They said there'd be days like this.
I have been very lucky for only being in my second year of fossiling on the Peace River. When I discovered the amazing honey hole last year, Jack tried to prepare me for the reality of the long haul by pointing out that there were going to be days where I found nothing. NOTHING.
I cannot accept this.
This weekend, on my only day to fossil, I found myself digging, and digging, and digging with very little to show for it. A series of words was running through my mind and it was beginning to sound like a Calvin Klein ad:
I have an Obsession with looking for fossils.
Maybe I'm suffering from Delusion, trying so hard.
Any minute now, Euphoria when I finally find that mammoth tooth.
As the weekend reports trickled in of other hunters' luck and fabulous finds, I mostly had a feeling of Depression, surely CK's least popular fragrance. I felt like I did my first weeks on the river as the old guys called out, "Horse tooth! Meg! Gator scute!" and I called out, "Zilch!"
Maybe my luck had run out. Maybe I never had luck, just brute determination. Or maybe, I was having a normal slow spell and my fossil hobby would be marked by such ebbs and flows during the ensuing years.
I started trying to photograph my meager finds this morning.
It was not improving my mood.
So, by way of a personal attitude adjustment, I poured a year and a half's worth of hemi teeth on a plate for a picture.
Mike looked up from his coffee, saw the mound of fossilized shark teeth, and said, "Wow!"
"Wow!" is right. It's really pretty amazing. These are the teeth of only one kind of shark. I have several more jars full of teeth. And these aren't even the good ones; I keep those in the curio cabinet or in riker boxes. I remember spending hours at Venice Beach and feeling ecstatic to find a few teeth, so worn you could barely tell they were shark teeth.
I'm spoiled!
No comments:
Post a Comment