Forever is a fragment in the end:
Our age another utterance of Time,
Where kingdoms tend to break before they bend.
Forever is a fragment in the end:
A broken memory we’ll never mend.
However strong or confident our climb,
Forever is a fragment in the end;
Our age another utterance of Time.
There’s a persistent conspiracy theory in my area regarding megalodon teeth.
You know megalodons? A handful million years ago, one of the largest and most powerful predators to have ever lived trawled the depths and shallows of the Miocene Atlantic. They swam, they ate, they personified nightmares. Then, a series of ice ages started to kill off the sea-beasts, carve up the northern hemisphere and create the Chesapeake Bay, the third largest estuary in the entire world.
The glaciers pushed the land down as ice and sea began to comingle. The ice receded and a tidal basin remained.
That’s why they’re there now.
That’s why you can still scour the shore and find scads of ancient shark teeth.
None of this is the story anybody cares about, though. Around these parts, you don’t really hear much talk of the lithosphere or chronospecies evolution. But most locals sure have heard of Molly Sampson.
Molly was a nice kid who made the paper some years back for being the latest among a long line of Bay visitors to find a freaking huge megalodon tooth. Hers was about as big as both her hands. As it tends to do, the news latched on to the story and ushered in a new wave of shore-trawlers who took to the beaches with baskets and filter traps. You can’t visit the state and local parks around Molly’s neck of the woods without seeing these folks prowl through the water.
That’s where the conspiracy comes in. It involves the teeth, sure, but implicates the park rangers.
Not everyone who wades through the Bay gets to find a megalodon tooth. Some folks wade out there for hours, only to get wet ankles and a few shells for their trouble.
However, rising interest and popularity in the teeth isn’t usually seen as a reason for their rarity. Nor are the news stories, or the rows of tourists who patrol the water on the daily.
No, see, it’s the park rangers. They get there in the mornings, before the parks open up. Everyone knows they hit up the beach and pocket the teeth for themselves. Have been for years.
Teeth belonging to a shark that makes Jaws look like a guppy manage to survive some 20 million years. They’ve sat through ice ages, continental drift and glacial terraforming to stretch through eons to make it into the palm of someone’s hand.
But what the fossil hunters want to harp on is how unfair it is that they don’t get to own any. And they blame the folks who maintain the very park that provides a venue for them to search.
I’m not saying that the park rangers don’t pocket a few from time to time. How am I to know?
I just think that it’s a better perspective we may want to search for instead.
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