On Trails (6 page)

Sitting next to him at dinner that night, it seemed odd to me that Liu, a soft-spoken and exceptionally careful researcher, was drawn to such a field. Liu told me he first became interested in Ediacarans during a class in his second year at Oxford with a professor named Martin Brasier, who spoke inspiringly about the mysteries of Precambrian fossils. Brasier—who died in a car accident in 2014, at the age of sixty-seven—was a Shiva-like figure among Ediacaran paleontologists, slashing down flimsy theories and widening the domain of
that which cannot be definitively stated
. In his 2009 book
Darwin's Lost World
, Brasier briskly disassembled the principle of uniformity, which decrees that, natural laws being uniform, fossils can be better understood by studying living animals. Uniformitarianism has proved a powerful tool in many fields, Brasier admitted, but it ignores an organism's profound interdependence with its environment. The theory's efficacy therefore begins to break down in the Precambrian era, when there existed a radically altered oceanic ecosystem. “The world before the Cambrian was, arguably, more like a distant planet,” wrote Brasier.

To us land-dwellers, even the present-day deep sea is foreign, a crushing black space haunted by spectral oddities: glass squids, carnivorous jellyfish, a fever dream of fluorescence. But in the time when the Ediacarans thrived, the oceans were stranger still. The first Ediacaran to begin crawling around would have discovered a world devoid of predatory animals, with a seafloor covered either in thick bacterial mats or toxic sediment, and, possibly, a climate thawing
from a worldwide glaciation event known as “Snowball Earth” (or, more recently, “Slushball Earth”). If that pioneering Ediacaran could see, it would have discovered an underwater desert patchily carpeted with gelatin. Here and there it may have spotted other, nonmobile Ediacarans, which resembled fleshy leaves, many-tendriled sea anemones, or low, round blobs: a whole world populated by brainless, jelly-quivering do-nothings.

The mystery Liu was trying to unravel—regarding the origins of animal movement—is central to solving the larger mystery of how that alien planet transformed into the natural world we all know. Muscular locomotion could have allowed animals to graze on the beefsteak-like bacterial mats and to attack other stationary organisms. The invention of violence might then have kicked off a biological arms race, prompting organisms to evolve hard shells and sharp teeth, the shields and swords that characterize the Cambrian fossil record. This hardening of animal bodies eventually led to the rise of trilobites and tyrannosaurs and Eocene-era Egyptian elephants—and us.

Before the discovery of Ediacaran fossils, and even for a while afterward, many prominent scientists argued that complex life began at the dawn of the Cambrian era. Looked at from a certain angle, the fossil record seemed to support this theory. Around 530 million years ago, like a symphony warming up, the fossil record began teeming with a cacophony of different fossil types. Further back than that was nothing: silence. Some scientists, like Roderick Murchison, a geologist and devout Christian, believed that this lack of evidence was geologic proof of a biblical genesis. (“And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures . . .' ”)

Charles Darwin cautioned against this interpretation, writing in
On the Origin of Species
that, “We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.” He saw the entire geologic record as a history book stretching across multiple volumes. “Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two
or three countries,” he wrote. “Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”

The truth, it now seems clear, is that Precambrian animals had existed in great numbers, but, being soft-bodied, had not lent themselves to fossilization. They crop up exceedingly rarely, in places like Mistaken Point, where the geologic conditions were just right.

After our dinner at the Trepassey Motel, once our plates had been taken away and dessert politely declined, Liu mentioned that another big question he has yet to answer is why the Ediacaran fossils of Newfoundland are so unusually well preserved. He suspected the Mistaken Point assemblage was smothered in a Pompeii-like flow of volcanic ash and impressed into the bacterial mats on the seafloor. He would have liked to test this hypothesis in a lab, but it had proved tricky, because he would need fresh volcanic ash.

Fortunately, Liu's girlfriend, Emma, was a volcanologist.

“Have you got Emma running around with a bucket to collect you some ash?” Stewart asked, grinning.

“I've asked her if she would,” Liu nodded, sincerely. “She was in Montserrat, in the Caribbean, last summer, and that's exactly the right type of ash. But it didn't erupt.”

Stewart laughed. “You may be the only man on the planet,” he said, “who, when his girlfriend goes to the Caribbean, hopes the volcanoes will erupt.”

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Around our second round of beers, the scientists' conversation turned to the topic of humans. They noted that research into the origins of life provokes an irrational vitriol in many people. Liu mentioned that one of his supervisors, upon publishing a paper about a fifty-­million-year-old monkey fossil he had discovered, soon began receiving death threats from creationists. I was reminded of a similar story I'd heard
from a former tour guide in New Hampshire. During one of her bus tours, she had mentioned to a group of children that the granite cliffs visible through their windows were some two hundred million years old. The students' chaperone jumped up and wrenched the microphone from the guide's hand to assure the children that what she'd
meant
to say was that the rocks were two
thousand
years old. Covering the microphone, the chaperone explained to the tour guide that it was their church's teaching that the universe was created by God only six thousand years ago. She asked the tour guide to, in the future, please be a bit more respectful of people's differing belief systems.

Liu wryly remarked that he would have little trouble disproving such an assertion.

“But you can't,” Stewart said. “Because whatever evidence you put in front of them, they're going to say it's the devil deceiving you.”

These words pinged around in my head as I bid them goodnight and started off down the darkened road to the town's beach, where I planned to camp for the night. A deceitful demon: the very same one Descartes summoned in 1641. How, the great cogitator had asked, do we know that what we see is not a pure hallucination, perpetrated upon us by a malignant, godlike figure? How do we know that what we perceive is really the world?

Aldous Huxley, having never forgotten the horror of his “stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster” in Borneo, went on to expand his prickly view of the wilderness into a kind of broad Kantian skepticism about the capacity of humans to ever directly experience reality. He cast the world-in-itself as a place of “labyrinthine flux and complexity,” which we are able to navigate only through imagination and invention. “The human mind cannot deal with the universe directly,” he wrote, “nor even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of thinking about the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic plan of the universe, only a simplified, two-dimensional map of things
abstracted by the mind out of the complex and multifarious reality of immediate intuition.”

Huxley believed that knowledge, even when empirically proven, is only ever a map, never a view of the territory itself. But perhaps it is not so stark as that: perhaps knowledge is more like a trail—a hybrid of map and territory, artifice and nature—wending through a vast landscape. While science may provide a more reliable route to certain answers than, say, a creation myth, it remains narrow; it can reduce the environment to a navigable line, but it cannot encompass it. To a fervent believer in the scientific method, this thought can be unsettling. Great mysteries surround us all, like beasts slinking silently through the night—their presence can be intuited, or imagined, but never fully illuminated.

Paranoia blew gently on my neck as I combed the beach for a suitable place to set up my tent that night. I became convinced that wherever I chose to sleep, local troublemakers would decide to harass me during the night. I feared that in the town's eyes I was seen as a homeless person, a foreign body to be expunged.

I erected the tent on a flat spot close to the road, but the headlights of each passing car swept over the tent, setting it aglow like a paper lantern. I could hear the cars' passengers speaking in parabolas of intelligibility as they bent past. A few remarked on the oddity of my impromptu campsite, so I picked up the tent and moved it farther down the beach, where it was darker. In the long headlights of those cars, my shadow resembled that of a giant carrying an igloo.

At first I selected the flattest spot I could find, but I realized that I was squarely in the path of a set of 4x4 tracks coming from a nearby house. Later in the night, I would hear drunk teenagers speeding down that same path where I might have slept. Beer bottles tinkled onto the sand. At least one rider, a girl, spotted my encampment and said, “Oh, weird, there's a tent down there.” I envisioned these antibodies gathering unseen around the tent, smiling, fingers to their lips.

As I lay awake, listening for the faint crunch of approaching footsteps, I thought back to something mentioned by one of the drivers I'd met while hitchhiking down to Mistaken Point. As she drove south along the coast, she had pointed to the hills to the west and told me that, not long ago, the countryside of Newfoundland was believed to be crisscrossed with “fairy paths.” Even now, she said, people occasionally reported seeing small blobs of light floating down these trails.

A fear of fairies traditionally prevented Newfoundlanders from building their houses over old paths. According to Barbara Gaye Rieti's exhaustive folk history
Newfoundland Fairy Traditions
, those who obstructed fairy paths often heard strange sounds in the night, which, in at least one documented case, induced a nervous breakdown. Worse horrors still were visited upon their children; parents would return from some chore to find their baby missing, or lying paralyzed in its crib, or sitting open-mouthed with pain, its head grotesquely enlarged. Sometimes, instead of a baby, they would find a very small, very old person sitting upright in the bassinet, its hair whitened and its fingernails grown long and curled. In one especially nasty tale, a girl in St. John's made the mistake of walking across a lane that ghosts frequented at night. As she crossed, she felt something smack the side of her head, which left a bruise. Back home, the bruise worsened and became infected. “A few days later,” Rieti wrote, “the infection broke and pieces of old cloth, rusty nails, needles, and bits of rock and clay were all taken from her face.”

As we had cruised south, the driver recounted stories of her family's encounters with ghosts, fairies, white ladies, goblins, gypsies, and angels. She described in detail a time when a ghost or an angel—she and her husband quibbled over which it was—enveloped her in its arms and prevented her from being struck by a car while she was walking down a snowy road at night. Afterward, she sensed that the angel was following her home. When her dog rushed out of the house to greet her, it trotted right past her and stood at the end of
the driveway with its snout angled upward, as if it were being petted by an invisible hand.

These stories unnerved me, because many of the details were so utterly mundane. The world looks clear and rigid in the bright light of the metropolis, but out here on the edge of the continent, in the murky night and gray fog, anything seemed possible.

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I awoke to a glassine dawn. Overnight the wind had gusted so hard it had ripped out two of the tent stakes. The beach was empty, blown clean. I groggily squirmed out of my sleeping bag, flattened the tent, and packed my things.

The night before I had agreed to meet Liu's team at the motel for an early breakfast so we could spend the day fossil hunting. After breakfast, Stewart and I pillaged the local grocery store for picnic supplies—white bread, industrial chocolate chip cookies, hickory-­flavored potato sticks, and icy plums (“to keep away the scurvy,” he joked)—and then piled into the research team's rental car, a Japanese SUV. The synthetic interior bore that rental car smell, the odor not of something new, but of something smudgily erased. The cargo area was packed with climbing ropes, a coil of metal wire, a yellow hard hat, blue aluminum camping bowls, a huge bag of Doritos, sleeping bags, a tent pole held together with electrical tape, a rock hammer, an inflatable raft, and tubs of platinum silicone rubber called Dragon Skin, which was used to make flexible casts of the fossil beds. If only its next renter could know what strange sights that vehicle had seen.

Liu's plan for the day was to begin our tour at a prominent fossil site called Pigeon Cove, and then work our way forward in time, covering about ten miles on foot and by car. We would visit each of the area's most impressive fossil beds, culminating at the surface where Liu had discovered the fossil trails.

Windows open to the hard sea wind, we raced across a landscape
of stooped trees and yellowing grass to Pigeon Cove, where we got out and hiked down a dirt path to the seaside. There lay a flat slab of rock, the size and texture of three cracked concrete tennis courts, which sloped down into the sea. Its surface was a swirl of gray, chalkboard green, and dusty eggplant. Impressed into it were faint but distinct symbols. One looked like a fleshy frond. Another looked like an arrowhead, but in life probably resembled one of those conical corn snacks sold at gas stations, with its narrow end stuck into the ground. A third, which paleontologists call a “pizza disc,” was just a big, bubbly mess.