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THE OTHER SHORE

Rebecca Campbell

Rebecca Campbell, author of "The Other Shore", grew up in the village of Cowchican Bay on the coast of British Columbia. Originally home to First Nations People, it was settled by Europeans in the 1860s and for many years was a busy fishing and logging community. Today, the main industries are fishing and tourism. The lives of people, fish, birds, mammals, and all other life in the region are completely dependent on the health of the ocean, and the life cycle of the salmon that spawn and hatch in the area every year.

In 2011, a tsunami caused three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan to meltdown. As a result of the accident, tainted water flowed into the ocean, causing concerns about the impact to ocean life and, by extension, human beings. Campbell found this to be "enraging". It became the catalyst for her vision of an avenging genius loci who could protect the sea from the predations and pollutions of humans.

In this story, the archeologists incur the wrath of the Genius Loci because they refuse to comprehend the inter-connectedness of the people, animals, and other organisms that make the whole of the sea. Every small thing has some purpose, some story, some place in the story of the ocean. To ignore this, to exploit the sea for the need of the moment, is to invite disaster.

***

The shoreline is indefinite, having been closer to the village, or across the bay, or far out in what is now a channel. For a few hours on a day in 1700 it was a kilometer up the river valley. I know this because I remember the day in 1700, but if one is shorter-lived—or not so clever—one might know that temporary high-tide by the shattered stumps that still stand just short of where the ground rises, exactly as they did on the afternoon of the tsunami. It’s a ghost forest now, and runs all along the river, so far inland that when one reaches its edge, one can no longer hear the waves.

Every summer for a decade now, Charlie brings a gang of them to town. They change year to year, students mostly. In other years I ignored them, maybe said hello Charlie when I passed him on the street or the restaurant.

This year, though, their dig takes in the midden. Do you see the grey heron poised above his supper, where the beach is the white of discarded molluscs? That is a human undertaking, and nearly as old as I am. Its history does not instantly reveal itself to shortlived creatures of Charlie’s kind, and in ten thousand years there has been little change in the whorl of the periwinkle, or the abalone’s deep and iridescent shell. Someone pried them open. Someone cut the muscly foot that anchored the hinge, and ate its body, and discarded its shell on the heap. If Charlie climbs up the hill from the midden, into town and the restaurant, I’ll serve them a similar creature garnished with lemon wedges, or wrapped in a cone of irradiated nori.

Charlie’s crew brings trowels and huge spools of high-visibility twine. They bring the laws of stratiography that fix time and its progressions in place by measuring the earth below their feet. They segment the ghost forest and dig up flat spangles cut from mother-of-pearl, chips of obsidian from a quarry eight hundred kilometers to the south and far inland; a dusting of volcanic ash, and the denser, blacker deposits of a forest fire.

They don’t often know what they’re looking at, though their work is meticulous. Even Charlie misses evidence of the other shore: ancient tree-roots sunk in the unforgiving salt. Palm fronds. They find but do not recognize the tooth-chip from a shipwrecked sailor who left a village outside of Quanzhou during the reign of Gegeen Khan. Filaments of rope from an outrigger canoe. A Tahitian pearl. They find a glass float—faintly bluegreen, as though constituted in the water from which it emerged after decades mid-Pacific, passenger on a March storm of 1930—that belonged to Susumu, a Meiji fisherman.

In the afternoon the sun throws long shadows toward the beach, and Charlie leads them up the hill from the dig to the restaurant, where they take one of the big tables on the sidewalk. I make sure they’re in my section, so I can listen, and say, “Hey guys, I’m Lin. I’ll be looking after you,” and bring them pitchers of Sea Dog Amber Ale. One of the younger men talks—uninterruptable—about microbrews until I don’t know how Charlie stands it.

I bring them calamari and the aforementioned sweet abalone (imported, having been fished to near-extinction twenty years ago). Chips, deep fried mac&cheese, sashimi (the salmon is farmed, the snapper is not), mercury-rich tuna tataki. Extra napkins. I know what they want before they do, in the manner of one who serves with great talent.

“So, what did you guys find today?”

The girl with the unwashed hair says, “Some rope fragments. A glass float.”

“Those are so pretty!“

“Pretty. Okay.” Corrected by the young man who cares so much about microbrews. He’s the one who explained to me, the first day, that they are archaeologists. He is an MA Candidate. He works on pre-contact material culture of the Malahat Nation. I think of Susumu, and how he lost the five floats his uncle made when he was little, that he inherited from his father the season before. How four shattered while this one survived the Pacific gyre to alight here. Unlikely. “They’re for collectors,” he adds.

“They’re nicer than Styrofoam, that looks so awful on the beach. We’re doing a great oyster burger today.”

“How’s the halibut?” Charlie asks.

I look for my manager. She’s distracted.

“I wouldn’t, if I’m honest. But the chowder is awesome.” I think about immigrant cattle from Jersey, and the long migrations of saffron. Their unlikely collision with bacon and scallops at this far western margin. They order the chowder.

From the sidewalk we can see most of town, hear the sharp, sweet echo of footsteps on concrete at the bottom of the street, where the kids are now emerging from the afternoon, caped in beach towels, their parents laden with coolers, laden also with radiation and its malignant gleam. On my way to Charlie’s table with ketchup bottles and malt vinegar I stop to watch the kids climb toward the ice cream shop and wish I could tell them to fill their mouths with seawater and then order a double cone, so salt might render the ice cream sweeter than anything that has ever existed.

Their first opportunity came in the form of a button that unsettled their stratiography. I felt the frisson when they found it, spreading through the six as though through a single body and I knew they had touched the other shore. I thought maybe it’s time. I was hopeful.

The button arrived on the waistcoat of a very young midshipman-and-water-colourist who leaned over the gunwale of the longboat in which he travelled from the HMS Encounter to an earlier iteration of this very village. Under the water he saw an even earlier village, drowned, though he could make out the fallen poles of a longhouse. He was contemplating its age when he realized that a face returned his gaze. It was a whale, perhaps, or a thunderbird carved in wood, with a few grains of paint still affixed, showing the eyes staring upward. An amnesiac ancient, he thinks, god or genius loci dozing among the dooryards of what was once a village, that had squatted on what was once the shoreline, before the glaciers melted, the waters rose, or the land fell.

The watercolourist is not a good sailor. His uniform is in bad repair, and one button of his waistcoat rests against the gunwale as he reaches down to the surface through which he looks—past his own eyes, which make anxious contact with their doubles, as though in warning—and down to the other shore, just out of reach. He leans, dirtying further his dirty cuffs, and the indifferent stitches of his last mend break and the button springs over the gunwale and into the water and clops like a stone that won’t skip. The old creature, the amnesiac, reaches out one hand to catch the falling button to its bosom.

That’s gone, then. Back onboard HMS Encounter he’ll be admonished for his disgraceful appearance. Behind him the button remains, covered in silt, then in sand, then in a plastic baggie with a tag in Charlie’s terrible handwriting. He keeps it in his pocket because it confuses him. It is a disobedient button. It undermines known laws regarding the deposition of strata, and the careful exhumation of the past. It is only the beginning.

But before that, and just this moment, the longboat surges toward the shore and the arboreal haunting stands knee deep in yellow grasses, the midden white at its feet. The Midshipman cannot imagine it, but there was once an enormous wave, rising through the shallows until it curled over the low bush of the shore, and rising through the villages it dragged the children out to sea, sending them all down to the other shore.

If Charlie’s lot were the kind who had prophetic dreams, and if it were among my talents to provide them with prophetic dreams, I would send them this. I would have one—the girl who doesn’t wash her hair, perhaps—awaken in a longboat, or a kayak, or a canoe. She would look down to find herself wearing a skirt of cedar bark. She would lean where the watercolourist also leaned, and seeing the drowned world, the faintest, whitened outline of its foundations, a glimpse of stainless steel through the seaweed. Or—if I am ambitious, and trust her to understand—the gleam of something that does not yet exist from her perspective: an underwater bulb attached to a surviving solar panel that still works, sometimes, despite the microbial haze of seawater. In the manner of dreams she finds her eyes zooming in to see, beside the panel, a cellphone lying on the ocean bed, where no such thing should exist.

The next day my feet hurt before I’d even put on my black nurse’s shoes, and the hot oil of the fryer had so penetrated my work skirt that it stunk—like fish, like fryer grease—even as I pulled it off the morning laundry line. And I thought, I will never not smell of fried fish, even if I live another ten millennia, even if the Kula plate rises again like Lost Atlantis. Even if the radioactive plume re-collects itself, and the glaciers return with the Thunderbirds and abalone. I remember smelling of smokehouses and doghair, and before that of mud and green things, but never so inescapably as I do now.

That is the day—when I cannot stand the humanish smell of my awful black polyester work-skirt—that they come into the restaurant carrying a yellow sony sport alkman, filthy, from 1986, and set it on the table.

“Oh, hey,” I say pointedly, “do you guys want a towel for that?” And when they don’t answer—rendered giddy and stupid by the object before them—I bring them bar towels anyway, with which they do nothing, preferring to stare at the alkman as it leaks ash onto my nice red plastic tablecloth. Though they found it under the deposits of a pre-industrial forest fire it is still brightly yellow. Inside there is a mixtape from 1987 whose second side is made up entirely of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” repeated six times.

“We’ve got some awesome specials—”

“—Charlie, it’s a hoax—”

“I’ll give you some time,” I say, but Charlie calls out to me, over his shoulder, waving his hand as though I’m a taxicab. It would only be worse if he snapped his fingers.

“A couple pitchers of the Lager, eh?”

“Yeah yeah,” I say, “on their way.”

The next morning it rains. When I’ve finished with the ketchup bottles I go out back through the kitchen with bag after bag of trash—dirty napkins, and child-gnawed straws from lunch, the fragile shells of shrimp with their powerful stench. In the parking lot, which is puddled and oilslicked with rainbows, I think about them under their tent, washing the fragments that so obsess them. These tourists, who reach their hands for the other shore without knowing a damn thing. These temporary souls, trespassers, immigrants, how immune they remain to unlikelihood.

They will find or have found the anklet of a Tuamotuan woman who reached this blue-green shore by a series of tragedies and accidents I alone remember. She arrived in an outrigger, blown from the far western islands, four months pregnant, her skin caked with salt and her eyes fluttering in their sockets, but the little swimmer in her womb turning his somersaults, and kept safe in his own seabed of salt and blood. I brought her water, and fed her salmon and salal berries from a cedar bowl. She bore her child. She died twenty-five years later, left five children, and her anklet in the earth below a longhouse whose remains are now halfway across the bay. A black Tahitian pearl, a bead of polished lava, and another of island coral that shed a faint light—diffuse, atomic, tropical—from the atoll of its birth.

They’ll find the pearl. They’ll find the stone weight from five thousand years before, that a young man strung on a line of tendon and flung out across the bay, and promptly lost, the silly boy, though it was my gift to him, when he needed it.

That evening I brought them three pitchers, and then another three, and they drank under the awning while the rain fell. The first, prescient bronze on the maple leaves, hinting at autumn in high summer.

“So it’s contaminated,” Charlie says, his greasy grey hair hanging in elfknots to his beard. He is remarkable for the constant dirt beneath his fingernails, the nervous flutter of his eyes.

“But the sedimentation—”

“—Sure. Fine. But there’s a coke bottle in a strata of archaic cedar ash.”

Charlie has made it clear that he will not be taken in because Time’s voyage is one-way—even in a Tsunami—and he is blind to the tangled logic of the high-tide line. When I ask if they want to try the banoffee pie we’ve got on for dessert, he ignores me, and that’s just childish, Charlie, I thought you were better than that. You’re just rude.

“Okay. You want coffee?”

Charlie snaps his no so sharply it might be a door slamming, and then I think back at him what do you take me for, little monkey? But he is impervious, so I lean on them with my own sharpness. They’re too stupid to feel their minds ripple, to notice that the slammed no opens into yes. In the kitchen I collect mugs on a tray, and I breathe over them, and over the sugar packets, the cream, covering all with the faint and invisible film of my breath. Salt.

It will swamp you with the smack of saltwater, especially you, Charlie, in the instant your lips touch the lip of the cup that has upon it the salt of my mouth. You will find yourself unable to stop thinking of the moment your head goes under, how for an instant your scalp is dry under your hair, before water winkles through to the roots and your skin leaps to goosebumps, and then submerged you tilt your head and seawater is in to your eardrums, and your sinuses, and down your throat, and all the wrigglers, the drifters, the spunk, the free-floating ovum, combining into the drifting zygotes of a billion different creatures, the single-celled and the amoebic, microbial colonies and embryonic clusters. Charlie. The salt stings inside you, as the water carries all those creatures up into your skull, before you release them in a snort and a bloom of mucus. You’re tumbling and buoyant in the cold and the salt, a bluegreen element constituted of bodies fucking, and dying, and being born, and growing, and leaving behind their recombined genetic matter to further recombine.

For an instant he is a drowned man. He rouses himself long enough to pay the bill and trail after the others up the hill to the guesthouse. He knows that somewhere there’s a trigger, but he’s too stupid to remember the taste of my breath in his coffee. That evening the setting sun glanced between the edge of cloud and the horizon. For a moment the air was cool-smelling and wet, as it will be in October, when the tourists are gone, and only newly-drunk teenagers will still go swimming.

That night some of Charlie’s crew will creep into bedrooms not their own, carrying condoms and bottles of brandy. The tedious young man who so loves microbrews will smoke a cigarette in the gazebo at the bottom of the garden, the one that overlooks the wetlands at the head of the bay. And he will call his girlfriend, and plead with her to just talk to him please just talk to him.

At home, my feet out of their work-shoes will be swollen and bear the imprint of my socks, so I put them up on the coffee table and decide to skip laundry. I think about the girl from Tuamotu with her anklet of pearl, and try to name her—Afaitu? Poe?—but in ten thousand years there are more names than even I can remember.

Though it began last night when Charlie felt the wave close over his head, that—like the alkman, like the button—was only the harbinger. One of the youngest ones, just twenty, assigned to the meticulous work of the teaspoon and the whisk, finds a Starbucks mug showing the name and skyline of an unfamiliar city.

“I don’t know,” she says. For a moment she is stupid. She thinks the mistake is hers, and she’ll get in trouble for digging into the wrong past. She looks through the earth to comfort herself with familiar things, the threads of a cedar apron, the abalone spangles. Instead she uncovers a flip phone with a pink sparkly butterfly sticker on the back. It’s covered in ash. If they had a Geiger counter it would tick.

“What did you do?” Charlie asks the girl when she shows him the flip phone. He didn’t sleep well last night, and when he did sleep he dreamed of deep water. His forehead is muddy where he scratched in the compulsive motion he makes when he is anxious, and his work goes poorly. When he’s not working, he thinks—incessantly—about the moment of submersion.

Though he snaps at them, it doesn’t stop. They find PDAs and tamagochis, a bottle of Spelman’s Elixir ca. 1873. A single white tennis sock with a pale pink bobble folded as though to protect the delicate whale-bone hook from an antique carver of great art. Find greenstone from Aotearoa, and black argillite that traveled down the coast from the Gwaii in the foot of a canoe. Find a bladder of oolichan oil. Find Oribeware, up the coast from what is just now called “Oregon,” the result of a shipwrecked Japanese fishing boat in an earlier millennium. Find a single page of that Rolling Stone from 1993, with Janet Jackson on the cover.

Charlie sweats through his khaki camp shirt. He stops the three who’ve uncovered the Rolling Stone and calls them all to the tent. It is summer again, after the previous day’s unseasonable rain. They think he’s going to reveal something to him, some plan, some theory.

“That’s it for today,” is all Charlie says, after a long moment in which he stares at their assembled feet. “Go on back to the house.”

When they troop past, I see the beer-enthusiast text his silent girlfriend, thumbs jabbing his unnameable anxiety onto the screen, though he deletes the words before he can send them.

Charlie, left behind, stops his work to stare out into the bay. Despite my little gift of the previous night he is too stupid to know that he stands on time’s faultline. The kids know better than to play there, and the teenagers don’t go there at night to drink and fuck in secret, though it’s far enough from town to be suitable for both activities.

But Charlie is not clever, so he keeps digging, alone, and finds a piece of gorilla glass and aluminum fused in an unfamiliar configuration, embedded deep in what must have been hot ash. A tetrapack of juice with a chip that raves in a thin, repetitive voice about the miraculous properties of its organic Jaboncilla.

It is not the noisy tetrapack, nor the evidence of ash that surrounds the unfamiliar hardware that stops him. It is the skull just visible beneath the most ancient layer at the bottom of the pit. A skull that—when it is disinterred—bears the irrefutable signs of an embedded electronic device, gold fused to the bone at the right temple beside a worn hole—trepanning of a still-to-come kind—where filaments once passed into the long-gone brain.

When he reaches the skull Charlie leaves without saying anything, and walks up to the restaurant, which is empty but for me at a table where I can watch the door, wrapping flatware in paper napkins.

“Charlie,” I say, as he pushes the plastic ribbons aside and comes in. “Charlie?”

“Oh,” he says. “Right, it’s…?”

“Lin.”

“Okay, Lynn.” He says. “Can I get some coffee?” It looks like a question, but it doesn’t sound like one.

I gather the cup and the coffee, and I think it’s not easy to touch the other shore. He has been narrow-minded. He has ignored the evidence of time’s instability, though it is before his eyes. But it is not easy.

“Maybe I can help,” I say as I set out his coffee. “Maybe I can give you a hand.”

I wait. An opportunity for repentance, I think. A chance to ask.

“Lynn, look, I’m kind of working here. I kind of need you to leave me alone.”

You are insistent in your ignorance. I would like a little awe.

Lean hard. It’s all there: earthquake, tsunami, subduction, meltwaters, gyres, currents, rising tides, reactors. There were prophetic dreams, and floods. Immigrants and refugees. Sasquatch and contrails and fallout shelters.

He’s sweating now. He puts a hand up to his head where he sees sparks that swim—like sperm, like schools of bright-bellied fish—through his peripheral vision.

Under the silt, and hidden by the barnacles of an earlier tide-line, the bronze canon of a Spanish galleon. There was a giantess with a basket made of snakes, kidnapping children to eat for her supper. There were gold ingots in the woods, and a set of steps carved in the granite mountainside, descending to a corridor that, once found and left, is never found again. The epoch of the glacier and the epoch of its withdrawal, when breakneck meltwaters trip down the hillsides, and all the things taken up by its dragging underbelly are revealed again to the air. I remember when we found frozen mammoths in the till of withdrawing glaciers, how we’d search them out, and relish them for the tang of extinction.

Charlie makes a sound like gurgling.

Drones. Oil spills. The ticktick of the geigercounter. The goo of dormant nanobots. Charlie’s breath bubbles in his chest. Thunderbirds—a family of them lived as humans, far to the northwest of here. And, Charlie, there will be thunderbirds again. The sea withdraws or advances daily, seasonally, on an epochal clock.

The other shore is indefinite: saltwater, and fresh, stone and liquid, invertebrate and mammal, spit and inlet, then and now shoved against one another by time’s tectonics. If you were a wiser man, Charlie, water logic would not so disturb you. But you are stupid, and you are small.

I have often forgotten how fragile they are, thinly-armoured like spot prawns, their minds translucent like the grey-green shell they call Pododesmus macrochisma. The hightide line I make on the inside of his skull swells one side of his face, one eye rolls up, as though he is searching the ceiling.

I am always so sorry, and it is always too late. I should be punished for what I’ve done, but who can punish me? There’s only exile, which I chose after Afaitu, with the Tahitian pearl on her ankle, or the silly boy who lost the bone hook I carved for him with great and original art.

As I have done before, I should walk into the island’s interior valleys, and live with the mountain lion and the argumentative corvidae. I should walk until I can no longer hear the sea, and then walk further, and wait for the terminal wave that is, one day, coming, soon, yesterday, tomorrow, that will disorder time with its passage, or has already done so, that will leave nothing in its wake. Not even me.