Spring rain formed a puddle in the infield where the shortstop usually stands. In the absence of human activity, birds alighted and walked around, leaving a number of three-toed impressions in the fine silt at the bottom of the puddle. When the puddle dried, the prints were traces of the birds’ presence, random footprints that sometimes crossed one over another. Some prints unaffected by subsequent walking showed the direction of a single bird. Before the next game starts, someone will rake or drag the infield and eradicate the vestiges of those bird tracks. As dips in the surface they can cause a bad bounce, making the shortstop’s task of fielding a grounder more difficult in the upcoming game.
You can see something similar but much older beneath a dome at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Dinosaurs walked over fine-grained wet sediments during the Jurassic Period. Subsequently, water washed sediments over the prints, filling them in with slightly different size grains and both layers turned to rock. Separating the top layer from the one beneath it, workers uncovered the tracks, similar, though larger, than the tracks at shortstop on a baseball infield.
Footprints are trace fossils: Evidence that life was present without any detrital hard parts to uncover and display. Thus, the Rocky Hill Dinosaur Footprint Museum displays no dinosaur bones found at the site of the impressions, but rather a Dilophosaurus that was common in Connecticut during the Jurassic. Unlike those who smooth the surface of an infield for the upcoming game, those responsible for the museum and the tracks’ preservation want the impressions left as they appeared during the Jurassic. The tracks tell a personal history of the region.
In a sense, all of us are like the infield and the rock at Rocky Hill. We have the tracks of thoughts left by those who walked over our minds through what they have done, said, written, and projected. We are analogs to the processes that preserved those footprints because with us there’s always a way to wash in new sediments to cover over the impressions of previous indentions in our lives. Filling in is what we do when we eventually lithify our personalities. Underneath lie the impressions, and they, like the tracks at Rocky Hill, can be uncovered if we strip off the top layer. For most of our lives, those early impressions lie hidden between layers of our own making.
For some, those early tracks are deep wounds, and no subsequent sedimentation can fill them to their own personal extinction. They remain as dips in the surface, still visible—even if only slightly—and still easy to excavate. The overlying sediments of experiences, repressions, and conscious efforts are all clasts that differ in size and composition from the underlying matrix of the infield or shoreline. Think of making an impression in sand or mud and filling that impression with pebbles. Maybe the tracks of others in our lives should never be covered over or filled. They are there, and they represent real influences.
But no one wants to play shortstop on an uneven infield. Fielding the next ground ball is easier when the surface is smooth, when a ball bounces more predictably across an even surface.
And every future is easier to handle when life’s surface is smooth. Is that why we consciously and unconsciously fill in those tracks?
You can see something similar but much older beneath a dome at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Dinosaurs walked over fine-grained wet sediments during the Jurassic Period. Subsequently, water washed sediments over the prints, filling them in with slightly different size grains and both layers turned to rock. Separating the top layer from the one beneath it, workers uncovered the tracks, similar, though larger, than the tracks at shortstop on a baseball infield.
Footprints are trace fossils: Evidence that life was present without any detrital hard parts to uncover and display. Thus, the Rocky Hill Dinosaur Footprint Museum displays no dinosaur bones found at the site of the impressions, but rather a Dilophosaurus that was common in Connecticut during the Jurassic. Unlike those who smooth the surface of an infield for the upcoming game, those responsible for the museum and the tracks’ preservation want the impressions left as they appeared during the Jurassic. The tracks tell a personal history of the region.
In a sense, all of us are like the infield and the rock at Rocky Hill. We have the tracks of thoughts left by those who walked over our minds through what they have done, said, written, and projected. We are analogs to the processes that preserved those footprints because with us there’s always a way to wash in new sediments to cover over the impressions of previous indentions in our lives. Filling in is what we do when we eventually lithify our personalities. Underneath lie the impressions, and they, like the tracks at Rocky Hill, can be uncovered if we strip off the top layer. For most of our lives, those early impressions lie hidden between layers of our own making.
For some, those early tracks are deep wounds, and no subsequent sedimentation can fill them to their own personal extinction. They remain as dips in the surface, still visible—even if only slightly—and still easy to excavate. The overlying sediments of experiences, repressions, and conscious efforts are all clasts that differ in size and composition from the underlying matrix of the infield or shoreline. Think of making an impression in sand or mud and filling that impression with pebbles. Maybe the tracks of others in our lives should never be covered over or filled. They are there, and they represent real influences.
But no one wants to play shortstop on an uneven infield. Fielding the next ground ball is easier when the surface is smooth, when a ball bounces more predictably across an even surface.
And every future is easier to handle when life’s surface is smooth. Is that why we consciously and unconsciously fill in those tracks?
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