Fossil Beds Essay

Florissant Fossil Beds

I walked from the hard packed gravel lot up to the main building at the fossil beds and noted the American flag swaying in the breeze.  The fluid rippling of the sheet in the wind would occasionally give a violent and turbulent whip like snap, as if to snort and tamp like a proud bull or puff its chest like a territorial gorilla. The clouds and sun high in the sky gave me a sense of this flag, not simply as its intended symbolic self, but also as the material flag itself.  The fibers that have been straining with the battering of the high mountain winds, the colors struggling to remain vibrant and true under the overwhelming power of the high afternoon sun, blazing.  What has this flag seen?  Has it seen the park go through physical changes over the years?  Was it fresh from the factory and newly raised, still drinking in its new surroundings?  Wise or green, the presence of that specific flag spoke to me – ‘I watch over this place.’ 

Moving further into the park I was struck by the drastic polarity between the fossils themselves and the new facilities.  The stone giants were massive, jagged and even the steel bonds that forbade them from crumbling and returning to the earth had a tone of age, rust covered and decaying.  The man-made structures covering the fossils from the elements were massive in their own right, straight and thick.  Protective and at the same time forbidding.  Not only separating the experiencer and the experienced, but forbidding the tired ancient giants from fulfilling their destiny – to return to the earth from whence they came.

As much as the facility honored the fossils themselves it seemed as much a prison as a palace.  A place that proves that the world changes overtime, that very different experiences or senses can occur in the same place in different times.  The naturalness of this change and its place in the world.  We prove all of this and then we disallow that very nature to take its course.  It is indeed interesting.  I see beauty in those fossils, old and wise.  I also see pain, shackled and perverted for our own amusement.