Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “There are about twenty-five or thirty grizzlies living in this valley. Five wolves, though in a week, we might have ten or twelve. Maybe thirty or forty people,” she said. “If we lost the wolves and grizzlies, this valley won’t be worth a damn. Excuse my language.”

  “Lost them?” the students wanted to know. “How?”

  The slowing days attenuated. The new light stirred the sludge in their blood. Colter chewing on a piece of sedge, sitting in the back of the classroom: pretending to listen, but the words not linking up and connecting in his mind. Adrift; one part of him drawn farther north, like needle and thread, while only a part of him remained anchored.

  The Cemeteries of the Bad Lands

  In Another Life, I Would Have Had No Love

  The wait for the Malachite Woman is interminable. I sit on the hill above the Home with my back to the fence for as long as they will allow me. My ankles are hobbled with iron shackles, as are my wrists. Even the once simple act of sketching in a notebook has now altered itself into a disagreeable task, so that the radial and brachial muscles of my arms and shoulders are swollen with muscle, as if I have been shoeing horses, rather than making these notes and guiding the reader through lands known only to me. From the ankle hobbles runs a span of chain a hundred feet long, welded to a stake driven deep into the caprock, around which my perambulations carry me like a badger defending his den; but of an evening, when day’s work is done, I am content to sit on the hill and stare across the veld and forest-leafing below, to the Home for Girls, and contemplate the Malachite Woman, whom I know more surely than anything is there. I have never seen any of the girls from the Home—occasionally, after dusk, I can catch fragments of their songs, and know again for certain that the Malachite Woman moves among them, as a deer moves among trees in the forest. Her movements and manners are inscribed perfectly in my mind, bounded and circumscribed by the places where I have not seen her.

  I am too late in the hole, too firm in the trap; even were I to confess Old Pap as the sole participant, they would not let me out of here until my time is up, and would surely execute him.

  Fireflies, like luminous spirits from the century before, at peace and immersed in beauty, prowl the riverbottom across the way, blinking serenely as if looking with lanterns for some lost something. The more desirable the Malachite Woman becomes to me—the more firmly I know and understand her—the more aware she becomes of my presence, and she disappears. Sometimes I fear she will vanish for two or three hundred years, such is the force of my desire: that though she would find me pleasing in every way, there is some rule of this upper universe not yet understood by me, which would require her to dissipate as if tatters of fog before the sun’s rays, were I to draw too near her, with too much force.

  Restraint is my only hope, and I have none.

  I hold in my hand before me a pale stone gleaned from beneath another stone, here—tapped free of its chalky tomb with blows from my hammer (at the ringing sound of which, I am certain, the Malachite Woman turned her head and listened for some time, knowing it was me—me whom she has never seen)—imbedded in which lies the skeleton of no fish ever viewed alive by man, or even by the likes of man. It is like a useless puzzle piece, one which many would discard, not understanding that whatever story can be pieced together for it must also be applicable for us.

  As the Malachite Woman stands there listening to the ringing of the hammer, not quite understanding what about the sound draws her interest, sparks emitted from the friction of steel against stone ignite briefly and tumble to the barren ground like melted or fallen fireflies. In breaking the rock open to discover the fossil trapped within, I smell the dust from civilizations that presided over life’s beginnings. This fish, not man—not you or I—presided at the right hand of God, for the longest time.

  The amphibian, the fish, the bird, the serpent, the mastodon are but a stage in the transformation of matter into mankind.

  This dead stonefish could be but the lost soul of one of your greataunts, or even one of the Malachite Woman’s progenitors. I grip the stone in both hands and sniff deeply, as if burrowing my face up into the clefts of the Malachite Woman herself. Which distance is greater—two miles, or two hundred and fifty million years?

  This stonefish—this great-aunt, who did not quite reach the glory of you or I—died and floated down into the midst of a sleeping, dreamy Golgotha—descended into the dead past. How old are these graves, locked in stone? Through how many winter storms have these silent skeletons slept here? How they rise, story above story. These bottom tiers lay down to their long repose while the great lake flapped its waves above. Its fishes swam over cemeteries. Other mute remains came in, layer by layer, to the house of silence, and the hand of Nature carefully envaulted them. The receptacle was filled; the lake vanished; the continent was here.

  Life once thrilled through all these torpid frames. These were conscious creatures. They were joyous creatures walking on the green earth. They were beings which inhaled the vital air and basked in the life-giving sunlight, and enjoyed each other’s society. They fed on the productions of the forest and the glade. They slaked their thirst at the border of the wide lake; they cooled themselves in its waters, and sported with its waves. Death came to them, as to their thousands of predecessors—as it comes to us. They were mired in a slough; they were hunted in a jungle; they lay down in the shade of a friendly tree. Some force of nature bore them to their burial. The lake was their tomb, and the lake preserved its trust. It was a later vicissitude which opened their cemetery and exposed these testimonies of a vanished age to the curious and irreverent scrutiny of science.

  I am nearer to this stonefish than to her, and, some days, anyone.

  The clang of the iron triangle summoning me to the bunkhouse. I hide the stonefish in the bushes and trudge down the hill toward the Home, chain music around my ankles, where the lackey will unhinge me and allow me to prepare for my own nightly descent.

  The longest Matthew had ever slept after one of his collapses had been five days and nights; and when the fifth night passed that year, and still he slept, Mel, as well as everyone else, was worried.

  The children came to visit him. They brought presents—antlers, stones, drawings—and went into his room one by one and observed him sleeping, and left their gifts in a pile on the floor, where they would be the first thing he would see upon awakening. One girl, bolder than the rest, touched his hair. Mel had told them about him—how he became worn down at the end of each winter and never quite had the strength left to carry on over into spring—and they had wanted to come see what such a phenomenon looked like. There was almost nothing she knew that she did not find herself wanting to teach them. As one rope unraveled, another was being woven.

  Helen came over to see him too, that fifth night, as she had every night. The river had finally begun to break up—great chunks of ice splitting and cleaving mid-river, shearing free with snaps of torque and cannon boom, which sounded like a sporadic, ongoing war—except that rather than strife, the valley was filled with excitement, as the river was free now to surge beneath the sun unhindered. It was joy in a language unknown to man, and all through the valley, the pleasure of that release could be felt, and the river broke off slabs of ice larger than buildings and tossed them to the side—raced them down river’s center, then shoved them rudely onto the shores, where they ripped out limbs and even whole trees, plowing and scouring along the banks for hundreds of yards, like ten million years of glacial passage in a few moments. The rubble of ice, the strewn shards and edges, glinted in the sun like diamonds; and from a distance the sounds of the river flowing again was like a stirring in one’s own blood—as if in this valley there could be no separation, no disconnection; that one thing could not move without the other feeling that movement intimately.

  Each time a new ice floe snapped, the geese nesting on the river’s islands and oxbows would begin shouting and honking, as if connected even more intimately—as if something in th
em had been tugged—and the people in the valley would feel their blood leap and surge yet again. And each of them marveled at how Matthew could keep sleeping through it. It was not the sound so much that should have awakened him, they supposed, as those leaps within the blood.

  “He knows it’s over between you and him,” Helen said to Mel. “His body can smell the change. He doesn’t want to wake up to that fact, is why he’s sleeping so long this year.”

  The three of them were sitting on the porch watching the day’s end and listening to the river’s distant rush. Wallis tried not to think of old springtimes with Susan down in the green hill country. A snipe was making its wavery wing-song overhead, rising into the dusk and then plummeting—staking out its territory with a thing ephemeral, invisible, the song of wind rushing over its wings.

  Wallis found himself once again daydreaming of his map: believing in it fully, despite the fact that he had never seen nor touched any of it. He held onto it as if to an anchor. It had to be right.

  “Maybe,” said Mel, talking about Helen’s theory. “It could also be that Pop’s taken the last bit of him there was left to take.”

  Mel washed Matthew’s hair that night. He had turned over in his sleep shortly after dusk, and the elk hides were off him. She set a bowl of soapy water beside him, and another of warm rinse water, and by lantern light massaged his scalp. Wallis sat next to her, expecting him to wake up, and wanting to see the spectacle of it. She scratched his scalp and rinsed his hair, rubbing it with a damp towel, scrubbing the old week’s worth of sleep away, but still he slumbered.

  The lantern sputtered out of fuel. The soap suds came to her elbows, and she kept scrubbing: lightly, gently, but thoroughly. Starlight illumined the three of them.

  Mel toweled his hair dry. If Matthew had felt it or even dreamed it he did nothing to show his appreciation. She tried to comb and straighten his hair without waking him. It was a mild enough night that she could leave the window open to dry it. It made Wallis a little sad to see someone so strong clinging, hanging by such threads, to the ghost of who he once was.

  South winds blew all night, and Mel and Wallis slept lightly but without moving, as if on a beach listening to waves. Wallis dreamed or imagined he heard the faraway cracks of thunder, though there was no rain—only warm, incessant rivers of wind. It was a sound like the plates of the earth rifting apart—the river continuing to fracture—and rather than feeling loneliness at such a sound, Wallis felt a cleanliness; and all night they slept motionless, their bodies twined and lying loosely over one another.

  When they awoke in the morning they could hear the geese coming up the valley in even greater numbers, and other birds—where had they come from? Had they emerged from the snow? Had they been blown in with that wind?—singing along the creek and fluttering around by the porch.

  “Bohemian waxwings,” Mel said, lying there with her eyes open, still not moving, and finally she sat up, saw Wallis looking at her, smiled, and for no reason known to her, covered herself.

  They went to the window and looked out at the swirl of wings; a landscape of color. There was an insect hatch going on, mayflies with slow wings jvhirring, rising to the morning sun. The waxwings were all over them, dipping and darting, snatching them all—the world a cloud of glowing mayflies; and a cloud of waxwings equal to it. Birds swerved to avoid colliding with one another as they dived at the slow-moving, spinning, light-filled mayflies. It was an annihilation. Everywhere—on all branches, on the porch railings, and on the eaves of the cabin—waxwings were perched, gulping down the pale green mayflies; and the morning sun was behind them, illuminating the birds’ flared combs and their bright eyes, and shooting light straight through their brilliant yellow tails, tails the color of sulphur. The sight of that color, the smudgings of yellow, and their furious activity after the long winter began to fill Wallis. He stared hungrily at the tails—yellow everywhere, a kaleidoscope—and felt tears welling in his eyes.

  The light came in through the windows and, though it was only morning sun, warmed their bodies.

  “Listen,” Mel said, and at first Wallis thought she meant the chattering birdsong, but then he heard another sound above it, the steady streamings of the geese, and then above and beyond that, and all around it, another sound.

  They went out into the sunlight.

  It was the sound of running water—not just trickling water, but water gushing everywhere. The creek was making music again, and every little drainage, every little draw in the woods behind them, was gushing; and it was a sound that made them smile and then laugh, and they stood there flat-footed and bare-assed in the sun and laughed. Wallis had never thought of running water as a funny sound, but it made them laugh: the sound of the water, finally running free again, exciting the water in their own bodies, and they laughed, and held out their arms to feel the south wind on them, and watched the frenzy of the birds.

  From farther down the valley, along the river, came the continued sound of explosions, and as the sun rose and spread warmth into new corners, warming new things, the explosions continued, a sound like the earth splitting. With each new crash they could feel things released, and they felt strongly now that they, as well as everything else, could get on with the business of living, and the business of growing.

  In school that day, after her brief lesson, she sat in the back of class with Colter, while all the water in the world, it seemed, released and ran past them.

  She skied home, believing for certain it was the day Matthew would awaken—the day she would have to crush him—but when she got home, Wallis was sitting out on the front porch, examining his map for the thousandth time, and Matthew was still sleeping.

  They sat in the sunlight together for the rest of the afternoon, and were silent: both of them edgy and anxious now.

  They slept wrapped in the same elk hide that night, warm together after having loved, and Mel dreamed several times of turning around and trying to go all the way back to the start, where Matthew was still waiting for her—but in the morning she had more resolve, and rose and dressed and went off to school again.

  More and more of the rock wall was emerging, as were the tops of snow-buried bushes: as if the world were being created in a week. Colter had gone down to the river the first day of breakup to see if his father was still there, but one of the huge tongues of ice had carried him away, and had scoured clean the cairns as well.

  The bears were tumbling from the earth—each day their tracks laced the slushy snow again, as if a tribe or nation of beings had come back into the valley with those south winds—and several of the black bears, gaunt and sleepy-looking, black as ravens, had been seen wandering through town as if lost. No grizzlies had been spotted yet, though some of their tracks were showing up along the river.

  Each day in school the students asked Mel, “Is he awake yet?” and each day she had to tell them no, and had to just keep waiting, still trapped.

  Some days they could hear, through the open windows, the sounds of Amy’s singing—choirsong, joyous, carrying from half a mile away. Some of the students sitting closest to the window would grow drowsy and lay their heads down on the table for a few minutes. Mel remembered her school days in Houston thirty years earlier. Almost nothing had changed. There were still wars in Africa and Israel. The recent developments with Russia were different, but in Russia’s formerly mysterious place now stood China. Central America was still in turmoil. The French were starting to act like Americans. The British were still the British. She stared down at her desk and ran her fingers over the scarred initials Matthew had whittled into the wood so long ago.

  Earth’s Deepest Graves

  Where We Came From

  Attending carefully to the movements of Amoebae beneath the hand lens, we discover that these movements have an end in view. The tentacles are extended in search of food. This animal is forever hungry. It is conscious of hunger. It knows how to secure food. It has a will which sets its organs in motion. It knows how to s
eize a particle of food. See! Its arm is wound about a minute animalcule; it holds it, but now it does not convey it to the mouth. Where is the mouth? In truth, there is none. The arm is absorbed—animalcule and all. It disappears in the common mass of jelly, and the animalcule is seen within it.

  So this creature feeds. It gets around its food successfully; but it simply pours itself over it. What an amazing simplicity of structure is here! Indeed, there is no structure; we have little more than a shapeless particle of jelly. Whenever the animal takes breakfast, it extemporizes an arm for seizing it. Whenever it eats, a mouth is extemporized for admission of food, and a stomach is extemporized for receiving and digesting it. From all the ailments of hands, mouth, teeth, and stomach, this animal is happily free. Exempt from headache, sore eyes, ringing ears and heart flutterings, it still exercises all the functions requisite to make it an animal.

  This modern creature is the representative of Eozoon. But Eozoon could not be placed defenseless in the sea. A little lump of jelly would be swept into annihilation by the waves. Eozoon, however, planted, held fast to its support, and immediately secreted a strong roof over him for protection. A thousand little holes through the roof allowed threads of its gelatinous substance to be protruded. These coalesced in a common film which spread over the roof like a coating of tar. This was unprotected, and a second and higher roof was built. The structure was now two stories high.

  Through the upper roof innumerable minute perforations allowed the jelly of the second story to be protruded in fine threads, and these in turn coalesced, and a third roof was secreted. Thus the process continued, and the structure became many stories high.