Mastodon Man

I had a spot of engine trouble heading up to Hessel in Michigan's glorious Upper Peninsula last Saturday. The cooling fan quit working and the Mackinac Bridge was congested. I had to exit the freeway and sit in a park until the traffic began to move. My newer older van would be okay without an operating cooling fan, if I could drive posted speeds. I parked by a park where I could observe the bridge and waited.

Another old gentleman (yes, I count as an old gentleman) sat next to me for a while, looking out over the crowded bridge. We chit chatted about this and that as he waited for his wife to come back from wherever she had been. 

It turns out that he was on a team which excavated the remains of a wooly mammoth, or mastodon, from a field near Chelsea, Michigan several years ago. Here's a You Tube clip: Mastodon skeleton

The fellow I met operated the scoop shovel in the video. He showed me pictures of him with the skull of the beast. Stupidly, I didn't catch his name. And I won't call him Cloyce because that wouldn't be right. Still, meeting a guy who dug up a mammoth, well, that was really cool. Car troubles aside, there were worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.