Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  They muscled the car all the way out to the main road in this manner—from time to time Matthew would gun the accelerator, but for the most part it was the pushing of the people and the pulling of the animals that kept the car going—he and Old Dudley were pitching around inside like tourists in a barrel going over some falls—and finally when the laborers had reached the main road, panting and sweating, covered with snow, they unhitched the horses. Matthew and Old Dudley drove away, drove north across the frozen snow, once more only guessing where the road lay beneath them—driving fast, slipping and sliding, knowing that they had to be out of the valley before the sun rose and softened the snow.

  The crowd watched the taillights recede into the heart of winter.

  Everyone trudged back in silence to where the fire had burned to low coals and was hissing in the puddling water, and where the abandoned lanterns cast melting scallop-shapes in the snow around them. The maw where the car had been looked like the gap left when a tooth is pulled. They all felt as if Dudley had somehow gotten away with something of theirs, but could not pin the feeling down with any specificity.

  People gathered their lanterns and dogs, then soothed and haltered their sweating horses. They headed home quietly—sleepy and calm: holding the memory already of their night’s work. They walked home together, still a community—and the woods absorbed it all, and slid back in over the people’s night passage. Wallis, for one, could already feel things healing—the events of the night—almost as soon as he was aware that there had been injury, or disturbance.

  Mel picked up the chain saw. She studied the wall where they had dissembled it to patch the road. In a single night, it had been worn down to ground level—twenty years of history laid flat.

  She and Wallis snapped on their skis and headed home.

  Now Mel would be going back to the wolves. Where else was there? She skied hard, even going uphill, kicking the tails of her skis out in her speed.

  Exhausted when they arrived at the cabin, yet filthy again, Wallis hauled more water for baths. It had begun to snow lightly, and Wallis wondered what it must be like for Dudley and Matthew to be driving together through the roadless landscape, across so much snow, and with more of it coming down.

  Mel bathed first. Wallis sat by the icy creek down by the smokehouse and let the snow cover him for a while. He looked back up at the cabin, and against the steamed yellow glow of the bathroom window’s lantern light, he could see the silhouette of Mel drying off. The snow landed on his face and in the creek, disappearing when it landed in the water. He could feel the smokehouse’s groaning cold behind him—the grouse and trout laid out in a line like soldiers, a regiment waiting to be consumed. He watched Mel dry her hair—elbows everywhere, shapeless form in the window light, floating in the woods on the side of the mountain. He saw her leave the bathroom then, and he waited for her to dress, then went up the hill with another bucket of water in each hand. Blue smoke streamed from the twin chimneys, rising to join the falling snow, and trees in the forest began to explode again, filling the night with the scent of fresh sap. Despite the beauty, he felt that he had been above ground far too long, and that it was time to dive again.

  Before daylight, the icicles hanging from their roof lengthened as the escaping heat from the cabin melted them into drips, which froze again in the night. The icicles had been a foot long in November, then stretched to two feet; now they completed their descent, dripping all the way to the ground before freezing again, so that Wallis and Mel were imprisoned as if within an ice tomb.

  The full moon appeared over Waper Ridge and struck their ice cage, the icicles as thick as a man’s wrist, so that the ice was filled and then illuminated with that moon, as if they were in a glowing womb. Wallis and Mel, each in their separate rooms, awakened, feeling something different about the cabin, and they looked out at that blue light but felt no sense of alarm, only wonder, and in the morning, at dawn, after the moon had passed on, but with the stars still burning, they went out onto the porch and with ax and maul smashed their way through those ice bars and back into the cold winter air.

  THEY FELL IN LOVE THE WAY ROUGHLY HALF THE WORLD does: not all at once, as if through a trap door, but gradually, through the incremental doings-of-things both together and alone—fitting and reshaping, settling into a newer place; and in their caution and deliberation, it could not be argued that they did not know what they were doing. There was not the excuse of innocence. Even though they understood what was happening, they would have been—and were—the last ones to call it love. They understood that it was the direction they were heading, but they told themselves they were not even ankle-deep in it; and then only ankle-deep, and then only calf-deep. As if it were a way of being that they could step back out of at any time.

  Mel continued to do what she had set out to do twenty years ago with enthusiasm: to gather and accumulate the data—the paths and trails of the wolves—and to weave that data together; or rather, to uncover the pattern that was already weaving itself. Some days it was a wonderful feeling, though other days she longed for the time when there had been more mystery—when she had been unencumbered by the knowledge of where the wolves were likely to be—what they would be hunting, and even—from a sense she could now pick up from the woods themselves—what the pack’s mood might be, on a certain day.

  Still, the wolves amazed her now, even as she entered trail after trail into her journal, and layer after layer onto the maps of years. The generations of them stayed almost invariably the same—ever playful, ever fierce and determined, ferocious when need be, with enough unpredictability to always force her to never assume anything, despite the increasing burden of her knowledge. One day she found where they had somehow caught and killed and eaten a raven, who was supposed to be their partner in the hunt—their co-navigator toward distant game downwind, and the caller of alarms when danger approached: a thing as close to a friend as was possible, outside the confines of the pack.

  Another time, for an entire year, there was an individual within the pack who hunted with them, but who always stayed on the other side of the river—following the rest of the pack and vocalizing with them, and hazing game toward them, but who, to the best of Mel’s knowledge, remained always across the river from them, trailing them like a shadow, but never joining in on the feast afterward. Mel never saw this wolf; she never found its body. Perhaps it drowned, trying to cross the river one day—or perhaps it was simply an outcast for that one year, and rejoined the pack in subsequent years.

  Mostly, it was her own self that was ceasing to amaze her. It was her own habits and continuity that she knew increasingly too well. Some nights she wanted to shriek.

  She knew, or believed, she was going to follow the wolves backward until she died. And then either someone would take her place, and her sixty years of data, and add their own sixty years to it, or not. If her work were abandoned, her own studies would become isolated, and would dissolve, or be buried and forgotten, or never known.

  And the wolves would keep hunting. As long as there was wild country in which they could travel great distances, they would keep being wolves, whether people knew their habits or not.

  They needed wild country; they needed deer, elk, moose. And the forest needed them. Perhaps it was that simple. Maybe nothing else was required but a largeness of the country. There were too many days now when Mel doubted her work—not its integrity, but its value. What did it matter to anyone but herself how the wolves worked, or even how the woods worked?

  It was a feeling like being buried alive: the insignificance of her work.

  What about teaching? she wondered. There’s a thing that matters. Maybe I should try and become a teacher.

  She dreamed of being buried alive: the taste of the loose dirt in her mouth, dirt filling her lungs, and her sinking into the earth. Her moans awakening Wallis.

  The wolves had moved to the far corner of the valley, but some nights their howls could be heard, even from that distance: and
so faint, so far away, were the howls that they did not sound like howls, but like breathing sounds, or tiny groans from the next room; and sometimes Wallis would have to lie still and hold his breath to be sure they were howls, and not the heavy pulsings of his own blood: imagined sounds just outside the range of hearing. He would often be unable to sleep, wondering whether he was hearing them or not, and he would go out on the porch and wrap himself in hides and look up at the stars and listen, so that he could hear them more clearly, though they were still distant, as if it were the stars themselves that were howling.

  He hauled wood and water for Mel while she was gone to those far corners. In the evenings she cooked for him—enjoyed having someone to cook for. She watched him inflating with muscle from the wood splitting and water carrying, and from all the good meat—watched him as if he were in some steady metamorphosis: returning, it seemed, the body or form of Matthew to the valley, though surely not his person or personality. Wallis was as deliberate, as precise, as an old man.

  They discussed books. Mel could remember the specific passages from all the books she’d read. Wallis could remember only the varying degrees of pleasure each book gave him, and consistently forgot the details—though still, they managed to converse at length about books they had both read, or which only one of them had read, so that in all ways it was as if they were speaking two slightly different languages. But it brought them closer to each other, even in the midst of all that caution. Great expanses of time substituted for intensity. As if they had nothing but time.

  She began reading to him at night after she had bathed, and as he lay in the shallow tub of new hot water: reading to him from the other side of the door, trying to catch him up on a lifetime’s worth of her favorite poems, essays, stories, novels. She read to him deep into the night. Sometimes he would lie there until the water grew cold, and the pleasure was hers as much as it was his. They grew used to the sounds of each other’s voices, and to each other’s silences.

  Wallis started over with the maps, too isolated to feel shamed by his failure. And in the beginning, what had he had to work with, anyway—a piece of paper, a pencil, and a few handfuls of dirt?

  He took the rocks that had spilled from the pockets of Matthew’s coveralls and studied them, dreamed stories for them. He studied anew the perceived slants and casts of the snow-clad mountain walls, but understood now that had nothing to do with the way things were structured at depth.

  He constructed and reconstructed the lands below solely from his imagination: paying no attention to the snowy landscape on the surface. He pretended that he was right, and then he believed it. In the end he knew he might as well be mapping the contours of his own brain.

  He mapped at five-hundred-foot intervals: starting a few hundred feet below the surface, and then descending—spending several days on each map. He kept the maps, when he was finished with them, rolled tightly within each other, like layers of onionskin. The paper was thin, so that when he held the maps up to the window in daylight, one map placed atop another placed atop another, he could see the transformations of time—the landscapes melting and reforming in places; could see certain features—ridges and knolls and mountains—shifting and sagging across the map, as if they had become fluid.

  The knowledge was itself a kind of creation. It stirred chemicals in his blood, made his blood sparkle: almost carbonated. Wallis didn’t mind the winter-short days, nor was he consciously aware of their subtle attenuation, now that the solstice had passed.

  He kept carving away old rock, old dirt—brushing it away from each new surface like the leavings of eraser crumbs, and he could understand how a lifetime of such work—ten million worlds drawn, crafted, discovered, built—could either make a man exceedingly humble, or could make him believe he was nothing less than God. It seemed like an awful temptation to place in the hands of a man or woman; but he could not turn away. Even in his dreams—while Mel sleep-moaned in the next room—Wallis’s hand was moving across the paper, half the time discovering secrets, half the time creating them.

  He read more in the boy Dudley’s journal:

  Gaseous Sunlight

  Natural Gas—Its Wonders, Its Geology

  The history of the search for native oil is romantic. Known for ages, it remained for a long time a mere curiosity. Even in America, where popular intelligence of a superior nature is supposed to utilize every possible advantage, petroleum rose only to the importance of a quack remedy for aches and other evils. But suddenly it assumed the scepter of king. It ruled the plans and lives of thousands; it sent men, many of them the most utter of numbnuts, blindly and stupidly in herds to the forks of streams in search of imaginary “ranges” and fanciful “oil belts.” The smell of petroleum was a craze.

  Men pursued it with the sound and fury of dogs on the track of their prey. They lost their power of reasoning on the subject. They could not be convinced that mineral oil is a geological product, fixed in its relations to the earth and to the strata as unchangeably and intelligibly as iron or salt. They would not listen to the counsel of science. Every man was confident in his self-wisdom, and never inquired of true experts on what grounds he believed and acted as he did.

  Repudiating the advice of those whose special business it was to know something on the subject, they preferred the dictates of their own ignorance. They went by the scent of the stuff; they were led by the nose; they put their money in the ground with the assurance of infallibility—and many of them have lost it there, as the souvenir of a happy intoxication. There was oil—millions of barrels of it; and many investors were fortunate if not wise; and many, though wise, were not fortunate.

  It was a new situation. It must be confessed that geologists took up the subject as novices. Many, however, who advertised themselves as geologists, were pretenders and quacks. Recognized by the undiscriminating as geologists, possessing equal authority with scientific men who had earned reputations among their peers, these geological quacks brought discredit on science, and justified, to some extent, the contempt of practical men such as myself, who appreciate certain conclusions, but spurn the illogical reasoning that leads to them.

  Now, some of the scientific principles which must hold true without any regard to the particular causes and conditions of oil accumulation, are such as these:

  Oil is not a direct deposit from the sea; it is the product of some changes in substances that became trapped in the ocean’s sediments.

  Being composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, it must have originated from organic substances.

  Being lighter than water, it must tend to rise through the water that saturates almost all rocks, instead of sinking. The source of the oil, therefore, can never be in any formation situated at a higher level than the place of the oil. This is a principle which the crazy crowd can never be taught.

  A good “surface show” is not favorable, since it is only caused by the escape and waste of the oil; while the thing wanted is an accumulation or retention of oil—that is, an absence of surface show. This the contemners of scientific guidance could not understand.

  There must consequently be an overlying stratum that is impervious to oil, to prevent the product from rising to the surface, to be wasted in a “surface show.” If a fissure even passes through this, the oil will escape. A bed of clay or compact shale might serve as such a cover. Compact limestone might serve; but most limestones are too shattered. Indeed, shattered limestones, in some cases, serve as reservoirs for the accumulation.

  The accumulation of oil must be determined, among other things, by the attitudes of the strata. The trends of “oil territory” must conform to the trends of underground formations. But the situations of creeks at the surface might have no bearing on the underground distribution of petroleum. The junction of two streams and the location of a sand flat might sustain no relation whatsoever to strata three or four hundred feet farther below.

  All of these principles have been disregarded by a majority of the “oil prospec
tors.” Some men under pay from capitalists even resorted to the witch-hazel fork in quest of knowledge on which capital might venture investment.

  It is generally admitted that the porous stratum in which oil accumulates must have an arched or anticlinal form. Otherwise the oil will spread laterally to an indefinite distance, and no local accumulation will take place. On the contrary, the oil will somewhere find an outlet to the surface, and be lost. It must be trapped and controlled by the earth to retain its power.

  The escape of burning gas from the earth has been observed for ages. It has long been utilized in some mines where it escapes through crevices. In a similar way, it enters coal mines, and is known to miners as fire damp, since, mixed with a certain proportion of atmospheric air, it becomes violently explosive. The Chinese have for centuries employed natural gas for lighting and heating. In Kentucky, gas accumulates in underground reservoirs, and the elastic pressure is sometimes attended by explosions, constituting earthquakes of local extent and lending some plausibility to the ancient theory of those phenomena. At Fredonia, New York, are gas emissions that have attracted attention for many years, and have long been utilized for lighting and heating. A gas spring was discovered there in 1821. The gas at that time accumulated was used for lighting a mill and several stores. It was also introduced into a few public buildings, and was brought to the attention of General Lafayette when he passed through the village in 1824. Subsequently, a shaft was sunk, and sufficient gas concentrated to supply thirty burners. In 1858, two thousand cubic feet of gas were delivered daily through the village. But in 1860, the entire village blew up.