Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Glissading snow-melt rushed down the rutted roads, carrying great scouring gouts of chocolate colored waters, spreading fans of silt into the creeks, which then discharged plumes of mud into the main river, covering the spawning beds of trout with sediment. “It’s amazing what one man can do,” Mel said, staring down at one of the roads as they stood ankle-deep in its rushing, muddy channel, as if crossing some new stream not on a map.

  They stood a moment longer in the rushing mud, made dizzy by the incongruous sight of it—water the color of a bayou, gushing through such an otherwise sylvan forest—and then they stepped into the forest, as if trying to hide from the skein of roads scattered all about the woods.

  “You should have seen it twenty years ago,” Mel said.

  “It’s still pretty nice,” Wallis said, thinking that she was half-joking.

  “You should have seen it twenty years ago,” she said.

  BY MID-MAY, THE SNOW WAS ALMOST ALL GONE; MORE AND more antlers were revealed, strewn up and down the slopes like bones, so that they were easy for the antler hunters to find. They gathered them in great numbers. The mountains were littered also with the skeletons of winter-killed deer, elk, and moose, the bones cast in hopeless disarray. Sometimes there were bones atop bones, from where one deer had died and gone down, and then a few feet of snow had fallen, and then another deer had died in that same spot. It seemed to Wallis that—as with the rocks—there were enough bones and antlers to build fences, walls, even houses from those white spars. He would spend some afternoons trying to reassemble the bones into working order, as if he were the curator of a great and vast museum.

  Colter looked out the window constantly, watching the receding snowcaps, seeing them curl over the mountaintops like the sea foam of a retreating tide. Notches, crevices, and passes that had been obscured now became evident. He had picked one particular mountain, Dome Mountain, as his exit route, when it came time for him to leave the valley, and he carved the outline of it on his desk, so that each day with the tip of his knife blade he could etch into the desktop the contour of that day’s shrinking snow line. The contours were pleasing to him, and in his boredom he soothed himself by running his fingers across the grooved cuts in the desk.

  He was compiling a list, too, of what equipment to take with him—listing the advantages and disadvantages, the justification, of each item. As the afternoons lingered, he would trade notes with Mel, arguing or questioning the merits of each item, until it seemed to Mel that when he left, some part of her, invested in him, would also be leaving.

  At lunch, Mel took the children down to the river, to the backwater sloughs and beaver ponds, where they caught the tadpoles of spring peepers and Pacific tree frogs and brought them back to the classroom in mayonnaise jars. They placed them on the windowsill in sunlight and fed them flakes of dry oatmeal and watched them through the hand lens daily, as the tiny nubs of legs began to sprout and the fatty tissue in their tails shrank.

  Sometimes in the morning there would be a dead one resting turgid on the bottom—pale belly up, tiny mouth agape—and the students would want to fish it out and give it a burial, but Mel told them to leave it there to disintegrate into a milky blue drifting mass, upon which the other tadpoles would sometimes feed. Mel said that as each tadpole died, it released chemicals into the water that had been proven to accelerate the development of the surviving tadpoles.

  The more that died in that puddle, the faster the survivors accelerated their rate of growth. The students puzzled at the mechanics, the consequences and logistics of such overcrowding.

  They kept caterpillars, too, in mason jars, and fed them prodigious quantities of green leaves and grass, and performed crude experiments on their varying rates of growth and development based on different diets. The beautiful myth of the caterpillar spinning its cocoon and disappearing from the world. The leaf litter, stems gnawed bare, and tiny caterpillar droppings an inch deep on the bottom of the jar, and the jar itself (with holes punched in the lid to vent the air), a hothouse, a dynamo of heat, as the caterpillar slept; and in both instances, frog and butterfly, the students marveled at the high cost of metamorphosis. They placed a stone in with the tadpoles for the frogs to climb out on once the transformation was complete, and they hung little twigs and branches for the butterflies to cling to as they dried their wings.

  The townspeople were beginning to move the rocks again, compelled in the sun’s warmth and amidst the scent of blossoming lupine to carry the stones back and forth like ants, working on the wall yet another year, trudging up and down the road raising plumes of dust behind them. No rain had fallen, though there seemed to be enough snowmelt entering the creeks to keep the valley lush forever. Throughout the day, there was a pleasant harmony as the surging river beyond carried tumbling boulders along its bottom. The river’s muted, subsonic clackings carried occasionally to the surface, mixing with the sharper sounds of their own work: one rock being stacked atop two others.

  And in the lengthening evenings at the bar, there was the good smell of work-sweat and rock dust and cold beer. It was a clean odor, as if all angst or wretchedness had been purged from them. It was impossible to understand how anyone could consider ever leaving. They shook their heads over Matthew’s defection, argued it round and round, before finally deciding that it must be extraordinarily fascinating down there where he spent his time, below the earth.

  They discussed with increasing anticipation the preparations for Colter’s trip, and imagined the things he might discover: gold, salmon, mastodons locked in ice, polar bears, echoes of white. They sat on the porch and drank and watched the sun set, watched the northern lights race and rill across the sky—images of green and red that seemed to be a form of communication they could not quite understand; and even though they might have seen the sight a hundred or even a thousand times in their lives, each time the lights emerged, the men and women fell silent in slack-jawed awe. Their faces relaxed—the furrows over their brows and the crows’ feet around their eyes softened as the eerie lights passed over them, and there were none who did not feel cleansed and energized by the phenomenon. And the men all agreed that if they were Colter’s age, they would do the same thing, with only a pack on their back, heading north until they came to the edge of the world; and they all agreed that they wished they had done so when they were younger, but that they had never gotten around to it.

  The road over the summit opened sufficiently for a backhoe and snowplow to cut through the ice bridge connecting the valley to the rest of the world—though it was still like driving through a blue and white tunnel, with compressed walls of luminous ice twelve feet high on either side of the road—and the mail made its first delivery since the profiteers had been in, resuming its weekly run: a flood of mail, that first day, like the release of driftwood floes from behind the breakup of a river’s logjam; and once more the town gathered at the saloon for the dissemination of the mail.

  They stood in the glimmering puddles of snowmelt, hatless and in short sleeves, intoxicated by the sun—their blood leaping. From here on out—or for six more months, until the next November—their lives would have the potential to be as exotic as they wished or could afford. It might take two or three weeks, but they could place an order for mangoes, or coconuts, or fresh coffee beans from New Guinea. They could even order salmon—ordering the ghost of a taste that once ran strong through their valley, carving the river’s heart.

  They could, if they wished, gas up an old truck and set out south, up and over the pass—driving as far into the coming summer heat as they desired.

  They didn’t leave, of course. There was no place richer, nowhere any of them would rather be. Wild horses could not have dragged them away. It was simply an added feeling of freedom, knowing that they could now go if they wished. A power accrued in their restraint. They were no longer proud isolates, survivors, hangers-on; they could once again engage, and correspond, with the world.

  There were drawbacks to this. The world cou
ld engage with and alter them—could come creeping in over the same road that offered that unaccepted freedom. But early in the spring, after so much seclusion, it never seemed a problem. It was impossible to imagine such hard-gotten integrity ever being altered or eroded.

  Charlie cooked another deer in honor of the mail’s arrival. They fell upon it quickly, craving red meat to nurture their day’s labors. Charlie handed out the mail as he served the meat, and people delved in with equal intensity, tearing open letters and eating sometimes with their hands, then licking the grease from their fingers. Uncle Harold’s garden in Alabama was already producing cucumbers. Sister Mary’s floral shop in Michigan had gone out of business. Another grandfather had died. Someone’s relative in Philadelphia wanted to know if they could see the stars clearly, out in the country.

  There was no mail from Old Dudley or Matthew. Mel had expected some letter of understanding from Matthew. She knew that none was needed, but still, she had been hoping for one—for the symbolism or ritual of the severance—but there was from both of them only silence, so that she knew they both had dived the moment they had gotten home, and were probably still diving.

  The only mail she had was from an old college roommate, who’d been an ornithologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service for a while, but who was raising a family now, four girls in Tucson, divorced, working two part-time jobs, drowning a little more each day. Mel read the letter with a shiver, folded it, put it back in its envelope, and thought back to college. No one follows the course they chart out, she thought. No one.

  There was no mail for Wallis—who had not been expecting or desiring any—nor for Amy, who had, and she took it hard, setting off into another round of weeping, so that Helen had to try to console her, leading her outside onto the porch and away from the curious stares of her neighbors, so that her shattered dignity might be reassembled.

  One of the wolves passed through town again, a different wolf, silver gray, and larger, following the exact path of the black wolf. Unlike the other, it glanced sidelong at the school—again, the class and teachers hurried to the window—as if searching for Mel.

  They saw that it had a face full of porcupine quills, an injury only recently inflicted, because the wolf’s face had not yet begun to swell and fester. From time to time it would stop and sit down in the street and paw at its muzzle with both front feet. It would writhe and twist, smearing its face along the road in an effort to dislodge the quills, and each time it did that, one or two would snap off—sometimes the wolf would then get them stuck in its paws or in the roof of its mouth, and it would snap and bite at those, gagging—and then it would be up and trotting again, right on through town.

  The children were horrified and wanted to know if the wolf would live. Mel said she didn’t know: that it might starve to death, even if the other pack members brought it food—if it was even in a pack—or that the quills might cause such massive infections that the wolf’s blood would be poisoned, and it would die of shock.

  Colter couldn’t stand it. Recess had come and gone, and they were mid-lesson in algebra, but he went out the door anyway, and into the street. Mel very nearly followed, but told herself that if she could let this go, she could pass through anything.

  Colter knelt in the street and began gathering some of the quills that had fallen free and put them in the leather medicine bag he carried around his neck. He looked off in the direction the wolf had gone, and they thought he was going to follow it, but after a moment he came back to the schoolhouse, where he handed some of the quills to Mel without saying anything.

  No one reprimanded him. There were only two weeks left in the semester, and everyone knew he would be going. He was already gone.

  Wallis’s map blossomed. This time he had it right. There were simply too much data now for it not to be accurate. So confident was he now that he was drawing the map directly onto a deer hide, sketching it with black ink. He took the information from all of Dudley’s and Matthew’s previous mistakes, wove that subsurface data in with what he was seeing above the ground—a slip-fault here, a sediment unconformity there—and now it was like pieces of a puzzle coming together on their own: as if the pieces desired to be reassembled and understood, and possessed a force of their own, propelling them toward that reassembly.

  Amidst all the chaos and fracturing, the elusiveness, the oil was hiding. He had not been certain when he first arrived in the valley, but now he knew it for sure. He could smell it through microscopic vents and fissures in the soil and he could feel the liquid reservoirs miles below, as a man might feel the sleeping form or faint stirrings of his child, still in his wife’s womb, through the drum-taut skin of her belly, halfway between the protruding navel and heavy breasts. He was going to find it, where they had not. Many nights he fell asleep on the skin of the hide, ink pen in hand, so that Mel would have to awaken him and lead him in to bed.

  Sometimes she would stand over him for a moment, contemplating his sleeping descent, and wondering whether to wake him or to let him continue sinking.

  It was a troubling proposition. Often she would sit in the chair and study him as he slept—his legs twisted beneath him, arms outstretched across the hide as if he had fallen and landed on it, or as if he were protecting it from something—and she would consider how much she loved that about him, when he was in that repose.

  She was fully aware that with the last one, she had desired to rein him in—had wished for Matthew to love her as he had loved the maps and the world below—and that the guilt of desiring that same passion—of wanting it but not asking for it—had worn her thin as a scalloped seashell tumbled in the waves until translucent.

  She was determined to neither ask nor even want that for herself, with Wallis. To love him as he was, when he dived—and to love him when he emerged—but to let go, and not try to control his descents.

  She thought she had it right this time. She thought she loved him as much when he dived as when he ascended.

  She studied Wallis’s map as he slept atop it. She knew little about geology, but she understood maps, and the currents of deposition he had sketched showing the old ocean’s tides and longshore currents and deltas and inlets were not so dissimilar from the movements of the creeks and rivers across that same stony, lithified land, millions of years later. She could read the contours, could read what it was he was tracking, and saw the logic he was applying. According to his map, there was not just one giant field lying on the other side of the river, but numerous smaller fields as well, scattered around the major field. Her father and Matthew would call it a bonanza. Mel wondered how Matthew had missed it.

  Occasionally he would open his eyes to see her sitting there watching him, and such was the grace that was developing between them that he could tell when she was thinking such thoughts: and he would raise up on one elbow and watch her watching him by firelight, and he would wait for her to ask him to pull back or turn away, but she never did. She wanted it to be yet another dry hole, but she would not dream of asking him to turn away. It was the only recklessness left to her: the recklessness of love, after it had previously seemed that love had gone away.

  They had made love on that map: it was not sacred; and afterward, sometimes, the sweat from the backs, and the warming drain of their fluids, would darken the hide in places, as if in blasphemy: the map Wallis would be presenting to Old Dudley, when Dudley returned for his bounty.

  “Will you go with him?” Mel asked. It was not too early to begin asking that question.

  “I don’t know,” Wallis said. “I would like to find a way not to.”

  The world had broken open; the mountains had split to reveal a living world that had been lying beneath, raucous and seething green. The din was as startling. It took some time before their ears could sort out the sounds and their meanings—sounds arriving seemingly overnight, on the south winds. Blackbird trill, snipe wing-mutter, goose-honk, duck wing-whistle at dusk, frog-song, thrush-squeal, wrens and chickadees courting, raven
laughter, hawk-shriek, rain on the tin roofs; and mixed in with it all, the land reawakening: water dripping, running everywhere, and the wind propelling warm air through the valley, with the days climbing now toward the solstice.

  It was the time of year when rain should have been falling every day—brief intense showers after which the trees sparkled with water drops on their needles and the forest was illuminated with a gold light, steam rising. Few rains fell however—though when they did, the villagers would go into the woods to search for the false morel and shaggy mane mushrooms that popped up immediately.

  Walking home from school after such a rain, Wallis and Mel would keep an eye out for the emergent dark shapes of the mushrooms, and would race each other to get to them first. And again, as with the glacier lilies, they would crawl amongst the rain-washed mushrooms on all fours, browsing them straight from the ground like bears, with a light mist falling on their backs and muggy steam rising all around them.

  On the last day of school the children released the oxygen-starved butterflies and the writhing little frogs and toads—some still bearing the nubs of tadpole tails—and the children cheered as their captives hopped or flew off in all directions, though they were quickly mortified as swarms of birds—how could they have known?—gathered and began picking off the clumsy butterflies mid-flight and chasing and pecking at the terrified tiny toads and frogs. A few escaped, but not many, and the children stared in disbelief, stunned and chastened by the difficulty of releasing something created into the world. After some milling around, they went back into the classroom somberly for their last lesson of the day, though soon enough their spirits brightened, made joyous again by the thought of summer vacation.