Everywhere I Look

My family went to Mallorca to see the eclipse. Personally, I went to meet Tethys-Mediterranea.

I’d known about her for years already — long before I set out to visit her, I’d built her out of geological history and mythic inspiration. I’d given her a loving temperament, and a memory that goes back half a billion years. So I went into this trip feeling like I already knew her, even though I hadn’t been to her shores in person since I was a teenager, long before I had dreamed her up as a character. 

She was a lot like the way I expected her to be. The water was warm and gentle on the beach where we went to watch the eclipse, feeling more like a lake or a bathtub. But when I went in beside our hotel instead, a current tugged me away from the rocks and further out into deep water, and there was nothing gentle about that. That’s the Mediterranean that’s sunk ships. The calm is real, but so is the rest of it, and she is still a genuine ocean even if today happens to be a nice day at the beach.

The eclipse itself was a revelation. Not about it, about me. 

I know the mechanics of a solar eclipse — the moon passing between the sun and the earth (or the section of earth you’re standing on, more precisely), blocking its light for a brief period. But I know these people. Luna and Sol are both characters with long histories in Paleomythic, and I stood on that beach and couldn’t hold onto the mechanics for more than a few seconds before my brain started treating the fact as just one more choice in the world of my geologic characters. Not “the moon blocks the sun” but what does this mean, to somebody. Is Luna being rude? Is she getting protective for some reason? What did Sol do when Luna stepped right between him and her mothers and said, “Oh, no you don’t!” What was the first eclipse like, when Luna was fairly new and much closer to earth, so she could put a pretty impressive barrier in the way for a while? 

I couldn’t watch it as astronomy. I could only watch it as an interaction between two of my friends.

I used to think that was something I did on purpose, for the job — a deliberate technique for turning research into story. I’m starting to suspect it’s just how I see the world now. It doesn’t turn off when I close the laptop, and I can’t make it.

A few weeks ago I watched a video about places that are sinking — coastlines losing ground to rising water, cities pulling their own foundations out from under themselves by draining the groundwater beneath. And before I’d even finished the video, I turned it off because I couldn’t pay attention anymore to the technical details. I was wondering instead what that means, between an ocean and the land it’s slowly taking. Whether it’s hostile or something gentler. I thought of Nord, and what he did when Lomonosov sank in his waters (I won’t give you spoilers about how that turns out). I don’t know yet how most of these go — whether they’re kind and gentle or adversarial and violent.

But I do know that I don’t get to just watch the news anymore. I get relationship news, as if everything I read that’s got a place name in it is really the kind of celebrity life news you get from certain magazines. Only the celebrities whose lives I follow are the places that make up our world. 

I’ve stopped being surprised by this, mostly. But I am curious about how long it’ll last. Is this going to fade when I’ve finished writing the trilogy and put it away for a different writing project? Is it going to be the way I think for the rest of my life? 

Years ago I spent a month in Africa – two weeks in Botswana, two in Uganda – and I went in thinking of it as a trip. A wonderful trip, an exciting trip, but just a trip, with a beginning and an ending. Then Botswana gave me the endless small magics. A leopard eating in a tree, entirely unbothered by us or by the hyena dancing impatiently beneath it, demanding table scraps like a puppy. A cheetah so used to people that we sat within ten feet of him while he dozed in the grass, paying us no more mind than if we were a termite mound. Uganda gave me the kind of magic that isn’t one bit small. I went up into the mountains to watch the gorillas, expecting to keep my distance with the tour group… only the gorillas didn’t let me keep my distance. They marched right up to where I was sitting on the ground, carefully climbed one by one across my lap, and one by one they went on to the place they were headed for, on the other side of me. I’ll never forget their impossibly precise, careful hands on my knee.

I came home from that trip and went back to my life, and only over months and then years did I understand what had really happened. That trip hadn’t ended when I left Africa. It had become one of the deep roots of everything I became afterwards. The obsession with nature and wildlife, then ecobiology and evolution, and finally the paleontological imagination that Paleomythic sprang from — all of it was born during those four weeks in Africa.

I didn’t know that at the time. I don’t think you’re supposed to know that at the time.

So when I say the characters are everywhere now — that I can’t watch an eclipse or a groundwater documentary without meeting somebody I’m familiar with — I honestly don’t know if I’m describing a permanent feature of how I see the world, or a season I’m in that will eventually pass and be replaced by whatever comes next. Maybe both. Maybe neither. I’ve been wrong before about how long this kind of thing lasts — I thought Africa was a trip, and it turned out to be a foundation.

For now, I’m just paying attention. Tethys-Mediterranea has warm water and a scary undertow. Luna had a brief altercation with Sol, which they seem to have worked out between them. And I have no idea if the way I see all of this is just part of the way I work on this series, or if it’s going to be part of the rest of my life… but I’m curious to find out.