| | By Rocky Ledges
POLAND, Maine - This is a story about how I came to discover the first known occurrence of the rare mineral chapite in a Maine pegmatite during the summer of 2005 - a find of a single loose crystal that remains intensely controversial in the mineralogical community at this writing. But the story really begins in the pavilion at Poland Mining Camps several years earlier. I had just returned from guiding a party of mineral collectors to the Emmons Quarry on a hot summer day. The group was seated at the long dining tables, pulling apart lobsters with abandon, sipping lemonade, and admiring their specimens from the day's digging. I had found a beautiful cluster of blue fluorapatite crystals with dozens of tiny bertrandites perched on them, using an infallible technique cultivated over hundreds of field trips: I had tripped over the rock and fallen flat on my face. Those who have accompanied me on past outings in the Maine pegmatites will recall that a similar stumble led to my discovery of a beautiful gemmy blue beryl crystal in spar-garnet matrix at Mount Mica in 2001. In 2003, I found a world-class eosphorite specimen at Black Mountain when my boot got caught under a foot-long spodumene prism and I fell into the main pit, fetching up, as they say in Maine, on a large eosphorite-bearing block of vuggy albite. Collectors familiar with my technique always watch me walking about the quarries, and they come running if I should happen to fall down. Not to help me, but to inspect the rocks in the vicinity of my mishap. | So, on this long-ago evening with a happy chorus of voices and lobster shells cracking in the background, I was showing Dudy Groves, the beloved proprietor of Poland Mining Camps, my fluorapatite-bertrandite specimen. I could tell he was impressed by the way he snorted, rolled his eyes, and gazed down at his dog, Mica, who was snoozing at his feet. Dudy mumbled something that sounded like ". . . seen better specimens in the ditch along Route 26. . ." but I can't be sure that's what he said. Then the look on his face changed and became a countenance I had come to recognize as the one he wore when he was about to impart a wonderful secret from his many years as a pegmatite miner.
He looked slyly around to make sure no one was watching. Then he beckoned me closer and whispered, "Ever find any chapite up there?"
"Chapite?" I was shocked, and the word flew from my lips - in too loud a voice, as I could see from the ticked-off look on Dudy's face.
"Chapite?" This time I whispered it. "Really? In pegmatite?"
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Dudy Groves |
Dudy nodded. "It's up there," he said. "Gotta be. All the signs are right." Then he laughed and added, "Even Sprague don't know about it. But it's there."
I filed away the information for the next time I was called upon to lead a sortie to the Emmons Quarry. But soon the season came to an end. Winter dragged along endlessly and my thoughts turned to other subjects. When spring came, I had forgotten about Dudy's prediction (and anyway, all the next year's collectors wanted to do was dig the old dumps at Mount Mica and fill tiny plastic film cans with small shards of green tourmaline).
In the summer of 2005, I received an email from Ray Sprague inviting me to come to the Emmons Quarry and pick through some rubble from blasting he and his partner had done recently. To find out what he really wanted, I had to read the last line of his email message: "Please stop at the Lake Store on your way to the mine, and bring me a bag of donuts." This was something of an inconvenience, as the Lake Store was 25 miles off my route to the mine, but I knew from experience that an early morning arrival at the Emmons might not move Sprague to get out of bed and make coffee, whereas the sound of a bag of donuts rebounding off the mine trailer door would produce quick results.
After coffee and donuts on the comfortable milk crate lounge chairs on the trailer's veranda, Ray showed me smoky quartz and fluorapatite specimens extracted from a new pocket the previous day. Very nice material! "Go on up and see the pocket," Ray said. "I'm going back to sleep for a while."
I walked past the lower pit, past "Dottie," his trusty excavator, and up to the ledge, where a basketball sized cavity showed in the wall. Buckets of smokies stood nearby, and Styrofoam coffee cups and other mining detritus lay scattered about. One of the Styrofoam cups lay on its side just outside the pocket. Inadvertently I stepped on it as I knelt down to look inside. Along with the snap of the Styrofoam I heard something rattle inside the cup. Then a round, blackish object rolled into view.
At first I assumed it was a smoky quartz crystal. But already through the dust and mica flakes clinging to its side, I could see that this was something possibly very special. I picked it up, and dipped it in a bucket of water. My heart caught in my chest as I held the object up to the light of the morning sun: It was a perfect, prismatic black chapite crystal! Dudy Groves had been right! Still encased in its plastic outer wrapper and bearing a price sticker ($1.29) the identification was simple. It could be nothing else. Chapite had been found for the first time in a Maine pegmatite. And as usual, I had made the discovery with my foot.
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The news traveled like wildfire. Back at Poland Mining Camps that night, Frank Perham inspected the crystal and commented on its similarity with an unusual chapite occurrence in pegmatite near Quito, Ecuador. But the skeptics were quick to make their feelings known, too. A mineral collector who had been at the Emmons Quarry the previous day claimed that a chapite crystal he purchased at a well-known jewelry and mineral store in West Paris, Maine, had rolled out of the pocket of his LL Bean vest some time that day, and that he had been drinking coffee out of a similar coffee cup to the one I stepped on. Geologists demanded to know why no matrix remained attached to the crystal; they suggested in their widely distributed article "Pegmatite Chapite: History, or Hoax?" that glacial transport was responsible for its presence in the pegmatite quarry. A geology major with his own blog proposed in jest that a Maine Chapite Park be created on the grounds of the Emmons Quarry. I even received an anonymous telephone call (from Massachusetts) suggesting that I had planted the chapite crystal near the pocket for the notoriety it would bring.
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Chapite on Beryl |
Chapite crystals in pocket assemblage |
That is where matters stand. At this point I am relying on a chemical analysis to be performed by the Maine Pegmatite Workshop to determine the origin of the chapite crystal. It is my hope that critics, now licking their dry lips with glee at denying me my day of mineralogical recognition, will be silenced. Of course, additional discoveries of chapite in pegmatite pockets will go a long way toward resolving the enigma. In the meantime, I am comforted by knowing that Dudy Groves "called it" years ago, when no one else was even dreaming that chapite would be discovered in the pegmatites of Oxford County, Maine. |
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