Awash in Talent (2 page)

I was leaving a final paper in my professor’s department mailbox on the last day of December reading period when I saw one of the graduate students pinning up a flier with a picture of mounds of dirt and happy people smiling amid the muck.

“Hey, what’s that?” I said as he was turning to leave, a stack of papers crammed into his backpack.

“What’s what?” he replied, wearily.

“That.” I pointed, as if I couldn’t go up and read it myself. It was my right as an undergrad to be taught by these people.

He put his arm against the wall to balance the weight of his backpack as well as underline what the flier said. “Field studies in Africa. Make the most of your summer. Study archaeology in the field with respected experts while earning course credit!”

“Ooh,” I said, mirroring his half-sarcastic tone. He looked familiar. “Hey, didn’t you TA one of the archaeology classes?”

“Intro to Prehistory, section four, and Field Arch, section five.”

I looked into his exhausted green eyes and wanted to drown. I hadn’t taken either of those courses myself, but if I’d known he was the TA, I would’ve signed up.

“Are you going to do the field study?” I asked.

He nodded with as little effort as possible. “Herding all the undergrads, probably getting Professor Marsden his coffee.”

“See you next semester,” I called as he trudged away down the hall. No one else was in the room, so I took the tacks out of the flier and folded it carefully into my backpack.

I hauled my bag downstairs from my dorm room all by myself. As I waited for the taxi to the airport, I fished out the paper with gloved fingers. It started the way he’d said:

Field studies in Africa. Make the most of your summer. Study archaeology in the field with respected experts while earning course credit!

The Middle Awash of Ethiopia is the most persistently occupied place on Earth. Join some of the most important scholars in a unique field study where you can make a real contribution to the newest science being done right now. The fossils are eroding right out of the ground. You could discover an important six-million-year-old specimen yourself!

The photo collage, arranged around the dusty, happy people that had caught my eye at first, showed carefully reconstructed skeletons of
Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus
, and
Homo erectus,
as well as a scenic view of what, strangely, looked to be Victoria Falls, and, for good measure, a tribesman of the Afar desert wearing red, black and white woven clothing and Adidas sneakers.

Below the picture, the application procedure and other details.

I knew the Professor Marsden that enchanting grad student had mentioned was from Archaeology. It wasn’t unusual for the departments to court each other’s students like this. By taking the flier, I had just about ensured that I would be the only applicant from Egyptology. Studying the mounds of dirt in the picture, I realized there was a major that was much dirtier than Egyptology. Because even with mummified corpses, Egypt was mainly sand, and you didn’t get quite as filthy kneeling in the sand as you did in the millennia of accumulated grime in that ancient desert where nasty microbes first came together to eventually end up as primates.

The only thing I remember about winter break at home is cyber stalking that beautifully exhausted TA. I found out from the Archaeology web page that his name was Carlos. His baby face smiled back at me from a mound of dirt on the glowing screen, no doubt a pictorial souvenir from some other fieldwork. He wore his hair parted down the middle, creating blond wings the sort of towheaded color that most people grow out of during puberty. On anyone else it would have been hideous. I read his bio over and over until I could have recited it:

Carlos received a BA in anthropology from Dartmouth College and went on to complete an MS in archaeology from University College London. He is interested in the potential of new digital technologies for archaeological practice, particularly mobile geolocation services in serving as a heuristic tool for both academic and nonacademic audiences. His research interests focus on sub-Saharan Africa and the African diasporas, and specifically on ethnography, anthropological demography, historical archaeology, material culture, cultural identity maintenance and social cohesion, landscape studies, comparative historical immigration studies, consumption, and consumerism. Other interests include looking at ceramics under magnification and digging circular features and floor surfaces, but Carlos says that getting married was the most intensely anthropological experience of his life.

None of the boys I’d known in California had had enough focus to make it through a single history class without at least an exaggerated yawn. As if their current lives were more interesting. But in Carlos’s bio I detected a passion for life—as narrowly defined by the twin disciplines of anthropology and archaeology. To say that he was different from other men was a laughable understatement. As I stared at the digital photo, I heard the strains of a certain piece from my musical survey class the previous semester:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken! . . . Alle Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt!

It was love, like nothing anyone had ever felt before.

I was able to change all my spring courses so I would be eligible for the field study, and I started writing the application essay before Christmas. My application would be irresistible by the time they finally started comparing it to other candidates’ in the middle of March.

I took Museum Studies and Introduction to Material Culture, both of which would still count toward an Egyptology degree if necessary. Most importantly, I took Intro to Prehistory and Field Archaeology, making sure to get into the sections Carlos had been saddled with yet again. I sat in the front row when everyone else flocked to the back, certain that the closer I was to his green eyes, the more I would remember about things that might have happened one to three or even six million years ago.

And so I ended up in an Ethiopian desert the summer after my first year of college. I didn’t go home at all, citing excessive airplane time to my parents, but stayed with a new friend on the Cape before leaving the States. With Carlos, Professor Marsden, and three other undergrads from Archaeology and Anthropology, I brushed the brown landscape with wide brooms to separate silt from fossil. The dust rose out of the earth in great foggy banks and clung to our hats, sunglasses, and loose cotton clothes. It was almost better not to shower, to stay dry and not create mud.

When we worked on the shaker boxes, Carlos usually chose me as his partner because we had the same rhythm. Back and forth, side to side, a mating dance to discover fossils. He was the only one who ever used the global phone, always at odd hours to call the States and check on his wife and their new baby. So imagine my surprise when he came running from the truck to where I was kneeling on the earth, sorting pebbles that might be fossils onto a crusty blanket, to tell me I had a phone call.

“It’s your mom,” he said breathlessly as we walked back together. His eyes shone.

I spat out some dirt and spoke into the receiver. “What is it?”

Tinny, tiny, the voice came back to me. “Emily, we’re coming to see you.”

“Who’s doing what?”

“Your sister wouldn’t let it go. Beth got a medical clearance and we’re all coming to see you.”

It had to be the connection. “Mom, it sounds like you’re saying you’re coming to see me.”

“We are. We have tickets for next week.”

None of this was possible or likely or desirable, but I played along. “Okay. But I can’t meet you at the airport.”

“Oh, we know you can’t leave the site.” The call suddenly cut off, apparently sympathizing with my discomfort.

I worked the next few days hunched over, looking but not seeing. One morning, Carlos noisily laid claim to what looked to be an intact hominid femur, so everyone moved to that site. The truck trundled up behind me as I used a soft toothbrush on the surface of the femur. Thoughts of Carlos still had a way of filling my ears and my heart. I was thinking about the raspy tiredness in his voice when he’d told me, “Emily, you’re the only one I can trust with this level of detail. Make sure none of the other students interfere.” My name in his mouth was like a melody, so I barely heard the commotion.

Finally, Carlos’s real voice startled me from my reverie.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy? We have an intact hominid femur in this area and you’re driving a truck through it!”

I looked up in time to see my father hopping out of the offending vehicle. “You have a what, now?”

My muscles protested, but I stood up and shaded my eyes in his direction. “An intact hominid femur. Femurs can tell us so much about where any hominid is in the evolution of upright walking.”

“You mean we didn’t just stand up one day, and that was it? I guess I never thought about it before,” said the man who had somehow engendered me.

“Oh my God, Dad,” I said, absently returning the hug and kiss my mother, so much shorter in Africa, was earnestly delivering to me. A shapeless blob was making its way out the door of the truck in clearly defined stages—clinging to the door, gingerly stepping onto the lip under the door, and putting one cotton-clad foot at a time on the sediment-laden soil, all while clutching a surgical mask ever closer to her mouth and nostrils.

It was Beth. She was in some kind of hazmat suit made of puffy, crinkly, white material, probably the cost of her unprecedented desire to travel. My mother went to help her and she tried to wave at me and say, “Hi!”

Carlos was at my side, wringing his hands. “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to get that truck out of here. This is a very delicate work site.”

“This is Carlos, Dad,” I said. “You really have to do what he says.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t want to ruin any scientific discoveries,” he said, then went to talk with the driver.

Maddeningly, they didn’t leave with the truck. Their presence was totally extraneous to the long, hot afternoons with the man of my heart. I set my relatives up with folding chairs under the tent where we kept the global phone and other electronic equipment and went back to work, crouching next to Carlos. He narrated, with unbelievable panache, every move he made and every theory he had about the story behind the femur. I would have chosen that moment to last for all time, no questions asked.

But there was a persistent, rough sound invading our enchanted space. Carlos kept looking over his shoulder, until he said, “Emily, look at your sister.”

Painstakingly, I turned my head in the direction of the tent. Actors portraying my parents stood in complete consternation, looking down at an actress in the role of my sister, who wriggled and squirmed in the whirling dirt, maybe trying to escape the retching, hacking cough that propelled itself out of her mouth unbidden.

“I knew it! It’s the dust. It’s full of allergens. I knew it!” My mother stooped in an attempt to hold Beth down.

I stood up, my body already resistant to the change in position. I knocked down a couple of the little orange flags we were using to mark fossil sites and had to prop them back up. By the time I made it to the tent, the coughing had become a prolonged, moaning scream and I heard my dad say something on the global phone about a medevac helicopter to Addis Ababa.

“No!” I shouted, knocking the receiver out of his hand. I lifted my mother’s hands off Beth and threw her over my shoulder in what I thought must be a fireman’s carry and jogged in the direction where I knew our truck would be, a half mile away. The driver took us to the site every morning from our camp and back again in the evening. We all walked the half mile each way in order to lessen the risk of disturbing the fossils. This time, my sister’s screaming filled my ear instead of the gentle hum of Carlos’s voice talking about the day’s plan with Professor Marsden.

I hoisted Beth into the passenger side of the cab, and my parents and the driver came running up behind me. “Take her to the nearest medical facility,” I said to the driver, intending to turn back to the site, but a great clamp that turned out to be my mother’s hand stopped me from speeding off. So I climbed in, too, and the four of us sat crammed so close together that we were able to squeeze the coughing out of Beth long before the driver gestured toward what looked like a simple mud hut. The lack of movement had not stifled Beth’s her high-pitched squeal, however.

My mother opened her eyes wide at the hut, as if by doing so she could convert it into a steel and glass grant-funded research hospital in San Francisco or Boston.

“They’ll take very good care of her here,” said the driver.

“I trust him,” I said as earnestly as I could, even though I wasn’t sure he was the same driver who brought us to and fro every day.

“Anything’s fine, really,” said Beth between gasps. “Just let me out of here.”

My dad opened the door from the inside and we all decompressed out of it. My dad and mom supported Beth’s weight between them as they walked to the uninviting corrugated metal door. An attendant in a lab coat answered the door and whisked us all inside. With the help of several more people, he absconded with Beth behind another unimpressive door. The speed with which Beth had disappeared into medical care impressed me and I tried to say reassuring things to that effect, but my parents insisted on pacing the waiting room, inspecting the plastic chairs and inscrutable pictures on the walls for something to do.

I was the only one sitting calmly—boredly, in truth—so when the doctor came from beyond the other door, she came to me and my parents gathered around us. The doctor was breathtaking: six and a half feet tall, with large, lucid eyes and closely cropped hair. Her lab coat was immaculate, so I guessed that she had changed it before coming to see us, because what she presented to us in a clear plastic bag was anything but clean.

Through the red gore and the grey-green foamy substance that seemed to writhe all over it, I could still see that it had, long ago, been the pop-top tab of an aluminum cola can. I held my hand over my nose and mouth and couldn’t keep back a few retching convulsions.