canoe around.
TO CHRIS, nice clothes meant matching. He came to breakfast wearing blue jeans and a blue T-shirt, and when it was time to leave he added a blue baseball cap. Although he seemed a little wound up about what he might learn at the museum, Gwyn thought he was happy to be going.
She set the pace, fast enough for them to reach the stop before the bus, but slow enough to accommodate Chris’s frequent pausing and squatting to watch ants drag dead bugs across the cement, bumblebees bounce from clover flower to clover flower and caterpillars invite almost certain death on the slow crawl from boulevard to nearby lawn.
“Caterpillars are sort of like snakes,” he said.
Gwyn took his hand and hurried across the road just before the light changed. “How are caterpillars like snakes?”
“Same kind of bodies.”
“Long and squiggly?”
“Yeah. Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then there’s larva. Same type of body, too.”
He talked about animal bodies all the way to the museum. Shapes of snouts, lengths of necks, reasons for tails. When Gwyn stopped to put the change from the admission in her purse he hurried ahead into the galleries. She caught up with him watching a video about the Earth’s changing tectonic plates. A male voice narrated while colored jigsaw pieces floated around two attached blue ovals, finally taking the shape of a modern map of the world. When the video ended Chris pushed a button and watched the whole thing again.
“So-o,” he said. “Things used to be different. All the land in the world was in one place.”
“A supercontinent.”
“I kind of thought it was more, you know…”
“Nailed down?”
She was trying to lighten the mood, but he nodded seriously. “I don’t really like that idea, Mom. What if it’s still doing it?”
“Still moving? I don’t think so. Not enough to make a difference to us, anyway. Not enough to make the trip to Australia any shorter.”
He gave her a look she would have called world-weary in an older person.
“It is a strange idea. You expect the ground under your feet to stay in one place.”
“Right.” He seemed more satisfied with that response. “All the time, too.”
“Because it’s not a boat. It’s a continent.”
That got a smile. He led the way around the corner and found what he’d come for: a floor-to-ceiling painting of a woolly mammoth.
Gwyn skimmed the small box of text provided. “It doesn’t say anything about your mammoth, Chris. Just about mammoths in general. They lived until around ten thousand years ago, at the time of the last ice age, and then they became extinct. They had long shaggy hair and long curving tusks. Several complete specimens have been found.”
“Does it say anything about grass?”
“Not a thing.”
Chris frowned with concentration while he tried to sound out the text for himself. He was doing fine at home with Dr. Seuss, but whoever wrote the museum’s plaques wasn’t into helpful rhyming.
“I’m not sure where to look next, sweetheart. Maybe the library.”
“Can I be of any help?”
A man stood a few feet away. Gwyn got the feeling he’d been there for a while. He was tall and dark, with an air of quiet authority. How he pulled that off in casual clothes with his pant legs damp and wrinkled below the knee, she didn’t know. A name tag hung from a long string, like a shoelace, around his neck. She got as far as David, then found she didn’t want to look at his chest long enough to read the rest. His eyes were dark brown, coffee brown. It was hard to meet them, but hard to look away, too.
He took care of that, turning to smile at Chris. “Did you want to know something about mammoths?”
After all the museum employees Chris had happily questioned on other visits, older fatherly ones and young motherly ones and gangly brotherly ones, he chose this moment to remember not to speak to strangers, not even strangers with name tags. Gwyn looked at the man’s collar instead of his warm, dark eyes and explained about the movie and the mammoth.
He nodded, with some enthusiasm. “I know the specimen you mean. A number of surprisingly well-preserved mammoths have been found. I’ve heard that the scientists who dug up one of them actually cooked themselves a few steaks.”
Gwyn’s stomach lurched at the thought.
“Eew,” Chris said. There was nothing like a disgusting thought to dispel shyness. “But the one in the movie, with grass in its mouth, do you know about that one?”
“Sure. Grass and buttercups in its mouth and stomach. Not digested yet, which led some people to conclude it might have died and frozen very quickly. Is that the part that got your attention?”
“Yeah. Like, in the movie, cold air froze people solid as soon as it touched them.”
“That was strange, wasn’t it? Pretty unbelievable, too. I don’t think that’s what happened to the mammoth. One possibility is that it fell into a crack in a glacier.”
That was what Gwyn had expected from the museum, a comforting dose of reality. “So it’s not a sign that an ice age erupted out of nowhere while the mammoth was eating?” She wanted to make that completely clear to Chris. “It’s not suggesting there’s going to be a sudden change in our climate?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
Her neck muscles tightened.
“A change in the climate is happening.” He glanced at Chris then looked back at Gwyn, apparently deciding she was his target audience. “It’s complicated and there’s still disagreement about the details. Whether or not the Earth could experience another ice age is difficult to say. If it did, it would be a response to excessive warming.”
She should have left well enough alone. The mammoth had fallen into a crevasse, end of story.
“Warming?” Chris asked. “You get ice from warming?”
“We have a video that explains how that works. If you like I can take you over to watch it.”
“Not today,” Gwyn said quickly.
The man glanced at Chris again. “I’d say a true ice age is unlikely. It’s speculation at this point. Some changes we can observe and measure, though. The planet’s temperature is increasing. So is the level of carbon dioxide in the oceans. The polar ice caps and all the world’s glaciers are melting. Permafrost is thawing. We’re seeing more extreme weather events—like the hurricane that’s pounding the Caribbean today.”
How could he talk that way in front of a little boy?
