The 40 million year old paper weight-Sand dollars in the Sahara

Mothers and wives sometimes don’t see the value in what guys or growing boys have.  Sometimes it’s a collection, a piece of clothing or a thing that looks like an old rock. For me it started with a concert tee for Oingo Boingo, who I had seen in concert at an outdoor festival.  That was early 80s new wave at its best, even today Boingo’s music sounds great thanks in part to Danny Elfman and their tight rhythm.  Their frantic, multi layered music captured the sensibilities of a hyperactive teenage boy perfectly.
As they were the trendy group du jour I wore their tee shirt as often as possible.  I was an early adopter and I wanted the world to know it.   One day the shirt never came back from the laundry.  Isn’t it great how kids view dirty clothes?  In reality it never came back from mom cleaning and folding it.  I thought it fell down the mystery hole of laundry and was sleeping with dozens of odd colored tube socks.   At first mom was obtuse, saying she didn’t know where it went to, but a couple years later she finally copped to throwing it away.

The other year my wife and I were renovating our house.  The bulk of our stuff we put in a storage unit in the back yard.  Putting the stuff back inside the house was a gradual project, but once the big stuff was in place it was time for the nick nacks to come back. After a couple of days I was pacing about the house, opening up every drawer and looking very worried. “What are you looking for sweetie”, my bride to be said. “I’m looking for those sand dollars that I kept on the mantle; you know the ones I found in Egypt“. “Oh, look in the kitchen in the back of the dumb waiter”, she said.

Sure enough, in the back of the dumb waiter were my two sand dollars.  In a conversation after that she said something along the lines of I almost threw them out;  why don’t we throw them out or why do we keep those dirty things in the house. The back story on those sand dollars is that I found them near Siwa, Egypt.   Siwa is an oasis in the Sahara Dessert, located about 300 miles south west of the Mediterranean Sea and 100 miles east of the Libyan border.

It’s not a place remotely near any large body of water, so to find two sand dollars there was odd to say the least. To make those sand dollars even stranger is that there were tombs located nearby.   Actually it was the tombs that I had gone to that area to see as some of the locals had said that they were interesting.   I started out on bicycle, but a sandstorm suddenly came up which changed my travel plans to a taxi with some Canadians.

Our driver took us about 20 minutes into the Sahara, stopped the car and pointed to a ridge a couple hundred yards away. We could barely make out the ridge because of the sandstorm it looked more like a divider between the sky and sand, rather than a ridge of tombs.  When we arrived there were about three dozen tombs cut into the face of the ridge.   In several of the tombs were parts of mummies, scraps of cloth and odd drawings on the walls.  It was utterly fascinating and scary at the same time.

In-between some of these tombs we found this head and torso just laying in the sand.My parka was zipped up to my eyes and the hood was fully over my head to protect my ears from the swirling sand.  It was beside the skull that I saw these sand dollars.  They are dense, much denser than any sand dollar I’ve found on the coast. They also have a much different color.

What are the odds on finding two sand dollars, 300 hundred miles from the nearest sea, in the middle of the Sahara Dessert during a sand storm? 

So since that magical Indiana Jones type day I’ve been holding on to those sand dollars.  Shortly after our home renovation I had a business encounter with somebody at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.I told her the story, described them to her and she guessed that they were around 40 million years old.  She said “that’s a pretty cool souvenir”.

The sand dollars are in our bedroom, no place special really. My wife sees them every day and I never miss the chance to remind her about the period in time when she wanted to throw away the 40 million year old sand dollars.  It’s not an Oingo Boingo concert tee shirt and isn’t worth as much as a #1 issue comic book, but it’s still as kick ass memory.

I also enlarged some of the mummy photos that I took that day, framed and hung them up around the house.  “At least our child won’t have a fear of death”, my wife jokingly says.  Actually the photos are at least five feet off the ground, so he won’t see them for a couple years.