I worry about how ridiculous this is: traipsing though corn fields, soaked in sweat sweetened by DEET-laden bug dope, ivy-off, and spf 1000 sun block. By this time of the season, the back of my neck is as red as any confederate grandson's and coated with a thick spackle of corn pollen. I am sure that I will lose sundry members of my crew to the Children of the Corn, that I'll be forced to explain to the RPW's wife and the YS's boyfriend that although I called and called, they never answered. Fretting that the potential for heat exhaustion was rated "severe" today by the ever-helpful Weather Channel, and fretting that if we don't push the limits of human endurance, I won't get the work done on time. My transects are a neurotic two rows deep, because the density of the vegetation and the noise created by my crashing through it sharply decreases my ability to keep track of distances further than a few feet away. And all the time, counting my paces in an attempt to keep track of our position in the field with respect to the sweat-soaked and dirty topographic field map.
But I Know...
But I know there's a site here. Our blessed corn field is on the east slope of an upland knob near a north/west running stream in eastern Iowa. The stream runs directly into a perennial stream, which has an outcrop of limestone and chert, the stone material from which many prehistoric Native American tools are made. Most of the hills in this area have sites of one age or another. Why can't we find one on this hill? Is my strategy not working? Is the model wrong? Was my mother right about that MBA?
And as all these thoughts racket around my poor DEET-dizzied brain, I hear from four rows to my left the grizzled RPF shout, "flake!" at the top of his lungs, and immediately to my right I hear "flake!" from a YS. And there, miracle of miracles, against the odds, against the heat, against the deer flies and the parsnip and the pollen, there at my feet is the sugary white gleam of a projectile point, beautiful, timeless, where it has waited for this moment for thousands of years.
Oh. I guess I can take it for another season or two.
