Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  It lasted about ten seconds. The bedrock on which I rested was very perceptibly vibrated, and a rumbling sound was audible, like that of a train of cars, with the beats quite rhythmical, as if, in those few moments, anyone who cared to listen could be made privy to some constant logic or rhythm always present beneath us, but never suspected, never even intimated—and yet one which powers everything.

  Allow me to discuss the magnitude of this force.

  Among the effects of earthquakes, though of a secondary character to the immediate destruction and turmoil, are the drying up of springs, or the sudden increase of their volume. Sometimes the occasion is signalized by the escape of mud, water, gas, or flames. Occasionally, as in the Andalusian earthquakes of 1884, the ground is rent open for considerable distances.

  During the frightful disturbances of Calabria in 1783, the phenomena of ground ruptures ranked among the grandest and most fearful effects of the catastrophe. Whole mountainsides slid down in mass and tumbled into the plains below. Cliffs fell down and rocks opened, swallowing the houses which stood upon them. Entire villages of man were subsumed.

  In one remarkable instance in the country of Cutch, the Great Runn sank down over an extent of some thousands of square miles, so that during a part of the year, it remained inundated by the sea, and during another part was a desert without water.

  Earthquakes are found to occur most frequently at new and full moon; also, more frequently at perigee than at apogee; also, more frequently when the moon is on the meridian than when in the horizon; also, more frequently in winter than in summer; and finally, more frequently at night than during the day.

  In subsequent days to the Balcones tremblings at the Home, I would conduct experiments upon the transmission of sound waves, both horizontal and vertical, through the strata. With a classmate I would take a hammer and would line him out at some great distance between us (as much as was permitted by the encircling of concertina wire), and would crouch with one ear to the ground and then signal him at his far and measured remove to strike the earth once with the hammer. I would make a visual note of the downward swing of his arm and then with stopwatch mark the first wave of sound, which would arrive slightly ahead of all others, traveling faster through the conduit of the rock; and then I would mark the second approach of sound”—what we think of as ‘true’ sound, carried diffusely on the winds aloft, but in actuality slower and more sluggish than earth-sound—so that it was for me as if hearing two voices saying the same thing, not quite simultaneously. As if the sounds above were but wind-wavered, distorted echoes of the true stories being told below.

  From my measurements of time and distance I could calculate the velocities of transmission for different mediums. The variability in these ratios would then illuminate for me the different porosities within each formation, and the ability then of each formation to retain within those porosities various fluids such as fresh water, salt water, oil, or even gas.

  With the meager allowance given to me by the state for my labors—stripping the foil liners from the interior of cigarette packages—I subscribed to the Beaumont newspaper, which, though nearly three hundred miles from the Home, was but a short distance south of our farm; and in that manner I was able to keep up with the news of each week’s subterranean developments: the dry holes and gushers, their depths and locations, and the individuals involved in this titan play.

  I learned intimately all the surface outcrops on the ten acres encircled by the Home’s perimeter. As my chains would permit me, I crawled over every ledge, rill, gully and wash—handled every stone a hundred times; as I similarly traveled, in my mind, to and fro in the great imagined oil fields of Spindletop, to the south.

  In the evenings I would stay out as late as was permitted and would not participate in the organized games, but would instead sit upon the highest point and stare across the river to the distant stone building, two miles away, that was the Home for girls. I would try to catch their scent on the breezes: scent of garments, scent of hair, scent of underarms, scent of anything.

  So went my sixteenth and seventeenth years.

  Wallis put the journal up and was trying to decide whether to pull down another.

  He had no idea what time it was, and was startled to hear the thumping of Mel’s snowshoes against the porch.

  The sound of the cabin door opening—an electric stillness, a tension he could feel even in the basement—and then the sight of her face at the top of the cellar door.

  She watched him for a moment before speaking. “How much did you read?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Wallis said. “I won’t tell. I have no reason to tell. There is no one to tell it to.” He gestured to the earthen walls. “It’s all over,” he said. “It’s almost all gone.”

  Mel sat down at the opening to the basement, framed in light. “It’ll be over after he’s gone,” she said. “Or rather, after you and I are gone.”

  “Does Matthew know?”

  Mel shook her head.

  The light from Wallis’s lantern was fizzing, sputtering low on fuel. To Mel, it looked as if he were disappearing. “Here,” she said, reaching a hand down, “come on up.”

  AT SCHOOL, SHE TAUGHT THE STUDENTS EACH DAY IN HER allotted thirty minutes about wolves and deer, and then from that—as if those stories were the base out of which could grow all other stories—she would inform them about other miracles of the woods. She told them of bulbs that lie dormant for decades, awaiting the breath of a forest fire that warms the soil in just a certain manner. She told them how the seeds of another plant might lie dormant for a thousand years, requiring precise factors before germinating. The seeds of such plants might then discover, upon blossoming, that their requisite pollinators—an insect, or even a bird or mammal—had gone extinct as the seed slept, so that those plants were also destined to fall into extinction, like an echo of the pollinator, and they would exist only a bit longer in the present, and seemed somehow less beautiful, not more, in that desperate isolation . . .

  She told them about the sentences that the plants and animals wrote upon the land, and their invisible script in the sky—the way the ravens followed the wolves who followed the deer who followed the first edges of green growth at snow’s edge in spring; and of the way the transcription was then reversed, in a blood tide pulled gently by star-and moon-spin: of how the wolves got the seeds tangled in their fur, as did the bears that came to eat in these green places, and to eat too upon the skeletons of the deer—dead deer lying along the edges of the wolf trails like salmon carcasses along a beach—and of how then the seeds were dispersed by the comings and goings of bears, wolves, and ravens, like some graceful net or ordered plan cast across a ragged surface of confusion.

  There was a disparity, she said, a similiar confusion in our souls, and a sorrow in our blood, which occurred when the stars still ordered these movements and rhythms but when those orders could no longer be carried out, because of too many obstacles: dams, highways, cities; and when many of the principal characters in the plan were extinct, or of such reduced numbers as to now be insignificant.

  The dread she felt in telling them such stories was balanced by the joy and hope she saw in their faces. She told them not to despair. She told them that the valley was like an island, still intact, and that those patterns of grace still operated fully in the valley; that that was why it was possible to feel such magic each day. She told them that what other people call “magic” was once a normal and everyday response to life everywhere else in the world.

  The students wanted desperately to touch a wolf, see a wolf: to pet one, stroke one, gaze at one. Some mornings she would take them out in the yard and howl, trying to get the wolves to respond. The students would join in, as well: and sometimes the wolves would answer.

  She would bring in samples of the wolves’ fur; would bring old skulls and the plaster casts of their tracks, and the cracked-open bones of their prey, and their mummified scats full of deer hair, in her attempt
to prove how a thing that was invisible could be understood to be as real as anything else.

  The clock on the wall carved out her thirty-minute intervals, and then, after that, she sat in the back row, listening to Ann and Belle talk about Constantinople, Hannibal, addition and subtraction. Jane Eyre.

  Colter asleep more often than not, with his head on the desk. The angle of sun growing slowly more direct. Some days the sunlight even carried with it—though only for a moment, felt through the glass windows—a thing like a trace of warmth. But most days, the snow kept falling, and the woods—save for a few of the starkest characters—kept sleeping.

  The smell of paste, the clipping sound of scissors during art class. A sweet breathy stillness in the room, a laboring, as the students concentrated on their art projects like divers descending, and no world beyond the one which they held at that moment in both hands. Mel’s attention would sometimes wander to the wolves—wondering what they were chasing, what they had killed that day—wondering if they missed or even noticed her absence from the woods.

  The first gap, or arrhythmia, to her winter data in twenty years. Their stories being washed away to untold silence. At one point the wolves were silent for a week, and Mel had the thought, the fear, that because she had stopped pursuing them, they had left the valley: and when she finally heard them again—a single long, low howl, at first, but then the whole chorus of them—it was a sound that seemed to crack open all of winter’s silence, and it took all the willpower Mel could muster to not go out to where they were calling.

  It was still in the middle of the week, and the students were becoming accustomed to, even anticipating, her lectures. She could have taken a day off and gone out to meet the wolves, could have deceived herself that it was research for the students’ sake—but she was honest enough with herself to realize the depth of her loneliness, and her homesickness for human company, and she knew that if she faltered and went back out to the wolves so soon after trying to turn back to the world of man, it would be for her as if she had leapt into some ever-deepening abyss; she would have no chance whatsoever. Irretrievable, she thought.

  Nor did she shut her ears to the wolves, when they began calling again. She took the students back out on the porch, and they all listened. Everyone was surprised that she did not go to them. Even the two old teachers, Belle and Ann, were surprised; Belle encouraged her to go.

  But Mel stood out there with them for a full five minutes, until the howls had ended—It will get easier after this, she told herself—and when they went back inside and the students wanted to know what the wolves had been saying, she had to tell them that she didn’t know.

  The snows kept piling higher. The sheer weight of the snows—twenty feet by February and still rising—was such that the weight of it was continually compressing, metamorphosing from white feathery stacked snow into thick blue waves of twisted ice, which draped themselves over whatever angularity lay below. Then the blue ice in turn compressed, so that the lower bands became a cobalt color, and below that, black: not from any impurities, but from a supercompression of whiteness.

  The deer, with their hooves scarcely the size of coins, cut their trails deeper into the snow, packing their own trails tighter, while the snows on either side of their trails rose still higher, so that now it was as if they were living in tunnels; and always, they were having to climb up out of those chilled tunnels and strike off floundering toward some new tree, from which to chew the bark, or the twigs. And in this manner more trails would spread dendritic from the main trails, and these in turn would be cut deeper to form tunnels, and from them would spring new trails, wandering from tree to tree as the deer slowly girdled whatever soft tree they could reach or find, so that even in the deep heart of winter the deer were like a kind of fire, gnawing and consuming and burning, as the snows piled still deeper.

  It was nothing for the wolves, with hearts of ice, to catch them now. It was as if the entire valley of deer had become like termites, writhing in logs. The deer were trapped in a maze, a labyrinth of box canyons; and one wolf would run along behind them, chasing them down the ice trail, while another approached from the other direction, and still others bounded along up above, huge-footed, as if flying across the new snow, until soon enough, all participants converged.

  Things were different for the wolves now. They were still one organism—the pack comprised of five individuals, like the strands or fibers in a rope or a muscle—but now the alpha female carried a beaded chain of six tiny wolves—enough to double the size of their pack, if all survived—the embryos in February no larger than a string of pearls, but riding along on the rhythm of the hunt nonetheless, like a necklace, an umbilicus of tiny voyagers deep in their mother’s belly, and warm, always as warm as a bed of coals, even amongst all that ice.

  She was home well before dark each day. Often Colter would ski with her back to the cabin, asking her questions along the way, questions they had run out of time for during class, and which he had been holding cupped within him all day. Sometimes they would stop and search for antlers, though it was now all but impossible to find them, buried so deep in the snow, and embedded in those cobalt layers of ice. Usually, they just talked as they skied, though always their eyes were alert to the signs and presences around them—the markings of passages other than their own. Colter would ask questions about Wallis, too—a child’s questions, such as what his favorite food was, and his favorite animal; his favorite color, his favorite book—as if molding or sculpting Wallis—for lack of anyone else—into some assemblage or approximation of a father, and Mel considered the buffering, calming effect Wallis might have on Colter, and then laughed out loud, considering the gas and fuel mixture that would have been Colter and Matthew together.

  A thing could be either one way or another. There didn’t need to be any more variance in the universe than that most basic rule of binary. A thing—glacier, fire, flood—happened or didn’t. A thing came or it went. A thing was either being born and was growing, or was dying. And with only those two possibilities—the day and night of things—transcribed across every object of the world, came all the mystery and richness one could ever hope to seek. For even in the act of grasping one thing, and achieving knowledge, there was always somehow an inversion that occurred, where the thing that you grasped or knew revolved back to mystery. The pulse. Within this pulse, day was but a variation of night. The pulse was always moving back toward its other.

  “Do you like Wallis?” Colter asked.

  “I like him a lot,” Mel said. “When I was younger, I wouldn’t have paid the first bit of attention to him, but I like him a lot.”

  “I like how he listens to me,” Colter said.

  “I like how he doesn’t knock things over,” Mel said. “He’s careful.”

  “Not boring, though,” said Colter. “Just quiet, and careful.”

  “Right,” said Mel.

  The three of them made vanilla ice cream that night out on the front porch. There was a full moon low in the east, and as they were watching it, they saw that a lunar eclipse was occurring. At first they thought it was a shoal of dark clouds moving beneath the moon, and paid no attention to it. They commented instead on how odd it was that the wolves were howling so plaintively, and what a ruckus the coyotes and owls were making.

  They then noticed the encroaching bulge of darkness, and were chilled by the beauty of it, and the singular shock of seeing one of the things most basic to their lives steadily disappearing. Even with the knowledge of what was happening, they felt an inexplicable quickening of their hearts, and a loneliness. They could not turn away from it, but stared in profound amazement: how could a thing be so frightening and beautiful both?

  The shadow crawled deeper across the moon; the discomfort of the animals increased throughout the valley, so that it sounded now like some place of torture. Mel got her binoculars and they took turns watching. The curve of light, the last little glancing crescent of it, out on the far edge; all else wa
s dim shadow.

  “The Indians used to say that a frog was swallowing the moon,” Mel said. “And you can bet they were scared shitless that they’d be next. You can bet they thought long and hard about mercy.”

  With the moon cloaked in reddish shadow, the constellations flamed brighter. Orion stood braced to the southwest, legs planted firmly, hunting forever. To the northwest, the comet continued to prowl, its tail more elongated than ever, so that it looked like the sweeping beam of a flashlight, or the headlights of some incredibly lost vehicle far back in the forest; or like some winter-lonely fire, burning so strangely out of season.

  Not until the moon had been returned to them did they relax; and afterward, as the valley fell silent once more, they felt cleansed, even purged.

  Colter had his bow with him, and they went out into the snowfield and tossed a target into the air for him to shoot at: a frozen grouse from the smokehouse, drawn but still fully feathered—and he hit it more often than not, and each time, they bragged on him.