I was channel-surfing this afternoon, waiting for ITN to come on, and hit the end of Raising the Titanic. When they're in the English cemetery trying to find the stash of Hollywood-designed secret radioactive element. The actor is using a Cutie-Pie. That is (or was?... things change) the radiation health worker's name for the hand-held radiation detector that they love to use in the movies. The one that looks like a big fat raygun, and makes lots of clicking noises when you point it at a radiactive source.

I love when they use one of those things to make you think something is dangerously hot... making it buzz like 10 million angry hornets. Of course they never show you that the machine has five to ten sensitivity settings, and the lowest will buzz like mad at an old radium watch.

And I suddenly wondered where my thorium was. One of my university classes took us on a field trip to the mountains along the Front Range of Colorado. The main point was to show how natural radiativity levels compare with what humans generate. We went to a cemetery for one of the old semi-ghost towns (Blackhawk?).

The town's boomed now, thanks to legalized gambling. But at that time it was a sleepy, undeveloped satellite of Boulder. We wandered through the graves from the late 1800s and early 1900s, armed with our cutie-pies. Must have been a sight.

These were miner's graves, and covered with natural spoil, very little dirt or grass. And the graves were hot, just like in the movie. From natural deposits of thorium, a radiactive daughter, or by-product, of uranium. Hot if you set your cutie-pie for the right setting, like in the movie. And the movie made me wonder where my thorium was.

I snagged a small piece of the hottest stuff off the cemetery (but not off a grave, for some reason) and brought it home. It sat on my desk then, and every desk after every move thereafter. Last I remembered, it was on the desk in the office (not the computer desk... the other one, the one with papers piled 61 cm high (I just measured)). But the wife was worried about having a "dangerous" source of radiation in the house, especially when she was pregnant. And I hadn't seen my thorium for years. Had she pitched it?

So I stopped surfing, gave up on ITN and had to dig for my thorium. Through the years of detritus in the mementos box on the desk, and under the one good funnel-web. My thorium.

Its an ordinary enough rock. A flat, 1/4-inch slab of rust-colored conglomerate. The thorium is in the layer of shiny-blue and green mineral on one side. Almost like Black Hills gold.

And it's hot.

As I roll the rock in my fingers, I can imagine the thorium nuclei exploding, with alpha particles shooting out and bouncing off my skin. And the beta particles shooting out along with them, blasting through the skin like it was porous paper until they finally hit a water molecule in one of my cells, and die in a burst of energy.

I look at this little rock now, and wonder about my compulsion to find it. I hadn't thought about it for a long time. Why today?

I know it has something to do with Pischina's cat.

This is the power of creation in my hand. The energy jammed into the nuclei of those atoms of thorium came from a star that blew up in a super-nova somewhere a long, long time ago. Before the earth formed. Before our sun was born.

These atoms have been around for billions of years, and some of them have chosen this minute, this second to explode and change into something else. Another atom of a different element, and a flash of energy.

Is that what we are? The flash of one thing changing into another? A brief spark in the aging of the Universe?

Yes, animals have souls. I have been present at the deaths of a lot of animals, many of which I caused. Deer, elk, coyotes, golden eagles, robins and horny toads. They all have that spark in them. You feel it gone when they die.

But where does that spark go?