Rinks and Fossils
Before yesterday, the last time we visited Dinosaur National Monument we slept in the car.
It was our first big trip in the RV and a storm blew in overnight. Forty mph winds don’t mesh well with a top-heavy popup camper, so at midnight we carried the drowsy boys into the car and “slept” like we were riding in the back of an airplane: upright, heads lolling, tremendous noise just outside our metal bubble.
“Yesterday, we visited again, and under very different circumstances. ”
The trip leading up to that night had gone swimmingly. We were still riding the high of being out of home quarantine. We rented kayaks and floated a mile of the Green River. We walked through several million years of geologic history on a hike. We saw a wall of dinosaur bones that a structure had been built around to preserve them. We watched a sunset made orange by the smoke of Western wildfires. Even after the “adventure tax” of a night in the car (which isn’t a big one), I had decided we would keep going. We wouldn’t stop for another two years.
Yesterday, we visited northeastern Utah again, but under very different circumstances. Our bodies were in the same general space they were then, but it was winter and we were the only people in the building full of dinosaur bones. It was just us and a wall of mud-encased prehistoric artifacts. We hiked the same trail, spotting small fossils in the rocks but mostly talking about the hockey games the boys had just finished. That was the reason we were in the town adjacent to the Monument – it was a two-hour drive from home and the games were early in the morning, so we stayed the night at a hotel with the rest of the team.
“So we went from living in an RV to team sports on Saturdays. This wasn’t the path I envisioned when we slipped back into traditional life, but that transformation is apparently complete.”
The weekend was a study in contrasts. In our previous lives, I never would have dreamed of staying at a hotel, eating a muffin from a plastic packet, or sitting in a hot tub on a Friday night. I never would have imagined that I’d need my warmest jacket not because it was actually cold outside, but because the temperature of the florescent interior of the rink was enough to turn my fingertips blue. Nor would I have guessed that I’d spend most of the day sitting, or shouting “get the puck” when the enthusiasm (really, the worry) overcame me for a game featuring no one over the age of twelve.
So we went from living in an RV to team sports on Saturdays. This wasn’t the path I envisioned when we slipped back into traditional life, but that transformation is apparently complete. Sitting on the locker room floor tying skates onto the players, I felt miles away from the woman who could lay her hands on basically everything she possessed by walking from the camper to the Subaru.
I miss parts of the previous life, and I like parts of the current one. I wouldn’t be here without having been there. But it felt just right to take an hour after the games and see some fossils, walk a trail in my favorite kind of resounding quiet, and take a peek back at what we once were.
Inspired by events at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah