More Caribbean side and an amazing Friday night

This one's long, and more experience-heavy than paleontology-heavy. It also lacks photos. You've been warned!

It's been another lab-intensive week, especially so because Aaron left Monday for an outreach event in Colombia, but towards the end of it I got a bit of a reprieve from the usual sample preparation and micro fossil picking. Thursday morning was spent at a STRI storage facility that's leased out from the Canal Authority. I was surprised to find, upon arriving there, that our building was just an old house, stripped of all furnishings, sinks, cabinets, etc. and filled with stacks and stacks of fossil-filled bins. As it turns out, the entire Canal-owned compound used to be a Panamanian military housing community. When the Panamanian army was disbanded, the housing development was given over to the Canal Authority and is now mostly used for storage or leased out to other government affiliates.

Anyway, our reason for being there was to size-sort sandbags full of sediment from the Cucaracha Formation (about 20 million years old and known, in places, to be exceedingly rich in microfossils) that will later be picked for microfossils. The process began with pouring the contents of the sandbags out into five-gallon buckets. The material was golfball- to softball-sized pieces of sandstone that, to my inexperienced touch, felt far too well cemented for us to possibly break down and separate the grains. But sure enough, after filling the buckets with water up to the level of the rocks and adding a small scoop of everyday detergent, they rocks immediately began to crumble. Working the slurry around in my hands for the next ten or fifteen minutes took care of the rest. It felt very little like paleontology and very much like making mudpies! One thing I really love about this field of work is all of the unexpectedly fun odd jobs that line the path to the end scientific goal. After my bucket of rocks and been fulling converted to a bucket of mud, the wet sieving began. We had three wood and wire-mesh sieves (not much different from what one might use out in the backyard) that ranged from maybe half an inch square down to a millimeter square in grid size, stacked one on top of the other from smallest to largest. The rest was just a matter of dumping the bucket's contents into the sieves and using a hose and my hands to work out any clogs and help the grains through the wire. By the end of it all, I had to have lost close to 90% of the initial mass (all silts and clays that are too small to contain any fossils of value to us) and dumped each sieve out onto a separate tarp to dry. Once they've dried, it will surely be up to Sam and I to pick through the material on our microscopes. We did this for close to four hours, all the while out in sun in the backyard of our storage house, so it was really a pretty great way to pass the morning.

Once again, Friday was spent at Playa Pina, pulling bones out of the beach rock. We've been going there so frequently that there wasn't really a whole lot to do. Two of us worked on removing a couple ribs out of the tidal flat while the other two made what progress we could on pulling a dolphin or whale skull out of a cliff face. The skull was A LOT more work, so we switched back and forth between the two tasks. The sandstone that supports the skull becomes fairly easy to chip off when saturated with water (thankfully at high tide the wave action takes care of that) but after you get through the first few inches on the surface, it's unrelenting. Our general strategy was to make indentations with our pickaxe then go in with chisel and hammer to remove as large of pieces as we could. The pickaxe was nothing short of infuriating to use - it's head has started to become loose such that the weight (and my balance) shift mid-swing and the rock would only chip off into hundreds of small fragments rather than large, satisfying chunks. And these fragments would invariably fly straight towards my face, entering eyes, mouth and nose, in complete disregard of safety glasses and improvised facemask. When the tide started really coming in and we could feel the water lapping at our feet, we decided to finish working on the skull the next week rather than attempt to haul out a 150+ pound slab of rock through ankle-deep water. We didn't go home empty-handed though; we had at least three or four ribs in the back of the truck by the time we hit the road.

Oh! And we saw Amado again, though his siblings and cousins stayed mostly out of sight. He came down to help us for the last hour or so that we were there. We noticed that he was visibly cringing as he was crouching over the ribs with hammer and chisel (he swings far too wildly for us to even consider handing him the pickaxe) and then saw that he had a huge gash on the back of one of his legs. I asked him about it and he told me it was the reason why he wasn't there to work with us when we first arrived - he had been attacked by a dog and had traveled into Colon to see a doctor. When he was telling me all about it (in Spanish) he kept referring to the dog as "un diablo" and I could see why. The monster had left one hell of a mark on the poor kid's leg. We all insisted that he shouldn't help us this week and should take it easy instead, but he refused. Before we drove off, we pulled a cellphone out of the truck's glove box and handed it over to him. More than well-earned, I'd say. Amado was much more talkative with us this time than when we first met him, and he really seems like a good kid.

Due to the rising tide, we were on our way home an hour or so earlier than we normally would have been, which boded well for actually making it to volleyball on time! Every week I miss the first game because I'm still en route from Pina, but not this time - or so I thought. We ended up having to make a stop at a Claro store (a cellular provider) to handle some phone and internet stuff, and by the time we got out and I made it to Tupper for the games, my team was just leaving the court and celebrating a win. I wish I could have been there for it, but at least we won. I decided to hang around anyway and chat with my coworkers and all the other STRI people that I'm slowly getting to know. Glad I did, because after the last official game had ended, I got to play three in a row with all the people who were still hanging around. I never thought I had even the slightest interest in the sport, but volleyball is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. And, after the games, I did a ton of conversing in Spanish with my coworkers. Many of them were just as eager to practice their English, so the conversations were bilingual, which was pretty fun, despite how challenging and slow it was. I stayed at volleyball really late, until they began taking the nets down, then went with a few people to one of my coworkers' apartment in the area to hang out. At this point, I was the only native English speaker left, so I was in full-out Spanish speaking mode. It was easy enough to follow the conversations, but participating  was a struggle! One-on-one I can do just fine, but with so many people you really have to be quick on your feet. It was great practice and a really good time, without a doubt one of my favorite things that I've done since I got here. The next morning I was supposed to go on a canopy tour with Nicole and Sam, but I slept through it entirely. As cool as their experience sounded, I don't regret missing it at all. What I did instead was an incredible experience and will probably stand out against everything else long after I've gotten back to the States.