So there I was, ‘cause that’s how all good stories start. I was in the twenty-second year of my existence, and preparing for the adventure of a lifetime. Or at least a college career. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it was the eve of the Historical Geology field trip. The 112-geology class was going out in the middle of nowhere, Utah, peeling off of the dirt road and wandering even further into a barren wasteland. Oh yes, it was the dream of any geology student worth his (or her) halite! A weekend of traveling in a stuffy van pulling a trailer, wandering around the Utah desert looking at formations that defy general principles of geology, and chasing 450 million year old fossils through shale pits and up mountains. Nothing could ruin this moment.
I was in the final moments of preparation before drifting off into a blissful slumber filled with dreams of Elrathia the size of volcano bombs when my roommate, Dylan, tromped into the apartment with mayhem on his mind. He noticed the assortment of picks, chisels, field journals, camping equipment, grits and the fragment of stromatolitic limestone that has become my personal pet rock, and stopped dead in his tracks. The atmosphere in the apartment became as thick and cold as the cynobacterial mats that our class would be visiting in the next few days. A slight, evil grin appeared on his face, and I knew that this could get ugly.
"Whatcha up to??"
I wasn't sure the best way to respond. The wrong response, and I could kiss a future ride to Wal-Mart to get Oreos goodbye.
"Well, my geology trip is tomorrow. Thought I might get the necessities together before morning."
His eyes narrowed. "Fair enough. What are you doin' on this trip?"
"Oh, chasing some fossils, looking at some formations, climbing up an uplifted reef, and driving out to some cynobacterial mats. It should be fun."
"Sweet man! Is that what you want to do?"
I hesitated. "I wouldn't mind it if we could find some rocks other than fossils. But I'm not complaining."
"What is it you want to find?"
His curiosity put me in a cautions mode. It could be actual curiosity, but previous curiosity from roommates had proven to not be necessarily fatal, but was an experience I wouldn't wish to go through again.
"Actually, I wish we could find some coprolites. They look really nice when they've been polished up."
He wasn't easily impressed. "Coprolite? What's that? Something you eat? Hahaha!"
"It is actually
paramineralized dinosaur feces. I know that sounds gross, but it actually looks
pretty cool."
"Feces?"
I explained. "It is fossilized dinosaur dung."
"DINO POO! Haha, you want to go find dino poo!!"
This conversation could have been worse, so I proceeded. "Well, I guess that’s one way to put it..."
"DINO POO!"
I was accustomed to a slightly more scientific range of vocabulary, and wasn't sure how to respond.
"Let me show you a picture..." "DINO POO!" shouted Dylan over my feeble attempts to justify a fascination with the excrement of 100 million year old extinct critters.
"No, really, let me show you some of it, its quite pretty." I pulled up a chair and started stabbing at the keys on my keyboard before he could once again belittle a dazzling geologic conglomerate of minerals. Dylan pulled up close and surprisingly remained quiet as I googled coprolite and pulled up the first picture I could find.
"That looks like POO!"
I couldn't argue. I should have looked at the picture before pulling it up.
"Give me a sec, let me find a good pic."
"DINO POO!"
I didn't have to search long before finding some beautifully tumbled (and overpriced) coprolites that would stun even Dylan with their radiance.
"Not gonna lie, that’s kinda cool!"
I was grateful for his understanding. "See, it's really cool what Mother Nature can do, isn't it?"
"DINO POO!"
I sighed and looked at the clock. It was past my bedtime.
3 days later….
I
stumbled back into the apartment just before curfew, bone-tired and scraped up
but thrilled with the weekends catch. Its not every Saturday night that you get
to come home from a weekend romp with 30 lbs worth of trilobites, other
Cambrian/Ordovician age organisms forever frozen in stone caskets, and a
beautiful Receptaculitid specimen that William Buckland himself would have been
proud of.
The
roommates, I soon found out, would not be so impressed to find an assortment of
shale over half of the living room. I tried to keep my new treasures out of the
Xbox/Wii/Rock Band/Guitar Hero/sound system/projector/TV area of the living
room, but didn’t quite succeed.
“CODY!
No fair having a landslide in the living room!”
"Shoot, you leave any rocks in Utah?”
Protesting that everyone else on the trip brought home enough rocks to sink a battleship (or at least enough to give the trailer a flat) had little effect.
“These are not staying here.”
"Shoot, you leave any rocks in Utah?”
Protesting that everyone else on the trip brought home enough rocks to sink a battleship (or at least enough to give the trailer a flat) had little effect.
“These are not staying here.”
My roommate Cam had little appreciation for the finer things in life, it would seem.
“Just looking, I’ll get them out of the way here in a minute,” I muttered. Why I couldn’t take up my 1/6th of the living room, I will never know.
I headed to my bedroom to dump everything but my rocks, and stopped short. The small part of the room I shared with Dylan that was not occupied with his computers, personal Xbox, guitars, a small mountain of DVDs and 12 two liters of Mt. Dew was now occupied with a futon. Any chance for storing a wealth of geologic spoils in my own bedroom was now Dead On Arrival.
You know, its not that I mind sharing space, he owned most of the room’s space already. But what’s a guy to do when his rocks aren’t given the proper amount of space to be properly appreciated?? I decided to let Cam and Dylan fight it out. I try not to get involved in the petty day-to-day drama of a college apartment. I prefer a more simplistic lifestyle, out with the fresh air, some rocks, possibly a Dactylioceras or Flexicalimine to keep me company.
Dylan romped back into the apartment well after curfew, citing an official round of Halo in the apartment next door. And as has been the case thus far in this tale, he too was unimpressed with my recently acquired collection of mineral matter of variable composition, with a few remains, impressions, and traces of living things of former geologic ages mixed in. Lucky for me, he enjoyed needling me more than he disliked my rocks. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get out of people…
“Hey, where’s your DINO POO?!? Ha ha ha!!”
I was slightly less than amused. Sleep had been a bit on the short side lately, and my patience was wearing as thin as a sheet of muscovite.
“I’m afraid that we had to put the Dino Poo on hold,” I said gravely. “We had to return post-haste due to a medical emergency.”
His eyes widened. “What, who died?!?”
“No one died. However, a maiming occurred while searching for the remains of former organisms, and sometimes those things get ugly. I guess its part of the job though…”
“What happened?!”
I took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “Well, if you must know, I was the injured party. While carefully uncovering layers of hardened clastic sedimentary boundstone, I was assaulted by a horde of rampaging Elrathia. Somehow, I managed to escape with only minimal wounds on my forearm. A cursory glance at the lacerations on my antibrachium showed no demand for immediate medical attention, so we skedaddled. We wandered around in the desert, not able to find our way out. We climbed a mountain to regain our bearings, and slogged through cynobacterial mats from a playa, passing through an Ordovician-age uplifted reef before we found the trail back up here to Rexburg. Its rough out there man.”
Poor Dylan just looked as if I had swung a gridiron in his face. “ugh…what?”
“Got some nice scrapes on my arm while digging for trilobite fossils. You take out pieces of shale and split 'em open, revealing the trilobites. And so I decided to try looking in a new area, and climbed up the face of the rock about ten feet. When I was up there, I got more excited about fossils than about keeping my footing, and kind of remembered the importance of it when it was too late. So I kinda had to jump out from the rock face with a 25 lb. hunk of shale at ten feet and, yeah…my arm’s not feeling real red hot.”
Dylan pondered this new development in his case Futon vs. Rocks, and must have come to some conclusion, though he declined on sharing me the details of the outcome. Couldn’t blame him. Had I found out earlier that evening that I was out of Peanut Butter Capt’n Crunch cereal, I too would be disinclined to publicize the results of my findings.
“So no dino poo?” Dylan was a rather persistent individual.
“Fraid not son,” I answered “One of these days, you and me, we’ll go out and beat around the brush, and someday, maybe someday, we’ll find some of this stuff for you.”
“Yeah, cause then I could have some DINO POO!”
I sighed and looked at the clock. It was past my bedtime.
