Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Colter’s going-away party was that evening. He had planned to leave that afternoon—the moment school was out—but Amy had talked him into staying one last night.

  Everyone gathered at the bar. Colter was as quiet as always, though they could all feel his stored tension, could smell the adrenaline coming off of him.

  The men all wanted to buy him drinks, kept sliding them down the bar to him, but after his first tentative sip—touching his tongue to the suds at the top of a beer mug—he decided that he did not care for it, and passed each beer down to Amy, who drank them.

  “My strength is as that of ten men,” Amy quoted, “because I am pure.”

  This started the men wondering how strong Colter was, and they ventured drunkenly out into the moonlight, to where the rock wall ran past the rusting wrought-iron spires of the cemetery’s gate. They pointed out different rocks for him to heft. The exercise soon turned into a contest, and Colter sat back and watched the men grunt and groan and strain. He did not participate, but saved his energy for his trip. The men stumbled and staggered beneath the residue of Matthew’s work, his dry masonry—some of the slabs they could not even budge, a failing which they discounted as “not being able to get a good grip”—and sometimes they dropped the boulders on each other’s feet or hands, so that they yowled in the night, and the damp earth shook with the thumps of the dropped stones.

  Colter slipped away without their noticing. His pack was on the front porch. He was gone before anyone knew it, gone without a word to anyone. He had taken care of his good-byes earlier in the afternoon. When the men realized this, they returned to the bar and washed the blood and mud off their bruised fingers. Artie went to the porch with the camera to get one last picture of Colter, but had to settle for taking one of Amy, Mel, and Wallis standing together, looking out into the darkness after him.

  There was a small comet to the north, and that showed up in the photo, too, as a smear of light, like a firefly. They watched the comet, knowing that as Colter hiked north he would be watching it too, and in that manner they were connected a bit longer, though tenuously now. They ransacked their minds, trying to remember if they had taught him everything he needed to know. It seemed to each of them that they must have forgotten something, though no one could think of what it might have been.

  Historical Glimpses;

  Or,

  The Story of the World Set In Order

  Wandering Germs of Worlds

  It will be interesting to inquire what matter was before it became fire mist.

  Comets are facts of observation; there is no mistake as to the real existence of such bodies, whatever they be. They excite our admiration. They are full of wonder. They come from the unsearchable depths of space and, after shining in our heavens a few weeks, disappear back into the unsearchable depths. What is their origin? What their end? Think of the approach of one of these mysterious messengers from the infinite. Before discernible to unaided eyes, the astronomer with his instrument detects it as a faint luminosity just appeared. For weeks he watches its changes. Nightly it grows brighter. It is approaching; it will arrive. Like the headlight of a locomotive seen at first as a luminous point in the far distance over some miles of track, gradually growing brighter—with no other evidence of motion—with brightness at length increasing in accelerated ratio, then dazzling us by its glare, and finally thundering past with a velocity which appalls, and retiring into the night that reigns in the opposite direction—so comes the headlight of a train of cosmic matter; so grows its luminosity; with such a stunning demonstration of physical power it rushes past us, then sinks into that infinite distance in another quarter of the heavens. I confess it is impossible to contemplate all this without a feeling of awe.

  Would that the mystery of the comet were once unfolded to us! It tantalizes us by its near approach and its undiminished inscrutability. But, thanks to intelligence—thanks to the spirit of science—thanks to that beneficent constitution of the universe by which it gives up its secrets one by one, to the demands of intelligent inquiry such as my own, we have found out something. We have seen comets torn to pieces by the power of attraction—without a collision—by the attractions of the satellites of Jupiter. This was Bi-e-la’s [Be-ala] comet, and each fragment thenceforward pursued its separate path. We have seen comets so shattered and disintegrated by the pulls and strains to which they were subjected in our system—in making their circuit about our sun, in getting through the entanglements of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s attractions, that they appeared literally to be going to pieces and dividing up their remains among the planetary masses of the system.

  The comet, in short, appears to be essentially a flying train of stones traveling with three thousand times the velocity of our own “railroad express.” The smaller stones, more resistant than the larger ones, by other matter disseminated through space, slacken their motion slightly, and are struck by the larger, causing ignition. The harder, rounder, little stones consume the larger, more angular ones. They possess some irreducible essence.

  We have seen the meteor ignited in the upper air. We have seen its bright streak vanish while we gazed. But finally even the little stones were melted—were vaporized. While passing through the space measured by its line, the comet changed from a cold stone to shining dust, and then a darkened dust left floating in the upper strata of the atmosphere.

  But though unseen, the meteoric dust still exists. It now belongs to the earth. It will be wafted to and fro by the winds; it will come down, after some months, and contribute some new material to the earth. It will fill our lungs, our blood. Some of these atoms will fall on the ocean; most of them will fall there; and after other months they will settle to the bottom and mingle with the ooze which is there accumulating. You will remember our walk under the sea and the comet dust which we found. It is an impressive thought. This black particle now resting through an eternity on the midnight-shrouded ocean bed, shone lately in a star. These are greater changes of fortune than any suffered by us.

  The point which we have reached reveals the boundless space around us well stocked with material particles. They are not uniformly distributed; by their mutual attractions they are gathered into swarms. By degrees, each swarm grows as long as it has a separate existence, by the accession of other swarms. As these swarms sail majestically through the ocean of immensity, some are brought under the control of distant suns, and start on long journeys to pay their flying visits.

  They approach now as comets. If they are induced to circle perpetually about given suns, they finally go to pieces again, and the parts are either drawn to their central suns, or distributed among the planets. If they escape from the systems entered, they steady themselves across the gulfs of space that separate systems, and in the progress of centuries, float into other ports and new excitements, new lives.

  But some of these swarms remain floating in the depths of extra-firmamental space and gather to themselves, by their increasing power of attraction, all other swarms and particles from their region of immensity. They become Nebulae. They are luminous because, pounded by the fall of other swarms, and lighted by the collisions of their internal parts, they glow. They are composed of matters solid, liquid, and gaseous. They rotate. Poised in space, the impacts of gathering matters have started them on their axes of motion. The background of the heavens is phosphorescent with the glow of these distant fields of world-stuff. Each is a living picture of that primordial state in which we fancy the matter of the solar system existed when that history of cooling began, which we endeavored to trace to a starting point.

  All of the rest of the world must follow them.

  THE FIRST DAY AFTER SCHOOL LET OUT, AND AFTER COLTER had struck out north in search of all the disappeared things, Mel faltered and slipped back into the woods, searching for the wolves and their pups, who would be between six and eight weeks old. She didn’t tell Wallis where she was going—if he had asked, she would tell him she was going to the school to take care of some
paperwork, and to then maybe take a little hike alone—but he didn’t ask.

  She went past the school and up the ridge above town and then toward the river, toward the place where Colter said he had seen the wolves’ sign. The snow was almost gone, and she watched the sky and listened for the sound of ravens. There was a warm breeze and it felt good to be back among the woods, as if waist-deep amidst an excess of the senses—but she wondered at the uneasy feeling of betrayal in her heart; at the difficulty, the compromise of spirit that would be involved in trying to have both: a life of anchored domesticity, surrounded by one of unfettered wildness.

  She saw ravens drifting in purposeful circles ahead, and began to notice wolf fur caught here and there in the bushes. A red-eyed vireo flew past with a twist of silver fur in its beak: cushioning for its nest. Wolf scats began to litter the trail, scats of meat and bone wrapped in loose deer hair. She heard the growling sounds of the pups and crept to a vantage behind a log, where she could see them in the clearing below.

  Four adults were lying in the sun, basking like dogs: two big gray wolves, two smaller black wolves. She imagined how warm the sun must be on the black wolves’ fur. Their hocks were muddy from where they had been chasing deer. There were six gangly pups—five gray pups, one black—wrestling and tearing at a deer’s hindquarter. Bones lay scattered around them, and the grass was flattened from their games.

  Mel watched as the pups played and fought hard for half an hour—yipping, growling, snarling, and chasing each other around the clearing in manic games of tag—before they suddenly tired and went over to collapse against the adults, where they all then slept in the sun. The wind ruffled their fur and likewise swirled Mel’s hair around her face, carrying her scent away from them. She lay her head down behind the log and napped, also in a patch of sun, saddened without knowing why, and when she awakened and looked out in the clearing, the wolves and the deer leg were gone, though the grass was still flattened.

  She walked home to Wallis. When she got home, she did not enter what she had seen into her journals, nor did she tell Wallis, or anyone, of what she had seen.

  She spent two restless days around the house, snapping at Wallis, considering running as Colter had—running from something, rather than to something—before finally finding some solace in the old garden, which she had not tended in years, and whose soil was rich and black from a decade of fallow compost. She had driven Wallis from the cabin with her surliness—distant toward him, suddenly, certain that he was only using her, that he would abandon her any day to resume life with Old Dudley and Matthew—“Three fucking peas in a pod,” she had shouted as he went up into the mountains with his compass that day—but now she found release in kneeling in the garden and pawing at the black dirt with her bare hands—digging up pink earthworms as thick as her little finger and as muscular as snakes. Robins and hermit thrushes surrounded her as she worked shirtless in the warm sun, the birds chirping in excitement and hopping on the writhing earthworms, so that if anyone had seen her, they might have mistaken her for a saint, of whom animals were unafraid, and to whom they were drawn.

  When she had the garden furrowed and ready for seed later in the afternoon, she lay down in the earth and napped until long shadows crept in from out of the woods and bats flitted overhead in ragged pursuit of insects. She awoke craving vegetables, but meat was all there was, and she went down to the smokehouse to select a venison ham to fix for supper, and told herself to remember to apologize to Wallis for being so rude. She felt fairly certain that the soil had absorbed her venom—that the toxins had drained from her, had leaked into the soil like something spilled—but she was mildly troubled by the sensation that, as she’d napped, the earth had carried her farther along toward some destination, and she was not altogether comfortable in not knowing where or what that destination might be.

  Mel’s fears faded when Wallis returned home. They had a candlelight dinner, and wine, and made up. The distance before them lengthened once more—stretched back toward infinity.

  Throughout the valley, people—mostly women—were planting, and with a wild zeal, a purity of passion, unlike that of any gardeners Wallis had ever seen.

  The tender plants—peas, tomatoes—were started indoors from seed on windowsills or in small greenhouses. No one had ever gotten a tomato to turn red in the valley, but still they tried, every year—the northern limit of successful tomato growing lay about forty miles to the south, like the strand line of rich sea-wrack—and all they ever ended up with were little testicle-sized clusters of green fruits, with a subtle failure of temperature and sunlight always conspiring to fall a few days short of redness. Occasionally one of the tomatoes would blush with a few sundial streaks of pink, or would fade to some metallic noncolor in a strange band of the spectrum between green and red—and such a fruit would be hailed as a champion and displayed at the bar—though when they cut into it and ate it, it still tasted like shit. “Next year,” they would say, “maybe next year it will be warmer,” and they would purchase canned tomatoes, or one of them might drive to a distant valley and purchase several bushels of tomatoes—marveling at the excess, the bounty, elsewhere—and bring them back for canning.

  The rest of the crops, however, they planted with a recklessness, secure in the knowledge that those crops would flourish. Root crops, warm beneath the skin of the earth and growing even through the light summer frosts, did best: carrots, potatoes, radishes. Lettuce did well, for a brief period in July, and they planted vast amounts of it, and ate as much as they could during that time.

  They traded seeds, and gathered wildflower seeds to plant around the borders of their gardens and walkways: bear grass, lupine, paintbrush, phlox. The blossoms seared their winter-tired retinas, charged their souls, with a higher voltage that allowed them to live more fully and deeply. The blossoms also attracted the jeweled hummingbirds—glittering colors they had not seen in a year—and now the transformation seemed complete. The shimmering indigo on the head of a mallard drake. The ruby eyes of a loon. The pollen yellow chest of a tanager.

  Mind In Matter

  The Interpretation of Nature

  Two little round seeds lie on the table before me. They seem to be exactly alike in every respect; but they came from two different packages, and were labeled by different names. What is there about them which makes them different? I plant the two seeds, and one grows to a stout “mustard tree,” and the other to a field turnip. Assuredly, with this difference of outcome, there was an original, fundamental, internal difference in their natures.

  The ova of two animals—say the elephant and the rhinoceros—are both simple nucleated cells. To the unaided eye, no difference is discoverable. Subject them to chemical analysis, and they are found composed of the same elements combined in the same way. Treat them with reagents and put them under the compound microscope, and nothing is seen in one which does not appear in the other. Materially they are the same. But one develops, out of itself, the embryo of an elephant, and the other, out of itself, the embryo of a rhinoceros.

  On these two different embryonic foundations the two different animals in their completeness are built up. With no difference in the matter, there nonetheless existed in the two germs a profound difference in nature and destiny. Beyond anything scrutable existed something inscrutable. That which was not matter gave to matter a destination from which it could not swerve.

  A human organism with all its parts perfect and all its parts in harmonious action is a splendid mechanism which can never cease to awaken admiration and wonder. But while we contemplate it alas, its activities cease. A powerful current of electricity has passed through the frame, and life is extinct. The change which we witness is appalling. The eye has lost its light; the voice gives forth no more intelligence; the muscles cease to grasp the implement; the fabric of a man now lies prone, motionless, speechless, insensible, dead—a stupendous and total change. But what is changed? Not the mechanism. The heart is still in its place, with all its valv
es; the brain shows no lesion; the muscles are all ready to act. Every part remains as it was in life. Neither chemistry nor the microscope detects, as yet, a material change. But something has gone out of the mechanism, for it is not as it was—something inscrutable, but yet something which ruled the mechanism—sustaining its action, lighting the eye, giving information to the tongue, making of this machinery absolutely all that which led us to say, “Here is a man.” The man has gone out and left only his silent workshop behind.

  Consider the life powers in action. The organism is in process of growth. A common fund of assimilative material is provided by the digestive organs. Out of this, atom by atom is selected and built into the various tissue fabrics. Here such atoms are selected as the formation of bone requires; there, the atoms suited for nerve or brain structure; in another place, the material of which muscles are made. Nice selection of material is indispensable.

  Then notice the building of the bones. In one place the framework is so laid that the filling up will result in a flat bone. It is to be a shoulder blade, or a portion of the skull. In another place the framework is elongated; it is to be a long bone. Every bone is constructed for its place and its function. The whole system of bones, moreover, is conformed to a definite fundamental plan of structure—it is according to the plan of a vertebrate.