Digging for Dinosaurs in My Twenties
I will fly out from Boston. Dan from New York City. Our flights will be delayed. Mike will be leaning on his car outside the Salt Lake City airport, say “Heyyyyyy!” when he sees us, then show his excitement and wingspan on the approach of the two-back-pat hugs he gives Dan and me.
And then we’ll be driving in Mike’s reluctantly purple 1999 Honda Accord, dusty and low to the ground. It will be 2 a.m, then 2:20. We will be just out of college. The stars out here will have a brightness that seems almost worrisome, sky like a fiercely freckled face on a kid with laid-back parents. As we leave the city, the stars will disappear because the road is narrow and the hills are high. I will press my face to the glass. The three of us will be quiet with occasional rallies: “I’m so glad you guys made it,” Mike will say as he drives. “It’s so great to be out here,” we will say, “This is gonna be awesome.” It’s weird to be tired at the beginning of something.
Mike is in his first year of grad school for paleontology at the University of Michigan, and spends his summers out west working to find something—some bones that will help humans know what came before us and help Mike make a name for himself and know where his funding and career will come from. Mike has been out here a month already, looking for his future in the desert.
Dan and I will come along because digging for fossils sounds ridiculous—and right now ridiculous has an aesthetic beauty unto itself. Because Dan and I are about to become grownups, if we aren’t already, and someone offers a few weeks playing in dirt and looking for dinosaurs, which we know to be monsters you get by adding science.
Mike is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Dan is probably the funniest. Mike's intelligence often seems so effortless it's dopey. Dan is a piece of energy dressed as a human. On campus, he was a member of the best sketch-comedy group, a huge deal. And now he’s in a sketch group with those same guys in New York, trying to make it. I go back and forth between having complete confidence that the world will recognize both Dan and Mike for their talents and worrying no one will ever know these things about them. Worrying that everyone thinks their friends are smart and funny. Lots of people are smart. Everybody’s in a sketch group in college. It’s basically required for males who go to a certain type of college to be in a sketch-comedy group. So who are we.
I will feel all of this without really thinking it. And later this year, after a summer in the desert, complicated financial things we will keep meaning to Google will justify our latent feelings of dread. Struggling news institutions will struggle to explain exactly how and why our generation is struggling. But the gist of it is there is a Recession and the three of us probably should not have studied what we studied: journalism, being funny, and dinosaurs.
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The bags we’ve packed will hold the ur-wardrobes of early-twenties boy-men of the mid-2000s: community service T-shirts that say “Volunteer” on the back and Gap T-shirts worn half-ironically. Cargo shorts, fashion cockroaches that seem to survive every style extinction, feature prominently. And our sunglasses, in a pre-Wayfarer renaissance, will be sporty, awful descendants of Oakleys from the ’90s.
Mike will wear a digital watch with a frayed fabric strap. This is
