La Dérive

Lyrics

It wasn't a plan.There was no design in the water.Late 19th century.The hunters had been so thorough.The Northern elephant seal, all but a line in a book.But on a single beach, forgotten,off the coast of Baja,a handful were breathing.Maybe twenty.Not the strongest. Not the fastest.Just the ones who happened to be there.The geographically fortunate.The lucky ones.This is the quiet current.The random walk in the dark.Not selection's grand opera, just a whisper.A coin toss in the salt spray.This is the drift.La dérive.The reason you are you, and I am I.Sheer, beautiful luck.I think of Sewall Wright.University of Chicago, 1931.Red-green colorblind, mapping the invisible.The smell of chalk dust and guinea pigs.Drawing his lineage charts by hand,trying to find the math for a crapshoot.He called it a random fluctuation.A shifting balance.He knew the dice were loaded,but sometimes, they just fall off the table.This is the quiet current.The random walk in the dark.Not selection's grand opera, just a whisper.A coin toss in the salt spray.This is the drift.La dérive.The reason you are you, and I am I.Sheer, beautiful luck.On Tristan da Cunha, an ancestor's cloudy visionbecomes the island's inheritance.In Pennsylvania, a founder's rare alleleis written into the blood of the Amish.Every bottleneck, a new beginning from a random sample.Every migration, a lottery ticket.The advantageous gene, lost in a storm.The neutral one, carried across the ocean to define a people.You and I, my love, are a founder effect of two.Now thousands of them lie on the beaches.A great recovery.But listen close.They all sing the same genetic song.The echo of twenty survivors.The ghost of a bottleneck.The proof that sometimes, the only thing that matters...is being in the right place,at the right time.