I, Paleontologist
When I was young, I wanted to be a paleontologist, to unearth things both terrifying and long dead. I suppose this memoir is not very different.
For me, dinosaurs were the gateway drug into science. It came through serendipity: not through spilling chemicals into my breakfast cereal, or through finding a patch of mold in the shape of a Stegosaurus, but through my mother falling asleep without putting me to bed.
My father thought TV turned your brains into oatmeal. My mother, on the other hand, would simply say, “Switch it off if you hear your father come in, Johnny.” She had a free-range philosophy of parenting. Meals, she believed, should be spontaneous acts of invention, unfettered by planning. Sporadic housecleaning occurred whenever she couldn’t find the book she wanted. Growing up in a long-lost era, my older sister and I played without supervision in the awkward toupee of trees on the hill behind our house, and if we ever came to her crying, her only question would be, “Do you require hospitalization?”
Unfortunately for me, she was stricter about bedtimes for six-year-olds, though this could be postponed when she was enjoying her TV shows. I thought it unfair that she got to dictate what we watched: boring husband-and-wife detectives and deadpan psychologists. One evening, while she snored on the couch, I tiptoed to the TV, and hoping to find some cartoons (I didn’t realize they weren’t on in the evenings back then), I turned the dial until I stumbled upon a late-night movie that grabbed my attention with long, sharp teeth. It was about dinosaurs—dinosaurs eating people.
It was crude stop-motion animation, yet to me at that age, it looked utterly real: long necks swaying above the treetops; massive feet making the earth shudder and ripple like my aunt’s green Jell-O salad; row after row of monstrous dentition. My heart squeezed each time a dinosaur gobbled up another victim.
When I finally felt about to burst from fright, I shut off the TV and stood very still, trying to listen over the pounding of my pulse. The summer was feral and warm, and windows had been left open to cool the house. From the sofa came my mother’s brassy snores. Then through the open windows, just as in the movie, I heard a slow, steady, ominous thudding.
Dinosaurs—outside my house. I almost peed myself.
There was no point in waking my mother. I knew now from experience that an Allosaurus could be standing right behind her, and she’d just tell me I had an overactive imagination. So, I ran out to my father’s home laboratory. It was really just our garage, but he had filled it with equipment, and whenever he came home from the university where he taught science, he retreated there. When he did, my mother would sigh, sip her glass, and say, “Well, it gives him something to do.”
The lab was a magical and scary place, smelling of oil and ozone and burnt metal. When I went in, my father greeted me, “Hello, John.” His welding goggles made him look like a giant bug. He had not actually turned into one, a misunderstanding I wouldn’t make a second time. Besides, he had gotten rid of all the cans of Raid. “Not sleepy?” he asked.
“Di… Dinosaur!” I managed to stammer.
“You know, I loved dinosaurs when I was your age,” he said with a dry smile. “Magnificent creatures. We humans killed off the mammalian megafauna, of course, but I wonder how would we have fared against a stalking Ceratosaurus, or if we could have brought down a Barosaurus.”
“No,” I said, barely above a whisper; I didn’t want the dinosaur to hear me. I could imagine its hot breath on my neck, reeking of blood. “Outside!”
The goggles were cold and unsympathetic. “John, dinosaurs died out a long time ago. Except for birds. Did you know birds are descended from dinosaurs? Like for dinner just last night, you ate—”
“No, I heard it!” I insisted. I felt panic flood my guts.
After taking off his goggles and adjusting his black-framed glasses, he led me out to the front yard. “To make a claim, we must provide evidence, no matter how fearful the search.” He was always saying things like that.
Of course, we found nothing. “Not even a footprint,” my father said. “A relief—and yet a bit of a disappointment, isn’t it?”
I nodded, my heart still pounding fast, expecting that at any moment, a set of massive teeth would burst out of hiding in the bushes and rip us to red shreds.
Inside, he poked at my mother. “Anne. Anne…? It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
She just groaned and turned over on the sofa.
***
In the morning, beside my breakfast cereal was a book. Its edges were worn, its cover scratched, but inside, there were brightly colored pictures of dinosaurs lumbering through steam-bath swamps and posing in front of puffing volcanoes, as if the dinosaur realtor had said, “Who doesn’t want an active volcano in the neighborhood? It adds so much character!”
After I finished my cornflakes, I sat on the front steps and leafed through the pages. It was the summer between kindergarten and first grade for me, although I was already reading several grades ahead. Our dog, Bessie, came and laid her head on my lap as I pored over the pictures and sounded out the names letter by letter.
I heard footsteps behind me—my father. “Do you like the book, John? Let’s take a walk,” he said, not waiting for an answer.
We went out the front gate, past a lawn more weeds than grass. My father crouched on the concrete sidewalk. “You’re too young to have thought about time much,” he began. “But let’s imagine the width of this crack in the sidewalk as measuring your life so far.” He placed the tip of his index finger on the concrete ahead of it. “This is my life so far. And this, the length of my thumb, is how old our country is.”
He straightened up and took a short step. “This takes us back two thousand years, to the time of the Roman Empire, to the time of Jesus.”
“Like Gramma talks about,” I offered.
“Like your grandmother talks about, a lot, yes.” He cleared his throat, then took two full strides. “And this is about ten thousand years ago—the beginning of agriculture.”
Walking on to the next house, he said, “Now we’ve gone back about a hundred thousand years, when modern humans began to leave Africa.” Then he strode off down the street and turned the corner, with me and Bessie following.
At the next street, my father held my hand as we crossed. “Here is a million years back, when hominids were coming out of the trees and venturing onto the African savanna.”
We kept walking. The houses gave way to storefronts, and we passed by shops and restaurants and the local veterinarian’s office. “Are we getting ice cream?” I asked, full of hope.
“Hmm? No, John. Now we’re about ten million years back, the middle of the Miocene. No humans at all, just early primates. We’re barely a sixth of the way to the Cretaceous; we have to go six times as far to find the last of the dinosaurs. Do you see, John? Dinosaurs have been dead a long, long time.”
“Jane says…” I began. Three years older than me, my only sibling was a reliable source of misinformation.
“John, listen. You don’t have to be afraid of dinosaurs. They are so far away from our lifetimes that it’s hard to even imagine. Remember that museum we visited at the beginning of the summer?”
I nodded.
“Remember the skeletons? Those were dinosaur bones. That’s all that’s left of them: bones that we dig up from the earth.”
***
In the morning, I began to dig. In the summer, I spent most of my time outdoors, trailed by Bessie. This was a time when suburbs still had gentle oases of green; relentless development had not yet choked out all but unnatural life. Our house sat on half an acre of land, backed up against an inconstant stream and a gentle slope that led to bristly patches of trees yearning to be a forest. Scattered through our backyard were rickety sheds housing the remains of my father’s failed experiments. Overhead and between the trees, he had strung up sheets of plastic and foil, part of a cosmic ray detector that ran into the house. When the sun was high and hot, Bessie and I sheltered in their shade.
I picked a likely spot, a low point not far from the dry carcass of the stream, and began to clumsily shovel the loamy ground. Bessie sniffed at the soil I overturned, then lay down and fell asleep.
All I found were roots, rocks, and some old tin cans. So, after lunch (peanut butter toast and lemonade, huffily made by my sister, Jane, at my mother’s direction from the sofa), I dug some more.
That night at dinner, I had my dinosaur book open. Grinning, my father patted me on the back. “You enjoying it?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
My sister glanced at a page. “They’re from Noah’s flood. That’s what Gramma says.”
My dad frowned. “Your grandmother doesn’t know—”
“What she knows, Alan, is how to push your buttons,” my mother said from the kitchen.
“Who? Your mother, or Jane?”
My mother didn’t answer.
That night, the fear rattling my bones had dissipated. I heard no dinosaurs stomping outside the house. I imagined they were now terrified, frightened that I might dig up their bones and stick them in a museum. (My imagination was fertile, but imprecise, casting dinosaurs both as fossils and as living, breathing monsters.) In my bed, I felt safe and triumphant.
***
After breakfast, I dragged the spade to the far corner of the backyard. I was surprised to see, squatting in the hole I had dug, a little blonde girl about my age. She scooped up dirt with both hands and patted it into a little mound. Already she’d made several rows of mounds, so she had been at work for some time.
“What’re you doing?” I asked curiously.
She glanced up and wiped her snub nose, leaving behind a smear of mud. “Making stuff.” She had green eyes and was wearing a dark blue dress with white stars on it. Bessie cautiously sniffed the girl, then lay down at her feet and looked over at me; she approved of the girl.
To me, the stipple of mounds looked like the armor plates on the back of an Ankylosaurus I’d seen in my book, but I wasn’t sure. “What are you making?”
The girl straightened and surveyed her handiwork. “Friends,” she said. Then she amended, “Followers.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
She eyed me with suspicion. “I’m not lost.”
“Oh,” I said uncertainly. “Um… This is my backyard. I was digging here.”
She looked at the ground and frowned. “What’re you digging for?”
“Dinosaurs. Dinosaur bones.”
She wiped her nose again, depositing more dirt. “Like a paleontologist?” She said the word fluently, as if it she had been saying it all her life. Immediately, I had a crush on her.
“Do you want to help?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’ll watch.” She stepped out of the hole, and with hands on hips, looked on as I resumed digging. I dug hard, wanting to impress my new friend.
The sun was high in the sky, I was sweating, and my hands hurt when my shovel hit something, the concussion traveling through my arms all the way to my head. With the shovel’s metal edge, I scraped away a bit more and saw a flash of white.
The girl squatted down and put a finger to the white surface. “What is it?”
“Bone,” I said, with all the confidence I could muster. “A big one.” Together we brushed away the dirt, revealing a curved surface, huge, bigger than me.
“Oh,” said the girl. “Neat.”
My heart leapt. Then I heard my mother call out, “John, lunch!” I grabbed the girl’s hand, and together we ran to the house, with Bessie loping after.
As I stomped into the house, my mother began, “Johnny, are you—” She stopped when she saw the dirt on my hands and shoes and all down the front of my shirt, and the little girl next to me with mud on her nose. My father would have frowned, but my mother threw her head back and laughed. Today she was in one of her good moods. “You might want to wash up first.” She eyed the girl. “And who’s your friend here?”
“I’m not lost,” the girl repeated with a defiant gaze.
My mother smiled. “I’m relieved to hear it,” she said as she placed a plate before the girl.
I squirmed all the way through lunch, only taking a couple of bites of my sandwich before saying, “Can we be excused, please?” as I slid out of my seat.
“Your friend’s not finished,” my mother admonished, and it was true: the girl was still eating her sandwich.
“Just a minute,” the girl said with her mouth full. I stood there, torn between impatience and wanting to be extra-special nice and considerate. Not looking at me, she took a couple more deliberate bites, then swallowed and put down the uneaten crust.
“That was tasty,” she said to my mother. “Thank you.”
“What wonderful manners you have! Maybe you can give Johnny a few pointers.”
The girl glanced over at me. “Okay.”
Back at the dig, my excitement became tempered by dismay as I realized just how big my find was. Even as I dreamed of a femur bigger than me, I realized there was no way I could get it out of the ground myself. But I was reluctant to go to my father for help. Since he was a scientist, everyone would think he discovered it.
My solution was this: I would break off a big chunk of bone, give it to my father to analyze without telling him where I’d found it (the fact that he might wander into the backyard and see the gaping hole didn’t occur to me), and only after he had confirmed it to be an ancient dinosaur bone and called in experts and journalists would I show them the site of my discovery.
I hit the bone so hard the clanging hurt our dog Bessie’s ears, and she slunk away. Nothing happened. “It won’t break,” I said in frustration.
The little girl stared intently at the bone, as if trying to imagine a world eons ago. “Drop a rock on it,” she said at last.
My admiration for her ballooned. I dragged a ladder out to the back and found the biggest stone in the backyard I could lift, a small boulder the size of my own head. Slowly, I lugged the stone to the top of the ladder, then unceremoniously dropped it on the bone. It made a satisfying crack!
After two more drops, I could see crevices on the surface. I felt bad, damaging my find like this, but I didn’t see any other way to preserve my claim to discovery. I lugged the stone to the top of the ladder once more.
“Be careful,” the girl warned.
This time, when the stone hit, it made a gaping hole and plunged on through. I jumped off the ladder halfway down and stared into the blackness. An awful smell—the stench of a million years—came wafting up. And then it was followed by a thick, viscous brown fluid. Yelping, I stepped back. The brown seepage bubbled out, starting to fill the hole I had dug.
“Uh-oh,” said the girl. Her brow furrowed.
My heart squeezing with fear over what I had unleashed, I abandoned my new friend and raced back to the house. I went into the bathroom to scrub my face and hands before changing my clothes.
That’s when I noticed the toilet backing up.
***
I was almost as thrilled to see the backhoe that excavated the broken sewer line as I would be to see any dinosaur. It too had a loud diesel roar that rattled the windows, and there was something powerful and prehistoric in the way its single arm scraped the earth.
My mother wouldn’t let me get close enough to watch, more as punishment than protection. She carried a tray of refreshments to the workmen, while from inside, I stewed, brimming with a green brew of jealousy and remorse. From that distance, I couldn’t hear any voices, but through the back window, I saw her gesture back to me, and both she and the foreman laughed uproariously.
The girl, held blameless, had been allowed to stay outside. She stood close enough that she had to cover her ears on account of the noise, but when she glanced back at the house, I saw her gleeful grin. Then her head whipped around in the other direction as a woman arrived in the backyard. With her head down, the girl walked over to her mother—I assumed that’s who she was—and buried her face against the woman’s leg. The girl’s mother shook hands with my mother, who gestured at the circus of construction in the backyard, and they too laughed together. As daughter and mother walked away, the little girl turned and waved to me, leaving me both hopelessly in love and with a sharp pang of loss.
When my mother walked back to the porch, she scraped the mud off the bottoms of her shoes. “Your father, naturally, claims to have a faculty meeting today. Since when do they have faculty meetings in the middle of summer?”
I was standing on my toes and squinting, intently watching the backhoe growl and buck as it bit into the dirt.
“Your father also failed to tell you that dinosaur bones aren’t conveniently found in backyards. You have to trek far out into the desert, where it’s hot and dry, and your camel dies, leaving you stranded. Or you have to hang off the edge of a cliff, a thousand feet up, trying to hammer a bone out of rock. I don’t like heights, Johnny, do you?”
I looked up at her. “I don’t think I want to be a paleontologist,” I said, enunciating the word as carefully as the girl had.
“Good boy,” she said, tousling my hair.
“But what kind of scientist is dad?”
She sighed.
***
After dinner, my father wiped his glasses on his shirt and said, “John, come out to the lab with me. You, too, Jane.”
A squat, heavy box sat on his workbench. Out of it ran thick cables, and it had a small hole about ten centimeters across.
“I can only open up the window for a few seconds at a time. Jane, with your healthy skepticism, perhaps you should look first.” He threw a switch, and the box hummed, the hole beginning to glow.
“What is this?” I asked.
He smiled. “This, my children, is a window back—if my calculations are correct—to the Jurassic.”
“A time machine?” Jane asked, clear incredulity in her voice.
“A time window—the largest I can make. The power required grows as the fifth power of the area.” The humming grew into a brutish growl, overlaid with sounds like metal tearing. Squinting through the window, I glimpsed a sunlit riot of green, and on a distant horizon, a herd of many-horned beasts. Into the window, my father thrust a pair of large tongs and pulled out a flower, its petals a bright bloody red shot through with yellow veins. It had an awful smell—not sweet, but like rotting hamburger meat—and a huge, ugly yellow stamen almost snapped in half by the tongs. “Ah, we’ve reached the Cretaceous, not the Jurassic,” he said. “Flowering plants.” Swinging it over to Jane, he said, “Here you go, little Weena,”and dropped the flower into her open hands.
She stared at it for a moment, her mouth a twisted map of shock and dismay. Then she threw it on the concrete floor of the garage and ground it under the heel of her sneakers. “It’s a trick,” she said. “A lie. Like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.” She kicked the pulpy mass under a tool cabinet.
“But Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are made up,” our father said. “I’ve always been honest about them. That flower—that was proof. You won’t find any plant like that today. Now I have to get another one.” He pushed his glasses up to his forehead and peered at some dials. “The capacitors have to recharge—half an hour.”
We trooped inside the house. My father directed us children to wash dishes. When I took too long to dry the plates, Jane splashed soapy water onto me, and I cried. My father sent Jane stomping up to her room, and shooing me aside, took command of the sink.
Unwatched, I snuck back to the garage. The air around the time window’s massive capacitors, each the size of a gallon-sized milk carton, was taut, shimmering. I threw the switch. Again the machine began to hum, low at first, then increasing in volume and pitch, just short of a squeal. The time window, which had been empty and dark, glowed like the innermost blue of a candle flame. I leaned close to the window, blinking against the sudden brightness, and for a moment I again caught a glimpse of a green landscape. I grabbed the tongs.
Suddenly, a shadow blocked the window. A huge eye, yellow and saurian, peered out at me.
With a panicked yelp, I shoved the tongs through the window, provoking an anguished roar. I dropped the tongs, letting them bang against the edges of the window. Blue sparks danced. The tongs clattered to the floor, bent by the shorn edge of a hole in time and space.
Without warning, the tip of a huge black claw poked through the time window. My heart squeezed, and I jumped back, peeing my pants. The claw filled the time window and pressed against the edges, causing more sparks and a foul, burning scent. The interior of the machine began to glow a demonic red, and a cry of pain came through the window. Then the machine burst into flames. The humming abruptly broke off, and all the lights blinked out. The claw tip, now a lump of sizzling charcoal, fell to the floor.
The garage door burst open, and by the jack-o’-lantern light of the flames, my father raced to the fire extinguisher our mother had made him install in the lab. A few quick puffs of white smothered the fire, plunging us into complete darkness. I heard a crunch as my father stepped on the carbonized remnant of the claw.
Then all was silent, until my mother’s voice came from within the house: “Alan? Alan! What the hell have you done now?”
***
A week later, when I was no longer grounded, I asked my mother if I could invite over the girl I’d discovered in the backyard. I assumed my mother, who knew everything, could contact the girl’s family.
My mother said gently, “I’m sorry, Johnny, they moved away. That’s why your little friend was hiding out in our backyard. She didn’t want to go.”
In the garage, which stank of burnt electrolytic paste, all I found was coarse black powder where my father had stepped on the fried dinosaur claw. On hands and knees, I hunted for the flower Jane had pulverized and kicked under the tool cabinet, but spotted nothing, save for a single yellow speck that could have been Mesozoic pollen. When I breathed out, the speck of maybe-pollen whirled away, and I couldn’t find it again, any more than I could find that little blonde girl who wasn’t lost.
Sometimes at night, I dreamed about her and her wide green eyes. Other times, I dreamed about the dinosaurs, crowding in the dark around my bed. They muttered threats for digging up their bones, for poking their eyes, for shearing off their beautiful sharp claws. “We’ll get you,” those terrible lizards promised. “We’ll have our revenge. We’ve had millions of years to dream up all sorts of ways to make your life miserable and lonely.”
A couple of years later, my mother sent me to a therapist, briefly, whom I told about the dinosaurs. He nodded and said those dinosaurs were a way for my mind to address the traumas of childhood. But I noticed that behind his thick glasses, his eyes looked vaguely yellow and saurian, and his ill-fitting clothes could have easily concealed a twitching tail. I decided he was a dinosaur, too, and I refused to see him again.
Now that you’ve asked about my life story, I am digging away at my memories, to recreate, like a diorama in a museum, a history. My history. To answer you, I’ve become a paleontologist once more.
