Where the Sea Used to Be (49 page)

His back and shoulders were growing wider, his waist tapering, and his upper legs growing broader—as if the ceaseless pulling, the bow's resistance as the string was drawn, then released, was chipping away at him as surely as he chipped at the obsidian.

Anyone, everyone, could feel him ready to go—like a subterranean rumbling, a trembling: the landscape desiring to send him up and out into the other world. Helen, and others who were old enough to remember, said that he reminded them in that manner almost exactly of Matthew.

It was strange how Colter hitched his power to the rising springtime as if in lockstep harness with it. The force of his growth was so extraordinary and vital that it seemed as if he were neither a boy nor a young man, but instead a hard and wild creature living now in their midst—a trained dancing bear, or a coyote; a wolf, a wild boar, a swan, wearing only the skin or costume of a man. Pleasant among them, but always separate in some manner and not quite of them—and with a gulf between them that could never fully be crossed in life.

 

Coming back from a hike north of town, carrying another bouquet, Wallis heard the sound of someone crying as he passed near Colter's and Amy's cabin, where usually he heard singing. He moved through the woods toward the sound, and when he came to the edge of the woods he saw that Amy was standing in the little corral leaning against the pony with her arms around his neck. Her face was wet with tears, and Wallis was embarrassed to find her in that manner, but wanted to be sure that everything was all right. He stepped forward carefully. When she saw him she cried out, “He has gone!”

At first Wallis thought she meant that Colter had left on his trek prematurely. Amy started crying again, and Wallis led her over to the porch, where they sat down and rested in the blue lingering dusk. She sniffled, “He left without even saying good-bye—he didn't even come by to see me.”

It took more crying, and several more teary statements before Wallis grew confused, and after one accusation—“He just wanted to
use
me. He's nothing but an old
miscreant!”
—Wallis said, incredulously, “Colter?” and Amy paused in her crying. “No,” she said, “Dudley.”

“Oh, shit,” Wallis said, before he could help himself, “that was weeks ago. You don't
like
him, do you?” But the look she gave him told him how far along it was, and he wondered if there was anyone Old Dudley could not snare. It was certainly not by charm that he captured any of them. As ever, he found instead the flaw in one's self and then widened it.

In the end, Wallis left the bouquet for Amy. At first she protested, knowing it had been picked for Mel, but when he offered them a second time, she said thank you. He walked on home, traveling not through the woods, but like a citizen of the town, hiking right down the muddy, snow-patched road, listening to the night mutterings of snipe and the riverine trilling of as many frogs, it seemed, as there were stars in the sky. Meteors tumbled in occasional cartwheels, and his peace at being settled in the world with Mel, and with so much newness before him, was tempered momentarily by the raw loneliness he had left behind: as if, this year at least, sorrow had avoided him and chosen another instead.

 

Trumpet vine crept along the stone walls, twining itself amongst the patterns of lichens, and the hummingbirds arrived from South and Central America, as powerful as small caps of dynamite, and regal as royalty: as if they had traveled all that way only to pollinate this one flower.

The first rains fell one weekend, a phenomenon so startling, after so much snow, that Mel and Wallis went out and stood in the light rain and rubbed it into their hair, into their scalps, and stood there washing in it; and afterward, they went back in, bone-chilled, to warm themselves by the fire.

Once the rains began, the valley snow slushed out and faded quickly—the creeks and river ran high—and the woods accepted both the sun and the rain with such intensity, such ravenousness, as to glow fluorescent with greenness. It seemed to Wallis that he could feel the land's energy, the turning over and stirring and stretching of it, even in his teeth.

Wallis moved farther into the high country, following the receding snow higher each day, mapping. This was where the grizzlies lived. The grizzlies had pretty much learned, in the last hundred years, to stay away from the river bottoms, where they could get into trouble with humans, and now the grizzlies spent more time up high, often hanging out at the edges of glaciers, and those receding snow lines, where the trickling melt-water kept a retreating strand line of vegetation always lush. Wallis watched the grizzlies browsing the sun-bright glacier lilies that grew in that wavering space between black earth and white glacier, and after the bears had passed on, he would go to that spot and gather several of the buttery blossoms to bring home for a salad each evening. He spent all of an afternoon watching a mother with three tiny cubs slide down an ice field, sliding several hundred feet on their backs with all four feet up in the air, whereupon reaching the bottom they would scramble back up to the top for another ride, again and again.

Wallis grew browned from his work in the high country, so tanned that someone who had known him before might not at first recognize him. Mel noted with pangs the browning of his skin and the increasing vigor surrounding him—the excitement with which he came down out of the mountains each evening—but she forced herself to remember her own burnout, and what a dead-end road that had been for her: twenty years of passion that had gotten her nowhere. Twenty years was not enough. It would take a hundred years of data to weave together any knowledge of significance; but now there was no one to pick up where she had left. It was the premature end of a pursuit: a thing not completed, not known.

Nearly every day Wallis would bring home a collection of various rocks he'd found, both for his own examination under hand lens and microscope, but also just to show her for their beauty: thirty, forty, sometimes fifty pounds of rocks each day—some glittering and sparkly, others colorful, and still others improbably dense and sullen—so heavy that it seemed they could not have come from this world, but were the clastic residue of exploded planets.

They stacked the rocks in a loose wall against one side of where the garden had once been. They were so beautiful that it was impossible to simply toss them out into the grass or cast them into a loose pile. Once discovered, they had to be somehow ordered and set apart from randomness.

One day in May a black wolf came trotting through town, cantering right down the center of the street without glancing left or right. It went right past the school—Belle and Ann and Mel and the students leapt up and went to the window to watch it—and it passed the mercantile, passed the saloon, and passed the cemetery, and continued on down the road in its easy, free-floating gait, as if merely traveling, and as if there were nothing remarkable in its passage.

 

She did not cut herself off from the woods entirely: not as Matthew had done. She still went out on hikes with Wallis on weekends, though they avoided the area where Colter said he believed the wolves were denning, to keep from bothering them.

Instead, they hiked north, working their way along the rocky south-facing slopes, hiking shirtless through bands of gold and copper light, with Wallis pointing out the fault striations on rocks—pointing out the direction each plate of earth had been moving, and which of the two had been the subsuming force. Mel continued to teach him about every living thing: the names and relationships of the lichens on the cliffs, and of ferns, back in the forest. The names of moths and butterflies. She weaved for him the stories of what ate what, which then was eaten by the next thing beyond that.

They lay on damp moss and sunned; they crawled on their hands and knees in the mosses at the edge of the snow line, the sun bright on their backs, and grazed the yellow lilies straight from the ground, while below them the valley glowed green, still whole and healthy.

Sometimes as they hiked back home their passage would intersect with the rutted paths to where Dudley and Matthew had drilled their dry holes. The little lanes ran seemingly indiscriminately through the old forest, as if they had been chasing something above the ground, rather than below—something elusive, erratic, and seemingly without logic. Old stumps—rotting, orange, crumbling moss-covered punkwood—lined the sides of the winding paths where bright light had been blazed into the forest. It was strange to think that each path led to a failure.

The roads had not been noticeable beneath the covering of snow, but now as more of them revealed themselves—the spoor of Dudley and Matthew—they became apparent: crude hackings and carvings into previously untouched places, as if rude wart-faced hogs had been snuffling in the soil. Mel said that eventually the forest would seal over the scars, in places where the soil had not washed away—as long as Dudley and Matthew remained satisfied they'd drilled dry holes, and did not come back, seeking to reenter those same old holes—but that, as the profiteers had warned, she was worried that the timber companies would soon come devouring, using the old roads as staging areas to launch their gnawing machines farther into the forest, in all directions.

Glissading snow-melt rushed down the rutted roads, carrying great scouring gouts of chocolate colored waters, spreading fans of silt into the creeks, which then discharged plumes of mud into the main river, covering the spawning beds of trout with sediment. “It's amazing what one man can do,” Mel said, staring down at one of the roads as they stood ankle-deep in its rushing, muddy channel, as if crossing some new stream not on a map.

They stood a moment longer in the rushing mud, made dizzy by the incongruous sight of it—water the color of a bayou, gushing through such an otherwise sylvan forest—and then they stepped into the forest, as if trying to hide from the skein of roads scattered all about the woods.

“You should have seen it twenty years ago,” Mel said.

“It's still pretty nice,” Wallis said, thinking that she was half-joking.

“You should have seen it twenty years ago,” she said.

 

B
Y MID-MAY, THE SNOW WAS ALMOST ALL GONE; MORE AND
more antlers were revealed, strewn up and down the slopes like bones, so that they were easy for the antler hunters to find. They gathered them in great numbers. The mountains were littered also with the skeletons of winter-killed deer, elk, and moose, the bones cast in hopeless disarray. Sometimes there were bones atop bones, from where one deer had died and gone down, and then a few feet of snow had fallen, and then another deer had died in that same spot. It seemed to Wallis that—as with the rocks—there were enough bones and antlers to build fences, walls, even houses from those white spars. He would spend some afternoons trying to reassemble the bones into working order, as if he were the curator of a great and vast museum.

Colter looked out the window constantly, watching the receding snowcaps, seeing them curl over the mountaintops like the sea foam of a retreating tide. Notches, crevices, and passes that had been obscured now became evident. He had picked one particular mountain, Dome Mountain, as his exit route, when it came time for him to leave the valley, and he carved the outline of it on his desk, so that each day with the tip of his knife blade he could etch into the desktop the contour of that day's shrinking snow line. The contours were pleasing to him, and in his boredom he soothed himself by running his fingers across the grooved cuts in the desk.

He was compiling a list, too, of what equipment to take with him—listing the advantages and disadvantages, the justification, of each item. As the afternoons lingered, he would trade notes with Mel, arguing or questioning the merits of each item, until it seemed to Mel that when he left, some part of her, invested in him, would also be leaving.

At lunch, Mel took the children down to the river, to the backwater sloughs and beaver ponds, where they caught the tadpoles of spring peepers and Pacific tree frogs and brought them back to the classroom in mayonnaise jars. They placed them on the windowsill in sunlight and fed them flakes of dry oatmeal and watched them through the hand lens daily, as the tiny nubs of legs began to sprout and the fatty tissue in their tails shrank.

Sometimes in the morning there would be a dead one resting turgid on the bottom—pale belly up, tiny mouth agape—and the students would want to fish it out and give it a burial, but Mel told them to leave it there to disintegrate into a milky blue drifting mass, upon which the other tadpoles would sometimes feed. Mel said that as each tadpole died, it released chemicals into the water that had been proven to accelerate the development of the surviving tadpoles.

The more that died in that puddle, the faster the survivors accelerated their rate of growth. The students puzzled at the mechanics, the consequences and logistics of such overcrowding.

They kept caterpillars, too, in mason jars, and fed them prodigious quantities of green leaves and grass, and performed crude experiments on their varying rates of growth and development based on different diets. The beautiful myth of the caterpillar spinning its cocoon and disappearing from the world. The leaf litter, stems gnawed bare, and tiny caterpillar droppings an inch deep on the bottom of the jar, and the jar itself (with holes punched in the lid to vent the air), a hothouse, a dynamo of heat, as the caterpillar slept; and in both instances, frog and butterfly, the students marveled at the high cost of metamorphosis. They placed a stone in with the tadpoles for the frogs to climb out on once the transformation was complete, and they hung little twigs and branches for the butterflies to cling to as they dried their wings.

 

The townspeople were beginning to move the rocks again, compelled in the sun's warmth and amidst the scent of blossoming lupine to carry the stones back and forth like ants, working on the wall yet another year, trudging up and down the road raising plumes of dust behind them. No rain had fallen, though there seemed to be enough snowmelt entering the creeks to keep the valley lush forever. Throughout the day, there was a pleasant harmony as the surging river beyond carried tumbling boulders along its bottom. The river's muted, subsonic clackings carried occasionally to the surface, mixing with the sharper sounds of their own work: one rock being stacked atop two others.