Finders Keepers by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs [CHILDS, CRAIG]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316052498
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

The crew took a break for lunch at the edge of the dig site, rifling through a bag of chips and eating sandwiches. Before us lay the theater of northeast Arizona, a parched expanse capped by the enormous blue shell of the sky. We talked about digging and taking, and when I asked, some of the students admitted feeling a twinge of violation in their work. Why them? they asked. Why now? Why should anyone have the right or not to excavate someone else’s history? I ventured a story and told them about the pot I once returned to the wilderness. (I carefully left out the part about how it came into my possession, a difficult omission, for fear they might turn on me.) To my surprise, they enjoyed the story. It seemed to reflect their own ambivalence about removing artifacts in the first place. “It’s a good question,” the dig boss said. “Do we really need all of this?” Another chimed in, “It is kind of strange what we’re all doing out here digging up dead people’s things.”

Then, nobody said anything. We looked across the view, listened to the sky.

As we returned to the trenches, people taking positions on hands and knees, I thought back to something I read from Charles Bowden, a dry and brilliant desert writer. While wandering in intense sunlight, surrounded by the remains of the dead, he said that a set of rules came to him, rules that define what we must contend with as we explore this land. They are:

“1. You are in the right place.

2. You do not belong here.

3. Deal with this fact.

4. Time’s up.”

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