Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “It’s lonely up here,” Mel said. “I like it better down along the river. But I wanted you to see this.”

  A star melted from the sky; it fell as slowly as a tear. It fizzed, then disappeared. The sun had set so far west as to be almost north. “Can you imagine what Colter’s seeing?” Mel said.

  Later, with each of them wrapped up in their sleeping bags, Mel said, “It’s as if there are all these different layers: like the same world exists beneath this one. It’s as if were you to scrape away the crust, you’d find a whole new world just below, but it would be almost just like this one.”

  But Wallis was already asleep, dreaming of nothing, hearing nothing—only resting atop a fast-cooling slab of rock, and she was alone, much as she had always been. She was just learning what Colter might take twenty or thirty years to learn—that pure beauty held no company, no companionship.

  In the morning on the hike out, they veered toward the sky language of ravens and came across a fresh-killed deer, a big doe, with wolf tracks splattering the mud, and bloody wolf prints drying on the stones.

  They walked around the edge of the disemboweled carcass, then continued down the mountain, hearing the ravens behind them settle back onto the kill; and they knew that the wolves would be slipping back to the kill also, emerging from hiding. Mel was glad she didn’t feel the compulsion, the obsession, to take notes and gather data. To let it all be forgotten.

  Closer to home, they stopped and gathered wildflowers for a bouquet to put on the kitchen table.

  The ascendancy was already over—it was all downhill now, until December’s dark solstice, and yet spring had not even fully occurred in places, or was only just now on the verge of occurring. What power could be achieved by such compression—fitting so much growth into such a small amount of time and space?

  Unbidden, the villagers began coming to Wallis, asking him to withdraw or withhold his map from Old Dudley: first Artie, then Charlie, and even Joshua, as well as others he did not know. Word had gotten out that he believed deeply in his map; that this map was different, and that it would open up a valuable new world below them: one in which they would share little if any part.

  They were hard-pressed to say what precise thing accounted for their change of heart, unless it was the simple brute proximity of the thing: the understanding that whereas the previous explorations had been speculative, cushioned by the possibility of failure, this one was different. Like Wallis, they could feel the certainty of this one, and so one by one they trudged up the trail to his and Mel’s cabin, past where Mel was working in the garden—nodding hello and commenting on how lovely the sun felt—but then they would continue to the porch and would tap lightly at the open door, and peer inside to where Wallis would be sitting shirtless at the desk with the map spread before him, windows open and curtains billowing, studying the map so as to memorize every bump and fold below, or rereading Old Dudley’s journals, or working up reserve calculations of just how much oil and gas might be recovered, based on all the different variables.

  After the second or third visitor, he had come to expect them, and he would push his chair back from the desk when they came, and they would visit quietly, explaining to him what their fears were, and the reasons they had changed their mind: and that they did not necessarily want him to go away, but that neither did they want him to drill, now that they understood—now that they believed with great faith—that he was going to find oil.

  Artie came closest to being able to explain it. “It was like a game, before,” he said. “It was kind of fun, watching Old Dudley and Matthew root around for it. But it’s not that way, with you,” he said. “It seems too final.”

  Many of them had been having dreams about it, they said—dreams of the future, in which their valley was altered savagely, irreparably.

  At first Wallis countered with the defense that if he didn’t find it, somebody else would. That they could not stop progress. But this explanation held no sway over them. His success, his certainty, had become like a strange creature in the valley—one which they were increasingly realizing did not fit. Wallis didn’t know how to answer them, beyond that; he felt betrayed by their changes of heart. He felt alone, stranded, like a dinosaur, continuing to believe in a thing steadfastly, while all around him other things dissolved, altered, shifted.

  He and Mel talked about it in the evenings.

  “I can feel it too,” Mel said. “How close it is. It scares me, too.”

  “You’ve changed your mind also,” Wallis said, looking out at the lingering dusk. Adrift: as alone as he had been when Susan had died. He had gotten nowhere; had traveled no distance, in all that time.

  “Yes,” said Mel, “I guess I have. I’m not going to ask you to turn away—I’m not going to try to change you—but yes, I’ve changed my mind, too. I don’t want you to drill the well.”

  The World Without a Backbone

  Here were banks of polyp corals—each little creature planted in his cup and expanding his petal-like tentacles in the life-giving sunlight. Over this slope of animated stone crawled lazy sea snails grazing on the tentacled growths then beginning a work of coral building which the Florida reefs still witness.

  The cycles of Cambrian and Silurian time swept on and came to an end. The history of life showed no departure from the fundamental types with which that history was inaugurated. There were new species, new genera, some new families, sometimes a new order or class. The changes were so slow that the world seemed finished for these happy creatures that held possession of it. Yet an occasional visitor from another world would have noted changes. The Cordilleran Land had sunken step by step, and was even now reduced to an archipelago. These lands were the empire of silence and desolation. Populous as were the waters, here was no motion or sound of animated creature. Sparse tree growths fringed the bleak horizon, but flower and fruit, grass and herb, were yet unknown. The sea, always jealous of the conquests made from his domain, continued to growl around the borders of the land, and pursued industriously the work of reclamation of his ancient slime. The wandering winds finding no fertile isle to fan or sail to waft, confederated with the destroying waves to wreak their anger on the crumbling shores and howled sullenly through the vistas of the sparsely wooded plain.

  DREAMS ENTERED ALL OF THEM, THROUGH THE HEART OF summer, so that the time and difference between waking and sleeping became less noticeable. They dreamed of people in the outside world whom they had not seen in twenty years, then received a letter in the mail from that person the next day, or the next. Amy dreamed that Colter was fine, three hundred miles north, and enjoying new sights, new marvels: fine and safe and healthy.

  Mel dreamed that her father was beginning to grow older: that Wallis somehow had her father under control, rather than the other way around.

  She dreamed that Matthew was vanishing: that he was losing body, soul, and mind, and was becoming distributed like sand or dust by the four winds.

  Helen dreamed that a man had been spying on her, lusting for her old body. The dream was troubling, though it also had strange moments of pleasure—and when she awoke in the morning she found nose- and paw-prints against her windows where a black bear had been standing up, trying to peer in. She told no one of the dream, and, lonely, began setting out food on the picnic table behind her store, preparing a place setting for the bear as a child would make a tea party for an imaginary guest. It was not imaginary, though, because each morning when she went to the window, the food was gone, taken neatly from the plate, and she found herself lying awake at night listening and waiting for the bear—straining to hear the clink of the china cup and saucer as he lapped from his bowl of milk—but he was always stealthy, and never came until he heard the rasp of her snores, with his arrival noticed therefore only by her dreams; and she would awaken earlier and earlier each morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, but always failing, and marveling yet at the resilience of hope and longing beneath even a skin as ancient as hers.

&nbs
p; Heat came in a way that they could never have imagined back in the whiteness of winter. Hawks and eagles soared above on the convective currents of breath rising from the stone lungs of the mountains. Some days, with his work largely done, Wallis would lie across one of the hot slabs and absorb the radiant heat below as well as that from above. He would lie there as if he had the oil pinned—knowing that he had it pinned—and that as soon as the master showed back up and gave permission, he could drill it.

  The heat was so different from any he had known. It was more intimate, and briefer. There was no cooling sweat—nothing but dry heat turning the skin papery.

  The rhythm of it was different, too. Back in Texas, the heat had fed on itself, and on the Gulf’s sea mass, climbing through the day toward a crest that did not usually occur until shortly before dark; and the echo or shadow of that crest fell over into the night, slicing down into what otherwise would have been the night’s coolness.

  This heat, however, had a more gentle swell—not like tall breaker waves crashing at the shore, but like waves farther out at sea. Some mornings there was still a shimmering frost, but the sun, rising so early—clear of the horizon by five o’clock—would brush away that silver velvet and climb quickly, steadily, toward a crest around one or two o’clock—but then just as steadily, it would descend, cooling in the same trajectory with which it had risen.

  Such steadiness, day after day, seemed to imbue a power, and a peace. Wallis wondered if some landscapes were violent, while others gave peace. He knew it didn’t matter—that his business, his attention, needed to rest below, where there were no emotions of man, and never had been—but lying there stretched out on the rocks, it was hard to pretend that he still had the same allegiance to that cold world below. It was hard to pretend that he was doing anything other now than worshiping the sun, and the earth, and his brief place caught between the two.

  His neighbors kept coming to him: petitioning him to turn away. Even Helen came, which pained him—pained them both—but she had to say what she had to say. “You found it,” she told him. “That’s the main thing. You found it, where Matthew and Old Dudley couldn’t. But you don’t have to suck it out. You can leave it there. Think of it like this,” she said, “it has more power if you leave it there.”

  Out of respect, he did not argue, only listened—but he knew that they had never been out on the rigs down on the coast, had never watched the mud-gleaming steel pipe come out of the hole, had never seen the heavy casing set back into that tiny hole, cemented and then perforated—had never set a wellhead on the casing, opened the valve, and waited, watching and listening as the blood of the ancient world, green-black and bearing an odor not known to this world, gushed steaming up that pipe and into the new world: powerful not for the uses it would be put to, but powerful in itself, in its integrity, before it was broken apart, refined, and ignited.

  Powerful in its having been discovered; powerful in its having escaped its entrapment.

  “We need wood; we need meat,” Mel said. There still seemed to him to be plenty of wood left, and plenty of meat, too, and moreover, plenty of time to get more, if necessary. The next winter seemed like a far shore. But he obeyed her. Though there was nothing he could do about red meat until hunting season, he caught fish from the river, and in the mornings and evenings he sawed and split and stacked wood ceaselessly.

  His physical strength continued to grow through the summer, so that it seemed to be almost past measure. Strangely, though, while all the others around him were working on extending the rock wall, and glorying in that work, he felt no desire to join them—knowing instead that the rocks he would be moving soon would be on a scale so much more vast and fulfilling.

  He felt ready for the task of summoning the oil. He wondered when the falconer would return. Some days Wallis felt antsy—as if, were the master not to return soon, a thing might be lost, might slip away—while other days he felt great serenity.

  The two emotions rose and fell, advanced and retreated gently in him. He kept doing as Mel had told him: splitting and stacking wood. Growing stronger, like a tree putting on growth rings. Most days, he felt that he could eat the world.

  Breakfast, work, lunch, work, dinner, rest; begin the day again. Mel had forgotten how one fell into the mash of love—the dailiness of it stretching out into whiteness, the dailiness of it stretching out to form a firmament of comfort, and peace. Of how days of doing nothing really of substance added up into a thing that had substance.

  Falling asleep with her hand lightly across his. Nothing more, nothing less. The scent of the garden earth upon her.

  He was starting to learn the value of a day, as opposed to the millennia.

  The rains would not come; they passed to the south, isolating the valley, stranding it in heat. The creek had gotten shallower, so that to bathe in it in the evenings they had to lie down on their backs and splash water over themselves. The creek ran higher at night, carrying the echo of the day’s snowmelt up in the high country; but the snow in the high country was fast disappearing, and though the woods were still bursting with growth and vigor, there was often a stillness to the days, and the old-timers, such as Helen, said that fire was coming for sure, that year; that it was already a done deal. She said you could feel it in the rocks.

  Wallis was surprised by how brief and quiet the Fourth of July was. There was a pig roast—the fire was dug in a pit in the center of the road and buried in coals, and there were perhaps as many as twenty tourists—ten of whom had attempted to ride their bikes into the valley, but who had had so many flat tires that they had ended up carrying their bikes on their backs like crucifixes, vowing never to return—but still, the celebration was quiet. People ate and drank and rested in corners of shadows, out of the day’s heat, and at dusk the children ran up and down the street holding smoking sparklers, bright fizzes of silent light, waving them in graceful tracings and etchings, running ceaselessly; and all the women, even the tourist women, gathered around Amy, and the residents discussed plans for a shower. They traded recipes, cures—remedies for the rigor not so much of the birthing but of the hauling around of the child for nine months within. Many of the women seemed to have forgotten that Amy had already been through it with Colter, while others remembered, and asked if Colter would be back in time for the birth, and Amy said, “I don’t know.”

  There was the usual testing to see if it was a boy or a girl—analysis of urine color, profile of the belly, reaction of hemp rope held over the belly—and the usual inconclusive disparities.

  “Will you go to a hospital or have the baby at home?” one of the bike riders asked.

  “I aim to have it at home,” Amy said, “but I know I should go in and get a checkup first.” She sighed, and looked up over the mountain. “It’s a long way, and I don’t like to leave.”

  “Oh, you should go,” one of the riders said. “You have to get a checkup.”

  “I know,” Amy said. “I know I need to.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Seven weeks,” Amy said.

  The women all made clucking sounds.

  “Where is the father?” one of the tourists asked, with fierce indignation, looking around at the crowd of men who were gathered around the charred hulk of smoldering pig. They were endeavoring to lift it from the pit using pitchforks, and the pig kept slipping and tumbling back into the coals.

  “In Houston,” said Amy, looking at Mel directly, neither apologetic nor prideful, and Mel stopped, knowing instinctively that it was the truth, but nonetheless trying to count backward and deny it; and when she could not, she lingered with the women for as long as she could, to show that she was not bruised—she gave Amy one last quick look—and then she left, went down to the river by herself. Wallis saw her and went to join her, though the men were about to cut into the pig, and everyone was assembling for the feast.

  Wallis sat down next to Mel at water’s edge. They sat with their backs against a big aspen tree whose
bark was white as a deer’s belly, smooth as a young woman’s skin. From back up at the bar there came the solitary sound of a banjo being tuned and then played slowly, tentatively. Mel listened to the fluttering of the green and silver leaves above and then laid her head in Wallis’s lap. She was quiet for a long time. They listened to the river and the leaves, and farther up the hill, the banjo, and now a fiddle, still quiet and slow, but growing a bit louder, a bit more confident—and after some time she told him, and asked if he had known.

  “No,” Wallis said, not believing it at first, either. “I didn’t ever hear anything like that.”

  “God help the child if it’s a boy,” Mel said. Then later, “God help her if it’s a girl.”

  “I thought his seed was bad,” Wallis said.

  “That’s the story I always heard,” Mel said. “And God knows if it hadn’t been, there would have been by now ample evidence supporting the contrary.”

  They lay silent a while longer. There was a pause in the music, in which the leaves seemed to speak louder. “I guess something in him changed,” she said.

  “If it changed in him, maybe it changed in you,” Wallis said—an observation; as if star alignments had shifted, like the tumblers of lock and key.

  “No,” she said. “I’m different from him.”

  They rolled over and made love, pale as the aspen trees that stood guarding them. Afterward, they fell asleep in the grass, and later awoke chilled. They dressed and went back up the hill, where the music was still playing.

  A my was lying on the porch, stretching her back; Mel sat down next to her. “I was taken a little aback,” Mel said, and put her hand on Amy’s knee. “I’m happy for you. Are you happy?”