There are old timers we have all run into along the way, those collectors, object historians, who keep putting the past into the hands of the future. Mr. Rael, my neighbor for over ten years, was one of these history collectors. When we first moved into this Hispanic neighborhood he warned us, “You never lose the big things, but keep your eye on the little stuff.”, and that is what completely covered Mr. Rael’s front yard, little things. He was mostly a metal man; a 1960 pair of Cadillac hubcaps right next to their rims, a pitted aluminum trellis, bundled up ready to go, or the center piece, a full 1950’s chrome table with the set of chairs. But most of these items spewed across his 1500 square feet of yard were unrecognizable items to the untrained eye.
By the time I met Mr. Rael he knew his value. His tin work retablos had doubled in price. There were no bargains. Unlike Mr. Rosen, who ran an antique junk shop on Main St. in Bethlehem, NH, ten years prior, Mr. Rael had learned a gringo would pay good money for an old thing.
Mr. Rosen, on the other hand, had the luxury of being undercover. He could gather perishable wood items and the whole history of Life Magazine, within whose covers you could find such information as the wonders of chocolate added to your baby’s milk or what a healthy wad of tobacco chew could do for your sex life. At Rosen’s you could purchase a great cabbage shredder invention, circa 1940 and instantly become a wholesale vendor of German coleslaw. In truth, the finds at these collector havens could change your life.
Mr. Rosen and his wife Rose, then deep into their eighties, had class. Though keeping one of the major collector tenets of orderly chaos and major disruption of the Dewy Decimal System, their shop held treasures. Unlike the daily newspaper, Mr. Rosen’s new supply would come totally unexpectedly. A summer’s leisurely walk passed his front display window would suddenly excite you with the likes of an authentic pre-war Antwerp diamond scale traded in by a summer vacationing Hassid, sitting there under the hanging 50 watt light, like the hands of blind justice weighing the weight of truth or an oak flip top school desk inscribed with “Johnnie B”, “I love Mary” and the initials of a decade of past and future students.
There where bargains to be had at Rosen’s shop. You could buy an old Coke machine for less than it would cost you to fill it with bottles of Coke. But no one then wanted his old copies of Life Magazines or National Geographic’s. He and Rose lived in the back of the shop on tuna fish and crackers. Rose would wander down to the only restaurant in town and use the pay phone that was out front, to call the owner in side. She didn’t have a phone, but she loved to talk on one. So the restaurant owner and Rose would have a conversation, she in the phone booth saying “It’s hotsy in the bootsy.”, and the restaurant owner from behind the lunch counter, looking at her sweating in that phone booth, trying to coach her out before she suffocated.
These old time collectors have died away and with them, like a house that has been sold five times over, the bargains. Mr. Rael left to live with his children in southern New Mexico before his legs gave out. Like a number of Hispanic New Mexicans, he had made a little stone grotto where he kept a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The statue he took with him. What he did with his metal collection, I never did find out. The spring after he left the new neighbors where digging up the front yard to make a xeriscape garden. Brooke was a landscape architect and Katie was an author. While digging in the dirt right in front of the stone grotto, they hit something hard. Not sure what they had found they dug around until they had uncovered a claw foot bath tub. The real find was not the tub, but what was inside. Mr. Rael had filled the tub with football size pieces of white quartz and black obsidian. Washed off, both where still bright and shiny. Our conclusion was that Mr. Rael had created some kind of secret energy force, a mystical battery right there in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Though Brooke and Katie gave me a piece of obsidian, we all decided the tub and battery should be left in place and we should not mess with the forces of nature. The obsidian and quartz are buried with the tub till this day.
You may ask, “What does this have to do with humates.” Well, when I first became a purveyor of humates I said, here’s a product that could radically change the method of farming in the United States. Here was something that was being used by millions of people throughout the world, yet was being kept out of the common knowledge base of Americans. And I had to ask myself, “Why”. The good news is, I have just returned from a two day conference given by the New Mexico Organic Farming Commission and in three different workshops humates where brought up independently by questions from the audience. In answering one of these questions Clarence Chavez, a soil scientist with the government’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, talked about his early days when he ran into a bunch of hippies in Taos, NM, who had filled up a 3”x 3’ PVC pipe with humates. They poured a quart of water into one end and offered him a cup of the yellow fluid dripping out of the other end, which he refused to drink. In his tone, I heard just another case of disparaging acounter culture until Herbal Essence or Coca Cola usurped their idea. But the real reason I’m telling you about Mr.Rael has to do with two scientific papers that I happened to come across over the weekend, one by a European nuclear group (Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) http://www.fzd.de/FZD/Jahresbericht/2004-2007/Internet_Environment_and_Safety.pdf) (http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=4707521) and the other funded by the NASA Physic’s Dept. (http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14987582). Basically in laymen terms, these scientists took radioactive uranium and put it next to humates. The humates electrons started acting up, but in a “unique and complex way”, so did the uranium electrons. In fact the outer shell of the uranium started breaking down! The scientists, to this date, do not know why or how this happens. The physicist journal words sound more like the description of a mystical battery than that of nuclear scientist discussing nuclear waste.
To understand these experiments here are some extenuating facts:
Though American Green Agricultures humates are not a derivative of coal, humates main ingredients, fulvic and humic acids is abstracted from leonardite (soft) coal by large commercial agriculture conglomerates. ( http://www.healthyhomemall.com/leonardite.asp )These acids are also used by the FDA in experiments and sold in health food stores to remove heavy poisonous metals from the body. Uranium is the heaviest metal that occurs in nature.
The ability of humates to transmute a radioactive material are as profound as Hoffman’s extraction of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) from coal, ( http://didyouknow.org/aspirin/) or Selman Waksman’s discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin from soil.
Who knows what forces of nature emanates from Mr. Real’s obsidian/quartz battery, and who knows what knowledge has been forever lost from Mr. Rosen’s shop.
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