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This year marks one decade of collecting, beginning with the punter weekend warrior scrabbling about and now a more seasoned, squinty-eyed veteran tying it up with professionals and plotting life around expeditions. My house is now a kind of de facto museum where just about every surface is fossils (much to my wife’s chagrin). The learning has been exponential, the experiences sublime and irreplaceable, and the focus has shifted from something casual to a complete devotion and dedication whereby I teach my eight months of the year to get it out of the way to afford the luxury of indulging this passion. I work to live, and I feel a bit like the lucky kid who ran away to join the circus. There is nothing quite like the opening of the season and feeling the heft of the hammer in one’s hand, playing that rock lottery in the hopes of finding something spectacular. Even when those hopes are dashed by a poor outing, I’d take a bad day in the field over a good day at work every time. For so many here, a decade collecting is a blip. It wouldn’t even register geologically in deep time. The fossil world is filled with lessons for our humility as we continue to read chapters from a rocky book where so many pages are incomplete or missing. What we do is one part forensic detective work, research, speculation, and sweat. In this last decade, I have gained so much knowledge and skill — in research, collecting, and preparation — but what is my most cherished aspect of collecting has been the lifelong friends I have collected along the way, people who have become close, best friends. The adventures of shivering in a two-man tent, dealing with vehicle issues on the road, breaking new ground on a new site, sharing our spoils, the long drive discussions, miles of blacktop burned, and of course the beer shared. They say it is much harder to make close friends as we get older, but this passion defies such a credo. Almost like soldiers, we have shed blood in the field, and opened our lives to one another. I would simply not recognize my 36 year old self. Surely, it was a personal tragedy that saw me rummaging through my childhood to resurrect the passions I had let go idle and die. I needed an anchor or a crutch to give life some semblance of meaning, to reorient the future. I never anticipated just how much I would transition from hobby to a way of life. There is no patch of ground I pass over without immediately reflecting on the geology beneath my feet. There is no mention of where people travel without me thinking about the viability of fossils in the area they traveled to. Wherever my feet or wheels travel, my eyes are locked on every stone, every speck of dirt. They say to a biologist, everything is biology; to a chemist, everything is chemistry. For us, everything is geology and paleontology. In just a decade, I managed to accomplish so much, to build a collection that is not too bad, to erect a foundation of knowledge, to make new and lasting friends. As I transition into being an old man, that is what truly endures, a bit like a personal fossil record. Just last evening, I was texting with a field comrade while on a train ride back from an out of town dig about some of our shared friends who are getting on with age, who are fallen from the peak of their health and abilities. In this case, we were speaking about a mutual friend who may be lucky to see the next five years. That person said, “no one will come to my funeral. I’ll be forgotten.” Heck, no. We will be there in numbers to celebrate the man’s life. He will not be forgotten. I have but to look at pieces in my collection to see what he has prepared for me, pieces I collected with him in the field, pieces that speak a silent paean to his legacy. Unlike so many other collecting-focused pursuits like coins, stamps, sultry pictures of armadillos, this is a pursuit that unites and binds us — both to each other and to the results of all that work in the field and at the prep bench. And in terms of collecting, it is said in psychoanalysis that our urge to collect is driven by a need to recollect the lost pieces of ourselves. Maybe that is true. Maybe we are as fragmented and incomplete as the strata and fossil record we so doggedly read. But perhaps we also recollect ourselves in that other way, which is to — in essence — collect those comrades with whom we share our lives and grant them, and our passion, additional meaning. But enough of my navel-gazing, mushy reflection. For those who are just entering into this, welcome. This passion has the possibility of changing one’s life in unanticipated ways. With hammer in hand, the open horizon of time, and dear friends by my side, what can we not accomplish together? There is always another outcrop for us to investigate. There is always more to find and delight in each other's successes, and commiserate about our failures. I am fortunate for my finds, but I am blessed by my field friends. In these work-free days, I am regularly dirty, sweaty, and tired, and I would not trade that for all the gold in the world. Obligatory @PFOOLEY selfie as his poor northern equivalent