Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Selection of appropriate material is an act of intelligence. The determination of one form of structure rather than another implies discriminating intelligence and executive will! The conformation of the total system to an ideal plan implies first a conception of the plan. Certainly, we must say that here mind is at work. But is it the mind of the animal or plant? Every person can answer for himself whether he made his own bones. The question is absurd. Is the mind evinced possessed by the matter? Do these atoms and molecules move and arrange themselves by an intelligence and choice of their own? Do they intelligently maintain the processes of digestion, blood purification, assimilation, and tissue building? How do they conceive, think, and will without brain? How select without eyes or hands? But, it is conceivable, you say.

  There is intelligence acting in the organism, which does not belong to the matter or the individual; whose intelligence is it? Intelligence is an attribute; it belongs to being; it does not act abstracted from being. What being then, acts in the living organism?

  You say you will admit that the earth exerts an active power through a medium. What ground have you to claim that any active power is possessed by the earth? Have you ever known a stone or a stick or a chunk of ice to exert any active agency—except this hypothetical agency of attraction? You think you have often seen matter put forth activities of its own; but really you have only seen activities exerted in connection with matter—just as you observe selection and choice in the working organism. Now in reality, all you know about the origin of efficient power is given you in your own consciousness when you exert power; and what you infer from analogy when power seems to be exerted by other persons. That is, you only know that efficiency originates in will—your own will; and when you see efficiency exerted anywhere, you can only affirm that some will is acting.

  Now, are you prepared to ascribe such will to the earth, to stones and mud and chunks of ice, when the so-called attraction seems to be exerted by them? This is the same question which has settled itself in the negative. The downward pull on the apple comes, then, from some other source. This is the other alternative. It means that power is exerted on the apple, and on all things, causing them to tend together in a certain fashion which we call the law of gravitation. Now, power is an attribute. It belongs to something; as it proceeds from will, power and will together are attributes of being. Manifestly, that being is omnipresent, for attraction is omnipresent. It is the Omnipresent Being. We can achieve this power.

  Glance next at the prevalence of patterns and plans in the world. There is the plan of vertebrate structure; I have often made mention of it. In the modification of the plan for beings so diverse, it is wonderful that a simple conception should persist through all the ages of vertebrate history. It is an imperishable thought. The Articulates present us another plan persistent for even a longer period. The earth grew and attained completeness according to a method.

  Out of the infinite storehouse of possible plans under which the Supreme Power might have proceeded in the origination of things, he has chosen the method which we call evolution. This is a divine choice. This sets forth a divine and eternal thought. This embraces the world, the heavens, the universe, and everywhere proclaims the Mind which instituted it. This great all-embracing, all-enduring fact inspires our souls with awe; it illuminates the dark realm of matter with the sunlight of a divine revelation.

  Nonetheless, we are ourselves amazing, and massive—of utmost significance.

  Be still! Do not say this doctrine displaces the doctrine of divine creation; for it proclaims a perpetual creation according to an intelligible, God-chosen method. Do not say that in recognizing the “reign of law” we displace personal divine agency; for the first principle in an intelligent divine government must be order, regularity, uniformity.

  Do not say on the other hand, that the ascription of world-regulating law to a personal Will is the delivery of the world to the government of caprice. Caprice results only from the absence of mind.

  I must not claim your attention longer. Perhaps I have penned some sentences which might seem difficult; but I hope you will all treasure the truth in these sentences, and ponder over it; then, when a little older, you will be enraptured, as I have been, with the richness and depth and grandeur of the meaning which the divine hand has written in the rocks and in the stars. It is all there, only for us to take.

  The babies of prey were born in the first week of June. The predators had had their babies early—the wolves and coyotes and even the owls birthing in April, and the bears, gentle omnivores for the most part, also crawling up out of the earth in April with their cubs—so that by June, when the rest of the world was born—the deer fawns, the elk and moose calves—the young predators would be ready and waiting for them. Only the caribou, giving birth on the highest, snowiest ridges, were safe; down below, it was carnage.

  Mostly it was the deer fawns that paid the price. For a week or so the woods would echo with their bleats and squeals as the lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves pulled them down and ate them before they were even a day old. The scats of the predators littered the trails, and in those scats could be seen the telltale little black hooves, no larger than a thumbnail—the only thing indigestible about the fawns—and the fawns were to the young predators what the blossoms of color were to the winter-tired humans: a burst of energy that got them over a hump and kept them going.

  It was Artie who discovered that Amy was pregnant. She had lost her taste for alcohol of any kind, for the time being, and now that the warmer weather had returned, it could be seen that she had gained some weight. Everyone else thought she was just looking a little heavier, but Artie understood and, when they were alone in the bar one afternoon, had the nerve to ask. He asked shyly, as if she herself might not yet be aware of her condition, and she smiled, relieved that her secret was over, and said that yes, she was in her sixth month.

  Artie counted backward, started to ask “Who?” now that the initial breach of intimacy had occurred, but when he settled on New Year’s, he raised his eyebrows but said nothing, unwilling to utter the name, and Amy nodded, with a strange mix of embarrassment and pride.

  What she did not tell Artie, but told the women in the valley (telling it to them when Mel was not around), was what a miraculous conception it had been: that they had not been coupled, and that although they had both been undressed, Old Dudley had been standing a good six feet away from her when he had gone off. It was almost like a spray, she said, and only a little bit had gotten on her. He had gone off just looking at her, she said.

  “Are you sure?” they asked.

  “I’m certain,” she said. She lifted her shirt and let them feel her stomach.

  It had been over a year since a baby had been born in the valley. The women smiled, then laughed. “I thought his seed was bad,” Charlie’s wife, Linda, said.

  A woman named Jeanette had had three husbands in her life. “Maybe it has turned good in his old age,” she said.

  “Old pine trees start producing excessive seed crops in the last year or two before they die, or when they’re injured,” Helen said. “It’s nature’s way.”

  “We probably shouldn’t tell Mel,” one woman said. “It’ll just upset her.”

  “She has to know sometime,” Helen said. “Does Old Dudley know?”

  Amy shook her head, and her face fell. “And no way is he going to believe it,” she said.

  “Not to worry,” said Linda. “They can do tests, and stuff like that, now.”

  “Can you imagine,” said Jeanette. “You’ve got a little heir in there.”

  Amy frowned, then started to cry. “I just want him to love me,” she said. The other women fell around her with support. Helen went outside to smoke a cigarette. “Good luck, honey,” she said, on her way out the door. She stood there in solitude for a long time, curious about the terror she felt—like a chasm opening below her—and she was mesmerized by both the beauty of the scene before her and the dread welling stra
ngely within her, total and absolute.

  She forced herself to stay calm. She finished her cigarette; coughed twice. A taste of blood—more than usual. Another little vessel rupturing in her throat. She massaged it lightly.

  She went back into the bar to gather her sweater and say good-bye. She coughed once more, by accident, and sent a projectile of blood, a spray of it, across the room. The mist of it settled on the wall as if sprayed from an aerosol can of paint. The other women stared at her in horror, and then sorrow. Helen sneezed another spray across the room. Someone handed her a scarf, but then she leaned forward and vomited a bright red half-pint of blood into an empty beer mug.

  They carried her across the street to her store. They took her upstairs, built a fire in the stove, and took turns sitting with her.

  In the morning she was better. The little fissures and ruptures in her throat and lungs sealed off tenuously.

  Linda helped her downstairs to open the store and start the day. Helen lit another cigarette. The road was open, but Helen chose not to go see a doctor. “I’m seventy-eight,” she told Linda. The blue smoke filling her lungs. “I hope it goes fast,” she said. “I would like to see my boy. And I would like to see that baby.”

  Venus, still bright in the morning sky. “I hope it doesn’t hurt,” she said.

  The year’s first lost tourists filtered in one weekend, in their bright clothing and their shiny rental cars. They usually came as young couples, just married or recently engaged. Something about the blank spot on the map drew them, made them want to see what was up in that corner of the world: as if that blank spot were the closest they could come to seeing into the future. They never came to backpack—the dense, brambly jungle was alien to their learned patterns of recreation. But they would stand and gaze at the rushing river and at the distant mountains for hours. Sometimes they would set up a tent by the side of the river a mile or two outside of town, and in the evenings after making a little fire on which to cook, they would extinguish their fire—blue smoke hissing as it filtered upward through the old cedars and green cottonwoods—and they would walk hand in hand down the road to town, where they would enter the bar shyly and spend the evening sipping beer or something stronger and listening to Artie’s wonderful bullshit.

  Later, further into darkness, they might sit on the porch—surprised by the night’s coldness—to look at one of the comets that seemed to always be circling overhead, and to listen to the trilling of the frogs.

  They would visit the cemetery; would lean against the wrought-iron fence, resting their hands on the stone wall, and would stare at the graves—some old, some new—and would feel the gulf of knowledge that lay between them and this place: all those buried lives of which they would never know anything; and so much peace overhead, like the weight of night itself. The hooting of owls; the river’s roar. The howls of the wolves.

  They might step back into the bar for one more nightcap, but then they would walk up the road to their tent, where they would build a new fire and sit by it, watching the stars and talking quietly about the future.

  Later in the night, chilled, they would crawl into their sleeping bags and hold each other, more certain than ever that the fit of one to the other was nothing less than a miracle, and they would fall asleep to the lull of the river’s steady thunder.

  They might stay another day or two, taking short walks up and down the river, and going back to the bar each evening for drinks. They would buy a few items from Helen’s store—lingering, as if stunned by the peace of things, the lack of confusion they felt, which was so prevalent wherever they had come from. In the bar, they were impeccably polite—aware somehow, strangely, of an inner softness; they were now acutely conscious of it, being in the company of those so hardened and integral to a place.

  With their subdued, respectful manners and their quiet absorption with each other, they were no bother, really. Sometimes they stared a bit too much, but beyond that, they altered nothing, interrupted little. They usually came on weekends, so that it was possible for the shyer hermits to avoid coming to town then.

  The pilgrims came with respect. The land lured it out of them, from the first moment they crossed over the summit and stared down at the green valley below.

  Joshua was working on Helen’s coffin, working on it diligently and with her blessing. She and Mel hiked over there one afternoon. Helen had tired after only the first ridge, so that Mel had had to carry her in her arms the rest of the way—amazed at how light Helen had grown—and when they came over the last ridge, they could hear the hammering and sawing and drilling and sanding. As they drew closer they could see Joshua standing at the side of his creation with fresh-cut wood shavings piled around his feet, bright in the sunlight.

  Helen wanted a bird. She had vacillated between a golden eagle and a raven, believing the former to be more beautiful, but the latter wiser, and had finally chosen the raven: not so much for its wisdom, but for all the various voices it possessed. She still believed that Matthew might be returning to the valley someday, and the way she imagined it, if she chose to be buried in a raven, then every time that he heard a raven caw, croak, or purr, he would be reminded of her, and might remember how she had loved him, and how she would always love him.

  The women admired the craftsmanship. They ran their hands over it. For eyes, the bird would use two black river stones. It was still rough-cut, unfinished—not yet recognizable as a raven—but the wood was beautiful, and they ran their hands over it again and again, and breathed in its scent.

  “It may take me all summer,” Joshua cautioned.

  “Oh, I’m good for it,” Helen said. “No way I’m leaving til Matthew comes back.” But even as she spoke, another vessel pulled loose in her throat, and once more bright blood leapt from her mouth—a clenching in her lungs—and Joshua and Mel waited as she turned away and dabbed at her chin with a handkerchief. They stared at the spatter of it on the ground. Helen turned back to face them, embarrassed.

  “Dry, this year,” Joshua said. “Could be fires, by August.”

  “I don’t have a spot picked out yet,” Helen said. “Maybe Matthew can help me pick one out when he comes back. Some place close to town, along the river.”

  She turned to watch it flowing past Joshua’s house. His black stallion was standing in the shade of a tree at water’s edge. Helen was struck hard and sudden by the eerie thought that there was something she had forgotten to do.

  “I’d better get back to work,” Joshua said. “If I’m going to finish.”

  Mel and Helen stepped back into the shade and watched Joshua work for a while; then Mel picked Helen up and carried her back up the ridge and through the woods.

  “What do you want?” Helen asked, as they passed the cemetery.

  “I haven’t thought about it yet,” Mel said.

  By mid-June, when all the flowers were blooming, it was impossible to measure anyone’s happiness. People laughed out loud at any moment. The sound of Amy’s singing carried through the woods at all hours—hymns, mostly—and in her garden, Mel found herself humming. She wanted Wallis to stay, but had decided that even if he left, she was going to stay happy this time—in this new, second life. That she would chase nothing.

  She could not work in the garden long enough. Because no rain fell now, the garden needed watering in the mornings as well as evenings, and she and Wallis hauled bucket after bucket of cold creek water. The days kept expanding as the solstice approached, so that it seemed there could be very little darkness in the world anywhere. They enjoyed making love in the garden, in the evenings, in the black soil before any plants came up, and anyplace else where they found intense patches of sunlight: the simple light so sensual, so arousing, after so much deprivation, that it was as if they could not help themselves, nor did they wish to.

  The stones in the rock wall absorbed the day’s heat and held it far into the evening, so that sometimes after loving, they would not dress but would move in closer to the rock wall and
press themselves against it as if against a warm stove, while the rest of the forest cooled slowly and the wind stirred in the treetops. Wallis wondered if there was something about the valley, the landscape of it, that summoned the physical act of love.

  On the solstice they went camping. They hiked into the high country, into a stony basin, and camped below a cirque by the edge of a small lake. The twin humps of Roderick Buttes descended from the skyline above them like steps in a staircase, and that night they watched as the sun settled slowly toward the horizon, following the silhouette of the mountain, perfectly tracing the outline of Roderick Buttes with a corona of fiery gold light—refusing to set, skimming the earth perfectly—and it was impossible to watch its passage without believing that, through the millennia, the sun had cut and etched as if with a laser that outline against the sky: that those humps against the sky were the pattern of the sun’s desire.

  Finally the sun reached the end of the buttes and now it descended below the earth, and the alpenglow cooled slowly from the high country, though they could still feel the sun’s warmth below them.

  The lake was still frozen with milky ice. A pair of ducks whistled overhead, flying fast and hard into the gathering stars. The country smelled different up high: sprucier, colder. Mel ran her hands over the smooth white limestone on which they were sitting. She rubbed her finger on the embedded fossils of crinoids and brachiopods. A band of mountain goats, white as cotton, had been standing motionless on the icy ridge above them, and now, as darkness fell, they began walking across a stretch of stony cliff.