Last summer my wife, Susan, and I drove from Belfast to Sonoma, Calif., for my niece’s wedding, a lovely affair.  We were in no rush so we wandered quite a bit and stayed on the small roads.  The country is full of wonderful things to see and eat.  Along the way we visited my friend, Tim, in Montana.  

I first met him when I was in college.  He was the 13 year-old brother of my room mate, Richard Dingman.  Tim was in a unicycle gang.  I could tell right away he wasn’t headed for the straight and narrow.  I gave him my old pool cue, which I didn’t expect to need anytime soon.  In exchange, over the years I have received some some extraordinary gifts in return.  Baleen,  a boomerang,  a beautifully preserved beaver’s skull, his grandfather’s books on fishing, plus a box of old Doc Dingman’s fly tying materials and equipment.  When he visited us he would bring stories of his travels.  Busking in Mozambique. Performing with the circus in Paris.  Sailing the Greek islands.  Studying tribal shamanism.  Paddling with gray whales in the Sea of Cortez.  More recently and to the point, he has been spending his summers on a cattle ranch in Montana digging fossils.  During the season he lives there alone in his Airstream.  Evenings, after a day of digging, he reads a book or throws tomahawks at a stump.  There’s no cell phone or TV reception.  It’s comfortable and quiet.  He’s visited by mule deer, antelope, elk, and mountain bluebirds.      

The written instructions to find him started about 40 miles away and seemed a little arcane, but after dirt roads, isolated ranches, cattle guards, abandoned missile silos, bits of surveyor’s tape on fence posts, and a green trailer we finally reached the last mile.  A track through rangeland and scattered livestock led us over a rise and there was the Airstream tucked in a natural bowl surrounded by Ponderosa pines.

The Inland Western Seaway once covered all this land with warm shallow saltwater.  Maybe a meteor event near the Yucatan triggered a mass extinction about 65.5 million years ago and ended the Cretaceous Period.  The dinosaurs going missing made room for our smallest ancestor mammals.  The sea was filled with sharks.  Tim is looking for their fossils.  He’s a field collector and doesn’t have a comfortable paleontology chair at a prestigious university, but among mineral collectors he has respect and unique credentials.  He’s the only one of them that graduated from Ringling Brothers Clown College. 

We got up and watched some antelopes through the binoculars before breakfast.  Susie got a quick tutorial on how to drive the four wheeler and then Tim and I headed out to the site he’s working.  The rangeland here is around 3,500 feet in elevation, so all this land has pushed upward over the last 65 million years, lifting it above the water.  The land is now cut with deep canyons that didn’t happen overnight.  On the sides of these canyons layers of old sedimentary seabed are exposed.  There, on a flat shelf down about 20 feet from the rim, Tim has been peeling off layer after layer of flat rock.  He showed me how to pry up an inch thick slab, how to give it a smack to break it into smaller pieces, and then how to inspect the edges for tell tales that might reveal that perfect 70 million-year-old fish.

Like any fishing, it has a lot to do with persistence.  The more rock you move the more chances you have to hook up.  You do it on your knees, day after day in the hot sun.  It’s hard, lonely work.  Crack a rock, look at the edges, break it up smaller, inspect it again and then toss the pieces over the rim of the canyon into a rubble pile below.  It's like covering water with exploratory casts when nothing is showing.  But, you can’t be too quick or you might miss something.  You can’t let your mind or at least your attention wander.  It’s purposeful, focussed work.

There are smaller fossils. Shell fish. Fish barfs.  Prehistoric shrimpy things.  The more interesting of them will be collected and sold.  He shares a small percentage of his sales with Royal and Josie, the ranchers.  I was pretty much worn out by about 11 a.m. and kicked back to get off my knees.  Tim and I were talking about what kind of conditions must have existed to lay down a thick layer of sediment in the ancient shallows and trap a fish there.  I saw it like a fisherman.  He probably saw it through a different filter.  The thicker layers are the best chance for a good find, probably laid down in storm conditions, but you have to work your way carefully through the centuries of shallower deposits.  He told me about his first season near here.

He met a well respected woman collector at a mineral show.  They sniffed around in a rock hound-ish kind of way and eventually agreed to team up for the summer season.  He was a big, strong guy, willing to dig, and... he could juggle.  They could move a lot of rock and the company would be a change for both of them.

That summer, they worked a site not far from where we dug.  Tim tells me about cracking open a rock one day, inspecting half of it, and tossing it over the side of the canyon into the rubble pile.  Then he looked at the remaining half and there was a discoloration on the break.  He opened it up a little more and knew he had something.  He called his partner over.  They opened it up carefully, but with growing excitement.  It was a great shark.  Or, rather, half a shark.  She asked where the rest was.  He looked over the edge.

He climbed down the canyon wall and spent the next two days looking through the rubble without ever finding the other half.  Things got a little chilly around the campfire after that.  The season soon ended.  The half shark went to a lab and turned out to be a previously unknown specie of extinct shark.  Half of it was a nice find, but not nearly as nice as a whole fish.  It wasn’t going to be named after him.  Luckily, the sea is full of fish.  

We spent a couple more days with Tim.  We met Royal and Josie.  We saw an elk herd up in the Missouri Breaks, prairie dog towns, and we even saw a badger.  It’s spectacular country, blue ribbon country, but pretty lonely.  In the last letter I got from Tim there was mention of a famous collector’s beautiful daughter.  Who knows?  He's persistent and keeps fishing.

Rick Cronin fishes in Maine and reports on why the big ones got away.

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