Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  The children leaned their faces in against the horses’ necks to feel that warmth, holding on tightly with mittened hands; and like icebreakers at sea, the horses set off into the starlit snow, which was now sanded as smooth as the surface of a calm lake.

  Their old trail had been filled in by the wind, but they took the same route out, the horses pushing through snow up to their chests. They plowed resolutely through it not only as if unaware they were retracing the same path they had just carved out less than an hour ago, but as if enjoying the labor.

  Wallis, Mel, and Colter stood on the porch and watched the glow of the lanterns, a dark procession, disappear into the woods; and even after the procession was gone, they remained there and listened to the singing.

  They heard other singing, too—the wolves on the mountain behind them—and they listened to that for a while, and then Mel went back down to the smokehouse—running, because she was cold; running across the taut-frozen shell of snow as if it were a hardened cast of concrete, so quickly and deeply had the temperature dropped—and she came back quickly, carrying a goose and an elk shoulder. They went inside and shut the door against the cold, and Mel began cooking all over again, preparing once more for the visitors she was not even sure were coming.

  As if in a parlor game, a thing to keep Colter entertained, Wallis pulled down one of Old Dudley’s journals and read aloud to Colter, while Mel baked and breaded and basted.

  Scenes from the Coal Period

  How the Coal Beds Were Formed

  While the grisly monsters of the ancient deep were luxuriating in empire and blood, the premonitions of progress were felt. The world was not made for them, but only an age of the world.

  Behold, the tide bears out into the sea a floating log. Its exterior is marked by peculiar and significant impressions. They reveal the crest of a dynasty in the vegetal world. They are the seal of a Sigilla’ria. It has floated from the shore of a low-lying and silent continent. There is a meager nursery there where nature is training vegetation for thriftier times. In this log is written the doom of the old placoderms which had stirred the Devonian mud of the sea bottom. It is a voice crying in the wilderness of waves. Prepare the way for new land, new forms, new sense, and new history. God almighty, Man is coming!

  It was back then the beginning of the Carboniferous Age. The tremors incident to the upthrow of a new belt of land had strewn the submerged continental slope with the sandy ruins of older lands and left the bed to mark the beginning of a new system of strata. They were not outspread in a day. They were laid down only with the destiny to be tom up in the human age—to serve as foundation stones for our more elegant structures.

  Meantime the waters deepened, and nature seemed to have forgotten her announcement. She had promised land and green forests; but instead she gave deep sea and an expansion of the empire of bony-scaled ganoids. She gave larger development to Brach’iopods. She dallied with the chambered shells and gave the world an improved type, which we have named Goniatites. She lingered lovingly over one of her ancient conceptions which we style crinoidal. She had had it in her repertory of beautiful thoughts since early Cambrian times—the pretty little stone lily. She had taken it up in every age, and had turned out yearly some improvements and some new decorations.

  But now, during this waiting period for man, she seems to have returned with true devotion to one of her first ideas. She gave great attention to diversifying life, decorating it, and filling the sea with its delicate and graceful forms. All for only the Age—not for perpetuity; for it, while we stand on this verge of a grand epoch, we lift the veil which separates the one beyond, we find the crinoidal conception gradually falling into forgetfulness.

  But then this dream of placid waters and teeming populations was broken as if within a dropped jar. Some long pressed crust of the earth was broken by the accumulated strain, and the mud of the sea was stirred from its prolonged repose, and floated over the fields where those crinoidal stone lilies had flourished, generation after generation.

  Tenants of the sea, alarmed, retreated to deeper waters or perished in their homes, and received a Pompeiian burial. The ocean bottom had been lifted to a higher level! The scene was totally changed. The summer sea became a stormy and turbid shore; and a broad belt was given to the land. The tom beach, crumbling before the waves, contributed coarse rubble for the foundations of new land in some future age.

  The vegetation promised for the impending epoch was crowding into possession of the ground. It flung its fragments into the deep in challenge to the conflict which now sent its murmur through the world. These chips from the bystanding forest were buried in the sands which loaded the sea bottom.

  Everything was ready; the curtain was about to rise.

  Now came the first charge in the conflict destined to alternate during an age. The land uprose by another notch; the bottom of the sea was lifted to the surface. The great “Carboniferous Conglomerate” was now first bathed in air and sunlight. The new territory included all the regions which had been selected as the sites of the capacious coal repositories for the use of civilization: Man! All this was being prepared lovingly for man.

  It was not a dry upland. It was a broad and mighty marsh. Texas was not included in the common continental marsh, but stood apart for a special destiny.

  Now, over all this breadth of bog and swale sprang up vegetable growths—trees and herbs, ferns and rushes, with the all-engrossing airs of those who come to hold possession. Whence these forms? Some, as I said, had been nursed on the older and contiguous land, and now entered upon a new possession because these patterns were already in existence. Some sprang from germs fresh planted by some unseen hand. What mean all these transformations? They mean progress. They mean man. They mean civilization. It is not change alone; it is improvement.

  This luxuriant crop is sustained by the carbonic acid of the atmosphere. This, as is generally supposed, was in excess. It made the air irrespirable; no terrestrial creature could live. But terrestrial animals must constitute the next step of progress. Man must arise from the swamp.

  The march of improvement had now gone as far as possible with water-breathing populations. The highest type of animals had been reached and its aquatic class had lived a striking career. Nature had now paused for the purification of the air for the next class. The plan of nature was blocked until this could be done. Man had to arise; man had to be summoned.

  The power which had called matter and force into existence could have made other disposition of this difficulty. The carbonic acid could have been combined with lime and fixed in limestones. It could have been banished from the planet. But carbon is precious. It is the basis of all our combustion. It warms and blazes in coal and petroleum, peat and gas. The carbon must be preserved for future use. Man would discover its utilities, though in the age then passing had no use for it. Man was yet far off; but man was anticipated; man was involved in the plans of the world; man was prophesied in these preparations. The earth must receive her kings.

  So vegetation was appointed to do the work and to conserve the material. This explains the presence of coal-making trees upon the shores of the preceding epoch. They came by appointment, they were to fulfill a plan; they stood waiting by the border of a domain which had been promised them for a possession. All the conditions favored. This was not fortuitous; it was a preparation. Unlimited supplies of aliment pervaded the atmosphere. The marshy situation exhaled the abundant vapor in which vegetation delights!

  The earth, in its comparative newness, retained the warmth to stimulate the root. So tree fern and herbaceous fern, Calamite and Sigillaria, began work. Atom by atom, they selected the poison from the atmosphere, and, returning the oxygen, fixed the carbon in their tissues. Frond, stem, and root treasured up the fuel impelled by the force of sunlight. Every pound of vegetable answered to a given amount of solar force. The world was in balance! A rough work in progress.

  Generations of plants succeeding each other fell prostrate
and added their substance to the growing bed of peat. Standing water protected the peat from decomposition. Now the skies again were lowering, and forebodings of change trembled through the continent. A cataclysm was at hand! The wide expanse of marshy land again went down.

  Old Ocean, which had roared and frothed in rage around the borders of the territory of which he had been dispossessed, came careering back to his old haunts.

  Old Ocean brought a freight of mud and sand, and he spread it over the whole vast peat bed—as if to make sure of no renewal of the usurpation—like those who sow with salt the sites of ruined cities to make the ruin a finality.

  But the salt sowed by resentful Old Ocean was in truth a packing away of something destined to be saved, not forgotten. It was part of a beneficent plan, and the anger of the ocean was made an instrument for this accomplishment. Beds of clay and sand shut out from the atmosphere the sheet of peaty matter which was to consolidate to coal.

  The dominion of the ocean was temporary. Apparent regress was in truth a forward movement! Again the reeking sea bottom came up to sunlight, and another scene of bright verdure was spread where late, Old Ocean had celebrated a jubilee. It looked as if the former forest had undergone a resurrection. Here stood again Lepidodendron in its summer hat, and Sigillaria and the other established forms. But they were other species; and with them was an occasional newcomer among the vegetable types. They understood for what purpose they had been sent, and resumed the work of selecting the impurity from the air. Already, some adventurous and hardy types of air-breathers had colonized the jungle. They were sluggish and slimy creatures, with whom life passed slowly, and respiration was a matter of comparative indifference. Yet they enjoyed existence. They grazed on the humble herb; they seized the dragonfly, alighted to rest his wing; they violated the home retreats of the passive snails. They crawled out and sunned themselves on the ferny bank. There were grosser and heavier forms, mail-clad and vociferous: haunting the bayou; paddling for some eligible fishing station; bellowing like oxen, when excited in pursuit; stirring up the mire of the stagnant bay; resting their chins on the reeking bank to absorb the slanting sun-warmth of the early morning, or lolling under the noonday shade of some wide-spreading and umbrageous Lepidodendron.

  Why prolong the tale? The land continued to oscillate as long as the purification of the air was incomplete: working, slaving to make the world clean for man. Again and again the forest resumed its work, and bed after bed was stored away beneath ocean sediments, to await the end.

  When the beneficent work had been accomplished, the tired forces, those which had endured with trembling and vibrations—the enormous strain that had been accumulating under the prolonged contraction of the earth’s interior—yielded with a tremendous collapse that jarred the hemisphere like the finishing throes of some great rutting thing.

  Huge folds of massive crust uprose and were mashed together till their crests pierced the clouds. This was the birth of both the Appalachians and the shining Stony Mountains. This event proclaimed the end of the long Paleozoic Era.

  Only the stumps of those folds remain today. Though crumbling, they stand as monuments of the mighty means through which the world was prepared for man and civilization. Lo, I come!! Me—Dudley Estes. Lo! I am here! The world was finally made ready for me!!

  Mel was still working in the kitchen, but had been listening and smiling as she worked. When he was done reading, Wallis asked Colter what he thought about all that—if that was the way they still taught it in schools.

  “I’d say that’s one mixed-up lunatic nut case, is what I’d say,” Colter said, forgetting that he was talking about Mel’s father.

  But Mel took no offense. “He’s out there all right,” she said.

  “Is he crazy?” Colter asked.

  Mel thought about it for a moment. “Well, he’s functional, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “He’s able to get by. And he’s a great geologist.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Colter said.

  “No,” Mel said, “he’s not crazy.”

  Colter wasn’t convinced. “He sounds like it.” He thought for a moment and then asked, “Do you think that’s what some of those people at the Bible school are like?”

  Mel shook her head. “Dudley’s not a churchgoer. The only god or church he believes in is the church of Himself.”

  She brought them each a cup of tea. It was two o’clock. The roof and rafters were groaning and creaking, contracting in the deep cold as if being clutched by it. “Cheers,” Mel said, “Merry Christmas.” She patted Colter on the back.

  They sat for a while watching the fire, and then Colter rose and said, “I changed my mind. I’m going home now.”

  “Are you sure?” Mel asked. “It’s so cold.”

  “Yes,” Colter said, and they didn’t try to talk him out of it, but felt guilty that they hadn’t been able to provide him with whatever it was he was looking for. Wallis felt especially bad, believing that perhaps the passage he had read from Old Dudley’s journal had upset him.

  Colter wouldn’t take an extra coat with him, or matches, though he did agree to take a lantern.

  “I’ll stay warm enough, walking,” he said. He stepped out onto the fierce crust of snow. “It’ll be fun, walking across the top of it. It’s like a highway.” He wished them good night and Merry Christmas, and set off toward the woods. The wolves were still howling, and Mel wondered if they were frustrated that, this evening at least, their prey could run across the top of the snow rather than floundering.

  Colter’s lantern disappeared, following the trail of the carolers.

  Mel and Wallis went back inside. They built the fires back up: stoked them full. They sat in the den—Mel at her desk, working in her notebooks, and Wallis sitting on the floor next to the fireplace, reading further into the old journals—and the clock ticked quietly, and all was as calm as if they were an old married couple.

  At midnight Mel blew out her lamp, put more wood on the fire, said, “I feel marooned,” and sat down next to Wallis.

  “I do too,” said Wallis.

  They slept again in each other’s arms—closer, this time—and, carefully—careful because there was still no love in it, only curiosity and loneliness—he kissed her, and just as carefully, she kissed him back once, slowly, and then they slept, both of them being extraordinarily cautious to avoid thinking of the future.

  THE MASTER CAME CREEPING INTO THE VALLEY AFTER midnight, bringing with him his human captive as well as two hawks. He was anxious to check in on, and in some manner reclaim, even if invisibly, what was his: his daughter and his other geologist.

  He had chilled the hawks—redtails—in the freezer at his townhouse in Houston, nearly to the point of freezing, and then had hooded them and wrapped them in newspaper for insulation and bound them with twine and duct tape before stuffing them into Matthew’s duffel bag, hoping that airport security would not discover them, which they did not.

  They had rented a car, a limousine used for dignitaries, in Helena, and had driven north, against Matthew’s protests that no vehicle would be able to get into the valley: that they would need snowmobiles, or helicopters, or skis. Matthew had seen Old Dudley like this before—almost rut-crazed with obstinacy, so much so that it seemed as if even a small matter had become a struggle of life and death. When he got this way, it was as if there had been a slippage within Old Dudley, as if the tooth of some gear had been chipped—and Matthew, who had been stalked by lions and charged by bears, was never so chilled or frightened—the hair on his neck rising—as when one of Old Dudley’s gears slipped and he fixed upon Matthew, or whomever the transgressive party happened to be, that unblinking round-eyed stare of what seemed to be nothing less than pure malevolence.

  Old Dudley’s tong marks would pulse and flex deeper, with a respiration of their own, as if two organisms, two beings, were inhabiting Old Dudley—one controlled by the human beatings of his heart, like any other man, and the other controll
ed by some awful, unknowable rhythm or pulse behind those tong marks.

  And always the offender would wilt and fall back, or turn away, and Old Dudley would get his wish; and the issue in question would no longer seem so important to his opponent, who would instead carry within him or her for days the illogical but inescapable feeling that he or she was fortunate simply to be alive.

  If Matthew had stood firm and argued further against the limousine, would the old man have flown at him, and tried, with his teeth, to rip his neck out? The force behind Dudley’s anger was such that it seemed he would.

  They had driven north in the long black car, through blinding snow, slipping and fishtailing on wind-scoured ice, then plowing through snow, while the hawks, still hooded, riding perched in the back seat, warmed back into full life, shitting and hissing, with their strength fading fast, and needing to kill soon. With each bend and slip in the road, the hawks had clutched the leather seats tighter with their talons, so that soon the upholstery was shredded.

  As usual, the northern landscape began to arouse discomfort in Old Dudley: the slashing snow, the tunnel of dark towering trees through which they were speeding made it seem to him, always, as if they had gone past some point of civility, past some point where things could be relied upon to turn out all right. A place where man was not king. He missed the steamy tropics of Houston—the heat and haze and sluggish, sweaty, fungal torpor; and to allay his nerves, he drank steadily from a bottle of rum, and from time to time turned on the overhead dome light to peer at the small photographs of nude women, cut from the pages of skin magazines and glued to the backs of index cards, which he carried with him on trips away from home for the purpose of cheering himself up.