Dan and I will come along because digging for fossils sounds ridiculous—and right now ridiculous has an aesthetic beauty unto itself. Because Dan and I are about to become grownups, if we aren’t already, and someone offers a few weeks playing in dirt and looking for dinosaurs, which we know to be monsters you get by adding science.

Mike is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Dan is probably the funniest. Mike's intelligence often seems so effortless it's dopey. Dan is a piece of energy dressed as a human. On campus, he was a member of the best sketch-comedy group, a huge deal. And now he’s in a sketch group with those same guys in New York, trying to make it. I go back and forth between having complete confidence that the world will recognize both Dan and Mike for their talents and worrying no one will ever know these things about them. Worrying that everyone thinks their friends are smart and funny. Lots of people are smart. Everybody’s in a sketch group in college. It’s basically required for males who go to a certain type of college to be in a sketch-comedy group. So who are we.

I will feel all of this without really thinking it. And later this year, after a summer in the desert, complicated financial things we will keep meaning to Google will justify our latent feelings of dread. Struggling news institutions will struggle to explain exactly how and why our generation is struggling. But the gist of it is there is a Recession and the three of us probably should not have studied what we studied: journalism, being funny, and dinosaurs.

* * *

The bags we’ve packed will hold the ur-wardrobes of early-twenties boy-men of the mid-2000s: community service T-shirts that say “Volunteer” on the back and Gap T-shirts worn half-ironically. Cargo shorts, fashion cockroaches that seem to survive every style extinction, feature prominently. And our sunglasses, in a pre-Wayfarer renaissance, will be sporty, awful descendants of Oakleys from the ’90s.

Mike will wear a digital watch with a frayed fabric strap. This is 2007, the watch still often useful, especially while traveling, when complex technologies falter in simple ways. Mountains will come between our flip phones and whatever it is they need from the sky. And when this happens, we’ll hold the phones up with one hand like a modern soliloquy, trying, like all prayers, to close our gap with the heavens by a foot or two.

Mike will not be stressed, but attentive to detail, worried, eager. We will go here, then drive to here, and work these days. Grant money will pay for our gas. It’s weird to hear logistics for hunting monster bones.

A road atlas will get its own seat. We know what GPS is, that it’s mostly for nuclear missiles and that some people have it. We don’t. What you can do if you’re lost is call someone on a Razr cellphone and ask, “Are you near a computer?” and, if they are, they can look up directions on Mapquest.com and read them to you, which feels like a marvelous hard-won alchemy. This is an era of in-betweens. Everyone doesn’t have all the technology yet. The only thing more laughable than the tech from three years ago is how little we understand what’s coming in three years. The road atlas is bound in a white plastic coil, the country stacked and flat, and on the page for Salt Lake there is a spot outside the city with a little triangle, meaning you can camp there.