Things Found

 

Queenie at the dig site



My dog, Queenie, is one of the greatest scientists in the world. It’s not surprising that you don’t know about her, given how little press truly great scientists receive.  She is an archaeologist. Excavation is her passion.  I’ve participated on other digs, and they turned out to be nothing but a lot of dirt and heat and dehydration and pretty irresponsible speculation. Anybody would want the fossil they found to be part of the largest Tyranosaurus Rex ever to walk the earth or evidence of a heretofore unknown civilization. It's only natural. But what’s the likelihood?  And does one fossilized fragment buried 20 feet deep in the lithified sediment of a Pleistocene river really warrant hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to  go in with everything from a backhoe to a toothbrush and dig a big hole in a fragile habitat to get at whatever prehistoric fragments might be left? I’m not so sure. Especially when the prehistoric fragments turn out to be 100-year-old antelope teeth. Hardly a significant find. I'm all for scientific discovery, but just because one can doesn't mean one should. And "because it's there" isn't enough justification either, not in this economy. Food for thought, is all I'm sayin'.

Detail of dig site and spoil heap.

Anyway, Queenie and I were out in the backyard the other day.  I was cleaning up the space where our very decrepit garden shed used to be, raking up bits of shingling, rusted nails, pieces of arsenic-treated wood, cardboard, other detritus.  Queenie was working at her latest dig site under the back fence. She works on it a little bit every day, rain or shine.  As I straightened up from trying to gather yet more rapidly disintegrating black plastic ground cover, I noticed something bright red in Queenie’s spoil-heap (which is archaeological lingo for “pile of dug-up dirt.”)  I reached down to pick it up, thinking to save her the effort of mapping, tagging and cataloguing this thing that was probably just another piece of trash--a piece of unidentifiable plastic or yet another wadded up pop can--but it turned out to be an actual artifact!  I can tell it is a real, live artifact because this is what it looks like. 

This is, without a doubt, a fire engine.  (AA battery provided for perspective.)

Note the inscription. This fire engine is from Denver, a fascinating discovery, because it indicates one of two possibilities:  Either trade with regions east of the Rocky Mountains 30 years ago was more common than we had previously realized, or my dog has succeeded in digging all the way from the Puget Sound area right through to the Colorado front range, an achievement of great import to both physical and social sciences, I think you'll agree.

This is why Queenie is one of the world’s best scientists.  She gets results.  None of this finding a teeny little rock that could be a bone, and if it is a bone, it might be a carved flute or it could be a hominid metatarsal. “Finds” like that happen, scholarly papers get written up with a lot of speculation and a lot of money gets flung out into the desert and never heard from again and then Spielberg makes a movie about it.  Crazy nutso.  When my dog digs something up, you damn well know what it is. 

 Also, she always comes in under budget.

Moving on.  My next found object is one of my favorite rocks. 

Don’t quote me on this because I was a geology major for only 3 semesters, but my best guess is that this is a pegmatite consisting of K-feldspar, amphibole and mica. Along the seam where the mica and amphibole (black rock) meet, there used to be garnets, but they fell off long ago. I’ve used this rock pretty hard.

I really shouldn’t have to explain why I say “one of” my favorite rocks, but if you need help understanding, read Byrd Baylor’s fine, fine book, Everybody Needs a Rock.  (by Byrd Baylor. Illustrated by Peter Parnall. (Atheneum, 1974.) Read it today, especially if you didn’t even know you needed a rock.  It starts like this, but you’ll have to get a copy to find out the rules.  Here goes:

Everybody Needs a Rock

Everybody needs a rock.
I'm sorry for kids who don't have a rock for a friend.
I'm sorry for kids who only have tricycles bicycles horses elephants goldfish three-room playhouses fire engines wind-up dragons and things like that - if they don't have a rock for a friend.

That's why I'm giving them my own ten rules for finding a rock...
Not just any rock.
I mean a special rock that you find yourself and keep as long as you can - maybe forever.

If somebody says, "What's so special about that rock?"
Don't even tell them.
I don't.

Nobody is supposed to know what's special about another person's rock.

All Right.
Here are the rules: 

I’ve always loved rocks and brought home buckets of them when our family took drives up into the Poudre Canyon when I was a kid.  But this rock found me.  I was 7 years old, riding my bike on a dirt trail in the field beyond our house.  I noticed a black thing sticking up in the middle of the trail and decided to see if I could run over it.  I hit the black thing, my tire jammed, I flew over the handlebars, landed hard and lay there,  winded and furious.  When I could breathe again, I got up, stumped over, and kicked the black thing as hard as I could. It turned out to be a rock, not a piece of cloth or plastic.  I have never been so angry at a rock in all my life.  That rock had to be mine.  The next day, I went back, took a stick and dug and dug and dug all around the black part until I could see that it was attached to a bigger, pale part. I’d never seen a rock like that before, so it had to be special. When I finally pried it out of the ground and brushed it off, the mica sparkled in the sunshine, the garnets flashed, the feldspar looked strong like marble and fragile at the same time with its pink blush. The black of the amphibole didn't look flat, like asphalt or construction paper, and it wasn't shiny like patent leather.  It was deep like a cave entrance or walking in the dark at night.  A mysterious space.  I fell in love right away and have kept this rock with me ever since, which is a goodly number of years now.  We belong together.   

Really, if you don’t have your own rock, you need to think about getting one as soon as possible.  Everybody Needs a Rock.

 

The last found object I want to tell you about here is . . . well, for lack of a better word . . . my mojo.  It’s been missing for years, and I’ve been floundering without it. Depression runs in my family and I've got it bad. An "episode" can last literally years and doesn't require a triggering event to come on.  It seeps in like fog and immobilizes me.  Living through those days is like trying to walk through the darkness of that amphibole.   When I struggle to move, I stumble around, usually in the wrong direction, and a lot of pain and destruction and more depression happen as a result. Most frustrating of all is that so many days go by, my face numb from standing with it pressed into the corner. 

Example of fog-stalled project:  Flannel jammies that should have been a weekend project took a year and a half to finish.

But something happened this past summer. The mojo came back with the light. Or something like that.  It's impossible to explain if you've never been there, and I couldn't tell you what made the difference, but I'm better.  

 

Things look brighter.  I feel hopeful again.  It’s good to have the mojo back.

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