Unearthing a life.....

I took this shot in May of 1989. I had leased twenty acres here in the summer of 1988 ... for $500 per year .... for the purpose of digging fossils .... and maybe a bit for the purpose of becoming famous bone diggers. Neil and Rosie and I dug here for seven years -- until the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting at the U of W in the Fall of 1994. By the time we loaded Neil's old wheelbarrow back into his truck for the last time, we had carefully dug out some 500 cubic yards of three million year old stream sediments, creating a considerable hole in the ground. A really, really big hole. One paleontologist wrote and informed us that out 500 cubic yard estimate had to be way off. "That, my friends, is fifty large dump trucks fully loaded," he wrote. I wrote back and said "That's right! And every shovelful was double screened and hand-picked." And I sent him a couple photos of the final hole. He didn't write back.

When Neil and I were kids living on the Milwaukee Railroad down at Smyrna, we excavated a series of square holes in the ground ... with short connecting passages, and roofed the lot over with old boards and 'grain doors' (grain doors were door-sized rough board structures used in box cars to block the car doors and keep wheat, etc. inside). A by-product of our excavations was a plentiful supply of dirt clods. And as brothers are wont to do from time to time, we warred on each other with these handy missiles. The battle would usually stop when one or the other of us (more often me) would catch a dirt clod in the forehead and go temporarily blind from a spray of dirt to the eyeballs.

So, after forty years of pretty much ignoring each other while we divorced wives and raised families, we finally redeveloped a close relationship learning the joys of photography. Odd that, after a couple of years of burning up film, we regressed right back to digging square holes in the ground with little connecting passages. I wonder if this is meaningful?

Probably not.

# posted by Clear Creek Girl : 3:40 PM