Free Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass Page A

see.”
    â€œLike what else?” Wallis asked.
    Mel shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of forbidden thing. Come on,” she said, “let’s get home.”
    Once back at the cabin, they hauled water from the creek. “It’s been a long time since I haven’t carried it all by myself,” Mel said. They began heating the water on the wood stove for a bath. There was a water closet, too, with an overhead reservoir and a chain attached to it, which, when pulled, released the water from the box and down a pipe, to flush the toilet. Wallis filled that, and, as was the cabin’s rule, left a backup bucket by the toilet’s side, so that the next person did not have to go out in the middle of the night.
    The cabin warmed quickly. “How old is it?” Wallis asked.
    â€œNineteen-forty-seven,” Mel said. “Matthew’s parents were teenagers when they built it. The valley had only been settled by whites for about thirty years.”
    â€œIt’s so new,” Wallis said, “to seem so old,” and Mel laughed. “Everything is the same age up here,” she said. “Everything is ten thousand years old, and that’s that. The last glacier went away, and the northern forest filled in. Hunters came down into this country after the ice left, killed the last mastodons and mammoths, but other than that, things are still pretty much the same. Fourteen-ninety-two, seventeen-seventy-six, eighteen-sixty-three, nineteen-forty-seven—it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same age. It’s not an old country. It just feels that way.”
    It bothered Wallis that Mel thought ten thousand years was a long time. He looked out into the night—at the flakes falling past the window and brushing up against it. “What’s the oldest a tree gets to be, up here?” he asked.
    â€œThe cedars down in Ross Creek are over a thousand.”
    â€œSo there have only been nine or ten generations of cedars, since the ice left?”
    She stared at him, understanding for a moment—seeing things the way he saw them—but she caught herself—righted herself, is what it felt like to her—and she shook her head and said, “You’re just like my father—you city guys. You forget how long time can be—four seasons, for instance. You like to compress things, rather than drawing them out.
Attenuating
them.” But she smiled.
    â€œIs Matthew a city guy?” Wallis asked. He couldn’t picture him being anything but: had never seen him, on a weekday, in anything but a suit.
    â€œHe is now,” Mel said.
    They took turns bathing in three inches of water, but were glad to have it. The salt of their sweat mixed with the steam, and the blood on them melted once more and slid from their bodies, viscous, like afterbirth, then rough and clean as each toweled off. It was not yet ten o’clock. Mel said that in the winter she usually went to bed around eight.
    They were too tired to eat. “I don’t have your room made up,” Mel said. “I didn’t really think you were coming. You can sleep in here by the fire tonight. It’s a mess in that other room—backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, snowshoes, lanterns.” She laid a pallet out for him—elk and deer hides—and exhausted, he lay there beneath them, with the hides feeling heavy as stone. Mel lay down on the pallet not that far from him—less than arm’s length—and propped her head up on one hand.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” she asked.
    â€œNothing,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s Matthew like down there?” she asked. “Is he really happy?”
    Wallis lay there with his hands behind his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, he’ll laugh at something, if it’s funny. It’s not like he’s really
tormented,
or anything. But I wouldn’t say he has a deep