from the pen of icarus blake

The first major loss I felt as a child happened in the town of Dinosaur, Colorado in a KOA overlooked by a billboard for McDonald’s that my parents tried desperately to hide from all 3 of their children.  I had a small figurine of a coelophysis, a souvenir from a paleontology museum in Fruita.  I slept with it, and I lost it at the campsite.  I was inconsolable until we arrived at Dinosaur National Monument an hour later, where the sight of a wall of bones struck me dumb.  So enamored with the bones, I ignored my mother who slipped away to the gift shop to purchase a diplodocus figurine.  She pushed it into my hands, but all I wanted to do was tell her about the dinosaurs in the wall.

The camarasaurus, small for a sauropod, but I saw it’s high nares and peg-like teeth in the rock and I reached over the railing to show her where they connected to the first towering vertebrae of its neck.  My brother and sister lost interest, and my dad whisked them away to the gift shop, but my mom stayed with me and listened and listened and listened to my 5 year old ramblings about the bones in the wall and how I wanted to be one of the people in the harnesses, belaying up the sides to pick them out layer by layer.

20 years later, I came back.  Fresh off an internship at a dinosaur dig in Wyoming with some meager camping supplies and a shitty Walmart tent for refuge, I dragged my partner 6 hours across the mountains to the middle of nowhere so I could talk at him about the bones in the wall.  The exhibit had changed, but so had I.  It was enclosed, climate controlled, with a camarasaurus rearticulated and hung in a twisting death pose on the wall opposite the bone bed.  We compared ourselves to it’s femur, both of us hovering around 5 feet tall and swamped by the height and weight of the bone.  He indulged me while I explained the ecology of the Morrison formation in both the site I had worked in that summer and the bone bed that stood before us.  I pointed out the articulated camarasaur skull and vertebrae, the same ones (I think) that I’d talked my mother’s ear off over at five years old.  

When I’d talked all I could, we went and clambered over miles of slickrock sandstone without enough water — I’d been out in the sun all summer, and forgotten how much the average person needs to weather the heat.  Luckily, my partner forgave me.  Even when we were chased out of our campsite by thunderstorms and flash flood warnings that night, we indulged ourselves with ice cream and watched movies on the hotel television.  Our feet tired, I still talked to him about the dinosaurs in the wall, late, late, late into the night.