Exposure

Getting to the cement quarry is easiest by going over the aptly named Skyway, which takes you up higher than the grain elevators clustered in rows, telling old stories of lost mills.  This raised drive is enjoyable, as Lake Erie and the breakwater are in shades of green layered with teal, the visibility sometimes goes all the way to Dunkirk, a city further down the Lake.  The trouble is, as the driver, you can't look more than 1 or 2 seconds or the car may swerve into a semi, go over the barrier, and end up as an accordion with a creamy meat center.

Triangular white sails of boats pushed about the water creating small wavelets; the descent down brought me to ground and the rusting foundries of the southtowns soldiered the road that led to the site, where shale was once mined for cement.  The company digging had revealed beds of ocean fossils that are now owned by the town of Hamburg, and Penn Dixie has become the largest fossil park open to the public for collecting.  You keep what you find.  Whee!

Usually the elusive Phacops rana trilobite is my goal, but today I wanted something graceful, the genus Spirifer of the winged brachiopods.  For them, you use a trowel and fork, no need to bang away on chunks of obstinate rock. Even though these things look like mollusks, they aren't, for they grew upright on stems that held them like flowers on short stalks.  Entirely different internal system than mollusks, which were just coming around; it's rarer to find a clam or gastropod than these myriad brachs.  But I did.

Now, for the majority of folks, finding a gastropod is not a big wahoo, (you found a snail?), but for me, it's better than a Crackerjack prize.  A pointy small thing that looked like a bear claw hung onto the edge of flaking stone, and was prised off with my fingers.  A horn coral?  Dunno.  But going up to the kiosk where volunteers helpfully identify what you've rescued, the wee thing was said to be indeed a snail, a witch's hat with a tiny curl at the peak.  I can't remember the long Latin name, but can look it up in the guide later.  Also that day rewarded the pouncing on rocks with several clams, which are fragile and better left in the matrix.  I have had the elusive crumble in hand after carefully tapping away excess shale, and so have learned acceptance of dragging home rocks with specimens too frail to bang out.  But my kitchen floor, amid potting soil, pots and now bins marked Brachiopods, Trilobites, and Miscellaneous for corals and bryozoans, is screaming for mercy.  I can still get a frying pan out of the cupboard, so we are good.  Let the linoleum scream.

But there were the brachiopods, the winged sort that are ridged with a central depression, and extended points on either side. They reminded me of the sails seen in the harbor, and maybe the evolved shape had something to do with catching the push of the Devonian ocean waters, just as people took the wing shape from seabirds to make catchers of wind for their boats.  Or perhaps pelicans.  Have you seen pelicans sail?

Storm clouds are running by as night begins, and a thousand wishes are flung upwards by the city for rain, as we are in a drought.  Wind is hurrying them to the east, and so far not a drop has let go of it's place in the sky.  You may as well expect a stream of ribbon candy to undulate earthward and get as much.  I have cleaned the dull, grey profusion of fossilized organisms, and given some a coating of white glue to preserve what layers of carapace remain.  To hold in place.  To further freeze in time, as if the first 380-400 million years wasn't enough.  Nothing stays the same.

Now that they are exposed to air, cats, and bins with stratifications of paper towels, there is inevitable chipping, or simply letting go of an exoskeleton that cannot bear the change in humidity or the chemistry of, the air. Change is inevitable as the wind, which is pushed by temperature of rising heat or cooled by ocean tides and currents. Stone is eroded by wind and sand into arcane visions; landscapes are lifted or washed away by storms; the earth rotates. All is fed by the physics of movement. And here we are, human us busy with our little monkey hands hammering at stone or each other.

We hardly notice our needs until we think it is too late, but it never is.  Don't you worry.  You have to go against the ideal devised by human nature to remain in stasis and thus seek change, how to fix things so that the first sound you hear is your own heartbeat, and that is what makes it difficult.  Take courage and go ahead, there will be adventures that take you to strange, new lands; some are pleasant, yet on other days the inhabitants will happily rob your wallet.

Day has become night, says the glow of the streetlamps; a moon has risen to climb the sky.  A train sounds it's horn before entering the tunnel outside my window, then again at Exchange Street, and a far away wail at the Depew station, the engines humming deeply over the rails, pulling passengers to they wonder where.  Let dreams pull you through the sounds and sighs of the night, through the storms and wild winds within.  Life is a blended chord.  Sleep well, good night.