The New Atlantis

Coming back from my Wilderness Week I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it — he was a dry-looking man with a schoolteacherish way of using his hands — and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”

The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”

“They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic. But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific, too.”

“Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown and because those blue stockings had been good warm ones.

He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the new. You can see that that is happening.”

You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.

“I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar melt.”

He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become habitable. But climatic factors will not explain the emergence of the new — or, possibly, very old — continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica and daydreamed about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward the white land went up in a long silence toward the Pole.

Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area. It had been a tiresome vacation. The other women in the dormitory were all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organized sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve, the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification Bureau advertisements. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorized persons. The forest ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,” he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from your very hand,” but I didn’t see any. Perhaps because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d seen a mountain jay I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who knows. Anyhow it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.

When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in it — nothing at all.