The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  For years, Father made trips to the cities, long trips on bad roads. He’d be gone two and three days at a time. Those days added up. We cannot get them back. Mother cannot get them back, nor can Omar or I. They are gone, like a leaf or a feather carried along on a river.

  ***

  The Catfish Man owned four acres on the hot glaring chalky outskirts of San Antonio. Father had to drive right past there on the way to his meetings in San Antonio. The Catfish Man lived alone, having fled his wife and six children in Louisiana. He had the look of an outlaw to him, always stubble-bearded and wild-haired, but Father said that he did not have the moral energy to even be an outlaw, that he was just lazy, was all.

  The Catfish Man had been drilling a water well not long after he bought his four acres, intending to start a roadside auto junkyard, but struck an artesian well before he’d drilled thirty feet. The force of it blew the drillstem back out of the hole and toppled the jack-mounted truck doing the drilling.

  The water flowed and flowed, for a couple years—sheets of it streaming across the caliche, most of it evaporating in the hundred-degree alkaline heat, forming as thunderclouds above, then, and drifting south in that form, heading out to the ocean, where it would finally end up watering the one thing that didn’t need more water, the ocean.

  It was theft.

  People heard about the well and came out on weekends to bathe on the bare white rocks across which it gushed, and to wash their cars on Sundays—driving out onto the rocks and getting out in the ankle-deep flow and lathering their cars up with soap, then tossing buckets of that frigid, centuries-old miracle water onto the hoods and roofs and doors of their cars, washing the suds away, and then waxing and polishing their cars until they were bright gleaming dots of color, out there on the rocks, orange and yellow and green and blue and red...

  The Catfish Man charged people fifty cents a day to come swim (or drive) in his spring. And it was his spring, for Texas still has the antiquated “rule of capture” law: however much water you can corral, from whatever source, belongs to you and no one else.

  This, too, was one of the things Father was working to change in all those many long, useless meetings... drawing up map after map and proposing statewide water conservation plans.

  Part of me wants that time back. Part of me feels robbed, as if that time were taken from me every bit as much as the water was taken from the country. But I understand too that he would not have been Father if he had not taken all those long, quixotic trips; he would have been someone else—some species more plain and brown—more common.

  In time the Catfish Man stirred from his lethargy and developed his public-bathing-and-car-washing facilities into something that would gain him an agricultural exemption: a catfish farm. With investment capital from one of the county commissioners himself, he excavated huge pits in the limestone and opened up the well by drilling a thirty-inch hole into the aquifer and channeling it through limestone tanks where the swarms of catfish seethed. He fed the catfish dried cow manure and rotten corn by the dumptruck load, and in the cool water, the catfish prospered. When each tank filled in with shit and sediment, the Catfish Man would simply excavate a new pit, and divert the well’s flow into that one.

  Father calculated that the Catfish Man used enough water from the aquifer to meet the daily water need of 250,000 people.

  Father stopped by there every time he passed. He said that there was an instant chemical dislike between the two of them—very rare for Father—but that the Catfish Man seemed to enjoy that, seemed to require an enemy, or a witness—a judge before which his actions could achieve full significance. With great glee the Catfish Man would allow Father to measure the vertical head and pressure coming out of that thirty-inch cavern, the holy river escaping. Father mapped the gradual decline of the hill country’s largest artesian well for twelve years before anyone believed him. He mapped other artesian wells’ declines, too, but it was this one, the Catfish Man’s, where they finally, in the early 1970s, admitted that Father was right. But because of the politically untouchable “rule of capture,” they claimed there was nothing they could do.

  It was in that thirteenth year of Father’s mapping—the year they finally believed—that even the Catfish Man’s well ran dry. The Catfish Man died of a heart attack the year after that, and Father bought the four acres and welded a steel plate over that wound in the earth. He filled in the catfish pits with brush, burned the brush, and planted wildflowers. He was an old man when he did this, shaky with the loss of all that had been taken from him, and now every spring as the new county commissioners drive to work they look up the hillside at the burgeoning field of wildflowers, all the colors in nature—the field surrounded by the sprawl of trailer homes—and surely, one would think, this new generation of commissioners gets the message, that it is all hooked together, that it is all inseparable. They are, of course, too timid to act on it, but perhaps the next generation will.

  ***

  Omar doesn’t have any children, either. I suppose the land is all we will leave behind. In that way it is both our parents and our children.

  The land grows flowers for me to lay at the feet of Mother’s grave, there under the big tree. I cut the flowers with scissors and carry them up there, but I am just a medium, a conduit, for that flow. It is really the land that is doing it.’

  Unassailable. It is a gradual kind of strengthening.

  ***

  I have not spoken enough of my younger days, my growing-up days. The first few years right after we planted her. I was in the river at least as much as I was on the land, that first year. Shuffling in the cool water, feeling crawdads and minnows scoot across the tops of my bare feet. Picking up small pebbles with my toes, lifting them up with my feet to study them in the sunlight. Stories of gold nuggets, though I never found any.

  Is it odd to picnic at one’s mother’s grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with her in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?

  I remember one of the last things Mother said to us, one of the very last things. In my mind, it has become the last thing, and maybe it was.

  She was lying on the cedar frame bed in the back bedroom in the early summer, with the bed moved over right against the window. The window was open to let the breeze and birdsong and sunlight in, the light rushing in through the lace curtains. She had lost a lot of weight and had had a hard time, but was never more beautiful in the way that there can be nothing more beautiful than dignity.

  “I’ve seen a lot,” she said, and smiled, and it was not an act for us, it was not a thing said for our benefit. She was just saying it, and smiling. She was just brave, was all.

  ***

  We went to the ocean once—to Padre Island, way south, down near Brownsville. We drove right out on the beach in Chubb’s black Cadillac. There was no one else around. We built a fire and set up a tent. We thought we understood about tides, could see the high-water mark of the driftwood, but that was just last week’s driftwood. It was a full moon, and that night while we were around the campfire, listening to the coyotes and looking up at the moon, Chubb looked out at the dark shiny vastness of the water and said, “I believe that ocean is coming closer.”

  Grandfather said, “Aww, bullshit,” but the rest of us had the feeling—though we’d never been to the ocean before—that Chubb was right, and we looked at the driftwood line again. Father got up, trying to be casual about it, and sauntered down to get another piece of driftwood for the fire, but when he came back he seemed a little rushed, and he said, “That water’s gotten a lot closer.”

  “Bullshit,” Grandfather said, and lit a cigar: took deep, satisfied puffs, leaned his head back, and aimed his cigar-clouds at the moon. But we could hear the waves. Even Omar and I understood we weren�
��t in river country anymore, and that the rules had changed: that in fact, there might not be any rules, down in this strange and terrible flat land.

  We could feel the ocean—could feel the waves coming closer. It was not a good feeling to be sitting there in the dark, not knowing how much nearer the ocean was going to come, but knowing in our children’s hearts—and I think Mother and Father and Chubb knew this, too—that it was certainly at least going to come over and through the spot where we were sitting.

  “Pop, do you think we ought to move the car back a little?” Mother asked. “Just to be safe? It wouldn’t hurt anything.”

  Even Grandfather had to admit by this point that it was an exceptionally high tide. It began to lick at the lowermost edges of the driftwood piles.

  “Never show weakness before an enemy,” he growled. “Stand your ground. It’ll be all right.”

  Mother looked at him for a long moment and then stood up and began taking the tent down. If it had been Chubb or Father doing that, Grandfather would have barked them back down into submission, I think, but it was his daughter, and he said nothing.

  Like zombies, the rest of us sat there in line, five monkeys on a log, and watched the white curl of foam come sweeping in under our feet, making the fire hiss and sputter, then sliding out again, carrying small pieces of our fire with it, back to the strange and ominous moonlit life source of the ocean’s maw. We did not understand it, and we had the undeniable feeling that it did not care whether we did or not.

  “Stand your ground,” Grandfather coached us. He lit another cigar. Behind us, I could hear Mother cursing as she moved the tent and sleeping bags to higher ground. The moon was bright on the beach, had everything lit in a deep kind of whiteness, except for the total shimmering blackness of the ocean. It seemed a thousand feet deep, not a stone’s throw away.

  “Stand your ground,” Grandfather said again, a mantra, as the water came back. I imagined that coming in with it were stingrays and jellyfish and sharks, and that they were all coming for us, tasty mountain-bait sitting like frightened rabbits in the moonlight on a log.

  This time the water crashed into our fire, swept past us at ankle depth. We jumped up, yelling, as hissing pieces of the fire scattered and swirled among us, and as the ocean receded, it carried the log we’d been sitting on (a huge one) a short distance back toward its center. The retreating tide sucked the sand out from beneath our bare feet.

  Grandfather looked down at his wet ankles as if the rules of physics, and his family, and the very earth itself had betrayed him. But I think even he believed that the ocean was after him, at that point—and out in the moonlight, the waves’ thunder seemed to grow louder, and the waves seemed to double in size, as if emboldened by the taste of the salt-sweat from our legs.

  Father was in the car, turning the spray-drenched engine over, trying to get it to start—finally it caught—and he threw it in reverse and tried to back out ahead of the next tide-sweep, but the car was stuck, the sand having been washed out from under the tires, and Chubb and Grandfather ran to the front of the car to help push it away from the hungry ocean just as the next waves hit, knee-high this time, and Omar and I were pushing, too, half pushing and half just hanging on, frightened by the waves behind us, and by the car’s oily sputterings and roaring in front of us—hot sulfury steam in our faces as we leaned in against the radiator and pushed—and Mother came charging down into the backwash and helped push too. Wet sand churned straight up like a geyser, and we groaned and cursed and pushed like, I suppose, giving birth—our cheeks turned sideways and our teeth gritted and neck muscles strained tight as cables—and finally, as the next waves came in behind us, we got the car moving with the force of fear as much as strength, and as if wrestling some great anguished draft horse out of the mud, we got the car going, got it up into the dunes, but still Father kept driving. He kept the car in reverse and backed another three hundred yards into the dunes.

  We gathered our sleeping bags and gear and followed him, like nomads, out into the brush. We walked in a procession, dragging our sleeping bags, the moon shining bright on our backs. Grandfather came last. We lay our sleeping bags out willy-nilly, as if having fallen from the stars, and didn’t even bother setting up the tent. From a distance, the surf sounded gently reassuring, but still our hearts pounded in wet ocean-fear, and our legs tingled from where the ocean had caressed and then seized them, and the last thing Chubb said before we all fell asleep was, “Hey Frank, do you want me to sleep up on the top of the car tonight and keep a lookout?”

  ***

  In the morning we awoke to a pink sunrise. We fixed breakfast and then went down to the beach. The ocean seemed very far away, and was almost flat. It almost seemed like our friend again. We wore straw hats and walked on the beach all day, picking up shells. I wanted to see flamingos, but Father and Grandfather cursed bitterly and said they’d almost all been killed so that their feathers could be put in women’s hats, which made me feel somewhat bad in general for being a girl—a kind of strange, hurt hopelessness—it wasn’t me!—but then Father put his hand on my back and reminded Grandfather that it had been men doing the killing, and Grandfather looked off at the ocean in the direction of Florida, and seemed embarrassed, even ashamed. Mother and Omar caught up with us and we walked together until we came to a tidal inlet where gulls and terns were splashing in the shallows, feeding on crabs and small fish. Their wings were filled with light, and we sat and watched for an hour, the six of us. A flock of thirty sandhill cranes flew over us, as big as bombers, wings flapping slowly, necks and legs outstretched, flying as if they were swimming through the sky, and a few of them uttered their great sonorous croaks as they spotted us below. Mother reached out and took my hand and squeezed it.

  I’d hate to have to choose what the single most beautiful thing I’ve seen is.

  ***

  We napped in our tent, sweetly feverish, mildly delirious. In the winter-short evening we cooked venison steaks on another driftwood fire, watching the ocean somewhat warily. Omar and I flew a kite after supper until dark while the grown-ups watched. There was a warm southwest wind blowing right before dark and I know what I did then was evil and trashy, but it was just a balsa-wood-and-paper kite. I took it from Omar’s hands and released it—he started to cry—but when he heard the grown-ups sitting on the log cheer the kite as it went far out to sea, he stopped crying and began to laugh.

  That night we stepped in the calm sea with kerosene lanterns and gigs, looking for flounder, all six of us strung out and wading with the lanterns whose light floated just above the water. We moved slowly, each of us away from all the others, searching intently, and from the beach it must have looked as if we were fireflies. Grandfather had cautioned us repeatedly about not mistaking, under the lantern’s glow, the shadow of our own foot for a flounder.

  Omar got the first one; he held it up, thrashing on the end of his gig, and whooped. Mother got the second one. The flounders must have known something was up, after that, because for a long time we didn’t see any, but it didn’t matter: we saw all kinds of little ghost crabs and minnows and mullet and skates passing beneath the light of our lanterns, little creatures going in and out with the tide, and best of all were the schools of shrimp, whose eyes glowed fiery red in the lights from our lanterns—devil shrimp!—and whose bodies absorbed that bright light. Glowing as they leapt through the waves, the shrimp were as luminous as ghosts, as they took our lantern light with them.

  Father caught a flounder, finally, and Chubb caught a big one, and that was enough for breakfast. Father called for us all to head in, and we waded back to shore, our lights converging as one.

  We stayed on the beach for four days. I think it was in February. Sometimes in the day we’d go off into the Laguna Madre, just exploring—a vast salt flat, perfectly horizontal, dotted with a few saltbush and creosote plants. We’d see a jackrabbit with his great ears sticking up, not forty yards away, and in the heat-shimmer and salt haze we couldn’
t get a fix on perspective—there was nothing around that was taller than us, and not a shadow anywhere—and we’d become convinced in that shimmer that we were seeing a large deer, a buck with antlers, about five hundred yards away. We’d set out after the deer, wondering why a deer would have antlers in winter, and we would be almost upon the rabbit before he came to his senses and bolted into zig-zag flight, coming so suddenly into focus—rabbit—that our bodies, our minds, were deceived further, and it seemed for a moment not as if it had been a mistake on our part, but as if there had been a magic trick: as if the earth itself, that strange salt country, had changed a deer into a rabbit in the blink of an eye.

  At the end I was glad to be heading home, riding in the back seat with the window down, feeling cool air turn colder as we headed back north. I knew Chubb would be relieved to get back home to the light in his cabin, and though we’d had a wonderful time, there was a sweet and unmistakable feeling, with each mile that passed, that we were leaving a somewhat ominous and threatening place, and going back to a place of immense safety and security, peace and comfort. I sat in the back with Omar napping against my right shoulder and Mother napping against my left, and I thumbed through the bird book and looked at pictures of all the new birds I had seen, and at the ones I had not seen. It was unimaginable to think that they were out there—all these hundreds, even thousands of birds—and that I had not seen them. I felt both hungry and sated—like a cat, I imagined. With Mother asleep on my shoulder, good crisp air coming in the window, a stomach full of flounder, and two dozen new birds flying through my mind—and returning home—I felt like there couldn’t be a more satisfied person in the world.

  This, in turn, made me hungrier: made me want to see more.

  We got back around five in the evening, just before dark, sun-browned and road weary, but I was out of the car and running even before Father had the trunk open to unpack. I ran past the swimming hole, past the little dam to the river—dusk was coming down fast now, floating in from out of the bare-limbed trees—a pair of wood ducks jumped up from the river and flew downstream, making their high strange squeal—and I made my way across the river and up onto the mountain, and into the junipers, scrambling, as the moon came up over the trees. I had to make sure it was all still there. I picked up rocks, squeezing them; bit the ends of juniper needles and tasted their turpentine sap. I went up to the cliff and sat and felt my heart thumping inside. I breathed the cold air and watched the moon climb higher until it, and all of the country below, was mine again.