I am imagining panning for gold, my garden trowel digging into the pebbled streambed. I fill my old kitchen sieve with sand and then swirl it repeatedly in the water of Poricy Creek until the sand has drained away. I am left with a small pile of rocks, small chips of stone, an occasional shard of glass, and bits of shell. The gold I am seeking has the burnish of prehistory, mollusks that inhabited this area when Monmouth County was a shallow sea more than 65 million years ago.
The fossils are embedded in the rock, but the work of water slowly earns their release. I can see the line of demarcation easily, the dark marl that holds the shells stretching from the waterline to a point at least a dozen feet above my head, where the reddish top soil takes over and soars to the cliff edge 30 feet up. At the water’s edge, though, I can see the fossils peeking out and the impressions they made all those eons ago.
I follow the streambed for several hundred yards, careful where I step. The sand is so dense in places that it sucks off boots and shoes.
Later, after a quick sandwich and a several-mile drive to another fossil bed at Big Brook, I search in vain for fossilized shark teeth. Instead, I find only orange-colored pencils of stone—the remains of belmnites, squid-like creatures that had 10 arms.