Loud Lincoln #4

Here there be dragons.

It’s hot, and I’m tired of working in the afternoon sun. It’s been three days and I’ve found nothing. Nothing at all. The red-orange rock is unyielding as I continue digging in my little twined off square. The Texas Red Rock beds have birthed huge insights into paleontology, but not today, and not for me. Dr. Bakker seems to have the most energy, walking amongst us to check progress, and to give an encouraging pat on the back, or a bottle of water. Digging, sifting, brushing, digging some more. I smell like sweat, the pits and collar of my shirt are red with the crumbled rock of ages clinging to the moisture I produce.

I drift back to the cold winter days that drove me to the attic. The attic was the warmest part of the house (heat rises). There I found some dead uncle’s encyclopedia, and happened upon the entry “Dinosaurs”. The information was from the 50’s, with black and white sketches that would make a modern anatomist scoff. But I was hooked. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus had separate entries still, years later they were actually found to be the same creature. On cold winter evenings I’d be surrounded by relics of a by gone era, looking even deeper in the pages for a by-gone millennium. Dinosaurs were an obsession, a fantasy, and in the intervening years I studied them fervently, searching for clues in old books that would dispel the mists of time and make these ginormous critters, clearer, realer. My little kid brain couldn’t fathom epochs.

The site I’m working on now is about 2 hours from Dallas, so it’s rare that we have any tourists. But Dr. Bakker is now giving a small tour to a couple of bedraggled Wisconsin’s, who are clearly melting in the heat, their passion for dinos forgotten as they listen to Dr. Bakker and watch him hop among the sites, explaining what we’re searching for: Dimes. The proper name is Dimetrodons, but with the heat, you can afford to drop a few syllables here and there. Dimes aren’t even really dinosaurs, on the evolutionary chain of things-they are a precursor to mammals. I chuckle as Dr. Bakker explains it all, and a kid asks if we are digging up Great Aunt Betty times a thousand.

I entered Paleontology with a fantasy. Big finds, fantastic creatures, large sums of money. All myths, I might as well be searching for the Loch Ness monster. With Paleontology, you’ve got to have an imagination, have a hope that some day you might find something big. But what we really do is carve dragons out of the earth, make since of them, explain them, whittle them down to words on a page of an academic journal. We take something majestic and knock it down to dry, pretentious babble. Hardly the notion that pulled me into this field. The kid in the attic no longer feels the mysticism of a by gone era. Mostly I grumble good-naturedly about the heat, the dirt, and how long I have until my master’s degree is done.

But sometimes, when it’s cooler-I dream I’m in the attic, looking for dragons.