As I jogged back, I saw the kids all sitting on the crumbling curb. They were waiting to present me with a treasure: a brown glazed pottery urn found buried near the fence line under the vines. The six year old saw it first: he thought it was the turtle we had released several weeks ago, only now it had flowering vines carved on the back. Then he realized it was a vase, so he and his brother dug it out to give to me.
Although caked with mud, it looked fairly pretty, having a crackled glaze, embossed peacocklike birds, and an uncommon shape. The only flaw was a broken handle, which snapped when they tried to pull it out of the ground because a root had grown through it. My admiration was genuine, as opposed to some times when I have to feign joy over a piece of broken Corelle, or chipped brick. Failing to find any “made in China” stamped on the bottom, I indulged an “Antiques Roadshow” fantasy: “Yes, my children found this urn in a vacant lot. It was probably washed away from some household during Katrina. . . . You mean it’s Shearwater pottery worth thousands?! . . . Oh, I’m going to hold onto it since it was a gift from my children, but it’s nice to know I could fund their college with it if I wanted to.” It was enough to make me want to find that piece of handle.
They showed me the spot where they had found it, and where we also saw three blue-tailed skink skittering under the detritus of rotted leaves and scuppernongs. Apparently their nest had been disturbed. I disturbed it further by sifting through the dirt by the fence. I found one piece of the broken handle, but another tiny brown fragment still lies buried for the next generation of archaeologists. I had to give up the search to go pick up another child. All day I plotted how I might jump on the bike to ride back over, but a free half hour never surfaced. Maybe tomorrow.
This adventure in archaeology serendipitously occurred shortly after reading Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. I picked it up because it went from the “New Books” shelf at the library to the “Recommended Reading” shelf, and because I had read a picture book, Stone Girl Bone Girl by Laurence Anholt, which I found more remarkable than the novel. The picture book’s simple illustrations reminded me a little of Barbara Cooney’s, and the author told the story in a way that made you interested in the fossils that Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot found, but the focus was on Mary as a little girl.
Chevalier’s story focused more on the unique friendship of Philpot and Anning, and on their identity as women in a men’s field rather than on the fossils themselves. Other than mentioning how the fossils contributed to theories of extinction and the resulting pressure on religious beliefs, Chevalier doesn’t delve far into the geological questions of the day, nor does she really frame the religious questions with clarity. Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of the World opened my eyes to those wonders in a more thorough way.
What becomes tiresome about Chevalier’s book was overemphasis on the barriers these women faced: that the women were unconventional in their pursuit of fossils and in their friendship is interesting, but reading repeated comments about these constraints is not. I get tired of being told how oppressed women of previous centuries were because they had to have chaperones and mind their manners. Whenever I read historical fiction I wonder about this emphasis on the unfair trials women of yore had to endure: did they really resent the restrictions as much as their modern sisters imagine? Take Jane Austen, who gets a mention in Remarkable Creatures, for example: some of her characters chafe against their societal roles, but more often what they struggle with are the constrictions of class, not gender. We judge the oppression of their cultural regime by our standards.
Maybe I expected too much from a novel that has been on the library’s special features shelf. This book ties into the resurgence of interest in Charles Darwin, which has resulted in renewed interest in natural history, or maybe vice versa. It’s a fascinating period of history, which makes reading Chevalier’s story entertaining. But of most value is its proposition that the story of the past is written in the rocks beneath our feet, and that if we keep our eyes open we can find extraordinary treasures in ordinary places, that time is more spacious and full of possibility than we can imagine, that our relationship with God can expand to include these possibilities. And maybe by articulating these thoughts I’ll hold onto that glimpse of wonder every time I look at our potential treasure of a lost artifact, a record of perseverance in the face of a storm’s destruction.
Fossilized coral petoskey stone, Lake Michigan
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