Romer’s Gap

Blue Beach, Nova Scotia

 
Today I am in search of fossilized water but what I am finding is everything but: it is a dense morning here on the Blue Beach of Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy, near to Grand Pré, almost claustrophobic in the low clouds and threats of rain. It is a day of indefinable unease, not one thing or another, the kind of day that puts your blood on alert without really knowing why. Maybe it is the press of wet trees in Longfellow’s forests primeval, dripping down my neck without warning, a sharp startle as I walk the path to the beach. As I bless my camping foresight to bring rain boots, I avoid the most insistent of thick mud puddles as I gingerly make my way from the Blue Beach Fossil Museum to the bay, my head filled with paleontology and geology and a little bit of Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail.

The tide is out, the distinctive red of silt stretching until I can barely see water. The sky may have been the blue-gray of rain clouds that had dogged me since Halifax, but the Bay of Fundy is always red. There is a part of me that enjoys the consistency, as if the Bay maintains its own character in the face of the largest tides in the world. I am not alone on the beach looking for fossils that would explain how we came to evolve from creatures of the primordial ooze to creatures with fully formed vertebrae and four legs, but I might as well have been. I’m here for nothing but the sake of curiosity, because of a paleontological conundrum called Romer’s Gap.

 

On our first California camping trip when we were kids, we stopped at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Standing in front of the wall of dinosaur bones, my sister Kristi, who was six or seven, loudly declared to one and all that she wanted to be an alientologist when she grew up.

We were forbidden from telling this story for many years.

The threads here are so thin, the reaching so hard, but the wanting is intense.

I left Yarmouth yesterday morning under a very low cloud ceiling. When we went up a hill, we got wet, and when we went down a hill, we dried off. I enjoyed the not-exactly-raining quality of it. It was a gorgeous drive along the western edge of the peninsula, strangely more so than the Atlantic drive to Yarmouth on the 103 a few days ago. I don’t know how to account for it, but it feels good to be here. I’m coming to understand the particular gravity of the Bay of Fundy, that it’s getting into my bones in a way that I’m never going to be able to escape, even if I wanted to. I’ve always been so curious about the relationship between natural history and human history, how landscape affects the people we are, who we will become, even as it is more than the location of the stories we tell—and the stories we don’t tell. I wonder what my bones will say in 20 years about these days in Acadie.

I stopped at the visitor’s center in Kentulle to get a campground recommendation and they suggested the Land of Evangeline campground. It’s nice enough, for an almost-entirely seasonal park, but because it is, I count hours before I see another human being in the campground. But here’s the strange thing I’ve noticed: on this trip, I’ve hardly talked to anybody, but I have not felt the silence, the quiet, as oppressive. I rarely do. The most meaningful conversations have been at gas stations, when the person at the pump next to me notices my license plates.

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Yep.”

You’re a long way from home.

 

On May 17, 1917, Selective Service passed the United States Congress, establishing the draft of all the eligible men, regardless of citizenship status. My great-grandfather, William Henry Babine, Sr., born in Nova Scotia, was living in Massachusetts and drafted on May 24, according to his naturalization papers. He was 28 and unmarried. He had immigrated to the United States in 1892 through the Port of Boston at the age of three, though passenger manifests list the family going back and forth to Yarmouth frequently. His papers list him as five feet, nine and three-quarter inches tall, with a dark complexion, brown eyes, and dark hair. He would pass this resemblance down to his twin sons, then to all five of his elder son’s children. The photographs of my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather at the same age are a stunning experience in genetics.

Bill was assigned to the Army’s Quartermaster Corps and sent to Texas for training, and between his naturalization papers, his discharge papers, and other archival information I have uncovered, there is a four-month gap I cannot account for.

What I want to know is if Bill went to France.

He was honorably discharged at the end of the war, became a naturalized citizen, married Catherine in 1922, and they promptly moved from Maine to Long Beach, California. My grandfather and Walt were born in 1924, but the family Bible indicates that she miscarried before the twins. The threads here are so thin, the reaching so hard, but the wanting is intense. I want to know if Bill went to France, because I want to know if that can explain the cross-country move, his alcoholism, what feels to me like self-medicating PTSD that would not become an official diagnosis for many more years. If it can explain his suicide in 1943. I want to know if his blood recognized something on the ground in Europe, if something in his bones recognized the weight of the air. He’d been living in the United States since he was a small boy, but French was the language of his blood. I wonder what happened the first time he spoke it without consciously realizing it, something beyond his conscious mind recognizing the language and slipping into its patterns like he’d never left. I wonder if he was sent to France because he spoke French, if he became valuable as a translator, and I wonder if he muttered to himself in French when he was drunk, stumbling around the yard with a bottle in his hand while Catherine and the boys kept their distance, war so loud in his head that the darkness of that back shed where he would take his own life was the only place the world quieted enough for him. And I wonder if he took his draft card out to that back shed, if he thought about his boys off at boot camp preparing to ship to Europe and the Pacific, and something in him that he’d been holding so tightly since 1917 crumbled and he was not going to go back to war.

I want to know if what he saw in France is enough that he passed it down to his descendants, that I could use it to explain the divergent paths my grandfather and his twin took after their own war experience, into marriage just three weeks apart from each other in 1948, into the five children each of them created, my father and his cousin David born just six months apart. I wonder if I can place France in the map of generational trauma, from Le Grand Dérangement of the French Acadians he came from to alcoholism to mental illness to David’s schizophrenic break in 1976 in which he murdered Walt and Catherine, and how the forcible breaking of family is something close enough for us to touch? I want to know, I want to understand, especially in moments where it’s not possible. How did this happen? What are the consequences of the gaps? Were such things inevitable? What does that hold for future generations?

For a small child, with no concept of war, of death, the terror I felt every time my dad left for his weekends or his annual tour wasn’t anything I could put into words.

I don’t know anything about war, but I know about fear. My dad was attached to Grand Forks Air Force Base for most of my life and the only real thing I knew about Grand Forks was the missiles spread out over North Dakota and the heat of the Cold War in the 1980s and knowing that if Russia launched nukes at us, they’d aim for Grand Forks. For a small child, with no concept of war, of death, the terror I felt every time my dad left for his weekends or his annual tour wasn’t anything I could put into words. When the first Gulf War started, Kristi, Kim, and I discussed plans to tie Dad up and hide him in a closet if he got called up. I’m sure we even wrote down the plan, because that’s the kind of kids we were.

We learned about war in school, but the knowledge wasn’t real. Like other parts of my knowing, it felt like Monopoly money. I remember standing at Gettysburg, though, on one of our family camping trips, wondering if I would see any of the ghosts of the First Minnesota Infantry, who had helped lead the Union to victory, and who had also captured the Virginia battle flag, an object that still raises ire today. Virginia wants it back and Minnesota refuses, every time, and I love the petty of it. Two of my three-greats grandfathers on the Swedish side fought in the Civil War, but I know next to nothing about their service, except a tiny trickle of a thread that might place my five-greats grandfather Charles Shoberg in Chattanooga after the Battle of Missionary Ridge, but sent home in time to quell the Dakota War in southern Minnesota which resulted in what is still the largest mass execution in United States history, before going back to join Sherman on his March to the Sea. There’s no such thing as being on the right side of history when it comes to war, because idealism doesn’t cancel out the abject cruelty of what humans will do to each other if someone gives them permission, tells them that the enemy deserves what’s coming to them, justifies the superiority of the cause.

I want to know if Bill went to France.

War is hell, and Sherman wasn’t wrong, but the problem with hellfire is that the smoke gets into your lungs and goes home with you. I have no way of knowing if Bill, Sr. came home with mustard gas in his lungs, the sound of bombs in his ears, an unmooring of himself from the ground where he stood and the people who loved him best. I don’t know, but I wonder, and then I wonder about if I look just a little harder, if I wonder just a little bit longer, if I might be able to fill this gap of knowledge. As the family historian, with archives and data in front of me, as a traveler in search of anything to fill these gaps in knowing, the pursuit feels necessary.

These are the generations close to me. For most of this trip to Nova Scotia, my Acadian ancestors have been very ancestral, paper thin, translucent enough to see through. I can trace them back to the first Babin in Acadie in the 1620s, through the horror of the Deportation in 1755, and into the 20th century, but they belong to history, not to me. Here, as I’m standing on Blue Beach, I think about my great-grandfather who I never met, or Walt who I never met, but I know people who knew them, loved them well. That’s close enough to mean something.

 

The morning in Grand Pré is of the inclement variety which will continue like this through the morning, then clear in the afternoon. I want to get to Blomidon about the time of low tide, so I can fossil hunt, though a bit on each side won’t matter. The clouds are developing dimension, which means the weather is moving in exactly the right direction and right now, it’s not rain, just wind, so when I get ready to head towards Blue Beach, I’m armed with my GoreTex and rain boots and my father’s classic reminder that I won’t melt. I’m not sweet enough.

The Blue Beach Fossil Museum is definitely a mom and pop operation, not exactly a proper museum. I don’t catch half of what the owner tells me about his collections laid out in front of me, but the crux is this: in our history, there’s the time when we’re in the primordial ooze and there’s the time when we’re walking on land and there are fossils from the ooze and fossils from the land, but there are no fossils in that transitory period that would show scientists how we came to have our backbones and legs. The first scientist to theorize about this was Harvard scientist Alfred Sherwood Romer in the 1950s and we’re still in search of those fossils to prove his idea. If there are fossils from this period, they’re either somewhere in Scotland or here at Blue Beach. Nobody’s found them yet, but new discoveries are being unearthed all the time. Romer’s Gap is shrinking. While something about that is satisfying, I also find myself hoping that some mysteries of the world and how we came to be who we are remain. Always one more thing to look for, to search, to hope for.

The owner tells me that to find fossils, you have to turn over the rocks on the beach, because the imprints will be made on the mud that settled into the space left by decomposing plants or animals. They won’t be facing up. When I go down to the beach and start turning over rocks, I’m not looking for anything specific, though I hope to find ripple marks—which I do. He is right: it’s back-irritating work. Not back-breaking, but my spine is clearly miffed when I stand straight again. I’m pretty excited about taking home fossilized water, or at least evidence of its movement, as it reminds me of the marks the ice age Missoula Floods left on the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, another moment where we couldn’t understand the story we were standing on until we could see the evidence of those massive floods from space. I’m not looking for the missing fossils of Romer’s Gap, or really even any specific fossils, or footprints, or anything that might be exciting to more than me. At the moment, I’m just enjoying the part of me that never outgrew collecting rocks. A few people out on the mud flats seem a lot more hardcore about their digging than I am, and there’s a part of me that envies them their dedication to whatever they’re looking for.

But I wonder about ancient landscapes, erosion that can only be measured in thousands of years and quarter inches. I wonder about seeing the same view my Acadian ancestors did 300 ago. I wonder if this place, not far from where they lived, formed their teeth, their bones, in a way that I could inherit. If I pull the lens back, can I see the movement of people making a home in this place? Land that had been stolen from the Mi’kmaq, then stolen from the Acadians in 1755, from my seven-greats grandparents Joseph and Anne Marie Babin, and Joseph’s brothers, those ancestors I know for sure were loaded on ships without much time to gather more than they could carry, and dumped wherever the ship happened to be pointed. The British were good at dumping people and not caring if they survived. I wonder about the British planters brought in and given their land, what they thought when they walked into the Babin family home and found all their possessions still there, and I wonder if they made a life at Anne Marie’s table with her soup pots, in Joseph and Anne Marie’s bed. I suspect so.

It’s easy to stand here and forget that America didn’t exist yet, that the Declaration of Independence was still 20 years away, easy to stand in geologic time and forget about shifting borders, shifting identities. I wonder how deeply confusing it would be to live in a place that saw its allegiances change without seeing the war, or the change. One day, you wake up and you’re under French control. The next morning, the English are in charge. The land itself just waits. The Flower Pots on the New Brunswick side of the Bay of Fundy wait for the tides to reshape them. The fossils at Blue Beach sleep. It will outlast all of them.

The owners were waiting on a group of schoolkids, who arrived and spilled out onto the beach in brightly colored jackets and voices. I wondered what it would be like to be a kid seeing this place, full of future alientologists, as I left them to the thrill of childhood discovery, wondering how the memories they made today will imprint on their minds in a way that will never fade.

When Grandpa and Walt came home for the funeral, the sheriff asked if they wanted the shotgun back. They said no.

Another kitchen table, another time, another place, another war: the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor and Bill and Catherine Babine’s Southern California world, so close to the base at Coronado, would have become instantly on edge. I would like to think that my grandfather and Walt would have been part of these conversations, included in concerns about what’s next, wondering about a draft, but the boys are still teenagers, 16 when news of Pearl Harbor lands, and I wonder at what point Bill would have considered his sons men.

Then draft papers come for Bill. He’s drafted in the fourth draft, the Old Man’s Draft. I imagine Bill sitting at the kitchen table in the adobe house in Ramona, holding his draft card, not saying anything. He’s not sober but he hasn’t been sober for a long time. He is 52. Catherine is 51. He’s given up working as a glazier after he lost his job in 1938 and they moved to Ramona. He’s been a house painter ever since and he’s good at that too, meticulous about cleaning his brushes, and if the alcohol affects the straightness of his lines, it can be fixed. Houses don’t usually need straight lines.

 He knows that when the boys turn 18 in October, they will face the war he’d fought so hard to run from. One son would go into the Army in Europe; the other would follow the Marines into the South Pacific, but he doesn’t know that yet. The boys would be separated, because Walt’s eyesight was better than his brother’s, and the Marines were taking the best of the best. I wonder if my great-grandfather voiced his fears to anyone, or if he simply took his comfort from the bottle. I suspect the latter. How can you put that kind of trauma into words when it’s so deep in your bones that there is nothing but primal pain?

As the story goes, on July 28, 1943, a few weeks after the boys left for boot camp and a few weeks before he’s scheduled to report himself, he decides he’s not going back to war, and he takes a shotgun out to the back shed. That’s always the phrasing: he took a shotgun out to the back shed. He was not going back. When Grandpa and Walt came home for the funeral, the sheriff asked if they wanted the shotgun back. They said no. His death certificate reads accident, so he could be buried in consecrated ground and I want to know what other little falsehoods lie in the records I have, the ones that recognize human suffering and do their best to alleviate it for the living, the ones that tell a different story than what happened.

 

I want to know if Bill went to France.

The evidence I have collected in the family archives is compelling and it sizzles in my blood: the date on his naturalization papers is the last day troop transports left Hoboeken for France.

Census records say his first language was French and I imagine his parents still spoke French at home, though they would have been fluent in English as well.

On Bill’s discharge papers, a stamp reads “approved for the Victory medal,” which was only given to those on the ground in Europe. My Swedish great-grandfather on my mother’s side, who was also drafted, never left the States and never received one.

I might never know the answer to this persistent question, though, because the military records repository in St. Louis burned in 1973 and only 5 to 10 percent of WWI records still exist, a Romer’s Gap in the records. If his records are there, I have not yet found them. I wonder if I can trace what might be the second Grand Dérangement of the Babine family, suicide and schizophrenia and murder and mental illness, to one four-month period that I cannot account for in my records. Strangely, this gap does not bother me. If the records are gone, and all that is left is silence, that somehow seems right, even respectful.

In the end, it wouldn’t be war, but by 1976, my grandfather would lose his entire family to violence.

My friend Jim once told me that silence is not always a failure, that we need to respect the choice to stay silent where it exists in a story.

Mark Doty once wrote that if there are gaps in memory, let it be part of the telling.

I was 17 before I knew my grandfather had a brother, let alone a twin.

These are things we don’t talk about.

 

In my hand, I hold my grandfather’s WW2 draft card. His twin’s is next to it.

In October 1942, the boys turn 18. I’m trying to imagine my grandfather as an 18-year-old boy, serious and responsible, holding down various jobs that I imagine kept the family solvent through his father’s drinking and the Depression. I remember one story about my grandfather’s job at the local grocery store, labeling canned vegetables on sale, 8¢ each or 3/25¢, his idea of a joke. I’m imagining that these were the years when my grandfather was saving up for a car, which Walt always wanted to borrow, which the stories seem to indicate as evidence that my grandfather was more responsible than his brother.

But even that is a skewed version of whatever the story is, whoever the boys were, so I go back to the data, back into the records, to see if there’s any foundation. I’m remembering that the 1920 census lists my great-grandfather’s occupation as a chauffeur for a private family in Kennebunk, and my grandfather’s draft record in 1942 lists his work as employed by the Chevrolet Motor Co and I wonder if Bill tried to bond with his sons over the magic of engines, the music of movement from one place to another. I don’t know. What I do know is that when Bill and Catherine moved to Long Beach in 1922, the city directories list her as manager for the Belmont apartments, registered Democrat, and Bill is a glazier for the American Glass Company, registered Republican. I come to love city directories that list occupation, as well as names and addresses. I am strangely charmed by knowing that both of them were registered voters, particularly Catherine, who in 1922 had had the right to vote only for two years. I read so much into this tiny line of data—not just that she’s registered to vote, but that she’s in a relationship that allows her to be so strong as to vote differently than her husband, and that she was 32 when they married. She’d been living on her own, living her life on her own terms, for a long time, and as I’m currently trying to live my life on my own terms, I appreciate Catherine just a little bit more in these moments. When my maternal grandparents got married, they came from different party affiliations, but decided they would discuss and vote together, so as not to cancel out the other’s vote. Just that tiny letter next to Catherine’s name tells me so much that I’d never be able to know another way.

In later years, Catherine is a housewife, raising the twins, still registered Democrat, and Bill has switched parties, moving up from glazier to salesman to assistant manager to store manager for Pittsburgh Paint and Glass. There’s a break from 1933 to 1935 when they were in Bakersfield, a gap I can’t account for or trace, and then they’re back in Long Beach. As the story goes, Bill struggled with cutting the large sheets of safety glass as its use became more common in cars, which apparently used a different technique than regular glass, and because it was expensive, and Bill broke enough of them, for which his drinking may or may not have been a factor, that he either quit or was fired somewhere around 1938. The family then moved to Ramona, where Bill and the boys built their adobe house in 1939. Catherine is listed as a housewife until after Bill’s death, when she got a job as an accountant for one of the local turkey hatcheries, a career she had before she married.

The military’s sole survivor directive, which I only know from the movie Saving Private Ryan, would not become law for several more years, would not have applied to all three of the Babine men being drafted in this moment, even as Catherine faced an empty house in Ramona. I wonder if Catherine ever sat at her kitchen table, late at night, with all her men asleep, holding all three draft cards, and facing the very real risk that her entire family could be killed. I wonder if she sat in much the same posture as my seven-greats grandmother Anne Marie Landry, 200 years before, in the pale of an evening fire while the house was asleep.

In the end, it wouldn’t be war, but by 1976, my grandfather would lose his entire family to violence.

In the darkness, in the cold, he kept stumbling over rough terrain in the trenches as he went back and forth. In the morning, he found out he’d been tripping over dead bodies.

I have a photograph of my grandfather in his Army uniform, poised to throw a snowball at whomever is holding the camera, a look of deep mischief on his face. He and Walt were fraternal twins, but even when they were babies, I’d never mistake one for the other. I hold my grandfather’s Bronze Star commendation for bravery at the Battle of the Bulge, trying to comprehend that my grandfather was only 20 years old.

For meritorious service in connection with military operations against the enemy in Germany on 21 November 1944. When a telephone line to an observation post was broken, Private First Class Babine volunteered to repair the line which was under constant artillery, mortar, and sniper fire. With complete disregard for his own safety, he succeeded in locating and repairing the break. His action contributed materially to the efficient operation of the company’s mission and reflect high credit upon the soldier and the military service.

The story goes that the communications line kept breaking and my grandfather volunteered to go back and forth, under heavy fire, to keep repairing it. In a 24-hour period, even with his efforts, they only had three minutes of communication with the front lines, but it sounds like those three minutes were the right minutes. All I can think in that moment is of what is broken, the lines of communication, what we read in the blank spaces between lines, Romer’s Gap everywhere we look. But the other part of the story is that in the darkness, in the cold, he kept stumbling over rough terrain in the trenches as he went back and forth. In the morning, he found out he’d been tripping over dead bodies. He never wanted to know if they were German or Allied. I don’t blame him.

His own father had been dead for a little more than a year. His twin brother was with the Marines in the South Pacific. My own mind has problems comprehending that he was only 20 years old, too young. The human brain doesn’t reach maturity until the age of 25. It’s easy to assign deep responsibility to my grandfather, who was an incredibly serious and responsible person, but he had to know the risks when he volunteered to repair the lines. I want to assign bravery and honor and a deep sense of duty and all the qualities I would have liked to ascribe to my other ancestors, but I look at those dates, I look at the citation, and wonder if it was something else. It must have seemed like certain suicide. Maybe a part of him didn’t care.

Maybe I’m wrong—that in the end, it really would be war that took them, the human brain trying to cope with the horrors humans do to each other in the name of power, and expect them to forget what they’ve seen when they come home. I’m remembering all the episodes of the radio show The Shadow I’ve listened to over the years, but in particular I remember the end of “The Silent Avenger,” which aired in 1938 and tells the story of Danny Bricker, the brother of an inmate on death row, and who is convinced by his brother to take revenge on all the people who put him in the electric chair. Danny is shell-shocked after his service in World War I and in the story I hear the echoes of Bill, Sr. and Walt. At the end, the Shadow says, “There is no credit. No glory in the death of Danny Bricker, Commissioner Weston. He was a victim, a human instrument of destruction, fashioned by mankind, that teaches men to kill their enemies in time of war, yet expects them to forget their murderous art in time of peace. Danny Bricker was an enemy of society—a killer. But only because you and I and countless thousands made him one.”

I wonder what happened in France that the enemy that Bill faced was the one he saw in the mirror each morning.

 

I leave Blue Beach with the Jeep loaded down with a ridiculous amount of rock, get back on the 101 and head to Windsor to see the Fort Edward Historic Site, one of the forts built in Acadian settlements during Father LeLoutre’s War and played a major role in Le Grand Dérangement. The name on my records is Pisiguit, which was renamed Windsor after the Expulsion. Pierre Babin was born there; his parents Joseph and Anne Marie were married there. When the hostilities began to brew between the British and the Acadians, the British started building fortifications near the major Acadian settlements and Fort Edward was nearest to Pisiguit. Pierre and Joseph Babin, and Pierre Surette, could have been as easily sent to Fort Edward as to Fort Beausejour, but I don’t know this until later. I know the place is important, but I don’t know the full extent of why.

The weather has turned decidedly cold and being so exposed on the beach has lost its allure. What’s left at Fort Edward is the blockhouse, the oldest in North America, and the incredible earthworks that feel like visible veins under the skin. The blockhouse, without its full context, is uninteresting. Without knowing what I am looking at, I find myself buffeted by sharp, cold wind and in that moment, I am no longer interested in trying to reconstruct what is not there.