by Rick Bass
Reaching for the kettle to pour his tea, he burned the side of his hand on the stovepipe: seared it, a quick crescent-moon welt of pain, as if he were being punished for something total and unforgivable. He gasped, then went to the sink and plunged his hand in a bucket of water. He felt oafish, incapable of inhabiting the surface of the earth: unable to even move around doing simple or mundane tasks without bumping into things or doing them clumsily, incorrectly.
In one of the wooden boxes in the storeroom there had been some musty old books and journals—Old Dudley’s textbooks and notebooks from the early part of the century, when he’d gone to a reform school in San Antonio. Wallis wondered if, perhaps at that age, Old Dudley had been relatively normal. Perhaps his eccentricity, or madness, was a deterioration in which the closer back to the source one got, the less distinguishable it became. Perhaps at the age of sixteen and seventeen Dudley would not yet have revealed a clue of his coming estrangement from—what? The surface of things?
But then again, perhaps not. Wallis picked up one of the old madman’s journals and began reading its handwritten, child’s-scrawl pages, and was surprised, almost alarmed, for even then, it was already the voice of an old man. Perhaps he had been born old.
Wallis’s hand throbbed, but his blood chilled, as he read the ancient, loopy ramblings of the precocious teenager.
This work attempts to hold a position between textbooks and books of light reading. The formal textbook would not suit the class of readers addressed: future citizens of great intellectual vigor. The style of light reading would have been unworthy of the theme, and would not have supplied the substantial information here intended.
My method of treatment is simple. The reader begins with the familiar objects at his very door. His observations are extended to the field, the lake, the valley, and the mountain. They widen over the continent until all the striking phenomena of the surface have been surveyed. The course of observation and reasoning then penetrates beneath the surface. The various geologic formations and their fossils are described, first in descending order, then to the oldest. We find here indications of heat which stimulate speculation and bring out the grounds of a nebular theory of world-origin.
Wallis thumbed ahead.
Facts; Or, The Record Given Us to Read Among the Rocks.
I. The Geology at Our Doors.
Surface Materials
Geology is the story of the earth and of earth’s populations. It is more than a story told by some narrator to whom we must listen. We ourselves shall weave the story. Perhaps we will ask the world to tell its own story; but we must try to possess the skill to understand the narrative. The world is vocal with instruction for those who know how to listen, and it is telling many secrets about its hoary past which are not suspected by those who have not learned to listen.
We shall travel all over the world. We shall climb over mountain-cliffs and descend into deep mines. We shall go down under the sea and make the acquaintance of creatures that dwell in the dark and slimy abysses. We shall split the solid rocks and find where the gold, the silver, the iron, and the oil are hidden. We shall open the stony tombs of the world’s mute populations.
We shall plunge through thousands of ages into the past, and shall sit on a pinnacle and see this planet bathed in the primitive ocean; boiled in the seething water; roasted in ancient fires; distorted, upheaved, moulded, and reshaped again and again, in its long process of preparation to become fit for us, the deserving, to dwell upon it.
We shall see a long procession of strange creatures coming into view and disappearing—such a menagerie of curious beasts and crawling and creeping and flying things as never yet marched through the streets of any town. And what is most wonderful of all, we shall plunge through thousands of ages of coming events, into the future, with our knowledge, and sit on our pinnacle and see the world grow old—all its human populations vanished—its oceans dried up—its sun darkened, and silence at midnight arid Winter reigning through the entire province in which a sisterhood of planets at present basks in the warmth and light of a central and paternal sun.
These are themes which arouse the profoundest curiosity in an intelligent soul. I fancy a masculine reader is impatient to begin.
But we must begin at the beginning. Those who go on long and pleasant journeys have to start from their own doorsteps. Geology tells all about this world. The world is here—under our feet. It is in the garden and along the roadside, and in the field, and on the shore where the summer ripples sing lullabies to the sleepy crags, and winter storms tear them from their resting-places. No summer ripples or wintry storms are here, but the solid land is here. Let us walk up this hill-slope and sit where we may get an outlook over a little piece of the world’s surface.
Wallis squinted, trying to read the crude lettering by the wavering candlelight. He felt somehow that he should not be reading the journal, and yet that he was also getting a naked glimpse at a thing: and he felt that these crude imaginings of how to find oil—Dudley would have been seventeen, at the time he wrote the notebooks—could help Wallis learn new ways of moving through the underground, if he dared approach so close to what seemed like madness.
Wallis had to force himself to read further: tempted, yet repulsed.
The houses and the herds, the wheat fields, towns and gardens, schools and nunneries: these are accessories. But the dark, beetle-browed ridge which skirts the horizon—that is nature’s. The green forest which glides down to the field borders; the stream which winds across the landscape, and rises and falls with the rains; the low swells and the valleys between; the outcropping ledge in the field, and the loose stone by the roadside—these belong to nature. There, in the distance, flies the train of steam-cars, its iron-bound way has been cut through hill and rock mass, and opens to our view something of the hidden material which goes to form the world.
How charming is all this scenery! How many times, imbued with the love of nature, we have strolled on the borders of this quiet lakelet, or lounged on the green slope, which seemed set, like an amphitheater, to accommodate the visitor who loves to look upon the scene.
Perhaps, as urchins straying from school, or getting the most out of a Saturday holiday, we have angled along this brook, or paddled our skiff over this pond. Perhaps in wonderment we have seen the artist from the city, with easel and brush reproducing on canvas the beauty of this simple landscape, thinking to win a prize in the Academy of Art, or at least to afford the pent-up dwellers in the dusty town the luxury of knowing how lavishly the beauties of nature are strewn before the gaze of those who dwell here in this agricultural vale—in this quiet hamlet which Providence has made our home.
This is all geology. We are in the midst of it. We have been enchanted by it before we knew its name.
Wallis closed the old leather journal; bits of dust fell from its binding as he did so, and he wondered how much longer the book would be in the world. It would not last long. He might be the last person to read it.
He returned the journals to their fraying wooden box and set them back in the storeroom. He left the rocks scattered like toys in the hallway. He put more wood in the stove and was wondering at the increased cost of that, as well, due to his presence—wood that Mel would not have been burning—when he heard her come up onto the porch and knock the snow from her boots. He hadn’t heard any approach before that; her skis had been soundless.
She came through the door in good cheer, taking her ski cap off and brushing the snow from her hair, smiling to see him, but then frowned when she realized he was still in the same clothes he’d worn the night before, and that they were not snow-damp.
“You didn’t go outside today?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I stayed inside and worked, and read. It was nice.”
“Oh, you’ve got to get outside,” Mel said, and he thought she meant in the future, but she meant that night. “You’ve got to get out and move around,” she said, “or you’ll get depressed. You’ll go
crazy. The winter will get in your blood. Everyone knows that. We’ll go after supper—we’ll go put that salmon carcass in the creek. You’ve got to get outside for at least a little bit, every day.”
“Fine,” Wallis said, though he did not believe her.
They had salmon and bread for supper. They peeled from the bones the flesh they couldn’t finish and put it in containers to keep in the refrigerator. Wallis asked if Mel had seen any wolves that day and she laughed and said she hadn’t seen any wolves in over two years. “Sometimes I see their tracks,” she said, “but I haven’t even seen those in two weeks. It’s hard, when it’s snowing like this. You’ve got to be real lucky. You’ve got to be almost right on top of them.”
They had Graham crackers for dessert. Wallis put on one of Matthews old coats and heavy boots, and they went back outside, wading through the snow. Mel carried the salmon’s skeleton in both hands. Wallis looked back at the cabin and could see only the faintest glow from one lantern.
The creek flowed through a lane of cedars. The snow was coming down in swirls now, twisting in whirls away from them. Mel put the skeleton into the creek and held it there in the current, her hands and wrists bare, sweater rolled up to her elbows.
“The salmon used to be here,” she said. “And the country’s still good for them. They just can’t get here anymore,” she said. “Only five hundred miles to the ocean, but five hundred dams between here and there.” She stirred the fish gently, made it undulate as it had when it was alive. “They’ll be able to smell this one,” she said. “They’ll taste it, out in the ocean, and they’ll see it in their dreams. And maybe they’ll come looking for it. And maybe they’ll get here. Maybe they’ll make it back somehow.”
She stepped back, clapped the water from her hands—for a moment, Wallis thought she was admonishing the salmon to leave—and for a moment, too, with the current rippling across the ghost-bones beneath the dark water, it looked as if the fish were obeying, was already beginning to swim back to where it had come from.
She crossed her arms, tucked her hands under her armpits. “Come on, I’ll show you the smokehouse,” she said. The snow was coming down so hard that Wallis could no longer see the lantern’s glow from the cabin.
The dark outline, the bulk, of the smokehouse appeared. When they got to the doorway, Mel kicked away a drift of snow and opened the door by slamming her body against it shoulder-first.
Inside it was just as cold, but it was a relief to be out of the snow. Wallis recognized instantly the ancient smell of horses and old hay. The snow’s reflected light barely made it in through the dusty windows.
Gradually he became aware of other presences. His eyes became more balanced with the darkness, and he began to see shapes hanging from the rafters. He could smell meat.
Mel went over to the wall, found a box of matches, and lit one. Wallis saw the flare of the match lighting her austere face—the cheekbones large, even muscular, but not unattractive—and she was working over a lantern, trying to light it. As the match dwindled she got the lantern roused into sputtering light; and as the light blossomed around her, he saw the figures hanging from ropes and chains, brilliant and glazed in the lantern’s broad light, and it was like coming into a new world, with new beings and citizens all around them: elk, deer, trout, and grouse. Juniper bushes, with their autumn berries still blushing blue-green on them, hung like tobacco sheaves.
Mel’s arms glistened as she held the lantern up to better illuminate a giant bull elk. There had been ice on her arms from where she had turned the salmon loose, and now those thin plates of ice were slipping from her and falling to the smokehouse floor and melting into steaming puddles. Her breath leapt in clouds. The lantern hissed and sputtered, coughed, as if protesting the necessary stir of atoms, the reluctant call to flame.
The elk was skinned, and his legs below his knees had been cut off, so that he was hoofless—but he still had his head and antlers attached, and the antlers rose into the high rafters. He rode the air in chains, as if flying—one set looped around his chest, another around haunches and hams, so that he seemed still to be galloping. A rope fastened around his head, tipping his antlers slightly back, and it looked as if he were about to bugle his autumn war-cry.
Only one steak had been cut from his left ham: all the rest of him was perfect and intact, powerful. Wallis walked around him, admiring the way he had been made for the mountains—the way he and his kind had made themselves fit the mountains—admiring every muscle and cross-muscle, every ligament, every woven tendon leading to movement and desire. Mel followed him with the lantern. The meat was deep red, and in places contained an iridescence that gave it a purple sheen. The muscles were frozen: tiny ice crystals were locked in the clefts between muscles, and before the dull heat of the lantern they melted and then fell, as if the meat were weeping.
Wallis walked around to the other side—beneath the dull blue marble eyes, the polished antlers, the black and tan cape. There was a small hole behind one shoulder where the bullet had gone in, and on the other side, a larger hole where the bullet had torn itself out, as if seeking freedom after its bloody passage through the elk’s heart and lungs. Damage to all that it touched, and then a yearning for sky again. The elk hung there motionless, suspended, as if all this were only an inconvenience.
“Matthew got him on Halloween afternoon, up on Boyd Mountain,” Mel said. She reached out to the elk’s bare muscle, the frozen slab of it, and rested her hand on it as she would a horse. “Boy, that was a happy day.”
“Matthew was here—that recently?” Wallis asked. He tried to think back to Halloween. If Matthew had come up here, he hadn’t mentioned where he had gone.
“Just for a day and a half.” Mel tucked her free hand in against her chest once more, warming it. “He always comes and gets my year’s meat,” she said. “He’s always done that.” She brightened, remembering the day. “We built a sled and skidded it to a cliff—lowered it down to the Bull River—built a raft, and rode, and swam with it, out to an old logging road. Loaded it into the jeep and drove home.”
They walked over to the other of Matthew’s bounty: a giant mule deer, not yet skinned, also hanging parallel to, but above the ground, like a ghost ship. “Matthew got him that next day, at daylight, just before he left, on the mountain behind the house,” Mel said, remembering the details with what seemed like the intensity of hunger. “I went out with him. There’d been a light snow that night. The deer was browsing kinnikinnick leaves. He had one stuck between his teeth and was standing there with his head pointed straight up, trying to dislodge it with his teeth. The sun was behind us. You could hear snow melting all over the mountain. When Matthew shot, this old boy went down like his legs were knocked out from beneath him.
“He was dreaming the sleep of angels even before the sound of the shot reached him,” Mel said. “While we were cleaning him, a grizzly came over the top of the ridge and sat and watched us. They’re starting to learn that when they hear a rifle in the fall, it usually means a gut pile to feed on. Sometimes they run the hunters off and eat the whole deer. Sometimes the wolves and ravens and coyotes and other creatures also come to the sound of the shot. But this day there was just that one big bear, and he didn’t bother us. We had blood up to our elbows, but he just sat there and watched us. We left the heart and liver for him. A big boar grizzly.
“He could have gotten us if he’d wanted. What a day,” she said.
They toured the rest of the smokehouse. All three of the valley’s species of grouse—ruffed, spruce, and blue—hung with heads and wings folded, feet dangling. Some were plucked; others still had their feathers. It was like being in a delicatessen, and Wallis hoped he would get a chance to eat them. He wondered what they tasted like. They were the size of small chickens, but as beautiful as pheasants: some rust and russet, gray and black, others dusky blue, with tiger bars across their tails, and short, sturdy beaks.
“Is Matthew a good shot?” he asked.
&nb
sp; “Yes,” said Mel.
There were fish hanging, too, skillet-sized trout and whitefish, belly-swooped from the gorging of summer, and the fish had absorbed the smokehouse’s odors, apple and cherry wood, and some alder. Wallis sniffed the side of one trout, a two-pounder—“Go ahead,” Mel said, “take a bite”—and he did. It was delicious.
“Do you ever use mesquite?” he asked. “Do you ever have Matthew or your father send it up from Texas?”
Mel shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t ask for it, if it’s not from the valley. I try not to bring in anything alien, anything foreign,” she said. “If Matthew sends it, I’ll use it—but I don’t ask.” She looked to the back of the smokehouse, to her stack of wood, as if Texas, and mesquite, were in that direction.
“Apples and cherries grow up here?” he asked.
Mel smiled. “Yes,” she said. “At the school, and behind Helen’s house, behind the mercantile, down low, along the river. Helen’s trees don’t blossom, and they don’t bear fruit, but they grow,” she said. “They’re real big, and real old.” She shrugged. “Maybe one year they will.”