Puzzling
The precursor for my love of shed hunting came from my grandma. I know, we should never blame Grandma. But she had a little box of arrowheads that she had found while working in the dirt in her garden. I was intrigued by them and started searching for my own little collection. I never found many but I did find a few on our farm, and I even found several fossils. To some of you, it seems pointless, but I used to love looking for these artifacts or remnants of times past. They are fuel to an imagination of how things might have been. I do know that pointless feeling, though, but in a different kind of puzzling. It's the feeling that I get when I'm working on a jigsaw puzzle. It's just not my cup of tea. Some people love them, but it's definitely not what I call fun.
For me, it's getting outside. My puzzle pieces have switched from arrowheads to shed antlers and mushrooms, but it's still lots of fun to look. And it helps me to relate with those people that enjoy putting together a tough jigsaw puzzle. Jenelle, as well as my mother-in-law, can spend hours looking through a box of pieces just to find one more before calling it a day. And I think that I get it. There seems to be something about the hope of finding just that one more that keeps you searching.
When I was younger it was the arrowheads and fossils. They always got my mind rolling and thinking and wondering what it used to be like way back in time. And so I read all that I could find about the Native Americans in our area, about fossils and dinosaurs, and I really learned to love the history of the first settlers that moved here. There is evidence and documentation of how things were in the past, and for some reason, it's exciting to me. These are all pieces of the puzzle that give us the beginnings of a picture. And then we add our imagination and we have a picture. And so when I look at an arrowhead, along with everything I've read, I can imagine exactly how the Natives in this area lived. The danger comes in when we assume our picture is right even though we know so little.
It always intrigued me to think that when some of the first white hunters came up here in the mountains in the early 1700s, that they found the remains of a buffalo mired in the swamp over by Marsh Hill, and so they named it Buffalo Marsh. Marsh Hill is over by the ski resort and it actually gets its name from Buffalo Marsh, which is at the foot of the hill but currently under Deep Creek Lake.
I would bet that if you asked most of the people in our county to guess how Marsh Hill got it's name, most of the answers would have nothing to do with a buffalo. And if I asked the same people if they thought that there were ever buffalo in this area, most would say no. And it makes sense because we've been taught that buffalo lived out on the great plains. Pictures have been etched in our minds of herds of buffalo rolling across the midwest. Since there haven't been Eastern woodlands buffalo fossils found in our area, but they were mentioned in journals from the 1600-1750s, archeologists say that the buffalo was only here for a short period of time and maybe several just wandered in from the Great Plains. Are they right?
If you are wondering how I got on this bunny trail, here it is.
The guy that I was working with told me about an interesting podcast of Joe Rogan interviewing some guy from Alaska that owned this place called the Alaskan Boneyard, a piece of ground containing hundreds or thousands of bones from ice age animals. There are supposed to be all of these bones that were found in the permafrost, and some that come from animals that scientists said didn't live there. And now some are scratching their heads and others are saying it can't be true.
If you can imagine what happens when you put a little air on a fire that pretty much went out, well that's what happened to me. I love discoveries like that and so I listened to the podcast. So now I'm writing about Woolly Mammoths and dinosaurs and puzzles.
To top it off, last week I'd been enjoying my morning coffee while reading through the book of Job. The book gives a pretty good impression of our lives. We don't know the why's and the when's in our life and our friends probably don't know that much either, even when they think they do. Towards the end of the book it talks about this big creature, and going by the description, some people think that it was probably a Brachiosaurus. God is giving Job the impression that even though we are made in the image of God, we have very little knowledge or power compared to God. In the same section it talks about a deer giving birth and an armored horse charging into battle. My picture has them coexisting. Of course, lots of archeologists say that man and horses with armor existed millions, if not billions of years apart from the dinosaurs. They would say that the book of Job is just fiction and all those other stories of knights and dragons that others have written are just based on a fantasy pulled out of someone's head as well. Are they right? Is it possible that man and dragons coexisted? Is it possible that dragons were actually what we call dinosaurs? The word dinosaur wasn't actually invented until 1841. We can pretty much put the pieces of the puzzle together and start to imagine what the picture looks like. And it's always fun to look for that one more piece.
We'll probably never all agree on what that finished picture looked like and I'm not here to argue about it. I'm really just here to say that we don't know much!
Happy puzzling!
(For those of you who are following my lead and already searching for the podcast, just a warning. If you haven't been spending much of your time with coal miner's, sailors, glass blowers, river runners, and other rough and tough sorts, you'll probably be offended by the language. If there's half as many bones in Alaska as I heard the f-word in the podcast, then there truly are lots of bones up there.)
