Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
searched only for sea creatures beneath the cobbles and boulders of the in-
tertidal. The rarest treasures were small eels living in the tide pools. Rocks
were not a priority. Life was.
But one rock caught my attention, in these last years of President
Eisenhower's rule, as I heaved it over to unveil the cache of scurrying beach
crabs beneath. Football-sized, gray, and rounded, this particular rock was ab-
solutely packed with clamshells. Finding clamshells was no revelation, for
shells in no small number littered the beach, but there was a major difference
have: This rock was filled with shells turned to stone. Although some of the
more far-fetched fairy tales of childhood dealt (in simpler terms) with such
issues as lithification, I was by no means so unsophisticated. This rock was
clearly filled with fossil shells, and with whoops and hollers I alerted the rest
of my family.
A week later, a local rockhound confirmed this find as indeed being
bona fide fossil material and even put a new spin on the stony clamshells.
Not only were they fossils, but they were old—Mesozoic in age, he said.
Mesozoic
was a key word for an eight-year-old; Mesozoic was the time of the
dinosaurs. I had found a rock with clams in it that had sat on that beach
since the time of the dinosaurs, or so 1 divined from all of this disparate in-
formation. Yet the beach from which it came had no rock other than' gravel
and was not the source of this fossil. It had come from the north, perhaps
from Sucia, or might even have been carried across the International Bound-
ary during the Ice Ages 12,000 years ago when the first Canadians were eat-
ing the last of their woolly mammoths.
The rockhound's lair was a place of wonder. He had a tumbling wheel,
rock saws and polishing laps, and of course rocks of all sizes and shapes lit-
tering dusty shelves. But he was also a person of some learning, and he had
the gift of patience in dealing with impatient youngsters. For my part, I had
made a find. I basked in glory. I asked questions. And inevitably I asked the
most common question about rocks and fossils: How do you
know
how old
this rock is?
He had a very difficult time answering that question in any sort of di-
rect manner. He could only say that the clams I had found were now extinct
