KATE STORY
Am I close enough? The microphone is built right in, is it?
Clever little technologies they have these days.
So, you’re here about the Bell Island Boom. What made you want to talk to me in particular?
Smart? Well, odd, or eccentric, that’s more what I’m used to hearing about myself. Or worse. But smart. I like that. It’s true, I always have my nose in a book. Always was like that. I used to love reading those old science fiction paperbacks. They had a soft feeling, the pages, and a musty smell. Must be the cheap paper. Do you read much? I used to go into St. John’s to get the books, because you couldn’t get them here, not on Bell Island. Not a bookshop in the place, me love. My brothers called me “Bookworm,” because I always had my nose in a book. Original jokesters, my brothers.
I was very fond now of books about Mars. Martians. There are so many of them. Barsoom. Red Planet. Have you noticed how we humans seem to recycle ideas? Like this idea, that somewhere and sometime on Mars there was this vast civilization. There’s a sadness to our imagining. A sadness to it all, yes, nostalgia. Nobody does nostalgia like Newfoundland. Take me back to my western boat. Let me fish off Cape St. Mary’s…
What’s that face, me duckie? Don’t you like my singing?
Take me back to that snug green cove, where the seas roll up their thunder…
All right, all right, I’ll get around to the Boom. We’ll start at the beginning. That’s what your high school teacher wants, right, for the project? Names and dates and all that.
My name is Susan Fitzgerald. I was born in 1935, and…
Yes, 1935. I am eighty-two years old.
You look disappointed. Aren’t I old enough? What’s that? Someone told you I was a hundred?
Not me, son, I’m not a hundred. My. I haven’t laughed like that in a long time.
You’re here now, aren’t you? Have another cookie.
1978, now, that’s when it was. I’m old enough to remember that, certainly. How old do you think I was when it happened? Or aren’t they teaching you math anymore?
Very good, I was forty-three. Still fairly ancient.
Well, it was very unexpected. For most people that is.
Yes, it was a Sunday morning. A lot of people were in church.
No. I was down on the beach. The Grebe’s Nest. The Grebe… A grebe is a bird, a migratory bird. It summers here, raises its young, then travels vast distances, almost unimaginable, all the way over to Europe…migratory. Migratory… Your mother’s from here, isn’t she? From this town, from Wabana? Before her people moved to Portugal Cove, after the mine closed, yes I knew your mother. I’d have thought she’d have taken you down to the Grebe’s Nest at least once.
I used to lie in the grass on the cliff tops overlooking the Grebe’s Nest, grass and wild strawberries, roses and vetch, and stare up into the sky, and wait for ancient aliens to come get me.
I knew if I wished hard enough, they would come. Because I was special, chosen. Oh, yes, we seem to recycle that idea too, don’t we? These ideas that come up over and over again, like being chosen… Does the mouse dream the dream of the cat?
The Grebe’s Nest is over that way. No, we can’t see it from here. It’s a bit of a walk, up past the Number Two mine, along Carter Avenue and past Mr. Crane’s place, then it sort of peters out into a path. It’s a lovely little sandy beach, sheltered, and many of the rocks have fossils…
Didn’t I say? Just that it’s shaped like a nest. That’s all. It’s a little crescent moon of a place. Magical. A lot of people say that about it, not just me.
In the old days, miners living nearby used to supplement their income with some fishing, and they’d bring their catches into the Grebe’s Nest. It was an easy place to drag a dory onto shore. But the cliffs are high there. I’d say over a hundred feet. They attached a cable and they’d send their catch up in tubs, to the top, pulled by a horse. Then row around and home again. You could get to a nearby beach just by walking, but that beach is rough and rocky, unsheltered – no good for boats. So in the 60s, after all the Bell Island mines closed, the miners had a lot of time on their hands and a lot of mining experience. Not to mention a lot of explosives. So they blasted through the point of land that separated the Grebe’s Nest from the path. Maybe a hundred and fifty feet, the tunnel. No, I wouldn’t exactly call it safe. Maybe that’s why your mother hasn’t taken you there. We can go after we finish talking, if you like.
Which we’ll never finish doing if I don’t stick to the point. Sunday morning, right. April 2, 1978. There was snow on the ground. I was down in the Grebe’s Nest, and everybody else was in church.
Everything got quiet. The wind dropped. The sea even seemed to pause. And then, the air filled with this ringing. Like a tone, like a bell.
And then I saw something in the sky. It could have been a meteor, yes.
The Boom rocked the island, like an electrical shock. It shook the island, me duckie. They heard it sixty miles away. That’s a hundred kilometres.
Electrical appliances burst apart. Blue flame shot out of electrical outlets. Animals fell over dead. Buildings were rent asunder. The explosion was loud, the loudest sound anyone had ever heard, louder even than the German torpedoes back in 1942… I’ll tell you about those later, me love. No, I don’t believe they ever found an epicentre to the explosion. All that was left – other than some dead chickens with blood seeping out their eyes and beaks, and some burnt-out appliances and startled people – were some holes in the snow, and two small hollows in the ground.
Mr. and Mrs. Bickford’s wee grandson saw a great globe of light, hovering above the ground. But nobody else saw anything like that.
What’s that? A beam of light? Yes, there was a woman over across Conception Bay swore she saw a beam of light shooting up from the ground. But I believe they didn’t hold much by her testimony.
Certainly there were lots of stories.
You’ve heard about Mr. Warren and Mr. Freyman, have you? People got very excited when they came. Yes, that’s right, from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. They started asking around.
Because of their suits perhaps, people thought they worked for the U.S. government.
It turned out they were tracking…lightning superbolts, that’s right, you’ve done your homework. They told everyone that they were satisfied the Boom had been a lightning superbolt, and they went back to New Mexico.
Yes, it struck near Lance Cove. Pretty much the opposite end of the island from the Grebe’s Nest.
No, I didn’t speak to them. I was in hospital in St. John’s. See this hand? Yes, that’s a burn. I still can’t close it properly.
How did it happen?
A burn, what do you think?
No, I never thought anything like that.
Who’s that? Nikola Tesla, who’s that?
I see. A doomsday device. But who’d develop a doomsday device?
Well yes, I suppose the U.S. or the Soviets might have had an interest back then… But who’d shoot a doomsday device at Bickford’s old farm?
Ah, the iron ore. Yes, me son, Bell Island’s riddled with it. Great blood-coloured layers of it all through the rock. It’s heavy. Here, hold this in your hand. Heavy, isn’t it? That’s the iron makes it so. But there’s a flaw in your theory, I think, me duckie. Iron ore isn’t a magnet. Just try and draw something with that rock you’re holding. It’s magnetic, certainly, and it can be magnetized, but it’s not in and of itself a magnet. So I don’t see how it could inadvertently draw this superweapon and…
Hematite, yes. Really? It means “egg”? Now that is interesting. Very, very interesting.
You have got my attention.
How do you spell that? Oolitic hematite. Half a second, I’m going to write that down. O-O-L-I-T-I-C. And it means egg, egg stone? Goodness. Sedimentary rock, yes, you can see that. It looks different from the main island of Newfoundland, doesn’t it? The rock around Portugal Cove is light and dark, gold and grey. Bell Island’s red, rising steeply from the sea, tall cliffs. Wonderful soil, here. The coast is very regular, you’ll have noticed. Almost no indentations or coves. It’s a big egg shape itself. Almost like someone dropped it into Conception Bay from space.
But that’s not an uncommon kind of rock here on Earth. You’ll find it all over the world. Here, the bottom of the Aral Sea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia. And China, yes, China has a lot of the stuff.
They opened up the first iron ore mine on Bell Island in the 1890s, a surface mine. That’s right, that’s why most of us are here at all, the mining. They went down under the ocean, under The Tickle. Conception Bay. It’s the biggest submarine iron mine in the whole world. It’s as big as St. John’s. Have you taken the tour? You should come down on my tour, I’m one of the guides. Yes, I am the oldest Bell Island Mine Museum tour guide. Although Mr. Carter’s getting up there. Anyway, come on the tour. I think you’ll like it.
We were one of the world’s major producers of iron ore. Oh, yes, during the Second World War we had ships anchored here. When I was seven years old, they torpedoed and sank four warships, right there. Look out the window and you can see where they were anchored. Seventy merchant mariners lost their lives. And one torpedo struck the DOSCO iron ore loading dock. The Germans didn’t mean to bomb the shore; it was an errant torpedo. But it turned out to be the only location in North America to be subject to a direct attack by German forces during the war. Even if it was a mistake, yes, it was still an attack. The whole island shook.
Where was I?
The Grebe’s Nest.
No, I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be in bed. I wasn’t a very good little girl; don’t use me as your model. You know what Catherine Aird said: “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” She’s an author, mysteries…never mind. Anyway, when the Germans attacked I was down in the Nest with a headlamp I’d filched from my father, who was a miner of course; almost everyone on the island worked in the mines back then. I was visiting my eggs.
Oh. The eggs.
I didn’t mean to tell you about that.
But really, what’s the harm? It’s all going to come out sooner rather than later.
What do you think is the real reason two physicists came to visit us here on Bell Island after the Boom? You might know better than I. They were into a particular branch of physics as I recall, something…
Plasma physics, that’s right. Something to do with lightning.
Yes, that makes sense; if plasma is electrically conductive, it responds to electromagnetic fields. Infinitely conductive, I see. Really? And it can form filaments and beams?
Could it form a passage?
That’s a very interesting idea. Space is filled with it, is it? A network of currents that transfer energy over large distances…I see. The solar wind is plasma. It’s the most abundant form of ordinary matter in the universe?
I think you have just explained something I’ve been wondering about for a long, long time.
Well, you will think I’m crazy. But you’ve explained it to me, how they can get from Mars to here. That’s been the sticking point for me all along. But if they can ride this solar wind, like a passage…
My eggs. Or what comes out of them, anyway, that’s what I’m talking about.
They weren’t my eggs. I just called them that. Of course I don’t lay eggs, what are they teaching—
Down in the nest. The Grebe’s Nest.
You can see the layers of iron ore in the cliffs; there are all kinds of fossils. And there’s this one place, about ten feet off the beach, that looks like a great big nest full of red eggs.
They’re about the size of your head, yes, bigger than an ostrich egg. And they’re red like the stone around them. In fact, you could just imagine they were strange egg-shaped formations in the stone, something that got fossilized back when the rock was part of North Africa, five hundred million years ago, and it was on the bottom of the sea.
They were there for anybody to see. I first noticed them during the war. I was only seven years old. But I always had my nose in a book, and I had a lot of ideas, and I noticed something that nobody else seemed to about the stone nest in the cliff.
Snow or ice never stayed on them for long.
I made myself a little tower of flattish rocks so I could climb up and touch the fossils or whatever they were.
The egg things were warm to the touch.
On the surface it looked like a hundred and two of them. Yes, me love, I counted them. I took a real interest in those stones. And when those torpedo attacks occurred, when the island shook, it seemed to me that for a brief moment, that nest of stones sent out a ruddy glow. But that soon disappeared, and afterward, I could never say for certain if it had happened or not.
I used to go down to the beach very often and visit my eggs. Climb down the cliff, down the old cable. This was before they blasted the tunnel, you see. I got a reputation for being odd. As if I wasn’t odd enough already for reading books about Mars.
I felt Chosen. The eggs had chosen me.
My dreams changed. My dreams became long, and dark, and full of strange music. I got so that I just loved going to bed, because with my head full of the eggs’ humming, I’d dream.
My mother said she’d never seen anything like it. Before, it’d been like pulling teeth to get me to bed. I was the baby of the family, and I guess I always felt like when I went to bed I was missing out. I’d scream and cry when I was a youngster, or worse, I’d sulk. Mother used to say my sulking was like a fog. “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it,” she used to say. Federal case. Newfoundland was a country back then, its very own country. Oh, you know about that, do you? I am glad they are teaching you something.
But yes, now I loved going into my little room and…sliding down. Not like sleeping. It felt less like dreams, and more like dipping back into one long dream. A long sleep, shared by many minds at once, minds that…communed. I’d feel like my body wasn’t my own. It’d stretch, it’d be enormous. Full of energy; made of energy. I’d remember soaring through long, lazy strands of ice-blue cloud. Vast, languid beats, great wings made of lightning. Living between and around…this. What we call reality. A red land. Dry. Terrible mountains, and glaciers burning cold. Thin air. Heat, and…
What’s that, me son? The eggs?
Well, yes, I kept going down there and reading to the eggs, talking to them, telling them about my life. Sometimes I’d hum, and it seemed to me that they hummed back. Maybe I imagined it. I was lonely, a lonely little girl, I suppose.
I never told anyone a thing about them. I knew they’d think I was touched. Touched. Nuts, crazy in the head, that’s what touched means. But now I’m telling you. I think it’s time to tell somebody.
I am quite sane, if old. I’ve passed all my memory tests. I still have my driver’s license. If that doesn’t prove sanity, what does in this society, I ask you.
Next, all the mines were closed. Every mine on Bell Island. There was lots of competition from all over the world, and we’d never made sure that local people owned the mines, that’s why. So everybody was all set to leave. There were over twelve thousand people living here then, can you imagine? Now there’s only about two thousand of us. I was pretty ancient by that time, the 1960s. I was around thirty or so. And everyone was leaving. My parents left; Dad was about ready to retire anyway, and they went into St. John’s; Mother always did like to shop. My brothers left. One to CBS, one to St. John’s, two out to Alberta to work in the oil fields.
I stayed. I wasn’t married or anything. The eggs took care of that. I didn’t have time or inclination for dating or courting or whatever it’s called now. I stayed, and got a job here and a job there. Had to commute back and forth on the ferry for a few years, because there was no work to be had on the island. I cleaned houses. And I kept visiting the eggs. It was easier, because by then they’d blasted the tunnel.
I’d wake up slowly in those days. I’d have to set my alarm very, very early to be ready for people, for work. Sometimes it’d take me an hour just to stand up and put on my clothes. I couldn’t move too fast. My eyes took a long time to adjust, too. Funny things, these human bodies. So small and meaty and chilly.
Then it was 1978.
My dreams went black and cold. It was a whole long dream, a dream that lasted for months before the Boom. It was, I realized slowly, a migration. The dreamer was migrating from the red place, the home place, the dry place, riding the electric wind. The long black airless cold, the between, gradually gave way, and the watery world came into focus. Watery world – that’s us, the Earth. We have a lot more water than Mars. So.
So, we’re coming up to the Boom again now. Goodness, that’s like me, I can’t seem to help but tell a story in a spiral.
The Boom, I was down on the beach, and when that bolt hit, the nest just…came apart.
That’s right. The eggs, or stones if you want to call them that, fell out onto the beach. Some of them, anyway. There were far more of them than I’d thought. I’d only been able to see the front of the nest, you see, that was the hundred and two I’d counted. But more than that fell out. Far more. And in behind, you could see they went back far, far into a sort of perfectly round, smooth tunnel. I’d say there were thousands, at least. Although without taking them all out it’d be impossible to tell.
The Boom dislodged them, that’s right.
I got even more curious, then.
Oh, yes, I took tools to them. Chisels and hammers and everything I had until I broke one, and what came out…
See this scarring across my hand? And the way I can’t really close it? That’s from what happened. Liquid fire. Magma, maybe. I’m lucky I didn’t lose a finger. If I hadn’t been wearing gloves…
I scooped up a few of the ones that had fallen out of the nest, all I could carry, to save them from being washed out to sea…
But that’s probably enough for your report, now, isn’t it.
The dream? Well, I’m sure I’m simply foolish.
The dreamer came close, came closer still. The watery planet filled her awareness. And she plunged into the atmosphere, following the filament, the path between our worlds. She plummeted toward Bell Island. I don’t know, I just felt it was a she. She came from Mars to awaken the eggs. She impacted the island, and sent a jolt right through the magnetic ore to the nest on the other side. She jolted them free.
The Bell Island Boom came from Mars.
Well, yes, that’s an interesting fact too. Mars is full of hematite. It’s one of the most abundant minerals in the rocks and soils there; NASA has proven it. That’s why it’s so red, red like Bell Island. They seem to be attracted to hematite, to need it. I don’t know how to understand their being. I’m just Susan Fitzgerald who reads too much science fiction and is touched in the head.
Certainly they must live for a very long time. Thousands of years, maybe. Maybe they never ever die.
Well, of course I have a theory. Here it is. If you look at the stories, it seems like there is a cycle of perhaps six thousand years. Think of all the legends. Chinese, Persian, Slavic, Indian, African, European. Water Serpents. The Leviathan.
Dragons.
They come here to lay their eggs. They hatch here; I think they need water for the first cycle of their lives. And there’s lots of prey here. The young need food to thrive. Here, have another cookie.
And then, when they’re ready, off they go, back to Mars. Where there’s all that nice red magnetic rock. They are, or become, beings of energy, perhaps. That’s what I think. Living plasma, that’s a good idea. Sentient energy.
They commute between planets, riding the solar wind. Migrate. Like the wee grebe.
So. Soon the eggs will hatch, and we’ll have the first cycle of dragons here on Earth in over six thousand years. And I’ll be alive to see it! I hope so, anyway. That will be exciting, won’t it?
If we live through it.
I am not sure they worry too much about us. I mean, we’re not all that relevant, except as a source of nutrition.
Anyway, thank you for coming and interviewing an old lady, even if she isn’t fully a century old.
What? Oh, you noticed that, did you? I didn’t finish telling you what I did with the fallen eggs. Very perceptive of you.
Well, to be honest, they’re here.
No, not on the cookie plate. They’re in a metal trunk, under my bed.
Do you want to see them?
They’ve gotten hotter than before, and sometimes, they move. Just a little rocking motion. My dreams have gotten longer now. Does the prey dream the dream of the hunter? Soon I’ll have to retire, just to keep dreaming.
You’re right. That’s them, that sound, rattling around in the iron trunk under me bed. Don’t worry, it’s been happening for months. Do you want to see them? No?
All right, me son. Go catch that next ferry, you’ll just be in time.
What an exciting time in history. To be alive to see it!
Where the stars shine out their wonder, and the seas roll up their thunder.
Yes, thank you, glad you enjoyed the cookies. Goodness, can’t you run fast.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.