Jurassic Waters

by E. Coulombe

  “Now I’m really wishing the waves were down,” George said to Andrew when he pulled up behind him.

  “It wouldn’t matter George. Grant said the men needed the boats for fishing, and the outboard to check cattle on the windward side.”

  “You mean he didn’t want any more time wasted on the search for George’s Folly. I know that’s what he’s calling it. Andrew shrugged. “Well, doesn’t matter, paleontologists are familiar with doubters and detractors, and now we will prove them wrong.”

  “You gonna make it?” Andrew asked, concerned about George since they started the hike. George wasn’t keeping the pace on the uphill slopes and stopped to catch his breath frequently.

  “I’ll be all right, but I need to rest. Go ahead, I can make it. I did it just the day before yesterday, remember.”

  “That’s okay, I’d rather wait here now than have to hike back later and find you dead on the trail.”

  “Tanks allot bra,” George teased in the local dialect.

  At a bend in the trail a half mile ahead, they could see Kerri, Michael, and Lono. “Oh, to be young again, hey George?”

  “Yes, young and beautiful.” George answered. “That young woman is one of the most glorious females I’ve ever seen. Look at how she lopes up that hill, easily, as if the land was level and her pack was empty.” He grunted, hefting his pack onto his shoulders.

  Several hours later, exhausted but intact, George and Andrew finally made it into camp. Lono had a fire going, and he served a delicious chicken laulau and rice that he’d packed in for the first night’s meal.

  After eating, George lay down next to the fire. He gazed at the stars overhead and listened to the waves making low, steady thunder below.

  “This is what I needed, “ he said to Andrew. “To be on my back, looking at the stars. I’ll tell you Andrew, I’m not used to this pace--nearly drowning in a tidal pool, running down a mountain in the dark, riding through ten-foot waves over a shallow reef--and believe me I was saying my prayers on that one--then turning around and hiking in here with full gear. I can honestly admit, I’m done in.”

  “You still do that George?”

  “What?”

  “Pray?”

  George chuckled. He and Andrew had spent many evenings over a pint of ale discussing George’s faith.

  “And I take it you still have no faith.”

  Andrew raised his left brow. “No, I do have faith in something now. I have complete faith in death.”

  “That’s really depressing,” Lono piped in, not yet asleep, lying still with his hands clasped on his chest.

  “No. Just realistic. We can’t be certain of anything in our lives, not even our next breath. Except, the one sure thing. Without a doubt, we are all going to die. That’s it. Just one last breath. I live with the certainty of death, which can’t be said for the rest of you.”

  “You don’t know that.” Kerri spoke up. “You don’t know enough about me to make that statement.”

  “No. Prove me wrong with a simple yes or no. Have you found the meaning of life?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yes or no.”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “You mean you had it once?”

  “Maybe, I thought I did until my parents got divorced when I was 15. Things changed then… my whole world came crashing down. I don’t know…”

  Sad memories filled the night air. A gentle gust of wind blew on the coals, causing the fire to flare briefly.

  “Well, as unhappy as that may make you feel, Kerri,” Andrew said, “I’m glad for you. Better to face reality at a young age than to come to that same conclusion later. Like Emma.”

  “What do you mean by that?” George said.

  “Nothing. Just that Emma is reconsidering her faith.”

  “Living with your lack of it has got to be hard for her.” George did not attempt to conceal his disapproval.

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, after years of debating religion and faith, I’ve come to realize the entire issue can be resolved with a yes or no question. Either way, it ends up the same.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You either believe you’ve found the meaning of life, or you believe there is no greater purpose--and then, you die. Same end either way. That pretty much sums it up.”

  George lay down using his pack as a pillow for his head. He gazed up at the cool dark sky. Cloudless, completely unthreatening. After a long moment of silence he sighed.

  “Well, in spite of your morbid view, I find it good to be here tonight, and even a skeptic like you has to agree with that.”

  Andrew smiled.

  “You know, Emma should be here,” George said quietly.

  “Yeah.” Andrew’s voice floated up, as though he was not quite sure.

  “She would have liked this.” George said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “What do you mean, ‘maybe so’?

  “Just what I said. Maybe so.”

  “Don’t you know what your own wife would enjoy?”

  Andrew took the bait, and like a fast-spreading fire, the two men entered into a heated, irrational argument about what Emma did and did not like to do.

  “I don’t get it,” Kerri said. “Why are you two arguing about this?”

  Her question stopped them short. Embarrassed, George explained that he and Andrew had been college roommates and had made the age-old mistake of falling for the same girl. “But Andrew won,” he said. “End of story. And just to prove that I was alright with it, I agreed to be best man at his wedding.”

  “Oh, just to prove?” Andrew said.

  “Yeah, I can’t think of any other reason I would’ve suffered all that silly pomp and circumstance.” George laughed, but Kerri caught a shadow crossing his face. She stopped herself from further comment as George called it a night and went inside his tent. Andrew decided to forego his tent, and sleep next to the fire with the others, but for the longest time he could hear George wrestling inside his tent, trying to find a comfortable position inside his bag.

  Suddenly George screamed, cursed and slapped his bag, slammed into the side of the tent so hard the tent collapsed and under the light of the moon they could see him rolling around inside the nylon, kicking and screaming. Andrew got up, found the zipper and helped him get out.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you old man?” Lono yelled.

  “Damn centipede crawled down my leg inside my sleeping bag!”

  They all laughed. George went on and on about his ‘near death’ experience, and those goddamn centipedes and what was he going to do now, and “how can you all just lie there?!”

  “Oh quit fussing old man,” Andrew laughed heartily, “you’d think you’d wrestled with the jaws of death instead of a crawling insect.”

  “One bite and I could be dead.”

  “Myth,” said Lono, “it stings for awhile and then it goes away. Now shut up and let us sleep.”

  “Great. Now I’ve got to put my tent back up in the dark.”

  “Hell no, just use mine George, I’m sleeping out here.”

  George shook out his bag, turned it inside out, slapped the walls, swept the floor and finally lay down inside on top of his bag – and lay awake most of the night, waiting for the next centipede to crawl up his bare leg.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Kerri was a natural camper. A minimalist in her daily life, she had reduced her physical needs so that when camping, she didn’t suffer for lack of comfort or household amenities. Unlike George, who preferred a tent, she slept on the ground with only her sleeping bag around her.

  Rising early, as was her custom, she stood by the remains of the campfire and brushed her fingers through her silky hair. George watched from the door of his tent, thinking about young beauty, how it never needed great tending. She went through a series of yoga positions, stretching her arms, hands clasped behind her back, slowly bending until her forehead touched her knees. By the
time she finished, she had four pair of male eyes fixed on her.

  “If I tried that, you’d have to call in the Coast Guard to medivac me out of here,” George laughed. “I didn’t even know the human body was capable of bending that way.”

  “It’s not,” joked Andrew, “Kerri had to have corrective surgery to be able to perform that trick.”

  Still bent forward, Kerri turned her head and gave George an enigmatic smile. Standing, she twisted her hair and tied it into a knot on the back of her head, walked over to the stream and rinsed her face with fresh water. Meanwhile, Andrew took the machete and slipped into the copse of trees behind their campsite. Moments later, he returned carrying a bunch of bananas, the bottom ones already ripened.

  George had convinced the entire crew to remain at camp a few extra days to help him search for the strange organism. They had enough supplies to last the week, and each of them shared George’s interest in finding the creature, for their own reasons. The weather looked iffy, but the thunderheads that loomed over the distant peaks could blow either way, and the group banked on the other direction.

  While contemplating the day ahead, he prepared coffee for himself and cocoa for the younger men. He gave each person directions on how to look and where to look for the creature. Lono, in particular, looked forward to the task. He was determined to find that clawed monster that had attacked him in the cave. “Catch it and cook it for our supper tonight. That’s my revenge,” he announced.

  By dusk, Andrew returned from the search, empty-handed and discouraged, followed by Michael who bounded in displaying his ten-pound trophy – an uhu—parrot fish—he had speared in the deeper water. Andrew watched Michael gut, scale, and fillet his colorful catch. He tried to picture his son just two years ago, in their Boston apartment, endlessly tied to his computer. Michael wouldn’t even eat fish then, much less clean one.

  Unfinished youth, Andrew thought, still being chiseled, still being shaped. A form originally created by himself, and Emma, they had always exercised restraint, letting Michael’s shape render on its own, offering only gentle guidance. But now comes Lono, Andrew thought, exerting a stronger influence, making deeper cuts, using bolder strokes, and—shaping Michael in ways over which we have no control. Will I like him when Lono’s finished? Will he become the man I’d like to call friend?

  He watched Michael squatting over the stones, intently cutting away at his fish, wondering what had become of the baby in his arms, the young squirmy thing in the bathtub, the child’s small hand reaching up unsure, looking for safety from the longer hand reaching down to give it? Not here, hacking away at that fish. Andrew grinned.

  Lono returned with five hardy lobsters, and once again, won George’s lavish praise that evening when he served grilled lobster tails with seaweed. George deemed it to be ‘the best tasting meal ever’.

  After dinner, George turned to Andrew. “I was lying in my tent last night thinking about our discussion at dinner.” Andrew shifted in his seat. He had hoped George would drop the debate about Emma. But when George spoke, he steered far away from the topic of women. “Let me see if I got it straight,” he said. “The Darwinian theory of evolution: mutations occur randomly and continuously, regardless of the environmental conditions. They are selected to survive if the new mutation is beneficial.”

  Relieved, Andrew laughed. “Jeeze, George, these are the thoughts that cross your mind as you fall asleep in a tent at night?”

  “They’re not yours?”

  “Touché,” Andrew touched his head with his hand in salutation.

  “So?” George pursued him.

  “Alright. That’s the prevailing theory in a nutshell.”

  “And let’s give Darwin credit,” George continued. “That’s one hell of a concept to come up with when the only tools at his disposal were…what, observations? He observed different animal forms on his voyage to south America, and he studied artificial selection in dog breeds and pigeon stock.”

  “And he had his ten year study of the barnacle,” Andrew shook his head. “Ten years. Wow. He must’ve become really familiar with that organism.”

  “So it took a crystal clear understanding of population genetics to come up with his theory.”

  “True. And he didn’t even know there were genes, just that there had to be some kind of a hereditary factor that got passed on, in part, not in whole, for we’re not clones of our parents. That’s all he knew. Had he known the wonders of DNA, the complex interaction of factors occurring, simultaneously, on multiple layers at any given moment in our DNA…it is truly mind boggling, what he would have come up with.”

  “And he may well have looked for something more than ‘random’ as the explanation.” George said. “Which leads me back to you. You’re thinking that the environment changes first, either a geological upheaval like a glacier, or a meteor, or a biological change like an explosion of some new insect, and the new econiche causes the mutations in some organisms which will allow them to survive.”

  "Yes. Not only do I think it. I plan to prove it,” Andrew said confidently.

  George was pleased. The two men were so involved in their conversation they barely noticed when Kerri left to crawl inside her nearly dry sleeping bag. A light rain started to fall, and she and the boys pulled their bedding further under the tarp, closer to the dwindling fire which Lono had ceased to stoke.

  Andrew went on. “So since you asked the question, here is the scenario as I see it. The genetic program can be thought of as blocks of information added on in a three-dimensional board game. Each slight change has several ramifications. In the Pre-Cambrian era, 600 million years ago, chromosomes were first formed from single pieces of DNA, which slowly came together and formed single celled organisms."

  "Which, as I said the other day, was a fantastic leap, probably the most incredible feat in all of evolution. And no one can explain it." George beamed.

  "It is, isn't it? But for now I'll just start there, if that's okay with you?" From which George gleaned Andrew had already considered this point, devised a hypothesis, theoretically tested it, and was in his mind ready to move forward. Andrew continued.

  “Those single-celled organisms were created by a short series of maybe fifty commands, and existed for billions of years without any change that we can see in the fossil record. Until 600 million years ago, the planula developed….”

  “…basically an eight celled ball.”

  “Right. Next, the outer cells grew cilia, or hair, and movement was accomplished. The DNA program in the planula must have been extremely flexible. New patterns could be easily tested.”

  “Now you sound like the evo-devo guys.” George said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The evo-devo guys, surely you’ve heard of them?” When Andrew looked baffled George went on. “Guys like Muller, and Newman, who espouse something similar. They call it developmental plasticity, or something like that. They think that in the beginning, when all these forms first originated, that it was not the genes, but something else, like the physical properties of primitive cell aggregates, or the conditional responses of tissues to each other and to external forces, non-genetic factors, which responded to the environment and caused all these forms to come into existence. Then the new forms are assimilated into a population, they become the norm.”

  “Very interesting. That would make sense in the beginning, in the three-dimensional board game. The interaction is what’s causing the new forms to arise. And that interaction would repeat itself not because it’s genetically controlled but because it’s dictated by the chemical properties of the cell aggragates themselves. “Very interesting. Any proof?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Too bad, we’re all a little long on theory right now.” Andrew shook his head, but went on. “Anyway, then you duplicate the first genes and mutate a few of the duplicates – and thus, the first hox-like genes were made.”

  George jumped in. “Which means you now have the spo
nges. They had different kinds of cell types, like cells for digesting, cells for absorbing, but the cells weren’t organized into tissues.”

  "Right, then the hox-like genes of the sponges were duplicated, and changed slightly, better defined, and then you had the four original hox genes found in the next organism, the jellyfish.” Andrew paused. George didn’t get it. “And scientists have now found that those same four hox genes still operate in jellyfish today.” Andrew raised his eyebrows, but still George didn’t jump in. “And today, those same hox genes, or nearly the same, are found in fruit fly DNA, and even in mammalian DNA.” Andrew raised his eyebrows and waited, signaling George to make the connection.

  “So?”

  “So? So?” Andrew taunted. “So, don’t you see man. That means the original hox genes of the most primitive jellyfish that lived several hundred million years ago are nearly the same genes you find today in all body plans!"

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” George whistled as he suddenly realized where Andrew was going with this. “Does that mean that if you were able to manipulate the hox genes of a jellyfish, like the Man o’ War that swims in your Hawaiian waters today, you could make those genes recreate the ancient organisms found in the seas 600 million years ago? Even though they are extinct.”

  “I don’t know,” Andrew answered slowly.

  “But you think so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you’re trying to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. Oh my god, you are trying to do it! Aren’t you? That’s absolutely fantastic!” George jumped up and started pacing, coming in and out of the dwindling light of the fire. He looked like an Indian, conjuring.

  Andrew laughed. “C’mon George. Sit your ass down. I don’t know anything yet. It’s way too early to speculate in that direction. Shall we continue in the world of reality?”