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The Pet Rock

I worked for my Father at his Sand and Gravel plant every summer, starting with my sophomore year in high school. One day the hired man, George, came back from lunch with a present for Walt, a birthday present, something he found at the drugstore. Walt opened it and there was this box and inside that was a pet rock. Now there was no difference between this pet rock and the rocks in the oversize pile, which at the time was selling for two dollars a ton, except that the pet one had a face painted on it, a frown, plus the imperative "Throw Me," and it came in a little box. This one pet rock cost two dollars. Dad held his pet in his hand, and a look came over his face.

Miles City Sand & Gravel Chora

The Choral Sorting Machine

One of my first jobs when I worked at the plant was to clean the grids of the screens used to grade the gravel into sizes. Eventually the screens plugged up with stones and I had to knock them loose with a hammer. The pea-gravel screen could be cleaned by running the tip of a large screwdiriver along the meshed grids, which produced an almost musical sound. This was the actual "gravel plant." The washer with its three grades of screen, one on top of the other, was fed by a conveyor belt carrying the pit gravel from the quarry, and fed in turn three piles of sized rock, with the sand coming out the bottom. The whole contraption made a terrible noise and shook violently. I realized years later, reading Plato's Timaeus after Derrida, that this gravel washer was a good metaphor for the operation of chora, sorting chaos into Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

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