FEW IN THIS TOWN HAVE EVER SEEN THE OCEAN.

IN FACT, far easier for them to

imagine the more distant and exotic plains of Africa - the dust of which at times blows
around the world to kindle the Midwestern sunsets and litter their windowsills - than
to comprehend such a thing as deeply liquid and darkly immense as the sea. The
African plains, much like the Midwestern fields and prairies, at least offer a foothold
on this earth, bend to shovel and sweat, project a flat and steady existence that in
some ways can be trusted, known. The ocean with its dark veneer and forbidding
deep is not intuitively understood and so cannot be trusted. Yet from its waters, from
its depths, life first emerged. For billions of years, life viewed the world through the
oceans dense layers and cloudy meniscus. And from these liquid continents the upper
atmosphere was brutally transformed so that life could muddle its way through billions
of years of mistake after mistake, until finally we emerged, nothing more than limping
seabags, carrying within us more of the oceans microbes than our own tissuecells. Yet
we havent the faintest conception of what the ocean looks like down in it depths.
When we look out over the sea, we may see an inverted sky, but we dont immediately
imagine the deep valleys, the mountain peaks taller than the Himalayas, the vast
underwater terrain more varied and more extreme than what we have on land. We
only know what we see, and so for the most part we dont know the sea. And this vast

tiding mother of all returns our disinterest. It holds ninety seven percent of the
earths surface water, produces half of our oxygen and covers seventy percent of our
planet yet cares not a primordial twit for human life. It truly is a hostile and alien
world for mankind. So how hard is it for a person raised on the great ordained plains, a
person who has dug up the rich earth and dutifully planted his crops, who has looked
out across endless fields plowed and cultivated under his geometries, who has diverted
streams, dammed rivers and cut roads at his will and for his purpose how hard is it
for this land-locked person to believe that the earth was created not to support human
life, but that the majority of its surface is uninhabitable, hostile to all of mankind?
And so how hard is it then for him to truly comprehend the sea?

She on the other hand lives by the ocean. Which is to say, she lives by its rules.
Its laws. Even the unknowable ones, the laws hidden so deep, covered by a darkness
no one has witnessed, tucked in crevices that no one could ever reach. She lives by its
unknown and perhaps unknowable history. In the ocean she sees all that has been and
will be. She has lived by the breath and pulse of the ocean ever since as little more
than a child she realized that even here in this Midwestern town, deep in the land that
is the furthest from any seashore, there is an ocean below her. Embedded in the rock
of her grandfathers quarry, she discovered the jellies floating within these layers of
ancient sediment; when she separated the loose layers of shale that contained them,
they were not dead at all but came flooding out towards her as if freed from five
hundred million years of static captivity, they were revealed in such numbers and
huddled in such density that she dreamed for months of the floating black jellies
falling upon her out of the darkness of her sleep, large drops of mineral rain covering
her, smothering her, drowning her in their stilled embrace.

INDEED, THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN THE OCEAN cannot be expected to
recognize the remarkable simulacrum that stretches over and above them. Yet like the
sea, the sky is hospitable only at its very edge, an expansive frontier we penetrate
only with assistance, unpredictable in tone and demeanor, filled at times with
mysteries made from water, fire and soil, at times demanding worship from even the
most hardened nonbelievers. The sky in the Midwest is an amazing presence that
stretches across this flattened terrain, dominating existence if only by the sheer
breadth of its reach. Some days it is a calm flawless blue without depth or substance,
other days it is a vast thick meniscus on which the underbellies of heavenly islands
dally past. Then there are the days when the sea above roils with upheaved layers of
dirt and mud, piles its dark layers of cumulus clay and shale into towering mountains,
fissures and explodes with blinding flashes that fracture its heavenly mounts, releasing
the load of its aerial lakes, drowning the dusty ground in a pelting rage, punishing it
with hail or smothering it with snow. Beneath these tempests, the people make their
time to pray, clamber to stay above the rising rivers, hold tight in their scattered,
weakly tethered vessels. Braced between the barns and silos, surrounded by the
faithful oak trees, the farmers ride out the fury like fisherman mercilessly cast in a
watery sea, each homestead an ark that holds family, livestock and an uncertain
future, a weathered and experienced vessel that has made it through these storms
before, although the past offers no odds of survival, despite the prayers and
supplications, survival is never attributed to a gods benevolence or fury, never

treated as more than dumb luck, a toss of some die of the universe, so come morning,
from the waters, silt and mud, they creep forth again, not baptized, only spared.

When she first had the chance, she left the land above those dead and longstilled oceans to go study within the oceans on which living seas appear. She has spent
enough time with the men and women who live on the ocean to learn that the sea is
not the ocean, but is the embodiment of the spirit of the ocean, the sea is its mood,
its demeanor, and at times the materialization of its force, its savage fury. Seas
appear and vanish, come and go, take lives and sometimes give them back. The ocean
is there when the sea is not. The ocean is the face on which seas find expression. She
quickly learned that the most exciting objects of study such as the great white shark
or the Crossota jellyfish, which looked like one of her aunts gaudily tasseled
lampshades, were also the most rare and the researchers dedicated to these spent
their time waiting, and waiting. She had not time or patience for this. So she sought
out what she could see and study in abundance. She followed the blooms and flows of
the common jellies, which could outcompete tuna and swordfish, brainless blobs of
gelatin unchanged for millions of years which can starve the whales into extinction,
dominate the oceans, shut down nuclear power stations, disabled our most powerful
submarines, rendered entire nations dark and powerless. These beautiful soulblobs
thrive in our carelessness and slough, they are one of the most successful of organisms
having survived ice ages, tepid seas, meteor strikes, mass extinctions, and now man.
While other species have given it their all learning to fly, breath, evolving brains and
opposable thumbs, jellies just continue on as they are, and they will carry on as the
oceans become hotter or colder, as the oxygen is depleted and other food sources
vanish, they will continue to thrive. In them, she saw the patterns that bridged the

millions of years from then until now, that will bridge now into an unforeseeable
future.

BENEATH THIS SHIFTING, UPTURNED SEA MIRAGE, the earth on which this small
town was built is an old but regular patch of ground, staged with forests, grassy plains
and undulating farmlands. Low lying hills are painted on the horizon, but these rises
appear tired and worn, their exposed edges and rocky extremes ground down,
softened by the countless arrivals and departures of the seasons. This is a place that
knows too well the tiring but ceaseless march towards death, seasons are the cycles
that bring life from death, but it is not an unending cycle, with each turn from winter
to spring the struggle intensifies, the miracle lessens, faith recedes. Whatever
breathes must by its nature come to an end, sometimes a bitter and painful end, and
nothing more is asked. Yet the people, by and large, watch these shadows of life and
death with an inbred indifference, with a less than stirring belief in new hope and
rejuvenation.

Years later, she returned home again. Her childish curiosity had bloomed into a
rigorous scientific obsession. She barely noticed the changes in the town for what she
sought was buried there in the rock of her grandfathers quarry. During the day she
picked through the dust and broken flagstone of the quarry, looking for more of the
captured medusa, the two- to three-foot diameter jellies that millions of years ago
were stranded so quickly on some sandy beach that their last breaths and movements

are recorded in that rock. All facing the same direction, they formed nearly perfect
rings in the flagstone, piles of sand had collected around the edges of the jellies,
indicating that they were still alive, still trying to move themselves back to sea, when
they were buried. She studied the fossils and she beheld them as they were: frozen in
time, locked in stone, yet still floating, still migrating, cast ashore perhaps, but still
palpitating in their eternal flight. These fossils were found in seven layers in this
quarry, making up twelve feet of flagstone representing a million years in time. In
other words, hundreds of millions of years ago, an ocean or lagoon had covered this
area and one day these jellyfish fought against something a terrible storms or huge
change in tides that left them stranded time and again over a million year span. All
this was preserved with the near clarity of photographs taken on the days those tracks
and ripples were made. She understood that these deposits told a five hundred million
year old story that was eerily similar to the story of jellies today. She realized again,
for the second time in her life, that she was not stationed on land as she thought, she
was on a sea, beneath her was an ocean, its time was over, but still beneath her the
waters flowed, waves roiled, life filled that layer, was trapped here, and the land on
which she now stood was no longer of eternal rock, but was created from water, built
up from wobbling fluids. From her studies of the earth, she learned that time was no
different a dimension than width or height. Inches meant hundreds of years and feet
meant millions of years. Time was frozen in these stories just as succinctly as the
outlines of the bodies that lived in these distant ages. She came to think that time
was what the soft bodied and the weak perceive while we are living, when we turn to
stone then time becomes no different than any other physical element of life.

THE FIRST SETTLERS TO THIS REGION CAME FOUL-MOUTHED, proudly ignorant of

science and disdainful of reason. Their freedom was the product of a Creator who
bound them, their freewill based on having no will of their own, and they built their
homes on no land that they owned. Reason followed, filling the emptiness, the
loneliness. Reason came barefoot and unshaven, with reasonings offered in their own
tongue, and with nothing but words it turned filthy settlements into a town, it built
churches and celebrated the role of God as the creator behind what was knowable,
what was privy to the weak and limited human mind. The people sang to their
limitations, they celebrated their freedom from the absolute. They dropped the
sacrament onto their tongues with their own unenlightened fingers. They chose the
images they wished to see of their pater, their mater. But neither was to be their
guide. Reason sent them out, reason would protect them, reason would render them
as god once made them.

We are even smaller than we think. She believes this. We are minuscule in
comparison to something that keeps us from destroying ourselves. It is not the trees.
It is not the millions of square miles of ocean. It is not the vessel of air above us. It is
certainly not some grand design. Or was it? Was there something that she could not
see? That others could not see? That we could never see? Was it something she was
unknowingly part of, she thought of how her movements were random, for example,
but if they were mapped over time, what remarkable pattern might evolve? Or
perhaps if we mapped the movements of all people, over all time, what monstrous
beauty would appear?

OPPORTUNITY. THIS IS WHAT BROUGHT THESE FAMILIES here two and a half
centuries ago; opportunity was written into the contracts that the people signed and
paid to cross the Atlantic, it was bartered at the wharves for cows and children, it was
shouted by the itinerant preachers who offered pages from a book to be planted like
seeds in the soils of the New World. Those seeds took root. It was bred into later
generations as what they should seek, what they must find; it was whispered in their
private supplications to their god, it was spoken to as if an invisible guest at the
dinner table, it was celebrated at dances, cursed and chastised at bars, men
challenged it as they stood knee deep in mud as they planted, women praised it when
they stepped out onto a porch on that first spring day, it was the low last utterance
upon death, it accompanied a parents joy at their babys first breath and cry.
Opportunity is the handhold on the otherwise unmanageable climb that is mans
progress. And progress comes of its own accord, like a wind or a rain, its benefits
granted with mercy to the lucky, perhaps the chosen few. Progress moves the sea,
taking what is possible to greater heights or lowering the unachieved into depths dark
and unknown. And from progress yields hope, breeds renewal. Yet time has
weathered what stands at the surface of the earth, a sea of timechange has deposited
a timestilling sediment over what once was strong, darkened what was once ruddy
with hope and renewal.

She learned that there are lessons in the earth, and the farther you go back
back to what the scientists call the dark time which is between three and two billion
years ago, when there are no signs of evidence of how life lived, when animals were

only cell membranes wrapped around water which left nothing behind, no real clues,
some markings, some trails, their slate was in essence blank compared to what the
shelled organisms and the vertebrates would later leave in stone the stronger those
lessons are. For seven-eighths of the history of life on earth, the only life was the
slimy masses and flows of bacteria, filling every niche and corner of the world oceans
and land. Lacking sex and reproducing by cell division these were slow to change and
mutate and hence reluctant to evolve. A story she considers biblical in its impact took
place some three billion years ago, when the cyanobacteria proliferated. Now life
assumed the ability to create energy from the sun, life could finally creep forth from
the depths, the hot fissures, the volcanic nooks far beneath the surface. The
cyanobacteria consume carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen, which at these earlier
times in earths history was a pollutant, a furious poison, burning all it touched, it
oxidized metals, rusted the earth and reacted with other compounds to further foul
the sea. The blue green algae that produced this oxygen became so successful that
they shoved the anaerobic life nearly into extinction, drove them even deeper into the
oceans, deep into rocks. Oxygen continued to pollute the earth until the earth could
balance it no more and it filled the atmosphere. The cyanobacteria became the
dominant form of life on the planet, not content to layer the oceans and cover the
seas, they joined with other organisms, they evolved in endosymbiotic fashion to
become the chloroplasts in plants and the eukaryotic algae, complex organisms which
would parasitically take over the earth and build the ancient stromatolites. Layered
structures formed by colonies of cyanobacteria whose slime collected the bits of sand
and silt and built these structures to protect their cells from the harsh rays of the sun.
These were the mounds of ancient civilizations that ruled the earth for billions of
years.

THE ANCESTORS OF THOSE WHO MAKE UP THE POPULATION of this town did not
come here for its brutal but beautiful isolation. No, they did not settle here for its
hills flush with deer and pheasants, nor for its broad flowing rivers with its fish and
waterfowl. Instead they came for something black and filthy that stains you down to
your inner rings. This land used to be the silted bed of a great ocean, where layer
upon layer of the living and the dead was collected and pressed between rocky
sediments. Over time, continents shifted, the land rose, and the seas receded to their
distance borders. And the people, they came for what was exposed in outcroppings
and river banks, the stuff that lay at various depths beneath the soil, the bituminous
rock, the tarsoft coal with which they could fire their smelters and mills, distill down
into coke, from which they could fashion an industry of iron and steel. Hills were
burned and stripped. Streams and creeks were turned into rusty, lifeless sewers. Trees
were stunted in their growth, grew brown and deformed in the foliage that faced the
heat of the coke furnaces, that hung in the passing exhaust of the trains and trucks.
The colossal mounds of slag form the rounded breasts and aged haunches of a supine
and unresponsive past, so perfectly sterile that after decades not a single weed has
taken root upon their surface.

She came to realize that we are mere accidents upon this planet. We are at
the mercy of such small things, a degree or two in temperature, a point or two rise in

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acidity. The movement of a current. Any change can spell devastation. Any difference
in what had been and we would not have been. We would not have arrived. Would
not be here now. The points of change are so small, that it is not luck that keeps them
in check. Something larger, something greater. Not god. But a buffer of some kind.
Not the carbon cycle in the ocean. Not the reservoirs contained in rocks, not the
photosynthesis or carbon dioxide sinks of the algae and trees. No, it is some reserve
that we have yet to discover, something that absorbs the pluses and minuses we pour
into the atmosphere, dump into the oceans. Not Gaia. No. Not god. God no. She
knew this but by what evidence? None. Then by what law? None for sure. Then by
what intuition? If she felt it was an intuition she would discard it immediately. Her
life has been nothing but a disaster based on her trust in intuition. There is something
pathetic in our fear that the world is dying, that the world is being destroyed. Like all
else we fear. No, it is more than that.

AFTER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF CEASELESS DIGGING, those layers of ancient

fecundity have been reamed and exploited and now nothing remains but dry veins and
piled dregs. The fiery smoke from the mills are gone, pubs no longer clog every street
corner, the red light districts were shut down and cleared away, the revival tents have
stopped visiting the malodorous baptismal waters of the river banks, the itinerant
medical healers, the recruiters for the railroad, the men with pomade slickened hair
selling options on land in California are all historical oddities now, the Victorian
mansions along tree lined avenues are no longer occupied by the elite: if not turned
into museums or nursing schools, most have been shuttered, too expensive to heat.

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The houses built by the factories for the working mugs sit like upturned stones upon
the low hills, asphalt roads weave their way across and back and forth, follow the
river on both sides. Churches and banks are still blackened by soot and most sit empty
now. Lifeless factories tattooed with graffiti crouch darkly off the river where barges
once floated, warehouses set hollow between the ancient iron bridges that once
rattled and creaked with the weight of trains carrying their loads of coal and ore. The
men and women grew empty and passive, sunk further into their quiet despair, while
other forms of life found opportunity for renewal. The violent wounds of old mining
operations and the tie-sutured gashes left by abandoned railroads began to heal, were
slowly absorbed into forgiving hills and valleys. The sky lost their perpetual haze and
no longer burst into flame at sunrise or sunset, it smolders now on distant berms. The
streams expunged their rusty sediments, their sickly orange hues, waters flow clear
again over mossy rocks, and birds nest in strands of tall grass and velvet tipped
saplings. Nature, though slow and gentle in its pace, ignores mans ignobility.

It is all part of the larger cycle, she would say. We do not simply evolve, we
merge into our fate. Natural selection does not miraculously create; nature forces
disparate elements to conjoin, to swallow and engulf each other, to merge as an ever
more complex being built from symbiotic parasites not some naturally driven design
mechanism that we base solely on a theory by a man named Darwin. Earth is not an
homeostatic organism, it is breeding house of organisms that evolve so as to live of the
wastes of others. We arose out of the muck of their toxic waste, we arose from their
own self-made disaster. We live in the skies and waters that killed our predecessors.
The fiery oxygenated skies that killed them, sustain us. They are in us now, a part of
us, in each and every cell, while we hasten to refill the skies with methane, carbon

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dioxide and sulfides, the poisons that once covered the world, three billion years ago,
the atmosphere that sustained life before ours. And so we drill now and draw upon
the tombs from a once terrible extinction within our seas and on our earth, we suck
the juices from these deposits of death caused by a transformation in conditions
similar to the changes we now create: as we burn and process the deathwaste of our
predecessors, we pollute our skies and acidify our oceans and thereby create the
massive deaths of our collective civilizations. We burn the dead and by so diving return
the dead back to the living. We suck the old blood of old layers of death in order to
prepare our new blood to be laid down again in a new layer of death. The earth knows
no balance. And so the cycle repeats, not to maintain but to continually change.
Natures imagination may be endless after all, while ours struggles against all we will
never know.

TODAY, NEW METHODS TROLL THE PREVIOUSLY FORBIDDEN DEPOSITS in the

black shale. The drills sink not just deeper but turn ninety degrees to snake
horizontally, crisscrossing the strata beneath the farmlands in search of the gaseous
stone, to pith the veins and better extract their juices. A new prosperity has
returned. New wealth comes to those dumb enough to hold onto their once worthless
land. And now once again flares burn and flicker from fields and farms, drilling towers
climb the sky with brilliant trees, new forests of lights. Worksites are cleared
overnight on the farms that have signed the leases with the oil companies, machinery
is brought in and installed within hours, drilling begins within days. Railroad cars bring
in new piping that was once rolled and treated solely at old man Norriss local pipe
coating plant, but the needs are far greater now, and armies in distant Asia are

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employed to mass produce the many miles of pipes that are stacked across acres of
land until there are shoved like hypodermic needles into the earths crust. Shiny
stainless steel tankers roll nonstop, transporting water, some say one hundred million
gallons a day, and top loaders carry millions of pounds of sand to be pumped deep into
the rock until it cracks and spits up the fetid breath it has been holding for millions of
years.

Of all the jellies, Turritopsis nutricula, fascinates her like no other. This jelly
that is spreading throughout the world and threatening our many ecosystems due to a
very unusual aspect of its nature: the jellyfish is immortal. Upon severe injury or other
trauma, a process is triggered which within minutes transforms the adult jelly into a
juvenile form. Once conditions improve, the juvenile grows back into an adult. Death
never arrives. Researchers are certain the key to immortality is in the DNA of these
animals. It is not hard to dream that in this small jelly, they are no larger than the nail
on her pinky, is the genetic key to human life everafter.

BY MOST ACCOUNTS, MIDWESTERNERS ARE A POLITE and accommodating

people, their voices low and measured, greetings pleasant and answers considerate;
but in the early hours of the morning it was common for those inner voices to rise from
the dark oceanwells of minds equidistant from god and science, and the radio would
crackle with the rants and condemnations of the silent witnesses who come forth with
their trumpets under the anonymity of darkness to warn and condemn those who

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ignore the cropsigns and abductions by aliens, who allow the corruption and waste of
our governments, and who cannot see the long, shadowy reach of the devils claw into
every aspect of our lives. But the voices offer a confused banter these nights: the
cries decrying Satans deeds have slipped beneath the hum of the universe,
conspiracies have crawled back to mental lairs whence they came, progress has
touched them all and awakened a new faith in capital and no devil seems significant in
light of the opportunity that only the most backwards deny.

What are we but bits of seafleck hurled over time across the landscape, what
are we but lazy drops of oceandew that roll through valleys and onto hilltops? Are we
but migrating mountains, shifting the minerals from the dust spread out over the
plains to the heaps that we create in out towns and cities? Are we just the bit and
pieces that form the vectors of disequilibrium, the fragments that form to tear down
the gradients of energy and order in our universe, are we merely the simple vectors
that follow the paths and directions of our physics? Yes, she says, that is all we are.
There is always a trade with the devil, she now believes. We humans gave up a long
life on earth for brains that gave us a quick chance at understanding everything: if the
time that life has had on earth was crammed into twenty-four hours, man would
occupy but seven seconds of that day. She thinks we overestimated our bet. The
jellies on the other hand traded simplicity for immortality. Ultimately, we know the
ocean on a level that is more basic, more elemental than thought. We know it in our
cells. Within billions, perhaps trillions of cells, we have carried the ocean over land
and through time, spread it across the landscapes while preserving its ancient
compositions. This is the oceans immortality, not our own. As much as she desires
her own immortality as long as that includes a new layer of pre-adolescent skin every

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time she renews - she recognizes the world will never truly follow suit, that it will
succumb to the role of humans, a role that was written long ago, instructions that are
being unerringly followed. We have unearthed the carbon back into the skies, tore
open our skies to violent rays, shattered the ice caps, desiccated our land: we have
set the stage. And just like humans, the immortal jellyfish will do what they were
designed to do. They will feed and they will bloom, they will drift like a living snow
and gently and graciously suffocate the world, which, on a day no one will count, will
reawaken and carry on unweighted by the past.

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