Paleontological Expedition no.1

Practically in the shadows of the ominous and unmistakable cooling towers of the nuclear power plant in Danville Pennsylvania is a collection of segments of undeveloped land and water all named The PPL Montour Preserve. (PPL standing for Pennsylvania Power and Light. The electric company, naturally.) After a two hour drive and five minutes of driving much slower, my Mom, my brother, his friend and I got out of the car in the Visitor's Center parking lot. It was Sunday, so the center was closed, but the large sign with a map printed on it is always willing to aid misplaced adventurers. If you should go there even now, you might be greeted with the same useful, though maybe slightly soggy directions to the fossil pit, or anywhere else in the preserve you would like to go.

Eventually we found the sign and the designated parking area. We grabbed our hammers, chisels, brushes and water and crossed the street. We followed a gravel path surrounded by thick vegetation, not putting much effort into hiding our anticipation of what we will see behind the bend.

We saw a pit of broken grey rocks somewhat smaller than a baseball field and a handful of other humans of various ages up on the slanted side. It was wonderful.

Let's rewind a bit. I'm not exactly sure what started my "sudden" interest in paleontology. Or rather, what made me take a more active interest in it. I get quite bored and restless at my job and a small grain of sand quickly turns into a pearl in my intellectually starved mind at work. The grain in this case was a small aquatic fossil I have found several years ago in a stream bed near a house in which I used to live. I wasn't looking for fossils, but when I broke open a rock with a hairline crack running through it for no other reason than "I could," my mind was blown at what I saw.

For years I couldn't identify it. But now I am quite certain it is a type of brachiopod as the characteristic gap in the striations would suggest. It's not unreasonable to assume it came from the Devonian Period which ended about 350 million years ago if my printed authorities are to be belived.

Just think about that. 350 million years. This is before dinosaurs anyone could easily recognize started walking around. In fact, I'm lead to believe that life on dry land was just barely starting to move away from sources of water. It's almost dizzying, but unquestionably exciting.

Pennsylvania was mostly under water for quite a few millenia. The mud and silt that settled at the bottom of this water formed shales that are exposed quite frequently across the countryside. Road crews blasted away some of it to get a highway built through it. The orange cliffs I've seen on the other side of the car widow my whole life are from a world an impossibly long time ago. Now, nearing 30 years old, I'm slightly obsessed in finding the secrets that hide under eons of rock. Eventually my slightly rambling web searches lead me to the designated fossil pit I mentioned above and a few other less specific locations and I wouldn't stop talking about them. (I still won't.)

My brother's birthday found me tagging along and playing miniature golf not too far from here. It's not that the game wasn't fun, but I'm sure you would forgive me for putting an otherwise unhealthy amount of interest in the orange rocks scattered about. That same day our most recent foster sister was working out places to go for her own birthday and %100 jokingly I audibly wondered where I was going to be treated for my birthday too. My mom said that the fossil pit would be interesting to go to sometime.

Huh.

Sometime after my birthday had come and gone, but before my mom's, she texted me to ask when I wanted to go. I ordered tools within the hour and said I hoped they would arrive before the weekend.

This and the threat of wet weather caused a bit of anxiety. The tools came quickly but it rained all day saturday. I wasentally resigned to postponing it to a much later date. Which became the very next day. Which was a hellish morning by the way. Anxiety tries as hard as it can to prevent you from doing anything fun. The weather reports were conflicting and I was very close to using that as an excuse to scrub the whole thing. But after an unfortunate event the night before inolving the ER and my foster sister on which I feel it is unfair to publicly elaborate, my mom basically said fuck it, we need this.

So while the preceeding days were quite wet, this day wasn't bad at all. The sun even showed up for a few minutes. Little yellow and white butterflies flitted about and for most of the day we were alone.

I found a feint and incomplete impression of a shell within the first five minutes. Foolishly, I discarded it thinking I would find much more sophistiated specimins if I dug deeper. My brachiopod had misled my expectations. To say I was disillusioned is inaccurate because I never felt like I was missing out. Even when everyone else was finding something interesting before me.

 I was in my element; attention and mind focused on my task. I felt as if I were on some other planet. Or more appropriately: Earth millions of years ago. The shale really gave the impression of being transported to another world, and then the rock was split to finally reveal an echo, a ghost of a life form that hasn't seen sunlight since the night sky was filled with very different constellations. My mom and I would walk back and forth to share what we found and puzzled over what we were looking at. Whether it be a fossil or just some interesting mineral stuff going on.

I've been finding it a bit difficult to be cheerful lately. I can blame it on a bunch of little things or just one big one, but I know what makes me feel at peace. It may seem like tedium to some but I could have stayed in that pit for hours and hours. But eventually my brother and his friend got bored and everyone got hungary. That's ok. We all found something interesting to take home. My finest specimins are a barely visible hint of a trilobyte and what I suspect is an impression of coral, but it could be a cluster of small, individual creatures.

Danville is a long drive to dig in the dirt, but I've kept an eye out for road cuts that would be safe to park the car by and excavate. There are not many dinosaur traces around here, but several sources claim evidence of Triassic animals can be discovered in the South Eastern part of the state. I would like to check it out, eventually. Ancient sea creatures are a bit more intriguing to me than dinosaurs for whatever reason, but I have made it a goal to find foot prints. It may be extremely difficult and it may never happen, but there is something mystical and wonderful about the thought of touching the ground where an iconic creature once stood. Even more so than its bones. A foot print is a remnant of something that was once living, was once breathing. Something that walked on this planet an unimaginably long time before I ever did. It might be impossible to know what the animal is like, but for a fraction of a second it stepped in the mud. What is a fraction of a second compared to millions and millions of years?

Phano