First of Two Childhood Adventures - Me~9 yrs. - Sister~6 yrs.

“Treasures Beneath Our Feet”

Walk fifty paces to the right of Dead Cow Beach and you'll find yourself staring up hundreds of feet of sandstone rocks . Climbing up the sandstone on this very steep hill can be quite fun, navigating your way over the loose stones, finding your footing where it shouldn’t be. Yet it is the exhilaration of discovering what lies beneath one of these overturned shards that becomes the true adventure.

The fossils are the treasure, and we become the pirates.

“A Vast, ye land lubbin’ scaly wag! Where be ye booty!?” We yell as we turn over stone after stone. My little sister wonderfully plays the part of Smee (Captain Hook’s sidekick in Peter Pan) while I play the all-knowing evil Hook himself.

“Ay, captain! I think I got sometin’!” She yells to me from below. I turn to look and a melon sized slate stone that was, one second ago, below my foot starts to crash down the hill towards her.

“OH!” I yell, because it’s all that can come out with the excitement of her discovery and the fear of this stone clobbering my lil’ Smee!

But it smashes into two after its initial bounce down the hill and continues to break and break and break and break until it’s a million little pebbles when it reaches the water below us.

I grasped tightly, with shivering fingers, the stones beneath me, while, oblivious to anything scary at all, my sister still worked to flip her giant discovery over. I carefully moved to my left then slowly, softly, slipped down the hill until I was parallel with her.

“What ya got beneath that there stoney stone rock?” I ask, still slightly shaken by the thought of what could have happened.

“No know, help me see.” So I try to wiggle my fingers in with hers to flip it over. For flipping it over was half the work of diggin’ for treasure. If ever want to become a most accomplished boney treasure hunter like my Smee and I, you must remember that it’s flipping the big, hard rock over that usually gets you the best treasures .

“K Smee, when I say heave you say ho and we pull!”

“K….”

“Heave!”

“ HoooOOOOEEEEWWRRRR!!” We yelled together as we pulled it up, flipped it over, and broke the giant sandstone in half. I had to quickly catch my footing again because it was I who did most of the flipping and as soon as the rock was turned, I began to slide down the hill.

Smee stood next to the rock (above it actually, which made me wonder if she helped pull the rock up at all). She was examining its shattered remains as I came up to her.

“A lubly spessy man Capn’!”

“Ay, that it is! That it is…” I said as I looked at the little half-inch Trilobite that lay perfectly preserved on the large half of the broken sandstone rock.