solitary hunter

The rock shop owner rushed in through the door thirty seconds after I did. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap, if I remember right, and glasses. I don’t think he’s used to customers, especially off season. I figured out later he lived next door when he admitted ownership of the two dogs who yelled at me and tried to chew through the fence out back. He said they’re sisters, as if that would help me understand and accept their ferocity. “That’s dogs for ya,” I said. He shrugged off my species-ism because, well, I was going to buy something, right?

Thing is I was already on edge. “I nearly got clobbered three times,” I’d told him earlier, referring to a crowded gas station down the street where just twelve days ago I’d had no trouble filling up and grabbing some milk. It was true: A dozen cars were competing for eight pumps, and one of them was out of order. Every time someone would finally leave, someone else would speed into the spot, shaking me enough that I gestured obscenely and barked like those sisters would in my near future. But nobody heard me.

The owner and I talked a bit about my trip and the various fossils he had in his shop, where they were from and how he had come to collect them. He’d lived in California the same number of decades I have but moved on some time ago. I wondered if I’ll ever come to my economic and other senses and do the same. The chips and squares of gray sediment with partial leaf impressions in a bin outside were from China, and the ammonites on the counter inside with their still extant opal-like sheen were from Madagascar. There were thousands of rocks in every room of that Craftsman home, but I wanted something that would remind me of that time in October 2018, when on an odyssey I couldn’t explain, I drove from one fossil site to another on my way to Wisconsin and back.

Though I’d had more unique finds in mind, I left the shop with two fish fossils in limestone collected from a quarry somewhere north of Evanston, near Fossil Butte National Monument. One is a Knightia, Wyoming’s state fossil and the most frequently found, the other the wide-eyed head of a less common Mioplosus, a “solitary hunter” often found with a Knightia in its mouth. I’m happy with my choices, and the owner seemed delighted to break the hundred I’d carried around folded in my wallet for two weeks — a particularly uncharacteristic act. I got some of it back in change, snapped a couple photos in front of the shop, walked back to my car with my 50-million-year-old rocks and started west.

My mood remained on the anticline that had risen earlier in the day and threatened to slide either way. Traffic was heavy and the sun was in my eyes. After dark I wandered around a desert town glancing sideways at drunken gamblers and revelers in the street, wondering why they were happy but not envying their lives. I see people and witness their behavior and get lost comparing it to who I am and what I’ve learned, right or wrong, as a child and an adult. In the solitude of my car and hotel rooms and inside my brain I dream of unobtainable things. Then in crowds or crowded places I continue dreaming but with a feverish tossing and turning of the mind.

Our nascent Anthropocene epoch has cluttered up the horizon with billboards, towers and turbines that scrape the clouds and kill bats and birds and the view. All the small towns are cities now except the ones imploding from inertia and abandonment. Snow that hadn’t been there on the way out gleamed on the mountains on the way back, and I caught glimpses of scenery through utility wires and above the black smoke of refineries and miles and miles of dust whipped up by winds, which at one point threatened to eclipse the Great Basin. The posted speed limit through Utah and Nevada was often 80 mph, but still bulldog SUVs tried to latch on to my bumper, and slowpokes became fastpokes as soon as I passed. Reno was lit up by brake lights on the freeway and casinos to the left — my fault for driving on a Saturday night. The Sierra pass where people got stuck in the winter a hundred and fifty years ago and survived with a bit of cannibalism now acts as a sluice between the city of California and the playgrounds east.

A yoga instructor on a podcast I half heard yesterday somewhere near Elko said traveling is good for the soul. It gives us time to look at our lives and rediscover our goals and values. When we’re not on the road we’re too caught up, the instructor said, in the day-to-day necessities of living, and we get pulled too far away from our true selves. Well, what can I do about that? It’s time to get back to work.