Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “It hasn’t changed much,” Helen said. “It’s probably changed less than any other place in the States.”

  “The swans and salmon are gone,” Colter said.

  Helen shrugged. “They’re not everything.”

  “I want to see them,” Colter said. “I want to see what kind of country they live in.”

  “You’d have to go north and west to catch up with them now,” Mel said. “Way on up into Canada, and almost to the ocean—to the Pacific.”

  “Do you think I could do it on foot?” Colter asked.

  “Yes,” said Mel, after some hesitation, and a glance at Amy, who kept knitting.

  “The Lord be with you,” Amy said.

  “That’s my goal,” Colter said.

  Wallis thought of a glacier, receding—warming, shrinking, leaving polished piles of rubble at its ever-diminishing perimeters. He imagined Colter clambering over those boulder fields: down into one valley, up and over the mountains, then down into the next, and so on—traveling across them as if crossing sluggish waves at sea.

  “When?” Wallis asked.

  “This year,” Colter said. “As soon as the snow’s gone.”

  “Will you come back?” Mel asked. Another glance at Amy.

  “Well, sure,” said Colter. “I mean, I think so.”

  Amy kept knitting: didn’t miss a stitch. “Zeke was that way,” she said, and seemed comforted by this statement.

  It was two in the morning. Snow was falling again. Helen, fatigued by the hour, had a strange, momentary impulse of recognition that this was a conversation like one from long ago—when Matthew was a little boy—but when she looked around the room, she saw that none of the principals from that time were present, and so it could not have been.

  She kept waiting for someone to ask how she had arrived here, but knew that the question would not be forthcoming. Everyone understood that she had been born here—had had no choice in the matter; and that night she had the curious loneliness known only to those who fall in love with their invaders, or who find that their culture has been sanded down and assimilated by a thing, which, if no longer bold and unique and fitted to a place, is at least more comfortable and ultimately familiar.

  Colter made plans to go out antler hunting with Wallis again the next afternoon. Everyone rose and said their good nights, wished each other a happy new year. Danny was asleep on the counter, laid out like a corpse. Artie placed a blanket over him, but saw no need to lift him down from the counter.

  They each went their separate ways then, skiing deeper into the falling snow. To Wallis it seemed that he was already descending, even by standing still.

  As ever, they bathed to rid themselves of the scent of the bar: the beer, and Helen’s cigarettes, and the human company. They told each other good night and went to their separate rooms, as if to caves beneath the snow.

  They were going through the supplies three times as fast as planned, for Wallis ate twice as much as she did. It was hard to judge whether the meat would hold out, but there was a lot of it. Of the firewood, there was less bounty, and he was burning it all day long, while Mel was out in the woods, and then all night as they slept. It was all Matthew’s, and Wallis consumed it without a shred of guilt. It was fuel for his dream, fuel for the imagination of his map which surely this time would rotate into place like lock and key. He wore Matthew’s baggy clothes, like the husks of a man who was no longer living. As Wallis dived deeper into his maps, he grew bolder and more confident. It was like feeding a monster. Whatever the cost, it would be worth it.

  Emboldened in appetite, he ate more, and burned more wood, raised the temperature of the cabin five degrees above its usual chill. The scar of the absence of Susan lingered, but even that was hardening beneath his new life. It all seemed to be fuel for this one map, and he hadn’t yet seen a single inch of the valley beneath its blankets of snow: but by now he understood that he did not have to.

  He descended, as ecstatic as an opium diver. He grew even fonder of his and Mel’s lazy time together in the evenings.

  They would eat supper together—the grain of wild meat from the forest entering their bodies as they ate in silence. By now Wallis knew the story of how each of the animals had been taken, as they ate on it. Then they would visit for a little while—fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty minutes—talking about their childhoods usually, but then, once the bonds of intimacy strengthened, venturing further, moving closer to the present by talking about their lives as adults: moving perilously close to the present.

  Mel was always the one who would break it off. She would rise to go work on her map—to enter in that day’s data, scoring still deeper her understanding of what was the wolves’ central territory at different times of the year. And willingly, Wallis would take a cup of tea into the middle room and work on his own map.

  He continued to work in ecstasy. Sometimes it would occur to him that they were somehow working together: she, in the next room, contouring the same movements and flows of patterns of the wolves through the years on a horizontal plane, while he, with far less precision, more recklessness, mapped vertical cross sections, all imagined, but also based on the repetition of patterns—one initial contour influencing forever all those contours that would follow—and, as they worked, there would be a density of silence in the cabin that made it seem to him as if they were creating something almost tangible, like two weavers on a loom; and later into the night, nearing fatigue, he would imagine that there might be no difference—that they were drawing the same lines, and that his hand was hers.

  He would work all morning, not daring to believe that what he was envisioning was anything less than accurate this time. Then he would read Dudley’s old journals in the early afternoon, and would split and haul wood from the woodshed up to the front porch. After that, he would go by the school yard to wait for Colter, and then the two of them would go into the woods looking for antlers.

  One evening their searching took them over one of the ridges south of town—following one of Matthew’s old antler paths, with the racks occasionally visible up in the snowy forks of trees—and, as they often did, they stayed out until dusk. “Come on,” Colter said, “I’ll show you something.”

  Wallis could smell wood smoke. They descended the ridge, passing by immense larch trees in the blue snowlight. The antlers rattled on their backs. Wallis saw at the bottom of the ridge a small unlit cabin—though smoke curled from the chimney—and behind the cabin, next to the river, a large barn, well lit by yellow lanterns. A canoe rested by the shore, tethered to a tree limb. There was no road. A huge black horse stood motionless beneath one of the old larch trees, waiting for spring.

  “This is a guy you’ve probably never met before,” Colter whispered. “He builds coffins.”

  Now they could hear, over the murmur of the river, the quiet, steady sounds of the sawing, and then, after a silence, hammering. More silence, and then a sound like sanding. They stepped in closer to peer through the window. The horse observed them but remained still.

  There were fantastic, brightly painted, animal-shaped coffins stacked on sawhorses throughout the barn. The man, who was working in a heavy coat but bare-handed, had moved over to the little pot-bellied stove in the barn’s center to warm himself: he stood draped over it like a vulture spreading its wings to dry in the morning sun, but could not seem to get warm; he shivered, and his breath came in white bursts, as if he were talking to himself.

  There was a stack of wood by his feet, and he loaded more into the stove, then crouched before it, holding his hands almost directly in the dancing flames. The snow on the barn’s roof was melting due to the escaping heat, dripping like spring rain. A cake of ice lost its clutch on the barn’s roof and slid like a raft out over the edge and crashed to the ground in thousands of small explosions, and the horse, whom the slabs had narrowly missed, tried to dance away, but it was hobbled with chains and could only make short lunging hops. The sound of the prisoner’s chains rat
tling had an oddly musical quality to it.

  Wallis turned his attention to the coffins. He saw now that some hung suspended by heavy ropes in the loft, in the likeness of giant birds—golden eagles, bald eagles, and ravens, all with wings outstretched—and that their colors gleamed lifelike above the glow of the lanterns.

  Down below were coffins both painted and unpainted, some rough and others sanded. Loose boards lay everywhere—Wallis could smell the delicious odor of fresh-worked wood—and there were fuselages, wings, and all manners of huge carved and painted pieces—the ears of bears, the feet of wolves, the beaks of herons—waiting to be assembled onto various boxes, though neither Wallis nor Colter could imagine how the builder kept each part straight in his mind.

  “Come on in,” Colter said. “Let’s go see him and warm up. He’s okay. He’s a nice guy. He doesn’t like to come into town, but he’s nice. Sometimes I give him antlers to put on his coffins.”

  They rapped at the window, then went around to the door. The man—Joshua—let them in without a word, as if he had been awaiting their arrival.

  The floor was heel-deep in sawdust and the bright yellow curlings of shavings. Joshua gathered up a handful and tossed them in the open door of the stove: they bloomed into fierce light and brief heat, and for a moment they felt the pleasure of that warmth. “Come on,” Joshua said, “it’s too cold to work anymore. Let’s go inside.”

  He put on another coat, a ski hat, and gloves, then went out, unhobbled the horse, and led the horse into the barn. The horse, a stallion, was muscular, black as obsidian, and accepted the barn’s warmth with relief—he nickered with gratitude. The horse moved next to the stove and stood near it. His hooves shone bright as the ice around them melted. There were coffins in the forms of elk and moose, as well as bear, and the horse stood among them looking like one of Joshua’s creations, who, having come to life, was now unwilling to leave the shop.

  “It’s a lot warmer with him in here,” Joshua said, petting the horse, “but I can’t work with him watching over my shoulder.”

  He carried the lantern out with him and shut the barn door, sealing the horse behind into blackness, save for the pinprickings of stars through the windows, the dull orange glow of the stove’s steel, and the tiny whispers of light creaking and flickering through the stove’s door seams.

  Inside, Joshua fixed them hot tea. His cabin was tiny, cramped with the three of them. The bones of various animals were fastened to the cabin walls in all their proper assemblages and articulations: the skeletons of deer, moose, and bear prowling the cabin’s walls and the rigid pale bones of eagles, owls, and herons hanging from the rafters above them: the structures around which Joshua would model his work.

  “The giant birds he can hang from a big tree,” Colter explained, and Wallis understood that he meant with the customer inside, like some ride at an amusement park—a county fair, perhaps. “Or he’ll bury them, or put them way up in the mountains, in caves, or just resting out in the open.”

  “The ones in the open, sometimes the animals tip over and crack open like walnuts, to get at the meat inside,” Joshua said. “I hate to see that. They really mess up the work. But I guess that’s part of it.”

  “Or he can turn them into boats,” Colter said, “and send them down the river. Swans, usually.”

  “Do many people—” Wallis searched for the word—“purchase these?” he asked.

  “They’re not for sale,” Joshua answered. “They’re just for people here in the valley.”

  “Which one would you choose?” Colter asked.

  “Mmm,” said Wallis, “they’re all so amazing . . .”

  “Let me know,” Colter said. “Then if something happens to you, you’ll be taken care of.”

  “Most people up here are shy,” said Joshua. “Most of them go underground, when it’s over.”

  “It’s better if you pick,” Colter said, “rather than someone picking for you.”

  “I’ll be glad when spring gets here,” Joshua said. He flexed his old hands before the fire, tool-curled and scarred from a thousand slips of the knife. A trapper’s hands, Wallis thought. Trapping things right up until the very end, and then beyond. “It’s hard to work out in the barn, once it gets too far below zero, and I can’t do any painting, either, til the temperature warms up. The paint freezes before it dries.” He shook his head. “I love working with the wood, but in the winter I start dreaming about color, and can’t wait for March and April to come, and then summer, when I can start painting.”

  “Which one do you want?” Colter asked the old man.

  “Oh, the swan,” he said, laughing. “A nice long boat ride in the belly of the swan.”

  Colter and Wallis finished their tea. The evening was still young, though the darkness had already settled profoundly. They said goodbye and thanked Joshua, then stepped out into the night. Joshua stood in the doorway of his little cabin briefly, framed by light, waving goodbye to them, but then quickly shut the door, before too much heat could escape.

  Colter and Wallis trudged up the hill, snowshoes squeaking on the crisp snow, burlap sacks on their backs. Stars melted, fell from the sky before them in sizzling streaks, and they stopped at the top of the ridge to watch the shower of them.

  Imagine! To heat the world with the unending fires from below! Not simply by the geothermal phenomena of hotsprings and geysers limited to those drifting fissures of earth where one formation slides so rudely upon another, truncating past processes and interrupting logic—venting foul gases to the surface like some awful dinner guest—but to heat the world via the ignition of the natural gas, the gaseous sunlight, trapped below like lakes and rivers.

  How to get to this explosiveness, this life-giving-ness? The forms of the earth above conspire to deceive—they strive to lure us to purposes of no account. All seeks to be erased into a stubborn silence. Notice how symmetrically the contour of summits sweeps from the upper to the lower stretches, seeking to conceal all secrets below. How gracefully these mountain swellings dissolve in the green ground of the landscape beneath.

  Look at our feet. The naked rock lies cracked by the frosts of unnumbered winters. The chips of the mountain strew the valley below. There the mountain firs, shrinking from the weather, begin to appear, but only as prostrate, crawling, and stunted shrubs. These rocks are Cenozoic. How hard and crystalline and stubborn they look. These black crystals are pyroxene; the dark, dusky ones are a species of feldspar called labradorite. The mixture forms a rock known as Norite.

  It is not an easy matter to travel down the slope of this summit. There is too much rock-rubbish, too dense an undergrowth. But the geologist must ascertain by some means. How arduous are the labors by which the investigator works out the geology of a wild region.

  While men labor brute to warm themselves with chunks of coal and grovel like low lemmings for scraps of wood, a few such as myself possess the knowledge to feed them, to deliver them from bondage: to give birth to, to sire, a new world, as if we are the loins of man.

  I dream the dream of the crystalline-marble woman, twelve feet tall, green-stained with intermingled serpentine. I alone find her, and consort with her, in the dream. I combine my seed with her to give birth to the future.

  Mel would do small things to keep Wallis from drifting too far from her—would perform small acts of kindness and warmth, if not reckless passion, to try to keep, with some degree of tautness or tension, the promise of a thing-beyond-friendship alive between them, like some little fire of tended sparks. Candles at dinner one night, for no apparent reason. A touch of her hand to his before going off to map the wolves. She tried to keep him from sinking too deep (though neither would she allow herself to be pulled down with him if he did descend to the bottom); she kept flexible the possibility of a future with him, as she considered Matthew’s further disintegration.

  Sometimes she watched Wallis map and would be struck by the fear that he, this one, would find oil where the others—even her fa
ther—had been unable to.

  The wood in her woodshed was larch. Even after it had been sawed and stacked in the shed—rendered from the forest depths into neat stackings of sixteen-inch lengths—the bright orange wood still possessed a presence, as if it was not done living.

  Wallis loved the weight, the density of it. He loved the sound it made when he split it with a single blow of the maul: iron cleaving tight wood, separating it cleanly down the grain. He learned to read the grains so that he knew beforehand how each piece was going to split. He loved the color of the wood when the sunlight was strafing bright upon it, the color of it when the snow was falling heavy upon it. And though the swinging of the sledge was easy—the wood desiring to be split, it seemed, when struck in the right place—he nonetheless would, after an hour or two, work up a sweat in the ferrying back and forth of the wheelbarrow from shed to porch, wearing a deep path of packed ice.

  Taking one round log and splitting it in half, and then again to quarters, and then into eighths. Into sixteenths, after that, for kindling. The days falling away, uncounted, unmeasured, in like fashion.

  A couple of hours of work would place a day and a night’s worth of wood on the porch. He started to calculate the crude inefficiency of it, but then stopped, understanding that it was irrelevant, that he liked the work.

  THE VALLEY WENT OUT TO SEE A COMET ONE NIGHT. IT WAS supposed to be the last significant comet visible in the century, and the last anyone would see of this particular comet for another two thousand years. They left the bar at midnight on a night when the temperature was falling like a stone dropped from a great height: fifteen below at sunset, with not a cloud or wisp of fog anywhere. By midnight it was thirty below, and before daylight it would fall to forty. Children were awakened by their parents (or stayed up late, so that they would better remember the evening), and they all met at the bar and then rode in horse-drawn sleighs across the frozen crust up one of the old narrow paths to the top of Hensley Mountain, where Dudley and Matthew had long ago drilled one of their dry holes. Brush and saplings crowded in from either side, and they traveled up the mountain in single file. It was so cold that despite their labors the horses did not sweat. There were three sleighs: a dozen adults, and half as many children. They carried stove-warmed rocks wrapped in hides in their laps and on the floorboard of the carriage. From time to time they could see the comet through the trees, but it was not until they reached the top of the mountain that it was in clearest evidence, lying not far over the horizon, due north.