The beach we’ve made our way home from is covered in punctuation marks. It spreads out at the northern end of the Monterey Bay, nearly under something called the Purisima Formation, a cliff rising from the seabed. It’s chock full of fossils that are 3 million to 5 million years old.
Every time I visit, I see paleontology students, serious and anticipatory, spread out along the beach in huddles, tap-tapping their chisels. Recreational gatherers hunt with small hammers and buckets, and children pull hunks of the cliff up from the waves, delighted and dancing, wet like sprites, until they grow bored with their finds and return to the sea for sand crabs, or skim boarding, or dunking their brother one, two, three times while he sputters salt water out his nose.
The fossils are embedded in grey-black slabs of sandstone and siltstone. The largest piece I’ve seen on the beach was the length of a 10-year-old’s leg; the smallest, the size of a necklace gem. From these hunks of rock gleam white curves, swirls, half circles of decoration; they are the commas of shells — the punctuation of the beach.
Up the side of the cliff, represented in fossils, are more than 55 mollusk species. You can also see fossils of whalebones, mammal teeth, crab claws, starfish, leaves and fronds, seaweed pods — all more than a million years old.
We’ve walked, generations of my family, on this beach and beside this cliff. My grandfather bought a little house here before WWII. What he paid for it would now buy half a compact car. Even all these years later, my young sons know the place well.
We get used to the things we know.
In the morning we pile chairs and coolers by the back door. I nag the boys to shake the sand out of their wetsuits from the day before, find their towels, pack a book. My husband carries more than he should, the boys don’t carry enough and we hoof it down to the beach, dragging boards and sometimes the dog. We set up an old, striped umbrella so cousins or my uncle or my mother will recognize us from the cliff above, should they decide to descend down. We vacation while they go about their regular week, and each day we stay, we tempt them by our insistence that they come stop everything with us.
Invariably someone joins us and we walk the walk from the cliff to the wharf, catching up, storytelling, water watching. None of us pays very much mind to what is underfoot. It’s too old, too ordinary, too much a part of what we’ve seen all our lives.
And all the while we’ve been walking over ancient bone beds. We’ve collected pieces of them without thinking much about it; we’ve lined the top of the fence with the fossil-rocks all in a row and even used medium small chunks as doorstops. I have a hunk of the bone-bed on top of my piano in Colorado.
Later, up at the house, I find an article my grandmother clipped and saved some 40 or 50 years ago. There is no indication of who wrote it, only a single sentence underlined and heralded with an arrow and a “Look!” written in her familiar hand.
The article suggests the cliff is peppered with remains of long-ago sea animals because of ancient “periodic high energy storm events capable of excavating mollusks from their normal habitats and depositing them in aggregate beds further offshore.”
The shell animals were literally blown out of the water.
We get used to the things we know, even though we sometimes have no idea what they are, why they matter, where they came from.
Look around you: look right underfoot. Search and examine what you love and think you know. There’s always more. Our eyes become trained on the ordinary when really, what would serve us better is eyes trained on the extraordinary that we trip over, every day.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
