gozzterLeave a Comment on The reluctant palaeontologist

The reluctant palaeontologist

There is a time for everything I suppose, and to continue the biblical Ecclesiastes, a season for every activity under the heavens. Not being religiously-versed, I have to rely on the short biblical snippets I can remember of my United Church Sunday school colouring books. I also remember I was never one for colouring within the lines and wiled away the time by inventing appendages with my crayons; more than once I was sentenced to sit in a pew at the back of the church, cleverly timed to coincide with the sermon.

What I’m attempting to describe in present day terms is that I often get times wrong and forget that others probably interpret the Ecclesiastical passage as an excuse to pursue every activity on their days off -which is to say the weekend with their wife and kids, and any of their friends in the neighbourhood who are anxious to see dinosaur bones glued together to frighten them. I’m referring, of course, to the fantastic Royal Tyrell Museum in the badlands near Drumheller, Alberta. I’ve visited it many times in the past, but on weekdays during those late spring months or toward the end of September when the kids were still in school or doing their homework.

The museum is truly incredible: apart from the huge dinosaur skeletons there are informative plaques explaining the conditions and time-frames when they lived: what the flora would have been like and how the fauna might have sounded. There is almost too much information on offer: too many enumerations of  the various time frames; too many signs about how the shifting tectonic plates over the millions of years changed the land masses and drove evolution; too many changing life-forms. It’s always new to me each time I visit; I mean it’s in one eye and out the other…

To even begin to process of remembering the information as an elder, requires concentration, time, and a quiet space to think about the vast expanse of time that changed the world into something we now take for granted. It is not information that can easily be assimilated in a hurried, jostled visit; and there are many sections making even several full, quiet days never enough.

And before each of my many visits, I am naïve enough to dream that the museum itself might evolve into a haven for learning: a library policed, like the ones in big cities, by stern middle aged women with greying hair imprisoned in untidy buns on top of their heads who demand it be a place of quiet contemplation; a place of whispers, gasps of appreciation in honour of the paleontologists who discovered and made sense of long entombed bones; a place of proud teachers, or parents whose duty is to restrain the unruly ones amongst their flocks. The Royal Tyrell is a recurring dream which I wait to revisit each year with hope springing eternal in my all too human breast.

On the morning after I arrived in a summer Drumheller (a Saturday) I got up early, had my breakfast and hurried out to the museum. I wasn’t expecting any crowds, and anyway most of the people would probably arrive in the afternoon: parents don’t usually get up early on weekends.

Wrong! I got there even before its cafeteria opened and there was already a long, noisy, rambunctious line at the ticket counter. Oh well, I thought, I’m here, eh?

So, I paid my senior’s fee and literally waded into the first exhibition through toddlers screaming and falling on the floor, slightly older kids also yelling and worming their way under elbows, and through family groups to see if they could touch the bones. I couldn’t stop long enough to concentrate on the information, or stand and think about how different life must have been in those faraway days; there was always an elbow poking me, or a kid trying to make it through my legs on its (can I call an unnamed child with long curly hair an ‘it’?) way to yet another array of scary bones.

None of them seemed to stop long enough to read the name, let alone the information they had fought to touch, before they were off, screaming at something else that caught their eyes. And not all screams were of pleasure or excitement; many (most?) were because they’d fallen in a crowd moving in a slow stampede along the corridors and found themselves separated from their friends or family in a bevy of feet. Some of them were terrified, and when found by a distraught parent were scooped up and hurried to the exit until they could calm them down.

The noise level was off the charts and I had the bright idea of going back to my car and putting on my noise cancelling earphones. It was then that I discovered I had been so distracted by the noise, the movement, and the pushing and shoving that I was actually in the middle of a large, slowly shuffling herd: buffalo came to mind. I had no idea how to reach an exit. I am a short man and in a world of tall parents, things seemed the same in every direction; any signs were at waist level and unreadable -unfindable– in the jumble of people unconsciously demonstrating random Brownian movement.

I realized that I was imprisoned in elbows and hands reaching for their escaped child; the floor was crammed with feet and crawling screaming children who obviously hadn’t expected a dinosaur experience to be like this. As far as I could tell, though, no child was hurt -just lost and scared. The adults seemed to be enjoying themselves, chatting -well, yelling– affably to each other. It occurred to me that maybe I was the only person who was bothered by the mayhem. Maybe normal, socially apt adults were used to this sort of thing at church socials, or cheering in their seats at their child’s hockey games…

Was I panicking? It was hard to differentiate annoyance from panic because of the noise level and not knowing in which direction to escape. I took a deep breath and tried to recollect the fossils on entering into the melee. They were big ones -I remembered that; they towered over the crowd. I could just see the head of a familiar dinosaur across the room and elbowed my way against the current through those who were just entering and noticed the store I knew was near the entrance.

What the heck, I pushed myself towards it and entered the peaceful almost quiet space dedicated to preserving memories of the visit. I saw a red cap I liked and bought it in celebration of my escape I suppose.

Only later, on my way across the jammed parking lot did I really look at what I’d bought: it had a sewn likeness of a triceratops on its front. Rather fitting, I thought as I put it on my head: a survival trophy. I’ll try to remember to wear it when I visit the museum (on a non-summer weekday) next year.

The experience was not wasted on me, though: it made me feel I was a sort of palaeontologist in the way I’d dug my way through the badlands of the crowd and discovered a red triceratop just waiting for my credit card…

, , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close