Mesa Trail ch. 22
Draft 2 

"Take a breath, take a breath, she told herself. She opened her mouth and pulled in a big gulp of air and looked as hard as she possibly could. But there was no sign of land anywhere. Only waves and more waves." – from Keeper










Among the fountain red rocks and layers of ancient shale and granite, it was our little turtle, Diver, who knew exactly where he was.  He did not know by reading or teaching, he knew by the ancient code that had been set inside his two eyes and inside his shell and his lungs.  The sea turtle had roamed among the waters of the ancient Western Interior Seaway which stretched the tip of the top of the Laramidia continent to the bottom, creating one great ocean that swooped right through the continent like the most giant of rivers, from Alaska to Mexico.  It carried in its vast ocean, and along its vast and ancient shores the Tyrannosaurs, the Dromaeosaurids, Hadrosaurs, the ancient shark Squalicorax, and yes, the forefather of all sea turtles.  On the bottom lived the giant clam Inoceramus which left their fossilized shells in the Pierre Shale, a formation that occured in the Rockies and Great Plains known for its dark gray layers, fossiliferous, with veins and seams of gypsum, and solidified iron oxide. The clam had a thick shell paved with 'prisms' of calcite giving it a pearly luster. The sea turtle itself grew from the murky metallic waters of the great upsloping mountains and formed eyes and tastes and smells in reaction to the very chemistry of the mountainous ocean.  As the sea subsided and the mountains rose, as the bones of dinosaurs and the stems of the ferns turned to the very rocks rising 10,000 feet up like fountains and eruptions into the sky, our turtle might have sensed the shallowing water and followed the last lanes of the tidal flats until he found another open ocean to the north, the south, or the west.  To return to the little Bear Canyon Creek, surrounded by the smell of the granite boulders and the taste of the floating tiny specks of gold all these eons later, it would not have been a fearful trek, yes, but one of filled with the comfort of home.