Mr. Cameron—eventually Vicar of Shoreham
Mr. Watkins—eventually Archdeacon of York
Charles, Sophie knew, escaped being a clergyman or a Canon, a Vicar, an Archdeacon. And somehow Sophie escaped becoming a nun.
Unbidden, a sentence came to her. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” That, of course, was Ishmael. Or was it? Or was it one of Job’s messengers? Or was it all of us?
The Language of Rocks
Polly, Old Red.”
“Does this mean a dog-like-me except for the Old part?”
“Old Red Sandstone. It was the cause of an important moment in Charles’s life when he went to Wales with Professor Sedgwick from Cambridge to learn more about geology.”
“What does Old Red Sandstone smell like?”
“I don’t know. Like rocks. You tell me. But, Polly, Professor Sedgwick sent his young student—the one who would become your dear Father—off on his own to scan part of the area near St. Asaph for Old Red Sandstone and though he tried and tried, our Charles couldn’t find any. When he somewhat anxiously reported this, Sedgwick believed him and congratulated him and said that his work would contribute to the Vale of Clywd being really recast in geological terms.
Marvelous, right, to feel someone believes in your work? Marvelous to have someone say you will have an impact on the plottings that will result in new maps? A downright holy task to help the young with their confidence.”
Polly yawned and then suddenly alert, stared through the sliding glass doors. Sophie followed her gaze and saw a lizard under a gigantic rosemary bush. But rocks were on her mind and she lifted her eyes to the mountains. Sophie knew next to nothing about geology. What was out there, in the Santa Ritas?
“Polly, let’s read a little and then let’s go.”
“GO.” Polly was on her feet.
“But we need to read first.”
“Not to read first.”
“Yes, we must.”
But Polly kept standing.
“Polly, lie down.”
“LIE DOWN? LIE DOWN? Am I not a terrier who has heard the word, ‘GO’?”
Polly stood for the whole time it took Sophie to go online and scan various lists of rocks and minerals in the Santa Ritas. Some of the names caught her eye:
Azurite Pyrite Silver
Wulfenite Cuprite Copper
Biotite Gold Gypsum
Malachite Hematite Quartz
Maybe she should start with what she might be able to recognize. Rocks.
The Santa Ritas, even from this distance, were more than she had thought. For her, a student of literature, they had satisfied yearning: their peace, their gigantism, their seeming steadiness, the way they drew the eye up to the blue zones.
In scripture, mountains could skip like rams; they could be made to smoke at the touch of the Lord; a lover could leap across them; they were spice-laden. A prophet could thresh them and crush them.
Mountains could burst into song, but they could also tremble and they could panic. They could produce trees and branches and wild fruit and they could drip with wine. And they could melt. Someone could stand and plead her case before them. Or she could watch them writhe. Chariots could come out between two of them. In certain dark moods she could ask them to fall on her. She could hide in these “azurous hung hills,” those “world-wielding” shoulders.
But now with Charles as her companion, it seemed to her that the images of scripture and literature needed a little stiffening, a little density and deepening. Those ancient authors and emenders had not had access to the geology lexicon.
“Such as azurite, biotite,” she said aloud to Polly. Polly raised her head and looked interested. “Azurite, biotite,” she repeated.
“I heard you the first time,” Polly said.
“And copper, gypsum, malachite, gold.”
“In which,” Polly said, “this is beginning to sound like an incantation.”
“Cuprite. Wulfenite, silver—”
“What? In which did you say ‘woof’? Woofenite?’”
“No. WULFenite. Are you having problems with your hearing?”
“No. It’s your enunciation. Sometimes you mumble jumble.”
Sophie thought: mountains, boulders, rocks, stones, pebbles, sand (from coarse to very fine), silt, clay. And then grains, dust, and specks.
And minerals, their underlying crystalline structures—those orderly atoms. Again, she thought of Hopkins’s “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. . . .”
Had the poet ever known geology and just how deep and various that freshness was? And did it point beyond itself? He certainly thought so. Would it endure? He clearly thought so. But was he right? With that, Sophie felt chilled.
What if such beauty were to vanish into a black hole? Were there depths, divine positions and velocities beyond positions and velocities? Or did the freshness have nothing to do with the divine so that the fleet and the particular had a kind of zero-at-the-bone conclusion. So that freshness stopped there, like the passing of a buck could really stop with a person, just as the last stop of a streetcar line felt like a physically absolute ending.
She was sometimes tempted to just give up her strong instincts that there was “something more.” Why had she ever decided to follow Darwin’s thinking to its conclusion. She was pretty sure that his conclusions were going to spell n-o c-r-e-a-t-o-r. Nada.
But she would continue. Why continue? Perhaps the heart had its reasons.
Right.
In Godspell, the singer put a pebble in her shoe and called it “Dare.” She walked and when she took it out she had come to a new road and someone was by her side. She was hoping for that. She could load her shoes with pebbles from Madera Canyon.
Poor Polly was still standing. Sophie said, “Poor Polly. Let’s GO.”
“Don’t ‘poor’ me. You need to stop sitting in that infernal chair so much.”
A quarter mile or so from the head of the Proctor trail in Madera Canyon with Polly’s leash-line taut, Sophie passed a signpost that mapped out the landforms in the distance—Elephant Head, the Tucson mountains, the Orphan. She passed alligator junipers, Mexican blue oak, Mexican white oak, and Arizona sycamore; then she came to Madera Creek.
As she studied the forms both along and in the creek, she felt as if someone had cracked a joke at her expense. She had come here in anticipation of seeing a rock. A rock. The last time she had driven to the canyon, she now realized, it had been beautiful but a blur. All of a sudden, rocks were everywhere in all their shapes and sizes.
She again recited to herself what she had memorized from her reading: mountains, boulders, rocks, stones, pebbles. Sand (coarse-to-fine), silt, clay, grains, dust, specks. And don’t forget, on another level, minerals and those crystalline structures.
Why had this happened to her in older age? How could she observe, pursue, ingest, digest everything the world offered in the compass of whatever few years were left to her? Well, she could not.
Regret, that was it. That was what she felt.
But she must get beyond that, get beyond it, do a dismount from regret that was as definite, as gracefully complete as any of the ones executed by Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics. Though she could not aspire to the half twist-to-back-salto-dismount, much less the double-twist dismount, she could try to keep it fleet and clean and do it with confidence.
Forget regret. Dismount. Get thee behind me, Regret. Move forward. She loosened Polly’s leash.
But thinking of the compass of past years reminded her that after Charles’s no-Old-Red-Sandstone triumph in Wales, he had set off for home. He had bid good-by
e to Sedgwick and departed from Capel Curig, leaving all the beaten paths and using only his compass and a map to get across the mountains to Barmouth. “I thus,” he wrote, “came on some strange wild places and enjoyed much this manner of travelling.”
Sophie wanted a compass; she wanted to try that. She wanted strange, wild places. Set off from Madera Canyon, from the Proctor Trail to Patagonia with only a map and a compass. Leave the trails when your own compass says so. Let go of the past in favor of what’s present and ahead.
But—not right this minute, Sophie Nordlund. Right now you are looking at rocks.
She turned back to the rocks. She was hoping to see a pebble so she could put it in her sneaker. The pebble named “Dare.”
Instead, she noticed what looked like a shard or a flake. It shone, although it was a deep black. When she picked it up, it was indeed a flake; and not only that but it was thin as if some fine stonecutter right out of “Little Red Riding Hood” had been shaving it from a rock. If she were to put it in her shoe, its sharp edges would probably cut her foot. Madera Canyon was a place of thick and thin.
Polly barked, her hackles rose, and the leash went so taut that Sophie lost her balance. It felt as if she were back on the airplane with the woman in the jaguar-print scarf.
The terrier was furious, straining at something that was obviously off the trail beyond the tangled hackberries. Whatever had incensed Polly was unseen. Sophie knew that black bears were in Madera Canyon. People had seen mountain lions. What about a jaguar? And then there were the undocumented.
“Let’s go, Pol. Let’s go home with our tiny rock-chip.” She would go immediately and order a field guide.
Four days later, she opened The Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals. Mastering this 850-page volume would take more years than she had. She wanted to chuck everything—grocery shopping, cooking, inspecting her outdoor drip system, bathing, e-mails, bill-paying, washing clothes—for the Field Guide. Forget that. Right now you are studying just this thin chip. The book itself was a thing of beauty; it would be disaster to read it on a mere tablet. The pages were tissue-paper thin except for the solid, shiny chunk of them toward the beginning—the colored plates.
They reminded her of something from her childhood. She had seen King Solomon’s Mines over and over again and now the jewel chest in the movie re-opened and she saw once more through Stewart Granger’s eyes. The book was the chest: exotic, Pandoric, the jewels full of promise as genies are. The gems glinted and flashed and the child who was Sophie lost her sense of being in a movie theater next to her mother.
Only now did she have the language for rocks and minerals, the naming. And only now did she have something real in her hand, something she had gathered from getting up and going into the mountains.
She went to the black mineral section in her book and worked her way through spinel, tourmaline, garnet (almandine), and on through hornblende, titanite, goethite, pumpellyite—there. She guessed that her chip was biotite. Basic potassium, magnesium, iron, aluminum silicate; mica group.
The best field marks were “dark color and generally small crystals.” But how could she see the crystals? Was there such a thing as a geology microscope?
There was, she found. Sometimes known as a polarizing microscope, a petrographic microscope, a PLM microscope and a pol microscope. She wanted one. Like the character Henderson starting out for Africa, she wanted, she wanted, she wanted.
She could just hear Ted, now in Paris, turning and saying to Sydney, “Now it’s a microscope for God’s sake that The Sophie wants. A frigging microscope, when all she has ever needed is a cowboy.”
“A cowboy? A cowboy. Yum.”
And Ted would say, “If this iPad were an actual newspaper, Syd, I would roll it up and throw it at you.”
Sydney ignored him. “What’s for dinner around here, by the way?”
“When are you ever going to learn to cook?”
“Never, that’s when. How about never? What’s for dinner?”
“Le Meurice. That’s what’s for dinner. Get your jacket. Put your shoes on.”
I have been asked by Peacock, who will read and forward this to you from London, to recommend him a Naturalist as companion to Captain Fitz-Roy, employed by Government to survey the southern extremity of America. I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation. I state this not in the supposition of your being a finished naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, and noting, anything worthy to be noted in Natural History. Peacock has the appointment at his disposal, and if he cannot find a man willing to take the office, the opportunity will probably be lost. Captain Fitz-Roy wants a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector, and would not take any one, however good a naturalist, who was not recommended to him likewise as a gentleman. Particulars of salary, &c., I know nothing. The voyage is to last two years, and if you take plenty of books with you, anything you please may be done. You will have ample opportunities at command. In short, I suppose there never was a finer chance for a man of zeal and spirit; Captain Fitz-Roy is a young man. What I wish you to do is instantly to come and consult with Peacock (at No. 7 Suffolk Street, Pall Mall East, or else at the University Club), and learn further particulars. Don’t put on any modest doubts or fears about your disqualifications, for I assure you I think you are the very man they are in search of; so conceive yourself to be tapped on the shoulder by your bum-bailiff and affectionate friend, J.S. HENSLOW. 9
– J. S. Henslow to Charles Darwin
August 24, 1831
The Diary
Here Charles is, after his geological expedition into Wales. Here he is, sitting in Devonport in foul November weather, his life changed by three things: a letter, someone second-guessing the shape of his nose, and the support of an uncle.
Sophie wanted to hold the letter in her hands. Charles had received it when he arrived home, having followed his compass back to Shrewsbury.
Had he run his fingers over it, smoothing it out? She wanted to do the same, smooth the vellum (was it vellum?) and squint at the now faded ink (what was the exact source of the ink?). She wanted to smell it. “Polly,” she said. “It was before your time. You never smelled it, did you, girl?”
Polly turned her head in disgust. “Whereas I smell everything. Whereas, however, he had dozens and dozens of letters filed away and smelly and this one amongst the ones that smelled of Cambridge, damp and with the hint of good Stilton cheese but also that tobacco and that port wine which practically spoiled my urge to roll in the rotten.”
Where was the letter? Cambridge. Sophie wanted to go there.
Professor Henslow was writing to tell Charles that he might expect an offer to sail as a kind of ship’s naturalist or companion to Tierra del Fuego and then home by way of the East Indies. He also said that he fully expected that his friend and student would “eagerly catch at” it.
And so he did catch at it, but Dr. Darwin hated the idea. Enter the uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, whom Charles visited at the former’s home, Maer. Josiah not only helped answer Charles’s father’s objections but went back with him to Shrewsbury. He picked up his nephew’s burden and heartened him.
What, Sophie thought, are we here for but to do just that for each other? Share the burdens and hearten each other in spite of what appear to be bare ruined choirs; hearten each other until a hermit thrush or a horned lark sings; until we get to the other side of the earthy, darkened sanctuary.
The other side? Maybe.
She remembered that she was on a path that might mean there was no other side.
Finally, Captain FitzRoy (who would command the Beagle) apparently re-examined his own initial assessment of young Mr. Darwin’s nose. He had at first thought that the shape of it did not bode well.
Charles later wrote that it suggested to the captain a “lack of s
ufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think,” Charles continued, “he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.” In the active presence of the young man, FitzRoy gave up his phrenological leanings. The person of Charles overwhelmed whatever fears his nose might have aroused.
He was excited to sail. On October 24, though, he was far from sailing. He had merely “arrived” in Plymouth “after a pleasant drive from London.”
But on the 26th he set foot on the Beagle on a bone-chilling day and saw the corner of the cabin he would inhabit. He grew worried. He also started to write in a diary.
And right there in front of her, at Darwin-online.org.uk, she found it. The diary. She read his own words about the delays in sailing and about his space in the cabin.
26th Wet cold day, went on board, found the Carpenters busy fitting up the drawers in the Poop Cabin. My own private corner looks so small that I cannot help fearing that many of my things must be left behind.— 10
At the beginning of what Sophie knew was to be a momentous adventure, there you have it. He felt fear. In her own quarters, at certain times, even the second hand flicking around her tile clock inspired fear.
And in the days to come, before the ship finally sailed, Charles would also be putting up with more wet cold days and then the actual decisions about what must be left behind.
There would also be loneliness for him and going to a church only to have to listen to a “stupid sermon”; learning to get in and out of a hammock, the wear and tear of waiting in harbor; more miserable weather, seasickness and a nighttime whistling wind and shouting during a false start out of Plymouth.
He wrote of the “extra trouble” of trying to do something like washing one’s hands or taking a book off a shelf while on board. Then, more rain, more wind, more false starts. He had what he called palpitations and “pain about the heart.”
No sailing. Still no sailing.
The Crossings Page 9