LETTERS FROM HOME: PASSING TIME IN A JURASSIC PARKING LOT

Dear Julie,

We should be in Cheyenne, Wyo., by now, but I'm in the parking lot of the Energy Inn Motel in Diamondville, Wyo. The manager called to ask about all the ruckus in the room, so I've taken DC's parakeets and finches out for some sun.

She and her brother Paul are off on a guided fossil-hunt, this being an area where ghosts of the Jurassic and Triassic periods can be found in, not under, every rock. Real three-toed dinosaur footprints.

Beneath the sagebrush that covers this lunar landscape, another kind of life shouts out its existence. Through the fossils, and through the coal and gas that still exist in the present, DC and Paul saw a sign for Fossil Butte National Monument yesterday, and we drove an hour off course to investigate.

It was getting dark by the time we got there, and no fossils were to be found. By 8 this morning, DC somehow had turned up a fossil guide, and soon they were in a quarry raising dust. I don't share their fascination with rocks and antiquities. My sacred places are more temporal -- Cooperstown -- or spiritually soaring -- Sedona, or, like the jambalaya, specific to my own history. I'm glad we met there one last time. So many poets and musicians and conversations there gave my soul something new to fix on. Glad Jerry Martien, keeper of the poetic faith, wordlessly checked in and out that night.

Since there, we have gambled in Reno, where we literally lost Paul in a mammoth casino uncomfortably similar to a rat maze. Stimulated by flashing lights and insistent bells, we humans fed coin after coin into the slots as expected. When some guy won $6,000, celebrated by much whooping and picture-taking, DC wondered what she was doing wrong. Even though she wasn't losing.

On the way to the quarry, it turns out, DC lectured her little brother on the necessity of expecting disappointment in life, and declared the outing would be a success if they found one good fish fossil. Now they have returned, looking like tired and dirty and scratched kids on Christmas day. DC shows me a large half-fish fossil, and I ooh and ah. But they're grinning too much. They pull out boxes containing more than 50 million-year-old fossils of all kinds and sizes. That's the thing about disappointment. It so often disappoints.

This has been my first trip through Eastern Nevada, an endless desert with a peculiar beauty, lonely mesas and lonelier little towns like Winnemucca and Battle Mountain. Towns that proudly carve their initials into whatever hill gives them shade. The enormous clouds have us looking up more than down at the antelope and dust devils that are at home here.

The three of us share driving time in the car and moving van, which crossed the mountain pass at Salt Lake City at the speed of a house, which we'll happily trade the truck for in just a few more days.

Leaving California has left DC and me emotionally prickly, like two cacti in the cab of a Ryder truck.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a Southeast Missourian staff writer on leave of absence in Garberville, Calif.