Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  There are several varieties of coal; let us look them over. Perhaps you will smile when I tell you that the plumbago of your pencil is essentially carbon. So it is. All your pencilings are strictly “charcoal sketches.”

  How long it takes, then—millennia!—to produce one good drawing by the hand of Man. Mountains rise and fall a thousand times to make one plumbago pencil, one pencil, the one in my hand. Why has the world been created but for us to eat it?

  THE STONE WALL WAS BEGINNING TO EMERGE, IT WAS A treat to see the rocks again—to see anything of the earth, other than snow. Sometimes people would go down to the wall just to look at it, and if the sun was out they might stop and sit and stare at the beauty of the rocks—gray and red and yellow, and rock, by God, not snow—and they would watch as trickles of sun-water began to seep slowly from all the snow resting atop the wall. The wall would glitter. The seeps would freeze at night, casting the exposed rock in a thin glaze, but the next day if the sun was out, the wall would be glistening again, as if weeping, though to the townspeople in that bright March light it would seem as if surely the wall was crying for joy; and they would find themselves yearning for the time when the snow would go away so that they could resume work on the wall: patching the low places where frost-heaves, or the simple stretching and ripping of the earth’s skin, had tipped it over.

  The wall had long since stopped being for them the symbol or manifestation of any territorial urges. It set no boundaries, laid no claims. It was only an assemblage of order, a crafted thing of durability. A homage to the beauty just beyond and above the wall—the mountains themselves—and they found themselves barely able to wait for the opportunity to throw themselves at it, body and soul, one more season, one more year.

  Though it had only been a little over thirty years since Matthew had first started fooling with it, the wall had now been worked on by three generations of families in the valley, and would, soon enough, be worked by a fourth, and then a fifth: for as long as people in the valley had eyes and hands and strong backs. One year, not so long ago, there had even been an old woman, older then than Helen was now, who had been blind in her last years but who had nonetheless participated.

  She had enjoyed sitting on the porch of the saloon in the midday light, drinking a cold beer and listening to the sounds of the town, and to the summer swallows nesting in the eaves above her. A few trucks and jeeps passing by, and the taste, the scent, of road dust, afterward—and she would listen to the clacking sounds of the other townspeople wrestling with the rocks—the slam of tailgates being dropped, the grunting and clattering of slabs and wedges of rock—and she would wander across the street and through the woods toward wherever that sound was coming from.

  They would see her coming, and would give her a pair of worn gloves to protect her arthritic hands and paper-dry skin, and would let her work amongst them, groping in the back of the truck for a squarish stone of proper size, one she could fit both arms around and give heft to; and then she would haul it toward the sound of the other rocks being stacked, wobbling as she walked, taking tiny steps.

  When she reached the end of the line, she would set her stone down to rest—panting and scratched from hauling the stone—and then with her gloved hands she would feel the set-up before her—the types and shapes and densities of the stones already set in place, each resting bound not by any cement but by its own gravity and relation to the others—and after what seemed to the others a random examination, even a confused groping, she would pick up her rock again. Using her hips as a fulcrum, she would shove it into the place where she wanted it, and it was always a precise fit, supporting not just its own weight, but the rocks around it, and the other stoneworkers would always marvel at how she could find such a fit—not having had the seeming advantage, as they did, of knowing in advance what space was available.

  One or two stones was all it took to please the old woman, and afterward she would go down to the river to bathe at some distance from the others, and then would head back up to the bar (her scraped arms stinging, but clean) for another beer. The sun would be lower and not as warm now, but she would wait until its last warmth had faded and the stoneworkers came back into the bar for their evening’s drinking. That and the sound of the wolves howling, and other sounds and silences, other compressions, told her it was evening. She would listen to those sounds for a while and then walk home in darkness, bone-weary from hauling the big stones, but filled with something new and whole inside, and she would remember making the same walk down the same road as a child, also in the evening, running and skipping.

  In the days that followed, the scratches on her arms would heal to tiny pinprick scabs, bumpy little tattings, and she would finger them in the warm sun and remember intimately the one or two stones she had placed in the wall, and their relation to the others.

  No one had known how old she was—it was believed, when she died, that she was 108—and she did not let Joshua put her in one of his craft, but instead asked to go up into the trees, like an Indian. They had obliged, and her bones were still out there somewhere, catching wind.

  The sun caught the rocks, and the rocks caught the sun, and held within them a little more warmth each day, so that the sun became like a plant with roots, reaching horizontally into the wall and gripping it, clutching it, with tiny brushings of warmth. The patches of bare rock enlarged slowly, as if ignited, a few more inches each day.

  Salamanders stirred between and beneath those rocks; they writhed within, on days when the sun struck the rocks squarely, and they, peered out sluggishly. They crawled out of the damp crevices and blinked, then returned to the safety of the cracks and folds. Some were solid ebony; others possessed the fantastic markings of emerald swirls and fuchsia. Gold zags of light swathed their ribs, and some had red masks. In the winter, as they slept suspended, the moisture in their skin froze, then thawed out again in the spring. Even their blood formed ice crystals, as they slept: but now they yawned and stretched like little bears, purged, with their blood crimson and flowing again.

  Young snowy owls, pushed across the border by snowstorms, began to work their way back north again. Occasionally a mature adult would show up, hunting the snowshoe hares, but for the most part they were accidental to the valley, and showed up only when they were lost or storm-driven down from the north.

  Mel lifted one of the slabs of rock from the wall one day and scooped up a handful of the rainbow-colored salamanders to show Wallis. When he failed to express proper amazement at them, she remembered that he, like her father and Matthew, was color-blind. She wondered if in her next life she would be able to love a man who would have a proper appreciation of color. A landscape without color was still as beautiful to her as it had ever been—a snowy owl flying through falling snow carrying the limp body of a snowshoe hare, so that afterward the only thing one had been able to discern for sure was the owl’s eyes and the drops of bright red blood on the hare’s breast—all else soundless and colorless. The stands of white-barked aspen, leafless, also in the falling snow—or the memory of white swans passing overhead—black wolves, black ravens, black bears, and the charred stumps from the field of each summer’s fires, waiting for the next cycle of winter’s snow—the black seeming to summon the white, in that manner, or vice versa . . .

  But those tiny handfuls of vibrant color—the stunning fluorescence of the salamanders, the electric blaze of a yellow tanager in summer—the wave of wildflowers that pulsed quickly across the land, then blinked out—the orange interior heartwood rot of logs, the brief incandescence of lichens following a rain—this transient, short-lived world of color just beneath the familiar tones of black and white—made Mel’s mind feel, whenever she encountered such a shock of color, as if a part of her had been cleaved open, bringing a greater ability to sense things.

  The reappearance of color was a feeling of refreshment, or purging, not unlike, she imagined, what the salamanders felt each spring when the ice crystals in their blood melted once again. A
kind of a fizz, or carbonation, or brightness in her own blood—a feeling like youth, or health, or vigor, or love.

  “You can’t see any of it?” she asked Wallis, twisting one of the salamanders so that the sunlight flared off its ribs and illumined him differently.

  Wallis shook his head. “I can see all the patterns,” he said. “But not the colors.”

  Frustrated, even lonely, but determined to share that fizz with someone, she put all but one of the salamanders back under the rock and carried one to school, to show to the students.

  THE MOON FELL INTO ITS WANE. MATTHEW CROSSED THE summit on the seventeenth of March, just ahead of the geese. He got the rent car stuck several miles shy of the summit, but fashioned a crude pair of snowshoes out of the green limbs of fir and spruce, and with his pocketknife cut his briefcase to shreds to form bindings and webbing. In the night—the diminished moon appearing in fleeting glimpses from behind a light snowfall—he walked up and over the summit. Once back into the valley, he was able to follow the road into town by keeping to the side of the rock wall, feeling it in the night with his hands as if reading Braille.

  He stopped to rest often, and to take scoops of snow into his mouth, for water—he was wearing socks for gloves—and he felt tired and even ignorant for having believed or assumed, as he once had, that his great strength and stamina would last him forever.

  Now his knees hurt, his legs were tired, and there was a catch in his back, and worst of all, there was no longer the thing in his blood that had always made him want to push on. This, more than anything—the mental fatigue—he viewed as laziness, and the deepest of character flaws. One that like a strange contagion could lead to the unraveling of others.

  All of his body was betraying him: not falling apart, but something more subtle and sinister. Calcium spurs in the joints of his toes. A fluttery heart, when climbing a hill, for the first time. Diminished nearvision. The usual litany of approaching middle age, and he was too tired to even be furious about it. He accepted it as had every other man before him—with a quiet, repressed rage—half ignoring it, as if it were not really happening—as if this diminishing were merely a dream, and any day now he would be restored to his full power.

  A grouse burst from its snow-lodging before him, drumming away fast. The explosion of it so rattled Matthew that his heart would not stop racing for long moments afterward, nor would the adrenaline leave his throat, where it remained, bilious-tasting, and wasted. His legs felt quivery then, as the adrenaline finally drained back into his muscles, and he had to sit down on the rock wall and rest. He marveled at how a place that had once been so intimately his home could now surprise him with its strangeness, and how a thing once so familiar to him could now hold the ability to frighten him: as startling a revelation as if, in passing a mirror, he were to catch sight of his own image and cry out at first in unrecognizable, nameless fear.

  Every March the pattern was the same, though with an increasing awfulness—a downward spiraling into despair, as Dudley worked him harder and harder, and as he worked himself harder, and drifted ever further from the valley. While conventional wisdom said it was a seasonal disorder, that he should flee farther south every March, he inevitably found himself drawn, in his last stages of consciousness, north to Mel, and the valley.

  It was like a fever, when it came. His head seemed to swell, so that there was always a dull throbbing, and a pressure at the temples. All desires fled him—appetite, sex, pleasure, pain—and sadness would fill him: sadness entering him slowly, like a dark river. Sounds became muted, and sensitivity left his toes and fingertips, as did his once-keen sense of smell.

  Later, as the depression deepened—dropping him mercifully from consciousness—he would lose even the ability to speak clearly, and then would be unable to speak or even think at all, so that anyone trying to carry on a conversation with him would be certain that he was a simpleton.

  Just before he faded from consciousness (though sometimes he fell, crumpling as if knocked in the head with a sledgehammer), he would be filled with the most awful self-hatred: the seemingly sudden, illogical belief that all he had accomplished—the hundreds of oil fields he’d discovered—wasn’t worth shit, was worth less than shit—merde, he thought, French for shit; morir, Spanish for death—mordant—languages and images and memories spilling from him as his brain shorted out as if with electrical skips, dropping him into that useless, resting fugue—and there just below the summit, sitting on the rock wall he had built so long ago, with his head bowed and the snow threatening to bury him, he had the epiphany in one of his last glimpses of lucidity that his life was getting away from him, that he really should try to patch things back together with Mel and find a way to live a life with her once more: and he raised his fevered face to the snow and felt a stirring of hope, even happiness, at the thought of her, and of reclaiming such a future.

  One more well, he told himself—one more big field. Just one more, to purge it from his system.

  He thought of how happy she would be to hear of his decision—his confession that he had been worn down beyond weariness: that her father had humbled him, tamed him, worn him smooth.

  He rose stiffly from his wall and started down the mountain.

  He arrived in town shortly before daylight, snow-clad, like the abominable snowman. He came in so silently that no dogs saw or heard him. He was anxious for the sight and touch of Mel—anxious to tell her the news—but could absolutely go no farther.

  He clumped onto Helens porch in his disintegrating, makeshift snowshoes. Helen had been dreaming of him, had been sitting in her rocking chair upstairs by her window watching for his passage; and when she heard the thump on the porch and the knock at the door, she knew who it was, and with great happiness she hurried down the stairs and opened the door to let him in, and hugged him silently, overjoyed that he had come to see her first.

  He awakened to gray light and falling snow, and the scent of breakfast. Helen looked over at him and smiled, watching him. He knew he’d been lucky to awaken this time—that the next time he went to sleep, he would not wake until true spring—and like someone wearing a mask of another, he conversed with her, chatted about the way work was going, some of the places he’d been and things he’d seen, and all the while he felt his soul gushing away from him like smoke leaving a burnt-out match.

  There seemed to be an extraordinary lag between the time he believed himself to be speaking the words and the time the sound of them reached his ears, so that there was often the impression that he was talking to himself, and he couldn’t even be sure that the words he was speaking to her were in the English language. Only by the way Helen smiled and nodded could he have any assurance that he was still making sense to her.

  When she excused herself to go upstairs to get the photo albums, he used the opportunity to carry his plate outside and scrape the leavings into the snow, on top of her garden plot. He scuffed snow over the top of the wasted food—elk sausage, fried venison, potatoes, toast, and eggs—and he stood there for a moment, strangely steadied and becalmed by his profligate waste. By the time the snow was gone—May or June—she would probably not recognize what he had done, and he thought of how the meat would help enrich the soil to help her vegetables grow, and of what an eerie metamorphosis that was—converting deer meat to plant matter, rather than the other way around. He wondered what the nature of vegetables from such a garden would be—fertilized with the flesh of deer and elk, rather than the compost of leaves.

  He hurried back inside, put his plate in the sink, rinsed it, then sat by the fire and tried to focus on staying awake.

  Helen came back downstairs with three big albums: infancy, childhood, and young manhood. He was terribly afraid he’d fall asleep midway through the viewing, and not wake up until April. The only thing he still knew, body and soul, was that he had to get home to Mel—had to lie down in her bed, in his cabin, as if fitting himself into some smooth cave of stone, in order to be healed; that it was the only
place, the only thing, he still fit. If he did not make it to that place before his collapse, he was certain he would dissolve, and disappear.

  He tried his hardest to stay awake as Helen thumbed through the pages. It was like shouldering a great weight—the burden of sleep crushing him down further. He tried touching the stove with his bare finger—tried to pull himself out of his descent and pay attention.

  A page with some trimmings from his first haircut. Up until he had been five or six, his hair had been as white as Mel’s was now. Cotton top.

  Pictures of him fishing, swimming, canoeing; pictures of him down on all fours, eating strawberries in the garden, grazing them straight from the plants. Unfettered happiness. Helen’s hand resting on his back now.

  She said all the old things, the same things, that any mother has ever said. “You were such a sweet baby,” she said. “I can’t believe how little you were,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like that long ago at all.”

  Even in his delirium, Matthew saw how happy it made her to just be sitting there by the fire with him, living in both the past and the present. Her pleasure was an utter mystery to him.

  He yawned, and reached his hand out to touch the stove again: held it there a moment before jerking it back.

  After they had finished viewing the albums, she told him about Danny. He felt a twinge of distress, but no true or deep sorrow. He knew this would trouble her, so he told her a lie to hide his indifference, his numbness.

  “I’ve been expecting it,” he said, shaking his head—“I’ve been having these premonitions about it.”

  Helen told him about the burial and asked if he wanted to go across the street and visit the grave. “No,” he said, or believed himself to say. “Later. It’s too soon. I’m not ready.” He tried to picture Danny’s face and demeanor, but could summon nothing other than the fact that he was the one who had run the bar. Matthew knew he had to leave very soon, and that even if he did, he might not make it all the way to Mel’s—only that he had to try.