What you’ll need: spectroscope, refractometer

Songlist: Diamonds are Forever by Kanye West, Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling Stones

Further reading: The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Last week as we road-tripped back from Wyoming to Minnesota, we stopped in Wall for breakfast. Now, if you’ve ever driven anywhere near South Dakota, you’ve probably seen a billboard for Wall Drug. They start several hundred miles away to entice drivers with offers of 5¢ coffee and free ice-cold water (a big draw for cowboys). The style of the boards and their messages are anachronistic, which is the point–Wall’s only allure, if it can be said to have any at all, is its bizarre attachment to a past it never had.

Anyone care for some ice water? Wall Drug's got that in spades

The real history of this area is much more tragic; after our breakfast we wandered through the stores and then past a wall of black and white photographs showing early settlers and their neighbors, the Sioux. We felt somewhat queasy reading captions like “Sarah and her new friends” under a picture of one white woman and several Sioux people wrapped in European-style jackets. Wall is, after all, less than 60 miles from Wounded Knee–not a proud incident in the creation story of the United States.

The only saving grace of the entire stop was a store full of non-precious stones. There were twenty-pound amethyst geodes, jagged quartz spikes, bins full of turquoise and topaz and rocks I’d never even heard of (dalmatian stones–who knew?) I let the polished stones slip through my fingers and all my Wall Disgust washed away.

I love rocks. In fact, right after I started this post I immediately started researching diploma programs in gemology (and got sidetracked for approximately 12 hours). When I was much younger my family visited DC and the only thing I remember is walking around the Smithsonian’s gem gallery in quiet awe. My parents let me get one thing from the gift shop; after coveting a small filament of 14k gold in a tube I instead chose a book that has a page or two for all the precious gems in the world, and information about some of the most famous, like the Hope Diamond (which I’d just seen in the Smithsonian’s collection).

I harbored dreams of being a gemologist for a long time, going so far as to request a rock tumbler for a birthday one year. The only question, though, was what to do with all those rocks from my backyard after they were nice and tumbled. They weren’t really all that pretty.

And after looking up those degree programs in gemology today, I was reminded of why I would not want to devote my life to the really gorgeous stones of the world. Precious gems often come from very poor countries and are the cause of horrible living and working conditions. I would find it difficult to appraise such gems knowing that truly magnificent stones were probably fought over and even killed over. Just like it’s hard to relax in Wall Drug knowing the horrors once perpetrated on that land.

Still, glittering gemstones are hard to resist…