Dark Corner Geodes

The pure white sand glistened like diamonds as it rained down upon the leaf-carpeted earth. It refracted the narrow shafts of sunlight that penetrated the grove of post oak trees where my sister and I were playing. Like the proverbial Genie in a bottle, the sand had been trapped inside the one-inch thick walls of a hollow rock ever since its mysterious creation.

My baby sister scooped up another double-handful of stand from the inside of a freshly broken basketball-size geode. As the sand trickled through her little fingers, and rained down on her bare feet, she danced about and squealed with delight, "I'm rich! I'm rich!" I suppose that Judy was pretending that we had just unearthed a pirates buried treasure chest. The sand worked its way up between her toes as she danced with glee.

Our widowed mother and four older siblings were busy planting a spring garden. Unbeknownst to them I had sneaked mom's broken-clawed hammer out again and it had taken its toll of geodes. Bowl shaped hulls and fragments of what was once sand-filled rocks were strewn about the hillside. However, most of the rubble that littered the landscape appeared to have been undisturbed for eons. While we found and broke many geodes from football-size on up, this continent's earliest inhabitants must have encountered a multitude of the odd rocks.

In retrospect, I can now picture a buckskin-clad Native American girl, a millennium earlier, playing out a similar scenario to that of my little pale-faced sister. However, I can't quite grasp what being rich would have meant to her. Maybe pretty beads; gem-type precious stones and soft raiment would be a part of being rich.

A half-a-century and no doubt, more than half of my expected lifespan has passed since that memorable day. Yet, like the sand in the rocks that the Genie in the bottle, my fascination is till held captive by the mysterious geodes. One of the strange phenomena concerning these geodes is they seemed to appear in the heart of Dark Corner. A few have been discovered north and south of the borders of Dark Corner and at least one as far away as Denison, Texas. The railroad cut through a massive honeycombed section of these geodes about ¾ of a mile east of the Dark Corner General Store.

They hand to be created by intense head coming in contact with the earth's surface. My guess is that a meteorite shower struck the earth at that point in the eons past and created these unique geodes. Each hollow rock contains sand that will be white, red, or any hue in between.

I spent many hours as a young man visiting with Ross and Beth McCorstin, who lived at 2030 Alberta Creek Road. Ross had one of the hulls of a big hollow rock at his outside faucet and he watered his dogs in it. He put up one on another big rock for a mail box, but the Postal Department wouldn't approve it. He did have a newspaper delivered in it for several years. That particular rock came from the Noge McCuan placed near the Beef Trail Spring. When Darrel Stoval acquired some of that property he had a huge pond build and the bulldozer broke open some of the geodes and the white sand spilled out of them. Incidentally, Darrell's pond is spring fed, and that spring is the Beef Trail Spring.

Beth McCorstin made a mosaic type sand painted from the various colored sand collected from some of the hollow rocks. It pictured a road winding through the desert and she glued small pieces of petrified wood around it for a border. It hung above the fireplace in the big family room that they had built on the east side of the house. I never visited them without going in and admiring that work of art.

After Ross passed away she gave me the picture and said, "Willis, every one of my kids knows that you are suppose to get this picture when I'm gone, but I just wanted to have the pleasure of giving it to you." I hung in on my living room wall and it was admired by all who saw it. When Beth passed away I took it down from the wall and gave it to her daughter, Carolyn Sue Taylor of Norman, OK.

The hollow rocks of Dark Corner are becoming increasingly rare, but they still hold a mysterious intrigue for those who discover one for the first time. The white, rose or red-colored sand that spills out of one when it is broken is still just as fascinating to me as it was when I was a child. If you live in or visit Dark Corner, I hope you have seen or will discover this geological phenomenon.