several subsequent tours, I still wasn’t sure that I understood what I was being told, so one day I stopped to chat with the center’s paleontologist-in-residence, Tim Tokaryk. A big guy (“ex-football,” he explains), he occupies a cramped office just around the corner from the gift shop. Everything about his space—from the portrait of Darwin on the door to the shelves of learned volumes that crowd the walls—speaks of his dedication to science. What will he think of me if I ask him what I really want to know? Is it possible that the land around us remembers?
I watch Tim for signs of discomfort when I blurt out this embarrassing query, but he merely nods his head. “Within an hour’s drive of town, I can hit almost a continuous seventy-five million years of vertebrate history,” he says matter-of-factly, “from the end of the Western Interior Seaway, through the Late Cretaceous and the extinction event, all the way to the Age of Mammals and the emergence of the grasslands. If you want a wonderful, wild, and wicked story about the past and the present, this is the place to come. We have to realize that we’re the luckiest.”
After imbibing as much evolutionary excitement as we can handle, Keith and I often pause on the walkway outside the T.rex Centre to take in the view. See, just down below, there’s our little house on the edge of town, with its proud new window, its apple tree, and its tidy chain-link fence. Back in the everyday world, the monstrous procession of life and death on display in the T.rex Centre fades into fantasy, as if it were a kind of scientifically sanctified freak show. And so it remained until one day, a few months after our arrival in Eastend, when the here and now cracked open, and cracked me open, too, and the profound strangeness of the real world crept under my skin.
We were out walking on the flat benchlands above the center—Keith and I, the dogs, and our grownup daughter, who had joined us for a few days. It was stinking hot, mid-August, so when we noticed the shimmer of water on a cutaway bank down below, we made a beeline for it, the dogs panting in the vanguard. In they all went, humans and canines alike, and no one else seemed to notice that the pond was green and slimy, with an oozy, muddy bottom that sucked up between your toes. As I watched my ankles disappear into the muck, I realized that there were worse fates than being hot. Surely, I thought, someone should sit up on the shore and watch the dogs, in case one of them tried to run off.
At first, all the bathers were happy to lie in the water, but after a while, one pesky dachshund (oh, they are wonderful trouble those dogs!) developed serious wanderlust. After retrieving her several times, I plopped myself down in the dirt, red faced and streaming with sweat. I had had it. So when the darn dog took off yet again, I found myself appealing in desperation to the fairies, the genius loci, the lares and penates, to whatever powers might be listening, to see if I could cut a deal. If I went after the runaway one more time, the world had to agree to show me something special.
With this illusory prospect in mind, I mustered the strength to stagger to my feet, as the dog tripped lightly up a scabby little erosion channel, heading for parts unknown. “I’m on your tail, mutt,” I muttered as I closed in on her rear. “And, this time, you’re going on your leash.” But even as I attended to these practicalities, I kept scanning my surroundings, nurturing my heat-hazed hope. We’d cut a deal, hadn’t we? I’d done my part—dog in hand—so where was my reward? In the ooze down below, where my family was still lolling? On these scabrous cutbanks or in this dried-up watercourse? It looked like I’d been skunked. Then, just as I was on the verge of returning to normalcy, I noticed something odd. A rock was poking out of the edge of the path, quite unlike anything else around. It was lumpy, gray-white, and ugly, about the size of my head. Idly, I wrestled it out of the earth and flipped it bottom-side up.
In an instant, I had forgotten about being put-upon and overheated. “You guys,” I shouted, as I hurried my companions out of the swamp. “You’ve got to come see this!”
We crouched in a circle around the rock, intent as children. There, protruding from the dry underside of a dry rock in a prairie gulch was a perfect fossilized clam. The hills had begun to show us their secrets.
{four} Ravenscrag Road
“No frontier is marked between the Western landscape and a country of fable.”
BERNARD DEVOTO, Mark Twain’s America, 1932
Although Keith and I usually traveled to Eastend on our own, with our rabble of pets, we were always glad when friends or family paid us a visit. The pleasures of these hills were so abundant that there was plenty to go around, and we were eager to share our house with like-minded souls. Our most frequent guests were our daughters, one of whom had stood in the magic circle around the fossil shell, and the other of whom joined the party whenever she was able. It was this second daughter—a bright, practical soul, not given to morbid thoughts—who made an observation that ever since has echoed through my mind. She came into the house one morning, after a walk with the dogs, and said that the hills seemed sad to her. “It feels like something bad must have happened here.”
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