A Lifetime Of Memories

My first wife, Valerie, died when my two children were little, and upon her request. her ashes were scattered over the field in which she found her first Colorado artifact. We had moved back to Colorado from Missouri where had attended Graduate School, and she loved to get out and walk in the dirt. Our tiny children were playing with their Tonka trucks in the turned soil of eastern Colorado wheat fields from a very early age. Camp rock can be used to make interesting forts, castles and towers. Valerie was an artist and these living sculptures the children created amused her and she often referred to their creations as “Stonehenge of the Plains.”

Some time later I remarried, and artifact hunting on weekends was one of the ways our new family “bonded.” Although Myra had never been exposed to artifact collecting, she seemed to enjoy it, though initially she was a “fair-weather hunter.” It only took a short while however, before she became “hooked” and braved wind, rain, ice and heat in pursuit of all things ancient. Many weekends would find the Westfall clan in the Jeep, looking for eroded fields. I can’t say that my children were always thrilled to be looking for artifacts, but they were tolerant, and except for a brief period of time when they were in high school, (and it just wasn’t cool hanging out with mom and dad), hunting artifacts has been a togetherness ritual for the family.

A wise man once observed that, “the only constant in the world is change.” This truth has many applications, but within the context of this discussion it is relevant to the process of “family.” It seems like there are times when our children are small and having a bad day that we feel like they will never grow up and we yearn for peace and quiet. About the next time we turn around, however, we’re seeing them off to college, walking them down the isle, or helping them move into their very first home. The house is suddenly quiet, and the tire swing in the backyard swaying in the gentle breeze serves as a silent monument to days gone by.

As I sit among the thousands of artifacts in my “museum room” a particular piece will catch my eye and I often spend a moment reflecting upon its discovery. Although I like remembering some of my more unique or interesting finds, it is family member’s finds that often make me smile or shake my head in amazement.

In the corner of the case from 1982, I look at a small, white corner notched point. It is perfect, and as I open the display case and pick it up, I am reminded of a little girl just four years old wanting to look for arrowheads with her dad. The day is much too cold and she is much too small, but she is so insistent and so there we were, leaving the warmth and comfort of the car and trudging up the slope of a winter wheat field. I’m smiling at the memory of that tiny but determined little girl, bundled in a bright blue snowsuit with attached mittens, fighting the biting wind as we made our way to the blown spot on “Arrowhead County,” one of our favorite hills.

Even I was feeling the sting of the wind that day and I figured we wouldn’t be out more than ten or fifteen minutes before she was ready to go. The wind was blowing hard enough that we really couldn’t talk, and we drifted across the eroded area, never separated by more than about 30 feet. Suddenly I heard her call that she had found an arrowhead, and I saw her bending over (the best that one can bend in a snowsuit). I arrived as she was trying to pick up the point but her mittens were those slick vinyl things and it was just cold enough that they didn’t want to bend. It took us several minutes to get her hand free from those bulky mittens, but she was determined to pick that point up on her own. Perhaps that’s the same spirit she demonstrates today in medical school as she pursues her dream of becoming a doctor.

Then there is the tiny translucent point my son found when he was 10 years old. He’d been bored one sunny summer’s day and mother had suggested he ride his bike just out of town a couple of miles to the “Blomstrom Hill,” a site that produced many points, including some nice Paleo artifacts over a period of about 10 years. If I remember the story correctly, he was in a terrible mood that day, just grumpy about everything. He reluctantly agreed to take a bike-hike, as we often called them, and he returned about three hours later. When his mother asked if he’d found anything, he replied that he had only found a little bit of flint.

I arrived home later that evening and, hearing the story of his adventure, I asked if he’d found anything. With all the disgust he could muster, he replied, “only some chips.” Trying to be supportive of his efforts to hunt, I asked to see the flint that he’d found. He had changed clothes by then, but went to the hamper and dragged the other pair of pants out, emptying the pockets. There were probably 15-20 small flakes, but the first thing I noticed was a complete arrowhead. I picked it up and remarked that this was a pretty good one.

I’ll never forget the look on his face as he realized that he’d found a perfect arrowhead and hadn’t even recognized it as such. In his defense, he’d been hunting a summer fallow field that was quite muddy and it is highly probably that when he found this piece it was sufficiently covered with dirt as to render it unrecognizable. To this day, however, if we’re out looking for points and he mentions that he hasn’t found anything, I’ll ask him if he needs me to examine his flint just to make sure!

One of my favorite memories is of a Sunday afternoon hunt with the family back in 1985. Sometimes, when we’re hunting artifacts, we’ll stick a small piece of flint into our mouth, to keep it moist. Grayson learned this technique and thought it worked pretty well. We’d been hunting for a couple of hours that day when Grayson came over and said that he’d swallowed his flint and that it was lodged in his throat. I was pretty certain that it wasn’t lodged in his throat, but rather had just scratched it on its way down the esophagus. I sent him back to the car to rest and get a drink, and pretty soon we were all headed home.

I had a Sunday evening appointment and shortly after we got home, I left and didn’t return home until about 9 pm. Immediately, Grayson’s sister, Erin, ran to me to report that Grayson couldn’t swallow and I should go talk to him. When I got to Grayson’s room, he held up a cup that was nearly full and said, “Dad, I
can’t even swallow my spit.” Moments later we were headed for the emergency room. There they tried to ascertain the problem, but lacking the proper equipment, they called the nearest surgical facility and made an immediate appointment. By this time, Grayson was getting a little panicked and the nurse gave him a pretty good shot of something that relaxed him for the 60~miIe trip to Morgan County Hospital Emergency room.

We arrived shortly after midnight and the surgeon laughed heartily as I told him what had happened. “At least it isn’t an old piece of steak,” he said. Grayson was laid on a gurney and hauled into the emergency room for a minor surgical procedure that would remove the blockage. It was decided that he needed anesthesia in order to relax him enough to insert the necessary equipment and I’ll never forget the exchange that took place next. The anesthetist was just bringing the mask down on Grayson’s face when she paused and asked, “Now Grayson, is this an arrowhead or a piece of flint that’s stuck in your throat?” Grayson, now nearly asleep due to exhaustion and the effects of the drugs, opened his eyes and asked, “Am I still alive?” The startled anesthetist replied. “Of course you are, we’re just ready to do your surgery.” 

“Well then,” Grayson said, “it must have been only a piece of flint. If it had been an arrowhead, my dad would have killed me!” (Badabing, badaboom!) I thought the surgeon would never quit laughing; he kept the piece of flint, a flake of Flattop chalcedony, as a souvenir.

My children have very different personalities. Erin, the younger of the two, is fairly quiet and introspective, fiercely determined and blessed with a mind and will of her own. Being two years younger than her brother, she was always competing just to keep up. She liked the idea of hunting arrowheads, especially when she was between the ages of three and nine, and then again from about her junior year in high school till present. (During those intervening years, she was pretty certain that arrowhead hunting was something akin to work and definitely wasn’t something that her “coolness” was interested in.) When she was little, she would walk without comment for varying periods of time, never complaining, and if she got tired, she would just go back to the car and play with whatever toys she’d brought, or read a book, while she waited for the rest of us.

Grayson, on the other hand, is very outspoken about his belief that if he hasn’t found an artifact in the first hour of hunting, “There aren’t any to find”. Or, he will ask: “Why does God hate me?” I’ve always enjoyed his observational style of hunting artifacts; he’s usually the one who first spots the deer up in the woods, or the Bald Eagle soaring high on wing. Still, with almost uncanny predictability, Grayson’s lamentations (not unlike those of Biblical proportions via Ezekiel) will garner a point.

As I’m looking at a case of small Woodland points, I notice three that Grayson never should have found, (or, at least, he really hadn’t ‘earned’ them). He was grumpy and it was hot. The bugs were incessant. It was “dumb to be out here in the first place,” and the arrowhead gods were conspiring to preclude a successful hunt. And I remember that on each of those occasions, I was just about to the limit of my patience with his diatribe, when suddenly he’d announce, ‘Oh, here’s one.”

As they got older, finds of significance became more common. I will never forget either of my children’s first complete Paleo points. Grayson’s was found on Christmas Eve in 1995. He’d been hunting about 16 years at that juncture, but we hadn’t yet learned about river hunting and perfect Paleo points from plowed fields are not very common. The point was a small Clovis point made of Edwards Plateau flint. It was a cold and blustery day, the kind that makes your eyes water when you face into the wind. There were some wheat strips just above
  the Arickaree River in southern Yuma County that we noticed had significant wind erosion.

Our spirits were a bit dampened when we began finding footprints, but there were four of us hunting and we decided that someone was bound to find something if we’d put in the time. Over the next couple of hours we did indeed persist and towards the middle of the afternoon I heard Grayson hollering. I was far enough away that I couldn’t really hear the words, but the excitement in his voice was evident. When I reached the spot on the field where he was standing, there on the ground, completely exposed in a recently eroded spot of hardpan, was a little Clovis. (And Grayson reasoned that since it was Christmas Eve, it was probably a gift from the obviously fickle arrowhead gods!)

Erin’s first good Paleo point was to be found the following September. We had finally learned about river hunting and (if Grayson were telling this story, the arrowhead gods would be credited with the accompanying flood that uncovered hundreds of great artifacts) a significant cleansing of the riverbed had occurred. Erin was a freshman at the University of Colorado, and along with her boyfriend, Michael (who is now her husband and also enjoys the hobby) They decided to come home over Labor Day for an early fall hunt because Erin had had some pretty incredible success on the river in August following the flood. In fact, she’d found four wonderful artifacts; including the families first perfect “Platte Point.” This multi-colored Archaic point was made from a very unique stone, something that was probably brought in from somewhere else, as we’ve still never seen anything quite like it. At the time, we’d only just begun hunting the river and we weren’t certain that we’d actually find anything. As she wandered near the edge of the fresh gravel that August day, her audible gasp broke the silence and, moments later, the Westfall clan had encircled this treasure. We were river hunters!

The Paleo point she found that Labor Day weekend is a great example of the utilitarian nature of the ancients. The piece was originally a large Allen point that had broken at some time in its life. Rather than having been discarded, the piece had been reworked into a knife and as it lay there on that narrow gravel bar, Erin shouted in excitement that she’d found a Paleo point! Three and a half inches is a good-sized piece, and this one was lying out, completely exposed, like a big, dead fish. Since we’d just begun hunting the river, you might assume that this was our first good Paleo. In truth, the aforementioned Michael had found two nice Paleo points on the previous day’s walk.

No doubt there is a story in nearly every piece in the collection. Since we don’t purchase nor sell artifacts, the ones we find are very personal, and although the vast majority of them are field-grade artifacts, they have particular significance for my family. Not only are they connections back in time, they are the tangible evidence of the hours and days we’ve spent together over the years, walking wheat fields, canoeing the river, climbing the bluffs. The points and other tools are wonderful, but the memories are priceless.

As I stare into the frames of artifacts, I see the passing of time. A little boy and girl, playing in the dirt, a young man helping his father from a watery repose following a canoe accident, my wife and daughter planning her wedding as they cross the river to a gravel bar. My father is happy as he shows me a good point he’s found, and Valerie’s enigmatic smile suggests that she likes the color of flint more than the style of the point.

My collection of artifacts is really a collection of memories. Days come and go. People enter our lives and sometimes they pass on, long before we’ve really learned who they were. The days we spend with family should be treasured as the gems they are. Time passes so quickly. Ten thousand years ago, others who walked upon this place I now call home, left their reminders that they had been here. And in the several hundred generations that have passed since early men and women first inhabited this ground, thousands of lives have come and gone. Cherish your family. Live with the knowledge that soon, all you may have is memories. Only the rocks last forever.