Ancient Places (22 page)

To demonstrate, Wehr highlighted the Alabama snow-wreath,
Neviusia alabamensis
—a shrubby member of the rose family that exists today only in the southeastern United States. He noted that a pair of closely related genera grow exclusively in China and Japan, and that recently a new species of
Neviusia
had been described from California’s Mount Shasta. “Indeed,” Wes remarked, “this is a very strange distribution for a living plant!” The publication announced that a fossil species of the same genus,
Neviusia,
had been unearthed both at Republic and at a sister Eocene quarry across the border near Princeton, British Columbia. Obviously, untangling
Neviusia’s
long-term life history would not be a simple task, but just as obviously, the Okanogan Highlands held information about it that was both important and intriguing.
“Fossils from the vicinity of Republic, Washington, provide an important window to the Eocene flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest,” he wrote. “Paleobotanists have already recognized 210 species from these beds. Many of these fossil plants have been found only at Republic and are known from only one
or two specimens. Moreover, species new both to the Republic flora and to science are still being discovered.”

In 1986, Wehr was the second author on the Missoula professor’s description of a
new species of fossil fir tree found at Republic. Wehr also shared some of his finds with Jack Wolfe, a US Geological Survey paleobotanist based in Denver who was investigating what leaf patterns and forest diversity might have to say about the larger Eocene climate. Wehr’s name appeared with Wolfe’s on a
significant 1987 US Geological Survey paper on the fossil plants of the Republic and Princeton sites. The report described how the outpouring of new fossils must hold clues to the ancient environment and geography, as well as the evolution and distribution, of several modern groups of temperate plants. The accompanying botanical list included more than a dozen new species that the investigators were obligated to name, and Wolfe and Wehr attacked this task with relish, honoring contributors both scientific and personal. The impact of Susanne Langer’s writings and friendship on Wehr was acknowledged in a witch-hazel family relative that he dubbed
Langeria magnifica.

Wolfe and Wehr’s report brought new attention to the richness of the Okanogan Highland sites. Not long afterward, a pair of paleobotanists working at the Princeton quarry found a way to acknowledge that influence when they uncovered a preserved staminate flower that constituted a new genus. Connecting the amateur and professional team to posterity with a timeless pun, they dubbed their new genus
Wehrwolfea.
Such recognition provided great satisfaction to Wes. “On those gloomy days when I felt wraithlike and doubted that I even existed,” he wrote, “I looked at pictures of
Wehrwolfea
in textbooks and erudite scientific journals. After that, what else could possibly happen to
me in matters of art world ‘recognition’ that would ever be
so exuberantly off-the-wall?”

In 1988, the
Stonerose Interpretive Center was launched in Republic. There, exactly as Wehr and others had envisioned, students from local schools could join fossil enthusiasts from all over the world. At a reclaimed house downtown, visitors of every stripe signed in and picked up a basic set of tools. From there they trudged to a Boot Hill roadcut that exposed many layers of Eocene shale. Along this curving face, together they could crack open stone books to their hearts’ content. Each participant was allowed to take home his or her favorite three fossil finds of the day unless local experts on the site determined that the discovery might be new or significant. In that case, the freshly revealed fossil remained at the interpretive center for a more rigorous scientific examination.

As most of the professionals who first published on the Okanogan Highlands drifted off to other scientific pursuits—there are always more fossil digs to discover—Wes Wehr continued to visit the Republic and Princeton sites on a regular basis. He was well aware that his instinctive return to the place followed the European Enlightenment tradition of scientific philosophers like Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who insisted that any understanding of the larger world required not only close examination of its smallest motes but also a steady awareness of their place in time. The seeker should keep detailed records of every movement, and spread them around as much as possible. Wehr learned early on that open distribution of such knowledge, like an ongoing Northwest potlatch, pushed everything forward, and he quoted
von Humboldt himself on the subject: “To keep what you already have,
you must always be giving it away.”

Over the next decade, Wehr used his far-flung connections to help expand the potential of the Stonerose Interpretive Center. He produced a stream of academic and popular articles explaining what had been found and what lay on the horizon. These included papers about conifer, hardwood, flower, fruit, seed, bird feather, crayfish, and insect fossils that had emerged from Stonerose. He drew parallels between the ancient and modern landscapes, titling his compendium of the earliest known occurrence of several rose-family flowers and fruit trees “The Eocene Orchards and Gardens of Republic, Washington.” He organized the latest discoveries into neat checklists of fossil plants and insects so that interested visitors could make sense of the imprints that they cracked out of the roadcut.

At Stonerose, Wehr also came into his own as a natural teacher, presiding over intensive fossil identification workshops through most of the 1990s. Sitting among an ever-increasing pile of split mudstone, he would project his laser gaze through a jeweler’s loupe, grunting and muttering as the object in question unfolded in his mind. A former colleague commented that “Wes had a particular talent for inspiring interested adults and children alike, who would crowd around him at a shale exposure, enthralled by his ability to communicate his excitement for the Eocene world, urging that they, too, might make a contribution to paleontology.” Wehr’s odd charisma helped lure a parade of unlikely characters to the Okanogan Highlands, rock-splitters of every imaginable origin and age. If they were serious, he found some way to encourage each one. Years later, a student from one of those workshops remembered the way Wes had pointed out small details of leaf anatomy as they strolled
through the University of Washington’s arboretum.
“You’ll never figure this stuff out,” he advised her, “unless you start your own herbarium.” Wehr understood that placing present-day specimens beside their Eocene analogs, then making the comparison available to interested diggers, would elevate everyone’s level of comprehension.

In many ways, Wehr always maintained the set habits of a slightly obsessive ten-year-old autograph collector. One of his many drivers described their epic road trips as a series of carefully modulated events. “We had to stop at every bakery, because Wes loved pastries, and in every tiny town, because he craved the way each post office would stamp his mail with their own postmark. Then when we got back in the car, Wes would hang his head out the window like a dog and just feel the air. Hang it out so far that
you could watch his ears flap.”

When
Washington Geology
dedicated its June 1996 issue to the fossil troves around Republic, the contents included, as expected, a pair of new contributions from Wehr. A separate piece by a different author, titled “Volcanic Arcs and Vegetation,” began with a nod to its catalyst: “Many of us who
were students of paleobotany during the mid-1980s vividly recall the appearance in 1987 of Wolfe and Wehr’s partial monograph of the middle Eocene Republic flora.” The issue explored the mysterious forces that were revealed when Wehr and Johnson kicked their first dawn redwood in Republic: the tectonic grind that created a vast and varied Eocene Interior Arc along the west front of the Rockies from British Columbia into northern Utah; the subtle interplay between elevation and temperature during the rise of the Okanogan Highland forests; the bursts of diversification visible in the fossil record that echo modern habitats in complex and often
deceptive ways; the myriad new and knotty avenues for study presented by the constantly expanding data set rising from the rubble of all these precious outcrops; the irony of a modern world paying attention to an unmistakably warm and entirely vibrant ecosystem from the distant past even as the early twenty-first century hurtles toward its own much warmer future with unsettling speed.

The river of scientific and popular publications continued to flow, bouncing from Wehr’s contribution in a 1998 Burke Museum report to a 1999
Smithsonian
magazine article describing how the institution’s fossil arthropod curator was teaming up with Denver’s Kirk Johnson and a group of experienced field-workers to assess insect damage on fossil plants from Boot Hill. Wes Wehr, naturally, was coordinating the partnership. “Over the past two decades, Wehr has
brought legions of other paleontologists to Republic,” the article explained, “and taken pieces of Republic to them.”

As Wehr oversaw that lively exchange of people and material around the Okanogan Highland sites, he maintained his many quirks. “I never saw him do one piece of laundry on his own,” recalled one friend. “He’d buy a bunch of clothes at Goodwill, with a particular eye for good dress shirts of a certain pale-blue color. He would wear a batch till they were falling apart, then give them away at the bus station.” Or as Wehr himself once put it,
“I had two patron saints: Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Vincent de Paul. Saint Francis nourished my soul, and the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store provided my clothing.” When an associate visited his
office at the Burke Museum, she noticed a hot plate, various cans of beans, a paperback collection of Flaubert stories, and several nice pale-blue dress shirts on hangers. Among his possessions lay several small works from
Northwest School artists like Mark Tobey, handy and tradable for an infusion of necessary cash.

In November 2003, the Paleontological Society of America presented Wehr with their Harrel L. Strimple Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the field by an amateur. Over two hundred friends, including artists, musicians, writers, museum curators, librarians, students, and paleontologists, attended a party in his honor the night before the awards ceremony. Kirk Johnson, praising the presentation, remarked:
“It is with true pride and deep friendship that I represent the more than twenty-five paleontologists who wrote letters in support of this nomination. Wes Wehr is a regional treasure.”

The following spring, Wehr began planning a large seventy-fifth birthday party for himself at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle. A week ahead of time he was calling friends to tell them all about the details of who would sit where for the shindig.
“This was vintage Wes. The only time I went head up with him was over arrangements at a dinner table,” said one of them. “He’d blow into a restaurant with a whole crowd of people, then insist on choosing who would be placed next to whom. In his mind there was a definite seating arrangement that would connect certain people and catalyze alliances.”

When Wes Wehr died of a heart attack five days before his birthday, a couple hundred of his close associates gathered at the intended birthday party for a memorial service. Many who attended expressed surprise to see so many unfamiliar faces there, and to hear such different moving accounts of their connections with the deceased. During the course of the afternoon, most of the fossil plants that bore his name, like
Wehrwolfea striata,
cropped up in the conversation: two ferns, a maple, a
fine brown lacewing, and a winged seed of unknown affiliation called
Pteronepelys wehrii,
“the winged stranger.”

Today, the Okanogan Highland researchers who explore in Wehr’s spirit think of their several known sites collectively: an arc of fragile lake beds, each one slightly different than the rest, that follows a line of rumpled terrain from Republic six hundred miles north-northwest to the Driftwood Canyon digs near Smithers, British Columbia. Taken together, they represent a far-reaching
interconnected
lagerstätte
—a German term that defines a significant fossil site with exceptional preservation of a diverse suite of organisms.

These Okanogan Highland fossils are not confined to any single situation. The climate that created them doesn’t quite match the weather we think we know. The habitats they suggest refuse to fit into neat categories recognized by current ecologists. Yet the species that pour out of them, like Wehr himself, continue to provide a flood of tantalizing information: full of names and new directions, contradictions and unsolved mysteries. There are unidentified bird feathers, waiting to take wing.
Nine new bulldog ant species have been named, belonging to four genera, and one of those recurs at an Eocene site in Denmark. There are
fossil palm beetles, which allow climatologists to gauge winter temperatures during the heat wave of the early Eocene, when those bulldog ants tracked across whole continents.

Most recently, in the northernmost of those ancient lakes,
bits of two different Eocene mammals have emerged. One is the lower right jawbone of a tapir relative that must have been about the size of a cocker spaniel. The other is the upper maxilla of a tiny forest-dwelling hedgehog whose entire body was probably
no larger than the collector’s thumb. It must have taken an eye as alert as Wes Wehr’s to spot it among the rubble, and to see right away how it might fit into the larger tapestry of the lakes.

Even as such discoveries pour in, Wes Wehr’s presence suffuses Stonerose and its associated fossil sites, especially in the energy that swirls around the collectors. It’s as if he remains fixed on the floor of the quarry, surrounded by fragments named by or after him, peering at an especially puzzling one through his well-worn jeweler’s loupe. He holds the surface of the stone in question up to the light, looking like a little Cyclops, single-eyed and blind to many things, but acutely attuned to many others. As he once wrote, “These artifacts of eons ago were constant reminders that no matter how immediate the present might seem to me, it was only a flickering instant in the ongoing continuum and flux of all things great and small.”