Humber River, ON

Devil's Creek Fossils - My brother John and I named this creek. Not terribly imaginative - but it stank, ran brown, and smelled septic. Also, I almost got beat up there once by the school tough-boy. At that point I had changed schools enough that I'd learned that the fight was worse than a bolt. Why bother? Plus I was slight, effeminate and not born with any predilection towards such activities... ALSO, I'd learned by this point that acceptance in the broader social sphere was not as interesting as the world I'd built for myself. Being the outsider has great advantages. So I breakneck ran and left my knapsack in the Buckthorn and Burdock at the top of the cliff. In that bag were a hammer, chisels, pill bottles and newspaper for wrapping fossils. See, Toronto is built on a 450-million-year-old sea and the intricate delicate remains of the creatures that lived there. Giant straight-shelled squid-type creatures, corals, shells and trilobite bugs. This Humber tributary flows over grey slate and shale that perfectly preserves the rippled silty bottom of a half-billion-year-old sea. This is not light stuff! I went back and got my bag with the evening's haul. Eventually, after years of meticulously searching these cliffs and enlisting other neighbourhood kids by preaching the amazingness of Paleontology, my little brother John came up to me with a little ball between his thumb and forefinger. "What's this?" It was a Flexycalymene meeki. A perfect trilobite. I felt as elevated as the first time the Rheostatics brought a crowd to its feet. Johnny and I argued about the ownership of that ancient sea bug, but it went into my "museum," which at this point took up most of our basement and had a guest book and donation box. Once you find something, you find more. Thank you, little curly blonde-haired Johnny.

-- This Watermark was taken from the article "My Humber" in the June/July 2018 Issue of West End Phoenix