DINOSAUR LOVERS

This post was prompted by a comment I made on Quin Browne’s blog today, and is about the love of dinosaurs.

Why is it that so many youngsters love dinosaurs?

I didn’t, when I was a kid.

I didn’t even know about dinosaurs when I was a kid.

Sheltered childhood, huh? Perhaps that’s what you can get from attending a one-room elementary school in the early-to-mid 1950s in rural Wisconsin, with one teacher to teach 17 students total in all eight grades. Days long gone? Not really. There are still one room schools today out in some of the wide open spaces of states like Wyoming and Montana.

Not even when I attended high school (which had more than one room) did I become aware of dinosaurs.

It wasn’t until I was in college in the early ’60s and took a freshman science course entitled: Physical Geology 101, that I finally became aware of and acquainted with dinosaurs. Better late than never!

God! How I loved that course! Only a few weeks into it, I decided to change my major from Business Administration to Geology, so taken I was with it!

During that semester of study, our professor, Dr. Peterson, took us on a day-long field trip to nearby Chicago and the Museum of Natural History next to Soldiers Field. What an exciting day of exploring and discovery that was for me, especially!

Doc Peterson was a pretty neat guy, coming from the U. of Michigan, to teach in Wisconsin. He was a well published paleontologist with a rather unique sense of humor. One day he was describing the various stages of the recent Ice Ages, and was gesturing on a large wall map of North America how this one huge glacier “…went whipping down past Chicago,…” and as he said it, he laughed his little laugh to let us know that he was making a joke here about glaciers traveling at breakneck speeds, to which the class let out a rather large, collective groan…

At the end of several hours of running around the museum, I was probably the only person, except for Doc Peterson, who didn’t want to leave yet, to head back to campus. The last thing I did though, was make a visit to the Museum Gift Shop and ended up buying a couple of dozen dinosaur miniatures, made out of copper. I had them spread out all in a line on my desk shelf in my dorm room for the rest of that semester. Eventually, when I went home that summer (1964), they ended up in a shoe box under my bed in my parents home, and were forgotten.

During the summer of ‘64, my parents decided to take the family in an extended summer vacation out west, ending up in Wyoming and Montana, where my father had hunted elk and mule deer in years prior to that. The first part of the trip was pretty neat, you know, seeing The Corn Palace in Mitchell, then stopping into Wall Drugs, then on to the Black hills for two days of sightseeing there.

Then it was over the Big Horns and on to Yellowstone, and the long lines of cars stopped to look at and feed the bears along side the roads. Yellowstone was neat, but still not our ultimate goal, as that was next, when we exited the Park through West Yellowstone and headed into southwestern Montana and the Ennis area. We were actually nearby when the earthquake struck that occurred that summer, and created Quake Lake.

Finally though, we reached the Canyon Creek Ranch, our final destination, where my father and our family doctor, his hunting buddy, had hunted elk for several years. It was while talking with the rancher, Ted, that my level of excitement really kicked into high gear, when I learned that there were fossils (and maybe a stray, old petrified dinosaur bone or two) all around the ranch, and that, if I wanted, I could go and look for some! SHAZZAM! You didn’t have to ask me twice! Ted soon had a young mare saddled for me to ride, assuring me that she was a very gentle horse, and I was on my way out into the ‘breaks’ country, along the dry creek beds, and soon was probably a mile from the buildings, where my family stayed to visit, sleep and take a nap, if needed.

After quite a bit of diggin’ and pickin’ with my rock hammer, I soon had uncovered several great little specimens of snails, fish and other petrified items, which I packed away in my backpack, with my rock hammer. Having run slightly over the time I had been alloted by my parents for my afternoon of fossil hunting, I swung back up into the saddle and turned back towards the ranch.

As I started my long journey back, my horse walking through a large, dry stony creek bed, I decided to transfer my back pack from my back, onto the saddle horn, for a more comfortable ride back to the ranch. Bad Choice! And one of the most innocent and life-altering of bad choices I have ever made in my life.

About the time I was transferring my back pack from my back to the saddle horn, my horse happened to turn her head and see what I was up to. Well, she instantly decided that what I was doing wasn’t to her liking, and she exploded into a series of bucks, jumps and twists that soon had me airborne and headed for a hard landing!

The end result was that I very quickly finished my short flight by landing hard on my tail bone on the rocks of the stream bed, painly suffering compression fractures of two of my lower lumbar vertebrae. Ouch! OMG, OUCHIE!!

So, there I lay, in severe pain on the rocks of the stream bed, about a mile from the ranch buildings, with my faithful horse, ‘She-Bitch’, heading hell bent for election back to the corral and her oat bucket! “DAMN,” as George Clooney says in ‘OH BROTHER, Where Art Thou’, “We’re in a tight spot!”

When She-Bitch came running back into the ranch yard, minus one male fossil hunter, Rancher Ted and my folks figured somethin’ was definitely up, and probably gone awry. The hopped into Ted’s pickup and started the search, trying to track me down and see what the deal was. Eventually, they did come upon my broken and pain-filled, near-corpse body, loaded me up, and carted me back to the buildings, where I was transferred into the family station wagon, and then up the highway many miles to the hospital in Butte, Montana.

Well, my dance card was filled for the next two weeks as an out-of-state temporary resident in the Butte hospital, until the doctors figured it was OK for me to be transported back home to Wisconsin for further care. Oh, how I came to love those hypos the nurses gave me so I could sleep through the pain at night while laying there in my bed, in that non-air conditioned room. At the end of the two weeks, my father ended up coming back out to pick me up and take me back home, a very long drive, believe me.

At the time, I was pretty sure God was pissed at me or somethin’, for allowing this tragedy to occur. And perhaps I might have figured at the time that having a broken, weakened body, which meant no more waterskiiing or playing baseball, ever, was a bad omen as to where my life might be headed.

However, some four years later, during the height of the Viet Nam War, when many of my guy friends were heading across the seas for that big Asian vacation, I was drafted, and figured I would be boarding that plane very soon to join them. And then, the She-Bitch struck again! This time, though, she gave me a blessing when the final doctor down in Milwaukee at the Military Pre-Induction Center, slapped a big ‘NO’ stamp on my pre-induction papers, and sent me back home on the bus, saying, “We’ll call you, Son, if we get invaded by ‘Charlie’.”

Just a few months before that, I was privileged to marry the girl of my dreams, and start the first year of what has become our 40 years total (next month), of life together. About five years after we hitched up, we decided to have kids, and oldest son came along in 1974, born out west, in Belle Fourch, South Dakota, which was about 55 miles east of the cattle ranch we were living on at the time in northeast Wyoming.

As he grew from infancy into and through toddler-hood, we read dozens and dozens of children’s books to him, and wouldn’t-you-know, among his very favorite books came to be those about…. dinosaurs.

One day during that time, as he was sitting on my lap in our rocking chair, and I was reading to him from one of his favorite dinosaur books, I stopped, put the book down, and he and I walked down into the basement to a set of our storage shelves. Retrieving an old shoe box from an upper shelf, we sat down on the floor and proceeded to open it.

As Lucas took out the first object wrapped in newspaper, and opened it, he literally shrieked with delight when he found that it was a miniature copper dinosaur! After excitedly telling me all about this particular dinosaur, he set it down on the floor, and reached for the next one, and very soon had all of them out and unwrapped. I told him that they were his now, to play with and to have, and hopefully take care of, and some day, share with his son(s).

During my recent visit to Lucas and his family in North Carolina over the easter weekend, I had plenty of time to play with my two grandsons, especially, the oldest, Noah. The first time Noah asked me to come and play with him, he got out a bunch of his toys, from his special toy box, and low-and-behold, they were dinosaurs! He said to me, “Come one, grampa, lets play with my dinosaurs,” and we did, as he told me all about each one, in order. I couldn’t have been more pleased, and proud.

Three generations of dinosaur lovers, and counting…