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Authors: Cynthia Pelman

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BOOK: The Voice of the Xenolith
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10
Fossils

This is the second essay I wrote for my English teacher after we came to that agreement.

Getting your eye in

By Amethyst Simons

People often ask me why I love searching for fossils. They are worried about all kinds of things – cliff falls (this does happen in England, quite often) and falling on the rocks (that can happen too; my mom once broke an ankle when she slipped on a rock while searching for fossils in Folkestone) and high tides coming in.

But it is not just the risks that people are concerned with. It is rather that they just don’t see the attraction of reaching under slimy, seaweed-covered rocks for little dark broken pieces of stone in the hope that you will find the remains of something which lived millions and millions of years ago.

Some people ask me why I don’t just go to those shops which sell fossils, fossils which have been prepared and cleaned and polished, and buy the best examples of each type that I can afford.

And my answer is, it is not the having of it, but the finding of it that matters.

It is the thrill of the search; it is getting to that state where your eyes see more sharply than usual, where your vision is super-charged, like an eagle. It is being a detective. It is that moment of discovery.

When you start out on any particular day, it takes a while to ‘get your eye in’. At first you find nothing. You are reaching under rocks, and you keep thinking that if you just move a few inches to the left or the right, or just under that rock over there, that is where you will find something. You know you only have forty-five minutes before the tide comes in.

If you are feeling brave you dig a little in the clay at the base of the cliff, although it is safer to stand as far from the cliffs as you can, especially after a rainy winter, when the cliff is undermined by water that has seeped in from the top and a rock fall can happen at any time.

You are bent almost double, your back starting to ache from the backpack you are carrying. The backpack gets heavier and heavier as the time goes by because you are picking up rocks which look like they might have something interesting inside them, but you don’t stop to try to break them open with your hammer because you are working against time. So you also pick up broken bits of not-very-special fossils because maybe you won’t find anything better on that day, or maybe you don’t have time to examine it right then with your magnifying lens but it looks kind of interesting; and it all goes into the bag on your back. And you are also carrying water and food and Ziploc plastic bags, and a rain jacket and a hat and sunscreen and spare shoes, because sometimes the clay sticks to your shoes and you can’t get back onto the train with sticky filthy shoes.

But then

suddenly

after wishing and hoping and visualising what you hope to find, you see something. You see a pattern, a regularity, maybe a vague hint of a spiral, or some lines which look too regular, too parallel, to be just a broken flint. It may be tiny, a little ammonite, but perfectly formed, and suddenly, like a flash, you see it, you reach for it, you feel it, you have it.

It makes you stop breathing for a moment. It is a revelation, and you feel a rush of wonder. You are the first – no, you are the
only
human, ever to have seen and touched the remains of this little creature.

And it is you who searched for it, you who didn’t give up, you who found it.

You wrap it up carefully in tissue paper and put it in a Ziploc bag so it doesn’t get lost among all the other debris you have picked up. And after that you can climb back up to the walkway, eat some of the cheese you always carry with you to give you energy, and go to the public loo to rinse your hands and your finds, and start the long journey back home.

A fossil is often not even an actual creature, and it is often not even the skeleton of the creature. Sometimes what you find is some minerals which have seeped into the shell of what was once a creature and created a shape which now simply resembles the original. It might be just the imprint of a wave which moved across some sand, creating curved lines, now solidly imprinted in stone. Or you may find just the tracks left by the feet and tail of a trilobite who walked on soft sand, tracks which got preserved because some more soft sand fell on them and buried and preserved them.

But seeing that shape, or that stone, finding it and taking it home, means that in some way you have kept it alive even though the creature who moved there, who left his tracks or died there, was on this earth millions and millions of years ago.

In a way it is like bringing something back from the dead.

Everybody who knows me knows I love fossils. My favourite place to look is among the rocks on Folkestone beach, because we nearly always find something there. But you have to plan very carefully because the tide comes in quite fast, and if you are a long way out you may not get back to the walkway in time. We are very careful to check the tide tables each time we go, and we keep checking our watches while we are on the beach so we won’t make a mistake.

Once, after we had finished searching, and had climbed up the rocks to the walkway above the beach and gone to the nearest cafe to have a cold drink, I looked back at the beach where we had been walking. The sea had covered the beach completely, and had come almost three quarters of the way up the cliff, as high as a multi-storey building. If we had stayed on the beach we would have been covered up completely, along with the fossils and the dinosaur footprints and the rocks and the seaweed. So you have to know how to plan carefully when you go looking for fossils, otherwise you could end up a fossil yourself.

We have a family tradition for birthdays. We don’t get birthday presents or have big parties; instead the person having a birthday gets to choose to go travelling somewhere. My mom doesn’t mind parties, and Jasper will agree to go to a party if they ask him to do a magician show for the kids, but nobody else in the family likes parties. If someone offered my dad a choice of how to celebrate his birthday he would choose a trip to some desert to look at sand; he would definitely refuse to have a party.

Of course birthdays don’t always fall during school holidays so the actual birthday trip is often months after the birthday itself. So what my mom does, for the actual birthday, is make a giant birthday card. Some of them are really huge, as long as your arm. She cuts out of magazines or travel brochures pictures of the place the birthday person has chosen to go to, and the person whose birthday it is has to do some research and make a list of what he or she wants to see and do there, and my mom sticks the pictures and the list into the card.

If she can book tickets for any special shows or museums in the place we are going to, she makes a cardboard pocket which she sticks inside the birthday card and places the tickets in there. She sometimes collects some of the money they use in that place, and puts it in transparent little coin holders, all stuck into the birthday card. And she cuts out something written in the language of that country and pastes it in: maybe a few useful phrases like ‘I am a vegetarian’ or ‘where can we catch a bus to the beach.’ So you can see how it can take months to make the card.

I suppose that is why Jasper and I know so much about other countries, about their language and culture and even their money, and what people do in those places. Jasper never did as much travelling as I did, because when he was born I was already in school and we weren’t travelling much except during the holidays, but if you add up all the birthdays our family has had, it means he and I have been to lots of different places.

For my thirteenth birthday I chose to go on a fossil-hunting holiday. My birthday is in April, so during the Easter break we went to Folkestone for four days to look for fossils.

Everyone in my class who is turning thirteen this year has a big party, with music and special lights; it is what everyone is doing. But I didn’t want a party, I wanted a fossil trip, and one or two girls in my class made some rude comments about me, because they thought I was weird not having a party and preferring to go to the beach when it wasn’t even summer. A few of them don’t invite me to their parties, which is no problem for me because I don’t want to go anyway.

So you can already see that I am a bit different from other people, or at least other people of my age. Maybe that is what those teachers didn’t like about me.

In a way I was glad the teachers complained about me because it ended up with my going to see Mrs. E. again.

It’s not that I wanted to learn how to fit in with the other kids in my class. I was definitely not interested in that. But I agreed to go and see her because she is interesting, and also because I knew that then my mom and dad would stop worrying so much about me. I hate it when they worry about me and talk about me in that strained anxious voice they both have.

I suppose I should describe what kind of person Mrs. E. is so you can picture her. When I was little and used to go to her every week because I didn’t speak, I already knew she was different from any other teacher, because she didn’t try to make me speak, or to make me do anything, for that matter, that I didn’t want to do.

She didn’t talk loudly, and she didn’t smile huge smiles. And she didn’t stare at me. If I didn’t want her to look at me or to hear me speak she would never force me, and if I didn’t feel like playing her games I could choose something else.

I think one of the best things about her was that she knew how to be silent, how to sit with me and not feel that she, or I, or anyone, had to be talking all the time. And she always explained her strategies to me, her small steps, so I was never surprised by anything that happened.

And now that I know her in a different way, now that I am thirteen, she is still different from any other teacher, because if I don’t feel like doing the work she sets me on any particular day she is happy if we just sit and chat.

When I think of her now, I suppose because I am a lot older and I know things I didn’t know then, I can see other ways that she is different from other teachers. Teachers usually know a lot, or at least they want us to think they know a lot, but Mrs. E. often doesn’t know things. Like Twitter and Instagram: she knows nothing about that, though I wouldn’t really expect her to, because she is quite old. She is a lot older than any of my school teachers.

I know exactly how old she is, by the way, because not long ago when I went to her house there were birthday cards on the table in the entrance hall, and one of them had a big ‘63’ in glitter on the front. So she is a lot older than my parents and I think she is older than all my school teachers too. In fact I don’t know anyone else as old as she is except for my grandmother, who is 68.

BOOK: The Voice of the Xenolith
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