By Matthew Rounis
The story of Found in the Ground Candles begins with one person. Me. Now, I don’t mean to sound full of myself here, I definitely inspired the candles you’re looking at. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
Most kids go through a phase of their lives where they really like dinosaurs. I was no different. Except for me, that phase began a little later, around 12. Luckily, I had the supportive parents I did growing up. When I say they were supportive, I mean it. Their encouragement of my new hobby brought them into a series of increasingly ridiculous situations involving fossils. Though we started our candles with Green River Fish, some of the best stories are some of the other fossil trips we experienced.
The first one I remember was in Big Water, Utah. As we drove by a cliff on the road north, I begged to stop. This cliff was a solid three or four miles off the main road, but my awesome parents stopped anyway. It paid off for me. Every rock I took out of this cliff had a plethora of fossil shells in it. I picked up a few before it was time to continue our journey. We packed up a box and started the car. Or at least, we tried to start the car when we found out the battery of the little Toyota had run out. Triple A wasn’t going to get there for three hours. So what did I do? I found more rocks. By the time we left, the little Toyota was brimming with ancient sea life. Many other parents would have cut me off after that. I’m lucky mine didn’t.
A few years later we were driving the same route on US-89 where I had heard about a dig for some beautiful trilobites in nearby Delta, Utah. What I didn’t know was that Delta was only the beginning of the road to the fossil quarry. So what did my mom and dad do? They trekked our silver Kia minivan across the desert until we came across a leathery old man with three teeth and an excavator. Needless to say, we found a plethora of trilobites in this out of the way spot, some of which are now beautiful candles.
The most insane time we had looking for fossils was in the tiny Arizona town of Jerome. Or, to be more accurate, it was a couple hundred feet above Jerome. I had found a rumor on the internet that a road cut above the tiny town would yield brachiopods, or tiny shells. So what did we do? We willed that minivan to a giant, sheer cliff above the town of Jerome. At this point, I think my mom and dad would have been more comfortable experiencing one of the town’s notoriously unsettling paranormal encounters, because we were pretty high up on a very narrow road. Needless to say, when someone needed to pass us going the other way, everyone’s knuckles were a ghostly white, as we thought that minivan was going to fall. To top it all off, I didn’t even find a fossil that day.
The point of all these stories is that, by the time I had exited my fossil phase, we had a house packed with fossils. I remember when I moved to college, my mom wondered out loud what she was going to do with all the rocks in my room. Turns out, she just needed some time to sit on the idea, because six years later she called me with this idea. What if we took one of the flat rocks I took from Wyoming, and made it into an oil candle? I replied that it would be a great idea. A few days later she had created her first candle. A few weeks later she had sold her first one online. Three months later, the etsy shop is booming and our house looks like my closet did all those years ago. Needless to say, it feels pretty great to see my mom’s idea start to flourish. But now it’s my turn to support. I just hope it doesn’t lead to any close calls on isolated cliffs.
-Matt Rounis
