Michael

Maybe if I send things for the blog you won’t have to do dangerous stupid things to fill space. So, the promised “eggs”. 

The summer I turned 13 (1971) my older sister invited me to join her on the archaeological dig she would be working on. The previous summer the archaeologist she had studied with had an exploratory dig which was small – the people were trustworthy and food had been terrific. My summer, there were about 50 archaeology student volunteers and graduate student leaders and a dozen or so paid day-laborers and me. We slept (not the day-laborers, but everyone else) 4 to a room in just-slapped-up two-room cabins (with no furniture) that would fall apart within 4 years, and ate in a similar, but larger space. It was in the northwestern corner of New Mexico. ( “Salmon Ruins is an over 250 room Chacoan Anasazi site, constructed in the late 11th century along the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico, approximately two miles west of Bloomfield. Recognizing the research and public education importance of this site, the citizens of the Bloomfield area, through the San Juan County Museum Association, have protected and interpreted Salmon Ruins for over 30 years. Originally preserved by homesteader George Salmon and his family, the site and surrounding 22 acres have been owned by San Juan County since 1969.”)

We all worked eight hour days. (Since I wasn’t an archaeology student I didn’t have my own plot; I helped those lowest in the hierarchy screen the wheelbarrow loads being removed by day-laborers from areas that were thought to not have much of archaeological interest.) Meals were at set times; I forget now whether 7AM, 11AM, and 5PM, or what. Evenings we hung out at “Armpit International,” one of the guys’ cabins, and they didn’t smoke until after I’d gone to bed. I now realize my sister may have invited me along to have an excuse to shake a persona developed the previous summer, because we went to bed together.   

The cook was the same as the previous year but he couldn’t handle the number of people so every breakfast was two fried eggs and toast slathered with already melted butter, every lunch was two baloney sandwiches with iceberg lettuce and mustard and mayonnaise, and too many dinners were barely barbequed chicken with iceberg and unripe tomato “salad”, mashed potatoes and canned carrots with vanilla sheet cake and canned fruit for dessert. But there was nothing else and we worked hard and I was always hungry. 

So one morning I got my food and sat down, and found myself across from someone in cholesterol-lecture mode. The food we were being served was terrible and we were all going to have heart attacks. The eggs were the worst part. He went on and on, all the way through me eating my entire breakfast. At some point … I guess I was done eating, he paused and looked like he expected me to say something. So I did: “Does that mean I can have your eggs?”

Jennifer