Where the Sea Used to Be (48 page)

Cooling off! That disclosure puts our minds in a new attitude toward the world's history. We have to contemplate the earth as a
cooling globe.
That points our thoughts backward, along a
progress of cooling.
That summons us to consider what conditions of the world must have been passed in the progress of cooling. By all the evidence that progressive cooling has been a fact.

This is the way reasoning leads us: Following the course of cooling backward, we arrive at a time such that water could not have existed on the earth. All the water of the earth must have been vapor or gas suspended in the atmosphere. At a time when no ocean had existed, no ocean-sediments had been deposited. All those rocks which have resulted from marine sedimentation were yet non-existent. The earth had probably a solid surface of some kind; but to emit heat sufficient to hold all the water of the world in an uncondensed state, the temperature of the surface must have been high—perhaps a glowing temperature.

We should distinguish between vapor and gas. Gas is dry, like atmospheric air—like the cloud of steam condensed in the air after escaping from the boiler. There may be mineral vapors as well as igneous vapors. Most mineral vapors must be intensely heated. We may call such a vapor “fire mist.” If the earth were vaporized by heat, to what limits in space would the vapor extend? We must think of that. If the earth was ever a fire-mist globe, its dimensions were vastly greater than at present. But now our world has shrunk to its final irrevocable being.

There is another thought to be mentioned here. The earth is only one of a system of worlds. There is good reason for believing that any remote origin which we can establish for the earth must represent the remote origin of the other planets. In saying they are one system, I refer to their common motions and patterns about one sun: the common elliptic form of their orbits; the fact that all move from west to east; that all revolve nearly in one plane; that, so far as ascertained, they all rotate on their axes; from west to east; that the forms and movements of all, and of all the satellites, are conformed to one set of laws, and that all we know of other planets points to a fundamental correspondence and identity between them. So many patterns are unable to be altered, only discovered.

This conclusion vastly enlarges our field. We must think of each of the planets heated up to a fire-mist condition. It is easier to think the sun also heated to such condition, since he is at present not so far removed from it as the planets. Now, when all these bodies were in that heated condition which maintained them in a fire-mist state, the whole space of the solar system must have been filled with fire mist. These particles—some of which may even have been solid—would have weight smaller than imagination can conceive. So the mist particles were practically suspended in space and required no gaseous support.

The cooling history can be traced no farther back. Such, probably, was its beginning. I am perfectly prepared to admit that matter may have entered existence as a fire mist. However it originated, the temperature implied in fire mist is as inherently probable as any lower or higher temperature. Temperatures are merely circumstances. Whatever temperature prevails anywhere, things adjust themselves to it, and that is natural.

From this point a
natural
process of cooling brings to pass all the events in our system's physical history—all the events in our world's history. We are proposing to show this, and trace our evolution in its general outlines. Now you shrink back and exclaim “Evolution?—Fate! Atheism!” That, my dear friend, shows your total ignorance of the nature of evolution.

Be calm. God was in the beginning, is now, and ever will be. God originated; God controls; God is in the midst of his works. Suppose we
call the fire mist the absolute beginning; there are certainly three things which are
not
fire mist, and require explanation infinitely more than a fire-mist condition of matter. Without these three things, there would never be a cooling history. These things are: 1. Matter
—
regardless of its condition. 2. Force
—
and that in its various forms. 3. Method—or everything would be plunged in chaos, and forever remain there. These things imply Power, Intelligence, Self-determination. Where self-determination is present, there is Personality. While the origination of Matter, Force, and Method remains, there is still need of a Creator. These three things originated, were the world to run down like a clock, we should be compelled in reason to ascribe its whole cycle of changes to the primordial activity of a Creative Being. For myself, this conclusion is infinitely short of satisfactory, as I shall explain in due time. But even this is a theistic view of the origin of the world.

 

It was not possible to quantify the happiness she felt. She had assumed the severance of Matthew would leave a scar, but she understood now that it was the wound itself which had been severed; failure had been excised. It was obvious to all—and now that the rift had been announced, all felt free to comment upon it—how Mel was helping sculpt Wallis into a citizen of the valley. Invisible or unnoticed by them all, however—except Helen—was the way Wallis was carving a new Mel. Not rubbing away old external trappings to help reveal the essence of who she had always been, but helping create an entirely new person: one who would fit the future, not the past. One who would fit happiness.

Anyone could have seen it. They could have followed her tracks in the disappearing snow and taken note of the length and briskness of her stride, including the long gaps where she appeared to have leapt, for no apparent reason.

 

She liked it when he dived. She was fascinated, watching him throw himself right back into his failure, his hands sculpting and sketching and erasing, reshaping each tiny contour on the map, working often by lantern light alone at her desk, in the manner that her father had so long ago worked late into the night beneath a single burning bulb. Some nights, as a child, Mel had awakened and looked down the hall—as if down a corridor or tunnel of light—and had seen him there at the end of the hallway, perched on his drafting stool, shoulders hunched forward, elbows on the table as he sketched and traced, drafting tiny worlds no larger than a desktop. Often she would go get in bed with her mother and press in against that warmth; and then, later, when there was just the two of them, she would go back to her room and would try to sleep, but would end up just lying there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

She read quietly as Wallis dived deeper, wrestled further with the map—working the other side of the river, now. There was a tremor in her heart when she dared consider the possible consequences of his success, but such was the grace of his passion—the muscular immersion in it, to the point of near-hypnosis—as if he were a chrysalis struggling to crawl out of a death-husk—that she could not look away. She read, glancing up from time to time—his lone hand scribing one contour after another, altering hills and mountains, as if he were bound to a thing. Her captive. His own captive.

In the daytime he went out mapping on foot, gathering data, and working the south slopes first, where the sun had burned off the snow and the rock faces of bare earth were visible. He used a Brunton compass and measured strike and pitch and angle of dip—took note of each mountain's orientation, and the larger trends and patterns of the mountains as a complete range. In many places the exposed formations were so jumbled, so twisted and fractured, that they were like giant waves that had just passed their crest and broken into the surface below. It was as if he were standing ankle-deep in the backwash. He did the best he could amid such a landscape of chaos, and looked longingly across the canyons at the shady north slopes, dreaming ahead to July and August, when those slopes would be revealed to him.

Try as he might to dwell in the buried world, it was difficult not to become mesmerized by the beauty at the surface. A whole buried world of its own was emerging as the snow subsided, shrank from everything. The fallen tips of antlers, the tops of stones and boulders, ice-bent bushes, and burrows and crevices began to appear as the snow drew from the valley like the tide drawn by the moon.

More birds were being drawn up into the valley, as if sucked north into some vortex or gusted along by the south winds, though Wallis knew it was not entirely the lengthening light that was propelling them north (as it had sent them south), but some inner hardness, something more durable than even the seasons.

To ignore the essence and spirit of each individual arriving bird would be to subscribe to the view that they were mechanistic, nothing more than chips of color, feather-clad protoplasm hurled across the skies like tatters of bright cloth tossed on the winds aloft.

Wallis did not subscribe to this belief. One had only to look at a single blackbird perched triumphantly upon a slender green reed, eyes bright in the morning light and tilting his head back and trilling and cackling with an emotion, a pleasure at having arrived, that was nothing less than joy. If it were just about hormones, the birds could have stopped anywhere and sang and courted and staked out territories. They might or might not have been as successful, but they could have stopped anywhere—or could have decided not to leave at all.

But to live through the winter in the place of their absence, as Wallis had, and to be on hand to see them come back—filtering at first, then flooding—there was no way to deny that each bird's presence went beyond the mechanistic: that place, as well as season, played a part in it, and that in this particular place, they felt uncontrollable jubilation. Wallis had heard that sometimes they would sing with such vigor, and so unceasingly, that their vocal cords would burst, and still they would continue, so that the bird sang blood, sprays of it flashing through the air and coating the emerald reeds crimson, as if there were a flaw or leak in the system's design . . .

Wallis began carrying one of Mel's old bird books in his day pack, to identify the birds—to learn their names and where they had come from. He felt a strong affinity for them, and was surprised to read that many of them came from the country in which he had once lived. He had not paid much attention to them down there—the light was often bright and harsh, so that when he glanced up he saw only a colorless silhouette flashing against gunmetal sky, or flying into the radial spokes of sun-ray—but now, watching them return to a place of previous stillness and silence, coming back at first almost one by one, he could better understand and observe their differences.

He tried to focus on his maps, and on the stones beneath his feet—but it was increasingly hard to resist the temptation to lift the binoculars each time a whisk of bright feathers and joy rushed past, leaving behind an invisible, fast-dissipating trail of birdsong. He would raise his binoculars quickly and lean forward, almost with the anticipation of a hunter.

 

The first flowers were appearing—the first butterflies, amazingly, right behind them—their crooked, awkward flights stunning and their brilliant colors wandering as if lost across the snow fields. Sometimes he followed them to where, sure enough, there would be flowers, and often he would pick a cluster for Mel: trillium, serviceberry, and twinflower—an elegant, simple bouquet of pink and white.

Some of the bouquets she took to school with her; others she dried and hung from the rafters in the cabin. A single vase of them sat on the table where they ate together. A loaf of new bread and two grouse for supper. Some daylight would still be left, afterward—a wedge of it, between dinner and darkness—and often they would fill it by cutting and splitting more wood.

The steady, rhythmic sounds of their working: the tight creak and then split of wood, with each swing of the ax. In some ways it was as if he—Matthew—had never left. As if Matthew had been transformed into Wallis, or Wallis into Matthew. Except that now she was happy again.

 

A slow afternoon at the mercantile. Blue-hazed sunlight from the cigarette smoke hung trapped in the high upper reaches of the store. Wallis had been out in the field all morning and had come in to dry his snow-drenched clothes by Helen's stove, and to wait for the school recess so that he could go see Mel, and maybe steal a kiss. It didn't hurt to try and patch things with Helen, either—to help her get used to the fact that it would be Wallis and Mel now, rather than Matthew and Mel—but he was surprised, as he spent time with Helen, by how little patching seemed necessary—as if Helen had other, far more important matters on her mind. Often she and Wallis visited with the ease of old friends.

Across the street, Wallis would hear the clang of the iron triangle signaling lunch and recess. Sometimes he would cross the street to have lunch with Mel; other times she would come over to the mercantile, where the three of them would sit on the steps in the bright sun.

Colter had been working out, doing exercises to strengthen himself for summer—performing pull-ups and push-ups, and lifting a single heavy slab of stone over his head repeatedly, as if it were a dumbbell—and it was a story as ancient as humankind, but no less amazing in its familiarity—the physical rise and development of an individual: like a blossoming. He was head and shoulders stronger now than any of his other classmates, and his accuracy with the bow had increased, as had his power, so that now he was hitting the bull's eye of whatever he aimed at, even from a distance of forty. He was whittling his arrows from cedar shafts and napping his points out of chert and obsidian—heating them in flames, then chipping at them with the tip of a deer antler—and his excellence at hitting flying objects had also improved. Mel forbade him to shoot at birds in the springtime, but he delighted in shooting flying insects—wing-whirring pine sawyer beetles, as well as butterflies and even the drifting flights of moths by moonlight. He would light a lantern against the backdrop of the saloon and then aim to pin the moths, sometimes still fluttering, against the wall with his finest, most delicate arrow points.