A piece of the puzzle

It is a little known fact that growing up I wanted to become an archaeologist.

Or more accurately, a geologist/paleontologist/anthropologist/archaeologist.

From a very young age, I liked to collect rocks and fossils. Which I meticulously identified, labeled, organized, and placed in small drawered cabinets in my bedroom. Although I had little guide books on rocks, I can remember running downstairs with new specimens to bother my father who was reading the newspaper. “What kind of rock is this?” He would answer me, and then I would run back upstairs, note this down, and run back down with another rock. “What kind of rock is this?” Unbelievably, my father put up with this for a very long period of time. At least five minutes.

Granite.

Quartz.

Limestone.

Feldspar.

Brick.

He would answer me, and I would accept his answer as gospel. Afterall, my father knew everything.

Our driveway was graveled with limestone chips, and occasionally we would find seashell fossils amidst the gravel. It was like finding a treasure. Imagine! Finding a real, live fossil right in your very own driveway!

Our nursery school playground had a digging pit, right across from the large swing set. Oh, how we loved to spend our recesses there just digging and digging with our little shovels and pails! I convinced my father that we should have a digging pit in our backyard at home, too, because it was just such a fun pastime. We could dig elaborate tunnels and forts and quickly work our way clear to the other side of the earth! He relented and designated a spot out behind the tool shed as our official digging pit. Almost immediately my little sister and I began to dig up bits of painted china and colored glass. This was not so unusual, considering that our house was built in the early eighteen hundreds. People back then didn’t have their garbage collected every week by Waste Management. They simply threw their detritus out back behind their homes. Even today bits of china and glass rise to the surface of the yard, like shrapnel working its way out of a combat veteran’s skin. Back then, though, I earnestly believed that each shard of china we unearthed was a clear sign that we were getting that much closer to China! I am not making this up. I truly, genuinely believed this.

I had an uncle who lived in Indianapolis and was an amateur anthropologist/archaeologist. He worked for GE by day, but his true passion was searching for Indian artifacts. His basement was full of arrowheads and bits of pottery and bones. He researched likely locations of former Indian camps, often along rivers. When farmers would plow their fields each spring, he would ask them if he could walk their land. Often the tilling of the soil would unearth a myriad of arrowheads and other bits and pieces of mankind. The Indians didn’t get their garbage picked up either.

We visited my paleoanthropologist/archaeologist uncle once, right after I graduated from Kindergarten, and I was mesmerized by his basement collection of Indian treasures. And his stories. One of my most prized possessions growing up was a piece of a skull cap my uncle gave me right before we left. He told me that because of its shape and appearance, it was probably from a young Indian child.

I felt somehow connected to this young Indian boy – I thought it was a boy, a young brave, someone who had perhaps died in battle defending his tribe -- and fantasized about meeting him. How we would go creeping through the woods together, tracking deer or other game to bring back to camp for supper. He taught me how to tread on leaves and sticks without making a sound, our soft moccasins leaving barely an imprint on the forest floor. He showed me how to make a bow from a young sapling and string it with sinew. (Indians were the only people I knew who used sinew.)

He spent hours teaching me how to fashion an adze from stone and sharpen arrowheads. Then we would patiently follow animals through the woods with our new bows and arrows. We would stop to sip water from cold, mountain streams. Eat dried maize and pemmican that we kept in deerskin pouches. At the end of the day, we would start fires with flint and a piece of moss. Sleep in lean tos. And paint pictures of our hunts on animal skins with berries and twigs.

So what if I was mixing up all the tribes and their geographic areas and customs all together? It made for a great fantasy life.

For my birthday, it somehow became a tradition for me to go to our local bookstore and pick out any book I wanted. I would have to look over all of the children’s books, and this could take hours until I found just the one I wanted most. One year I spotted my treasure right away, however. The book spoke to me as soon as I saw the gold-plated Egyptian sarcophagus on its cover. It was the Landmark series book All about Archaeology. I read that book over and over again until it probably fell apart. I knew everything there was to know about Heinrich Schliemann and the discovery of Troy and Howard Carter and King Tutankhamen’s tomb. The book covered not only Greece and the Middle East and Egypt, but Central and South America as well. Mayan, Oltec, and Aztec cities lost in the jungle and Incan ruins high in the mountains of Peru! After a while, I felt like I, too, had traveled to all of these locations and helped take part in all of the wonderful explorations and discoveries.

As I grew older, I became enamored with the entire Leakey family and their intensive digs in the Olduvai Gorge area of Africa. I read the book Origins by Richard Leakey multiple times; it still holds a prominent place on my bookshelf. I was intrigued by the origins of our species and how modern humans went about trying to piece the puzzle (or bone) pieces together to figure out about our prehistoric ancestors and our evolution. It was a giant mystery, an incredible puzzle, just waiting to be solved by anyone who had the wherewithal to devote his or her life to it.

I dreamed of growing up to become a great paleoanthropologist or archaeologist (I was a purist; I insisted on spelling “archaeology” with an “a” in the middle. “Archeology” was simply not… right) and making all sorts of earth-shattering discoveries myself. I wouldn’t be like Agatha Christie who just followed her husband around on digs and wrote mysteries on the side. I would be the leader of expeditions all around the globe. They would probably make National Geographic specials about me and my latest discoveries.

I didn’t much think about how labor-intensive and boring the actual day-to-day activities on a dig might be and how they would require enormous patience and grueling work under stark (often hot) conditions. That didn’t matter to me. I was star struck. Intrigued. Hooked.

I am not sure how and why I gradually lost interest in this career choice. The topics still interest me tremendously. I have a memory of reading somewhere that a truck driver makes more than an archaeologist and this upsetting me. I am not sure why. I have nothing against truck drivers and, in fact, know several quite well. I know how hard that job must be. I would never want to be a truck driver. I would never be able to spend that much time in a vehicle sitting on my ass, just driving and driving and driving, and putting up with all the boneheads that are out on the road.

I can’t imagine the revelation that truck drivers make more than archaeologists would have had any real impact on me. I am not even sure it is necessarily true, although I doubt archaeologists make a whole heck of a lot. I myself am not really driven by money in any of my passions or career interests. In fact, it disturbs me when money has to enter into my job considerations at all, but in the end, I do live in the real world and I have a family to support.

I started out in the military and am now a librarian, neither of which is a career to go into if making money is your major motivator. I would prefer never to have to ever even think about money. I know we need it to survive, to pay our bills and our taxes and buy groceries and clothing and gas. But beyond that it has little meaning to me. I am not saying I want to be poor. Because I do not. I do not want to be rich, either. I just want to be able to pay my expenses and support my family and be able to do most of the things I want to do. None of which are ever terribly extravagant. And pursue my passions and interests in a constructive, contributing way.

Being an archaeologist was romantic. Full of fantasy and glamour and allure. Solving puzzles and mysteries for a living. Using my brain and sense of adventure to unearth new old worlds. A life of pursuit and discovery. Uncovering and piecing together the great truths of existence and of our past. What more could anyone ask for?