To the Fossil Beach

It’s New Year’s Day. I am going to the fossil beach with Dennis.

I awoke today from a horrible dream. I was in some kind of stadium. The person next to me got out a gun and started firing into the arena. No one moved to stop him, myself included. The person on my right was pretending not to notice.

I awoke out of that dream with a tense stomach and a dreary sense of shame and humiliation.

Why does the unconscious mind do this?

As we were driving Dennis said: “This year is the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War…”

He served in that war, rising to petty officer, on the frigate Ambuscade.

He retired from the Navy at the age of 30 and retrained as a chemistry teacher.

Now Argentina has renewed its claim to the islands and has the support of other Latin American countries.

We went down to the beach.

A woman was painting. There was a stiff breeze coming off the sea. Her easel was rocking and the canvas was pegged to the easel.

We passed a family playing soccer. An older boy just elbowed a younger boy too hard, pushing him to the ground. The younger boy was crying.

“Not very sporting”, the father said, coldly.

Dennis got out his hammer and started to tap the soft crumbly clay lumps that had fallen out of the cliff. Soon he found a fossil.

“An ammonite”, he said. “Ammonites once swam in warm tropical seas, in the Jurassic period.”

“Tell me”, I said, “why do nodules of chert form inside limestone rocks.”

I don’t know why I thought of that. I just have read it and remembered the words, with no idea what they meant.

“I think it is something to do with little creatures like radiolarians which secrete silicon.”

“What are radiolarians”, I said.

“Tiny symmetrical creatures, making beautiful shapes like you see in children’s kaleidoscopes.”

There is something melancholy about New Year’s Day.  I guessed Dennis was thinking about old friends and colleagues from his Navy times.

I found myself thinking of another New Year’s Day over 30 years ago.

I was walking with Aaron in the Arizona desert among the teddy bear cholla and the weird ocotillo bushes, which are just like stands of dry sticks until little leaves suddenly sprout straight out of the stems.

He had been one of my closest friends at college. He was angry with me  because I was working for a big West-coast newspaper. He had been a student activist.

“How vulgar”, he said.

That made me angry, too. I never saw him again. I think he still lives in New Mexico but I don’t know where.

I picture an angry old man with a weathered face and a grey beard, grey hair in a ponytail, living in a desert community somewhere.

Perhaps I should go find him.