dead end at the beginning

“There’s no snow on the Sierras.” That was the first thing I thought when I left South Lake Tahoe this morning. I noticed the gray granite mountaintops on the horizon, but I can’t remember looking at the lake. I drove alongside the shore on Highway 50, but if I glanced at the water at all, the color would be in my memory. It’s not. Why is that? Have I really lived so long I’ve begun to take iconic America for granted?

I was watching the traffic, of course, and besides regretting global warming and wondering if rain is on the way, I was thinking of the friends (and family) I’d just visited and the trip ahead of me. The sign on the door of the wooden cabin of my imagination says, “Gone fossil huntin’.” That was an early goal today, but three hours and several podcasts later I found myself doing a Y-turn on a narrow gravel road the width of a loveseat. For the first time I tested the “M2” gear of my car to climb back up from what might have been a record-breaking rollover should I have followed the downhill route to where it allegedly leads — a mystical hill of ammonites preserved in as inconspicuous a spot on the map as an extinct group of mollusks could plan several hundred million years in advance.

My chickening out has its own sort of irony considering I’m on the hunt for fossils. Chickens, it turns out, like all other 10,000 species of birds, are dinosaurs. Come to think of it, my friend (maternal figure) Donna packed two boiled dinosaur eggs in my lunch. But ammonites are not dinosaurs. My lack of four-wheel drive and courage may have prevented me from seeing those on this trip. There will be dinosaurs though. Tomorrow I’m going to see some fossils from a more recent age — sea creatures and other more familiar animal ancestors on a butte in southwest Wyoming — and I should see some dinosaur bones and excavation sites later in the week.

Also I hope to find a fossil or two on my own. I want to bring home a small souvenir from my 5,000-mile trek. The fossil hill in Nevada remains like Shangri La, but there’s a quarry in my future in Minnesota, if I time things right and the weather cooperates. That adventure, if it happens, is more than a week away.