Mussel Memory By Jill Heinerth

I must look absurd, a Christmas tree of sorts, strung with sidemounted scuba tanks, two bags of scientific gear, seven large lights, a PVC quadrat, slates, notebooks, and a camera system. My mission today is to survey benthic life within the cave. Specifically, I’m searching for the endangered hickorynut mussel, a species never previously documented in such a habitat. My permit allows me to collect two specimens for the Canadian Museum of Nature, if I’m fortunate enough to find any.

A couple of hundred feet in, well past the last glint of daylight, I begin my first survey. I lay down the PVC square and methodically count and identify over sixty bivalves. Each mussel gets a moment in front of my mask, studied in the fleeting clarity before disturbed silt clouds the water, reducing visibility to inches. Everything is clipped to the guideline; in this place, blackness swallows anything not tethered.

By the third quadrat I hit pay dirt. Three hickorynut mussels, but I take only one.

As I lift her gently, she closes her shell in a small defence against my intrusion. The shell is dark brown and thick, worn at the beak where irridescent white nacre peeks through. I unclip my callipers from my pouch and measure her: 67 millimetres. A mature female, likely in her twenties. Her body has filtered over 350,000 litres of water in her lifetime, purifying, protecting, doing quiet, necessary work—a life spent cleaning the world around her.

And then it hits me.

Sixty-seven millimetres. The exact size of the largest of four cancerous tumors cut from my neck just ten weeks ago.

I float there, suspended in the cave’s dark silence, the parallel hanging heavy in my chest. This mussel, so small, so ancient, so essential, and me, still healing, still unsure what comes next. But today I am here. I am underwater, doing the work I love. Not just surviving, but returning.

In the quiet pulse of the cave, I hold a life in my hands and recognize my own.