mud and bones

I’ve turned my corduroys inside out so I won’t get red clay on the rest of my clothes in the suitcase. I’ll let the mud dry on my shoes and slough off on its own. The “dry wash” of the Sound of Silence trail was anything but, and the name of the trail had issues too — I heard insects, I heard jet planes — though I did have those two hours mostly to myself.

Earlier in the day I’d encountered more fellow tourists than expected, mostly 60-something couples engaged in verbal arm tugging. I’m sure the place gets a lot busier and more obnoxious in the summer. These folks were mostly fit and friendly, maybe even the guy who insisted I “go ahead” on a narrow vertical path alongside a cliff embedded with ancient clams and remnants of dinosaur bones I couldn’t find. Maybe I was mad at him for his chattiness and because he pointed out to his wife a very obvious line of vertebrae a few yards up before I had the chance to discover it for myself, although I was looking all over that damned wall. Instead of gratefully passing, I said, “I was about to say the same thing.” They were headed upward, and I down, and it seemed to me they could pass more safely. Oh, well. I grumbled something and took the offer, chastised myself for being moody and rejoined the main trail leading to the Dinosaur Quarry Exhibit Hall. Built in the ’50s and recently renovated, the massive wood and glass structure encases an expansive wedge of the Morrison Formation scattered from wall to wall with 149-million-year-old dinosaur remains, apparently including allosaurus, diplodocus and stegosaurus bones. I’m straining to do justice to the scale here — think of a floor-to-ceiling aquarium tank and multiply by ten — because the exhibit is like a sepia version of that aquarium tank, and none of the dinosaurs move, of course, or appear recognizable to a layperson.

On my way to the next hotel (somewhere in the middle of northern Colorado), I listened to more podcasts. One was an interview with a biographer who told about President Harry Truman’s unusual ability to find his way even though he agreed with his own detractors that he appeared too unassuming and reserved to make a great leader. Another was a 1935 Lux Radio Theater program about Louis Pasteur starring Paul Muni. It recounted how the French scientist looked where no one else was looking and discovered the anthrax vaccine and helped introduce germ theory, saving millions upon millions of lives.

Tonight I know where I am on the map, but I arrived after dark, so I have no idea what it looks like outside. I’m guessing there are mountains because there are some lights way up high that aren’t stars. For tens of millions of years the fossil bones in Dinosaur National Monument were visible, lifted by earthquakes and tectonic activity and exposed to daylight, but nobody noticed until 1909, when Earl Douglass went in search of great lizards for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I suppose you really need time, persistence and luck on top of a healthy sense of self-confidence to do anything of importance, if anything is important, given the incomprehensible vastness of geologic time and beyond. There was a quote in the Lux podcast spoken by Muni that would be appropriate here, but I searched back and forth across the 59-minute show and can’t find it. I guess that’s just as appropriate.