Feedback from the last story seemed to revolve around the notion that I may have exaggerated the time I spent in cemeteries as a youth. Unfortunately, I haven't told the half of it. Here's another scenario that occurred when I was in 5th grade:
Dad had volunteered, and in some cases contracted, to mow and maintain a few cemeteries which held some distant relatives. (Back then it seemed to me that our family had A LOT of relatives, mostly dead, but that few had the same last name. I wondered if other families had this problem.) Our usual routine on a weekend was to go to a cemetery on Saturday morning after a few "vital" cartoons and Dad would have me, and my sister when she came, pick up sticks to put in a fire pit or bonfire location while he was mowing. We weren't really organized and he frequently had to yell to split us up as one tended to follow the other. The mowing took longer than the stick gathering, so we would frequently play until Dad was finished. After he loaded up the mower we would often light the fire and roast marshmallows or hot dogs on sticks we had held back from the flames. (More on fire later, though it isn't such a good tale.)
If we had a particularly good day where the grass hadn't grown enough we would go to another cemetery. Often one where Dad had transcription work to do or where he just wanted to see what additions had happened since his last visit. There was one whose name was something like Spring Hope that my sister and I visited in the summer of 1982. At first we looked around to see the lay of the land while Dad did his thing. It was mostly a modern cemetery, so the stones were either small or were flat to the earth. We preferred the Gothic look of our usual haunts, with tattered VFW flags marking the last resting places of soldiers from days past and tall granite pillars for the family plots. (I'll admit to feeling a bit sad every time I saw one of the old child gravestones which were usually bone white with the carving of a kneeling lamb on the top.) In any event, this graveyard was kinda boring. I don't know which of us decided the next idea was good, but we chose to pick flowers for Mom from among the discarded funeral arrangements dumped by the maintenance people at the edge of the woods. That's when we found the stream.
About a 10 foot drop down a wooded cliff face was a small stream with a good swift current. At this time I was very much into engineering and the idea of building a dam came into my head. My sister often followed my lead because, being two years younger, she hadn't discovered the idolatry of Barbie. (More on that story at a later time as well.) So we climbed down the embankment and started to explore the stream for a likely dam spot. I selected the curve nearby because the water had to slow and the chasm was narrowest at that point between the wooded hills. The problem was that there was a large pinkish-gray clay deposit right there. Of course, in the way of children, we immediately decided the dam could wait while we fashioned the clay into pottery to be baked on the shale bank of the stream. It was a short time later that I found the first fossil.
I found set into stone the footprints of what appeared to be a large bird. The clawed feet seemed to be about six inches across the foot with three front toes and one in the back. Laura found one or two of shelled creatures, though I can't say where they are now. Mine I washed off and donated to my social studies teacher whose name, if I recall correctly, was D'Zurko.
I wish the story had a happier ending. It took about a year before we could convince Dad to visit the cemetery again. In that time the spring rains had done their work: the clay bank was washed away and we didn't find a trace of anything interesting in the stream after an hour's hard search.
So what is the lesson in all this you ask? I'm not sure I have one, but if I must I would say hold on to your fossils. Enough said.
No comments:
Post a Comment