3

Thorns scraped my ankles as I ducked under low-hanging branches, and I inhaled notes of wild onion among the pungent aromas of the vegetation. My dad’s machete rang like a bell as he hacked at vines and tree limbs. Then, finally, we broke through.

We stood in a cathedral of nature, the tree branches arching toward the sky, the creek lapping quietly below. We checked our equipment to make sure we had the chisel and the hammer. I twisted my hair back into a ponytail, and we headed into the frigid, spring-fed creek like prospectors searching for gold. Only in our case, the treasure we sought was fossils.

This land had been in my family for over a century, and I’d been coming here all eleven years of my life. Every time my parents and I visited my grandparents in central Texas, we always took a trip down to “The Creek”, as this land was known in our family. It was a touchstone for me amidst our many moves for my dad’s job. I always felt a sense of coming home, a comfort in this landscape that was unchanging except for the color of the leaves.

On my right was the gently sloped bank where my great-grandmother and her best friend once chatted while dangling their feet in the water. Over the cliff to my left was the farmland that my ancestors first saw through the tattered fabric of covered wagons. As we made our way down the creek, I recognized pockets of brushy woods that I’d seen in the background of faded, sepia-toned photographs.

Normally, being surrounded by the history of this place made me feel protected, connected to something larger than myself. This time, I felt the absence of my ancestors more than their presence. I was aware of a creeping realization, and I tried to shake it away—literally giving my head a quick jerk back and forth, as if I had been pestered by a fly.

The waterline inched lower as the pebble-covered creek bed rose beneath our feet, and we stepped up onto a bank. In front of us was our favorite section of rock wall. The water had cut through its hard surface millimeter by millimeter over time, exposing a little more of the wall every few thousand years.

Fallen branches cracked under my feet as I moved toward it. I looked up to the top, which stood as high as a one-story house, but my eyes only briefly lingered there. The good stuff was always lower. The wall was a timeline, the creek’s eons of work cutting through the land to reveal the ancient story of one era covered over by another. Just below the grassy farmland at the top was the entombed layer of land that the conquistadors once walked. A few inches below that were the remnants of soil trod by the first humans ever to see this land. Six feet lower, about eye level for me, brought us back tens of millions of years in time. That’s where the riches always lay.

Dad said something, maybe a joke about who was going to score the biggest find this time, but I hardly heard him. That formless darkness I’d tried to shoo away earlier grew closer, and my mind raced to pinpoint its source.

I leaned forward and touched a spot on the wall. Eighty million years before that Sunday morning, this spot on earth was the muddy floor of a shallow ocean. My dad had explained with awe that in the time that had passed since then, the continent of Africa had moved across the globe, Mount Everest had risen from flat land, and an entire ocean had receded and left this land dry, with only a creek chuckling through it.

I spotted something: the pattern of a medium-sized ammonite, about the diameter of a small coconut. I pulled the chisel from my pocket and chipped away at the pliable white rock around it.

“Great find!” Dad hopped over rocks to watch me extract it.

It took a few minutes to loosen the wall’s grip on my newfound treasure without breaking it, but eventually black cracks shot through the wall around the fossil. The rocks that clutched it were giving way. As I eased it out, Dad thrust his hands under it to catch any pieces that fell, and a complete ammonite emerged.

“Wow. Would you look at that,” Dad whispered.

We both gazed at the fossilized form of a round spiral shell, its ripples radiating out from the center with perfect symmetry. This creature had been resting at that spot on earth for so long that, molecule by molecule, its glossy shell had been replaced by stone. A few inches below the indentation left in the wall there was another fossil, one of those simple shells from an entirely different time period, maybe even the late Jurassic. I scanned up and down the space between the two fossils. Millions of years, condensed to inches. To look at that wall of rocks and fossils was to understand that a thousand years is nothing—a century even less—and the span of a human’s lifetime is so short that it’s not even worth talking about.

My heart pounded faster. I stepped back from the rock wall and made my way over to the water’s edge. The fossil in my hands suddenly seemed too heavy to carry, so I dropped down to sit on the rocky bank.

My dad had returned to his own excavation efforts, and the scraping and crunching of his chisel faded away in the noise of my thoughts. The mental gates that had been straining against the dark realization snapped, and it all came roaring into my consciousness.

I looked at the ammonite settled in between my soggy sneakers, and I understood for the first time that my fate was no different than its own.

I had always thought of these creatures as being fundamentally different from me. They were the dead things, I was the alive thing, and that’s how it would be forever. Now I wondered what had kept me from understanding that to look at these long-dead life-forms was to look at a crystal ball of what lay in store for me—except that, unless I happened to die by falling into some soft mud, I wouldn’t end up a fossil. Ten million years from now, there would be nothing left of me.

I looked over at my dad, who caught my gaze and smiled. He pointed at the wall with an exaggerated expression, joking that he’d found an even better specimen. Him too?! I thought. Wasn’t he too strong to die? Wasn’t he interesting and cool enough that it would carry him past the fate of the old mollusks stuck in the fossil wall? Surely the universe couldn’t move on without him.

“You okay?” His voice pulled me out of my thoughts for a moment.

“Yeah. Just thinking.” I pulled myself to my feet, the musty smell of creek water wafting up from my wet clothes.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Every time we come here I can’t believe how lucky we are to have this place,” he said, speaking breathlessly as if The Creek were the Eighth Wonder of the World.

I considered telling him what was troubling me, but it seemed pointless. Either it hadn’t occurred to him, in which there was no use in shackling him with this same two-ton ball and chain, or it had occurred to him and there was nothing to talk about. What can you really say when you’re having a nice day and the person you’re with starts sputtering about how we’re all going to die?

Through sheer willpower, I dragged myself back into the present moment. I gathered up all the troubling thoughts and shoved them away, like when I would get sick of cleaning my room and jam all the clutter into my closet, leaning on it to force it shut. We waded to another outcropping thirty yards downstream, but had no luck there. On our way back we stopped by the first bank to pick up the ammonite I’d found, then made our way to the truck.

“You want to drive?” Dad asked when we arrived at the pickup. It was a 1978 blue and white Ford that was built like a tank, and we always borrowed it from my grandfather when we came down here. Since the truck could withstand just about anything and there wasn’t much on the property that could be damaged anyway, I was usually allowed to drive to and from the main road.

I slid behind the wheel, my clammy skin welcoming the sun-warmed vinyl seats. I was tall for my eleven years and could reach the pedals easily when I scooted forward. I watched the gear display to make sure that the white line moved over the D when I pulled the lever in the steering column, then I eased my left foot off the brake, touched my right foot to the gas, and felt the truck lurch forward.

We bounced along the trail, the trees that lined the creek drifting past the right window. Grasshoppers hopped up in front of the truck like popcorn popping. There was a narrow opening in the fence that divided the wooded area from the fields, and I always had to focus to get the truck through it. My eyes were so locked onto the gate that it took me a moment to register movement on the ground. So close that it was about to disappear behind the hood of the truck, a fat black snake slithered across the path in front of us. My left foot pounded the brake before I had a chance to think about how hard we should stop, and Dad and I slid in unison toward the dashboard as the fossil and the machete flew from the seat between us onto the floor. The snake raced behind a thicket of cacti, flipping wildly as it moved as if it were annoyed by the presence of the truck.

After a beat of silence, Dad and I laughed. And when I laughed, it was a moment of pure, all-encompassing joy. The thoughts that had troubled me earlier dropped so low in my awareness that they effectively ceased to exist, and for a few seconds all I knew was the pleasure of sitting behind the wheel of a big truck with my father at my side.

I put my foot back on the gas and maneuvered the truck through the gate. As we neared the main road, that pleasant burst of distraction began to fade. By the time I scooted over to the passenger seat, the disturbing thoughts floated to the surface once again.

When we returned to my grandparents’ house, it was time to start packing so that we could make the three-hour drive back to Dallas before it got too late. I changed into dry clothes and began throwing Garfield comic books and drawing pads into my backpack, and with every move I felt the same sinking sensation I’d had at The Creek.

After a dinner of takeout barbecue, which I barely touched because of a stress-induced nausea that rumbled in my stomach, my parents and I said goodbye to my grandparents and piled into our Oldsmobile. As we backed out of the driveway, the headlights illuminated the pickup truck.

There was no solution to my problem, because it wasn’t even a problem; it was just a new awareness of reality. But as I took one last glance at the pickup before it disappeared from view, I felt like there was some answer in that brief flash of happiness I’d experienced while driving the truck. The grim truth I’d uncovered hadn’t gone away, but it was somehow rendered less significant when I’d been immersed in the distraction of having fun.

I’d already begun to worry that I’d live the rest of my life with these awful feelings bearing down on me at every second, but now I felt a trickle of hope that some relief could be found if I could amass more experiences like that one. It might not be a solution, but chasing those moments of happiness might be all I had.