Where the Sea Used to Be (15 page)

Wallis walked farther down the hall, his glass empty. Pictures of Helen as a young woman in a canoe on the river—the trees behind her looking only slightly smaller and younger.

This was a little what it was like, looking for oil and gas. Going down, farther down and back—sheets of time falling away in layers, with the newest resting atop the oldest. His affinity for this kind of searching must always have resided in his blood. No man, and no landscape, could have instructed him in that pleasure. It was too deep, too certain. Surely he had brought that pleasure with him into the world.

Helen came over to where he was standing. Wallis was swaying slightly, but Helen had another drink for him, and she steadied him.

“He loved that camera,” she said, speaking of Matthew's father. “He and his wife never had any money to spare. He always wanted to take lots of pictures, but he only allowed himself one a week. Sometimes, on special occasions, two. He'd send the roll of film off to Helena to get it developed. Everyone in the valley would have to wait a couple of weeks for the photos to come back—him checking the mail every day, having been sleepless all night, he said—and when the pictures came, he'd lay them out on the floor of the bar and study them for what seemed like forever.

“And when he died, I gave the camera to Danny, who now takes only three or four pictures a year.” Helen's voice was hoarse and gravelly. She moved down the hall, squinting in the dim light through her thick glasses. A lit cigarette dangled from her mouth. “Here,” she said, “here, I think, is where Buster left off and Danny picked up.”

Buster's last photo, a close-up, had been of a pattern of lichens on gray stone, up in the high country. There were tufts of alpine bracken clinging to the rocks, and some fresh blown snow. “He was out on Robinson Mountain, in October,” Helen said. She pointed to the snow in the picture. “A storm came in that afternoon, and he got wet and caught the pneumonia that killed him. He could have beaten it, but he just quit.” She drew hard on her cigarette, frowned, trying her best to remember something important. Released the blue smoke from her mouth and then from both nostrils. “I can't remember if he ever saw this picture or not,” she said. “Seems like maybe he didn't.” She shook her head, surprised by the memory of the sadness she had felt back then—so distant and without substance, now. As if she had somehow not been justified in feeling it so deeply, for it to all be gone now.

“How old was Matthew?” Wallis asked.

“Little,” Helen said. “Four.”

“It's amazing,” Wallis said. “You really can't tell where one left off and the other picked up.”

Helen laughed, stubbed out her cigarette. “It's a good camera,” she said. “Cost a pretty penny, even then.”

Wallis headed back to his table, bumping one table with his hips, and then another. Made it back to his chair just in time, before his legs went out: all power draining from him, except for that required to lift another glass to his lips.

“The caribou,” Colter said, and Wallis thought he meant something that was cooking on the stove—but everyone was rising and moving over toward the windows. Wallis followed them to the front door, still unsteady.

The caribou had their faces pressed against the glass of the windows—big bulging eyes, with long white manes and beards that made them look like circus creatures. As they tried to peer in, the windows would fog, then clear, then fog, then clear, with each breath, so that the caribou's faces were visible only in shuttered pulses, like the awkward frames from an old motion picture. Everyone went out onto the porch to marvel at their strange and magnificent antlers.

“They come down from Canada sometimes,” Helen said. “You hardly ever see them anymore. They're damn near extinct. Woodland caribou,” she said. “The kids are all certain they're reindeer.”

Wallis counted twelve of them. They milled around like horses bunched together for warmth. There was snow on their backs, and when one caribou's antlers brushed against another's, there was a dull clacking sound like the music of rocks tumbling downstream under heavy water. “We just see them in the snowiest winters,” Helen said. “I guess it's going to be a corker.”

“Do they always come here?” Wallis asked. “To the bar?” It seemed to him that they were like strangers checking into town.

“Always,” said Helen. “They're so damn tame. We may or may not see them again this year. I think they just come by to check in on things, and to let us know they're around. They'll disappear after this. Look,” she said, and pointed to Colter, who was feeding one of them an apple. “It's an omen,” said Helen.

“Of what?” Wallis asked.

“I don't know,” said Helen. “But it's an omen.”

The caribou—a bull—finished his apple, and all the caribou stared at the people a little longer, and the people stared at the caribou, and then the caribou turned, as if having heard some unspoken command, and headed back up the road. They soon disappeared into the falling snow.

“They'll go to the peaks of the mountains,” Helen said. “The more snow, the better. They've got those big feet, so that they just float on top of the snow. They reach up and eat lichens from the tops of trees. They need all the snow in the world.”

When the caribou were gone, everyone turned and went inside. Already, in that brief time, their hats and backs and shoulders were covered with snow. Colter put on his coat and told Amy that he was going to follow the caribou on his skis for a short while.

“He's like a little Indian,” Amy said, after he was gone. “He's like his father.”

The cold had sobered everyone—or made them believe, for a moment, that they were sober—and so more drinks were ordered. Now Wallis felt himself wobbling, felt his interior self diving, and was relaxed: this was sometimes how it was, at depth, mapping. A free fall, with no struggling against one's plummet.

Mel came in the bar, snowy and steaming. She shook the snow from her hair and clothes, knocked it from her boots, and began unpeeling. She too was greeted with great joy and warmth, and it was some time before she could separate herself from conversations and come over to Wallis's table, where, upon seeing his condition—lights out—she asked him how many drinks he'd had.

He barely heard her telling him—instructing him, almost commanding him—to never again have more than one drink in winter.

“Your blood's too sluggish, and your brain shrinks, same as it does for bears in hibernation. If you drink even two, then it's all over—you can't stop. Two's the same as five or six, seven or eight. How many did you have?”

Wallis made a dim attempt at answering. Artie and Danny tried to cut him some slack—they weren't in much better shape themselves—but were silenced by Mel's glare, and they made excuses to leave the table and find other things that needed doing. Mel frowned, nodded at Amy's empty pitcher and Helen's near-empty shot glass. “Y'all know how it is up here, in winter—he doesn't. That wasn't fair,” she said.

“He's a grown-up,” Helen said, but Amy agreed with Mel and said, “You're right, we should have taken better care of him.”

Helen was annoyed. “Since when is it your job to take care of him—and why can't he take care of himself?”

“He's my guest,” Mel said. “I have to live with him. I don't want him coming down here every night like some runaway hound.” She picked Wallis up—he was unconscious now—and folded him over her shoulder like a bag of feed. “He doesn't know any better yet,” she said. She headed back out the door, Wallis's head bobbing behind her, upside down, like a gutted deer.

Chastened, Danny followed her outside and gave her a lantern to take with her on the ski home. She thanked him and took off down the road without using her poles: holding Wallis in place with one arm, the lantern and poles in the other. The lantern cast a small yellow globe of light in front of her: a mesmerizing light filled with millions of falling snowflakes, as if she, too, were descending. Wallis's body was warm against Mel's back and shoulders. She was not angry at him, and told herself that he was not so much drunk as only sleeping.

 

He awoke with his head clear, but with his muscles feeling poisoned. Mel was gone—a note on the chopping block in the kitchen, next to a new-baked loaf of bread, said “Back after dark,” and he fixed toast and tea, then stripped and went down and sat in the creek, and then lay down in it to bathe. It was still snowing.

Wading out, he rolled in the snow, ran back up to the cabin, and dried off and dressed by the fire, shivering. Later in the afternoon, still trying to shake the poison from his muscles, he went out to the woodshed and split kindling.

At dusk—still snowing—he fixed more toast and tea, and pulled down the old journals, as the short day slipped away, like all the ones before it.

 

A Walk Under the Sea

What Goes on in the Ocean Depths

“The sea! The sea!” shouted the companions of Balboa, as they caught the first glimpse of the Pacific from the heights of the American Isthmus. The sea has always inspired the wonder—often the veneration—of mankind. Its vastness and power overwhelm the imagination. Its permanence, its antiquity, form a bewildering conception. The same “far-sounding sea” roared in the hearing of the mariners of the remotest past. The same ocean floated the ships of the Tyrians and Carthaginians. Its mysterious depths aroused the superstitions of the ancients the same as they excite the intelligent curiosity of modem science. A “glorious mirror,” as Byron conceived it,

 

“Where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests,

Boundless, endless, and sublime,

The image of eternity—the throne

Of the invisible.
”

 

Let us stand on some bold headland and look out over the Atlantic. Let us plant ourselves on Sankaty Head, the eastern promontory of Nantucket, itself the “ultima Thule” of New England. The breakers roar along the beach. Across the billowy blue, thought wanders to the European shore. Underneath the ruffled surface, imagination pictures a world of curious and wonderful existences. There lie the skeletons of noble ships
—
there moulder the dead sailors of all nations—there rot invaluable cargoes—there sleep the mysteries of steamers which sailed out of sight of land and never returned—there swarm the sharks that desecrate the sacred forms of humanity which sank into their silent empire. Shall we venture among the dangers of the underworld? Yes, we invoke the magic protection which has made warriors invulnerable, and shielded adventurers upon the waters of Styx, and the fiery waves of Phlegethon.

We go down like bathers in the sea. We pass the margin where

 

“The dreary back seaweed lolls and wags.”

 

We traverse the borders where the brown, belted kelp sways to and fro in graceful curves. We get beyond the slope of stony bottom to the smooth sand. We come to the gardens of the rosy-tinted sea mosses—the
Dasya,
the
Grinnellia,
the
Callithamnion;
and startle the bluefish and halibut in their safe seclusion. A moonlight gleam is here, and the water also takes on the chill of evening. We attain a depth of half a mile. Our feet press into the finer sediments derived from the land—the dust of other
“continents to be.
”
The twilight has faded into a deep shade. The creatures of the sea swarm curiously about us, then flee in terror from our presence. We feel the gentle movement of
“a river in the ocean,” but surface disturbances do not reach to this depth.

A change of climate impresses itself on our sensations. The water where we started had a temperature of sixty degrees—here it is forty. But we are panopalied against harm; we press on. We descend to the depth of a mile. The species of the shallower water appear no more. Their home is the zone which now stretches above our heads. The green and rosy sea mosses never venture here. We are in total darkness. No chlorophyll tints the growths of the vegetable kingdom. Here are only stony, white calcareous algae and silicious diatoms of microscopic minuteness.

We pause to contemplate the awful stillness of the submarine realm, and feel our slimy path down to the deeper profound. Above us now float two miles of black sea. Any surface fish brought down here perishes from the effect of enormous pressure, if possessing an air bladder. If it have none, the fish becomes torpid, and finally dies.

We are here, probably miles from the shore—that varies with the steepness of the slope. The sediments which the rivers have brought to the ocean have mostly been. But here still are some of the finest particles contributed by the land—slime from Louisiana, from the Rocky Mountains, from our native town. Will these far-brought and commingled atoms ever see daylight again?

We are standing on the border of the vast abyss which extends over half the area of the earth. It is an undulating, silent desert. No diversity of mountain and valley, cliff and gorge exists. By a gentle grade the bottom descends to a depth of five miles. Over all this dread waste, no rocks rise above the bed of slime.

The pressure on us in this abysmal region is four or five tons to every square inch. The water is ice-cold everywhere. The darkness, absolute and palpable. A curdling revulsion of feeling and purpose seizes us. We halt and reflect. We turn our eyes upward with a painful longing for the “holy light, offspring of heaven first-born.” Only the black ceiling appears. Two miles above us is the sunny sea, where all the blue of a genial
sky beams down. Will we ever return? There float the ships in summer calm upon a
“painted ocean,” or tossed and rent by the winter tempest which inspires the waves with madness. But no summer and winter vicissitudes are here. No sunrise or noonday or sunset is ever known.