Analog SFF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

They talked every other weekend now, as awkward as that usually felt. There was a notion of meeting, but his parents weren't inclined to travel the several hundred miles from Connecticut. Less wasteful for him to make the trip east, they hinted. The old tensions were still there, and Andrew's lone concession was not to push things to a blow-up.

  Andrew dodged their questions about why he had ended the estrangement. He didn't mention her name once. All he admitted was that he had been seeing a frozen woman for a while. “Didn't really work out,” closed the topic, and they hadn't tried to reopen it.

  He didn't reopen it now, even in his own thoughts. He pulled over a magazine to skim, occupying his mind while he finished his sandwich.

  One bite from the end, he heard a commotion in the hallway. “New tenant,” he guessed. Plenty of people were still moving into the half-full Evergreen. He carried his crust to the door, thinking of greeting a new neighbor.

  Several movers were in the corridor, handling large boxes on dollies. A pair of them carried one through the door two units down, barely squeezing it inside. Andrew squinted to read the label on the nearest box. Computer Parts.

  Another loaded dolly arrived. Whoever was moving in owned a lot of computers, Andrew thought, or one really big one.

  Something clicked in his head. No. It couldn't be.

  But then he heard it, around the corner, probably by the service elevator. It was a girl's voice with an adult cadence, no rarity here. And it was much more.

  He slipped back inside before she could appear, and downed the last of his sandwich with a hard gulp. Kazuo, he thought. Their last two dinners, he'd been making a show of keeping some secret. Andrew thought it had involved Luna, and Kazuo had seemed to encourage the assumption. That sneaky SOB.

  So she'd moved to Evergreen. If nothing else, she had pried herself out of the death-grip. What else it meant wasn't at all clear, save for one thing. She knew he lived here, and came.

  Andrew dropped himself into his softest chair. He was excited, and scared—and somewhere beneath that, he thought he was glad. She didn't despise him, not enough to stay away. Whether she still held some of those old feelings, he couldn't say. He wasn't even sure about himself.

  But he was going to find out, soon enough.

  Copyright © 2009 Shane Tourtellotte

  * * * *

  Among those whom I like, I can find one common denominator: all of them make me laugh.

  —W. H. Auden

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Science Fact: FROM ATLANTIS TO CANOE-EATING TREES: GEOMYTHOLOGY COMES OF AGE by Richard A. Lovett

  Long ago, according to Indian legends of the inland Pacific Northwest, the twin sons of the Great Spirit, Wyeast and Pahto, dwelt on opposite sides of the big river the whites would one day call the Columbia. For many years, they lived in peace. But then, as is the way with young men, they quarreled for the attention of a beautiful woman known as Tah-one-lat-clah. Soon, Wyeast and Pahto were hurling rocks and fire at each other, scorching the land and frightening its residents.

  Learning of the commotion, the Great Spirit came back to restore order, forcing the brothers to apologize and promise to quit fighting. As a sign of the truce between them, he built a beautiful stone bridge across the river, not far from the place where the whites would later build Bonneville Dam.

  Then he went away again. For a while, peace reigned. But the brothers soon forgot their promise and resumed their quarrel. Tah-one-lat-clah tried to intervene but was severely burned in the fray. The bridge was destroyed, and the brothers, chagrinned, withdrew to the locations where they reside today as the mountains later to be called Adams and Hood. Tah-one-lat-clah, now known as Mt. St. Helens, also moved away, seeking a place to hide, far from other mountains. There she nursed her wounds, and there she remained, even after the Great Spirit returned to heal her disfigurement and restore her to her former beauty.

  It's a great story, though this version has probably been somewhat Paul Bunyanized by the white missionaries who collected it in the nineteenth century. But it's just a myth, right? A tale to be told around the campfire to entertain the children and maybe teach a lesson about sibling rivalry?

  Maybe not, say geologists. Such myths were once discounted, but these days, scientists are paying more attention. There's even a new field called geomythology that draws on everything from Aztec legend to Bible lore in an effort to better understand the Earth's turbulent history by correlating old stories to actual geological events.

  Let's take another look at the Bridge of the Gods legend. As far back as 1805, Lewis and Clark knew there was something odd about that part of the Columbia. Approaching from upstream, they found the river curiously sluggish, with deep, calm waters in which the boles of dead firs rose from the bottom like drowned sentinels, twenty feet tall.

  Aware the water couldn't have been that high when the trees were alive, Clark figured something must have dammed the river. When the expedition reached the giant boulder field that (unknown to them) the Indians interpreted as the ruins of the Bridge of the Gods, he speculated that it must have been formed by a gargantuan landslide—recently enough that the submerged tree trunks hadn't yet had time to rot.

  As it turns out, he had everything right but the date.

  "They thought it occurred twenty years [before], but it was hundreds,” says John Jengo, a geologist who's studied the Lewis and Clark expedition's records. “But there was no way for them to know that."

  The Indian legend actually matches the region's geological history quite well. Mt. Adams has frequently vented steam, and Mt. Hood had a series of eruptions several hundred years ago.

  Mt. St. Helens also went through a major eruptive phase from 500 to 350 years ago. The eruptions began with the mountain blowing its top in the 1480s (determined by growth-ring dating of trees buried in the ash). Ensuing eruptions then slowly rebuilt it from an ugly, stumpy pyramid into the elegant cone that persisted until its famous 1980 explosion.[1]

  "It would have been something that would have been very noticeable,” says Peter Frenzen, monument scientist at Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

  According to Pat Pringle, an earth science professor at Washington's Centralia College, the latest radiocarbon studies on the submerged tree trunks indicate that the Bridge of the Gods landslide occurred somewhere between 1435 and 1455. That's several decades before Mt. St. Helens’ 1480s blast, but the events occur in the right order and in close-enough sequence for storytellers to have combined them into a single tale, especially since the story doesn't bother to state how many years elapsed between its events.

  * * * *

  Troy and the “Telephone” Game

  Geomythology may be a new science, but it has precedents in archaeology, which has been discovering truths in ancient stories since at least the 1870s, when Heinrich Schliemann found the ruins of Troy, the city besieged and defeated in Homer's Iliad. Archaeologists have also found many biblical sites once believed to be nothing but myth. Today, biblical archaeology is a flourishing field, complete with its own journals.

  But geologists have been slower to take the hint.

  Partly that's because many of the old stories sound fantastic. Also, our culture is steeped in the “telephone game,” in which a phrase is whispered to one person, who whispers it to another, and then another ... until the statement reaching the end of the chain is barely recognizable. “Eliza has the flu,” for example, could easily emerge as, “Arise and get glue.” Or worse.

  But we are not an oral-tradition-based culture. We're poor storytellers and worse listeners—with a bad tendency to assume that everyone else has always been just like us.

  From everything anthropologists have been able to determine, the ancients were very good at passing on stories by word of mouth. And, at least as importantly, they were a lot better than we are at paying attention to the world around them. (If you doubt this, go on the web and check out the “bioregionalism” test, which asks such questions as where
your water comes from and what is the current phase of the moon.[2] Many modern city-dwellers can't even get close to answering such questions.) “The ancients, because they were closer to nature, were very observant,” says Jelle Zeilinga de Boer of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

  Just how observant came to the fore in mid-2008, regarding a passage in The Odyssey. The passage describes the Sun as having “perished out of heaven” and an “evil mist” spreading across the world, which occurs shortly before Odysseus slaughters the suitors besieging his wife, Penelope.

  The line about darkness and evil mist is clearly a prophesy of doom, but in a paper in the June 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, a physicist at Rockefeller University, teamed up with Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, to argue that it also describes a total eclipse of the Sun.

  Magnasco and Baikouzis weren't the first to hit upon the eclipse theory. More than eighty years ago, other astronomers went so far as to calculate that if it was an eclipse, it had to have occurred on April 16, 1178 B.C.E., because that was the only such eclipse visible from Greece during the Homeric era. It even occurred at noon, as described in the poem. But the suggestion had been pooh-poohed by Homeric scholars.

  Then Magnasco and Baikouzis went back and looked for other astronomical references in The Odyssey. They found several. Some related to the phase of the Moon (which must be new at the time of a solar eclipse). Others described Odysseus steering his boat by the positions of the constellations Boates and the Pleiades, twenty-nine days before the slaughter. Both constellations are visible at sunset, something that only happens at certain times of year.

  Venus is also visible as a morning star, high in the sky. There's a somewhat cryptic reference to the god Hermes (equivalent to the Roman god Mercury) taking a trip to the far west and turning back, thirty-four days before the slaughter. That, Magnasco and Baikouzis hypothesized, might be a description of the planet Mercury at the far end of one of its retrograde cycles.

  The two scientists then used planetarium-style computer software to simulate the Greek skies, night by night for 135 years (49,000 nights) centering on the known date of the eclipse. What they found was that the descriptions of the Moon, stars, and planets only fit the story line on one occasion: a sequence that had the suitors being killed on—you guessed it—April 16, 1178 B.C.E.

  Did Homer really include an actual eclipse in his story? Who knows? “The implication is that ‘Homer’ (in quotes as [he] may have been many poets) was aware of astronomical events occurring four centuries before the poem was cast in its current form and was interested enough in those events and knowledgeable enough about them to weave them into the narrative,” Magnasco told me. The implication is also that there might be a great deal of history woven into both The Odyssey and its prequel, The Iliad.

  "Under the assumption that our work turns out to be correct, it adds to the evidence that he knew what he was talking about,” Magnasco added, to the Associated Press. “It still does not prove the historicity of the return of Odysseus. It only proves that Homer knew about certain astronomical phenomena that happened much before his time."

  Or maybe he was just really, really lucky and his poem had an awful lot of astronomical coincidences written into it.

  * * * *

  Floods and Trumpets

  Let's take a look at another old story, this one from the Bible: the account of how the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into the Promised Land.

  According to the story, the Israelites, who had been wandering in the Sinai wilderness for two generations, finally moved into Canaan in harvest season, which in that part of the world came in late spring. But that meant they hit the river at flood stage, an obvious problem.

  For three days, they camped on the bank. Then their leader, Joshua, announced it was time to cross, with priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant leading the way. The moment the priests’ feet touched the river, the Bible says, the water from upstream stopped flowing:

  * * * *

  It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah [the Salt Sea] was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground. (Josh. 3:16-17)[3]

  * * * *

  The river stayed dry long enough for the people, including 40,000 soldiers, to cross over. Then, as soon as the priests stepped out, the water returned, flowing at flood stage, as before. Soon after came the famous story of the siege of Jericho, in which the Israelites circled the city each day, carrying the Ark of the Covenant and blowing trumpets and rams horns until, on the seventh day, the walls fell down.

  So what's going on? The two simplest answers are that God intervened miraculously, or that it's all just a myth. But it could be a little more complex.

  It is well known that the Jordan River valley is prone to landslides that can block the flow of the river. The most recent was triggered by an earthquake on July 11, 1927. It even occurred near the site believed to be the one called “Adam,” about sixteen miles upstream of Jericho, and it blocked the river for twenty-one hours. Another five such landslides, all caused by earthquakes, are known to have occurred in the past 3,000 years, says Zeilinga de Boer.[4] Thus, he says, the biblical account is “very logical."

  Similarly, the fall of Jericho might well have occurred in the aftermath of a major earthquake, related to the one that blocked the Jordan River.

  "If you read the Bible carefully,” Zeilinga de Boer suggests, “you can see geological events very clearly."

  It should be noted that interpreting such stories in this manner doesn't necessarily boot God out of them; many Christian Bible commentaries take the earthquake theory seriously. There's plenty of room for a miracle if you want one. The Israelites seem to have done an extremely good job of being in the right place at the right time.

  * * * *

  Vanishing Cities

  Another good example is the tale of Helike, a coastal city in ancient Greece, which reputedly disappeared overnight after an earthquake in 373 B.C.E.

  According the legend, the earthquake occurred on a winter night. By morning, everyone was dead and the city had sunk into the sea. Some people, in fact, think that this is the source of the legend of Atlantis, though as we'll discuss later, that legend might have a better source farther back in history.

  Accounts of the demise of Helike are sprinkled through Greek and Roman writings. There are stories of a rescue attempt in which nothing was found but the tops oftrees, rising above the water,and stories of travelers, years later, seeing the ruins beneath their boats.

  But could a city truly be swallowed by the sea? For years, Zeilinga de Boer says, geologists viewed that as “total nonsense."

  But the sea isn't the only thing that can swallow a city. In 1692, a powerful earthquake shook Port Royal, Jamaica. The destruction wasn't total, but in places the vibrations turned sand to quicksand that swallowed buildings and people whole.(To see this phenomenon on a small scale, try tapping your foot gently on damp beach sand and watch the way it tries to flow.)

  This process, called liquefaction, isn't the only way a town can vanish. In British Columbia, natives long told of a village called Kwalate, destroyed when a big chunk of a mountain fell into the sea, beside a narrow fjord. It sounded like another Atlantis myth, half a globe away. But the village was real and archaeologists have found it, determining that it was destroyed in the late 1500s. The culprit: a giant landslide from a 2,800-foot peak. Somewhere between 100 and 140 million cubic meters of rock fell into the water, says Brian Bornhold of the University of Victoria. Minutes later, the entire village, home to about 100 people, was gone, wiped out by a wave that might have topped thirty feet in
height.

  In 1988, a team led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Helike Project[5] and Steven Soter of the American Museum of Natural History,[6] began a serious search for Helike, which they knew lay somewhere along the Gulf of Corinth, a narrow rift that nearly slices Greece in two, west of Athens. Their story is an exciting exercise in false starts and dashed hopes.[7] They found ruins, only to determine that they were from a Roman city that post-dated Helike. Then they found more ruins, but these were from a Bronze Age village dating back nearly 5,000 years.

  Then, in 2001, Katsonopoulou and Soter found what they were looking for: a Greek city from the fourth century B.C.E. Never looted by treasure hunters, ancient or modern, it might be one of the greatest archaeological finds of recent times: a Pompeii, buried in mud. But the discovery is recent; only time will tell whether the promise pans out.

  In part, Katsonopoulou and Soter have determined, Helike appears to have sunk due to liquefaction. But there also may have been a tsunami that ricocheted through the narrow gulf. Either way, an entire city had indeed vanished, overnight. It may even have gone under water as well as being buried in mud; such earthquakes can easily create lagoons a mile or two inland from the beach. The myth of Helike was no longer a myth.

  But does that mean Helike was Atlantis? Probably not. The Atlantis myth dates from the writings of Plato in about 355 B.C.E., barely a generation afterward. Personally, I find it hard to believe that a real disaster could have been so thoroughly mythologized so quickly.

  Besides, Plato said the story originated in Egypt, where it was told to a visiting Greek named Solon. Plato wrote that Solon was told that Atlantis had sunk 9,000 years before—roughly 11,000 B.C.E. by our calendar.

  There's little chance an advanced civilization could have existed at that date, which is part of why many people have either discounted the story entirely or tried instead to link it to Helike, difficult as that might be.

  Then, in 1969, Greek seismologist Angelos G. Galanopoulos suggested that Plato might have botched up one little detail about the source of the myth. Maybe, instead of being told about it when he was in Egypt, Solon read about it on an Egyptian scroll and mistranslated the date: not 9,000 years before, but 900. That would put the date for the demise of Atlantis at 1250 B.C.E. or so.