Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Matthew had survived nineteen years of it, thus far. Mel stood in the snow some nights before going inside and wondered what Matthew might look like when he was an old man—if he managed to survive—but she knew what the answer was, even as she considered it. She could take her gloves off and touch the side of her face—the place where the lines were coming—and know the answer to that sculpting. It was the same answer for her. Old Dudley was carving one of them with his blood and the other with his hands.

  Occasionally, at her desk—listening to Wallis roll the rocks around in the hallway, positioning and repositioning them on that blank map like some demented child—she would feel pity for him; other times, sorrow, and other times, a shared bond. But still she kept her distance; and likewise Wallis told himself not to pursue Mel. To struggle to dive deep, rather than traveling far.

  HE WAS LEARNING NOTHING. THE SUN HAD GONE TO the other side of the world. Cold rolled onto the land as if venturing from cracks and fissures in the earth. Trees exploded all night, every night, filling the woods with the sounds of their cannonade. As they fell, the creaky, twisted splintering sounds—the muffled thumps—drummed the earth so soundly that surely it was awakening, even if briefly, the bears sleeping like astronauts frozen in the earth. The smell of the trees’ crushed green limbs permeated the woods.

  The snow robbed all other sounds—took away even the silence, so that there was now a thing even more absolute than silence. One lone raven could break the day open. Three feet, four feet, five feet of snow. Wallis stayed inside and read.

  In Dudley’s late adolescent scrawl, his young man’s scrawl, Wallis read the words that had been written as if beneath a fever. He marveled at the insane arrogance: as if the writer had truly traveled to and seen these places, rather than imagining them, and was describing them from ancient memory.

  Introduction to the Rocks

  Kinds of Minerals and Stones

  It is not entirely satisfactory to roam over the fields with bowlders lying on the right and left, but without any knowledge of their natures. True, we shall experience much satisfaction in feeling that we know something of their origin and their history. We may walk up to the side of one of these way-worn rock-travelers and say: “Old Hard Head, when did you arrive in this country, and where did you originate from?” Old Hard Head will lie sullenly and answer never a word. But he is written all over with inscriptions which we can begin to decipher. So we look on the rounded and weather-beaten form and say to ourselves: “This immigrant rock came from a northern country. He left his mother rock, and most of his kindred, in the woods, or up in the mountains. A large number of his kindred came with him. He rode part of the way on the back of a glacier. By and by he fell off, or got into a hole; and after that he had a severe squeezing. He got crushed and rubbed and rolled and pushed for some thousands of years.

  But every year he made some progress. By and by there was a great change of weather. The ice carriage melted away from him, and fine weather returned, and lo! he found himself, one spring, in this field. That was long enough before Adam and Eve set up business in gardening and other such fuckery. But here old Hard Head has been lying ever since. And now, we are the very first persons who ever stopped to pay him a moment’s attention, and make his acquaintance.

  If old Hard Head thinks, he is revolving some handsome compliments on our intelligence. Whatever old Hard Head may think, we are sure the ability to learn something of the method of the world was given us to be exercised. If we go stupidly through the world without exercising that ability, we do no better than an ox. But if we seek to gain an insight into the method and history of the world, we honor the Author of the world; we read His thoughts. Knowing some of His thoughts, we come into more intimate relations with Him. The study of science is a virtue. Attention to geology is a human duty.

  To complete our introduction to old Hard Head we must know his name. To call him old Hard Head is like calling a man “Old Russian” or “Old Englishman.” He has, besides, his personal name. Now, there is a way of finding out the particular name of each rock. Like a dog with his name on his collar, each mute rock displays a name written on its exterior.

  Do you see that nearly all these bowlders appear to be mixtures of different colors and kinds of rocks? See one rock with round pebbles imbedded in a mass of smaller grains. See another rock, less coarse, with silvery scales. Now, all these differently colored constituents of the rocks are so many different minerals. Rocks are composed of minerals. Some rocks have two minerals; some, three; some, four. The particular name of a rock depends on the minerals in it. As soon as we know the minerals, we can call the name of the rock: can shout it to both the heavens and hell. Now, sit down and take a lesson in minerals.

  Do you see this white flint rock, composed throughout of one kind of mineral? That mineral is quartz. It is the hardest of all the common minerals. Try to scratch it. You see the point of steel makes no impression on it. But it leaves a black mark. The quartz wears away the steel. When one of these bowlders is thus composed entirely of quartz, its name is quartzite. There are many quartzites, as there are many Smiths and Joneses. Let us learn the other part of the name. Look at these uniformly colored quartzites—white and gray. You see one is composed of distinct grains; this is a granular quartzite. One contains pebbles; this is a conglomeratic quartzite, or simply a conglomerate. None of it is worth a good gott-damn for holding oil, but once eroded back into sandstones of sufficient porosities, can again be of use in the service of possessing petroleum. In fact, quartz is the most abundant of all minerals . . .

  Wallis skimmed ahead. He knew about conglomerates: knew how two things were forced to become one. He was more interested in learning about the workings of Old Dudley’s—young Dudley’s—fevered mind. What percentage had been fact, and what percentage imagination, back then? When he described a sound, did he really hear it in his mind? What did it take to succeed—to find oil—as Old Dudley and Matthew were finding it?

  The winter silence, or absence of silence, deepened; the snow fell more soundlessly than ever, compressing everything, as Wallis read:

  The sharp clacking collision of transported rock fragments accompanies the loud roaring of the impetuous stream. The white streamlet, always rapid, has been swollen to a furious torrent by a recent cloudburst. The torrent in its rage has rent all barriers and courses over adjacent lands. Stones, up to several tons in weight, hurl right and left, in the same fashion as an autumn wind disperses the leaves of maples along the street. Hundreds of acres lay buried beneath sand and mud, cobblestones and massive rocks. The rough and rocky slope receives her deposits; the last goat pasture lies concealed beneath a bed of stones, and the grassy flat lies hidden by a blanket of gravel and slime.

  Observe the power of sorting exerted by moving water. The heavier rocks are left where the most precipitous hillside graduates into the sharp slope. Here is the first abatement of the force of the stream. It drops what can no longer be moved by the diminished power of the torrent.

  The smaller rocks lay next in order. Where the slope passes into a gentler grade, the still waning force of the maddened stream becomes insufficient to bear them on.

  Still farther, on the lower levels, the flood is widened, its velocity slackened, and its transportative power so abated that the average-sized cobblestones have to be left.

  Still travels on the gravel, finds pause only on the pastures where domestic animals have been grazing.

  But the sand is borne to the lower level and spreads itself out over many an arable field and fragrant meadow; while the fine alluvial mud floats with the tired waters, which seek out sheltered nooks and depressions in which to rest, searching the swamps and bayous and peat bogs.

  This was yesterday. This morning the lesson lies before us. Here are effects of a geological cause on whose action the startled peasant yesterday gazed despairingly. He needs no theory to convince him of the nature and mode of action of the forces which devasted his fields.


  Not far from the home of my boyhood was the mill pond, dear to every schoolward trudging urchin who had to pass it, and a Saturday resort for many others who lived in the adjoining “district.” Here we bathed; here we fished; here we risked our lives in shaky skiffs, and astride of unmanageable logs. The water was deep and clear. Last summer I visited the old pond. Like the anxious parents who shared with mill pond the affections of which boyish hearts are susceptible, the scene of so much truant enjoyment was changed almost beyond recognition. The deep, clear water was silted up, and logs were thrusting their brown noses up in the sites where I used to swim in summer and skate in winter. Sedges fringed the borders; bulrushes, to their knees in water, were holding possession of land that was expected to be, and their encroaching march threatened to corner the anxious perches and sunfishes in the last lingering bowl of clear water close by the decrepit old dam. This, I thought, is a picture of the history of the world. How long, I queried, before this millpond will be a swamp? Is this the impending fate of all our ponds and lakelets? Johnny, do you think your favorite skating place will ever come to this?

  Perhaps Old Dudley had always had an old soul, Wallis thought. He was pretty certain Dudley had never had any damn skates, much less a mill pond. In the year that Wallis had lived and worked with him down in Houston, Wallis had had the notion that Old Dudley had been growing older, like some doddering old man who was watching his fortune, his capital, grow and multiply at some vast and unstoppable pace, regardless of his attention or inattention: that things were out of control, and that his fortune was recklessness, with his two geologists finding oil and gas as easily as sunlight finds the earth—unable to miss, in rhythm and in groove.

  What if, however, Old Dudley was growing younger and less horrible? What if—pathetic as he was, unlovely as he was—he was, in his advancing years, finally aware of his horridness, and was trying to put on the brakes—trying not to waste or spurn love and friendship, trying not to consume so wantonly?

  If this were so—if he were really trying not to be an asshole—it would seem to make his wanton consumption seem somehow even more horrible.

  Stranded up in the valley, Wallis imagined all sorts of awful things. He imagined, and then had dreams, of Old Dudley clawing up from great depth beneath a rubble of stone, emerging monstrous and earth dripping; and then, deeper into winter, the dreams worsened, so that it was Wallis himself who was buried and gasping for air and light, but finding only earth, soil, stone. His lungs filling with dirt, his body turning into dirt. Some fire within him blinking out.

  Mel heard him cry out in his sleep some nights and shook her head, felt herself soften and fill with sorrow as she would upon hearing the sounds of a wounded animal that she knew was not going to make it. She would grow angry with Dudley for continuing to eat the young men, and angry with Wallis and Matthew for allowing themselves to be eaten. Angry with herself for even listening, much less responding, to Wallis’s groans and whimpers, and angry at herself for her inability to tear fully away from either her father or Matthew.

  She would get up and put a piece of wood on the fire. She would study her maps by firelight: the tiny stipplings, the dots and dashes, of the pack’s comings and goings in the river bottoms and side canyons. The dates and locations of their kills. A different map for each month. The position of the moon and stars overhead, as if the wolves (and the deer they followed and chased) were but a gearworks of their own devising, with blood and gristle as the lubricant. She didn’t even know for sure how many wolves there were. Sometimes she thought four; other times, three, and on other occasions, five. She saw them so rarely. Except for the raw carnage of their passage—the jaw-crunched bones, the hide and hair, and the piles of shit, and the tracks of their huge feet (each larger than her outstretched hand)—a person could easily believe that they were not really there.

  To give the wolves space, and respect, she tracked them backward, hoping to avoid giving them the feeling that she was chasing them. She worked backward along their trail, working always two or three days into the past. The maps would look the same anyway; as long as she could find the tracks, the story would get told. And as seen from the air the map would look identical, whether she mapped them forward or backward.

  She would read her maps by firelight for a while, then go back to bed. She would put the pillow over her head to block out the sounds of Wallis’s bad dreams, and would try to get another hour or two of sleep before it was time to go out again.

  She didn’t think Wallis could possibly last through the winter.

  She knew she needed to sleep: especially in the winter. But it wasn’t as it had been when she was younger. She no longer fell into sleep as if diving deep, plunging, only to emerge, shimmering and cleansed, eight hours later. It was as if she had become a little clumsier, now, even in her sleep—grasping, even stumbling. Awakening every few hours, as if trying to recall a thing she was missing. Not a child, or a husband, or a lover, but something—as if she were missing out on, or had misplaced, something.

  Once out in the woods, following the tracks backward, those doubts and feelings would fade—but lying still and alone in bed each night, she felt them moving in closer, where before she had not even known they existed.

  Helen came skiing up one day, pulling a sled behind her. It was a sunny day—the temperature nearly up to freezing—and Wallis was wrapped in an elk hide, sitting in a slash of sunlight, drinking hot coffee and watching the stark mountain to the south—watching the snowy wall of it, and the way the sun was striking it, as if hoping or believing that the purity of his need might make the snow slide from those rock cliffs, like the unclothing of some beloved.

  Helen skied up to the porch. Wallis rose to greet her. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “No,” said Wallis.

  “Then why are you just sitting there?”

  “I was thinking.”

  Helen stared at him not only as if he were ignorant, but worse—as if he were some infiltrator sent into the valley from the outside world to weaken things, to dilute hidden strength, and foment discord.

  “You’ve got to keep moving, in winter,” she said. “Especially this early into it. You’ll go down for sure if you don’t keep moving. Your blood will pool. Part of you will rot. The other parts will stiffen.” She waved her hands. “What’s the word?”

  “Lithify,” he said. He could feel it already. He didn’t need her to tell him. It was a feeling like giving up. He had felt it before.

  “What are your designs on Mel?” Helen asked, unclipping the skis and coming up onto the porch.

  “Designs,” he said.

  “She still belongs to Matthew,” said Helen. “She will always belong to him.”

  Wallis sat back down and pulled the elk hide tighter around him and stared out at the wall of mountain again. He knew there would be cross-bedding planes visible, formations laid down atop one another visible even to the naked eye. He knew he could sit on the porch in the summer and study the direction and depositional history of them through a telescope; and that he could also climb the cliffs’ crevices, could climb like a spider and with his rock hammer could chip the real and physical samples from the cliff walls—ancient petrified oceans frozen to stone and lifted high into the sky so that the world—erosion, weathering, wind, and the clutch of plant-roots—could begin eating at them.

  He was afraid he might go mad if he kept staring at that wall, not knowing which way the formations ran.

  “Say it,” Helen said. “You’re in love with her.” She peered at him closely. “I think he’s going to come back soon. Maybe in a year or two. I think he misses the valley. I’m pretty sure he’s coming back. And Mel will still be here, waiting for him. Does he ever talk like that?” Helen asked. “Does he ever mention quitting?”

  Wallis looked away from the snowy cliffs: studied Helen as if he had forgotten the difference between the animate and the inanimate. “Can I fix you some coffee?” he asked.

  “Tea,
please,” Helen said. They rose to step inside to warmth, though lingered, in the doorway, reluctant to leave the rare bright light.

  “I’m not in love with her,” Wallis said. “I just want to find oil.”

  “It’s not here,” Helen said. “If it was, Matthew would have found it.” Wallis smiled, built the fire up in the kitchen’s wood stove to heat more water.

  “What’s in the sled?” he asked.

  “Grapefruit,” Helen said. “A Christmas present from Matthew. He had the grapefruit brought in over the pass on a snowmobile.”

  “Are they still coming for Christmas?” Wallis asked.

  “Of course,” Helen said.

  “How long?”

  “They never stay long. Just a couple of days.”

  “No,” said Wallis, “I mean how long before Christmas?”

  “A week,” said Helen.

  “How will they get here?” Wallis asked.

  Helen shrugged. “Sometimes snowmobiles, sometimes helicopter. Some years, dog sled. They always get here.” She studied Wallis. “You’re really not in love with her, are you? You really want them to come up here.” She paused. “Who do you miss more, Old Dudley or Matthew?”

  “I don’t think of them individually,” Wallis said.

  Helen frowned. “They’re not at all alike! Matthew’s a lot different—”

  “I know. But I think of how they are together. The two parts of them combining.”

  Helen was silent for a while. Wallis handed her the tea.