by Rick Bass
“He’s a grown-up,” Helen said, but Amy agreed with Mel and said, “You’re right, we should have taken better care of him.”
Helen was annoyed. “Since when is it your job to take care of him—and why can’t he take care of himself?”
“He’s my guest,” Mel said. “I have to live with him. I don’t want him coming down here every night like some runaway hound.” She picked Wallis up—he was unconscious now—and folded him over her shoulder like a bag of feed. “He doesn’t know any better yet,” she said. She headed back out the door, Wallis’s head bobbing behind her, upside down, like a gutted deer.
Chastened, Danny followed her outside and gave her a lantern to take with her on the ski home. She thanked him and took off down the road without using her poles: holding Wallis in place with one arm, the lantern and poles in the other. The lantern cast a small yellow globe of light in front of her: a mesmerizing light filled with millions of falling snowflakes, as if she, too, were descending. Wallis’s body was warm against Mel’s back and shoulders. She was not angry at him, and told herself that he was not so much drunk as only sleeping.
He awoke with his head clear, but with his muscles feeling poisoned. Mel was gone—a note on the chopping block in the kitchen, next to a new-baked loaf of bread, said “Back after dark,” and he fixed toast and tea, then stripped and went down and sat in the creek, and then lay down in it to bathe. It was still snowing.
Wading out, he rolled in the snow, ran back up to the cabin, and dried off and dressed by the fire, shivering. Later in the afternoon, still trying to shake the poison from his muscles, he went out to the woodshed and split kindling.
At dusk—still snowing—he fixed more toast and tea, and pulled down the old journals, as the short day slipped away, like all the ones before it.
A Walk Under the Sea
What Goes on in the Ocean Depths
“The sea! The sea!” shouted the companions of Balboa, as they caught the first glimpse of the Pacific from the heights of the American Isthmus. The sea has always inspired the wonder—often the veneration—of mankind. Its vastness and power overwhelm the imagination. Its permanence, its antiquity, form a bewildering conception. The same “far-sounding sea” roared in the hearing of the mariners of the remotest past. The same ocean floated the ships of the Tyrians and Carthaginians. Its mysterious depths aroused the superstitions of the ancients the same as they excite the intelligent curiosity of modem science. A “glorious mirror,” as Byron conceived it,
“Where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests,
Boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity—the throne
Of the invisible.”
Let us stand on some bold headland and look out over the Atlantic. Let us plant ourselves on Sankaty Head, the eastern promontory of Nantucket, itself the “ultima Thule” of New England. The breakers roar along the beach. Across the billowy blue, thought wanders to the European shore. Underneath the ruffled surface, imagination pictures a world of curious and wonderful existences. There lie the skeletons of noble ships—there moulder the dead sailors of all nations—there rot invaluable cargoes—there sleep the mysteries of steamers which sailed out of sight of land and never returned—there swarm the sharks that desecrate the sacred forms of humanity which sank into their silent empire. Shall we venture among the dangers of the underworld? Yes, we invoke the magic protection which has made warriors invulnerable, and shielded adventurers upon the waters of Styx, and the fiery waves of Phlegethon.
We go down like bathers in the sea. We pass the margin where
“The dreary back seaweed lolls and wags.”
We traverse the borders where the brown, belted kelp sways to and fro in graceful curves. We get beyond the slope of stony bottom to the smooth sand. We come to the gardens of the rosy-tinted sea mosses—the Dasya, the Grinnellia, the Callithamnion; and startle the bluefish and halibut in their safe seclusion. A moonlight gleam is here, and the water also takes on the chill of evening. We attain a depth of half a mile. Our feet press into the finer sediments derived from the land—the dust of other “continents to be.” The twilight has faded into a deep shade. The creatures of the sea swarm curiously about us, then flee in terror from our presence. We feel the gentle movement of “a river in the ocean,” but surface disturbances do not reach to this depth.
A change of climate impresses itself on our sensations. The water where we started had a temperature of sixty degrees—here it is forty. But we are panopalied against harm; we press on. We descend to the depth of a mile. The species of the shallower water appear no more. Their home is the zone which now stretches above our heads. The green and rosy sea mosses never venture here. We are in total darkness. No chlorophyll tints the growths of the vegetable kingdom. Here are only stony, white calcareous algae and silicious diatoms of microscopic minuteness.
We pause to contemplate the awful stillness of the submarine realm, and feel our slimy path down to the deeper profound. Above us now float two miles of black sea. Any surface fish brought down here perishes from the effect of enormous pressure, if possessing an air bladder. If it have none, the fish becomes torpid, and finally dies.
We are here, probably miles from the shore—that varies with the steepness of the slope. The sediments which the rivers have brought to the ocean have mostly been. But here still are some of the finest particles contributed by the land—slime from Louisiana, from the Rocky Mountains, from our native town. Will these far-brought and commingled atoms ever see daylight again?
We are standing on the border of the vast abyss which extends over half the area of the earth. It is an undulating, silent desert. No diversity of mountain and valley, cliff and gorge exists. By a gentle grade the bottom descends to a depth of five miles. Over all this dread waste, no rocks rise above the bed of slime.
The pressure on us in this abysmal region is four or five tons to every square inch. The water is ice-cold everywhere. The darkness, absolute and palpable. A curdling revulsion of feeling and purpose seizes us. We halt and reflect. We turn our eyes upward with a painful longing for the “holy light, offspring of heaven first-born.” Only the black ceiling appears. Two miles above us is the sunny sea, where all the blue of a genial sky beams down. Will we ever return? There float the ships in summer calm upon a “painted ocean,” or tossed and rent by the winter tempest which inspires the waves with madness. But no summer and winter vicissitudes are here. No sunrise or noonday or sunset is ever known.
As it was when the Garden of Eden was first consecrated to man, so it has remained and must remain. Not even the crash of thunders or the roar of storms can be heard. Into this world, too, I can be master. The huge waves, crested with elemental fury, roll on, but make no stir in the stillness and stagnation of this abysmal realm.
When we crossed the borders of this dark and silent abyss, our feet sank in a white pasty slime which has been designated “Globigerina ooze.” The dredges of the ship, the Albatross, have been down here, hung by a piano wire over the stem of the vessel, and samples of this ooze have been studied. We find it composed chiefly of microscopic dead shells called Fo-ram-i-nif’-e-ra, together with others called Pter’-o-pods. The little creatures which formed the shells do not live here; they dwell in calm zones of water far above. When the conscious animal ceases to live, its tiny house sinks down into this dark world. And thus, as the ages roll by, the fine chalky rain of their deaths slowly accumulates upon the bottom. When this ooze is dried and hardened, it resembles the chalk of Europe; and when that is examined, we find in it the same little Foraminifera. These are important geological facts, which, though they come out of an abyss of darkness, throw a vivid light on equally dark chapters of the world’s long-past history. Perhaps they will pool in their death to create my oil.
We have groped our way down three and four miles beneath daylight. A sort of ooze still spreads over the bottom; but it is not the Globigerina and Pteropod ooze. It is a fin
e rusty clay. But the white shells are not wanting because the tiny creatures which secrete them are not overhead. They swarm there as elsewhere, far from land with other pelagic forms. But the fragile matter of the shell is dissolved before it reaches this great depth. Only the aluminous and insoluble constituent reaches the bottom. This clay ooze possesses other interest. Disseminated through it are minute crystals of such minerals as escape through the throats of volcanoes into the upper air. Here are the dust particles which have imparted a ruddy glow to many a past sunset. Once the source of the roseate glory of the twilight hour, they lie now in impenetrable darkness and the repose of death. How changed the fortune of the little particle! It floated for months in the upper thin air—in the film of space which separates earth from heaven—borne hither by the simoon, thither by the antitrades, hurled in the vortex of a cyclone and precipitated in mid-ocean by a down-falling mass of vapor. Then, perhaps, seized by the waves, and rocked and beaten at the surface till it reached a zone of calm, it began its silent descent into the dark world where it is destined to rest undisturbed for centuries.
Here too is cosmic dust. The seeds of worlds have been sprinkled through space, and some of them have been planted in the soil of this abyss. These minute globules of magnetic iron were sparks emitted from a burning meteor. The meteor was a small mass or particle of material stuff coursing swiftly through the cold interplanetary spaces. It pierced the atmosphere of the earth. The friction resulting ignited the meteor, and for a brief moment it painted a fiery streak in its flight, until it found, at last, a resting place in the cold bed of the Atlantic. What a reversal of fortune was here! The particle might have swept on through space, as many of its companions did, until it became part of a glowing comet. Perhaps it once shone in a star—now it is dead for a cycle of ages. It is an impressive thought that here, in this rayless night, we find the black ruins of a star.
We still stand wondering over the scene which surrounds us. How oppressive in this silence! How welcome would be the cheerful chirp of the sparrow! Even the piping of the hated mosquito would break the eternal monotony.
From age to age this reign of death persists. A chill which is more than icy pierces us to the marrow. Sometimes, as we grope through the gloom, we kick the bones of aquatic creatures which have perished in the water above us. Often their kind is still in existence; but sometimes their species are long extinct. Here are teeth of sharks and ear-bones of whales which have lain during geologic ages. Grand vicissitudes have passed by, which transformed the aspect of continents, but these relics lay here undisturbed—unburied—so slowly do the sediments accumulate.
But there is indeed life here. Sparse, quaint life; and the species are of archaic and embryonic forms; that is, they resemble creatures which lived in the earlier ages of the world, or creatures which have undergone but a part of their development—crude, uncouth, and alien to the modern world. Here are Crinoids, or Stone Lilies, which, in all other waters, have perished from the earth—save one species long known in the Caribbean Sea. But from deep waters off the coasts of Florida and Norway, comes up, with other forms, Rhiz-oó-ri-ns, a genus which disappeared from shallow seas unknown millions of years ago; but here, where nothing changes, it has perpetuated its existence through half the history of the world. Between death and the changeless life which here reigns, the difference is slight.
Still more startling in their grotesqueness are some of the fishes which lie here more than half buried in the mud. Here is one fashioned like a scoop net. The long, slender body is the handle, and the net is an enormous pouch under the chin, which would take in the whole of the body three times over. Another hangs like an open wide-mouthed meal bag. In this case, also, the bag hangs suspended from the part where the throat should be. The diminutive body is noticed as an appendage attached to the back side of the bag. It is known by the fins. Four of these bodies might be contained in one pouch. A different, but equally erratic form brandishes an attenuated body like a whiplash appended to an enormous head, exposing an eye which is nearly half its own diameter. Still again, we note a sharklike form, with enormous gape and horrid teeth, having a range of spines along each side of the slender body above and below, and, most curious of all, a long, threadlike organ depending from beneath the chin, with a tassel-like tentacle bearing structures for feeling.
But see! Somebody is here with a lantern. How sleepily the light gleams in the darkness. There is no fire in it. Something it is. An animated lantern. A lantern without a flame. It is another strange fish. It is phosphorescence which gleams from his shiny sides. Still another lantern-bearing fish. Here are luminous plates beneath the eyes; behind them, in a cavity, retinal tissue, as if these structures were planned for eyes; but they are not eyes. Real eyes are present: our own. We discover, then, faint relief from the palpable darkness in which we have groped.
But our task is done; our curiosity is gratified; we have glimpsed the underworld, and have gathered observations on which we shall ponder many a day. Let us now, like the heroes of epic song, ascend to the light of the upper world.
TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE, THERE STILL HAD BEEN no word from Old Dudley and Matthew. The summit had received more snow than ever for that time of year; but still, Mel believed they would make it, if only because they always had before.
Mel followed the wolves backward through the new snow, following their tracks until they disappeared beneath the night-before’s snow, never knowing even the color of the animals she was following. She knew from the fur she would sometimes find tangled in the brush that some of the wolves were the color of smoke and that at least one of them was as black as a raven, but she could not match their prints to their fur; and though she knew both sexes were present—some urinations made from squatting positions, others with raised legs—again, she could not be sure of the numbers of each.
She had the suspicion that some days there were only four or five wolves that traveled up and down the river, while another wolf stayed at some distance, only to rejoin the others days later. She logged it all into her notebooks, to transcribe onto her maps, and tried to sort it out in her mind nightly, but she knew that she was not seeing the real thing: that instead she was applying a structure, an explanation and logic to their movements, which was constructed at least as much from her own imagination as from the wolves’ desires and communications: and this gap, this failure, would sometimes cause Mel great sorrow, even in the midst of her pleasure of being out and amongst the wolves, or the day-before’s echo of the wolves, and in their great country.
There were days when the wolves would leave the river bottom and travel inexplicably up into the mountains, where there was little if any game, and Mel would be filled suddenly—exhausted by the steep climbing and deeper snows, her legs aflame—with the knowledge that the wolves knew she was backtracking them and had gone up high only for the purpose of tiring her.
Or perhaps they simply liked the view of the valley from up high. Every sixth or seventh day, they would go up high; and every seventh or eighth day, she would follow them, would follow where they had been. She would rest up there, staring down at the narrow valley, and would sometimes hear their howls even in the middle of the day, many miles distant—as if they knew where she was and what she was doing at any given moment, and were calling specifically to remind her of the slight but real difference between wolves, and the tracks of wolves.
Sometimes the wolves would be silent for days, and in the falling snow, Mel would feel as if she had stepped into some dreamland, and that even though she was traveling backward, she would meet up with the pack at any moment.
Never had anything so invisible seemed so real. Her own hair became tangled in limbs and branches as she followed their passages through thickets, and in the spring, birds would line their nests not just with the warm insulating fur of the wolves but with Mel’s hair, plucked from those thickets; and in the spring, when she would hear birdsong—Swainson’s thrush, red-eyed vireo, Bohemian waxwing, siskadee�
��she would feel bound up in that, too—and rather than feeling trapped by this, it was a feeling like freedom. It might even have been the thing or essence of freedom itself: beyond the imagined sensation of it.
Though her thoughts were free and clear most of the time—twined only with the immediacy of the moment, measuring this track or that, this instep or that stride—she would occasionally think of the stranger who had come to live in her home, like some dim echo of Matthew.
Mel was still certain that Old Dudley would crush Wallis, as he had crushed or burned to ashes all of the others; but she felt also as if she was starting to have some sort of investment in Wallis—if not so much by the harboring and feeing of him, then by the fact that, bit by bit, the valley was attempting to absorb him, and Mel was so of-the-valley that there was little difference; it was as if she too were absorbing him.
And she had the thought that as Wallis was absorbed by the mass of the valley—gaining, in that initiation, access to some of its characteristics and values—it would be harder for Old Dudley to find or grasp him again; and harder, too, to crush him.
