The Crossings

by Deborah Larsen

  Which reminded her. “Polly,” she said, “Charles wrote that the sailors said that they knew why it was late December and no sailing: it was because someone on shore was keeping a black cat under a tub.”

  “Whereas,” Polly said, and then—sounding like Tweety Bird in the Sylvester cartoons—“Now that sounds logical.”

  2

  Crotalus Scutulatus

  The phone, the land-line of all things, was ringing.

  “Sophie, this is your neighbor. Jack.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’m calling because there is a rattlesnake in your driveway.”

  “A rattlesnake.”

  “Yes. I think it’s a Mojave.”

  “A Mojave. A Mojave what.”

  “A Mojave rattlesnake.”

  Sophie hesitated. “Is that bad?”

  After a brief silence, Jack said, “How do you mean that?”

  “I mean, is a Mojave rattlesnake poisonous?”

  “Yes. Very. One of the worst.”

  “Is it out of its range?”

  “Its range.”

  “This is the Sonoran Desert, not the Mojave.”

  “No, it is not out of its range.” A silence again, and then her neighbor said, “What would you like to do?’

  “Do?”

  “About the rattlesnake in your driveway.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You have a few options. You can call 911 for snake removal; the fire department relocates them though they don’t do well in unfamiliar territory. If Stella were here, she would kill it if I would allow her to do so. Or you can do nothing.”

  “Nothing.” Sophie considered. Then she said, “I want to see it.”

  Jack was standing in her driveway when she got there. He said, “Hi. The rattlesnake is gone.”

  “Gone.” She exhaled and her shoulders sagged.

  “Yes. But we can search for it if you like. When I saw it, it was headed out of your driveway.”

  Sophie shaded her eyes against the sun and surveyed the vacant lots across the street. When she had bought her house, she was told that the land parcels—the last and least desirable ones in her development because they faced the copper mine tailings off to the west—were being snapped up by Coloradans, Minnesotans, and Californians. The recession had intervened and brought home building to a standstill.

  Did they know what they had lost by not moving here? They had lost the constant sun and all that the sun represented.

  She said to Jack, “What do you do with one of them when you see it in your yard?”

  He took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, and resettled his cap before he answered. “In my yard? I let it alone, let it be. If I see it in someone else’s, I let them know. But I don’t tell them what to do.”

  What did the Mojave look like? When Sophie searched she found its fearsome-sounding Latin name: Crotalus scutulatus. She pronounced the term, haltingly, probably wrongly, out loud so she could help herself remember it: “Crotalus scutulatus. Crotalus scutulatus. Crotalus scutulatus.” This pit viper was difficult to distinguish from the Western Diamond Back. It could measure up to fifty inches long.

  There were 52,000 entries in Google for the snake. She wanted to read them all, to know every last thing about the Mojave, to become expert at distinguishing it.

  Right.

  The white bands on the tail tended to be wider than the black. It also had enlarged scales on the top of the head and according to Wikipedia, the “light post-ocular stripe passes behind the corner of the mouth.”

  She wondered how Jack was so sure it was a Mojave. Was he that good at identifying things that he could see the white bands as slightly wider than the black? Could he see the post-ocular stripe passing behind the corner of the mouth?

  She resisted the temptation to call him on the telephone, to say, “Are you sure? And by the way, how did you learn to tell the difference? Studying pictures? Seeing them time and time again side by side?” Maybe she would go on to ask, what was your training, what was your work, where did you live before, by the way how old are you and also by the way how long have you been married to Stella—

  “Cut that out,” she said out loud. “Stop it.” She spun around in her swivel chair. “Just stop it.”

  To say “rattlesnake” to her friends made them shudder. “I am certainly not coming to see you out there,” a colleague, Alice, had said. “Rattlesnakes,” she had said. “Not. Coming. To. See. You. Out. There.”

  Devonport to Canary Islands

  1831

  December 28th

  Waked in the morning with an eight knot per hour wind, & soon became sick & remained so during the whole day. — My thoughts most unpleasantly occupied with the flogging of several men for offences brought on by the indulgence granted them on Christmas day. — I am doubtful whether this makes their crime drunkedness & consequent insolence more or less excusable.

  29th

  At noon we were 380 miles from Plymouth the remaining distance to Madeira being 800 miles. — We are in the Bay of Biscay & there is a good deal of swell on the sea. — I have felt a good deal nausea several times in the day. — There is one great difference between my former sea sickness & the present; absence of giddiness: using my eyes is not unpleasant: indeed it is rather amusing, whilst lying in my hammock to watch the moon or stars performing their small revolutions in their new apparent orbits. — I will now give all the dear bought experience I have gained about sea-sickness. — In first place the misery is excessive & far exceeds what a person would suppose who had never been at sea more than a few days. — I found the only relief to be in a horizontal position: but that it must never be forgotten the more you combat with the enemy the sooner will he yield. I found in the only thing my stomach would bear was biscuit & raisins: but of this as I became more exhausted I soon grew tired & then the sovereign remedy is Sago, with wine & spice & made very hot. — But the only sure thing is lying down, & if in a hammock so much the better. — The evenings already are perceptibly longer & weather much milder.

  30th

  At noon Lat. 43. South of Cape Finisterre & across the famous Bay of Biscay: wretchedly out of spirits & very sick. — I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking, little did I think with what fervour I should do so. — I can scarcely conceive any more miserable state, than when such dark & gloomy thoughts are haunting the mind as have to day pursued me. — 11

  — Darwin’s Beagle Diary

  Nausea

  The black cat must have recovered enough from some catatonic state to push on the tub, topple it, and then zip out from under on December 27th, 1831. For on that date the Beagle herself sallied out from Plymouth and was not blown back.

  The sailing must have felt like an anticlimax. Charles wrote that he had a total “absence of sentiment.” He wrote in retrospect that “with every sail filled with a light breeze we scudded away at the rate of 7 or 8 knots an hour.” Though he had hoped that the goings out and turnings back would serve to inure him to seasickness (as if rehearsing for it), they did not.

  The misery caused by nausea was “excessive.” Sophie knew the feeling from having been salmon fishing on a charter boat near the Columbia River bar. The worst was that the constant vomiting in sea sickness in no sense relieves long-term nausea.

  On some of the days Charles experienced “unceasing suffering.” Suffering enough to fervently wish he had never sailed.

  This from his diary but only this from the published Journal of Researches which was later reprinted as The Voyage of the Beagle: that her majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-ton brig, had been beaten back by gales at first but had eventually sailed on the 27th of December, 1831. And that on the 6th of January they had reached Tenerife.

  Did he console himself with the prospects
of what he had so looked forward to—Tenerife? And did he wonder if he could bring himself to get back on the Beagle at all? From Tenerife, after all—the largest of the Canary Islands—he could catch some sort of ride back home.

  Tenerife. He had read about it in his own copy of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, and those passages had set a fire burning in his bones. The book cheered his heart, he says, during the long days of nausea; all the sickness would be worthwhile as long as he could place one foot and then another on the soil of Tenerife.

  There he could see the great Dragon tree, the sandy plains, the forest. Palm trees, bananas, arbutus, laurel, pine. All that volcanic rock. Indian figs, Euphorbia, laurels, myrtles, Canary house-leek, dates, cocoa trees, musa, orange trees, cypress, hedges of agave, cactus, pomegranate. His anticipation could only have been full of fervor.

  Small Shit

  Sophie had been in the hardware store reaching for a birdseed bell to hang from one of her mesquite branches, when she heard a voice.

  “Packrats.”

  She turned and Jack said, “Hi. Packrats.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Packrats.”

  She said, “Packrats.”

  “Yes. If you hang that bell and the birds come for it and knock seed onto the ground, packrats will come in the night for the spilled seed. Pretty soon you will not only have snakes who will be attracted by the packrats, but you will also find packrat nests under your cholla, packrat bites out of your red outdoor cushions, packrats in your storage box, packrats in the corners of your brick grill, and maybe even packrats inside your house walls.”

  “Oh.” It sounded as if he had memorized her backyard.

  “Sorry to throw cold water on birdseed.” Then as if there were some connection between cold water and Madera Canyon, he said, “The early morning bird-watching in Madera Canyon is getting interesting right now.”

  Where was he going with that? “Good,” she said and then thought “Good” sounded inane. “I spend my early mornings doing some writing.” She didn’t tell him that she now took a morning a week off from reading and writing to go to the canyon.

  “Yes, of course.”

  She bought the birdseed bell. Jack appeared behind her at the cash register. She did not look to see what he was buying.

  The following Thursday morning she took Polly and went for a walk in the canyon. Toward the end of Proctor Trail, the man she saw lowering his binoculars was none other than Jack.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi. Once in a while I take a morning off and walk out here.”

  It wasn’t so much that Jack nodded: he made the smallest, the shortest of bows.

  “What are you seeing?”

  “Well, something a bit common. Lucy’s Warbler. Near the top. The far-left branch. Middle.”

  Only when the bird moved and twitched its tail did Sophie see it. “I see it.”

  “Want to take a closer look?” He started pulling his binocular strap away from his neck and over his head.

  “I would.”

  She took the binoculars, raised them and adjusted the focus. Nothing: just a tangle of branches. “I can’t find it.’

  “You might want to look at the bird with your naked eye and then without moving, raise the glasses to your face.”

  It worked. “I see it.”

  “It’s a male. See the red on the crown.”

  “It looks mostly gray all over.”

  “The red crown is small, right at the top of the head.”

  Sophie saw it and thought a door had opened somewhere. “I see it.”

  “It also has a rusty color on the rump.”

  She looked. “I can’t see that.” The cataracts? She wasn’t going to say she saw something she didn’t see.

  The bird flew. Lucy’s Warbler flew.

  “I used to shoot them,” Jack had said.

  “You were a bird photographer?”

  “No,” he said. He looked up. He said, without expression in voice or on his face, “Bang, bang.”

  “With a gun?”

  “Yes. A 16-gauge shotgun.”

  “For specimens?” She remembered her friend Sylvia, a watercolorist, who had her freezer stuffed with birds she had found dead. Subjects for her paintings.

  He shook his head. “For fun and for eating. When I was young, in Texas. Part of the culture. My mother roasted them. White-winged Doves.”

  “And now you watch warblers. You don’t shoot birds.”

  “Not anymore.” He paused. “Small change. A few moves forward, anyway.”

  He looked toward the trees. “I used to watch them in the east with my friend, Clarke. We didn’t talk much but when one of us saw a warbler—well, I’ll spare you all that. I’m running on.”

  “When one of you saw a warbler—” she repeated.

  He sighed. “When one of us saw a warbler, we would nudge the other and say sotto voce, ‘Small shit.’”

  Later, Polly said, “Whereas you ignored me the whole time when we were out there with that Jack person.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I didn’t have much choice.”

  What was and where was a bird’s rump, exactly? Was it under the tail feathers? Was it Jack’s word? Later, she looked it up online and found the morphology of a bird. A bird had a rump and it was the projection of the lower back above the upper tail feathers. That helped. She had thought it might be under the tail feathers.

  Then she looked at warblers. For that she went to her Smithsonian Field Guide, something she had on her shelf but rarely picked up.

  Orange-crowned

  Chestnut-sided

  Yellow-rumped

  Black-throated Green

  Hermit

  Golden-cheeked

  Bay-breasted

  Black-throated blue

  Then there was the Worm-eating, Prothonotary, the Hooded, and the Mourning. To name a few. But so many compound names. She loved it.

  Why did Jack and his friend say “small shit”? Maybe because warblers were small. Or maybe they produced small shit as in “Watch out, small ‘bombs away’ above you.”

  Now the seemingly implacable, formal Jack had slipped; he had let some silliness show. Maybe he is a little silly inside, like me. Or silly like Yeats who was, as Auden had written, “silly like us.” A community of sillies.

  I was much interested, on several occasions, by watching the habits of an Octopus, or cuttle-fish. Although common in the pools of water left by the retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink. These animals also escape detection by a very extraordinary, chameleon-like power of changing their colour. They appear to vary their tints according to the nature of the ground over which they pass: when in deep water, their general shade was brownish purple, but when placed on the land, or in shallow water, this dark tint changed into one of a yellowish green. The colour, examined more carefully, was a French grey, with numerous minute spots of bright yellow: the former of these varied in intensity; the latter entirely disappeared and appeared again by turns. These changes were effected in such a manner, that clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut brown were continually passing over the body. Any part, being subjected to a slight shock of galvanism, became almost black: a similar effect, but in a less degree, was produced by scratching the skin with a needle. These clouds, or blushes as they may be called, are said to be produced by the alternate expansion and contraction of minute vesicles containing var
iously colored fluids. 12

  — Charles Darwin, 1839. Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle. . . .

  A Plot Twist

  Then something strange happened as the Beagle approached Tenerife. A memoirist could not have gotten away with writing about it. It would have been construed as fiction. A plot twist. Some reader would have searched it out and posted it on Twitter. Falso, false. Never happened. No way. String the writer up. Let the publisher call back his advance. Let all the books be returned to the warehouse and then burned.

  But this strange thing did happen. A boat from the island pulled up alongside the Beagle. A simple matter. Nothing of import.

  Except, according to Charles, the news that came from it was like a death-warrant. The Tenerife consul had ordered a twelve-day quarantine to be sure that no one on board had cholera. They were but one-half mile from the port of Santa Cruz.

  Captain Fitzroy made short shrift of that; he ordered the crew to set sail and leave the island behind. By no means would he sit there for twelve days.

  One-half mile from the two hills that rise in the form of bells. One-half mile from arborescent heaths, the spring of Dornajito, the goats of a deep brown color, the Nostrils of the Peak, the Sugar-loaf (El Piton). Not to speak of the small plain of Rambleta to which Captain Baudin tumbled during his ascent of the cone of the peak. Not to speak of the warblings of capriotes. The great Dragon Tree. How he had wanted to see and hear all of that.

  Charles used the word “misery.” He was never to step onto the soil of Tenerife.

  Sophie thought about his misery. She was as sad as if this had happened to her. I must love Charles Darwin. My life is entangled with the life of Charles.

  “Your life is hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul had written. I have a hidden life with Charles. In God? Is that blasphemy?

  But there was no question that she would continue. Simply, Charles was now the object of her affections. For some, he was the Evil Genius if not the anti-Christ. The object of my affections. . . . How strange was that? She was now continually imagining him and his world.