What happened to our mastodon?

It is raining today. The forecast is for 2 to 4 inches of precipitation for New Jersey. On top of the past weeks, I wonder if we are all getting mossy. Even the tap water has a river odor to it. Being inside means lots of time to read or blog.

I read today that a group of Bergen County fossil owners have given their 21 million year old prize to the State Museum here in Trenton. This is great opportunity for interested scientists and school children to appreciate the prehistoric treasures that lie beneath our macadam and Walmarts.

This also got me to wondering what happened to our mammoth back in the '60's. My husband was a contractor with some expertise in building ponds and lakes. We had several draglines and wide-track bulldozers that literally could walk in muck that would not support a man. We were working on a pond site in Johnsonburg, New Jersey, and got a call one morning from our wide-track operator that we had to "Come quick!"

The location was a peat bog about twenty minutes from our business location. This was before cell phones and today's instant communication, so details of the emergency were sketchy. I remember finding the estate, driving down the snowy white stone driveway and marveling at the spotless barns and rolling hills landscaped like a golf course. I headed up a hill towards several weeping willows. Willows always mean water so I assumed that that was where they were working. Sure enough, in the midst of these manicured meadows I spotted the pond site down in a hollow. Our operator, Jerry Snyder, had tons of experience but his excitement was out of character. My husband had gotten there before me and they were bent over and intent on their digging.

I slugged out to the hole, peat and slime sucking at each step, and then got my first look at a tusk. It looked like the golden mottled tortoise shell back of my antique comb. Jerry held one up and my husband bent over to help him with more, heavier pieces hidden in the muck. I reached out to touch it but thought it was rather ordinary looking. Obviously it was not an ordinary tooth. It had an amber patina but there was no drum roll to announce that it waited millions of years for light of day. I did not know what to expect but the thought crossed my mind that it would be more dramatic on my glass coffee table.

I rolled up my sleeves and squished through the ooze. My fingers found something slippery but solid. It had an opening that my fist could hook into and I tugged. In those days, I was quite sturdy from carrying water buckets and hauling hay bales so it was not much trouble to put my back to it and retrieve my prize. With a smooshing sucking sound it gave up its million-year old bed and hung in my dripping arms. Jerry informed me that I had snagged a vertebrate.

That was the first of several that we collected in about an hour, hoping that we could get the thing out before someone found out that we had uncovered it. Any delay while working in these conditions meant costly holds on a contract, and on payments, but more than that, over time, the peat conditions would revert to a steady state and any excavations would have to begin all over again. Whatever we had accomplished to excavate for the pond parameters could be lost and need to be initiated all over again.

As luck had it, a local dinosaur enthusiast showed up and for some reason absconded with the remains. I heard later that the mammoth or mastodon resided in a chicken coop in Paulina for a time. I always regretted that I had not kept a vertebrae for my coffee table.

I googled today and read that the Trenton State Museum owns up to as many as thirteen mastodons, mostly from Sussex County. But there is no mention of the one I helped scoop out of the peat bog in Johnsonburg. I wonder if someone can tell me if it ever made it to the Capital.

Everytime it rains and I can smell the Delaware river, I think about the peat bog.