Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  It was not possible to quantify the happiness she felt. She had assumed the severance of Matthew would leave a scar, but she understood now that it was the wound itself which had been severed; failure had been excised. It was obvious to all—and now that the rift had been announced, all felt free to comment upon it—how Mel was helping sculpt Wallis into a citizen of the valley. Invisible or unnoticed by them all, however—except Helen—was the way Wallis was carving a new Mel. Not rubbing away old external trappings to help reveal the essence of who she had always been, but helping create an entirely new person: one who would fit the future, not the past. One who would fit happiness.

  Anyone could have seen it. They could have followed her tracks in the disappearing snow and taken note of the length and briskness of her stride, including the long gaps where she appeared to have leapt, for no apparent reason.

  She liked it when he dived. She was fascinated, watching him throw himself right back into his failure, his hands sculpting and sketching and erasing, reshaping each tiny contour on the map, working often by lantern light alone at her desk, in the manner that her father had so long ago worked late into the night beneath a single burning bulb. Some nights, as a child, Mel had awakened and looked down the hall—as if down a corridor or tunnel of light—and had seen him there at the end of the hallway, perched on his drafting stool, shoulders hunched forward, elbows on the table as he sketched and traced, drafting tiny worlds no larger than a desktop. Often she would go get in bed with her mother and press in against that warmth; and then, later, when there was just the two of them, she would go back to her room and would try to sleep, but would end up just lying there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

  She read quietly as Wallis dived deeper, wrestled further with the map—working the other side of the river, now. There was a tremor in her heart when she dared consider the possible consequences of his success, but such was the grace of his passion—the muscular immersion in it, to the point of near-hypnosis—as if he were a chrysalis struggling to crawl out of a death-husk—that she could not look away. She read, glancing up from time to time—his lone hand scribing one contour after another, altering hills and mountains, as if he were bound to a thing. Her captive. His own captive.

  In the daytime he went out mapping on foot, gathering data, and working the south slopes first, where the sun had burned off the snow and the rock faces of bare earth were visible. He used a Brunton compass and measured strike and pitch and angle of dip—took note of each mountain’s orientation, and the larger trends and patterns of the mountains as a complete range. In many places the exposed formations were so jumbled, so twisted and fractured, that they were like giant waves that had just passed their crest and broken into the surface below. It was as if he were standing ankle-deep in the backwash. He did the best he could amid such a landscape of chaos, and looked longingly across the canyons at the shady north slopes, dreaming ahead to July and August, when those slopes would be revealed to him.

  Try as he might to dwell in the buried world, it was difficult not to become mesmerized by the beauty at the surface. A whole buried world of its own was emerging as the snow subsided, shrank from everything. The fallen tips of antlers, the tops of stones and boulders, ice-bent bushes, and burrows and crevices began to appear as the snow drew from the valley like the tide drawn by the moon.

  More birds were being drawn up into the valley, as if sucked north into some vortex or gusted along by the south winds, though Wallis knew it was not entirely the lengthening light that was propelling them north (as it had sent them south), but some inner hardness, something more durable than even the seasons.

  To ignore the essence and spirit of each individual arriving bird would be to subscribe to the view that they were mechanistic, nothing more than chips of color, feather-clad protoplasm hurled across the skies like tatters of bright cloth tossed on the winds aloft.

  Wallis did not subscribe to this belief. One had only to look at a single blackbird perched triumphantly upon a slender green reed, eyes bright in the morning light and tilting his head back and trilling and cackling with an emotion, a pleasure at having arrived, that was nothing less than joy. If it were just about hormones, the birds could have stopped anywhere and sang and courted and staked out territories. They might or might not have been as successful, but they could have stopped anywhere—or could have decided not to leave at all.

  But to live through the winter in the place of their absence, as Wallis had, and to be on hand to see them come back—filtering at first, then flooding—there was no way to deny that each bird’s presence went beyond the mechanistic: that place, as well as season, played a part in it, and that in this particular place, they felt uncontrollable jubilation. Wallis had heard that sometimes they would sing with such vigor, and so unceasingly, that their vocal cords would burst, and still they would continue, so that the bird sang blood, sprays of it flashing through the air and coating the emerald reeds crimson, as if there were a flaw or leak in the system’s design . . .

  Wallis began carrying one of Mel’s old bird books in his day pack, to identify the birds—to learn their names and where they had come from. He felt a strong affinity for them, and was surprised to read that many of them came from the country in which he had once lived. He had not paid much attention to them down there—the light was often bright and harsh, so that when he glanced up he saw only a colorless silhouette flashing against gunmetal sky, or flying into the radial spokes of sun-ray—but now, watching them return to a place of previous stillness and silence, coming back at first almost one by one, he could better understand and observe their differences.

  He tried to focus on his maps, and on the stones beneath his feet—but it was increasingly hard to resist the temptation to lift the binoculars each time a whisk of bright feathers and joy rushed past, leaving behind an invisible, fast-dissipating trail of birdsong. He would raise his binoculars quickly and lean forward, almost with the anticipation of a hunter.

  The first flowers were appearing—the first butterflies, amazingly, right behind them—their crooked, awkward flights stunning and their brilliant colors wandering as if lost across the snow fields. Sometimes he followed them to where, sure enough, there would be flowers, and often he would pick a cluster for Mel: trillium, serviceberry, and twinflower—an elegant, simple bouquet of pink and white.

  Some of the bouquets she took to school with her; others she dried and hung from the rafters in the cabin. A single vase of them sat on the table where they ate together. A loaf of new bread and two grouse for supper. Some daylight would still be left, afterward—a wedge of it, between dinner and darkness—and often they would fill it by cutting and splitting more wood.

  The steady, rhythmic sounds of their working: the tight creak and then split of wood, with each swing of the ax. In some ways it was as if he—Matthew—had never left. As if Matthew had been transformed into Wallis, or Wallis into Matthew. Except that now she was happy again.

  A slow afternoon at the mercantile. Blue-hazed sunlight from the cigarette smoke hung trapped in the high upper reaches of the store. Wallis had been out in the field all morning and had come in to dry his snow-drenched clothes by Helen’s stove, and to wait for the school recess so that he could go see Mel, and maybe steal a kiss. It didn’t hurt to try and patch things with Helen, either—to help her get used to the fact that it would be Wallis and Mel now, rather than Matthew and Mel—but he was surprised, as he spent time with Helen, by how little patching seemed necessary—as if Helen had other, far more important matters on her mind. Often she and Wallis visited with the ease of old friends.

  Across the street, Wallis would hear the clang of the iron triangle signaling lunch and recess. Sometimes he would cross the street to have lunch with Mel; other times she would come over to the mercantile, where the three of them would sit on the steps in the bright sun.

  Colter had been working out, doing exercises to strengthen himself for summer—performing pull-ups and pus
h-ups, and lifting a single heavy slab of stone over his head repeatedly, as if it were a dumbbell—and it was a story as ancient as humankind, but no less amazing in its familiarity—the physical rise and development of an individual: like a blossoming. He was head and shoulders stronger now than any of his other classmates, and his accuracy with the bow had increased, as had his power, so that now he was hitting the bull’s eye of whatever he aimed at, even from a distance of forty. He was whittling his arrows from cedar shafts and napping his points out of chert and obsidian—heating them in flames, then chipping at them with the tip of a deer antler—and his excellence at hitting flying objects had also improved. Mel forbade him to shoot at birds in the springtime, but he delighted in shooting flying insects—wing-whirring pine sawyer beetles, as well as butterflies and even the drifting flights of moths by moonlight. He would light a lantern against the backdrop of the saloon and then aim to pin the moths, sometimes still fluttering, against the wall with his finest, most delicate arrow points.

  His back and shoulders were growing wider, his waist tapering, and his upper legs growing broader—as if the ceaseless pulling, the bow’s resistance as the string was drawn, then released, was chipping away at him as surely as he chipped at the obsidian.

  Anyone, everyone, could feel him ready to go—like a subterranean rumbling, a trembling: the landscape desiring to send him up and out into the other world. Helen, and others who were old enough to remember, said that he reminded them in that manner almost exactly of Matthew.

  It was strange how Colter hitched his power to the rising springtime as if in lockstep harness with it. The force of his growth was so extraordinary and vital that it seemed as if he were neither a boy nor a young man, but instead a hard and wild creature living now in their midst—a trained dancing bear, or a coyote; a wolf, a wild boar, a swan, wearing only the skin or costume of a man. Pleasant among them, but always separate in some manner and not quite of them—and with a gulf between them that could never fully be crossed in life.

  Coming back from a hike north of town, carrying another bouquet, Wallis heard the sound of someone crying as he passed near Colter’s and Amy’s cabin, where usually he heard singing. He moved through the woods toward the sound, and when he came to the edge of the woods he saw that Amy was standing in the little corral leaning against the pony with her arms around his neck. Her face was wet with tears, and Wallis was embarrassed to find her in that manner, but wanted to be sure that everything was all right. He stepped forward carefully. When she saw him she cried out, “He has gone!”

  At first Wallis thought she meant that Colter had left on his trek prematurely. Amy started crying again, and Wallis led her over to the porch, where they sat down and rested in the blue lingering dusk. She sniffled, “He left without even saying good-bye—he didn’t even come by to see me.”

  It took more crying, and several more teary statements before Wallis grew confused, and after one accusation—“He just wanted to use me. He’s nothing but an old miscreant!”—Wallis said, incredulously, “Colter?” and Amy paused in her crying. “No,” she said, “Dudley.”

  “Oh, shit,” Wallis said, before he could help himself, “that was weeks ago. You don’t like him, do you?” But the look she gave him told him how far along it was, and he wondered if there was anyone Old Dudley could not snare. It was certainly not by charm that he captured any of them. As ever, he found instead the flaw in one’s self and then widened it.

  In the end, Wallis left the bouquet for Amy. At first she protested, knowing it had been picked for Mel, but when he offered them a second time, she said thank you. He walked on home, traveling not through the woods, but like a citizen of the town, hiking right down the muddy, snow-patched road, listening to the night mutterings of snipe and the riverine trilling of as many frogs, it seemed, as there were stars in the sky. Meteors tumbled in occasional cartwheels, and his peace at being settled in the world with Mel, and with so much newness before him, was tempered momentarily by the raw loneliness he had left behind: as if, this year at least, sorrow had avoided him and chosen another instead.

  Trumpet vine crept along the stone walls, twining itself amongst the patterns of lichens, and the hummingbirds arrived from South and Central America, as powerful as small caps of dynamite, and regal as royalty: as if they had traveled all that way only to pollinate this one flower.

  The first rains fell one weekend, a phenomenon so startling, after so much snow, that Mel and Wallis went out and stood in the light rain and rubbed it into their hair, into their scalps, and stood there washing in it; and afterward, they went back in, bone-chilled, to warm themselves by the fire.

  Once the rains began, the valley snow slushed out and faded quickly—the creeks and river ran high—and the woods accepted both the sun and the rain with such intensity, such ravenousness, as to glow fluorescent with greenness. It seemed to Wallis that he could feel the land’s energy, the turning over and stirring and stretching of it, even in his teeth.

  Wallis moved farther into the high country, following the receding snow higher each day, mapping. This was where the grizzlies lived. The grizzlies had pretty much learned, in the last hundred years, to stay away from the river bottoms, where they could get into trouble with humans, and now the grizzlies spent more time up high, often hanging out at the edges of glaciers, and those receding snow lines, where the trickling melt-water kept a retreating strand line of vegetation always lush. Wallis watched the grizzlies browsing the sun-bright glacier lilies that grew in that wavering space between black earth and white glacier, and after the bears had passed on, he would go to that spot and gather several of the buttery blossoms to bring home for a salad each evening. He spent all of an afternoon watching a mother with three tiny cubs slide down an ice field, sliding several hundred feet on their backs with all four feet up in the air, whereupon reaching the bottom they would scramble back up to the top for another ride, again and again.

  Wallis grew browned from his work in the high country, so tanned that someone who had known him before might not at first recognize him. Mel noted with pangs the browning of his skin and the increasing vigor surrounding him—the excitement with which he came down out of the mountains each evening—but she forced herself to remember her own burnout, and what a dead-end road that had been for her: twenty years of passion that had gotten her nowhere. Twenty years was not enough. It would take a hundred years of data to weave together any knowledge of significance; but now there was no one to pick up where she had left. It was the premature end of a pursuit: a thing not completed, not known.

  Nearly every day Wallis would bring home a collection of various rocks he’d found, both for his own examination under hand lens and microscope, but also just to show her for their beauty: thirty, forty, sometimes fifty pounds of rocks each day—some glittering and sparkly, others colorful, and still others improbably dense and sullen—so heavy that it seemed they could not have come from this world, but were the clastic residue of exploded planets.

  They stacked the rocks in a loose wall against one side of where the garden had once been. They were so beautiful that it was impossible to simply toss them out into the grass or cast them into a loose pile. Once discovered, they had to be somehow ordered and set apart from randomness.

  One day in May a black wolf came trotting through town, cantering right down the center of the street without glancing left or right. It went right past the school—Belle and Ann and Mel and the students leapt up and went to the window to watch it—and it passed the mercantile, passed the saloon, and passed the cemetery, and continued on down the road in its easy, free-floating gait, as if merely traveling, and as if there were nothing remarkable in its passage.

  She did not cut herself off from the woods entirely: not as Matthew had done. She still went out on hikes with Wallis on weekends, though they avoided the area where Colter said he believed the wolves were denning, to keep from bothering them.

  Instead, they hiked north, working their way a
long the rocky south-facing slopes, hiking shirtless through bands of gold and copper light, with Wallis pointing out the fault striations on rocks—pointing out the direction each plate of earth had been moving, and which of the two had been the subsuming force. Mel continued to teach him about every living thing: the names and relationships of the lichens on the cliffs, and of ferns, back in the forest. The names of moths and butterflies. She weaved for him the stories of what ate what, which then was eaten by the next thing beyond that.

  They lay on damp moss and sunned; they crawled on their hands and knees in the mosses at the edge of the snow line, the sun bright on their backs, and grazed the yellow lilies straight from the ground, while below them the valley glowed green, still whole and healthy.

  Sometimes as they hiked back home their passage would intersect with the rutted paths to where Dudley and Matthew had drilled their dry holes. The little lanes ran seemingly indiscriminately through the old forest, as if they had been chasing something above the ground, rather than below—something elusive, erratic, and seemingly without logic. Old stumps—rotting, orange, crumbling moss-covered punkwood—lined the sides of the winding paths where bright light had been blazed into the forest. It was strange to think that each path led to a failure.

  The roads had not been noticeable beneath the covering of snow, but now as more of them revealed themselves—the spoor of Dudley and Matthew—they became apparent: crude hackings and carvings into previously untouched places, as if rude wart-faced hogs had been snuffling in the soil. Mel said that eventually the forest would seal over the scars, in places where the soil had not washed away—as long as Dudley and Matthew remained satisfied they’d drilled dry holes, and did not come back, seeking to reenter those same old holes—but that, as the profiteers had warned, she was worried that the timber companies would soon come devouring, using the old roads as staging areas to launch their gnawing machines farther into the forest, in all directions.