If your only mode of transportation is by foot but you want to get to the end of the wilderness road, where it has been noted all America lies, you join a club. So I joined the Seminole Divers who made regular sallies to many interesting places for a gas contribution.
Real diving had long been an aspiration. Unreal diving saw several youthful attempts including building a scuba tank out of used sacristy candle glass containers (worked not at all) and who hasn’t tried the old breathing through a garden hose while under water (gives one a real appreciation for what “number of atmospheres” is all about).
The Seminole Divers were mostly the Seal Team of the anthropology department plus a few wackos who only wanted to go places where they could scuba as deep as possible. Consequently, we did a lot of river diving for artifacts. Apparently all past tribes, including the Spanish and English, were constantly throwing stuff into the rivers so it was a real source of items that had not been in the air for hundreds of years. Add to this the mastodons, who apparently swam poorly, and there was much to be found; plus the group was naturally sawed-off. I joined shortly after the trip where they tried to kill a wild pig with spear guns – my kind of crowd.
Beginner’s luck struck one Saturday morning just downstream of the second bridge on the Black Lagoon’s outflow. Though I preferred free diving, scuba tanks let one descend to the bottom and basically crawl along while holding onto the eel grass to defeat the current. The rule was “If it doesn’t look like it belongs there; it’s something”. ‘It’ was sitting completely in the open. A mottled pale blue marbled rock shaped like a hockey puck (maybe 6in by 3in). Others reported it shined like a big jewel as it surfaced first clutched in my hand.
Nobody knew what it was beyond being sure it was man-made. A professor in the anthropology department immediately labeled it a “chunky stone”. While its use to the Indians was speculative, its substance was fossilized brain coral. The professor asked if he could hold on to it for a time to measure and photograph. I said “sure”. Had he called me back I would have told him to keep it. However, a year later I concluded he was not going to call back so I called him and retrieved the rock.
It was something worth showing to others and another graduate student’s parents were seriously into Indian artifacts. Apparently they vacationed to reservations, constantly collected arrow heads and pottery shards and their living room was rumored to be full of display cases of such treasures. So an offer was made to acquire the rock.
Now it was a great rock but I did snakes and wanted to get into the big time which then meant a python. So I sold the rock for $25 to buy a rock python. In the event, I got a reticulated python which grew to the biggest snake I ever owned. This was my intention but in the fullness of time the snake ended up living in a cage made of a bulletin board glass front and uncut 4 x 8 ft sheets of plywood. The time came when the next cage was going to be a bedroom. So I sold the python.
All I have left of the snake are a few photos and a left forearm scar from the bottom two rows of teeth, and I miss the rock. However, if I had to do it all over again I’d probably do the same thing. Not for the snake but to get the rock where it needed to be – with people who did people rocks. The location of its discovery was duly noted and I hope it has remained with those who let others see it.
Besides, I still have a mammoth backbone disc and a clay pipe (unbroken bowl & stem). I also have an almost perfectly round stone, about the size and color of a ping pong ball, that my aunt picked up out of a Pennsylvania trout stream and handed to me when I was about five years old. Her interpretation was that the stream had so rounded it. I’ve been thinking about that hypothesis for over half a century and I don’t think the stream did it. I think some distant Seneca relative did it. It’s not for sale.
ML
7-9-07
