It would be incorrect to say that, without human intelligence, Goldendale simply ‘lay’ beneath the sun—stale, abandoned, lifeless; it didn’t. To say that would be to deny what life remained: the foot-long Triassic dragonflies, for example, blue-green and iridescent, like 7-Up bottles, which erupted from the weeds as we pulled up to the market and scattered, like seeds, on the wind; or the slim, tan, almost stick-like Compies—hopping and foraging amongst street trash when we arrived—which did the same. Rather, it was that without human agency the town lived and breathed but simply no longer knew it, and so, far from being inert, it merely slumbered—silently, dreamlessly.
“Welcome to Goldendale,” shouted the driver from his window, jocularly. “The time is half-past 65 million years B.C. and
