Time Traveller

Out on the open flat was a beaten shelter that housed lawn chairs and a few tables strewn with tools and informative pamphlets.  Examples of the finds were displayed, with printouts of the geological layers that held each species from 380 million years ago.  I have trouble understanding what one million amounts to, so the idea of this chunk of time makes my head fuzzy.  As a natural encyclopedia of the remains of Devonian marine life, the Penn Dixie Paleontological & Outdoor Education Center is within 12 miles of the city and makes an easy trip for families or anyone else inclined to delve into layers of ancient ocean bed.

Fossils were rife in the soil of Clarence, New York where I spent some childhood years, and a shoebox full of horned corals, crinoid stems and brachiopods was kept under the bed as part of my natural science collection, besides pheasant feathers, woodchuck skulls, and shed snake skins.  It fascinated me that these little sea shell things had once been living critters who went through the mysterious process of fossilization, older than Jesus, the dinosaurs, or even the continents.  The ocean that covered us was shallow, therefore the animals were small compared to those who lived in deeper, more expansive climes.  Also, and this was a surprise, today I learned that New York State happened to be a part of a land mass that was 20 to 30 degrees south of the equator at the time.  Sort of where Kenya in Africa is today.

It was a quick drive past the Ford Stamping Plant, left onto Bayview, left onto Big Tree, and left onto Bristol; closer than the southtowns mall, Penn Dixie is just tucked into what was once a quarry owned by a company who scraped off the top ten feet of shale to sell to a cement manufacturer.  Abandoned, it lay unused until geologists recognized that the exposed Windom layer was significant in an important chapter of Western New York history, simply because of the profusion of fossil life that lay on the ground waiting to be studied, or taken home in buckets and bags.

If you have a science-crazy kid, this is better than Disneyland.  No dinosaur bones to be had, for they were all shoved south by the glaciers some 13,000 years ago.  What's left can fill a quart-sized plastic bag in under a half an hour; bring a small trowel or claw tool to poke at the shale.  To pry out a fossil, all you need is to crumble the shale away with your fingers, it's that soft, almost like a dry mud.  Rinse them off when you get home, and for preservation, paint the fossil with a solution of white glue and water.  Once these things are exposed to air, some begin deterioration, especially the shells, and trilobites have fragile structure to begin with.  It was exciting to find examples of the listed specimens, I may have to find a new shoe box.

The reception was manned by a fellow named Keller who was most cordial in explaining that I shouldn't join the membership until next week, when a whole year would be added to the deal.  This week was just finishing up to September, when I would have to rejoin to get a year's benefits.  Who could argue?  I related that it was my first visit, and Mr. Keller then directed me to someone out in the field, supervising. This was Megan, who was studying geology at a local college and thus came to help diggers understand just what it all meant.  She trotted me into the various areas of the landscape, knowing where the trilobites surfaced, which corner provided cephalopods and clams, and where to dig for brachiopods and snails.  She glowed, and you could feel the mud of Devonian ocean bottoms pulsing through her veins as she bent down  to scoop up specimens, providing a brief dialogue concerning names, what rubble to note, and why we have no granite in western New York.  If you see a slab here, it's from Canada.

Her enthusiasm for the site was unabashed and open, she looked around with eyes that witnessed events from those 380 million years ago.  Split open layers of shale, and you'll find the traces of primordial life that is a little bit of her, of me, of you, and all the life that now exists on earth.  The thing is, she knows it; I think Mr. Keller does also.  There are people enamored of business, the science of economics, poetry, argument, words; good for them, someone needs to tend to it.  There are the ones, however, who poke and observe the natural world, the earth sciences, and these are my favorites.  So much 'why' out there, regarding the entities of sky, water, earth, and the things that call it home, and how their atoms, a sprinkling of everything,  composes the human body.  Brother cephalopod, I greet your shell centuries after the cataclysms, the spilling of sunlight into shallow depths, tectonic movement, and the mechanical inventions that scraped away soil to reveal your whereabouts.  I am undone.

Afterwards, with my bag of fossil loot in tow, I drive over to the nearby big box store for thread and cat food.  At the check out, all heads lift, for a tremendous deluge hits the flat roof, noisy as the fortieth day of Noah's boat ride, hatches battened.  We are at the mercy of the rain, which forcefully descends in white sheets, it's that thick.  I imagine it running in violent rivulets through the beds of shale, rinsing, lifting, and exposing more contents from before the first sauropod footprint.  It rains on us, also, and I canter briskly to the car while Scouts stationed at the front of the parking lot beg for buyers of fundraising candy bars so they can go home to dry off.  Rain, lovely rain.

Now at evening time, the cloud ceiling still hangs low, heavy with humidity.  I have yet to wash the specimens, but that is a job for tomorrow, along with the picking of blueberries.  Thinking of millions of years may not be as vivid tomorrow, but the vibration of salt and hemoglobin created by time and mud will endure, and maybe I will remember where I come from a bit better for the information.  Tonight, I sleep, the depths of the dark sky revolving as it did when.  Watch me, Orion, I breathe air and contemplate the stars, my feet walk paths of clay.  To bed, to bed.  Good night.