at the bottom of the rocky edge. Half an hour later, the water had receded up to at least a mile into the sea. At that time, we hadn’t heard about Tsunamis, or we definitely would have rushed back home!
Looking forward to an adventure, we decided to walk out into the sand bed. As we climbed down the rocks on the shore, our dad’s called us over, pointing to something among the rocks. Making our way over to them, we saw what they were looking at. It was a dead stingray, with flies swarming all over it. Its long tail had a number of spines at the tip. Clambering further down the rocks, we saw a huge rock near the bottom, which had a cave-like hollow eroded into it due to the waves. It was just like something out of my geography book. It was dotted with a number of tiny shellfish with shells of various colors. Reaching the sand, we started walking out into the sea. Watching us walk out into the sea, many others followed
I dug through my old pictures, and lucky me! I found a picture that dad had taken back then from the shore. You can see how far out we are, and how tiny!
Looking back at the shore, the people looked just like ants. On our promenade, we managed to collect a wide variety of sea shells of all shapes and sizes, our moms also collected mussels so we could take them home to cook. We even caught a few baby crabs. Finally, at around tea-time, we decided that it was time to go back to the shore.
Slowly, we made our way to the rocks on the coast. We all settled down at a convenient spot and Gina and her dad left to get some mineral water from a concession store nearby. When they got back, we all had our tea and snacks, and then Gina’s dad mentioned that he had seen a weird looking rock that was very different from the others around it.
“Maybe you should go take a look at it,” he said. We were excited.
Quickly finishing our tea, we went to take a look at this rock that was so worthy of mention. We found it in a spot near some other rocks on the coast. It stood out distinctly cuz of its sandy color with reddish streaks here and there, while all the other rocks around were brown or grey. Its dimensions were about a foot and half by three-fourth a foot. It was an oval-ish rugged shaped rock with crystal formations between some of the layers. We were curious to find out what exactly the crystals were, so we hurried back to our picnic spot. Grabbing a plastic bag and making excuses, we ran back to the rock.
We were just figuring out how to put it into the bag (It was so darn heavy!) when we realized that there was a newly married couple sitting nearby and curiously watching what we were up to. For a moment, our minds were filled with second thoughts. Wouldn’t it look really silly if a pair of girls tried to put a rock into a bag and carry it away?
“Oh, who cares,” I told Gina. “Let’s just be really quick.” She nodded.
A while of pushing, heaving and dragging and we were beat. The rock was simply just too heavy. We even considered leaving it there, but our hearts just wouldn’t let us give up on a new discovery. We looked at the couple. They were obviously amused, and entertained. You should have seen those smiles. We could almost read their minds. We were definitely making a fool out of ourselves.
Finally we realized that the most foolish thing we could do would be to give up. So what if they think we’re crazy? We’re never gonna see them again. We’re gonna take this rock home and find out what it’s made of.
They say you can do anything if you just put your mind to it. Well, that’s what we did. Putting our mind to it, with all our strength, we lifted the rock just enough to slip the bag under it. The fact that it was mildly windy didn’t help. But, we finally managed to do it and the rock was in the bag. We turned and gave the couple a look of triumph. But that obviously didn’t impress them either. All they did was whisper something to each other and giggle.
Well, now that Mission One had been accomplished, we had to accomplish Mission Two: carrying the rock from the place we were to our picnic spot. Hoping that the plastic bag wouldn’t tear under the rock’s weight (which would be even more of an embarrassment), we braced ourselves and carried the bag, each of us holding one hand-grip. Finally, we reached our picnic spot, drenched in sweat, much to the surprise of our parents. Our dads tried to convince us not to take the rock along, but our minds were set on what we wanted to do.
Unwillingly, they helped us load the rock into one of the cars, along with the shells and mussels, and we headed home. It was almost six by the time we reached home, and the minute we stepped into the house, we ran to the bathroom with the bag of shells and emptied it out into the bathtub. The rock, which we had brought up to our apartment with a lot of trouble, was left in the living room until we cleaned the shells and found the crabs. We had counted three in the bag, but we didn’t know how many would have survived the journey. Looking these up now, I figure they’re probably some species of oyster crabs or soft-shell crabs, since most of them were really tiny and some were in empty oyster shells.
Soon, our parents left us at home to do some shopping by themselves, and we were left to clean the shells. Rummaging through our shells, we found four crabs, of which two were dead and one was on the verge of dying. Desperate to save the fourth, we thought about how we could keep it alive. Since we got it from the beach, we figured that we should probably put it into some water. Then we realized that we needed salty water.
“But we can’t use table salt,” Gina stated. “It probably contains other chemicals and stuff.”
“Well, then what should we do?” I asked back. We thought about it for a moment, and suddenly I had a brainstorm. “Hey, rock salt is salt that’s not processed,” I said. “I bet mom’s got some in the kitchen. Maybe if we mix that to some water, we could get something similar to sea water.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Gina said. “Let’s try it out.”
I got some rock salt from the kitchen shelf while Gina got a mug of water. Putting some salt into the water, I tasted it to see if it was salty. Then I found an empty glass container, and Gina poured in the salty water up to the brim. We went to check on our little friend, and, finding that he was as active as ever, we put him into the water. Keeping the glass container aside, we started the tedious process of cleaning the shells with dish soap and toothbrushes. After a grueling hour or so, we turned to look at our little friend and found out that he was dead. We were devastated. We ended up killing him faster by trying to save his life. We didn’t know whether we had to laugh at our silliness or cry for the fact that we had unintentionally killed a poor creature.
We decided to put the past behind us and we went to look at the rock. We had to break it to see what was inside. Opening my dad’s toolbox, I found a hammer, and the two of us started hitting the rock with the hammer. We tried, but neither of us had the force enough to break the rock into two pieces. The more we hit it, the more it crumbled, but we couldn’t even get a decent piece to see its inside. We even tried scraping off some of the crystals.
Finally, we decided that it was enough of fieldwork. Turning to the computer, we looked up an encyclopedia that I had on CD (I doubt if we had wikipedia back then). At first, we didn’t know what to look for, but then, we started typing in words like rocks, minerals, crystals, etc. Our parents arrived just then, and were amused when we explained to them the death of our pet crab.
After a quick diner, we were back at the computer. We searched for hours, trying out all sorts of odd words we could come up with, but nothing turned up. Our parents were telling us to go to bed, but we knew that we probably wouldn’t get a chance such as this, ever, as Gina had to go back home the next day.
We looked at the time; it was past one in the morning. We were sleepy, tired, anxious and irritated at the same time. We went back to the living room. There was one property of the rock we hadn’t expressed in our keywords. This rock was composed of layers, which implied that it was some form of sedimentary rock. Excited, we went back to the computer and typed in sedimentary rock. Reading the article, we stumbled on to limestone, and then to quartz, and what a shock we got! The description of the formation of quartz crystals in layers between the layers of sedimentary limestone, the color of sandy to reddish-brown, everything fitted so perfectly, that we couldn’t believe our eyes.
Hastily, we convinced our dads to come and see what we had found. They were impressed, of course, but nothing could describe what we were feeling that night. We were happy that all our hard work had not gone in vain. What we were doing might have looked foolish to others around us, but then what we accomplished meant much more than that.
Really wish I had pictures to share the excitement. But this is just the story of a not so interesting weekend outing, which turned out to be a unique adventure, the best we ever had!
