Geoscience Reference
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Paul's life became a treasure hunt. At first his mother would drive him and fellow members of
the mineralogy club to their sites, but as they grew older they went unaccompanied. They scoured the
public records in Toronto for locations of old, abandoned mines, then set off on camping trips to find
them. Or they travelled to existing mines, where they charmed the workers and won permission to
poke around the waste dumps.
Once they visited a quartz mine where a single large cavern was crammed with spectacular crys-
tals, some milky, some as clear as water, some as long as your arm, and all gleaming like ice. From a
mine in Cobalt, northern Ontario (“the town that silver built”), Paul brought back thin plates of native
silver embedded in bright pink cobalt salts. During one morning of careful searching you could find
ten or twenty ounces of silver among the rocks that had been tossed into the waste there. In the dump at
a uranium mine, he found black cubes of uraninite set in a mass of pink and white calcite; also chunks
of purple fluorite housing spectacular yellow needles of uranophane—calcium uranium silicate. Both
of these uranium minerals are radioactive. Paul and his friends bought cheap Geiger counters from a
scientific supply store in Toronto. They held the Geiger counters up to their finds and were thrilled by
the staccato crackles that emerged. They weren't afraid of the radioactivity. As long as you're careful,
as long as you don't spread the dust on your toast in the morning, you'll be fine.
Every fine weekend, Paul would head off to another mineral site. He loved being outdoors.
Continuing to collect minerals avidly throughout his teenage years, he evinced no interest in dating
girls or following fashion. Instead he traded samples with the museum mineralogists, and swapped
stories with the scientists at the University of Toronto. In minerals, Paul thought he'd found his métier.
But in 1961, during his freshman year at McMaster University in Hamilton, they turned out to
be a major disappointment. The study of minerals mostly happened in a lab, it seemed, where you
spent your day leaning over a desk, measuring the distances between spots on photographic film.
Paul wanted to be outdoors, back on a treasure hunt. He wandered from the Mineralogy Department
along to Geology, which sounded like the next best thing. Were there any opportunities for the sum-
mer? They sent him to the Ontario Department of Mines in Toronto, where the austere director, J. E.
Thompson, looked him over and decided to take him on board. “Take the overnight train to Sioux
Lookout on May tenth,” Thompson told him. “Bring a good pair of boots.”
Sioux Lookout was a tiny town surrounded by the ribbon lakes and dense forests of northern
Ontario. Paul took both the train and the boots and soon found himself on a bush flight out into the wil-
derness. The lake shores were gorgeous, but the interior was a treacherous, forbidding place of dense
bush and swampy ground. To reach the outcrops of rock hidden among the trees, you had to take a
compass bearing and then fight your way through the undergrowth, counting paces to see how far you
had travelled. The four members of the field party lived out of two canoes. Each morning they struck
camp, stowed their tents and gear in the canoes, and then paddled on to a new site.
It was a bad year for forest fires, and sometimes the smoke grew so thick that the researchers could
scarcely breathe. And then, several weeks into the trip, David Rogers, the party leader, felt a crippling
pain in his gut, which he quickly realized must be appendicitis. There was no point in waiting for the
weekly supply plane. Paul stayed with Rogers while the other two paddled north through the night for
help. Eventually their route intersected with a railway line, and they managed to flag down a train. An
intercontinental train takes a long time to stop, even after the driver has seen two young men frantic-
ally waving from the bush, and has slammed on his brakes. The driver and his precious radio finally
came to a halt several miles down the track. A hasty call summoned a bush plane to pick up the pa-
tient and whisk him away to a hospital. Geologists are tough. Three days later, sans appendix, David
Rogers was back in his canoe, in the field.
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