Excerpt from the novel, Origin
Prologue
There are only the long, thin stretches of sand, rising like fingers from the water as the sea lowers, imperceptibly, over many, many years. These fingers grow knuckles of dune, wrinkle and harden, become land. Rains wash layers of salt away. Seeds take hold, vegetation rises from the sand, banks are stabilized by cordgrass, sea oat, beach grass. Pine scrubs grow, weave the shifting surface into land, an island. This new island forms a collarbone of sand between the ocean and a larger mainland, miles beyond. The pines grow in dark twisted clumps, forming a southward winding spine. A bay forms on one side, ringed with cattail and thick dark mud. There are dunes sculpted into breasts and thighs and shoulders that no human sees for hundreds of years. Everything is brilliant with sun.
At the island’s center, water begins to gather in low, dark marshes. A swamp is born of storms, wind, held wetness. Grasses send floaters out on breezes, to catch and fly across the small waters, land in new fertile patches. Gum saplings inch their roots into pooled water. Spaghnum moss creeps over roots, up trunks, to cling and dangle. Bog ferns emerge from the blackwater ponds to unfurl their wet leaves.
Out on the dunes, gulls call, drop oysters. Plovers and sandpipers mimic the surging waves. The ocean approaches in glimmering rolls, in deep shadow swells. Sunlight burns the edges of thick scudding clouds. Mergansers, egrets, and herons appear on the bay, moving in their steady ways, as always, as ever. The land develops like this, slow and sunny, for a long, long time.
The first men to climb out of boats onto the land hide their faces from the brilliance of light. Their voices are tiny and temporal in the winds. After pulling their boats high on the sand, they stand and look at the wide bright beach. The spray that smacked their boats as they rowed in the surf drips from their beards. They are hungry. They have been lost, trying to find this nowhere place. They wonder if it can be true, that they are the first. They walk the long empty wilderness, breathing space into their fragile lungs. They find the bones of dead things, whitened and silted away, driftwood and shell. They find the swamp, cool black waters under cypress and tupelo gums. They find small freshwater ponds. They find pine-shadowed clearings.
They fall in love; wildly, vastly, inexplicably, a love that blinds like the sun burning down, a love that owns them, like the salt that stays on their bodies from the surf. These men have dreamt of this place, they have been searching for it. It can’t exist. Even as they stand upon it, they cannot believe it.
After days of walking the land, searching for some sign of other men, sleeping under the massive, rolling sky, they turn to one another. It is true. It is theirs. They will risk disease, starvation, deprivation and storm, gladly, for a chance to live in this essence. They crave the fundamental challenge, the intention of survival. They crave the freedom of unclaimed land, and this is the miracle, unclaimed land has been found.
The day they are to leave no one kneels. No one prays. No one weeps. They shake hands, these men who are suddenly strangers to themselves, brothers to one another, and they turn for one last look at the land they have claimed.
Upon finding this island, this long-fingered branching bone of land, each man knows that what he wanted to begin has begun.