by Jim Reilly
“I didn’t help her get chosen for this assignment, and I didn’t endure fifty-six hours of travel hell if I didn’t think this would help us get closer,” James countered.
Jennifer, slender in silhouette with long, straight, dark brown hair, a hint of freckles on her cheeks, and soft inviting brown eyes, was waiting outside the bus as James and David departed the vehicle and gathered their gear. The rest of the way would be by bumpy dirt roads leading to the established campsite.
David was the first to gather his gear and then approached Jennifer, saying, “Hi. I believe we have seen each other on campus, and we were in a couple of classes I think, but we haven’t formally met. I’m David Ch--”
James rudely cut in, “Jennifer you would not believe how awful a trip I had to get here. Long flights, long waits, horrible food, and intolerable people.”
David could do nothing but chuckle, as he was not too surprised how rude and self-centered his traveling companion acted. He noticed that Jennifer, with her elegant yet unpretentious appearance, smiled toward him as if to let David know that she was not too surprised either.
On the road in the Land Rover, David turned to Jennifer and asked, “What are the people like?”
Jennifer explained, “They are very accommodating and nice. The Surma people dominate this area. They are renowned for the strange custom of having their women slit their lower lips and insert circular or rectangular clay discs when they reach maturity, and the Surma men are known for a style of stick fighting called Donga. Since they’re used to foreigners coming to the area for at least forty years, the people are very friendly and hospitable. When we get a break, I can bring you back so you can experience their culture.”
“No thanks,” said James. “These people don’t seem any more advanced than the people we’ll be digging up.”
“You don’t find it fascinating how the Surma developed their culture?” David shot back. “I’d like to know their reason for the lip insertion, or the stick fighting, or if they migrated here versus having been here forever, or types of food they typically eat. I find it fascinating, to say the least.”
James said, “The first thing you’ll learn is their bathing habits, or lack thereof.”
“Oh, James, will you ever become inquisitive and stop letting your biases come out?” said Jennifer.
James just grunted in disapproval.
It was early evening as they reached the project’s campsite, where Gibbs and Sanchez greeted James and David.
Gibbs addressed the group. “Welcome to the Kibish rock formations. I hope your trip wasn’t too bad. We have high expectations for this dig to be successful, and we hope it will be rewarding to you as budding anthropologists. Classroom study can take you just so far in your education, and being out in the field will allow you to apply what you have learned in a real-life adventure.”
Dr. Sanchez added, “It is getting late, though, and we like to take advantage of as much sunlight as we can. Breakfast is at 5:00 A.M., and we’ll be at the dig site by 5:30 to be ready for sunrise at 5:46. Jennifer will now show you where to get some food and where your tent is to bunk for the night. Sleep well, for you will need it because we have a long day tomorrow.”
“See you in the morning,” David said, and they all headed for their tents.
Jennifer showed James and David to their tent area. “Make sure you check your cot and blanket before you lay down for the night, because we have found little creepy crawlers and snakes looking for a warm place to sleep,” she said. “We already had a geologist get bitten, and her whole arm swelled four times its size! Lucky for her, we had the right medicine for that particular bug. Anyway, when you get hungry, the tent with the food is in the center of the camp. You can’t miss it; it’s the one that has all the coolers and refrigerators. So, if there’s not anything else, I’ll see you guys in the morning?”
James responded quickly, “But Jennifer, I thought we could talk and…”
Jennifer cut him off as she headed to her tent. “There will be plenty of time tomorrow at the dig site for talking. I’m tired from a long day of digging. Good night!” Then she walked away.
A dejected James just stared into the dimly lit corridor between the tents, then peered behind him to see David diligently checking every corner of the tent. “We will do that later. Let’s go find some food first,” he said.
Walking back to their tent with a few snacks from the food tent, David said, “I can’t believe they have chocolate pudding snacks all the way out here. My favorite.”
“Modern conveniences make being in the middle of nowhere a little more bearable,” said James as they entered the tent, “but please keep your excitement down for tomorrow’s first day at the site, because it’s a slow and mundane process. Trust me, it will be long days of chiseling rock and sifting through sand. Then, if you are lucky, you might find a hint of prehistoric life in a fossil of some long-dead plant or ancient bug that was plentiful hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the chance of finding an ancient ancestor is very remote. The actual excavating is slowed by painstakingly removing layers one inch at a time, then mapping out each layer on a diagram. It is tedious.”
As David finished the last of his chocolate pudding, he told James, “Don’t be a killjoy. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Now I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
David lay on his cot and told him, “I can’t believe I am finally going to dig for ancient man in the morning. I can’t believe it.”
James just shook his head in disapproval.
“Hey, guys! Wake up or you’ll miss breakfast!” Jennifer yelled into James and David’s tent as she continued on her way.
“Oh, my God. I’m so tired,” David mumbled as he tried to focus in the dark of early morning. “It feels like midnight, not 5:30. OK. Right. Jetlag. OK. I’m up and excited to get started.”
“Yeah, I’m thrilled to death, too,” James said sarcastically.
David and James were late for breakfast but grabbed as much food as they could hold on their way to meet Gibbs and Sanchez for a quick orientation at the dig site before they got started.
“Good morning, guys,” Sanchez said. “As you can see, we have already started excavating the area where we will focus our dig. Oh, and by the way, I want to thank your classmate Jennifer for getting in country with the advance team to help set up our camp. She was a Godsend.”
James peered over to Jennifer as if to give her a silent, “Good job.”
Gibbs took over for Sanchez. “We found this location to be, due to erosion, not too deep into the ground. Our geologist, Dr. Harris, has located a layer between 200,000 and 250,000 years old, yet not too deep in the earth.” Sanchez then yelled over to Harris, “How is the arm feeling?”
“The swelling is going down, but it is starting to itch a little,” she said.
“Give it a few more days,” Sanchez said, and then continued to David and James, “We figure to be at that level in about three more days of slowly sifting through the ground and diligently recording every item.”
David asked, “With all the digs that have gone on here since the Leakey Dig some forty years ago, when they found Ono 1, why do you feel this is a good spot?”
“Good question, David,” Sanchez said. “We believe this is a previously overlooked part of the Kibish rock formation because previous digs were looking at a much later time in the rocks’ age. We believe most of the digs before us were looking for early modern man in earth that was not as early in history as this layer. Since the sun has now given us enough light to start working, let’s not waste another second of precious sunlight and get started.”
As they broke up, Dr. Gibbs said to James, “I bet your old man is happy you’re here, and I bet he wishes he were here too.”
James just nodded his head as to agree, but in reality he was glad that the giant shadow of his father that usually made him feel invisible was not there.
After three days at the dig,
James was starting to feel dejected, as Jennifer seemed always to be busy with little to no time for him. Every time he approached her, she was going in a different direction, and even though they were only a few yards away from each other at the dig, it seemed they were worlds apart. Yet every night James prodded David with questions since she had been teamed up with him since the first day. James found David a wealth of information because he told James many things that James did not know about Jennifer. He told James how she got the scar on her leg, what it was like in the part of Indiana where she was from, what her parents did for a living, and her aspirations for her career.
Eventually, David told James he was tired of being his information-gatherer and to talk to her himself. Right after dinner and before she got back to her tent for the night, James planned to do just that.
Later on, James was sitting at his table finishing his dinner and waiting for the chance to get a hold of Jennifer, who was in a conversation with some of the other team members. As he was waiting, David, who had been sitting next to him, got up and grabbed the binoculars hanging on his chair.
“Where are you going?” James asked.
“I am finally not too exhausted to go out on that ridge and gaze at the stars tonight on this clear night. I don’t get too many opportunities to see the stars without the lights on Long Island polluting the sky and blocking their view. Too much light on the ground makes it harder to be able to see the heavens. When it is dark here you can see so many more stars as the sky fills with them. They are so bright that you think you could just reach up and touch—”
James cut him off rudely, “Go enjoy yourself,” then got up to follow Jennifer as she left the dinner area. “Jennifer, wait up,” he called as he ran over to her before she made it to her tent.
James looked at Jennifer and suggested, “I thought we could spend some time together since we will be together here for a few weeks. Back at school you are always so busy and had little time for anything other than the school work.”
Jennifer was a brilliant student who had finished high school a year early and her four-year bachelor degree in three years. Her dedication to her schoolwork made her a favorite of the faculty despite James’ claims to helping her gain access. She was very inquisitive and talented in understanding how things worked.
She said, “Hey, James. I told you back at the university that I’m concentrating on my work and learning as much as I can so I can excel as an anthropologist. Doing a project like this is a dream of mine. I now have the opportunity to take what I learned and use it out in the field. I am slowly digging through the earth to find remnants of life that lived on this planet hundreds of thousands of years ago. I think that this is so amazing. Most of all, James, this is my dream job, and I feel fortunate for the opportunity to be able to do something I love to do.”
She then paused and tried to explain to him, “I sense you want to be more than friends, but I have career aspirations that are a world apart from yours. I also feel we should just remain friends because our goals are not compatible. Your personal wants and needs are different from mine. Don’t get me wrong, James. I do appreciate what you did for me back at the university, but it would make me feel better if we could just remain friends.”
James had thought that all the time he put in trying to get her attention through the years at school would pay off for him now. He was disappointed, but he couldn’t let go and responded to appease her wishes with a little hope for himself when he said, “It would be great to remain friends, and maybe things will change as we become better friends, don’t you think?”
Her intentions were not to hurt him, but her answer was ambiguous at best. “Sure,” she responded.
She then walked into her tent, but quickly came back out, to James’ surprise. At first he thought she was coming back out to talk some more with him, but he noticed that she was holding a pair of binoculars and started to walk away from him.
He asked in confusion, “Where are you headed?”
She barely turned around to make eye contact with him when she said, “David mentioned that he would be on the ridge viewing the stars on this clear night.” She took a few more steps and reluctantly said, “You are welcome to join us.”
But James, like a wounded animal, decided he would rather go lick his wounds. “No, thank you. It was a long day, and I’m tired. I think I’ll go back to the tent.”
“OK, then,” she said as she kept walking. “Have a good night.”
James just nodded his head while she disappeared into the darkness.
On the ridge, she approached David, asking, “Do you mind if I join you?”
David was a bit surprised to see his dig partner. “I thought you would be hanging out with James. He was looking forward to speaking to you.”
She replied, “We talked briefly.” After a moment or two she confessed, “He has always tried to be more than friends, but he is not really my type. I believe that deep down he is not a bad guy. The biggest stumbling block has been that he knows nothing about me, and he has made no attempt to find out. Yet I know all about him because he is his biggest promoter. As a matter of fact, I could probably write his biography. You traveled with him. What did you two talk about?”
A reluctant David replied, “Ah, him.”
Jennifer continued, “He doesn’t know where I’m from, anything about how I grew up, or what I want to do with my life. To tell you the truth, you know more about me from the last few days than James knows from the last few years he has tried to date me.” This caused a brief awkward stare at each other, then she quickly continued, “He does try to help me, but it is more about what he can get out of it instead of for the sake of helping. With the help of James, I have met his father, I have been to university functions reserved for the dignitaries of the university, I have sat in on meetings about the ongoing partnership the university has with the Museum of Natural History, and through his influence, because of his father’s status in the university, I’ve been given the opportunity to be here. I didn’t ask for any of it. But his influence there at the university can also be a little disconcerting. I always happen to be in the same class and have the same lab hours he has. No matter what class it is, he is always in the seat right next to me.”
In an attempt to defend James, David said, “Well, he likes you and wants to be near you, I guess.”
She replied, “It’s a little creepy. But even if I could see past his self-centeredness, his goals don’t match mine. I want to learn and explore and then take that knowledge to advance my career in this field. I love the fact I’m an anthropologist and have an opportunity to discover something that lived on this planet so long ago and learn about it. He lacks passion, and without passion for and a love of what you do, you’re just going through the motions. But on the other hand, he is brilliant, and it irks me that I work extremely hard just to maintain what comes so easily to him, and he just wastes it.”
David agreed, “I know. He is like a lot of people I have met in my life that have all the talent in the world, and you would think they could accomplish anything they set their minds to, but they lack one important ingredient, desire. Without that, they can never reach their potential.”
After a few quiet moments, both looking up at the starlit sky, they both looked to change the subject from James to the reason they were out there in the first place.
David began, “I love getting to a location far from city lights so I have the opportunity to see as many stars as possible with the naked eye. Back on Long Island, there are too many streetlights, porch lights, car headlights, and shopping mall lights in the atmosphere that block out our vision of the night sky. But out here on a clear night, you see so many stars that you think you can reach up and touch them. If you look over there, you can see the center of the Milky Way, where there are billions of stars. Some of these stars are so distant from us that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the light to reach us. We are actually looking at the past when we loo
k at them. The light from that star could have originated so long ago that at this moment the star may not be there anymore, but we will not know about its demise until the light from its massive explosion someday reaches us. I find that amazing because I love looking at the past.”
Looking up, Jennifer agreed. “As a young girl I would travel with my family to northern Michigan so my dad could go fishing at some of the fresh water lakes in the state parks. The nighttime was special at the campgrounds we would stay at because I would look up and wonder who might be looking down at me and whether I was looking up at something my ancestors looked at as well. It helped me to become interested in history so much that here I am, ready to find an ancestor who might have looked up at the sky in wonder as I am today. So tell me, what else is up in the sky?”
“Well,” David said. “It was pointed out to me recently that the bright one above the moon and to the right is Jupiter, and later this month we will be able to see Venus.”
David and Jennifer continued to gaze at the lights in the sky for a little while longer as they relaxed after a long day of digging. It was for only an hour, but it gave them time to talk and get to know each other.
For James, the days got longer with his realization that Jennifer did not think of him in the way he thought of her. He was not especially keen on being out in the field, and it reminded him of the boring trips he had to make with his dad. Now each day he had to work at the dig site and notice the budding relationship between David and Jennifer. The dejected feeling he had took its toll on his already sub-par effort at the dig site. It was now three days after the night Jennifer told him she was not interested in taking their friendship to another level, and his poor work was starting to get noticed by the other members of the team.
He also drew the attention of the project leaders, Gibbs and Sanchez, who decided that for the good of the team James would be sent on a task. They did not want his lack of excitement to affect the good morale the team had exhibited so far. But because he was the son of Patrick Connor, and out of respect for him, they decided against sending him home if his attitude did not improve. So they chose to have him scout the local area outside the dig zone for signs of ancient bones that might be on the surface. The artifacts could be visible due to erosion or from being overlooked by earlier archeological digs. Sometimes these finds led to major discoveries when little fragments of bones instigated more extensive digs on that spot.