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I’ve been rummaging in the dirt, looking for connections to the past, for as long as I can remember.

When I was nine years old, my family lived on a little farm outside Sylvania, Georgia. My greatest love was the outdoors. I spent my afternoons and summers in the woods, swimming in creeks and ponds, searching plowed fields for artifacts, and generally having a good time. I was living a rural kid’s dream.

My first memory of archaeology comes from those days. Crossing a plowed field, I came across an arrowhead. Taking this treasure back home, I showed it to my father that evening and he explained its origins to me. He pulled out a Time Life book on American Indians and let me loose on the whole series. The idea that people had lived here long ago, making weapons out of stone, fascinated me. Like most boys my age, I loved dinosaurs and had a dinosaur poster on my bedroom wall. But this arrowhead was something else—something in my own backyard—something that I could find. Finding ancient things became an obsession of mine.

My mother’s father was proudly Irish and proudly southern—and as an amateur genealogist, he had worked out the pedigree for both. He would talk to me for hours about our family’s roots. My father’s father, Grandpa Berger, was a wildcatter: a man who sank wells on speculation to prospect for new oil fields. He combed West Texas for the big strike that never quite came, costing him some fingers in the spinning chains of the drills. Grandma Berger flew light planes and had a pet chimpanzee, among other eccentricities. They were risktakers, those two, and my father told stories about growing up in the slipstream trailer pulled behind the latest model Cadillac.

Growing up this way, my father had never really settled in one place. He attended both Texas A&M and the University of Arkansas, where he met my mother. She was a teacher, like her parents; he entered the corporate world of insurance. After having my older brother, Lamont, they moved to Shawnee Mission, Kansas, where I was born. Our family followed my father’s work for a few years, from Kansas to Connecticut and then to Georgia, where he worked for a regional insurance company.

In true 1970s style, my parents tried their hand at raising our own food, which meant chickens, a few cows, and a menagerie of other small farm animals. Our old farmhouse outside Sylvania was built of pine, raised off the ground on bricks for cooling in the summer heat of southern Georgia. It had a tin roof and floorboards that creaked and groaned whenever you walked over them. A swamp ran along one side of the property, and a stream that my father dammed up to create a pond, eventually attracting hundreds of waterfowl. Our home may have been primitive by most standards, but to me it was heaven. I was a little naturalist, spending practically all my time in the woods.

Sylvania was tiny, with a population of about 3,000 people, and truly rural. I kept myself busy with choir, saxophone, Boy Scouts, and 4-H. By high school, we had moved to a new farm. This one was larger—a little over 500 acres—with ponds and sprawling pine forests. I was certainly less interested in schoolwork than I was in getting home after school to explore the woods, hunt and fish, and just be out in nature. I saw homework as a hindrance, keeping me from the outdoors and the sports I excelled in: swimming, cross-country, and tennis.

I even started a business of my own, raising purebred Yorkshire pigs. I made a fairly significant amount of money—very helpful during my college years—and I also learned what enormous responsibilities farmers have. From time to time my parents would hitch up a trailer and take us to competitions, me with my prize pigs and my brother with his prize cattle. As part of an Eagle Scout project I helped found the nation’s first gopher tortoise reserve, which eventually led to the naming of that threatened species as the Georgia state reptile. And I still spent every spare moment I could scouring plowed fields and eroded gullies—anywhere the earth had been disturbed—in search of Native American artifacts.

Like many kids from small towns, my extracurricular activities gave me a taste of the big world out there, and I liked it. I was elected state president of Georgia 4-H. My pig farm had grown to 50 animals, and mornings before school consisted of a 5 a.m. wake-up to feed my pigs and our hunting dogs. On weekends, I deejayed a morning radio show on a little AM country music station, WSYL, that reached just a few hundred people. I managed to get a Naval ROTC scholarship to Vanderbilt University. Maybe because I never stopped talking, my teachers and family encouraged me to become a lawyer. So I packed up my things and left Sylvania behind for Nashville, Tennessee.

COLLEGE LIFE OPENED MY eyes. The NROTC scholarship kept me busy every morning for physical training, while my evenings were increasingly full of new friends, Greek life, and socials. My classes were a different matter. I found I hated economics and political science—in fact, all the pre-law courses. I didn’t jell with other students in pre-law, and my grades suffered.

On the other hand, I found my electives at Vanderbilt exciting. I took courses in videography, religion and science, and geology. For the first time I met people who made a career of rocks and fossils. In all my years of reading books about dinosaurs and roaming the fields in search of Native American artifacts, I had never really thought about any of that as a possible career. Yet here were graduate students and scientists who studied the things I loved, and they seemed to be having a great time doing it. After a few weekend field trips to roadcuts looking for fossils, I started thinking, “Could I do this?”

Except I had a problem: The Navy had spent a great deal of money and training to make me a naval officer and a lawyer, and I was busy failing.

My academic adviser was Lt. Ron Stites, a naval aviator and the picture of naval officer success. I was terrified as I stood at attention in front of his desk. He held my future in his hands. There I stood in my white midshipman’s uniform, probably trembling with fear, and there was my academic transcript in front of him.

“Berger, what do you see here?” he asked. He slid the paper with my grades on it across the desk. I didn’t need to look down to see the numerous D’s and F’s in my core subjects. The A’s and B’s in my electives didn’t help my GPA very much, and the Navy certainly hadn’t brought me here to play with rocks and video cameras. Another semester of grades like this, and I would fail the conditions of my scholarship. If I defaulted, I might have to pay back all the time as an enlisted man.

With all this in mind, I muttered something like “A failure.”

A flicker of a smile crossed his face as he shook his head gently from side to side. “No, Berger, I don’t see a failure,” he said. “Your fellow cadets respect and like you. You’re a natural leader. It’s your grades.” He tapped my transcript. “I see someone who hasn’t found what he loves to do.” He was pointing to my grades in geology. I remember glancing up from this finger to his face, a bit startled and confused. Here was a naval officer and my academic adviser, and that was the last thing I expected him to say.

He watched me for a moment, and then he asked, “What are you going to do about it?”

I gave a small shake of my head, shrugging a bit. I honestly didn’t know. My whole life had been planned with just a limited number of options. Bright kids from rural Georgia had three or four pathways: Doctor, lawyer, engineer, maybe accountant—those were the tickets out.

“Maybe I should enlist for a while, find myself?” I said.

He shook his head. “No, you don’t belong in the enlisted Navy, Berger.” He looked me over for what seemed like an eternity.

“I’ll tell you what I will do,” he finally said. “If you commit to me that you will deregister from this degree before your grades get any worse, get out of college for a while, and go do something constructive, find what you love, and then come back, I will release you right now from any obligations you have to the Navy.”

I was stunned. This was my get out of jail free card, and at least it gave me motivation.

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” I nodded. And with that, I did just as he suggested.

My reception back home was, to be generous, lukewarm. I was supposed to be this success story—Eagle Scout, state president of 4-H, naval scholarship winner—and yet here I was, back home in Georgia, having all but flunked out of college. My parents were disappointed. But luckily, I had my pig money to support me while I tried to sort out my life.