Relicts of a Beautiful Sea by Norment Christopher

Author:Norment, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

And after we have proclaimed

this thought, and by doing so subtly pointed out

that we are allowing them to live, we direct them

and manage them and herd them and train them and follow

them and map them and collect them and make specimens

of them and butcher them and move them here and move

them there and we place them on lists and we take

them off lists and we stare at them and stare

at them and stare at them.

And one time, after staring and staring at Cyprinodon diabolis, my friend Ralph Black and I went out into the desert north and east of Devils Hole, into a long valley lined by limestone mountains, in the manner so characteristic of the Basin and Range country, mountains which funneled the lovely space into the clean and exquisite distance. We camped at the head of the valley, and in the night I lay in my sleeping bag and thought of pupfish in the warm and quiet water, a scatter of electric blue points in the dim light, making do with what they have in their close and limited world. I pictured them slowly swimming through their vulnerable home, past the objects of our affection and concern, the sensors and feeding tube, video cameras and wires, a staccato chorus of ultrasonic Cyprinodon clicks and rasps in the indigo pool, creatures protected, as best we can protect them, by laws and regulations, by boundaries and fences and a thirty-five-year-old Supreme Court decision. I thought of science and our halting attempts to comprehend the Devils Hole pupfish, to describe their world of rock and light and water, to raise them and make them safe, to control them in ways that seem antithetical to their very nature. I thought of all these things, and had no clear answers to my questions. And as I drifted off to sleep beneath a halo of stars, I knew only that in Devils Hole the pupfish were going about their business much as they always had, much as I hoped they always would.

And in the morning Ralph and I walked out into the desert, where he showed me an old bore hole that he had found the night before—a relict, perhaps, of Spring Meadows Inc. and its vanished dreams of cows and alfalfa. It had been a very dry winter; the land felt as though “The structure of every living thing / Was praying for rain,” and so when Ralph dropped a stone into the darkness, we expected a quick “thunk” as the stone hit dry ground. Instead, there was a much longer fall, followed by a soft “plunk” when the stone plunged into water. And then came an eerie bass reverberation, a hollowed-out echo that climbed back up the hole and into the light: a haunting pulse traveling out of the vast continent of water that flows beneath the desert, water that falls out of the Spring Mountains and sweeps through the great plains of rock beneath the long dry valleys as it drifts toward the Amargosa Desert.

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