Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics faculty was recognized for its scholarly contributions in the advancement of earth sciences. Harvard shared international acclaim, but provided a competitive curriculum in organismic and evolutionary biology within the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
It was the scholarly combination that drew McCauley to both universities. For now, Yale was his home. He basically ate and slept there and looked the part of a college prof. In fact, the people at the Johnson & Murphy down the road in Westport loved him. He shopped their store for everything, from loafers and sandals to striped button-down shirts, slacks, sports jackets, and vests. Everything including his leather zip top briefcase. It fit his academic look, right down to his black, wavy hair and infectious smile, made all the more pleasant with his warm, deep voice.
The seven students joining McCauley on this summer’s dig were from a variety of colleges. He liked to cast them based on their interests and disciplines and how they could contribute to the whole experience. He personally picked each of them. The students, alas, weren’t the issue now. He was still trying to decide where to go. There were so many treasure troves in the west, particularly eastern Montana where students could extract the real crowd pleasers — good old fossilized dinosaur bones. On site, his team would quickly discover that, in addition to being a brilliant teacher, McCauley was arguably one of the country’s best archeological safe crackers.
McCauley reviewed the resumes one more time while DeMeo gave a running commentary. There was Anna Chohany from Harvard, Rich Tamburro from the University of Michigan, Tom Trent from the University of Chicago, Adam Lobel and Leslie Cohen, both PhD candidates from Penn State, Carlos Rodriguez from the University of Madrid, his only foreign student this year, and Al Jaffe, UC Berkeley.
“Now Jaffe’s an interesting guy,” DeMeo noted. “A little older. He’s a vet. Served two tours in Afghanistan. I don’t think he’ll have any problem with the accommodations. It may be a step up.”
“Yes, a solid group, Pete. Thanks. Send out the acceptances. Tell the dream team they’re good to go, but they better be ready to work like crazy.”
“Consider it done,” DeMeo replied.
DeMeo was a postgrad student, hoping to have a faculty assignment much like his boss. But that’s where the similarities ended. McCauley’s graduate teaching assistant was a former member of the Yale crewing team, with a winner take-all attitude and a huge sexual appetite. He kept his curly, brown hair short, his body tight, and his personal calendar extremely busy. He lived in black jeans and polo shirts all year long, at least when he wasn’t romancing the latest coed.
McCauley stood up, reached for his briefcase, and started for the door. “I’ll be at the gym if you need me.”
McCauley, had upped his routine to get in shape for the summer. He added weights to his training, jogged, and biked to shave off the New Haven winter pounds. It wasn’t as easy at thirty-six as it used to be, but it was more necessary for the dark-haired, six feet one inch, 205 pound former Eagle Scout from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
He’d grown up digging for Susquehannock and Lenape arrowheads in the woods near his home. Now he was digging for deeper, older finds in God’s country.
“Oh, and you better tell those pups that they need to get in shape, too!”
McCauley typically exhibited a flamboyance that was sound-bite worthy when the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, BBC, or Discovery Science needed a handsome go-to expert in the field. He gave the same sense of enthusiasm to his students. Though he talked about being political, he was bad at university politics. He hadn’t attracted serious grant money in three years and he wasn’t connecting well with the new department chair who was looking to make institutional changes.
Job pressure was building. It didn’t help that he had no significant other in his life to take him away from his work.
McCauley liked to say his last girlfriend died one hundred forty million years ago, but reeked of bad breath. However, that wasn’t completely true. A few years ago, before he came to Yale from Harvard, he was involved with a grad student who became a Boston attorney. They broke up and now that he was in Connecticut and Katie Kessler moved to Washington where she was working for the Supreme Court, he knew they’d never get back together. More importantly, he heard that she was seriously involved with a Secret Service agent.
So Quinn McCauley threw himself into his work, the ever-punishing “Publish or Perish” treadmill, and his summertime excavations which could dry up if he didn’t “win more friends and influence people” in his own department.
There was another issue he had to consider. Science was under siege and evolution was increasingly a hot topic. As a result, fewer checks were being written for anthropological and paleontological work by the government, let alone by corporations or foundations. The long tail of the dwindling resources? It seemed like dinosaurs were going to stop making noise even to kids.
How many more years until the virtual end to research? McCauley mused. Three? Five? That would put him at roughly the same age as the legendary competing paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were more than one hundred fifty years ago. True colleagues at first, they named amphibian fossil findings after one another, Ptyonius marshii and Mosasaurus copeanus, respectively. However, their relationship fell apart when Cope rushed to publish his work on a new species shipped to his office from Kansas. He called the finding Elasmosaurus platyurus. In his haste, he accidentally or mistakenly reversed the position of the head to the tail of the vertebrae. Marsh identified Cope’s error and published a correction. This destroyed their relationship and created a scandal in the new field of paleontology that had only been so named decades earlier.
What would be McCauley’s bragging rights? As he peddled his exercise bicycle at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gym, he wondered if this year’s exploration would reinvigorate both his department’s support in him and his own belief in himself. And what about his legacy? Would he ever discover his own evolutionary branch that might add true knowledge to the genealogical tree?
Strictly out of frustration, McCauley stopped biking and leaned over the handle bars. He was beginning to think that just wasn’t going to happen. That paleontology was just getting old.
Gotta dig out of this hole, he thought.
Five
Whoever was in charge of The Path had the responsibility to pass on the knowledge in the event of something unexpected. Martin Gruber had done so. Now, with the end in sight, he publicly announced his retirement as editor-in-chief of Voyages.
He told the staff that Colin Kavanaugh would soon be taking over as publisher. To Kavanaugh, the public statement meant he’d immediately assume more oversight of the magazine and undoubtedly be subject to Gruber’s lectures up to the bitter end.
“Colin, come in. Please, please, come in.”
It was time for another.
Kavanaugh had been called; no, summoned. He was called when Gruber needed a companion; he was summoned for everything else.
“Good day, Mr. Gruber.” Kavanaugh carried galleys under his arm. He placed them on the work table in the far end of Gruber’s office.