Where the Sea Used to Be (3 page)

He stayed north—did not cross back over the Divide, where he could feel the sea of grass behind him and to the east. Instead he turned west, traveling farther into the deep timber: up through the Bitterroot and then farther, where the trees were taller, the mountains higher, and it stopped snowing, as if all that was below him now. The whole world had turned white, save for the deep blue of the sky, a depth of blue he had never seen, and there was so much silence that it seemed to be a sound of its own. The sun was bright but there was no warmth. He wanted to build a fire but wanted also to keep going.

He passed only two other vehicles all day: immense snowy logging trucks, tires swathed in clanking chains, slapping sparks behind in roostertails—the trucks' long trailers loaded-to-groaning with the giant trees, the first trailer carrying only five trees to fill its load, and the next trailer, six; and they left behind the thick, sweet scent of fresh-crushed boughs.

Wallis began to consider consulting his map, but decided against it, in a way that he knew would displease the falconer. He felt a stillness entering his heart, a peace, not unlike the one he felt when mapping the lost lands that were twenty thousand feet and two hundred million years below. Could he have found, or imagined, such a place without Old Dudley's—and Matthew's—instructions? He felt a gratitude toward them, and confusion too, as his heart grew still calmer. If this place did exert a pull on him—if it did have a desire for him—why had he never felt it before? What crust had overlain?

Shortly before noon on the last day he rolled through the little town called Swan—a wide spot in a river valley with a few snowy pastures, buck-and-rail fences, and old cabins with smoke rising straight from their chimneys. He stopped at the only store and bought gas and asked the lady what lay farther north.

“Nothing,” she said, and laughed. “Trees and clear-cuts,” she said. “Then the clear-cuts end—just trees, the woods they haven't gotten to yet—and savages.” At first Wallis thought she was saying the people taking the trees out were savages, but then he understood that she meant the people who lived back in the woods.

“The other Swan,” she said. “The second Swan.” She lit a cigarette, looked out at the bright day: seemed trapped by the beauty that was too cold to go out into. “I've never been up there,” she said. “It's mostly dope addicts and hippies,” she said. “Criminals. It's right on the Canadian line. Part of it goes over into Canada. They say there are about twenty or so people living up there. Dark, wet—way back in the woods. A ghost town. They get a lot of wolves up there.” She drew on her cigarette. The odor of it stung Wallis's face, but he could tell that his own days'-traveling smell was none too fragrant to her. “You can shower back there for a dollar, if you want,” she said, pointing to the bathroom behind the poker machines.

“No thanks,” he said, and then, “That other place, the one that has the same name—how far is it?”

“You go to the end of the world,” she said. “Go til you begin to hear wolves, til you see their big pawprints in the snow along the road. Go until the road stops.” Another puff of cigarette. “Go til you see all the dead deer and the flocks of ravens, from where the wolves have been.” One more puff. “We had the name first.”

And he had not traveled another twenty miles before he began to see the wolves, or what he thought at first were wolves, gathered on the sides of the road gnawing on the frozen red carcasses of deer, their faces masked red, with vapor clouds drifting from their mouths as if they were speaking, and eagles soaring overhead, waiting for a chance to join in on the feast.

They were only coyotes—shadows of wolves—but they were larger than any coyotes he had seen in Texas, so that they might as well have been wolves: and there were so many of them, and the woman was right, the ravens, flocks of them, were always in attendance, like black flies over spoiled fruit—though this meat was not spoiled, this meat had been living earlier that very day.

He reached the Canadian line—a small green and white sign said, simply, “Canada”—and opened the iron gate that spanned the road (only a lane, now, where a snowplow had tunneled through)—and he passed through it as if driving in to visit someone's home. He stopped and closed the gate behind him.

It was dusk now and he followed the winding icy road as if on a toboggan run. The stars began to appear through the forest and cast themselves brightly about him in a multitude, and the temperature fell away in the sun's absence, falling like a thing tumbling from a cliff edge. Twenty-five, thirty below by the time he reached the summit, which he knew was the summit because he could go no farther. The snow had not been plowed on the back side, so that the valley beyond and below him was sealed in.

Wallis was not sure when he had crossed back over out of Canada, but he could see the faint shape, the dark bowl of the second valley. He got out and looked at his watch—he was six hours late—but could tell that Mel had not been there yet, because of the absence of tracks in the snow.

He could smell the forest even more strongly—could breathe deep into him the scent of things, the names of which he did not yet know.

There were only two lights in the distant valley that he could see—lantern light, he knew, or bulbs powered by generators. He had been told that there was no electricity in the valley, and only one pay phone—a strange jury-rigged system that combined a shortwave radio with various ephemeral satellite links—the satellite passing the valley's side of the earth only every second day—so that as often as not the valley lay in near-total isolation, save for that one slender road leading in.

Wallis gathered green fir branches and built a fire in the middle of the road. He took a hatchet from the jeep's tool box and chopped down a small tree and burned it, branch by branch and length by length. With each flare he could see a short distance into the woods around him, and could feel brief heat, but then the flare would fall away to tiny, insignificant flames; though through the night, as Wallis kept diligently adding limbs—breaking snow trails into the woods and snapping off branches like some hungry creature browsing—the fire built enough coals to melt the snow around it to bubbling, boiling water, and steam.

He was able to bank the coals around the jeep—a glowing orange ring of quickly cooling fire around him—and in that manner, in that brief breath of heat, he was able to fall asleep at ten thousand feet, looking up not at the stars but at the meandering pipes of his jeep's underbelly. In the half-land before sleep, he rolled, in his mind, so that he was not looking up, but down—twenty thousand feet below these ten thousand feet—looking for black oil in a world void of other colors.

If the falconer said it was down there, it was, though how much of it, he could not be sure. Across the thousand square miles of the little valley, and at any depth below, in one of an infinite number of seams, there might be only a ribbon of oil: only enough to fill one bucket, enough oil or gas to burn one candle, one lamp, for one night.

Wallis wondered if Mel would be like her father, or if she would be his opposite, as often happened: as if blood, as it runs through a person, spirals and twists—bright and glittering one moment, and then shrunken and opaque, between generations.

Isolated from the world as she was, she might have been shaped not so much by her blood lineage as by the land itself—though from the brief, starlit glimpse of the bowl of dark valley below, Wallis would not have been able to guess what kind of a person that landscape might scribe.

He dived deeper in his sleep: vertical now, so that it was not like swimming, but like a falcon in its stoop, though without the falcon's speed. He descended to the safest place in the world.

And while he was twenty thousand feet below, did the rest of him which he had left behind—the skin or husk of his body curled there atop the snow—drink in and absorb the scent of spruce and smoke? Did it absorb the faint light of the stars? Did the movement of the stars, in this new place, carve new messages across him, even as he slept: wrapping him in those new thin scribings?

The coals of his fire froze and the steam went away. The jeep itself began to freeze, contracting in the cold and making groaning sounds like an animal; and in his descent, Wallis, if he heard or felt the sound at all, imagined that it was the sound of the world below: the risings and fallings of things—secret passageways becoming open and available for a moment—chasms appearing, then being quickly filled—peaks and crags, whole mountains wavering like flowers in a breeze.

The oil inside the jeep turned thick as licorice, but the blood inside him was still hot, still flowing—sparkling like the stars, as he slept—running strong, while above, the stars kept writing their faint messages across him, as well as all around him—hemming him in, whether he realized it or not: or hemming in, rather, that part of him that he had left behind in his descent.

As he slept—as his body slept, while the rest of him dived, gaining speed and depth now—an owl hooted, but he did not hear it, could not hear it.

Snowshoe hares, the color of the white world, edged around him, made curious by the dying fire. Snowmelt from the fire's perimeter froze into twisted, grotesque, translucent shapes—resculpted from snow's smoothness into clutching, clawing shapes all around the jeep and flecked with charcoal and bits of wood.

From above it would have looked craterlike; and it would have looked too as if Wallis was frozen in the grip of that ice. It would have looked as if, as he slept, the ice had crept toward him in waves and begun wrapping itself around him.

 

A WOMAN'S VOICE SAID, “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD.
” Wallis opened his eyes to stunning brightness. His own breath was so cloudy that at first he could see nothing; but as the cloud faded, he saw the woman who was speaking. He struggled to lean up on one elbow, beneath the jeep, but his blankets and sleeping bag were frozen in the ice. She laughed as he struggled to free himself.

Her hair was long, and not so much white as it was the color of frost—as if her rhime-breath, or the winter, had colored it—and her face was long and narrow. She was a big woman—tall, with rounded shoulders, and a strong neck. Her eyes were green, and they held Wallis now with a steady, curious look of amusement. She was hunkered down, leaning in to peer at him in a way that made him think of the phrase
sitting on her haunches.
“Mel,” she said, introducing herself. She took her glove off and reached her hand in under the jeep. Holding onto his hand, she pulled him free of the curls of ice that had gripped him, and she laughed again, once he was out, as if she had caught a fish.

“You don't have skis or snowshoes,” she said.

“No. I wouldn't know how to use them anyway.”

“You sure made a mess.” She was still hunkered over her heels. Charcoal and ash-flecked gnarls of rutted ice stretched everywhere. Wallis couldn't remember when he'd seen someone so cheerful and full of life.
Healthy
was the word; robust. Her vigor reminded him of the energy possessed of a man or woman deep in love. It did not seem possible that that kind of energy could come from within: that there was not some other, external source helping support it.

“You're the geologist,” she said, and studied his face as one might examine the skull of some extinct species, vaguely hominoid—marveling and wondering at what shared similarities there might be, despite the presence of some immense gulf of time, and evolution.

“I'm learning,” he said. “They sent me up here to find oil. They told me you might not be too happy about it.”

She smiled. “What else did they tell you?”

Wallis blushed. He couldn't tell if she was beautiful or not. He thought she was, but her force, her strength, was so overriding that that was the main impression he got, looking at her. Her beauty—if it could be called that—was not so noticeable, not any singular thing. If he watched her eyes, he would not be able to pay attention to the shape of her mouth. Her lips were pale from the cold. Her eyebrows and eyelashes, already sand-colored, were also rhimed with frost. She had a ski cap on.

The valley below gleamed in the sunlight—the velvet uncut forest cupped within it. A few gray threads of smoke rose from the chimneys of a handful of cabins that he could not see. A river cut through the middle of the small valley, sometimes straight and other times winding, and he read it quickly, like an x-ray technician, imagining already the fault structuring that had given birth and shape to such a river.

The valley was ringed by high white mountains, jagged, stony. The night before, the dim shape of the valley had looked like a sump, a depression—a trap one could stagger into, with no way out—but in the morning, in that bright cold sunlight, it looked like a haven.

“They didn't tell me much else,” he said, and she studied him less like a specimen now—less interested in cranial content—and more like a living human; as if interested in his specific secrets.

“Uh huh,” she said. “I'll bet they didn't.” Another laugh—a sharp breath of ice—and now he studied her teeth, square and white, as if she ate nothing but snow.

When they stood, he saw that she was leaner than he had first thought—wide-boned, but loose-fleshed—and she saw that he was leaner, too. She had imagined—in the little she had thought of it beforehand—that he would be shaped like Matthew: as if that was how the earth sculpted geologists—wide, short, and muscular; as if even the body desired to move boulder and earth.

Wallis, she saw, wasn't much of anything. Plain old brown hair, with a glint or two of red in it. She wondered if each geologist Dudley sent, after Matthew, would be more and more diminished, like waves thinning as they slide into shore.

“You'll be here until the spring?” she said.

They both knew it would be the summer at least, and probably into the fall: that the snows would not melt, revealing the surface rocks for him to map, until April or May. Wallis wasn't sure why Old Dudley had sent him into the valley so early, unless it had something to do with the way Dudley hunted his falcons and hawks: the “waiting on” period being nearly as dramatic as the dive itself: the hawk hovering so high as to be sometimes out of sight—suspended, like desire drawn taut, waiting for the quarry to flush—waiting forever, it might seem. Waiting to see if there even was a quarry.