Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Old Dudley was a falconer—less ardent about it than he had been in his youth, though he still kept a couple of falcons tethered on perches in the back yard of his townhouse overlooking the bayou. From time to time he would hunt his falcons on the pigeons that lived under the bridges of the interstate, and would even take them downtown with him to hunt there. Old Dudley instructed Wallis to try to find the oil that neither Dudley nor Matthew had been able to find, and to then return. He gave Wallis a set of instructions, in this regard, as specific as the DNA coding of a cell.

  Wallis had lived on the bayou with them for that last year and had watched Old Dudley work the falcons enough to know what Dudley meant: that the falcon would starve without the falconer. A falcon could live either all wild, or wholly captive—but a hunting falcon, one which had been trained to be somewhere between the two—always crossing back and forth between those two lands, hunting whenever the falconer unleashed him, but then sitting idle for two or three days, too weak to fly hard enough to kill, and having to be fed pigeon breasts in order to get its strength up enough to fly and hunt again—that kind of bird could not survive without the falconer.

  The penalty—nature’s penalty—for failing to learn such a lesson was always death.

  They told him all of these things, not so much like predictions, but as if they were seeing them so clearly that it was as if they could see into the future as well as the past: as if the future were just another version of the past, obscured beneath something, but that they could chart and map and manipulate that, too: that nothing could remain hidden from them.

  “She’s mine,” said Matthew.

  “She’s probably nobody’s,” Wallis said. The two men were not as close as brothers, but perhaps cousins. There was no rivalry; there was only the hunt, which they both loved dearly.

  Dudley had never had a geologist last as long beneath his tutelage as had Matthew. Sometimes Old Dudley would wake in the night and have the fearful thought that this one, Matthew, might outlast him—that the scent of metal-against-metal sparks Dudley was smelling this time was coming not from his disciple, but from himself. He would fear for a moment that the sound of loose rubble sliding down the mountain came not from some safely removed distance, but for the first time, from himself. Because such a thing had never happened before, however, Dudley could not imagine it or believe or accept it, and he would label it for what it was, a nightmare, and would get up in the night and go fix a drink and sit at his drafting table beneath the lone overhead lamp, a pool of yellow light in the depth of the blackness all around him, and he would stare with fondness at whatever map lay on the table—the elegance of the map’s contours, the feminine curves of buried earth.

  “Leave her alone. She’s mine,” Matthew said again, as Wallis was leaving.

  He fled Texas, driving in an old jeep north and west, following no map, knowing only that not until he neared the end of his journey would he need the little scrap of map Dudley and Matthew had sketched for him, though perhaps he would not even need it then. He felt a pull, a tug, and a snatch upon his heart as he crossed over the hill country where Susan was buried, and he slowed, felt her with him as strongly as if she were clawing up out of the ground to be with him, or as if he were being drawn down into that place to be with her. He hesitated, but then thought not so much of the falconer, to whom he had no overbearing allegiance, but of the thing itself that had given his life surge again, the oil, and he kept going, continuing north and west.

  Across the dry gold grass of the plains, then—mid-November—beneath swollen, purple winter skies the color of bruises; through sleet, leaving north Texas, and up into the piñón hills of New Mexico, with the smell of smoke in the wood stoves, and magpies flying through the falling snow.

  The hawks from the north were in the midst of their autumn migration, and every day, all day, through clearing patches of sky, he would see them heading south, sometimes drifting and soaring, other times flying, but always heading south, so that it gave him a strange feeling to be pushing so resolutely north. One night he camped in a pale arroyo beneath an old railroad trestle that smelled strongly of creosote, but which provided shadow against the relentless moonlight. He awoke in the night to feel the ground trembling and thought at first a flash flood was coming, but then he heard the wail of a train and looked up to see its huge black mass go roaring past twenty feet above him. The sparks from the steel wheels showered down upon him, and long after the train had passed, his heart was still pounding with the excitement and beauty of it—the speed and force with which it had passed.

  There was no heater in his jeep, and the farther north he got, the more often he had to stop and warm himself: in a restaurant or service station, or, increasingly, by building a fire of sage and juniper, and then, higher, farther north, with fires of fir and spruce. He slept beneath the jeep when snow fell and listened to the snapping of the fire. When he slept sometimes she would come up from behind him, from out of Texas, as if to capture and pull him back down with her—and often he would not sleep but would lie in his sleeping bag watching the fire; and sometimes it would feel as if the world beneath him was still moving, still drawing him north and west, so that his own desires seemed to have no say in the matter: that too much of it was already decided as if by some alignment or movements of the constellations above, or by forces below. He knew this was not the way Old Dudley or Matthew moved through the world—he knew they pinned it down as if with their paws and told the world what to do and how to behave—but Wallis liked watching the fire and letting the earth keep moving along beneath him, with him riding on it.

  In southern Colorado the snow was coming down so hard that he had to slow to a creep. He drove along at five and ten miles an hour. Deer and elk were coming down out of the mountains, moving down into their winter range, and often they walked alongside him, on either side of his creeping jeep as if in a parade, coming down off the high pass and onto the back side of the Divide. Snow collected on their backs in thick coats. They wore their antlers like kings.

  He turned west and drifted up and across Utah. He saw almost no one. There was a lure, a pull, now, that turned him north again: up through Idaho, like a salmon. He crawled beneath the jeep, tried to get to sleep quickly, absorbing the last remnants of warmth from the engine, and it kept snowing, burying the winking red coals of the fire he’d built, and then there was the huge silence as the night’s new layer of snow settled onto the world, burying everything that had happened during the day, burying all the days. It was possible now, as he drew nearer to the Swan—not like an arrow fired from a bow, but again, like some fish working upstream—to believe that he would have found or been directed toward this place, this rhythm, without instructions—without having been directed toward it by the falconer.

  He stayed north—did not cross back over the Divide, where he could feel the sea of grass behind him and to the east. Instead he turned west, traveling farther into the deep timber: up through the Bitterroot and then farther, where the trees were taller, the mountains higher, and it stopped snowing, as if all that was below him now. The whole world had turned white, save for the deep blue of the sky, a depth of blue he had never seen, and there was so much silence that it seemed to be a sound of its own. The sun was bright but there was no warmth. He wanted to build a fire but wanted also to keep going.

  He passed only two other vehicles all day: immense snowy logging trucks, tires swathed in clanking chains, slapping sparks behind in roostertails—the trucks’ long trailers loaded-to-groaning with the giant trees, the first trailer carrying only five trees to fill its load, and the next trailer, six; and they left behind the thick, sweet scent of fresh-crushed boughs.

  Wallis began to consider consulting his map, but decided against it, in a way that he knew would displease the falconer. He felt a stillness entering his heart, a peace, not unlike the one he felt when mapping the lost lands that were twenty thousand feet and two hundred million years below. Could he have found, or imag
ined, such a place without Old Dudley’s—and Matthew’s—instructions? He felt a gratitude toward them, and confusion too, as his heart grew still calmer. If this place did exert a pull on him—if it did have a desire for him—why had he never felt it before? What crust had overlain?

  Shortly before noon on the last day he rolled through the little town called Swan—a wide spot in a river valley with a few snowy pastures, buck-and-rail fences, and old cabins with smoke rising straight from their chimneys. He stopped at the only store and bought gas and asked the lady what lay farther north.

  “Nothing,” she said, and laughed. “Trees and clear-cuts,” she said. “Then the clear-cuts end—just trees, the woods they haven’t gotten to yet—and savages.” At first Wallis thought she was saying the people taking the trees out were savages, but then he understood that she meant the people who lived back in the woods.

  “The other Swan,” she said. “The second Swan.” She lit a cigarette, looked out at the bright day: seemed trapped by the beauty that was too cold to go out into. “I’ve never been up there,” she said. “It’s mostly dope addicts and hippies,” she said. “Criminals. It’s right on the Canadian line. Part of it goes over into Canada. They say there are about twenty or so people living up there. Dark, wet—way back in the woods. A ghost town. They get a lot of wolves up there.” She drew on her cigarette. The odor of it stung Wallis’s face, but he could tell that his own days’-traveling smell was none too fragrant to her. “You can shower back there for a dollar, if you want,” she said, pointing to the bathroom behind the poker machines.

  “No thanks,” he said, and then, “That other place, the one that has the same name—how far is it?”

  “You go to the end of the world,” she said. “Go til you begin to hear wolves, til you see their big pawprints in the snow along the road. Go until the road stops.” Another puff of cigarette. “Go til you see all the dead deer and the flocks of ravens, from where the wolves have been.” One more puff. “We had the name first.”

  And he had not traveled another twenty miles before he began to see the wolves, or what he thought at first were wolves, gathered on the sides of the road gnawing on the frozen red carcasses of deer, their faces masked red, with vapor clouds drifting from their mouths as if they were speaking, and eagles soaring overhead, waiting for a chance to join in on the feast.

  They were only coyotes—shadows of wolves—but they were larger than any coyotes he had seen in Texas, so that they might as well have been wolves: and there were so many of them, and the woman was right, the ravens, flocks of them, were always in attendance, like black flies over spoiled fruit—though this meat was not spoiled, this meat had been living earlier that very day.

  He reached the Canadian line—a small green and white sign said, simply, “Canada”—and opened the iron gate that spanned the road (only a lane, now, where a snowplow had tunneled through)—and he passed through it as if driving in to visit someone’s home. He stopped and closed the gate behind him.

  It was dusk now and he followed the winding icy road as if on a toboggan run. The stars began to appear through the forest and cast themselves brightly about him in a multitude, and the temperature fell away in the sun’s absence, falling like a thing tumbling from a cliff edge. Twenty-five, thirty below by the time he reached the summit, which he knew was the summit because he could go no farther. The snow had not been plowed on the back side, so that the valley beyond and below him was sealed in.

  Wallis was not sure when he had crossed back over out of Canada, but he could see the faint shape, the dark bowl of the second valley. He got out and looked at his watch—he was six hours late—but could tell that Mel had not been there yet, because of the absence of tracks in the snow.

  He could smell the forest even more strongly—could breathe deep into him the scent of things, the names of which he did not yet know.

  There were only two lights in the distant valley that he could see—lantern light, he knew, or bulbs powered by generators. He had been told that there was no electricity in the valley, and only one pay phone—a strange jury-rigged system that combined a shortwave radio with various ephemeral satellite links—the satellite passing the valley’s side of the earth only every second day—so that as often as not the valley lay in near-total isolation, save for that one slender road leading in.

  Wallis gathered green fir branches and built a fire in the middle of the road. He took a hatchet from the jeep’s tool box and chopped down a small tree and burned it, branch by branch and length by length. With each flare he could see a short distance into the woods around him, and could feel brief heat, but then the flare would fall away to tiny, insignificant flames; though through the night, as Wallis kept diligently adding limbs—breaking snow trails into the woods and snapping off branches like some hungry creature browsing—the fire built enough coals to melt the snow around it to bubbling, boiling water, and steam.

  He was able to bank the coals around the jeep—a glowing orange ring of quickly cooling fire around him—and in that manner, in that brief breath of heat, he was able to fall asleep at ten thousand feet, looking up not at the stars but at the meandering pipes of his jeep’s underbelly. In the half-land before sleep, he rolled, in his mind, so that he was not looking up, but down—twenty thousand feet below these ten thousand feet—looking for black oil in a world void of other colors.

  If the falconer said it was down there, it was, though how much of it, he could not be sure. Across the thousand square miles of the little valley, and at any depth below, in one of an infinite number of seams, there might be only a ribbon of oil: only enough to fill one bucket, enough oil or gas to burn one candle, one lamp, for one night.

  Wallis wondered if Mel would be like her father, or if she would be his opposite, as often happened: as if blood, as it runs through a person, spirals and twists—bright and glittering one moment, and then shrunken and opaque, between generations.

  Isolated from the world as she was, she might have been shaped not so much by her blood lineage as by the land itself—though from the brief, starlit glimpse of the bowl of dark valley below, Wallis would not have been able to guess what kind of a person that landscape might scribe.

  He dived deeper in his sleep: vertical now, so that it was not like swimming, but like a falcon in its stoop, though without the falcon’s speed. He descended to the safest place in the world.

  And while he was twenty thousand feet below, did the rest of him which he had left behind—the skin or husk of his body curled there atop the snow—drink in and absorb the scent of spruce and smoke? Did it absorb the faint light of the stars? Did the movement of the stars, in this new place, carve new messages across him, even as he slept: wrapping him in those new thin scribings?

  The coals of his fire froze and the steam went away. The jeep itself began to freeze, contracting in the cold and making groaning sounds like an animal; and in his descent, Wallis, if he heard or felt the sound at all, imagined that it was the sound of the world below: the risings and fallings of things—secret passageways becoming open and available for a moment—chasms appearing, then being quickly filled—peaks and crags, whole mountains wavering like flowers in a breeze.

  The oil inside the jeep turned thick as licorice, but the blood inside him was still hot, still flowing—sparkling like the stars, as he slept—running strong, while above, the stars kept writing their faint messages across him, as well as all around him—hemming him in, whether he realized it or not: or hemming in, rather, that part of him that he had left behind in his descent.

  As he slept—as his body slept, while the rest of him dived, gaining speed and depth now—an owl hooted, but he did not hear it, could not hear it.

  Snowshoe hares, the color of the white world, edged around him, made curious by the dying fire. Snowmelt from the fire’s perimeter froze into twisted, grotesque, translucent shapes—resculpted from snow’s smoothness into clutching, clawing shapes all around the jeep and flecked with charcoal and b
its of wood.

  From above it would have looked craterlike; and it would have looked too as if Wallis was frozen in the grip of that ice. It would have looked as if, as he slept, the ice had crept toward him in waves and begun wrapping itself around him.

  A WOMAN’S VOICE SAID, “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD.” Wallis opened his eyes to stunning brightness. His own breath was so cloudy that at first he could see nothing; but as the cloud faded, he saw the woman who was speaking. He struggled to lean up on one elbow, beneath the jeep, but his blankets and sleeping bag were frozen in the ice. She laughed as he struggled to free himself.

  Her hair was long, and not so much white as it was the color of frost—as if her rhime-breath, or the winter, had colored it—and her face was long and narrow. She was a big woman—tall, with rounded shoulders, and a strong neck. Her eyes were green, and they held Wallis now with a steady, curious look of amusement. She was hunkered down, leaning in to peer at him in a way that made him think of the phrase sitting on her haunches. “Mel,” she said, introducing herself. She took her glove off and reached her hand in under the jeep. Holding onto his hand, she pulled him free of the curls of ice that had gripped him, and she laughed again, once he was out, as if she had caught a fish.

  “You don’t have skis or snowshoes,” she said.

  “No. I wouldn’t know how to use them anyway.”

  “You sure made a mess.” She was still hunkered over her heels. Charcoal and ash-flecked gnarls of rutted ice stretched everywhere. Wallis couldn’t remember when he’d seen someone so cheerful and full of life. Healthy was the word; robust. Her vigor reminded him of the energy possessed of a man or woman deep in love. It did not seem possible that that kind of energy could come from within: that there was not some other, external source helping support it.