Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

“He’ll say you’re being selfish,” Mel said. “He’ll say you’re being a hypocrite.”

  Wallis laughed. “He’ll say worse things than that.”

  “Yes, he will.”

  Because he could not bear to destroy the map, he hid it in the basement: rolled it up and placed it in a cedar chest to show his daughter or son, forty or fifty years distant, perhaps. It took all the resolve he could summon to separate himself from it.

  He rolled the hide within a decoy of other blank hides and furs, locked the chest, moved it into a corner, piled empty cardboard boxes over it, then placed a shelf of canned goods in front of it.

  He imagined the cabin crumbling in a hundred years or more; imagined the basement filling with sediment and the forest growing in across the spot, swallowing the map in that cedar chest. He thought how strange it was that he could accept the notion of it rotting, but that he couldn’t burn it, even though the two processes were basically the same, and only a matter of time’s scale: that rotting was nothing but a very slow burning.

  Helen selected her tree. It was the one she had known she would select all along, one she had walked down to visit the first day she had got it in her mind that she needed to be making such a decision—a great cottonwood, towering above the aspen at the edge of a marsh behind her house.

  She kept looking for others, but that was the one against which she had measured all the others in her searching, and the time had come for her to be grateful for that one rather than to squander any more time or energy wishing for something beyond it.

  She now spent time in the tree’s company, and was increasingly glad she had chosen it. It was a short walk from her cabin. She could walk down there at any time of day and nap in the green grass beneath its broad lattices of shade, breathing the punky moldering scent from the leaves of years past. It had been such a dry year that the marsh was a scorched field of umber sedge and sawgrass, possessing no mosquitoes, in mid-August, so that she was able to sleep peacefully, and it seemed to her as she slept that she was beginning to understand some things about her tree.

  Occasionally when she woke there would be the impression that she heard the sound of voices: voices that had fallen silent just as her eyes fluttered open, so that it was more the sharp edge or echo of their silence than the sound itself that had awakened her.

  Often they would be the voices of people she had known but who were now dead—her mother, father, aunts, brothers, sisters, usually—and other times she woke thinking of men she had loved long ago with a clarity and longing she had not known in many years, and she would feel both hopeful and refreshed.

  She lay on her stomach in the cool grass, face turned to one side, a trickle of drool falling from the corner of her mouth, saliva sometimes flecked with blood, but feeling only comfort and peace. The day’s currents of heated air moved just above her as if searching for her; but she kept sleeping, down in the cool grass, as if already buried.

  In her sleep she could smell the fresh-peeled bark of young cottonwoods, trees scribed and even toppled by the toothy workings of beavers. It was a syrupy odor, like sassafras, clean and sharp to the nostrils, the palate, the mind. She heard from a farther distance the barely audible sounds of axes ringing and saws buzzing as people began to go about the business of gathering firewood in earnest; and these steady, lulling sounds reassured her. There were certain things in which economy was grace, but the gathering of firewood was not one of them. It was one of the rare things for which excess was best.

  Sleeping beneath her tree was the only peace left to her. All other waking moments were dominated by an awareness of the rudeness with which her body was betraying her, with farts and whistles and other leakages escaping from her without warning or control: imbalances, rumblings, intestinal flutings; lungy gags and mutters, even in the midst of the once-simple act of breathing. The heart’s riddled erratica: she had had enough. No rhythms remained in her possession. She belonged to the stars already.

  Things began to move fast for her now. As one thing fell away, it carried with it ten other things: plunging. The townspeople had been honoring her struggle, yet now that she had chosen her tree, they couldn’t help but feel some small sense of betrayal. How could the valley still be the valley without Helen? What tree could take her place?

  The little green globes of huckleberries blushed pink, then swelled and sugared toward purple, converting sunlight to sparkling sugar, in one of the sun’s last acts of magic before it was lured south in its own migration. The days were dryer than ever, and the heated breezes stirred and circled the valley, bathing and ripening the berries, passing across them like the warm breath of animals.

  People prowled the sunny hillsides with buckets, gathering the berries in great quantities, eating them as they picked, but still managing to fill their buckets. Their hands, arms, and faces were stained purple from eating the berries, as were their clothes from where they had passed through the shrubbery. Birds and bears also moved across the mountains in these same berry fields, browsing and grazing, so that their faces and muzzles, their chests and legs, were purpled, and it made it seem as if they were all of a brother- or sisterhood, in that last part of August. Even the creatures that did not eat the berries had parts of their bodies painted from where they had passed through the berry fields on their way to other comings and goings.

  The larch trees began to burn orange gold, changing at their tips first—the coned crown of the tree turning amber while the needles below remained green, so that in that first week, a forested mountainside looked as if ten million matches had been struck; and then in the days that passed, as the gold coloration crept slowly down the tree, the trees looked like candles with flames that grew longer each day, so that the mountains looked as if they were already burning. The shape and essence of a thing is responsible for the shadow it casts: can a shadow reverse this, and create something real? By what process can a dream become reality? Could a dream of earth create stone, landscape, lives?

  Wallis had no regrets about burying his map. As the animals began to stir and consider leaving the mountains, preparing for the journey south, he felt that the life that was leaving the landscape was somehow finding its way into his heart. And he felt as if Mel were holding his heart; holding it with great care, soothing it. Not even the old buried earth had owned him as she did now.

  A mother, he thought, and then almost as if in indulgence—a father. Such new land, so close—so imminently touchable.

  Amy visited often. She and Mel canned jam together at the cabin: stoked the fire up for boiling water with which to sterilize the jars, poured in more sugar, then sealed them and set them on the table in the window’s sunlight and waited out on the porch, drenched with sweat, listening to the pop! of each lid flexing as the jam expanded in the jars to form a seal: dozens of jars popping, a percussive chorus of security: food through the winter, bounty carried forward, protection against austerity.

  After each batch of jam had sealed, they would make their way down to the creek and undress and lie in the shallows, hanging their sweat-soaked clothes over the bushes, and would let the creek cool them as a bucket of water cools the horseshoe taken from the blacksmith’s anvil. Nude, Amy looked as big as a horse, lying in the shallows, and both women would watch as the baby within stirred and flexed: moving with such animation, such stretchings, that they could see the tidal rolls of knees and elbows.

  Each night, frosts cut the leaves as if to draw blood, burning them red at the edges and drawing more moisture from the drying land. The wind rubbed the dry tips of branches against other branches, a ceaseless scraping, the friction of which often kindled small flames that burned for a few minutes before petering out. Crystals of quartz up in the high country caught and bent sunlight, focused and magnified it into flame whenever the concentrated light fell upon the proper medium: a patch of duff, a clump of lichen—and these little fires, too, burned bright for a few moments before extinguishing themselves, so that there was now the far scent of sm
oke and wisps of gray thread rising from the forest, so tiny as to look like ropes dropped from heaven.

  Mel held both hands to her still-flat stomach and thought of how much Matthew would have enjoyed this year had he still been living in the valley.

  The garden was producing. Each night she laid light sheets over the plants to protect them from the frost, and in the day she gathered more harvest: peas, carrots, potatoes. She stacked the bushels on the porch and felt for a moment like her father, glorying in the number of barrels of oil a certain well might have brought forth. She touched her hands to her belly again and tried to pooch it out round: tried to imagine it swollen as huge as Amy’s, but couldn’t.

  She sat on the porch barefooted, hot and dusty, and ate a carrot. She could smell the smoke from the little fires, could hear the tiny gnawings of distant axes and saws as villagers continued to gather wood. Wallis was off fishing.

  She decided to go for a walk. Each new time she went into the woods without paper and pen and returned without data—or rather, with secret data held only in her mind, unrecorded to the rest of the world—she felt stronger and fresher, and found that she enjoyed each walk more than the last. It was like seeing the world anew. Twenty years’ data were enough; it was time to rest and to marvel, but not count. Her scientific walks had once been a kind of work; now, her entries into the woods were like a kind of prayer. Many days, early into the autumn, she would find herself so happy while on a walk, or working in her garden, that she would find herself crying.

  One afternoon she came across the carcass of the wolf she’d seen late in the spring with the porcupine quills in its face and muzzle. It had died only recently—it still had all its fur on it, and had not been touched by other animals—only by the indiscriminating lusts of flies, ants, worms, and beetles—and in the heat the wolf had swollen and bloated to twice its normal size, so that it looked like some kind of monster. Mel stopped instinctively when she saw it, believing it at first to be a sleeping white bear.

  Mel approached the dead wolf and its stench with a deep mix of sadness, revulsion, and curiosity. She stopped when she was ten feet away and crouched and studied its swollen, barely recognizable face. A thousand putrescent infections had set in, rendering the flesh pulpy and in that manner finally releasing the barbed quills from the sodden medium in which they had once found firm purchase. Mel could see that the wolf had been blind for some time before his death—perhaps all through the summer.

  As she studied the wolf, she read the signs now, her eyes casting upslope of where the wolf’s final death throes had occurred: the torn-up duff where it had careered down the slope, cartwheeling to its final resting place—black dirt and drying strawberry vines and porcupine quills caught between the wolf’s toes from where it had been digging mindlessly in its agony, building its own grave—and, studying further, she saw too where other wolves had been visiting the quilled wolf in its last days. She read their tracks, and the multitude of their scats—farther up the incline, some castings of old deer bones—and realized that the wolf pack had been tending to the wolf as it died—feeding it, and keeping vigil.

  She remembered now the howls of a week, two weeks, three weeks ago, and was surprised and slightly ashamed that she had not been able to interpret them: that she had been living so totally in another world, with other concerns—so disassociated from that to which she had previously been so deeply attached.

  She squatted there a while longer—“Poor wolf,” she said—and watched the wind stir the woolly underfur of its belly. The hair was beginning to pull loose in clumps. Mel watched the dead wolf a few more moments—as if still not quite understanding it would not at any second get up and walk away—before a thing relaxed inside her, and she understood that it already was getting up and walking away.

  Mel moved closer and touched the wolf’s ear. Another tuft of fur fell free. She put her hand to its muddied chest and wondered, What kind of tree, what spirit and nature of a tree grows out of a dead wolf’s chest?

  She said a prayer for Matthew, and a prayer for the wolf, and turned and went back down the mountain. She came out onto the road below town at dusk, where she saw a figure walking ahead of her. She ran to catch up. It was Wallis, walking home from the river with a stringer of fish. She admired the fish, kissed him. They walked hand in hand home.

  The Dynasty of Fishes

  Devonian and Carboniferous Times

  When the morning of the Devonian Age dawned, a new form was seen moving in the populous sea. It was a vertebrate form. Without a bony skeleton, its cartilaginous framework and general plan embodied a new conception. Among vertebrates its organization was decidedly low. It was not a fish in any ordinary acceptance of the term, though we shall have to call it a fish. There were other vertebrate forms more clearly fishlike, but all widely separated from modern fishes. One could easily distinguish three types of these archaic vertebrates. They are known among us as E-las’-mo-branchs, Plae-o-derms and Gan’-oids. The Elasmobranchs are a group which still survives. They are all sharklike. Cestraeion, the Port Jackson shark, has spines in front of both the dorsal fins; the nostrils unite in the cavity of the mouth, and the upper lip is divided into seven lobes. The teeth along the middle of the mouth are small. External to these are large flat teeth twice as broad as long, arranged in oblique series so as to form a sort of tessellated crushing surface.

  Among the very earliest American fishes were some of these spine-bearing sharks. The spines are flattened, two-edged like a bayonet, and curved as if one had belonged to the right side and the other to the left. Some of them were more than a foot in length. Being two-edged and very sharp, they must have been very powerful weapons. These cestra-cionts were numerous during the Comiferous period. Their smooth brown spines are very often found in the Comiferous limestone of New York, Canada, Ohio, and Michigan. If you wish the name, here it is: Machaeracanthus, or “dagger-spine.”

  Another of the most common and most striking fishes of the same age appears to have been a relative of the modern sturgeons—a family of plated ganoids. Our American geologists have almost buried it under a pile of nomenclature, which they have finished in the following shape: Mae-ro-pet-al-ich’-thys, or “big-plated fish.” These fishes were of large size. The cranium was composed of large polygonal plates, united by double sutures which are nearly concealed by the tubercled enameled surface; the tubercles are stellate; the surface is ornamented by double rows of porea and single thread lines, forming a pattern which does not correspond with the plates below. These large, geometrically formed plates often attract the attention of quarrymen, since they are sometimes fifteen inches in length.

  These relations enable us to contemplate with new interest some of the despised fishes which live in our time. Our sturgeons, garpikes, and sharks are the sparse representatives of those ancient families which once sustained alone the dignity of the vertebrate type. In their forms was first enshrined the conception of the vertebrate plan of structure that was destined to remain on the earth under its various modifications, until man, the thinking and ruling vertebrate, should arrive. In modern times, our familiar bony-scaled garpike haunts the freshened waters of river and lake—the poor degenerate descendant of ancestors which once dominated over the world. Venerable relic of a mighty empire! Were the lineal descendant of Menes or Nebuchadnezzar II to stand before me, the antiquity of his lineage would inspire my interest and veneration, but it would be as yesterday compared with the lineage of this poor garpike.

  Why have these creatures been preserved in existence so long? The march of organic improvement has advanced for thousands of centuries, and left them far in the rear. These forms are misplaced in the modern world. They constitute an anachronism, which is either an absurdity, or a phenomenon too full of meaning for ordinary comprehension.

  The garpike destroys our game fish and our market fish—as he ravaged neighboring kingdoms while he ruled an empire of his own. He tangles and tears the nets of the fishermen, who visit their
execration upon him. His flesh is unpalatable for food. The mud-loving sturgeon, less destructive in his nature, brings no utility into the modern world. The fierce shark, equally unfit for fuel, is the freebooter of the ocean. Other fishes furnish aliment to man. They come from unknown realms to meet man and serve his ends. But these archaic types linger from a time when human wants had as yet no existence, when human food was not demanded. They were never intended for food, since they made food of every other creature. These useless and destructive beings are out of joint with the world and with history. Why are they here?

  Why? They come to import ideas into the modern world. They bring down to us living illustrations of faunas passed away. The plates of Cephalaspis and the spines of Machaeracanthus quarried from the rock might pique our curiosity and distress us by their mystery, but they would not instruct. It was intended that the intelligence of the being which always stood as the finality of organic improvement should grasp the conception of the world and reproduce the grand history of departed cycles. Why? It was an act of beneficence which saved these relics of ancient dynasty from total destruction. There was purpose, not accident, in the failure of their complete extinction, and the assignment of the world exclusively to more modern creatures. These freaks are precious examples preserved in a museum. These are caskets filled with documents from an olden time. The garpike and the sturgeon and the shark are missionaries from the past to the present. Hear them. They are preaching to man’s intelligence. They are unfolding the plans of Infinite Wisdom. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

  Nothing exists but for the benefit of Man. Beauty is for us alone.

  One day the geese got up from the river and left. There was an excitement in their leaving, all through the day; but that night there was a loneliness, and people gathered at the bar to shore one another up, and to make brave jokes about the coming winter. It was the finest time of year—the days suspended in hazy gold light, the daytime temperatures mild, the nights starry and crisp—the leaves turning color, the scent of wood smoke pleasing in the air, and the cabinets in all homes filling with bounty—but for those who had lived through it in the past—this sweetest time of year—it was burnished with the knowledge, the forethought, of its brevity, and of the coming price to be paid yet again. The departure of the geese was the first indicator of that marker coming due.