wrangellia
ammonite
Kim Novak’s hair
It’s nine-thirty on a Thursday night and it’s pissing with rain. I’m sitting here in the Nanaimo Greyhound station staring down onto an expanse of cracked and filthy linoleum, trying to figure out what colour it had been before it succumbed to erosion. I decide on ‘white’, sort of. But that must have been a very long time ago. Behind me, a young Vietnamese woman in a dark blue wind-breaker, pinstriped flares and a white newsboy cap sits among a pile of sodden cartons full of Asian groceries, sucking her teeth so loudly that it reverberates through the waiting room. A not-altogether-unpleasant odour of coriander and peanuts emanates from her beautiful mouth.
A couple of meth heads in black hoodies and multiply articulated plastic moon shoes stand hunched over a cell phone playing a game, twitching and vibrating as they pass the handset back and forth. They giggle in loud bursts as they exhort their blocky 8 bit avatar through the mazescape of the screen’s tiny universe, powering it forward by the sheer maniacal energy of their drumming thumbs. The wall behind them is quite exactly the colour of baby shit and this flu I’ve got is making me nauseous.
The double doors burst open and in with a blast of wind and rain comes a blonde young, short-haired guy in a black nylon wind-breaker and cargo pants. He’s wrestling an enormous khaki duffle bag up onto his shoulders that seems to have developed a sort of writhing lump at each end, as though it was undergoing mitosis or contained a couple of kidnapped children, suffocating and fighting for their lives. The little conical silver horns, pierced into his bland and unlined face, one above each eyebrow and another in the dimple of his chin just above his abbreviated strip of porn-star-pubic-patch beard, make him look like an apprentice devil back from a day’s hunting. As he approaches the counter, the lumps in his bag stop thrashing, as if obeying some silent command, and our young Satan buys his ticket without breaking the trance of the zombified clerk, resplendent in a coffee-vomit beige, short-sleeved, polyester, bus company shirt. Devil boy bursts back out the door, strides across the platform and stuffs his sack of souls into the Greyhound’s cargo hold for the long night ride back to hell.
I don’t know if it’s the flu, the garish fluorescent lighting or the beginning of some psychotic episode but everything in the room is starting to crackle with an aura of electric green corona discharge of the type I usually experience before peaking on acid. But I’m not on acid, although I kind of wish I were. My burning eyes wander over to a broken vending machine, then settle in exhaustion on a wire stand in which a cup of takeout coffee lies spilled over a stack of “New Dawn” papers, turning them into a kind of sodden, brown, stratified, pre-shale sediment, the beginnings perhaps of a new prehistory.
I hear the big diesel turn over. I get up in a fuzzy delirium and shuffle out to the platform and climb aboard the grumbling metal womb, which will take me away from here. I settle into the dark anonymity of my seat and the bus growls and lurches out of the terminal, beginning its long slow drive down the Old Island Highway. I close my eyes and pass out almost immediately into a deep and drooling stupor. I feel opiated. My mind loses its grip on the inside of my fevered eyelids and I start falling backwards into a warm, dark tunnel, the walls of which seem to be made of some sort of palimpsest of layered sediments. Here and there, in what seem like floating fragments of mirror, I catch a glimpse of something monstrous, churning through a limpid ocean that seems somehow to have inundated the glistening, lonely nightscape I am still half-hearing, half-remembering, swishing and droning by, outside the bus window. But that highway seems so far away now. I spiral deeper into the primeval warmth and start to drift. . .
It’s getting hotter and I continue to drop through the void. Perspiration is sheeting on my burning skin and my forehead is glowing like an ember. Seemingly at random, I turn toward one of the passing mirror fragments and it explodes open into a turquoise supernova, sucking me through it like a rupture in an airplane’s fuselage at 30,000 feet. I wince and find myself suddenly suspended in the water column of a warm and scintillating ocean, looking up towards its shifting surface.
I’m just getting my bearings when I glimpse the enormous crocodile-like form of a Mosasaur rising up from far beneath me, surging upwards with great sinusoidal thrusts of its tail. Remarkably, I seem to be invisible to it and it rockets past me, up towards a shoal of rams-horn-shelled ammonites bobbing like pearly Christmas ornaments just below the opaline waves. The monster lunges its needle-toothed maw into their midst and they jet away in nimbuses of purple ink. I pop to the surface, gasping for breath in the fetid air. All around me, the sky is raked with lightning and there is a pervasive smell of sulphur and rotting vegetation. I’m furiously treading water and in the distance I see what I take to be a Plesiosaur bursting through the boiling surf. Its sinuous neck uncoils like a bull whip and it sinks its hideous fanged head into a leathery-winged flying thing that had been gliding like some chthonic pelican just above the surface of the chop. Within seconds, it is dragged shrieking and flapping into the seething sea, leaving only a dark halo of blood foaming on the waves.
The bus shudders and I am shaken back awake into the endless rainy night. My heart is pounding and I am drenched in sweat. I can taste its salt in the corners of my lips as if it was the residual spray from the Mesozoic ocean in which I was just immersed. I open my eyes. We’re in Duncan, a city of strip malls incongruously juxtaposed with beautifully First Nations totem poles. Another palimpsest. We’ve pulled into a shopping mall and it looks completely abandoned. Nobody seems home on Vancouver Island tonight, just miles of dark trees and wet blacktop, interspersed with pools of fluorescent mall aura, the cold light of wasted kilowatts reflected in empty, rain-slick parking lots. Nobody waits for us at the bus stop and nobody gets off our bus. The air brakes hiss, the driver hits the accelerator and we pull back out onto the highway, re-entering the twin beam tunnel of our headlights and our lonely passage through the darkness and rain.
Settling back into my seat, I wonder what could have happened back in those long-ago seas that wiped out all those fearsome dragons in their watery lairs. They must have seemed invincible at the time. Yet they couldn’t escape the wrath of their destiny— even the mightiest reduced to a mute mountain of flesh sinking in abyssal mud, swarmed over by writhing hosts of zombie worms and hagfish. The creek beds of eastern Vancouver Island are littered with their fossilized remains. Almost intact, mineralized skeletons of mosasaurs and elasmosaurs (the most hyperbolic plesiosaur—12 metres in length, half of it neck) have been found near this old highway, along the Puntledge River. I imagine their fearsome teeth, arched ribs and endless vertebral columns sticking out of the ferny banks like the remains of a petrified armada, sunk in a surprise attack at the very apogee of its global supremacy. These mute bones date back to the late Cretaceous, just before the malcontent asteroid Chicxulub, struck the earth in a titanic suicide bombing, precipitating the fifth great dying—the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. Chicxulub may not have been acting alone, but whatever the geometry of the disaster, at the end of the Cretaceous, life on earth was dealt a sudden and cataclysmic blow.
Vancouver Island’s fabled landscape has always made me feel a bit uneasy. It’s as if the geomorphological rug could be pulled out from under me at any moment. I’ve always put this down to me being a transplanted easterner, a stranger in a strange land, but it turns out that there really *is* some basis for my trepidation. Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and a chunk of Alaska are collectively part of an errant raft of the earth’s crust called Wrangellia. This rogue land mass started out somewhere in the proto South Pacific 270 million years ago and headed off on a tectonic joy ride, slamming into the side of what we call North America, 140 million years later, in perhaps the worst parallel parking job ever in the history of the continent.
Wrangellia’s rather tentative relationship with the rest of the continent can be seen in its palaeontology, which has more in common with parts of Asia than it does with the rest of North America. In fact Wrangellia was spawned together with a whole herd of other micro-continents called terranes, which careened hither and thither across the Pacific in a slow-motion tectonic demolition derby, still very much in progress. The incessant lurching and grinding of our bus’s syphilitic gearbox makes me wonder what would happen if Wrangellia started to buck and strain more determinedly at its continental mooring, or worse still, slipped downward into the sea.
For months now, I’ve been obsessing over this idea of rising sea levels. Even without the help of plate tectonics, global sea levels are inching upwards with the relentlessness of a department store escalator. U.S. National Parks officials are reporting that global warming has become the latest spectator sport in Alaska. Tourists are flocking there to see what’s left of the rapidly melting glaciers, “before they’re all gone.” The Greenland ice cap is currently in full bore melt mode and it contains enough water within it to raise the oceans seven metres by the time it’s all gone.
Back in 1962, J.G. Ballard wrote a lurid science fiction novel, Drowned World, in which he portrays a post-apocalyptic civilization rotting under a vast and stagnant ocean. As I look out the window at the pounding, Noachian rain, the question seems to be not “if” we will have a “Drowned World” but “when?” The plesiosaurs and mosasaurs of the Cretaceous may be gone forever but I imagine the shadows of saltwater crocodiles, fattened on our bloated corpses, undulating over strange rectangular reefs that once were the big box stores of Nanaimo. It seems inevitable to me that all this suburban sprawl, these dark forests and fields, will soon become just another page of sediment in Wrangellia’s unfinished paleontological book.
Time seems to be oddly plastic tonight and I feel like I am floating through it like some sort of spectre.
I think of Kim Novak’s character, Madeleine, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, when she lapses into a state of chronosthesia or time confusion, while looking at the cross section of an ancient redwood tree. Pointing at a space between two growth rings she tells James Stewart’s character Scottie:
“Somewhere in here, I was born and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.”
Like Madeleine, I often suffer from a kind of temporal confusion, my mind racking focus back and forth across time with seeming impunity and without warning, accompanied by a frequent, complete inability to focus on the present. The fossilized scallops in the flagstones of my suburban Toronto boyhood seem as real to me now as the words I am typing on this page and yet I am constantly plagued by distractlingly tactile visions of the future. For some years now, I’ve had the feeling I am standing at the precipice of a great phase shift, a rip in time, like the one that deposited the thin layer of iridium at the transition between the extinction apocalypse of the late Cretaceous and the rest of history.
The bus continues to drone through the night. I close my eyes and it’s a Saturday afternoon in 1965. I’m a kid lying on a stained, avocado green expanse of broadloom in an overheated living room in suburban Toronto. My friend Billy and I are watching the Flintstones through the acrid haze of his parents’ endless Craven ‘A’ Menthols. I hear the tinkling of ice cubes in gas station glassware and I smell the sweet effervescence of their rye and ginger ales. We’re all sharing a big bowl of fluorescent orange Cheezies. The windows are frosted up outside and coloured Christmas lights are twinkling from the eaves. In the febrile brightness of the lo-fi screen (the first colour TV on the block), fat Fred and stumpy Barney are driving up a Palaeolithic version of the Santa Monica freeway, propelling their stone age vehicle forward with the trundling of their oversized feet. I hear the line from the cheery theme song:
“Let’s ride
with the family down the street
Through the
courtesy of Fred’s two feet.”
The laugh track kicks in. Mechanical laughter laughing at a mechanical stone age, conceived as an homage to cookie-cutter American suburbia. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Like the theme song says: “It’s a place right out of history . .”
A swirling blur and its a few days ago. I’m in front of another television, watching a newscast. Another endomorphic man is using the power of his own muscles to move a hulking vehicle up the interstate. Only this time it’s not a cartoon. Unlike Fred Flintstone’s car, the Ford Explorer the guy is pushing doesn’t have the benefit of holes in its floor through which he could put his feet. There’s no laugh track either. In fact nobody is laughing in this stream of refugees leaving Houston trying to escape the wrath of Hurricane Rita, in this, the worst hurricane season in memory. Many others are pushing their cars, which move slowly forward like recalcitrant, giant beetles, their iridescent, metallic wing covers glinting in the afternoon sun.
My mind continues to shuffle the present, the past and the future, back and forth, like some neurological slot machine. Facts and sensations meld and unmeld, juxtapose and disconnect. Houston is the largest petrochemical manufacturing area in the world yet these people don’t have any gas because a hurricane has shut down the oil refineries and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists have been telling us for years that the severity and intensity of hurricanes will increase because of anthropogenic global warming, caused in the main by the excessive burning of fuels from fossils. The next hurricane, already forming above the overheated Atlantic has been christened ‘Wilma,’ the name of Fred Flintstone’s long-suffering and sarcastic Stone Age wife, who I recall wore a rather fetching, over-the-shoulder white animal skin and tied her garish orange hair in a bun. Any given litre of gasoline, might contain some tiny fraction of decomposed residue from the fearsome mosasaurs and plesiosaurs swimming through my mind just minutes ago, as well as untold other extinct organisms—the distillate of life’s fecundity, wrung from the vanished ages of deep time.
We are burning our prehistory. Yabba-Dabba-Doo!
Another vision emerges. In a grey-green tropical sky, atop a billowing thundercloud, ripe with rain, I see a gigantic luminescent abacus, shining like Ezekiel’s terrible wheel. It’s fiery beads slide back and forth across its rungs, slowly tallying up the thermodynamic overdraft of our race. I look down and see the putrefying remains of civilization—millions of human corpses buried in thick marine sediments, slowly transmogrifying back into oil. I start to sweat again. I feel strangely greasy.
The bus lurches to a stop. We’ve pulled over somewhere in the darkness alongside the Malahat highway. A couple of stocky native guys in black and white athletic gear get off the bus and are absorbed immediately into the inky mist. Where are they going? It’s as if they’ve just slipped into another dimension. Maybe they know the way through time. . .
The doors close and we continue through the night. I can feel my fever begin to subside. I can’t sleep any more and I stare catatonically out the mud-spattered window. The orange lights of suburban Victoria come into view and before I know it, I’m watching myself from a curiously disembodied, astrally-projected vantage point from somewhere above the corporeal me— which is schlepping its bag out the front door of the Victoria depot and somnambulating towards the absurd looking Chinese windmill palms on the other side of Douglas St.
I’ve always thought of Victoria’s proliferation of palm trees as a ‘fuck-you, Canada’ kind of landscaping, a self-conscious horticultural exhibitionism designed to depress everyone that didn’t live here. Yet now, their rattling fronds seem to me like a botanical beachhead, heralding the imminent re-tropicalization of Wrangellia. I slip forward into time and suddenly staid old Victoria has become a sleepy atoll, it’s stiff little prim and proper palm trees now grown luxuriant and languid, swaying sensually under a sky as blue as a Noxzema jar. Apartment blocks and office buildings, their facades streaked with rust and guano, stand abandoned and windowless, their bases inundated by a tepid coral sea and their tops enveloped in vast, wheeling swarms of shrieking birds.
I find myself in bed the next morning and I silently thank the reptilian part of my neural cortex for having run autopilot for me the night before, to get me back here. Over the years my R-complex has ferried my squirming and distracted consciousness across many treacherous mindstorms, like a stalwart and indefatigable tortoise. I’ve come to count on it. Yet lying here catatonic and staring at the ceiling, I realize that my mind is still wandering the cracks in between the beginnings and endings of ages, forever looking for some illusive place called ‘now.’ I resolve to search out professional help. I need ‘time therapy.’
prehistoric walrus
A few days later, I’m on my way back up the Island Highway again, this time with my long-suffering wife in her highly efficient German automobile, which looks like a piece of polished black Lego. It’s hasn’t really stopped raining since the last time I was on this road. Ruth has offered to drive me to my first appointment in what I am hoping will be the beginning of my process of chronotherapy—a kind of talking cure for my temporal drifting. We pull up in front of an old brick building in the quaint little town of Qualicum Beach. We are here to meet Graham Beard, the director of the Vancouver Island Palaeontology Museum. The museum has been shut down for the winter, but he has been kind enough to open its doors for us and give us a tour. An affable retired school teacher, Graham has become a preeminant expert in the prehistory of Wrangellia and his enthusiasm for the subject is immediately apparent. He tells me that he moved here to Qualicum Beach, expressly because of the region’s rich fossil beds.
The whole area from Campbell River to Duncan is one giant fossil bed, he says. Despite the incessant rain, he got back just last night from nearby Hornby Island, collecting Late Cretaceous ammonites in a formation accessible only at low tide.
We step inside the little foyer and Graham switches on the lights. I am confronted by an odd assortment of objects, mostly pioneer bric-a brac and old photographs and inexplicably, in the middle of all this, a stack of HAM radio transceivers carefully tagged, dating back to the 1940’s. I wondered what these radios are for. Was Graham employing some arcane principle of ionospheric skip to communicate through time? He speaks of the Cretaceous as if it were only yesterday. I can’t quite bring myself to ask him.
He directs us to a large glass case near the stairwell. It contains the remains of a 70,000 year old walrus, Odobenus rosmarus, which had been found sticking out of the beach just ten miles north of here. Its stubby tusks show the signs of lactation rings, identifying the specimen as a female, twelve years old when she died. There is something melancholic about seeing her dusty skeleton propped up against a crudely painted backdrop, locked in this glass sepulchre in a small town museum. Maybe because as a fossil, at 70,000 years she isn’t very old. In my mind’s eye, I can already see the ocean lapping up against the building’s foundations about to reclaim her.
But it won’t happen just yet. We’re at least a half a mile inland. Apparently walruses used to live as far down this coast as California but something killed them off. Graham says that a male walrus has a penis bone the size of a baseball bat. We smile and follow him upstairs.
This room seems more exclusively devoted to palaeontology, a kind of Wunderkammer of strange objects dating back to the beginning of life. There are rows of glass cabinets full of Graham’s beloved ammonites.
But I’ve seen that spiral form somewhere before. . Yes, that’s right, it was the back of Kim Novak’s hair in Vertigo—Kim Novak when she was playing Madeleine, lost in time, inhabiting her long dead ancestor. Or was her ancestor inhabiting her? Madeleine’s hair was pinned into the spiral shape of an ammonite. Hitchcock’s camera becomes fixated on it, using it as a trope for the sense of falling through time that runs through the film. I remember the exchange between James Stewart’s character Scottie and Madeleine:
Scottie: Have you been here before?
Madeleine: Yes.
Scottie: When? When? When were you born?
Madeleine: Long ago.
It’s exactly how I feel at this moment.
Graham explains that ammonites might have been very intelligent creatures. They were close relatives of the modern day octopus, except that they had fantastically chambered shells through which it is believed they could control their flotation, by taking in or expelling sea-water. Some have been found with shells that are over nine feet in diameter although most in this room could easily have been held in two hands. Many are much smaller. Graham says he has found thousands of tiny ammonite embryos preserved in a single concretion the size of a beach pebble. Ammonites were ubiquitous in the Cretaceous seas. Their remains are found all through the marine deposits of the time, including, Graham points out, in the fossilized dung of extinct marine reptiles.
He takes me over to a vitrine in which there are three exceptionally opalescent ammonite specimens. A closer look reveals an exquisite fractal patterns of radial sutures on their surfaces, giving the impression of the finest Damascus steel or a Japanese product ID hologram. The fractals are genetically unique and help taxonomists differentiate between the species. Next to these polished specimens is a case full of twisted, truncated, back-curved ammonite specimens that Graham describes as ‘heteromorphic.’ It’s as if the rigidity and elegance of the spiral form became too much for them and they just blew apart and reassembled themselves. Perhaps their DNA got bored. They wind up looking like random pieces of twisted drier duct or severed, cancerous intestines. Nobody really knows how heteromorphs moved through the sea, having so spectacularly opted out of hydrodynamic efficiency. Their anarchic, asymmetrical shapes present us with questions, which are for part still unanswerable. As is the ultimate question about ammonites. Why did every single one of these diverse and numerous creatures suddenly disappear from the planets’ oceans 65 million years ago? For ammonites it seems, their time was simply up.
Yet some species manage to stick handle their way through extinction holocausts and then go under the radar for a long time, only to suddenly pop out of deep time and land in our laps. Graham grabs my elbow and excitedly ushers me over to another vitrine, asking me if I know what was in it. It’s a fossilized fish, a bony looking one, with jet black scales embedded in a grey piece of shale. One look at its peculiar fins though, and I know what it is. It’s a coelacanth, a member of an ancient family of fishes known only from the fossil record, until 1938, when one strayed into a fisherman’s net off the coast of South Africa. This was sensational on a couple of levels: firstly because nobody was expecting a creature thought to have disappeared in the Late Cretaceous to still be swimming around and, secondly, because the coelacanth is a kind of missing link. Its stubby, lobed fins are the precursor to legs, which allowed it to drag itself out of the sea and onto the land and eventually to evolve into us. Contemporary coelacanths seem to have abandoned this ambition and have gone the other way, retreating into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean below 100 metres.
Maybe they didn’t like what they saw up on land or were mortified by what their distant ancestors had evolved into. Perhaps, like some of their modern day descendants, they stopped believing in evolution. In any case, scientists estimate that there are fewer than a thousand coelacanths left. I imagine these ancient fish murmuring in the inky blue depths, gesturing to each other with their expressive fins that they must bide their time until after the next mass extinction. Maybe when the earth’s surface is at last free of a certain bipedal primate, they’ll give terrestrial life another shot.
(to be continued)
