Geo-Dudes

A Story of Tradition and Family
He sits quietly in his chair, rocking back and forth polishing a bronze agate the size of a robin’s egg with a dingy rag. The air around him is filled with a quiet clamor from his mumblings as he continues polishing. Another much younger man leans against a red trailer staring intensely at his phone. The man in the chair is not a small man. Wearing a dirty checkered shirt and ripped blue jeans, and with his bushy grey beard he gives the distinct impression of a weathered lumberjack.
In his lap sits a polished twisted cane made from the branches of a diamond willow, a tree found only along sections of the Missouri river.
Families walk quickly by his stall averting their gaze from him. Despite that he looks up and gives a grin of more gums than teeth. The children freeze. Their stares are blank from fear or surprise. Then wide grins creep slowly to the corners of their faces as they laugh and run at the stall, not waiting another moment to gape at this man’s treasures.
This is the Haymarket Farmers’ Market. It is a place where tradition matters. It is a place where authenticity matters. It is a place where interaction with the customer matters. It is where the individual matters.
We are transitioning to a modern world where craftsmanship and art are being violently ripped apart. Efficiency is the only goal. When building we consider support strength, internal space, balance, elevator speed, resistance to decomposition, bathroom access, stair comfort, window tint, etcetera etcetera. But a craftsman takes pride in all his work, every design, every cut, every inch of what he makes is intended to serve an aesthetic purpose. That’s why for centuries artists would leave marks, signatures, and insignias on their pieces. There’s no point now, though.
Pat Akins is a craftsman.
He is doing more than handing children shiny pebbles and little jewels he’s passing on a tradition, a legacy far older and wider than himself, and Pat is a big boy. Pat comes from a big family, really big. He has five brothers. Each brother an artist of some discipline, one a carpenter, two construction workers, one metallurgist, and a wood carver. Not to mention their father, a carpenter for his entire life.
It doesn’t stop there either. Pat’s grandson Chris, now 22, has been a part of his grandfather’s business since he was in the third grade.
He still spends every Saturday in the summer down in the Farmers’ Market with his grandfather selling his beautiful collection of minerals. Even after carrying boulders totaling 2,000 lbs for the shop his interest in selling the stones still haven’t been jaded.
Today Chris attends the University of Nebraska Lincoln and is a senior pursuing a career in writing fiction with his English major. That hasn’t kept him from following his grandpa all around the Midwest to show and exhibit their materials. The two are an inseparable pair and their bond is obvious even to passerby.
You think the petrified wood is old? Once the old man fossilizes I’m going to put him on display and sell for a nice profit teases Chris. The old man doesn’t skip a beat, it would take a product as good looking as me for you to finally get a sale around here he says.
The farmers’ market is filled with funny man/ straight man banter all day. The majority of the stalls’ customers are attracted just by the humor trickling down the street. All the rest is done by the sparkling gems.
These two comedians aren’t all fun and games though. Pat has to step away from his stall on the phone to do business with two different groups of people.
The first is all of his suppliers, people Pat has met throughout his travels across the country and the globe. Even though you can’t tell from looking at him, Pat is not a stationary man. He’s sold a million trinkets on the side of his job working in construction. That extra money has let him go around the world. He has contacts in Brazil, South Africa, and the Czech Republic.
Once we actually went on vacation there (the Czech Republic) and while I was walking in the downtown area where there used to be a lot of conflict and I bent over and took a chunk of slab out of the ground where machine gun fire had damaged part of the pavilion. After that I took the slab and polished it with diamond powder and it’s now on my mantle.
The second is all of Pat’s online customers, who view his wares using a website that promotes local store owners. The website has galleries of his crystals, agates, and petrified logs and encourages anyone who’s interested to phone him immediately. He knows his wares so well he calculates the value in his head over the phone and shrewdly tells the final transaction’s cost. It’s an impressive scene, but Chris treats it like nothing.
It’s not impressive when you have several centuries’ worth of practice he jokes.
Pat begins to rant at the joke because does have a long history with the geodes. Thirteen years and his cutting and polishing rocks have forced him to replace equipment time and time again.
We have synthetic diamond saws, harder than natural diamonds, just wearing down little by little every day. Our diamond powder isn’t in any better shape; we seem to polish about a hundred stones before we have to look for another bag of the stuff. The petrified wood is tougher than steel, we have to polish our diamond saws with diamond powder just to leave a scratch on the damn things. Don’t even ask about our cart, interjects Chris. I’m worried it will drop a boulder on my foot any day now.
Chris and Pat are quite the pair. Pat is a relic from a time where hand crafted meant special and important, Chris from the contemporary era, where the same quality of work can only be seen as a simple trinket. Yet the traditions live on, the art persists, taking a new medium. There is one thing for certain, the duo are like two crystals in a geode.