Where the Sea Used to Be (11 page)

The slow moths that emerge from the log's orange rot.

If wolves howled that night, he didn't hear them. The snow absorbed everything.

 

N
OW THE WOLVES TOOK HER AS SURELY AS IF THEY HAD
come in the cabin and seized her in their jaws. Each morning long before daylight Wallis would awaken to the glow of coals from where he had let the fire burn down and would see Mel in the kitchen working by candlelight to avoid waking him. She would already be bundled in her parka, breathing frost, making a little fire in the kitchen's wood stove to boil water for tea, and fixing a slab of toast, over which she would spread thick butter and jam.

She would eat in silence, standing on the other side of the cabin, watching him, and then she would dust the crumbs from her hands, dab a towel at the corner of her mouth, and go out the door quickly.

And the geology, the old earth, took Wallis, just as surely as if he had died and was now only some ghost wandering the surface, trying to get back to the time when he had felt most alive, and not noticing the paradox: that in his rigorous efforts to return to that past, he was becoming more alive.

As if he could be both numb and aware. As if a man could be both awake and asleep, or both good and evil.

Some days he was so hungry for a taste and feel of the soil, some sighting of rock, that he would wander out into the yard, or into the woods beyond, and would begin digging in the snow with his gloved hands, or with a shovel: digging like a madman or a searcher looking for something dropped, until the shoveltip clinked against the frozen soil. He would chip away at the soil, sparks skittering sometimes as steel struck flint—that acrid odor—and then he would scrape up the small tracings of soil and study them. He would look at the towering, snow-clad mountains above, and he would want to howl at the gulf of knowledge. He would feel trapped, that for all of his laborings he could only get a few inches into the recent glacial moraine. He would feel bereft of intimacy.

His despair would broaden from that. He would believe that Old Dudley had sent him up here to abandon him: that Dudley had found another geologist to train, and that Dudley and Matthew and that third geologist were busy cracking open old anticlines like streamside raccoons cracking freshwater mussels to suck out the meat, and him not included in any of the fun.

The caw of a lone raven, overhead: cold blue skies, and the stillness of the north: and then after the raven's echo was gone, only silence. He could not get to where he wanted.

And when Mel came home in the evenings, she would sometimes notice the small mounds from where he had been digging—a faint sprinkling of black earth atop the snow—but said nothing, glad only that he was getting outside.

Some days the coyotes would hear his labors and would appear at the edge of the woods to watch him as he worked. They could smell the blood from his barehanded labors as he tried to pluck polished moraine from frozen earth, and Wallis would not notice them until—as if to mimic him—the coyotes would begin digging also, tunneling at the snow, digging fast and furious.

Wallis would hear the roostertails of snow swooshing up and landing in clumps and patters behind the coyotes as they dug, and he would pause in his own digging, sheened with sweat, and would watch; and after a short time, one of the coyotes would appear with a mouse in its jaws gotten from beneath the snow. At that point the other coyotes would chase the one with the mouse, all the coyotes flowing lightly across the top of the snow, dodging and feinting not like individuals but like one swirling organism—and then after a while whichever coyote had ended up with the mouse would tease both the mouse and the other coyotes by tossing it high into the air and then catching it again. Finally one of them would eat the tattered mouse, and Wallis would go back to digging, and the coyotes would sit on their haunches and watch him a bit longer, and when Wallis looked up again, they would have vanished, though later in the day he would hear them laughing and howling and yipping back in the woods, chasing something.

He despaired. In the evenings, when Mel came home, she could see that he had despaired, could read the landscape of his frustration by the dozens of half-finished diggings that surrounded her cabin—dustings of frozen black crumbs of earth resting atop the snow—but still she said nothing, though she was sad, believing that in no way could this one be as enduring as Matthew—believing for certain that Dudley would consume him soon.

And perhaps for this reason—believing that Wallis would soon be crushed and buried—she did not volunteer things, did not teach him the things she knew. She found reasons to stay out later, and traveled farther, tracking and mapping the wolves. When she came home in the evenings, she isolated herself from him. She read, or worked quietly in her journals. And though the romance between her and Matthew was all but over, worn smooth—Old Dudley owned him completely, now —she nonetheless found herself trying to keep track of the days and dates, knowing Matthew and Dudley would be coming up for Christmas. She thought of her own entrapments—her memories of Matthew of when he had been free. He had loved her; he had loved hunting the oil. Matthew had once said that if he remained with her in the valley and did not follow Old Dudley down to Texas, some part of him would always feel trapped, and would resent her for that. So she had turned him free—he had turned himself free—and now had gone and gotten trapped anyway. All to naught.

So almost as if blaming Wallis—as if Wallis were some residue of her father—she shunned him now without being rude about it. She simply distanced herself from him, as many animals are said to do when one of their number becomes injured. It was only the wolves who would wait with one of their injured, and tend to it until it recovered. All the other social animals vanished when one of their kind went down—knowing that the crippled one would rob valuable resources, would disrupt delicate rhythms, and, worst of all, would summon predators.

Wallis could feel the winter sickness coming on. Knowing the name of it, however, did nothing to ease his despair. The waning days, waning light, and his isolation from the world: he felt his power draining from him as if from a wound, and felt old grief rising. He suspected the nature of what Old Dudley was doing to him, why he had banished him to this place. Wallis knew he was being stripped from the secure world of data and facts, stripped of the assurances of reality he'd come not only to depend upon, but to which he had become addicted. He understood that Old Dudley was jerking his head around, forcing him, like a dog whose leash is tugged sharply, to become a creature of the imagination, rather than fact.

He could only imagine what lay beneath the snow. It was as if Old Dudley—or the land itself—was bending Wallis's mind, forcing it to alter shape and capability completely. Wallis could feel his mind threatening to crack, under that pressure—swelling, bucking, and folding. Some days out in the snow fields Wallis would sink to his knees and then lie down on the snow, face down. The falling snow would cover him.

But as it covered him, he would calm, as if healed, and would sit up, ready to try again, not knowing whether it was his will—some spark within—which had lifted him back up, or the land itself, or even some thing buried beneath the land.

And each night, upon returning home, Mel would wander around her cabin before going inside—reading clearly Wallis's story of that day's despair. To her the signs of floundering—the weary snow angels—were not even so much like the etchings or scribings of Wallis's despair as they were evidences—the tracks, the prints—of Old Dudley's awful domineering: as if the beast of Dudley himself had passed through there earlier in the day; and Mel would shiver, and, half-believing that he had, would be glad that she had not been there.

Mel had survived beneath his thumb for eighteen years—though because his blood was hers, she sometimes did not stop counting from the day she left home, but was still counting, at thirty-eight.

Matthew had survived nineteen years of it, thus far. Mel stood in the snow some nights before going inside and wondered what Matthew might look like when he was an old man—if he managed to survive—but she knew what the answer was, even as she considered it. She could take her gloves off and touch the side of her face—the place where the lines were coming—and know the answer to that sculpting. It was the same answer for her. Old Dudley was carving one of them with his blood and the other with his hands.

 

Occasionally, at her desk—listening to Wallis roll the rocks around in the hallway, positioning and repositioning them on that blank map like some demented child—she would feel pity for him; other times, sorrow, and other times, a shared bond. But still she kept her distance; and likewise Wallis told himself not to pursue Mel. To struggle to dive deep, rather than traveling far.

 

H
E WAS LEARNING NOTHING. THE SUN HAD GONE TO
the other side of the world. Cold rolled onto the land as if venturing from cracks and fissures in the earth. Trees exploded all night, every night, filling the woods with the sounds of their cannonade. As they fell, the creaky, twisted splintering sounds—the muffled
thumps
—drummed the earth so soundly that surely it was awakening, even if briefly, the bears sleeping like astronauts frozen in the earth. The smell of the trees' crushed green limbs permeated the woods.

The snow robbed all other sounds—took away even the silence, so that there was now a thing even more absolute than silence. One lone raven could break the day open. Three feet, four feet, five feet of snow. Wallis stayed inside and read.

In Dudley's late adolescent scrawl, his young man's scrawl, Wallis read the words that had been written as if beneath a fever. He marveled at the insane arrogance: as if the writer had truly traveled to and seen these places, rather than imagining them, and was describing them from ancient memory.

 

Introduction to the Rocks

Kinds of Minerals and Stones

It is not entirely satisfactory to roam over the fields with bowlders lying on the right and left, but without any knowledge of their natures. True, we shall experience much satisfaction in feeling that we know something of their origin and their history. We may walk up to the side of one of these way-worn rock-travelers and say: “Old Hard Head, when did you arrive in this country, and where did you originate from?” Old Hard Head will lie sullenly and answer never a word. But he is written all over with inscriptions which we can begin to decipher. So we look on the rounded and weather-beaten form and say to ourselves: “This immigrant rock came from a northern country. He left his mother rock, and most of his kindred, in the woods, or up in the mountains. A large number of his kindred came with him. He rode part of the way on the back of a glacier. By and by he fell off, or got into a hole; and after that he had a severe squeezing. He got crushed and rubbed and rolled and pushed for some thousands of years.

But every year he made some progress. By and by there was a great change of weather. The ice carriage melted away from him, and fine weather returned, and lo! he found himself, one spring, in this field. That was long enough before Adam and Eve set up business in gardening and other such fuckery. But here old Hard Head has been lying ever since. And now, we are the very first persons who ever stopped to pay him a moment's attention, and make his acquaintance.

If old Hard Head thinks, he is revolving some handsome compliments on our intelligence. Whatever old Hard Head may think, we are sure the ability to learn something of the method of the world was given
us to be exercised. If we go stupidly through the world without exercising that ability
,
we do no better than an ox. But if we seek to gain an insight into the method and history of the world, we honor the Author of the world; we read His thoughts. Knowing some of His thoughts, we come into more intimate relations with Him. The study of science is a virtue. Attention to geology is a human duty.

To complete our introduction to old Hard Head we must know his name. To call him old Hard Head is like calling a man “Old Russian” or “Old Englishman.
”
He has, besides, his personal name. Now, there is a way of finding out the particular name of each rock. Like a dog with his name on his collar, each mute rock displays a name written on its exterior.

Do you see that nearly all these bowlders appear to be mixtures of different colors and kinds of rocks? See one rock with round pebbles imbedded in a mass of smaller grains. See another rock, less coarse, with silvery scales. Now, all these differently colored constituents of the rocks are so many different
minerals.
Rocks are composed of minerals. Some rocks have two minerals; some, three; some, four. The particular name of a rock depends on the minerals in it. As soon as we know the minerals, we can call the name of the rock: can shout it to both the heavens and hell. Now, sit down and take a lesson in minerals.

Do you see this white flint rock, composed throughout of one kind of mineral? That mineral is
quartz.
It is the hardest of all the common minerals. Try to scratch it. You see the point of steel makes no impression on it. But it leaves a black mark. The quartz wears away the steel. When one of these bowlders is thus composed entirely of quartz, its name is
quartzite.
There are many quartzites, as there are many Smiths and Joneses. Let us learn the other part of the name. Look at these uniformly colored quartzites
—
white and gray. You see one is composed of distinct grains; this is a
granular quartzite.
One contains pebbles; this is a
conglomeratic quartzite,
or simply a
conglomerate.
None of it is worth a good gott-damn for holding oil, but once eroded back into sandstones of sufficient porosities, can again be of use in the service of possessing petroleum. In fact, quartz is the most abundant of all minerals . . .