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SUNSETS AND FOSSILS
Since my wife Elspeth got me a digital camera for Xmas, I’ve been collecting sunsets. This winter Tulsa and environs has enjoyed mostly mild weather (symptom of global warming?)—just a couple of cold snaps for variety, and not as many overcast days as is usual. Many days have been cold but clear, with china blue skies decorated with wispy high clouds. Perfect for roadtrips, fossil hunting, and sunsets.
Above is a snap I took over the steering wheel on the way home from work. It came out remarkably well, I thought. I spend my work day in a windowless room, and sometimes sunrise and sunset are all I see of the day. This is not good for a man who suffers from S.A.D.ness on top of Manic Depression. On sunny days, I’ll take a long lunch, or leave work early, and go for a drive, or a walk—anything that gets me out in the sunlight.
I like to drive the blue highways and county roads, I like fossil hunting, and I like to be alone—a harmonious trinity, for me. I am an intermittently obsessive fossil collector, and the area around Tulsa is relatively abundant in fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. The limestones, sandstones, and shales that underlie N.E. Oklahoma’s little hills were laid down mostly in Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian time, roughly 245 to 360 million years ago, and are predominantly marine, because the area was mostly undersea during that period. In road cuts, quarries, creek beds, shorelines on local reservoirs, anywhere rock is exposed, I seek out my quarry. Here’s a poem on the subject:
Dem Bones
I lay my hands on the exposed rock
of the road cut,
"Nellie Bly" limestone laid down
300 million years ago,
press my finger whorls into the rough
weathered jumble
of creatures rained down into muck
when firedrakes and salamanders ruled the earth.
Cold fire quenched in stone.
Mason's hammer tapping on cold chisel
I break open a striated chunk
of sandstone.
Brachiopods show rust red shields
on a field of deep yellow,
cinnabar against gamboge.
The aegis of Poseidon
exposed
in landlocked Oklahoma.
The grey shale still ripples under vanished waters
next to Dirty Butter Creek.
I follow the tracks of a trilobite
off the cracked stage
crazed and tilted
as mountain ranges rose and fell.
The ancient alphabets spiel themselves underfoot
and I listen
very hard
to hear the water
"that always passes away, and does not decieve
that always passes away, and does not change
that always passes away, and does not end."
Note: The last three lines are by Juan Ramon Jimenez, as translated by Richard Wright. Previously posted as PoD 5.
Lake Keystone sunset from Prue Road fossil site. | 
