These days, the Eastern Shore is my home as well, and in the years that I have lived here, I have spent so much time in the house where C. grew up that it has become a kind of home to me, too. Her mother taught me to pick crabs on its front porch; her father taught me to use a miter saw out in its shed. I have helped repaint the bedrooms and reorganize the crawl space and clean up downed limbs outside after a storm. I have sat in the kitchen shelling peas, sprawled on the couch watching television, brought potato salad and corn on the cob when family friends were coming over for a cookout. Some days I drop by just to pick up a spare key or leave a plate of biscuits; other times, I laze around for most of a weekend. I have been there in dress clothes and pajamas, have gone there to share good news and to find solace in grief.
But on that first visit, I came as a stranger, new to the Shore, new to her family, still very much in that phase of love I described as a yearning for information. For many months by then, I had wanted to see the home where C. grew up; now she led me up the walkway and through the door. The archaeological dig out back had long since been filled in and plowed over, but all the artifacts she’d found while excavating it were still inside, neatly organized in a display case she fished out from under the bed. The bookshelves her father had built for her remained in her childhood room, although there was not much else to see there, since her younger sister had redecorated after C. left. In the living room, I stood for a while in front of a shelf full of photographs of her as a kid, adorable and serious-eyed and scrawny as an urchin: sitting on the church steps with her sisters in identical Easter dresses; standing on a dock holding up a freshly caught rockfish almost as tall as she was; muddy-kneed in a Little League uniform.
I could have looked at them forever, looked at a thousand more. My farmer’s daughter, my Rhodes scholar, my devout Christian, with the fierce intellect and the faithful heart, who can recite Eliot and read Greek and run a wood splitter and set a trotline: before we met, if someone had given me pen and paper and ten thousand years and asked me to describe the person I would one day fall in love with, I would never, in all that time, have dreamed up anyone like her. “Where did you come from?” I sometimes asked C. in those days, in awe and gratitude. Standing there in her house, in the very center of a certain kind of answer to that question, the deeper one did not seem any less mysterious. How, from here, had she come to be who she was? How, from here, had she come to be with me?
What an astonishing thing it is to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair. In all the vast reaches of space, among all of life’s infinite permutations, out of all the trajectories and possibilities and people on the planet, here I was, in this house, following along beside C. as she took my hand and led me out of the living room and into the kitchen, where, she told me, there was something else she wanted me to see. I picked it up off the hearth by the woodstove and examined it, not sure what I was looking at. It was a meteorite, she explained, that her father had found after watching it fall in the fields outside when he was a boy.
III.
And
Long before C.’s father was born—long before any of us were born—another meteorite struck the earth not far from his future home. This was toward the end of the Eocene epoch, some thirty-five million years ago, a time when much of the Mid-Atlantic region really was mid-Atlantic. Because the eastern coastline of North America fell well inland of its current location, parts of what are now New Jersey and Virginia, together with all of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, lay beneath a shallow ocean.
For the previous twenty million years, the earth had been extremely hot. Under an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide and methane, seawater exceeded one hundred degrees, alligators crawled around Canada, and palm trees cast their shadows on the fertile soil of the Arctic. By the late Eocene, global temperatures had begun to moderate, but in North America, lush tropical rain forests still stretched from Appalachia to the Atlantic Ocean. Like rain forests today, these teemed with life: frogs and toads and salamanders, butterflies and dragonflies and golden beetles, dwarf ungulates and dawn horses and miniature tapirs and scores of other prehistoric creatures.
Who knows what they registered, if anything, when the object that would put an end to most of them passed overhead. At all events, they had only a few seconds to do so. The meteorite was roughly two miles wide and a billion tons; it came in from the north, at fifty thousand miles per hour, covered the distance from the Arctic Circle to Virginia in three minutes, and smashed into the Atlantic Ocean just west of what is now Cape Charles. The ocean barely slowed it down; it vaporized millions of tons of water, displaced millions of tons more, and roared on through layers of sediment and stone until finally, five miles beneath the bottom of the sea, it slammed into the basement rock of the earth. On impact, it obliterated itself, opening up a crater a mile deep and twice the size of Rhode Island and igniting a massive explosion. Ash and burning rocks rose some three hundred thousand feet into the air, strewing bits of meteorite-made glass across more than four million square miles of North America and the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, the swath of that ocean that had been displaced rose up in an enormous fortress of waves, well over a thousand feet high, collapsed under its own weight, and began speeding off toward the coast. The resulting tsunami poured inland across a hundred miles of Virginia before finally dissipating its remaining energy high up on the granite sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Time passed. Day turned to dusk, dusk to night, night to dawn. The fires extinguished themselves. Ferns and saplings took root in the rotting bodies of downed trees. The earth carried on in its usual course around the sun. A year passed. A century passed. Lava boiled up from the seafloor, creating new continent stuff, nudging the land above it into sluggish motion. Volcanoes erupted, clogging river valleys and lake beds with layers of ash. Millennia passed. The rain forests receded, replaced by stands of white oak and beech and pine. Saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves roamed among them, hunting giant sloths and juvenile mammoths. Another year went by, a million times. The eastern coastline of North America rose up out of the sea and dried out. Megalodons trawled the waters beyond it, the ocean sliding over their backs the way a river turns flat and calm over a large, smooth stone. Inland, the forests filled up with white-tailed deer, the first or second or third of the next four hundred thousand generations. Half a globe away, in the Rift Valley of Africa, a kind of primate wholly new to the planet took, for the first time, to its feet.
More time passed. The earth, already colder than it once was, started to cool some more. The polar sea solidified. Ice began to spread across the planet. There were glaciers in New Zealand and Tasmania, glaciers on the islands of Sardinia and Majorca, glaciers in Columbus, Ohio, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Across North America, the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered five million square miles, in some places to a depth of ten thousand feet. The ice made land where there used to be water, and countless creatures in search of new homes, including humans, walked across it.