snails

[nicktheradical]

This past Sunday, Katie and I were up at the junction of the Lampasas River and some creek the name of which I don't know. There's an aged philanthropist of the old-school variety who has a lot of land up there--on which he built a chapel and a graveyard so he could his deceased wife could be legally buried on their property--and he noticed a while back that people had been coming onto his land and digging great holes there, where the river and the creek join up. It seems that the spot has, historically and prehistorically, been a great place to find lots of edible snails and mussels. (Snails, at least, are still present there in great abundance.) Consequently, everyone from Paleoindians to a cabin-dwelling Anglo-American settler or two has lived out there from time to time. We went on what was my first archaeological expedition ever, on which I found my first stone tool. The Paleoindians of the area, who had not acquired the pottery meme as of two thousand years ago, used to stop by every fall when nuts and mollusks were in season, build "hearths" by setting large fires and covering them with stones, then use the red-hot stones to bake their catch. While they were stopped there, they'd take the opportunity to do a certain amount of repair or construction of their worldly goods, which is why things like drillbits, scrapers, and gravers are common finds at that site. Katie and I were excavating a couple of different hearths (different, I say, because they were at different strata and were probably temporally separated, though they were very close to each other physically) when I found an oddly-shaped rock. Most of the stones we'd been uncovering were flat, and they were burnt and cracked from the heat; there were shells all over the fucking place, which we had to collect and sort, and I was scraping away the dirt from what I thought would be another baking stone when I realized that it had a kind of prismatic shape to it, and that is coloration was not that of limestone, but more veined and translucent. I'd found a big hunk of chert, which I thought at first was a leftover core from which various tools had been struck, but which turned out to be a graver/scraper about the size of my fist. Its function was surmisable from the wear on one of its edges and the fact that it had clearly had an elongated point on one corner, which had been broken off. Maybe this damage led to its having been used, finally, as part of a hearth before it was buried by time and clay. Digging up dead people's trash with a trowel turns out to be one of the cutest possible things a couple can do.

Annie, your parents ought to move out there. I have been dreaming of that country for several years now, from time to time, and it turns out to be pretty much real.

Also, they have remodeled my Starbucks. (The corporate powers that be, that is, not Annie's parents.) The new design is so flabberghastingly asinine--we have about a third of the cabinet space, and even less of the counter space, that we used to have, along with spoutless sinks, pointless drawers, and a trash can placed directly in front of a coffee grinder--that the store is now basically useless. Thank God we've now got an automatic half-and-half dispenser and a Liliputian dish sink. I can't tell you how many times I've longed for a sink built for midgets and some technological miracle to save me from the awful burden of having to pour cream by hand.

Consequently, after I sleep for a few hours, I'm going to go look for a new job. Too bad it can't be as a professional graver-finder, or at least not yet.