Moonlight Gemstones: The Wanderer

Hunting for gems in the vast wasteland of the Chihuahuan Desert

Dion and The Belmonts’ “The Wanderer” plays on a small radio, caked in dust and drips of dried paint. “Oh well, I’m the type of guy who’ll never settle down… with my two fists of iron and I'm going nowhere.”

The hair on the back of Paul Graybeal's neck is standing on end as he hunches over the wheel of a pumice grinder. Sparks fly. His face lights up with a big, gap-toothed smile. “Look at that,” his smile widens as he points to a white striation in the rock. “See the way it just creeps in there. That’s when you know you got it.”

The proprietor of Moonlight Gemstone settles back in at his workstation, surrounded by colorful rocks. “Gemstones,” he says as a means of correction.

“That’s called a Marfa Bouquet,” he continues. “Picked that out of one of my favorite spots not too far from here.” He winds his way around the shelves of his shop, which clearly has an organizational code, one which only Graybeal knows.

“Apache, Blue Lapis Lazuli, Plume, Moss, and that?” he says. “That’s the result of this beautiful, iron-colored lava.”

Ask him to divulge some of the spaces where he most likes to hunt for the dusty rock he polishes, and he becomes the slightest bit cagey—cagier still when prodded about his involvement in the film No Country for Old Men, which was filmed in Marfa.

“Oh that?” Graybeal shrugs. “Yeah. Yeah, I had a couple belt buckles in there. Can’t remember which ones, but you’ll watch it now, and you’ll see them.”

Though he trained as an electrician and worked for a number of years at the nearby McDonald Observatory, he taught his eye to find literal gems on the ugly rock formations of Big Bend and began to develop a serious agate collection. Later, he took a class in silversmithing at Sul Ross State University, and a new profession was born.

Graybeal says hunting for rocks is his favorite thing in the world to do. He likens the idea of being isolated in the desert hunting for rocks to that of a well-spent life.

After he runs some water over his newly polished creation, a colorful stone that has become the purest combination of light green and Tar Heel blue, he hands it over. “That’s a Sleeping Beauty Turquoise which has been shaped and polished in the cabachon shape,” he explains. “‘Cabachon’ is French for ‘dome.’”

Walking out of Graybeal’s shop, strolling down the sidewalk back to downtown Marfa’s fourway stop, you can hear another agate screeching as it hits the pumice, and suddenly, Dion and The Belmonts are coaxing the wheel “around and around and around.” Yet the man, much like the wanderer in the tune, isn’t really going anywhere.

Originally published in The Collective Quarterly, Issue Ø (Marfa, Texas), 2014.