Lake George
Larry Johnson’s handsome face was weathered by the relentless sun after two decades of guiding whale-watching trips and nature expeditions in the ovenlike heat of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. The hours were long and the days left him exhausted. He started thinking about retirement. He needed a hobby.
The hobby would not be golf, a game dating to the early 1400s when Scottish men walked the seaside sand dunes hitting a small rock with a stick and thus achieved their goal of getting the heck out of the house on Saturdays.
Neither did Johnson choose sport fishing, a hobby traced to the year 200 when Roman essayist Claudius Aelian wrote about Macedonian trout anglers who used artificial flies and, you’d guess, also learned how to lie about the one that gotteth awayeth.
The hobby that Johnson stumbled onto made those pastimes seem absolutely modern. Johnson’s retirement hobby was formed some 4.5 billion years ago.
Johnson is a meteorite guy.
It was just after noon on Sunday when the clouds rolled over the landscape to the west of this small Colorado mountain town. And then the winds came. Johnson and others who’d set up exhibit booths at the Lake George Gem and Mineral Show scrambled to keep papers and documents from blowing away. Johnson countered the wind with chunks of dust, rock and metal that had been forged together, formed spheres and grew ever larger in the distant reaches of our galaxy.
Meteorites make terrific paperweights.
“Whoa, don’t want to lose that one,” Johnson said as a gust lifted a document from his table. He ended the paper’s bid for freedom by plopping on top of it a chunk of stone and nickel meteorite that slammed into a field in Campo del Cielo, Argentina.
Johnson, 68, brings his collection of meteorite fragments to only a few shows each year. He sells a few slices of the stone and metal missiles that slammed into our planet.
“I’m definitely not making a living doing this,” he said, laughing.
Johnson, who lives in Monument, goes to the shows these days mostly to help people who believe they’ve found a chunk of space treasure. Most of the time they haven’t. A woman approached on Sunday with a bagful of small, broken objects she said she’d found recently near the summit of Pike’s Peak. She thought they were meteorite fragments. Larry took a long look.
“I think it’s a chunk of cast iron,” he said.
The woman looked dejected. Johnson said he’d take a fragment back to his home laboratory and conduct some tests to make sure. The woman looked happier.
A while back a man came to him. Said he’d found meteorite fragments in the Arizona desert.
“It was a freakin’ cannonball,” Johnson said. “It had a distinct radial pattern pointing toward the center. An ancient Spanish cannonball. Not a meteorite, but a treasure for sure.”
The passion for meteorites struck Johnson on a hot April day in 1993 during a whale-watching trip around an island off the Mexican coast near the town of La Paz. Johnson brought his clients ashore for lunch. He wandered off, exploring, as he often did. And suddenly at his feet rested a sizable chunk of odd-looking rock. Johnson’s heart thumped.
It turned out to be a fragment of a stony meteorite, rock and dust and minerals that formed in space. A lab at the University of California at Los Angeles authenticated the 4.5-million-year-old treasure.
In 2001, on a return expedition to the island, Johnson found another chunk of the same meteorite. The pieces, totaling 869 grams, are now reunited. They rest together in a polished wooden box that Johnson displayed at the recent outdoor rock and mineral show. Together they are officially the Isla del Espiritu Santo (Island of the Holy Ghost) meteorite, named by Johnson for the island where they were found.
Johnson was raised by an inquisitive father, a botanist by training but a man with an interest in all things scientific. Albert Johnson taught his son to be curious. And it was, perhaps, that ingrained quest for discovery that caused his son to wander away from an island lunch on that steamy April day in 1993, a day that would give Larry a hobby, a retirement passion, and send him down the path of galactic wonder.
Or not.
“To be honest, I just needed to get away from my clients for a while,” Johnson said. “Those people could drive you nuts.”
1Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
