The field office didn’t have any full-time positions that I qualified for, but the more tasks I completed, the more work different folks in the office seemed to find for me to do. And there were some changes going on with the permanent staff that ended up working to my advantage. By summer’s end, Glade had been hired to head up all of the archaeology efforts. The office team had never had a trained archaeologist before. Glade was pretty much a one-man show with more work than he could handle, which included surveying and mapping hundreds of sites within the White River jurisdiction. I’d already proven myself a quick study when it came to surveying, and I was willing to work for minimum wage. Glade’s passion for his work became a new territory for me, full of all kinds of possibilities. I felt protective of the places we mapped. We didn’t have all of the cameras for surveillance at that time. Instead, I would backpack into the areas and hike and camp for weeks, patrolling the sites by foot.
By my fifth year on the job, the BLM had decided to send me for an eight-week law enforcement training program in Nebraska. The program would take place during January and February, when fieldwork was slow. I’d been renting a small apartment close to town by then, a seven-hundred-square-foot building that had been converted into living quarters, on the edge of some public grazing land and the Smith ranch. I’d been seeing Todd that fall. By December, I was ready to break things off, and he didn’t seem too unagreeable when I told him, so we went our separate ways. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I drove to Missouri to stay with my parents for Christmas. My dad had come down with a stomach bug, and I thought I’d been suffering from the same. Then I was so busy with the eight-week intensive training program that I didn’t pay my menstrual cycle, or lack of one, any mind. When I returned to Colorado, I bought a pregnancy test. It was nighttime and dark outside, and I closed all the blinds as if trying to create a cave in which I could hide when I found out the results. I peed on the stick and then carried it into my small living area. I set the stick on a coffee table, lit a candle, and sat on the floor.
And in those couple of minutes that followed, I knew I wanted to be pregnant, and I was afraid to look at the white piece of plastic, because I was afraid I’d find out I wasn’t. But I did look, and I was pregnant, and hope perched on my body, as if this new life forming inside me were all the affirmation I’d ever need, and I knew then, in this huge awakening sort of way, that it wasn’t grief that had driven me to Colorado. It was love. The capacity for my grief was all the love I’d had for Brody. And my own capacity wasn’t big enough. I needed a space just as wild and vast as that love to set it free.
—
I worked out of the White River Resource Area office in Rio Mesa, which was responsible for approximately one and a half million acres of land. And most of that land was rich in Paleo-Indian heritage, especially in the Douglas Creek territory, the same area where Amy Raye had disappeared.
Throughout the year, I patrolled the different sites and investigated them for any disturbance, such as holes in the ground, back-dirt piles, discarded fragmentary artifacts, or tools left in the area. I also kept record of and looked into footprints on an open site. I reported my findings to Glade, who would then try to determine what artifacts might have been at the ruin before the area was vandalized.
The previous summer, I’d worked with a field school team on a stratigraphic excavation where several living sites had been stacked one on top of another. The earth had eroded away in a deep gulch that ran one hundred feet long. The site was named Hanging Hearths Shelter because the hearths were hanging on the side of the cut bank of the cliff.
But the site was also a prime target for vandalism, so I patrolled the shelter several times a week. I had set up a surveillance camera as well. The camera, built into a synthetic rock, operated with a motion sensor. When the sensor was set off, the camera took pictures that would trip the radio back at the office with a code and deliver the pictures digitally to my computer. I strategically placed cameras at shelters like this to catch any looters—amateur archaeologists who would scavenge the ruins before all of the permits had been obtained and a field school could begin.
Such was the case with Hanging Hearths Shelter. Prior to the first field school, I’d noticed a number of footprints coming and going from the area. Then pictures began to show up on my computer. One morning the camera captured a man and his dog walking up to the shelter. The man was carrying a shovel. By the time Glade and I got out to the site, the man was gone, but in one of his freshly dug holes, he had left behind a cigarette butt with his DNA. Colm was able to come up with a couple of suspects from the photo, and with the DNA, he was able to make a perfect match.