Halloween is nearly upon us along with that scary yearly ritual: the family gathering. Recently, my father and I traveled back to our ancestral home to visit his one surviving brother and to haunt the inhabitants of the places we used to live.

As a geologist, I also planned to collect fossils from the Upper Ordovician limestones exposed in that area. I needed a brachiopod called Platystrophia to satisfy the collecting desires of my friend Kat, who is 5. But let’s begin as we should at the bottom of the stratigraphic column. The Law of Superposition states that in any sequence of sedimentary rocks, in the absence of deformation, the oldest rocks are at the bottom.

The McMillan formation contains a zone of shingled shells deposited in a swift current. Shell orientation suggests current direction at the time of deposition.

The house that my grandfather built in about 1928, and in which my father and my uncle were raised, is located on limestone that is possibly the McMillan formation. My father had his own fossil collection, and I have pictures of the entire family standing in the driveway in 1945, the three boys wearing military uniforms. No one was home when we stopped by, but in the car my aunt told a story about a couple who went boating. Their boat overturned, and the man’s pants were lost in the swift current, giving him a great excuse for losing his pants. The location of your pants suggests current direction.

Atop the McMillan formation lies the Arnheim formation, in which the first appearance of Richmond faunas is accompanied by a decline of Platystrophia ponderosa.

Richmond fossils are everywhere around the home my father built shortly after my first appearance. I knocked on the door and introduced myself as the son of the man who built the house 60 years ago. The young man at the door, wearing no pants (it was windy), introduced himself as a relative of a boy I played with as a child. He said we could wander around if we wanted, so we headed for the back yard. When I passed the concrete stairwell to the basement, I saw our dog lying dead outside the door in 1964, draped across three steps. Cindy had been poisoned and she was seeking her family, dying before anyone knew where she was.

A fossil hash marks the top of the Arnheim, on which was deposited the shale and limestone of the Waynesville formation. The Waynesville contains trilobites of the genus Flexicalymene.

It was to the second home my father built (amid trilobites) that I moved at age 13. No one was home when we visited, so I left a business card and collected some Buckeyes from a tree my father planted before I knew how to drive. The next day, the woman who owns the house called me. My father had worked for the phone company, I told her, but he took pride in that house, building a curved wall in the family room and adding lots of electrical outlets. The owner said “We thought your dad had to be an electrician. There are plugs everywhere!” I resisted the urge to joke that some of our DNA must still be in the carpet, but I’m sure our family history has left other detritus in the layers of that house. All of our creations, good and bad, leave footprints.

Overlying the Waynesville formation are the Liberty and Whitewater formations, comprised of shales and interbedded limestones. Platystrophia acutilirata is restricted to Whitewater strata.

Not content to stay bound by my local strata, I escaped west after high school. Mankind is thought to be the most successful invasive species in the history of the planet, and I explored wildernesses here and on other continents. But if a future paleontologist examines strata formed from the soils of today, he won’t find my traces. He’ll find the remains of people who stayed in one place long enough to be felt.

Pleistocene glacial till rests unconfortably on Whitewater strata at this site. The hiatus between the two units represents a missing record spanning 400 million years.

It has been a rare thing for me to visit my uncle. A hiatus of 40 years eroded connections and weathered all of our surfaces, but when we came together, we grew. My perspective broadened when I learned of unspoken illnesses and traumatic losses. At a monthly lodge breakfast, I saw a membership of conservative Protestants welcome (and put to work) four young Mormon missionaries who were exploring their personal wildernesses.

Glacial soils in this region fed agricultural productivity. Coupled with easy transportation on the canal, development in the 19th century led to economic abundance.

It was abundance that allowed my family to grow and scatter. The future my parents envisioned following the war did partly come to pass, and the future I envisioned at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is somewhat evident today. Our next future may not hold as much promise, but the fossils we collected as kids will still be in the ground, along with a few newer ones for which we have to craft good excuses. Thank goodness for swift currents and strong breezes.

— Greg Wessel  is an island geologist, who said he would give a fossil to the first person who guessed the largest city closest to his hometown.