Fedoras and Whips and Earth and Picks…and Nat Geo
One idle day when I was middle school age, I was flipping through the TV channels looking for something to watch, and I got interested in a show on the Nat Geo or Discovery channel (don’t know if it was really one of those back then but something like them, at least) about Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii. I was fascinated by the whole thing…the volcano and all those people and the town discovered immortalized in time! I wanted to be there…picking and brushing away all the layers of dirt and packed ash…Pompeii was again in the light of day! Then of course around that same time Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and I was hooked. There was no going back. I wanted to be a paleontologist/archeologist/anthropologist. Ultimately I didn’t become any of those things (although I did own the necessary equipment for archeology… a Fedora and whip), but I think that day, watching the story about how Pompeii has slowly been unburied, was a turning point in how I saw myself and what I wanted to do. Hair and clothes and shoes became a lot less interesting and were just a necessary part of the social graces. I think I started identifying myself a little less as “girl” and more as “person” and that as a “person” there was a whole lot of cool stuff to do and see that didn’t involve matching my fingernail color to my purse. (This was a big realization for a girl from the south.) From this point on I remember one of my prized possessions was my small but growing collection of National Geographic. Then I got to high school and discovered that the library had just about every Nat Geo all the way back to the beginning of Nat Geo…oh man…I hardly ever ate lunch during high school. I spent almost every lunch period with those old, dusty, disorganized magazines. I ran across Jane Goodall somewhere in those stacks, and at some point I read In the Shadow of Man, and I was blown away by her courage and insight. One thing leading to another, I read about Fossey and the gorillas and Galdikas and the orangutans. They were all chosen to study primates in wild habitats by the Leakey family…the Leakey family that for several generations has uncovered the fossils of human ancestry within Africa. I didn’t become a primatologist either, but those primatologists and anthropologists were the main reason I ended up with a degree in zoology. All of it culminated in my fascination with the comparative physiology, anatomy and behavior of animals (that includes human animals and the world we have fashioned for ourselves). Recently I saw where an old snack bar has been unearthed in Pompeii and now visitors to the ruins will be able to stop in and sample what the city folk might have been munching on there before the big day brought it all to an abrupt end. In the unearthed snack bar they discovered lovely murals depicting the aesthetics of food. They found an old coin jar there with what would have been probably two days worth of sales in coin…the money they took in while in complete oblivion to the fact it would all end in two days. Anyway, they had “snack bars” in Pompeii! Awesome! I hope I get to go there someday and at least see it all, even if I chose an eppendorf tube over a rock pick.
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